Development of a GPS-Based Sign Inventory Tool for Iowa’s Statewide Management System, May 2011

This report is on state-of-the-art research efforts specific to infrastructure inventory/data collection with sign inventory as a case study. The development of an agency-wide sign inventory is based on feature inventory and location information. Specific to location, a quick and simple location acquisition tool is critical to tying assets to an accurate location-referencing system. This research effort provides a contrast between legacy referencing systems (route and milepost) and global positioning system- (GPS-) based techniques (latitude and longitude) integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) database. A summary comparison of field accuracies using a variety of consumer grade devices is also provided. This research, and the data collection tools developed, are critical in supporting the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) Statewide Sign Management System development effort. For the last two years, a Task Force has embarked on a comprehensive effort to develop a sign management system to improve sign quality, as well as to manage all aspects of signage, from request, ordering, fabricating, installing, maintaining, and ultimately removing, and to provide the ability to budget for these key assets on a statewide basis. This effort supported the development of a sign inventory tool and is the beginning of the development of a sign management system to support the Iowa DOT efforts in the consistent, cost effective, and objective decision making process when it comes to signs and their maintenance.

Expression quantitative trait locus mapping across water availability environments reveals contrasting associations with genomic features in Arabidopsis.

The regulation of gene expression is crucial for an organism's development and response to stress, and an understanding of the evolution of gene expression is of fundamental importance to basic and applied biology. To improve this understanding, we conducted expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping in the Tsu-1 (Tsushima, Japan) × Kas-1 (Kashmir, India) recombinant inbred line population of Arabidopsis thaliana across soil drying treatments. We then used genome resequencing data to evaluate whether genomic features (promoter polymorphism, recombination rate, gene length, and gene density) are associated with genes responding to the environment (E) or with genes with genetic variation (G) in gene expression in the form of eQTLs. We identified thousands of genes that responded to soil drying and hundreds of main-effect eQTLs. However, we identified very few statistically significant eQTLs that interacted with the soil drying treatment (GxE eQTL). Analysis of genome resequencing data revealed associations of several genomic features with G and E genes. In general, E genes had lower promoter diversity and local recombination rates. By contrast, genes with eQTLs (G) had significantly greater promoter diversity and were located in genomic regions with higher recombination. These results suggest that genomic architecture may play an important a role in the evolution of gene expression.

Short term behavioural consequences of denied access to environmental facilities in milk

Selostus: Eräiden ympäristövirikkeiden saatavuuden estämisen välittömät vaikutukset tarhaminkin käyttäytymiseen

Use of GPS for Photogrammetry, HR-342, 1993

Five test flights were conducted to study the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) in Photogrammetry, three in Iowa, one each in California and Texas. These tests show that GPS can be used to establish ground control by the static method and to determine camera location by the kinematic method. In block triangulation, six GPS controls are required and additional elevation control along the centerline is also required in strip triangulation. The camera location determined by aerial triangulation depends on the scale of the photography. The 1:3000 scale photography showed that the absolute accuracy of the camera location by GPS is better than five centimeters. The 1:40000 scale photography showed that the relative accuracy of the camera location by GPS is about one millimeter. In a strip triangulation elevation control is required in addition to the camera location by GPS. However, for block triangulation camera location by GPS is sufficient. Pre-targeting of pass and tie points gives the best results in both block and strip triangulation. In normal mapping for earth work computations the use of 1:6000 scale photography with GPS control instead of 1:3000 scale is recommended. It is recommended that research be done in the use of GPS for navigation in aerial photographic missions. It is highly recommended that research be done in the use of GPS to determine tip and tilt of the aerial camera, that is required in stereoplotting.

Airborne GPS Final Report, HR-359, 1995

The objective of this project was to use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to determine the aerial camera location and orientation that best facilitated mapping done from aerial photographs without any ground control. Four test flights were conducted. The first test flight was performed in June 1993 at St. Louis, with the objective of testing the multiantenna concept using two antenna on the aircraft. The second test in August 1993 was conducted over the Iowa State University (ISU) campus at Ames. This flight evaluated the use of GPS for pinpoint navigation. The third test flight over St. Louis was flown in October 1993, with four antenna on aircraft; its objective was to evaluate the 3DF GPS receiver and the antenna locations. On the basis of the results of these three tests, a final test flight over the Mustang Project area in Ames and the ISU campus was conducted in June 1994. Analysis of these data showed that airborne GPS can be used (1) in pinpoint navigation with an accuracy of 25 m or better, (2) to determine the location of the camera nodal point with an accuracy of 10 cm or better, and (3) to determine the orientation angles of the camera with an accuracy of 0.0001 radians or better. In addition, the exterior orientation elements determined by airborne GPS can be used to rectify aerial photos, to produce orthophotos, and in direct stereo plotting. Further research is recommended in these areas to maximize the use of airborne GPS. The report is organized in the following chapters: (1) Introduction; (2) Photogrammetry and Kinematic GPS; (3) Analysis of First Test; (4) Analysis of Second Test; (5) Analysis of Third Test; (6) Analysis of Final Test; (7) Applications of Airborne GPS; and (8) Conclusion and Recommendation.

