Distribution, ecology, life history, genetic variation, and risk of extinction of nonhuman primates from Costa Rica

We examined the association between geographic distribution, ecological traits, life history, genetic diversity, and risk of extinction in nonhuman primate species from Costa Rica. All of the current nonhuman primate species from Costa Rica are included in the study; spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), howling monkeys (Alouatta palliata), capuchins (Cebus capucinus), and squirrel monkeys (Saimiri oerstedii). Geographic distribution was characterized accessing existing databases. Data on ecology and life history traits were obtained through a literature review. Genetic diversity was characterized using isozyme electrophoresis. Risk of extinction was assessed from the literature. We found that species differed in all these traits. Using these data, we conducted a Pearson correlation between risk of extinction and ecological and life history traits, and genetic variation, for widely distributed species. We found a negative association between risk of extinction and population birth and growth rates; indicating that slower reproducing species had a greater risk of extinction. We found a positive association between genetic variation and risk of extinction; i.e., species showing higher genetic variation had a greater risk of extinction. The relevance of these traits for conservation efforts is discussed.

The Interloping Beguiler: for Bass Clarinet and Orchestra

The Interloping Beguiler is an nineteen-minute concerto in four movements for bass clarinet solo and orchestra. The title refers to the role of the solo instrument, which continually thrusts itself into the affairs of the orchestra, deceiving and diverting the members of the orchestra away from their task of performing a "serious" orchestral composition. The bass clarinet portrays a comical, cartoon-like character whose awkward, and sometimes goofy, interjections cause chaos. Attempts are made by various members of the orchestra, especially the horns, to regain control of the work, but the bass clarinet always succeeds in its distracting antics. By the final movement of the composition, the bass clarinet has propelled the work into a cartoon-like landscape of quickly changing textures, dissonant intervals, and overlapping themes. The first movement, Introduction, sets the serious tone of the music to follow, or so it would seem. The entrance of the bass clarinet immediately changes this texture with its out-of-rhythm alternations between high and low pitches. This gesture provides a glimpse into the personality of the bass clarinet, an instrument here to mislead the members of the orchestra. Deception truly begins in the second movement, The Interloping Initiates. The bass clarinet starts the movement with a driving theme and is immediately supported by the orchestra. As the movement progresses, the bass clarinet quickly begins altering the theme, making it more playful and cartoonish. A struggle ensues between the horns and the bass clarinet, with the bass clarinet catapulting the piece into a latin-inspired section. The struggle continues through to the end of the movement. The third movement, Calm, is exactly what the title suggests. A sectional form distinguishes this movement from the second movement. Throughout Calm, the bass clarinet behaves with decorum, except for very large melodic leaps. The seed of anarchy planted by the bass clarinet in the second movement comes to fruition in the final movement, The Beguiling Builds. Here, the bass clarinet sends the work into chaos with sections recalling Looney Tunes cartoons, Hollywood western music, and children's folk songs.

CIRQUE DE LA VOIX: VOCAL PERFORMANCES FOR THE 21st CENTURY AUDIENCE

This dissertation addresses the growing need to entice people to attend a classical solo vocal recital by incorporating thematic programming, multi-media presentations, collaborations and innovative marketing. It comprises four programs that use the above tactics, creating live performances of classical vocal music that appeal to the attention deficient 21st-century audience. Each program focuses on repertoire appropriate for the male alto voice and includes elements of spoken word, visual imagery and for movement through collaborations with actors, singers, dancers, designers and visual artists. Program one (March 1, 2004), La Voix Humaine: The Life of an Englishwoman in Music, Poetry, & Art, outlines the life of a fictitious Englishwoman through a self-composed narration, spoken by an actress, a Power Point presentation of visual art by 20th-century English artists and musical commentary provided by the collaboration of a vocalist and a pianist. Program two (October 15, 2004), La Voix Thfrmatique: Anima - Music that Moves, is a program of pieces ranging from the 14th- to the 20th-centuries of which half are choreographed by members of the University of Maryland Dance Department. Program three is a lecture recital entitled L 'Haute Voix: Identifying the High Male Voice and Appropriate Repertoire which is presented in collaboration with three singers, a pianist, a harpsichordist and a cellist. Program four, La Voix Dramatique: Opera Roles for the Countertenor Voice, comprises performances of George Frederic Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto (1724) in collaboration with the Maryland Opera Studio and the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (Leon Major, director; Kenneth Merrill, conductor). There are two performances each of the title role, Cesare (April 15 & 17, 2005), and his nemesis, Tolomeo (April 21 & 23,2005). All programs are documented in a digital audio format available on compact disc and are accompanied by program notes also available in digital format. Programs two and four are also documented in digital video format available on digital video disc.

