The advent of cloud computing and the expectation of anytime availability of user data and services have brought data center design to the forefront of computer science research. Modern data centers can be massive in size, consisting of hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of virtualized end hosts. At this scale and complexity, the underlying network becomes central to data center scalability, efficiency, availability and fault tolerance. Given the scale of today's data center networks, operators typically turn to symmetric, highly structured network topologies, sacrificing flexibility for relative simplicity. These topologies tend to have an "all or nothing'' tradeoff between fault tolerance and scalability. Over these topologies, data center operators often run protocols borrowed from the Internet, an environment that is drastically different from that of the data center. Because these protocols have not been built for the data center, they can operate and interact in unexpected and undesirable ways. Moreover, they are generally vetted by virtue of having survived in the Internet, rather than by formal reasoning. This makes the management burden associated with configuration, maintenance and error diagnosis for these protocols substantial, leading to compromised efficiency and availability. The first contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of a new class of network topologies called Aspen trees. Aspen trees provide the high throughput and path multiplicity of current data center network topologies while also allowing a network operator to select a particular point on the scalability versus fault tolerance spectrum. This addresses the challenge of supporting simultaneous scalability and fault tolerance in data center networks. Next, the challenge of providing scalable and efficient communication is addressed with the design of ALIAS, a protocol for scalable, automatic and decentralized addressing and communication in the data center. Finally, this dissertation presents a formalization and proof of correctness of the fundamental building block of ALIAS, thus enabling feasible configuration and maintenance of ALIAS in the data center. This combination of tunable topology structure and tailored communication protocols enables scalable, efficient and fault-tolerant data center communication

Voles of the genus Microtus feed on bark and vascular tissues of trees in fruit orchards across North America. Management of orchard floor vegetation with multiple applications of herbicide effectively altered habitat and reduced montane vole (M. montanus) populations in apple orchards near Summerland, British Columbia, Canada. Non-target populations of deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus), northwestern chipmunks (Tamias amoenus), and Great Basin pocket mice (Perognathus parvus) appeared to respond positively to the treatment units. None of these non-target species was adversely affected by the actual herbicide treatments. Species diversity of small mammal communities in treated orchards was the same as that in untreated orchards and nearby old fields. Orchard agroecosystems with intensive vegetation management regimes appear to maintain diverse non-target small mammal communities.

This paper reports results from a prototype Compton imager (PCI) which consists of three planes of silicon pixel detectors as a scattering detector followed by an array of CsI(Tl) crystals as an absorbing detector. The CsI(Tl) array is mounted directly behind the silicon detectors. Simple back-projection algorithms are not sufficient to resolve extended shapes, but iterative algorithms provide the necessary de-convolution. List-mode maximum likelihood expectation maximization (LM-MLEM) is an iterative algorithm that reconstructs the most probable source distribution for a given data set. LM-MLEM attempts to reconstruct an image by finding successive approximations to the true source data. Each data set imaged is different, but the number of iterations required for convergence is typically 10-30 for the PCI. In this paper, reconstructed images of point and extended sources using measured PCI data are presented. Data are corroborated using GEANT4 simulations.

Two natural products, norcembrenolide B and scabrolide D, have been synthesized in a biomimetic fashion. With the synthesis, a strategy has been developed for the transformation of furanocembrenolides to their [Beta]- ketotetrahydrofuranone derivatives. Further manipulations, namely C11 and C13 oxidation strategies, have been developed to allow access several natural products of this family

For my digital monograph I worked with a traditional academic press to get my work peer-reviewed by colleagues in my field. But the digital aspect certainly added new wrinkles to that process. The peer reviewers evaluating my work did so before the final version of the project was ready—they did an early review of the written manuscript, images, and some videos, but they weren’t reviewing the fully final published project with all the interaction that was part of the final web-based publication. So I think it is clear that making a direct one-to-one transition between traditional book publishing and web-based publishing doesn’t necessarily work.

We may decide that in the digital environment we should emphasize postpublication peer review in the form of scholarly reviews and critical engagement with digital publications instead….