Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne
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Vocalizations of Sea Turtle Hatchlings and Embryos
No full textMany animals vocalize to communicate. While this vocal communication has been studied extensively in mammals and birds, far less attention has been paid to reptile vocalizations. Sea turtles vocalize in the nest, but the purpose of these vocalizations is unknown. I aimed to characterize the vocalizations of the olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) in the nest during incubation, hatching, and emerging. I also aimed to characterize and compare the vocalizations of olive ridley, leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), and East Pacific green (Chelonia mydas agassizii) turtle hatchlings. I relocated three olive ridley nests at Parque Nacional Marino Las Baulas, Costa Rica, and buried them next to a plexiglass window, which was used to obtain video recordings using a Canon digital camera. A hollow tube leading from above the eggs to the sand’s surface was used to insert an Earthworks M30 microphone that was attached to a Marantz PMD61 MKII recorder to record audio. Each recording was categorized as incubation, hatching, or emerging. 60 minutes of each stage was analyzed using Raven Pro sound analysis software. The type (harmonic, non-harmonic, pulse) and characteristics (highest frequency, dominant frequency, lowest frequency, duration, and frequency range) were documented. In addition, I recorded olive ridley, leatherback, and East Pacific green hatchlings in buckets. The same characteristics of vocalizations were documented from the bucket recordings as the nest recordings. For statistical purposes, the Chi-Squared Test, Friedman Test, and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used. I recorded a total of 157 vocalizations from the nests. The frequency of the vocalizations ranged from 0.05 - 11.4 kilohertz and the duration ranged from 0.01 - 0.54 seconds. I found significantly more vocalizations in the incubation stage than the other two stages (p \u3c 0.05). The pulse vocalizations were only found in the incubation stage. Also, there was no significant difference seen in types or characteristics of vocalizations among the stages (p \u3e 0.05, all cases). The bucket recordings revealed that the frequencies were not significantly different, but the duration of the leatherback hatchling vocalizations were significantly longer than the other two species (p \u3c 0.05). The other characteristics of the vocalizations between species were not different. The olive ridleys hatchlings in the bucket vocalized more often than the hatchlings in the nest (p \u3c 0.05). The frequencies in the bucket were within the same range as the frequencies in the nest, which was also seen when comparing the leatherbacks in the bucket to Ferrara et al. (2014). The results suggest that the number of vocalizations or the pulse vocalizations could possibly be used in synchronizing hatching. The significance of the frequencies of the vocalizations in the nest is unable to be determined from this study. The similar frequencies of vocalizations among the three species suggest that all sea turtle species vocalize within the same frequency range both in the nest and in other situations such as a bucket. Elucidating the importance of vocalizations in hatchlings can help develop more conservation plans to make sure development and other noise pollution isn’t interfering with any vocal communication
Getting Down to Earth Along the IPFW Creek
No full textAs water moves downstream, it carries sediments that become sorted and rounded. The purpose of this research project is to determine the water content of soil, overall composition of sediments (gravel, sand, etc.), and grain size changes (if it does change) along a river profile, using a creek that runs through the Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) campus. In the 2014 Fall semester, grain size distribution analysis was performed on 14 soil samples collected along the length of the creek. Fourteen soil samples were also collected from same sites in the 2015 Spring and Fall semesters resulting in three sets of data. Collected data indicates water content and grain size distribution vary along the creek profile. Water content for the Fall 2014 samples has a range of ~20 -28%. This is closely mimicked with the Fall 2015 samples with a range 20-25%. However the Spring 2015 data begins ~28% and falls to ~24% over the course of the creek profile. This could be due to a higher influx of water during the spring season keeping the sediments waterlogged. Certain soil samples contained significantly lower water content than others, that, when examined more closely, revealed different soil profiles containing less silt-clays and higher sand-gravel. The soil composition data ranges from coarse to fine grained sands, silts, and clays with less gravel present in the recent samples. This could be due to heavy flooding experienced in this area as well as recent construction on campus. Knowing the cause(s) of finning sediments downstream in the creek may help in managing the stream and probably other rivers in northern Indiana. This is an ongoing research and new data will be presented.http://opus.ipfw.edu/stu_symp2016/1037/thumbnail.jp
A System Design of a Rural Hospital Operating Room