PIANO AS A PARTNER IN TWENTIETH­ CENTURY ART SONG REPERTOIRE: A RECORDING PROJECT

The piano's role in art song repertoire has evolved from a modest one during its formative years to the versatility, complexity and creativity found in the twentieth-century. The art song repertoire of the twentieth century is vast and has secured the reputation for being the most diverse, innovative, illustrative, atmospheric and colorful in all of art song literature. Within this time period, there are compositions that reach back to the romantic works of nineteenth century, others which combine old and new traditions, and finally those which adopt new means and new ends. In choosing the material for this project, I have focused on compositions with uniquely challenging and unusual piano accompaniments in order to achieve a balance between well- known and rarely performed works, as well as those pieces that combine various languages and styles. Selections range from Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilter, Francis Poulenc, Fernando Obradors, and Joaquin Rodrigo to composers such as Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Dominick Argento, William Bolcom, and John Duke, including arrangements of traditional spirituals by Harry T. Burleigh and Florence B. Price, all of which helped to establish the American Art Song. My objective is to trace the development of the twentieth-century art song from the late Romantic Period through nationalistitrends to works which show the influences of jazz and folk elements. The two CD's for this dissertation recording project are available on compact discs which can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM). The performers were Daniel Armstrong, baritone, Giles Herman, baritone, Thomas Glenn, tenor, Valerie Yinzant, soprano, Aaron Odom, tenor, Jennifer Royal, soprano, Kenneth Harmon, tenor, Karen Sorenson, soprano and Maxim Ivanov, baritone.

The Effect of Diet-Induced Obesity and Subsequent Weight Loss on Body Composition, Glucose Clearance, Metabolite Profile and Liver Amp-Activated Protein Kinase in Mice

Obesity, currently an epidemic, is a difficult disease to combat because it is marked by both a change in body weight and an underlying dysregulation in metabolism, making consistent weight loss challenging. We sought to elucidate this metabolic dysregulation resulting from diet-induced obesity (DIO) that persists through subsequent weight loss. We hypothesized that weight gain imparts a change in “metabolic set point” persisting through subsequent weight loss and that this modification may involve a persistent change in hepatic AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a key energy-sensing enzyme in the body. To test these hypotheses, we tracked metabolic perturbations through this period, measuring changes in hepatic AMPK. To further understand the role of AMPK we used AICAR, an AMPK activator, following DIO. Our findings established a more dynamic metabolic model of DIO and subsequent weight loss. We observed hepatic AMPK elevation following weight loss, but AICAR administration without similar dieting was unsuccessful in improving metabolic dysregulation. Our findings provide an approach to modeling DIO and subsequent dieting that can be built upon in future studies and hopefully contribute to more effective long-term treatments of obesity.

Evaluating the Feasibility of Implementing a Green Roof Retrofit on Pitched Residential Roofs

Green roofs are one solution to stormwater runoff which is a major environmental problem. However, the majority of green roofs are primarily implemented on flat roofed commercial buildings and not residential homes with sloped roofs. Team SO GREEN designed a light-weight green roof system retrofit for residential homes. Between June and November 2014, green roof performance data was collected and compared between the designed sloped roofs and a non-sloped control. The sloped design performed well and one test slope was improved with a recirculating irrigation system. An economic analysis was made and a focus group determined preliminary consumer interest, aesthetic preferences, and barriers. This study enriches the body of knowledge regarding bringing green roof systems to the residential home market.

