Conservation science in NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuaries: description and recent accomplishments

This report describes cases relating to the management of national marine sanctuaries in which certain scientific information was required so managers could make decisions that effectively protected trust resources. The cases presented represent only a fraction of difficult issues that marine sanctuary managers deal with daily. They include, among others, problems related to wildlife disturbance, vessel routing, marine reserve placement, watershed management, oil spill response, and habitat restoration. Scientific approaches to address these problems vary significantly, and include literature surveys, data mining, field studies (monitoring, mapping, observations, and measurement), geospatial and biogeographic analysis, and modeling. In most cases there is also an element of expert consultation and collaboration among multiple partners, agencies with resource protection responsibilities, and other users and stakeholders. The resulting management responses may involve direct intervention (e.g., for spill response or habitat restoration issues), proposal of boundary alternatives for marine sanctuaries or reserves, changes in agency policy or regulations, making recommendations to other agencies with resource protection responsibilities, proposing changes to international or domestic shipping rules, or development of new education or outreach programs. (PDF contains 37 pages.

Collected notes from the Benchmarks and Metrics Workshop

In recent years there has been a proliferation of proposals in the artificial intelligence (AI) literature for integrated agent architectures. Each architecture offers an approach to the general problem of constructing an integrated agent. Unfortunately, the ways in which one architecture might be considered better than another are not always clear. There has been a growing realization that many of the positive and negative aspects of an architecture become apparent only when experimental evaluation is performed and that to progress as a discipline, we must develop rigorous experimental methods. In addition to the intrinsic intellectual interest of experimentation, rigorous performance evaluation of systems is also a crucial practical concern to our research sponsors. DARPA, NASA, and AFOSR (among others) are actively searching for better ways of experimentally evaluating alternative approaches to building intelligent agents. One tool for experimental evaluation involves testing systems on benchmark tasks in order to assess their relative performance. As part of a joint DARPA and NASA funded project, NASA-Ames and Teleos Research are carrying out a research effort to establish a set of benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics by which the performance of agent architectures may be determined. As part of this project, we held a workshop on Benchmarks and Metrics at the NASA Ames Research Center on June 25, 1990. The objective of the workshop was to foster early discussion on this important topic. We did not achieve a consensus, nor did we expect to. Collected here is some of the information that was exchanged at the workshop. Given here is an outline of the workshop, a list of the participants, notes taken on the white-board during open discussions, position papers/notes from some participants, and copies of slides used in the presentations

Strategic Directions in Object-Oriented Programming

This paper has provided an overview of the field of object-oriented programming. After presenting a historical perspective and some major achievements in the field, four research directions were introduced: technologies integration, software components, distributed programming, and new paradigms. In general there is a need to continue research in traditional areas:\ud (1) as computer systems become more and more complex, there is a need to further develop the work on architecture and design; \ud (2) to support the development of complex systems, there is a need for better languages, environments, and tools; \ud (3) foundations in the form of the conceptual framework and other theories must be extended to enhance the means for modeling and formal analysis, as well as for understanding future computer systems

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 338)

This bibliography lists 139 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during June 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Incorporating Food Security into Regional Strategic Environmental Assessment

