University of Memphis

About: University of Memphis is a education organization based out in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 7710 authors who have published 20082 publications receiving 611618 citations. The organization is also known as: U of M.

Common features of the excitation and propagation of strong ground motion for North American earthquakes

Abstract: The central matter of this investigation is the commonly held belief that eastern North America (ENA) earthquakes are felt to much greater distances, at all levels of intensity, than their western U.S. (WUS) counterparts of the same source strength. By comparing the areas enclosed by Modified Mercalli intensities I to III (felt), IV, V, VI, and VII for ENA and WUS earthquakes at the same source strength, we find that this proposition is mostly false at damaging levels of ground motion (intensities VI to VII and greater). For M ≲ 7, neither should such differences exist, if strong ground motion is confined to R ≲ 150 km and arrives principally as body waves and if ENA and WUS earthquakes share the same average stress drop. In fact, observable differences in the areas enclosed by intensity VI ( A VI) for ENA and WUS earthquakes at the same M point to slight but significant differences in stress drop, the ENA earthquakes having stress drops a factor of about 2 higher. Only for the largest earthquakes, M ≧ 7 ½ as the 1811 to 1812 New Madrid and 1886 Charleston earthquakes seem to be, can strong ground motion propagate to much greater distances as low-loss, higher-mode surface waves in ENA relative to WUS. The strong dependence of high-frequency strong ground motion on stress drop and its weak dependence on M admit the possibility that the 1811 to 1812 events and the 1886 Charleston earthquakes are no larger than M = 6 ½ to 7, provided that their stress drops are higher than average by a factor of 2 or so.

Modeling the rupture process of the 2003 September 25 Tokachi‐Oki (Hokkaido) earthquake using 1‐Hz GPS data

Abstract: Received 10 September 2004; accepted 3 October 2004; published 3 November 2004. [1] High-rateGPShasthepotentialtorecoverbothdynamic and static displacements accurately. We analyze 1-Hz GPS data recorded during the 2003 Tokachi-Oki earthquake. The 1-Hz GPS displacement waveforms show good agreement with integrated accelerometer records except for low frequency noise that are inherently present in integrated seismic records. The GPS waveforms were inverted to model the spatio-temporal evolution of the fault slip during the rupture. The slip is found to propagate downdip in the subduction zone with largest moment release 50 km northwest of the hypocenter. The region of largest slip agrees in general with traditional seismic studies, indicating that 1-Hz GPS can be used for finite fault studies. The 1-Hz GPS slip model shows clearer contrast with afterslip distributions than those inferred from strong motion data, possibly because 1-Hz GPS is more sensitive to cumulative slip distribution. INDEX TERMS: 1294 Geodesy and Gravity: Instruments and techniques; 7209 Seismology: Earthquake dynamics and mechanics; 7212 Seismology: Earthquake ground motions and engineering. Citation: Miyazaki, S., K. M. Larson, K. Choi, K. Hikima, K. Koketsu, P. Bodin, J. Haase, G. Emore, and A. Yamagiwa (2004), Modeling the rupture process of the 2003 September 25 Tokachi-Oki (Hokkaido) earthquake using 1-Hz GPS data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L21603, doi:10.1029/ 2004GL021457.

Psychological preparation for invasive medical and dental procedures.

Abstract: Psychological preparation for invasive medical and dental procedures has been based on the rationale that high levels of preprocedural fear are detrimental to patients' subsequent adaptation. After a brief survey of the theoretical and empirical evidence pertaining to this rationale, the major psychological approaches designed to alleviate preprocedural concern and enhance recovery are discussed. Outcome studies that have employed informative, psychotherapeutic, modeling, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and/or hypnotic techniques are summarized and evaluated. Although the research suggests that each of these approaches can be effective, such serious methodological problems as heterogeneity of sample characteristics, limited range of outcome measures, and lack of manipulation checks prevent definitive conclusions. Legal-ethical concerns and the issue of cost effectiveness are also considered. Suggestions are made for future research and theory development.

Handedness as a function of sex and age in a large population of Lemur

Abstract: A population of 194 lemurs (Lemur spp.), 116 males and 78 females, from 1 to 30 years of age, was assessed for lateralized hand use in simple food reaching with a minimum of 100 reaches per animal. A hand preference was present in 80% of the population with a bias for use of the left hand that was most characteristic of male lemurs and young lemurs. The results confirm the presence of lateralization in prosimians, and we interpret the sex and age differences in relation to current theories of neural lateralization.

How Programmers Debug, Revisited: An Information Foraging Theory Perspective

Abstract: Many theories of human debugging rely on complex mental constructs that offer little practical advice to builders of software engineering tools. Although hypotheses are important in debugging, a theory of navigation adds more practical value to our understanding of how programmers debug. Therefore, in this paper, we reconsider how people go about debugging in large collections of source code using a modern programming environment. We present an information foraging theory of debugging that treats programmer navigation during debugging as being analogous to a predator following scent to find prey in the wild. The theory proposes that constructs of scent and topology provide enough information to describe and predict programmer navigation during debugging, without reference to mental states such as hypotheses. We investigate the scope of our theory through an empirical study of 10 professional programmers debugging a real-world open source program. We found that the programmers' verbalizations far more often concerned scent-following than hypotheses. To evaluate the predictiveness of our theory, we created an executable model that predicted programmer navigation behavior more accurately than comparable models that did not consider information scent. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for enhancing software engineering tools.