Utilising computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the modelling of granular material in large-scale engineering processes

In this paper, the framework is described for the modelling of granular material by employing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This is achieved through the use and implementation in the continuum theory of constitutive relations, which are derived in a granular dynamics framework and parametrise particle interactions that occur at the micro-scale level. The simulation of a process often met in bulk solids handling industrial plants involving granular matter, (i.e. filling of a flat-bottomed bin with a binary material mixture through pneumatic conveying-emptying of the bin in core flow mode-pneumatic conveying of the material coming out of a the bin) is presented. The results of the presented simulation demonstrate the capability of the numerical model to represent successfully key granular processes (i.e. segregation/degradation), the prediction of which is of great importance in the process engineering industry.

Coupled 3-D finite difference time domain and finite volume methods for solving microwave heating in porous media

Computational results for the microwave heating of a porous material are presented in this paper. Combined finite difference time domain and finite volume methods were used to solve equations that describe the electromagnetic field and heat and mass transfer in porous media. The coupling between the two schemes is through a change in dielectric properties which were assumed to be dependent both on temperature and moisture content. The model was able to reflect the evolution of temperature and moisture fields as the moisture in the porous medium evaporates. Moisture movement results from internal pressure gradients produced by the internal heating and phase change.

Parallel performance in multi-physics simulation

A comprehensive simulation of solidification/melting processes requires the simultaneous representation of free surface fluid flow, heat transfer, phase change, non-linear solid mechanics and, possibly, electromagnetics together with their interactions in what is now referred to as "multi-physics" simulation. A 3D computational procedure and software tool, PHYSICA, embedding the above multi-physics models using finite volume methods on unstructured meshes (FV-UM) has been developed. Multi-physics simulations are extremely compute intensive and a strategy to parallelise such codes has, therefore, been developed. This strategy has been applied to PHYSICA and evaluated on a range of challenging multi-physics problems drawn from actual industrial cases.

Multiphase mesh partitioning for parallel computational mechanics codes

We consider the load-balancing problems which arise from parallel scientific codes containing multiple computational phases, or loops over subsets of the data, which are separated by global synchronisation points. We motivate, derive and describe the implementation of an approach which we refer to as the multiphase mesh partitioning strategy to address such issues. The technique is tested on example meshes containing multiple computational phases and it is demonstrated that our method can achieve high quality partitions where a standard mesh partitioning approach fails.

The Shared Memory Parallelisation of an Ocean Modelling Code using an Interactive Parallelisation Toolkit

This paper briefly describes an interactive parallelisation toolkit that can be used to generate parallel code suitable for either a distributed memory system (using message passing) or a shared memory system (using OpenMP). This study focuses on how the toolkit is used to parallelise a complex heterogeneous ocean modelling code within a few hours for use on a shared memory parallel system. The generated parallel code is essentially the serial code with OpenMP directives added to express the parallelism. The results show that substantial gains in performance can be achieved over the single thread version with very little effort.

Domain decomposition using a 2-level correction scheme

The PHYSICA software was developed to enable multiphysics modelling allowing for interaction between Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Computational Solid Mechanics (CSM) and Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA). PHYSICA uses the finite volume method with 3-D unstructured meshes to enable the modelling of complex geometries. Many engineering applications involve significant computational time which needs to be reduced by means of a faster solution method or parallel and high performance algorithms. It is well known that multigrid methods serve as a fast iterative scheme for linear and nonlinear diffusion problems. This papers attempts to address two major issues of this iterative solver, including parallelisation of multigrid methods and their applications to time dependent multiscale problems.

Computational modelling of particle degradation in dilute phase pneumatic conveyors

The aim of this paper is to develop a mathematical model with the ability to predict particle degradation during dilute phase pneumatic conveying. A numerical procedure, based on a matrix representation of degradation processes, is presented to determine the particle impact degradation propensity from a small number of particle single impact tests carried out in a new designed laboratory scale degradation tester. A complete model of particle degradation during dilute phase pneumatic conveying is then described, where the calculation of degradation propensity is coupled with a flow model of the solids and gas phases in the pipeline. Numerical results are presented for degradation of granulated sugar in an industrial scale pneumatic conveyor.