Screening of pharmaceuticals and other pollutants of concern by a combination of chemical and biological methods

This study examined the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCP's) in surface waters of Florida and their potential to be use as indicators of wastewater contamination. Previous studies have shown that elimination of pharmaceuticals in municipal sewage treatment plants is often incomplete. Aquatic ecosystems are under increased stress from human activities, particularly in heavily populated areas. The purpose of this study was to find an ideal indicator for wastewater. The applied methods, GC/MS and LC/MS, were suitable for the determination of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in aqueous environmental samples to the lower parts-per-trillion (ng/L) level. As a result of this study a snapshot view of the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in south Florida was produced. PPCP's were commonly detected in coastal environments of South Florida at relatively low concentrations. In general, PPCP's were higher inside the canals and contained bodies of water than in open water systems. Caffeine was successfully used to describe impacted versus pristine locations. However, no particular correlation was observed among caffeine and other traditional water quality parameters.

More than Metadata: Where the Rubber Meets the Road in DLS Migration

This panel presentation provided several use cases that detail the complexity of large-scale digital library system (DLS) migration from the perspective of three university libraries and a statewide academic library services consortium. Each described the methodologies developed at the beginning of their migration process, the unique challenges that arose along the way, how issues were managed, and the outcomes of their work. Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, and the University of Central Florida are members of the state's academic library services consortium, the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC). In 2011, the Digital Services Committee members began exploring alternatives to DigiTool, their shared FLVC hosted DLS. After completing a review of functional requirements and existing systems, the universities and FLVC began the implementation process of their chosen platforms. Migrations began in 2013 with limited sets of materials. As functionalities were enhanced to support additional categories of materials from the legacy system, migration paths were created for the remaining materials. Some of the challenges experienced with the institutional and statewide collaborative legacy collections were due to gradual changes in standards, technology, policies, and personnel. This was manifested in the quality of original digital files and metadata, as well as collection and record structures. Additionally, the complexities involved with multiple institutions collaborating and compromising throughout the migration process, as well as the move from a consortial support structure with a vendor solution to open source systems (both locally and consortially supported), presented their own sets of unique challenges. Following the presentation, the speakers discussed commonalities in their migration experience, including learning opportunities for future migrations.

Development of an open architecture motion control system

A multipurpose open architecture motion control system was developed with three platforms for control and monitoring. The Visual Basic user interface communicated with the operator and gave instructions to the electronic components. The first platform had a BASIC Stamp based controller and three stepping motors. The second platform had a controller, amplifiers and two DC servomotors. The third platform had a DSP module. In this study, each platform was used on machine tools either to move the table or to evaluate the incoming signal. The study indicated that by using advanced microcontrollers, which use high-level languages, motor controllers, DSPs (Digital Signal Processor) and microcomputers, the motion control of different systems could be realized in a short time. Although, the proposed systems had some limitations, their jobs were performed effectively. ^

Knowledge assisted data management and retrieval in multimedia database systems

With the proliferation of multimedia data and ever-growing requests for multimedia applications, there is an increasing need for efficient and effective indexing, storage and retrieval of multimedia data, such as graphics, images, animation, video, audio and text. Due to the special characteristics of the multimedia data, the Multimedia Database management Systems (MMDBMSs) have emerged and attracted great research attention in recent years. Though much research effort has been devoted to this area, it is still far from maturity and there exist many open issues. In this dissertation, with the focus of addressing three of the essential challenges in developing the MMDBMS, namely, semantic gap, perception subjectivity and data organization, a systematic and integrated framework is proposed with video database and image database serving as the testbed. In particular, the framework addresses these challenges separately yet coherently from three main aspects of a MMDBMS: multimedia data representation, indexing and retrieval. In terms of multimedia data representation, the key to address the semantic gap issue is to intelligently and automatically model the mid-level representation and/or semi-semantic descriptors besides the extraction of the low-level media features. The data organization challenge is mainly addressed by the aspect of media indexing where various levels of indexing are required to support the diverse query requirements. In particular, the focus of this study is to facilitate the high-level video indexing by proposing a multimodal event mining framework associated with temporal knowledge discovery approaches. With respect to the perception subjectivity issue, advanced techniques are proposed to support users' interaction and to effectively model users' perception from the feedback at both the image-level and object-level.

