Geology of the Las Vegas area
We document a rich Upper Triassic bonebed in Borden County, Texas in either the uppermost Tecovas Formation or, more likely, the Trujillo Formation of the Chinle Group, that represents one of the highest stratigraphic occurrences of the aberrant archosauromorph reptile Trilophosaurus. The associated fauna includes indeterminate coprolites, unionid bivalves, osteichthyans, indeterminate reptiles, a possible ornithischian dinosaur, and the putative theropod dinosaur Spinosuchus caseanus Huene.
Tectonic Influences on Ground Water Quality: Insight from Complementary Methods
A study using multiple techniques provided insight into tectonic influences on ground water systems; the results can help to understand ground water systems in the tectonically active western United States and other parts of the world. Ground water in the San Bernardino Valley (Arizona, United States and Sonora, Mexico) is the main source of water for domestic use, cattle ranching (the primary industry), and the preservation of threatened and endangered species. To improve the understanding of ground water occurrence, movement, and sustainability, an investigation was conducted using a number of complementary methods, including major ion geochemistry, isotope hydrology, analysis of gases dissolved in ground water, aquifer testing, geophysics, and an examination of surface and subsurface geology. By combining information from multiple lines of investigation, a more complete picture of the basin hydrogeology was assembled than would have been possible using fewer methods. The results show that the hydrogeology of the San Bernardino Valley is markedly different than that of its four neighboring basins in the United States. The differences include water quality, chemical evolution, storage, and residence time. The differences result from the locally unique geology of the San Bernardino Valley, which is due to the presence of a magmatically active accommodation zone (a zone separating two regions of normal faults with opposite dips). The geological differences and the resultant hydrological differences between the San Bernardino Valley and its neighboring basins may serve as a model for the distinctive nature of chemical evolution of ground water in other basins with locally distinct tectonic histories.
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.