The METAFOR project: preserving data through metadata standards for climate models and simulations

Climate modeling is a complex process, requiring accurate and complete metadata in order to identify, assess and use climate data stored in digital repositories. The preservation of such data is increasingly important given the development of ever-increasingly complex models to predict the effects of global climate change. The EU METAFOR project has developed a Common Information Model (CIM) to describe climate data and the models and modelling environments that produce this data. There is a wide degree of variability between different climate models and modelling groups. To accommodate this, the CIM has been designed to be highly generic and flexible, with extensibility built in. METAFOR describes the climate modelling process simply as "an activity undertaken using software on computers to produce data." This process has been described as separate UML packages (and, ultimately, XML schemas). This fairly generic structure canbe paired with more specific "controlled vocabularies" in order to restrict the range of valid CIM instances. The CIM will aid digital preservation of climate models as it will provide an accepted standard structure for the model metadata. Tools to write and manage CIM instances, and to allow convenient and powerful searches of CIM databases,. Are also under development. Community buy-in of the CIM has been achieved through a continual process of consultation with the climate modelling community, and through the METAFOR team’s development of a questionnaire that will be used to collect the metadata for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) model runs.

A low cost one-camera optical tracking system for indoor wide-area augmented and virtual reality environments

In the last years the number of industrial applications for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments has significantly increased. Optical tracking systems are an important component of AR/VR environments. In this work, a low cost optical tracking system with adequate attributes for professional use is proposed. The system works in infrared spectral region to reduce optical noise. A highspeed camera, equipped with daylight blocking filter and infrared flash strobes, transfers uncompressed grayscale images to a regular PC, where image pre-processing software and the PTrack tracking algorithm recognize a set of retro-reflective markers and extract its 3D position and orientation. Included in this work is a comprehensive research on image pre-processing and tracking algorithms. A testbed was built to perform accuracy and precision tests. Results show that the system reaches accuracy and precision levels slightly worse than but still comparable to professional systems. Due to its modularity, the system can be expanded by using several one-camera tracking modules linked by a sensor fusion algorithm, in order to obtain a larger working range. A setup with two modules was built and tested, resulting in performance similar to the stand-alone configuration.

A situation awareness interface for a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft: design, development and evaluation

The intention of this thesis is to develop a prototype interface that enables an operator to control a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft that will work within a fusion power plant if the automation system fails. This fusion power plant is part of the ITER project a conjoint effort of various industrialized countries to develop cleaner sources of energy. The development of the interface prototype will be based on situation awareness concepts, which provide a means to understand how human operators perceive the world around, then process that information and make decisions based on the knowledge that they already have and the projected knowledge of the reactions that will occur in the world in response to the actions the operator makes. Two major situation awareness methods will be used, GDTA as a means to discover the requirements the interface needs to solve, and SAGAT to conduct the evaluation on the three interfaces. This technique can isolate the differences an operator has in situation awareness when presented with relevant information given by each of the three interfaces that were built for this thesis. Where the first interface presents the information within the operator’s focal point of view in a pictorial style, the second interface shows the same information within the same point of view has the first interface but only shows it in a textual manner. While the third interface shows the relevant information in the operator’s peripheral field of view. Also SAGAT can provide insight on the question to know if providing the operator with feed-forward information about the stoppage distances of the bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft has any effect on the operator’s decision making.

Molecular adaptability of nucleoside diphosphate kinase b from trypanosomatid parasites: stability, oligomerization and structural determinants of nucleotide binding

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Some economic considerations in the design, commissioning and operation of power stations containing large generating units

Includes bibliography

Intensive Rotational Grazing of Steers on Highly Erodible Land at the Adams County CRP Project, 2001

A steer grazing demonstration was conducted in 2001 at the CRP Research and Demonstration Project farm near Corning, Iowa. Ninety-five steers were delivered to the Adams County CRP farm on April 27, 2001. The steer pasture at the CRP farm was 76 acres, divided into 33 paddocks with electric fence. Cattle were moved 101 times to a fresh paddock during the grazing season. Most of the moves (79.2%) followed 1 day of grazing in a paddock. No paddock was grazed for more than 3 days in succession. Rate of gain on pasture (2.12 lbs./animal/day) was higher in 2001 than in any previous year in the 8-year steer grazing project at the CRP farm. The 95 steers gained a total of 21,056 pounds on pasture, and the cost of the gain on pasture was $51.30/cwt. The 2001 steer grazing project showed a small profit above all costs. The net profit was $4.12/steer or $5.15/acre. Large profits and large losses are possible, primarily depending on the difference between the buying and selling prices.