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based air interfaces and multiple input multiple output techniques in cooperative satellite communications for 4th generation mobile systems

Recently, wireless network technology has grown at such a pace that scientific research has become a practical reality in a very short time span. Mobile wireless communications have witnessed the adoption of several generations, each of them complementing and improving the former. One mobile system that features high data rates and open network architecture is 4G. Currently, the research community and industry, in the field of wireless networks, are working on possible choices for solutions in the 4G system. 4G is a collection of technologies and standards that will allow a range of ubiquitous computing and wireless communication architectures. The researcher considers one of the most important characteristics of future 4G mobile systems the ability to guarantee reliable communications from 100 Mbps, in high mobility links, to as high as 1 Gbps for low mobility users, in addition to high efficiency in the spectrum usage. On mobile wireless communications networks, one important factor is the coverage of large geographical areas. In 4G systems, a hybrid satellite/terrestrial network is crucial to providing users with coverage wherever needed. Subscribers thus require a reliable satellite link to access their services when they are in remote locations, where a terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. Thus, they must rely upon satellite coverage. Good modulation and access technique are also required in order to transmit high data rates over satellite links to mobile users. This technique must adapt to the characteristics of the satellite channel and also be efficient in the use of allocated bandwidth. Satellite links are fading channels, when used by mobile users. Some measures designed to approach these fading environments make use of: (1) spatial diversity (two receive antenna configuration); (2) time diversity (channel interleaver/spreading techniques); and (3) upper layer FEC. The author proposes the use of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access) for the satellite link by increasing the time diversity. This technique will allow for an increase of the data rate, as primarily required by multimedia applications, and will also optimally use the available bandwidth. In addition, this dissertation approaches the use of Cooperative Satellite Communications for hybrid satellite/terrestrial networks. By using this technique, the satellite coverage can be extended to areas where there is no direct link to the satellite. For this purpose, a good channel model is necessary.

The development of optimized high performance liquid chromatography systems for the analysis of improvised explosives

Existing instrumental techniques must be adaptable to the analysis of novel explosives if science is to keep up with the practices of terrorists and criminals. The focus of this work has been the development of analytical techniques for the analysis of two types of novel explosives: ascorbic acid-based propellants, and improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel. In recent years, the use of these explosives in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has increased. It is therefore important to develop methods which permit the identification of the nature of the original explosive from post-blast residues. Ascorbic acid-based propellants are low explosives which employ an ascorbic acid fuel source with a nitrate/perchlorate oxidizer. A method which utilized ion chromatography with indirect photometric detection was optimized for the analysis of intact propellants. Post-burn and post-blast residues if these propellants were analyzed. It was determined that the ascorbic acid fuel and nitrate oxidizer could be detected in intact propellants, as well as in the post-burn and post-blast residues. Degradation products of the nitrate and perchlorate oxidizers were also detected. With a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (QToFMS), exact mass measurements are possible. When an HPLC instrument is coupled to a QToFMS, the combination of retention time with accurate mass measurements, mass spectral fragmentation information, and isotopic abundance patterns allows for the unequivocal identification of a target analyte. An optimized HPLC-ESI-QToFMS method was applied to the analysis of ascorbic acid-based propellants. Exact mass measurements were collected for the fuel and oxidizer anions, and their degradation products. Ascorbic acid was detected in the intact samples and half of the propellants subjected to open burning; the intact fuel molecule was not detected in any of the post-blast residue. Two methods were optimized for the analysis of trace levels of hydrogen peroxide: HPLC with fluorescence detection (HPLC-FD), and HPLC with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ED). Both techniques were extremely selective for hydrogen peroxide. Both methods were applied to the analysis of post-blast debris from improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel; hydrogen peroxide was detected on variety of substrates. Hydrogen peroxide was detected in the post-blast residues of the improvised explosives TATP and HMTD.

Linking Old Librarianship to New: Aligning 5-Steps of The Innovator's DNA in Creating Thematic Discovery Systems for the Everglades

