Conservation Easement Outreach Project, Wenninger

Stratham voters approved a 5 million dollar conservation bond issue in 2002 to preserve open space through easement or outright purchase. The Ad-hoc Conservation Bond Subcommittee to the Conservation Commission is helping achieve Stratham’s open space goals and is continuing to reach out to landowners that have undeveloped land that may be suitable for Stratham’s open space initiative. It was an opportune time for the subcommittee to provide updated outreach materials when a grant by the Natural Resources Outreach Coalition (NROC) Implementation Grant Program became available. The grant, managed by the New Hampshire Estuaries Project, provided funding to produce and mail an updated full color tri-fold brochure to each resident household that provided information on the open space initiative and achievements after approximately 2 1/2 years of work. It also provided funding to update workbooks provided to landowners that are interested in conservation easements

Adaptive Bernstein-von Mises theorems in Gaussian white noise

We investigate Bernstein-von Mises theorems for adaptive nonparametric Bayesian procedures in the canonical Gaussian white noise model. We consider both a Hilbert space and multiscale setting with applications in $L^2$ and $L^\infty$ respectively. This provides a theoretical justification for plug-in procedures, for example the use of certain credible sets for sufficiently smooth linear functionals. We use this general approach to construct optimal frequentist confidence sets based on the posterior distribution. We also provide simulations to numerically illustrate our approach and obtain a visual representation of the geometries involved.Comment: 48 pages, 5 figure

Development of EM-CCD-based X-ray detector for synchrotron applications

A high speed, low noise camera system for crystallography and X-ray imaging applications is developed and successfully demonstrated. By coupling an electron-multiplying (EM)-CCD to a 3:1 fibre-optic taper and a CsI(Tl) scintillator, it was possible to detect hard X-rays. This novel approach to hard X-ray imaging takes advantage of sub-electron equivalent readout noise performance at high pixel readout frequencies of EM-CCD detectors with the increase in the imaging area that is offered through the use of a fibre-optic taper. Compared with the industry state of the art, based on CCD camera systems, a high frame rate for a full-frame readout (50 ms) and a lower readout noise (<1 electron root mean square) across a range of X-ray energies (6–18 keV) were achieved

The Second Law and Rivalrous Digital Information (Or Maxwell's Demon in an Information Age)

Over thirty years ago Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in an extraordinary book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process opened up a whole new branch of environmental economics, exploring the impact of a fundamental, though not widely known, law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, on the economic process. The 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that when energy gets transformed some of it always gets wasted. No matter how efficient we make any machine it will always waste energy to some degree. This has implications for the knowledge society. There is a widespread belief that once information is digitised it can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost but digital information fundamentally depends on access to a source of energy. And it turns out that large data centres and servers use up a lot of energy. The big technology companies' energy bills can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In a world facing an energy crisis that means digital information is a little more rivalrous than we originally thought..