Developing a national item bank

The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges’ virtual learning environments. Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA item bank. Processes have included deciding on appropriate item types and subject areas, training authors, peer-reviewing and quality assuring the items and assessments, and ensuring they are interoperable and tagged with appropriate metadata

NHEP Data Management Plan

A goal of the New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP) and its monitoring program is to promote a cooperative effort by all agencies and organizations who participate in monitoring activities, in order to maximize the usefulness of current monitoring efforts and available data. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to effectively manage the large volume of existing information as well as new information that will be developed through the NHEP monitoring program. Data and information about NH’s estuaries now exists in multiple formats within a variety of organizations. Existing monitoring programs are designed to meet the missions of the various implementing organizations. The organizations use different procedures and protocols for data collection, analysis, storage, and reporting. Coordination of data management among organizations is currently limited. This Data Management Plan contains protocols for data reporting to the NHEP to facilitate data integration. Different protocols will be applied to different types of data (e.g., chemical, geospatial, and biological). The protocols will be considered contract requirements for NHEP monitoring programs and recommended guidelines for other partners. This plan also includes protocols for conducting quality assurance tests on water quality data to ensure the integrity of the NHEP indicators

Putting interoperability to the test: building a large reusable assessment item bank

The COLA project has been developing a large bank of assessment items for units across the Scottish further education curriculum since May 2003. These will be made available to learners mainly via colleges virtual learning environments (VLEs). Many people have been involved in the development of the COLA assessment item bank to ensure a high level of technical and pedagogical quality. Processes have included deciding on appropriate item types and subject areas, training authors, peer-reviewing and quality assuring the items and assessments, and ensuring they are tagged with appropriate metadata. One of the biggest challenges has been to ensure that the assessments are deliverable across the four main virtual learning environments in use in Scottish colleges-and also through a stand-alone assessment system. COLA is significant because no other large project appears to have successfully developed standards-compliant assessment content for delivery across multiple VLEs. This paper discusses how COLA has dealt with the organizational, pedagogical and technical issues which arise when commissioning items from many authors for delivery across an educational sector

The Dark Energy Survey Data Management System

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a 5000 deg2 griZY survey in the southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process and archive these data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists of an integrated archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy codes and a data access framework. We are developing the DESDM system for operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at NCSA and Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers both speed and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs, and for more compute-intensive tasks such as large scale image coaddition campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available to the Collaboration and later to the public through a virtual-observatory compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project, which must deploy and maintain only the storage, database platforms and orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we tested the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database. We also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired with the Mosaic2 camera. Comparison to truth tables in the case of the simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE conference on Astronomical Instrumentation (held in Marseille in June 2008). This preprint is made available with the permission of SPIE. Further information together with preprint containing full quality images is available at http://desweb.cosmology.uiuc.edu/wik

Eelgrass Distribution in the Great Bay Estuary and Piscataqua River for 2017

Eelgrass distribution in Great Bay, Little Bay, and the Piscataqua River Estuary was mapped from aerial photography acquired on August 24, 2017. The total area of eelgrass beds with 10% or greater cover and a polygon area equal to or greater than 100 square meters was 625.9 hectares or 1546.7 acres. Eelgrass polygons were coded for Assessment Zone location and the results reported for each zone. The largest concentration of eelgrass was found in Great Bay with lesser amounts in the vicinity of Portsmouth Harbor. The total area of eelgrass beds with 10% or greater cover and a polygon area equal to or greater than 100 square meters has decreased by 142 acres which is approximately an 8.5% decrease from the previous year