This poster presentation from the May 2015 Florida Library Association Conference, along with the Everglades Explorer discovery portal at http://ee.fiu.edu, demonstrates how traditional bibliographic and curatorial principles can be applied to: 1) selection, cross-walking and aggregation of metadata linking end-users to wide-spread digital resources from multiple silos; 2) harvesting of select PDFs, HTML and media for web archiving and access; 3) selection of CMS domains, sub-domains and folders for targeted searching using an API. Choosing content for this discovery portal is comparable to past scholarly practice of creating and publishing subject bibliographies, except metadata and data are housed in relational databases. This new and yet traditional capacity coincides with: Growth of bibliographic utilities (MarcEdit); Evolution of open-source discovery systems (eXtensible Catalog); Development of target-capable web crawling and archiving systems (Archive-it); and specialized search APIs (Google). At the same time, historical and technical changes – specifically the increasing fluidity and re-purposing of syndicated metadata – make this possible. It equally stems from the expansion of freely accessible digitized legacy and born-digital resources. Innovation principles helped frame the process by which the thematic Everglades discovery portal was created at Florida International University. The path -- to providing for more effective searching and co-location of digital scientific, educational and historical material related to the Everglades -- is contextualized through five concepts found within Dyer and Christensen’s “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the five skills of disruptive innovators (2011). The project also aligns with Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science, especially the 4th Law -- to "save the time of the user.”

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Based Air Interfaces and Multiple Input Multiple Output Techniques in Cooperative Satellite Communications for 4th Generation Mobile Systems

Recently, wireless network technology has grown at such a pace that scientific research has become a practical reality in a very short time span. One mobile system that features high data rates and open network architecture is 4G. Currently, the research community and industry, in the field of wireless networks, are working on possible choices for solutions in the 4G system. The researcher considers one of the most important characteristics of future 4G mobile systems the ability to guarantee reliable communications at high data rates, in addition to high efficiency in the spectrum usage. On mobile wireless communication networks, one important factor is the coverage of large geographical areas. In 4G systems, a hybrid satellite/terrestrial network is crucial to providing users with coverage wherever needed. Subscribers thus require a reliable satellite link to access their services when they are in remote locations where a terrestrial infrastructure is unavailable. The results show that good modulation and access technique are also required in order to transmit high data rates over satellite links to mobile users. The dissertation proposes the use of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Multiple Access) for the satellite link by increasing the time diversity. This technique will allow for an increase of the data rate, as primarily required by multimedia applications, and will also optimally use the available bandwidth. In addition, this dissertation approaches the use of Cooperative Satellite Communications for hybrid satellite/terrestrial networks. By using this technique, the satellite coverage can be extended to areas where there is no direct link to the satellite. The issue of Cooperative Satellite Communications is solved through a new algorithm that forwards the received data from the fixed node to the mobile node. This algorithm is very efficient because it does not allow unnecessary transmissions and is based on signal to noise ratio (SNR) measures.

The Development of High Performance Liquid Chromatography Systems for the Analysis of Improvised Explosives

Existing instrumental techniques must be adaptable to the analysis of novel explosives if science is to keep up with the practices of terrorists and criminals. The focus of this work has been the development of analytical techniques for the analysis of two types of novel explosives: ascorbic acid-based propellants, and improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel. In recent years, the use of these explosives in improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has increased. It is therefore important to develop methods which permit the identification of the nature of the original explosive from post-blast residues. Ascorbic acid-based propellants are low explosives which employ an ascorbic acid fuel source with a nitrate/perchlorate oxidizer. A method which utilized ion chromatography with indirect photometric detection was optimized for the analysis of intact propellants. Post-burn and post-blast residues if these propellants were analyzed. It was determined that the ascorbic acid fuel and nitrate oxidizer could be detected in intact propellants, as well as in the post-burn and post-blast residues. Degradation products of the nitrate and perchlorate oxidizers were also detected. With a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (QToFMS), exact mass measurements are possible. When an HPLC instrument is coupled to a QToFMS, the combination of retention time with accurate mass measurements, mass spectral fragmentation information, and isotopic abundance patterns allows for the unequivocal identification of a target analyte. An optimized HPLC-ESI-QToFMS method was applied to the analysis of ascorbic acid-based propellants. Exact mass measurements were collected for the fuel and oxidizer anions, and their degradation products. Ascorbic acid was detected in the intact samples and half of the propellants subjected to open burning; the intact fuel molecule was not detected in any of the post-blast residue. Two methods were optimized for the analysis of trace levels of hydrogen peroxide: HPLC with fluorescence detection (HPLC-FD), and HPLC with electrochemical detection (HPLC-ED). Both techniques were extremely selective for hydrogen peroxide. Both methods were applied to the analysis of post-blast debris from improvised mixtures of concentrated hydrogen peroxide/fuel; hydrogen peroxide was detected on variety of substrates. Hydrogen peroxide was detected in the post-blast residues of the improvised explosives TATP and HMTD.