As concern for the health and wellbeing of children grows in a society geared toward a more sedentary lifestyle, many doctors and therapists are pointing to the importance of access to, and time spent interacting with the natural world. The idea of using the restorative properties of nature in healing has been around since ancient times. There is currently a renaissance in the health care industry looking at the importance of incorporating gardens into the design of health care facilities once again. This project proposes to explore the importance for children in health care facilities to have access to the natural world while using the biophilia hypothesis as a framework for design. Furthermore, the benefits of outdoor areas for the families (particularly siblings) of child patients and the staff of the health care facilities was explored. Through the use of literature and case reviews, data was collected and synthesized to determine the elements best used to strengthen the designs for children’s therapeutic environments. Outcomes include three models of therapeutic environments including focus areas for the Tucson Medical Center campus in Tucson, Arizona.

Urbanization in China is rapidly improving with the economic growth. But the development that ignores environment has caused lots of environmental problems in Chinese cities, especially the large ones. As the capital of Hubei Province, Wuhan is the fifth among China cities for its size and its economic production. Because of extreme urbanization and high dense population in Wuhan city, some significant issues have been constantly emerged: lack of adequate wastewater management and water resources protection, urgent need for efficient solution to sludge treatment and disposal, serious urban flooding because of the natural flow or urban lakes and streams restriction, degradation of water quality, and so on. These issues have been seriously impacted the quality life in the city. Along with the urbanization, the conflicts between urban development and ecosystem are inescapable. How can urban development balance environmental sensitivity to support ecological health in the vulnerable urban ecosystem and mitigate the problems in the city? This project tries to redesign a master plan for Yangchun Lake sub-urban center in Wuhan city and find suitable ways to mitigate these problems with attention to the environmental, functional, economic, social and aesthetics aspects of the proposed solutions. The design will balance the urban development and environmental protection, support and enhance the development of a new ecological urban center.

Pertinent abiotic and biotic factors and their interdependencies necessary to comprehend the ecology of saline systems are investigated and evaluated. A designed saline ecosystem is proposed as a constructive method to reduce waste volume. Landscape pattern is investigated as the vehicle for an evapotranspiration induced directional saline gradient. A demonstration site is used to explore conceptual design application of the idea of ecosystem pattern consisting of a linear sequence of ecotopes, each displaying its own ecological community in relation to salinity range and site context. Biota is relinquished to self-organization. Potential for research use of the ecosystem is illustrated.

Competition among fungi has been characteristic of antibiotic relationships between microbes, leading to the discovery of novel antimicrobial compounds. This study observed such antagonistic relationships between marine fungi isolated from coral off the coast of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Competition assays were conducted on these fungal isolates against two chosen competing species on PDA plates. Three fungal isolates were observed to release antifungal compounds inhibiting the growth of the competing species. Methanol extracts were taken from each of the three fungal isolates and ¹H and ¹³C NMR spectra obtained. The three fungi were shown to produce antifungal compounds, not observed in previous studies. 14 fractions were obtained from subjecting the methanol extracts from each of the three fungi to chromatography. The final step remains to test these fractions for antifungal activity leading to the isolation and identification of the antifungal compounds.

The goal of this project was to design an ethanol production process from sweet sorghum for use as a renewable fuel. Sorghum stalks are first harvested and sent through a series of 2 three-roller extractors (70% total efficiency). Extracted juice is pumped to the reactor for preservation and fermentation. Sodium metabisulfite preserves the juice. Ethanol Red (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is the fermentation yeast. Following fermentation, the juice (8% ethanol by mass) is distilled to achieve 90% ethanol. A molecular sieve extracts excess water, resulting in 100% ethanol. Plant wastes accumulate during the process. These wastes are collected, dried, and sold as animal feed for profit. The project economics indicate that the overall process is not currently economically feasible. The net present value (NPV) for the optimum economic situation, assuming a 15 year plant lifetime and 15% interest rate, is -$125 M. Under these circumstances, the ethanol would need to be sold at $44.37 per gallon to break even. To improve this process, further development of methods for increasing juice extraction efficiency should be explored. Additionally, the distillation process could be enhanced with a second distillation column to achieve 95% ethanol prior to using the molecular sieve.