Assessment of emotional reactivity produced by exposure to virtual environments in patients with eating disorders

The aim of this study was to assess the usefulness of virtual environments representing situations that are emotionally significant to subjects with eating disorders (ED). These environments may be applied with both evaluative and therapeutic aims and in simulation procedures to carry out a range of experimental studies. This paper is part of a wider research project analyzing the influence of the situation to which subjects are exposed on their performance on body image estimation tasks. Thirty female patients with eating disorders were exposed to six virtual environments: a living-room (neutral situation), a kitchen with highcalorie food, a kitchen with low-calorie food, a restaurant with high-calorie food, a restaurant with low-calorie food, and a swimming-pool. After exposure to each environment the STAI-S (a measurement of state anxiety) and the CDB (a measurement of depression) were administered to all subjects. The results show that virtual reality instruments are particularly useful for simulating everyday situations that may provoke emotional reactions such as anxiety and depression, in patients with ED. Virtual environments in which subjects are obliged to ingest high-calorie food provoke the highest levels of state anxiety and depression.

Melanin-based colorations signal strategies to cope with poor and rich environments

One hypothesis for the maintenance of genetic variation states that alternative genotypes are adapted to different environmental conditions (i.e., genotype-by-environment interaction GxE) that vary in space and time. Although GxE has been demonstrated for morphological traits, little evidence has been given whether these GxE are associated with traits used as signal in mate choice. In three wild bird species, we investigated whether the degree of melanin-based coloration, a heritable trait, covaries with nestling growth rate in rich and poor environments. Variation in the degree of reddish-brown phaeomelanism is pronounced in the barn owl (Tyto alba) and tawny owl (Strix aluco), and variation in black eumelanism in the barn owl and Alpine swift (Apus melba). Melanin-based coloration has been shown to be a criterion in mate choice in the barn owl. We cross-fostered hatchlings to test whether nestlings sired by parents displaying melanin-based colorations to different extent exhibit alternative growth trajectories when raised by foster parents in poor (experimentally enlarged broods) and rich (experimentally reduced broods) environments. With respect to phaeomelanism, barn owl and tawny owl offspring sired by redder parents grew more rapidly in body mass only in experimentally reduced broods. With respect to eumelanism, Alpine swift offspring of darker fathers grew their wings more rapidly only in experimentally enlarged broods, a difference that was not detected in reduced broods. These interactions between parental melanism and offspring growth rate indicate that individuals display substantial plasticity in response to the rearing environment which is associated with the degree of melanism: at least with respect to nestling growth, phaeomelanic and eumelanic individuals are best adapted to rich and poor environments, respectively. It now remains to be investigated why eumelanism and phaeomelanism have a different signaling function and what the lifelong consequences of these melanism-dependent allocation strategies are. This is important to fully appraise the role played by environmental heterogeneity in maintaining variation in the degree of melanin-based coloration.

Fate of Hydrophilic Nanoparticles in Biological Environments

The nanoparticles developed are based on chitosan, a biocompatible and biodegradable polysaccharide. The chitosan nanoparticles are formed in an entirely water-based process by electrostatic interactions with other biocompatible molecules. As a prerequisite to understand the fate of such nanoparticles in cells, comprehensive characterization and stability studies serve to identify quantitatively the impact of the raw material characteristics and preparation conditions on the nanoparticle characteristics. Methods included H-1 NMR spectroscopy, dilution viscometry, particle size analysis and electron microscopy. Cytotoxicity and cell uptake experiments on RAW 264.7 murine macrophages and p23 murine endothelial cells were performed to investigate the correlation with nanoparticle characteristics and effect of surface decoration with alginate. Cytotoxicity was assessed by the MTT survival test; cell uptake was monitored by fluorescent microscopy using labeled polymers.

