The preferred method of randomizing a deck of N cards is the riffle shuffle–cut the deck into two stacks, then riffle the two stacks together. A number of mathematical models have been proposed for this process. The model which has received the most attention, and about which the most is known, is the GSR (for Gilbert, Shannon, and Reeds) shuffle. In this model, all permutations with exactly on...

Concrete bridge decks are prone to ice accumulation. The use of road salts and chemicals for deicing is cost effective but causes damage to concrete and corrosion of reinforcing steel in concrete bridge decks. This problem is a major concern to transportation officials and public works due to rapid degradation of existing concrete pavements and bridge decks. The use of insulation materials for ...

The instructions for generating and sustaining all life forms are encoded within each life form’s genome. A major challenge in the postgenomic sequencing era has been assigning functions to the hundreds of thousands of noncoding sequence elements within our nuclear genome that are homologous to sequences in other species. These snippets of DNA have been hypothesized to impart information for in...

We designed and built a next-generation visualization facility, the Reality Deck, that simultaneously offers state-of-the-art aggregate resolution and immersion. The Reality Deck is a 1.5 gigapixel immersive tiled display with a full 360◦ horizontal field of view. Comprised of 416 high density LCD displays, it is built to tackle today’s big data problems while providing users with 20 20 visual ...

We carry out the harmonic analysis on four Platonic spherical three-manifolds with different topologies. Starting out from the homotopies (Everitt 2004), we convert them into deck operations, acting on the simply connected three-sphere as the cover, and obtain the corresponding variety of deck groups. For each topology, the three-sphere is tiled into copies of a fundamental domain under the cor...