No full textRural hospitals have been closing their doors at record rates. This fact is distressing because small town hospitals serve 51 million Americans. Often small hospitals are the only major point of care and triage for communities they serve. When rural hospitals close, they force emergency patients to be served at larger hospitals that are located at a much greater distance. This paper focuses on the redesign, through Collective SystemDesign (CSD), of the Operating Room scheduling system in rural hospitals to increase efficiency and to reduce rework in patient care
How Hospital ER Team is Sustaining Improvements through Tone in Collective System Design
No full textThe paper presents a continuation of the research with St. Francis Hospital ER. It is a follow-up to the Collective System Design to develop the NowER in 2012. Several principles affecting tone that are sustaining the St. Francis ER system design will be discussed. The new system design resulted in a patient satisfaction increase from 13th percentile to better than 65th percentile, nationwide. The tone of the redesign team not only made the new system design possible, it is the reason why the new NowER system is being improved and sustained
Self-Stopping Epidemic Routing in Cooperative Wireless Mobile Sensor Networks
No full textEpidemic routing is considered useful for wireless mobile sensor networks where infrastructure support is limited and sensed information has to be disseminated in a timely manner. The relaying overhead of epidemic routing, however, needs to be reduced to conserve energy. In this paper, we study a new problem: what is a good strategy in epidemic routing to self-stop forwarding a message when a certain percentage of nodes have received a copy of the message? The goal of such a strategy is to disseminate the information to a certain percentage of nodes in the network in a timely and predictable manner, and at the same time to cooperatively avoid further spreading when the goal has been reached. As a first attempt, we focus on wireless mobile sensor networks where nodes move rapidly and randomly around and a synchronous time model is applied. We first select an accurate mathematical model to characterize the information dissemination in wireless mobile sensor networks. We then apply and extend the model to analyze and design different self-stopping strategies. Moreover, we propose a new self-stopping strategy, called the time-based probabilistic self-stopping strategy, by taking advantages of both the time-based and the probability-based strategies. We find that such a self-stopping strategy is fast, accurate, and energy efficient
Simulating the Response of CFRP Strengthened Shear-Keys in Composite Concrete Bridges
No full textThe reduction in the integral action between cast-in-situ slab and precast prestressed concrete girders in composite concrete bridges can be attributed to the increase in truck loads; increase in the allowable stress at service loads; exposure to aggressive environments; and the increase in traffic flow. It is a necessity to restore this integral action by strengthening against horizontal shear. In this paper, a finite element analysis (FEA) was performed considering 32 push off specimens using ANSYS software package to evaluate the behavior of shear-keys of composite concrete bridges. The studied parameters include: the concrete compressive strength, spacing of the shear stirrups, the carbon fiber reinforce polymer (CFRP) sheet spacing, and CFRP plate spacing, fiber angle, and anchorage length. The FEA results show that the reduced crack opening and slip in the strengthened shear-keys compared with the control specimen reflect the efficiency of the CFRP strengthening scheme. Moreover, the FEA results indicate that the CFRP composites anchorage length and angle had a notable impact on the longitudinal shear force and corresponding slip, failure mode, stiffness, and toughness. Finally, an empirical model was proposed for predicting the bond-slip behavior of shear-keys based on reliable experimental results available in literature
A New Method to Identify Collaborative Partners in Social Service Provider Networks
No full textThe interactions among service providers are represented as a social network to support service-oriented collaborations across multiple manufacturing enterprises. The combination of service-oriented computing and social network facilitates the connection and collaboration within enterprises. It is essential to identify a group of prosperous collaborative partners in a social network in a prompt and efficient way, especially when the number of alternative service providers is large. However, traditional exhaustive searching approaches are inapplicable in identifying a host enterprise and constitutive members due to the prohibitive computations. In this paper, a new and efficient approach has been proposed to identify service providers optimally based on existing social relations. Three innovations inthe proposal are (i) a set of new concepts has been defined to construct a social service provider network; (ii) based on remodeling the social graph, the betweenness centrality algorithm has been enhanced to efficiently find the leader who serves as the host enterprise of a given engineering project; (iii) to improve the efficiency of computation, an innovative algorithm is proposed to identify the collaborative partners by confining the searching space in the set of connector nodes. For the validation purpose, the experimental simulation is conducted and the results have demonstrated that the proposed algorithms outperform several existing algorithms in terms of computation time in dealing with the increasing number of enterprises