The objective of this research is to develop a formal semantic model, theoretical framework and methodology to facilitate interoperability among distributed and heterogeneous geographic database systems (GDSs). The primary research question is how to identify and resolve various data- and schematic-level conflicts among such information sources. Set theory is used to formalize the semantic model, which supports explicit modeling of the complex nature of geographic data objects. The semantic model is used as a canonical model for conceptual schema design and integration. The intension (including structure, integrity rules and meta-properties) of the database schema is captured in the semantic model. A comprehensive framework classifying various semantic conflicts is proposed. This framework is then used as a basis for automating the detection and resolution of semantic conflicts among heterogeneous databases. A methodology for conflict detection and resolution is proposed to develop interoperable system environment. The methodology is based on the concept of a "mediator." Several types of semantic mediators are defined and developed to achieve interoperability. An ontology is developed to capture various semantic conflicts. The metadata and ontology are stored in a common repository and manipulated by description logic-based operators. A query processing technique is developed to provide uniform and integrated access to the multiple heterogeneous databases. Logic is employed to formalize our methodology, which provides a unified view of the underlying representational and reasoning formalism for the semantic mediation process. A usable prototype system is implemented to provide proof of the concept underlying this work. The system has been integrated with the Internet and can be accessed through any Java-enabled web browser. Finally, the usefulness of our methodology and the system is evaluated using three different cases that represent different application domains. Various heterogeneous geospatial datasets and non-geographic datasets are used during the evaluation phase. The results of the evaluation suggest that correct identification and construction of both schema and ontology-schema mapping knowledge play very important roles in achieving interoperability at the both data and schema levels. The research adopts a multi-methodological approach that incorporates set theory, logic, prototyping, and case study.

XML has emerged as a new standard for information representation and exchange on the Internet. To efficiently process XML data, we propose the extended preorder numbering scheme, which determines the ancestor-descendant relationship between nodes in the hierarchy of XML data in constant time, and adapts to the dynamics of XML data by allocating extra space. Based on this numbering scheme, we propose sort-merge based algorithms, εA-Join and εε-Join, to process ancestor-descendant path expressions. The experimental results showed an order of magnitude performance improvement over conventional methods. We further propose the partition-based algorithms, which can be chosen by a query optimizer according to the characteristics of the input data. For complex path expressions with branches, we propose the Containment B⁺-tree (CB-tree) index and the IndexTwig algorithm. The CB-tree, which is an extension of the B⁺-tree, supports both the containment query and the reverse containment query. It is an effective indexing scheme for XML documents with or without a small number of recursions. The proposed IndexTwig algorithm works with any index supporting containment and reverse containment queries, such as the CB-tree. We also introduce a simplified output model, which outputs only the necessary result of a path expression. The output model enables the Fast Existence Test (FET) optimization to skip unnecessary data and avoid generating unwanted results. Also in this dissertation, we introduce techniques to process the predicates in XML path expressions using the EVR-tree. The EVR-tree combines the advantages of indexing on values or elements individually using B+-trees. It utilizes the high value selectivity and/or high structural selectivity, and provides ordered element access by using a priority queue. At the end of the dissertation, we introduce the XISS/R system, which is an implementation of the XML Indexing and Storage System (XISS) on top of a relational database. The XISS/R includes a web-based user interface and a XPath query engine to translate XPath queries into efficient SQL statements.

As everything in the real world changes over time, the ability to model thistemporal dimension of the real world is essential to many computerapplications. Almost every database application involves the management oftemporal data. This applies not only to relational data but also to any datathat models the real world including XML data. Expressing queries ontime-varying (relational or XML) data by using standard query language (SQLor XQuery) is more difficult than writing queries on nontemporal data.In this dissertation, we present minimal valid-time extensions to XQueryand SQL/PSM, focusing on the procedural aspect of the two query languagesand efficient evaluation of sequenced queries.For XQuery, we add valid time support to it by minimally extendingthe syntax and semantics of XQuery. We adopt a stratum approach which maps a&tauXQuery query to a conventional XQuery. The first part of the dissertationfocuses on how to performthis mapping, in particular, on mapping sequenced queries, which are byfar the most challenging. The critical issue of supporting sequenced queries(in any query language) is time-slicing the input data while retaining periodtimestamping. Timestamps are distributed throughout anXML document, rather than uniformly in tuples, complicating the temporalslicing while also providing opportunities for optimization. We propose fiveoptimizations of our initial maximally-fragmented time-slicing approach:selected node slicing, copy-based per-expression slicing, in-placeper-expression slicing, and idiomatic slicing, each of which reducesthe number of constant periods over which the query is evaluated.We also extend a conventional XML query benchmark to effect a temporal XMLquery benchmark. Experiments on this benchmark show that in-place slicingis the best. We then apply the approaches used in &tauXQuery to temporal SQL/PSM.The stratum architecture and most of the time-slicing techniques work fortemporal SQL/PSM. Empirical comparison is performed by running a variety of temporalqueries.