A non-linear VAD for noisy environments

This paper deals with non-linear transformations for improving the performance of an entropy-based voice activity detector (VAD). The idea to use a non-linear transformation has already been applied in the field of speech linear prediction, or linear predictive coding (LPC), based on source separation techniques, where a score function is added to classical equations in order to take into account the true distribution of the signal. We explore the possibility of estimating the entropy of frames after calculating its score function, instead of using original frames. We observe that if the signal is clean, the estimated entropy is essentially the same; if the signal is noisy, however, the frames transformed using the score function may give entropy that is different in voiced frames as compared to nonvoiced ones. Experimental evidence is given to show that this fact enables voice activity detection under high noise, where the simple entropy method fails.

Measurement of the mechanical power of walking by satellite positioning system (GPS).

PURPOSE: This descriptive article illustrates the application of Global Positioning System (GPS) professional receivers in the field of locomotion studies. The technological challenge was to assess the external mechanical work in outdoor walking. METHODS: Five subjects walked five times during 5 min on an athletic track at different imposed stride frequency (from 70-130 steps x min(-1)). A differential GPS system (carrier phase analysis) measured the variation of the position of the trunk at 5 Hz. A portable indirect calorimeter recorded breath-by-breath energy expenditure. RESULTS: For a walking speed of 1.05 +/- 0.11 m x s(-1), the vertical lift of the trunk (43 +/- 14 mm) induced a power of 46.0 +/- 20.4 W. The average speed variation per step (0.15 +/- 0.03 m x s(-1)) produced a kinetic power of 16.9 +/- 7.2 W. As compared with commonly admitted values, the energy exchange (recovery) between the two energy components was low (39.1 +/- 10.0%), which induced an overestimated mechanical power (38.9 +/- 18.3 W or 0.60 W x kg(-1) body mass) and a high net mechanical efficiency (26.9 +/- 5.8%). CONCLUSION: We assumed that the cause of the overestimation was an unwanted oscillation of the GPS antenna. It is concluded that GPS (in phase mode) is now able to record small body movements during human locomotion, and constitutes a promising tool for gait analysis of outdoor unrestrained walking. However, the design of the receiver and the antenna must be adapted to human experiments and a thorough validation study remains to be conducted.

Quantitative comparison between simulations of seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous poro-elastic media and equivalent visco-elastic solids for marine-type environments

There is increasing evidence to suggest that the presence of mesoscopic heterogeneities constitutes an important seismic attenuation mechanism in porous rocks. As a consequence, centimetre-scale perturbations of the rock physical properties should be taken into account for seismic modelling whenever detailed and accurate responses of specific target structures are desired, which is, however, computationally prohibitive. A convenient way to circumvent this problem is to use an upscaling procedure to replace each of the heterogeneous porous media composing the geological model by corresponding equivalent visco-elastic solids and to solve the visco-elastic equations of motion for the inferred equivalent model. While the overall qualitative validity of this procedure is well established, there are as of yet no quantitative analyses regarding the equivalence of the seismograms resulting from the original poro-elastic and the corresponding upscaled visco-elastic models. To address this issue, we compare poro-elastic and visco-elastic solutions for a range of marine-type models of increasing complexity. We found that despite the identical dispersion and attenuation behaviour of the heterogeneous poro-elastic and the equivalent visco-elastic media, the seismograms may differ substantially due to diverging boundary conditions, where there exist additional options for the poro-elastic case. In particular, we observe that at the fluid/porous-solid interface, the poro- and visco-elastic seismograms agree for closed-pore boundary conditions, but differ significantly for open-pore boundary conditions. This is an important result which has potentially far-reaching implications for wave-equation-based algorithms in exploration geophysics involving fluid/porous-solid interfaces, such as, for example, wavefield decomposition.

Spatial learning by rats across visually disconnected environments

Two spatial tasks were designed to test specific properties of spatial representation in rats. In the first task, rats were trained to locate an escape hole at a fixed position in a visually homogeneous arena. This arena was connected with a periphery where a full view of the room environment existed. Therefore, rats were dependent on their memory trace of the previous position in the periphery to discriminate a position within the central region. Under these experimental conditions, the test animals showed a significant discrimination of the training position without a specific local view. In the second task, rats were trained in a radial maze consisting of tunnels that were transparent at their distal ends only. Because the central part of the maze was non-transparent, rats had to plan and execute appropriate trajectories without specific visual feedback from the environment. This situation was intended to encourage the reliance on prospective memory of the non-visited arms in selecting the following move. Our results show that acquisition performance was only slightly decreased compared to that shown in a completely transparent maze and considerably higher than in a translucent maze or in darkness. These two series of experiments indicate (1) that rats can learn about the relative position of different places with no common visual panorama, and (2) that they are able to plan and execute a sequence of visits to several places without direct visual feed-back about their relative position.