Cuban Land Use and Conservation, from Rainforests to Coral Reefs

Cuba is an ecological rarity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its complex political and economic history shows limited disturbances, extinctions, pollution, and resource depletion by legal or de facto measures. Vast mangroves, wetlands, and forests play key roles in protecting biodiversity and reducing risks of hazards caused or aggravated by climate change. Cuba boasts coral reefs with some of the region’s greatest fish biomass and coral cover. Although Cuba has set aside major protected areas that safeguard a host of endemic species, its environment is by no means pristine. Its early history is one of deforestation and agricultural production for colonial and neo-colonial powers. Using remote sensing, we find Cuba’s land today is 45% devoted to agricultural, pasturage, and crop production. Roughly 77% of Cuba’s potential mangrove zone is presently in mangrove cover, much outside legal protection; this is likely the most intact Caribbean mangrove ecosystem and an important resource for coastal protection, fish nurseries, and wildlife habitat. Even the largest watersheds with the most agricultural land uses have a strong presence of forests, mangroves, and wetlands to buffer and filter runoff. This landscape could change with Cuba’s gradual reopening to foreign investment and growing popularity among tourists—trends that have devastated natural ecosystems throughout the Caribbean. Cuba is uniquely positioned to avoid and reverse ecosystem collapse if discontinuities between geopolitical and ecosystem functional units are be addressed, if protection and conservation of endemic species and ecosystems services accompany new development, and if a sound ecological restoration plan is enacted

Mission Information and Test Systems Summary of Accomplishments, 2012-2013

This annual report covers the activities of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center's Mission Information and Test Systems directorate, which include the Western Aeronautical Test Range (Range Engineering and Range Operations), the Simulation Engineering Branch, and Information Services. This report contains highlights, current projects, and various awards achieved throughout 2012 and 2013

Towards Optimal IT Availability Planning: Methods and Tools

The availability of an organisation’s IT infrastructure is of vital importance for supporting business activities. IT outages are a cause of competitive liability, chipping away at a company financial performance and reputation. To achieve the maximum possible IT availability within the available budget, organisations need to carry out a set of analysis activities to prioritise efforts and take decisions based on the business needs. This set of analysis activities is called IT availability planning. Most (large) organisations address IT availability planning from one or more of the three main angles: information risk management, business continuity and service level management. Information risk management consists of identifying, analysing, evaluating and mitigating the risks that can affect the information processed by an organisation and the information-processing (IT) systems. Business continuity consists of creating a logistic plan, called business continuity plan, which contains the procedures and all the useful information needed to recover an organisations’ critical processes after major disruption. Service level management mainly consists of organising, documenting and ensuring a certain quality level (e.g. the availability level) for the services offered by IT systems to the business units of an organisation. There exist several standard documents that provide the guidelines to set up the processes of risk, business continuity and service level management. However, to be as generally applicable as possible, these standards do not include implementation details. Consequently, to do IT availability planning each organisation needs to develop the concrete techniques that suit its needs. To be of practical use, these techniques must be accurate enough to deal with the increasing complexity of IT infrastructures, but remain feasible within the budget available to organisations. As we argue in this dissertation, basic approaches currently adopted by organisations are feasible but often lack of accuracy. In this thesis we propose a graph-based framework for modelling the availability dependencies of the components of an IT infrastructure and we develop techniques based on this framework to support availability planning. In more detail we present: 1. the Time Dependency model, which is meant to support IT managers in the selection of a cost-optimal set of countermeasures to mitigate availability-related IT risks; 2. the Qualitative Time Dependency model, which is meant to be used to systematically assess availability-related IT risks in combination with existing risk assessment methods; 3. the Time Dependency and Recovery model, which provides a tool for IT managers to set or validate the recovery time objectives on the components of an IT architecture, which are then used to create the IT-related part of a business continuity plan; 4. A2THOS, to verify if availability SLAs, regulating the provisioning of IT services between business units of the same organisation, can be respected when the implementation of these services is partially outsourced to external companies, and to choose outsourcing offers accordingly. We run case studies with the data of a primary insurance company and a large multinational company to test the proposed techniques. The results indicate that organisations such as insurance or manufacturing companies, which use IT to support their business can benefit from the optimisation of the availability of their IT infrastructure: it is possible to develop techniques that support IT availability planning while guaranteeing feasibility within budget. The framework we propose shows that the structure of the IT architecture can be practically employed with such techniques to increase their accuracy over current practice

Student Handbook 2012

Originally published online

Daily Eastern News: November 08, 1990

https://thekeep.eiu.edu/den_1990_nov/1005/thumbnail.jp

The Goldstone solar system radar: A science instrument for planetary research

The Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) station at NASA's Deep Space Communications Complex in California's Mojave Desert is described. A short chronological account of the GSSR's technical development and scientific discoveries is given. This is followed by a basic discussion of how information is derived from the radar echo and how the raw information can be used to increase understanding of the solar system. A moderately detailed description of the radar system is given, and the engineering performance of the radar is discussed. The operating characteristics of the Arcibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are briefly described and compared with those of the GSSR. Planned and in-process improvements to the existing radar, as well as the performance of a hypothetical 128-m diameter antenna radar station, are described. A comprehensive bibliography of referred scientific and engineering articles presenting results that depended on data gathered by the instrument is provided

NASA Oceanic Processes Program annual review

Current flight projects and definition studies, descriptions of individual research activities, and a bibliography of referred journal articles appearing within the past two years are contained

The 1988 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence

This publication comprises the papers presented at the 1988 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence held at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland on May 24, 1988. The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed. The papers in these proceedings fall into the following areas: mission operations support, planning and scheduling; fault isolation/diagnosis; image processing and machine vision; data management; modeling and simulation; and development tools/methodologies

Network time : synchronisation in real time distributed computing systems

In the past, network clock synchronization has been sufficient for the needs of traditional distributed systems, for such purposes as maintaining Network File Systems, enabling Internet mail services and supporting other applications that require a degree of clock synchronization. Increasingly real time systems arc requiring high degrees of time synchronization. Where this is required, the common approach up until now has been to distribute the clock to each processor by means of hardware (e.g. GPS and cesium clocks) or to distribute time by means of an additional dedicated timing network. Whilst this has proved successful for real time systems, the use of present day high speed networks with definable quality of service from the protocol layers has lead to the possibility of using the existing data network to distribute the time. This thesis demonstrates that by using system integration and implementation of commercial off the shelf (COTS) products it is possible to distribute and coordinate the time of the computer time clocks to microsecond range. Thus providing close enough synchronization to support real time systems whilst avoiding the additional time, infrastructure and money needed to build and maintain a specialized timing network