Adequate consideration for health in strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is important for effective and sustainability-driven SEA practice. Food security is fundamental to human health and is threatened, in part, by industrial development, yet is given little to no attention in environmental assessment (EA) discourse despite its importance to health and sustainability. Regional strategic environment assessment (RSEA) is an evaluation process that informs strategic decision-making related to natural resources extraction and development and it is well-positioned to integrate food security considerations in environmental governance. This study explores how food security may be effectively incorporated into RSEA conducted for natural resource development in Canada and internationally. This study proceeded in two phases and used standard qualitative research methods. In phase one, semi-structured interviews with food security experts were conducted. This was followed by inductive thematic data analysis to identify key criteria and requirements for effective food security assessment that align with RSEA process demands and constraints. This set the stage for phase two, which consisted of a document analysis of 17 Canadian SEAs performed for offshore petroleum exploration projects. Phase two adopted a deductive thematic data analysis to identify latent and indirect consideration for food security within the SEA reports, then further evaluated the SEAs using magnitude scales to quantify the level and means of consideration for food security. No direct evidence of consideration for food security was found in any of the 17 SEAs analyzed. Many of the shortcomings of practice were consistent with the general shortcomings of SEA practice, previously identified in the literature. These included limited consideration for the socio-economic environment in comparison to the biophysical environment, and inadequate public participation measures. Some evidence of indirect consideration for food security was identified in the 17 SEAs analyzed. When present, these practices generally aligned with the recommendations for food security evaluation established in phase one of the research. Thus, the findings suggest that RSEA has a solid foundation to fully incorporate evaluation of food security. The product of this thesis is a framework aimed to guide adequate and effective consideration and assessment of food security in RSEA processes, based on food security expert recommendations and grounded in the state of SEA practice. It is anticipated that the framework will provide a valuable tool for RSEA practitioners in the future, contributing to efforts to improve both RSEA effectiveness and food security in areas affected by natural resource development programs

The Political Use of Family Values Rhetoric

The bipartisan political slogan “family values,” coupled with discourse surrounding the supposed breakdown of the American family, is a rhetorical move used by political agencies in an effort to excuse the socio-economic failings in America and to reassign responsibility for these failings to the private sphere. This rhetoric tends to promote the idealized nuclear family, while marginalizing the poor and non-traditional family groups

Geospatial Informational Security Risks and Concerns of the U.S. Air Force GeoBase Program

Technological advancements such as Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and the Internet have made it easier and affordable to share information, which enables complex and time sensitive decisions to be made with higher confidence. Further, advancements in information technology have dramatically increased the ability to store, manage, integrate, and correlate larger amounts of data to improve operational efficiency. However, the same technologies that enable increased productivity also provide increased capabilities to those wishing to do harm. Today’s military leaders are faced with the challenge of deciding how to make geospatial information collected on military installations and organizations available to authorized communities of interest while simultaneously restricting access to protect operational security. Often, these decisions are made without understanding how the sharing of certain combinations of data may pose a significant risk to protecting critical information, infrastructure or resources. Information security has been an area of growing concern in the GeoBase community since, by definition, it is required to strike a balance between competing interests, each supported by federal policy: (1) the availability of data paid for by tax dollars and (2) the protection of data as required to mitigate risks. In this research we will explore the security implications of the US Air Force GeoBase (the US Air Force’s applied Geospatial Information System) program. We examine the rapid expansion of the use of GeoBase to communities outside of the civil engineering field; examine the intrinsic and extrinsic security risks of the unconstrained sharing of geospatial information; explore difficulties encountered when attempting to rate the sensitivity of information, discuss new policies and procedures that have been implemented undertaken to protect the information, and propose technical and managerial control measures to facilitate sharing geospatial information sharing while minimizing the associated operational risks

Review of the Synergies Between Computational Modeling and Experimental Characterization of Materials Across Length Scales

With the increasing interplay between experimental and computational approaches at multiple length scales, new research directions are emerging in materials science and computational mechanics. Such cooperative interactions find many applications in the development, characterization and design of complex material systems. This manuscript provides a broad and comprehensive overview of recent trends where predictive modeling capabilities are developed in conjunction with experiments and advanced characterization to gain a greater insight into structure-properties relationships and study various physical phenomena and mechanisms. The focus of this review is on the intersections of multiscale materials experiments and modeling relevant to the materials mechanics community. After a general discussion on the perspective from various communities, the article focuses on the latest experimental and theoretical opportunities. Emphasis is given to the role of experiments in multiscale models, including insights into how computations can be used as discovery tools for materials engineering, rather than to "simply" support experimental work. This is illustrated by examples from several application areas on structural materials. This manuscript ends with a discussion on some problems and open scientific questions that are being explored in order to advance this relatively new field of research.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figures, review article accepted for publication in J. Mater. Sc