Toward a Coordinated Global Observing System for Seagrasses and Marine Macroalgae

In coastal waters around the world, the dominant primary producers are benthic macrophytes, including seagrasses and macroalgae, that provide habitat structure and food for diverse and abundant biological communities and drive ecosystem processes. Seagrass meadows and macroalgal forests play key roles for coastal societies, contributing to fishery yields, storm protection, biogeochemical cycling and storage, and important cultural values. These socio-economically valuable services are threatened worldwide by human activities, with substantial areas of seagrass and macroalgal forests lost over the last half-century. Tracking the status and trends in marine macrophyte cover and quality is an emerging priority for ocean and coastal management, but doing so has been challenged by limited coordination across the numerous efforts to monitor macrophytes, which vary widely in goals, methodologies, scales, capacity, governance approaches, and data availability. Here, we present a consensus assessment and recommendations on the current state of and opportunities for advancing global marine macrophyte observations, integrating contributions from a community of researchers with broad geographic and disciplinary expertise. With the increasing scale of human impacts, the time is ripe to harmonize marine macrophyte observations by building on existing networks and identifying a core set of common metrics and approaches in sampling design, field measurements, governance, capacity building, and data management. We recommend a tiered observation system, with improvement of remote sensing and remote underwater imaging to expand capacity to capture broad-scale extent at intervals of several years, coordinated with stratified in situ sampling annually to characterize the key variables of cover and taxonomic or functional group composition, and to provide ground-truth. A robust networked system of macrophyte observations will be facilitated by establishing best practices, including standard protocols, documentation, and sharing of resources at all stages of workflow, and secure archiving of open-access data. Because such a network is necessarily distributed, sustaining it depends on close engagement of local stakeholders and focusing on building and long-term maintenance of local capacity, particularly in the developing world. Realizing these recommendations will produce more effective, efficient, and responsive observing, a more accurate global picture of change in vegetated coastal systems, and stronger international capacity for sustaining observations

The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, volume 1

These papers comprise a peer-review selection of presentations by authors from NASA, LPI industry, and academia at the Second Conference (April 1988) on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, sponsored by the NASA Office of Exploration and the Lunar Planetary Institute. These papers go into more technical depth than did those published from the first NASA-sponsored symposium on the topic, held in 1984. Session topics covered by this volume include (1) design and operation of transportation systems to, in orbit around, and on the Moon, (2) lunar base site selection, (3) design, architecture, construction, and operation of lunar bases and human habitats, and (4) lunar-based scientific research and experimentation in astronomy, exobiology, and lunar geology

Place-­attachment in heritage theory and practice: a personal and ethnographic study

The thesis is a critical study of the concept of place-attachment in Australian heritage practice and its application in this field. Place-attachment is typically characterised as a form of intangible heritage arising from interactions between people and place. I trace how this meaning borrows from concepts in psychology and geography and argue that the idea of place-attachment is often applied uncritically in heritage conservation because the field lacks a body of discipline-specific theory. It is my thesis that place-attachment can be conceptualised in a way that is more amenable to effective heritage management practice than is currently the case. I construct a concept of place-attachment that draws on a notion of intra-action and theories of attachment, agency and affect. I define place-attachment as a distributed phenomenon that emerges through the entanglements of individuals or groups, places and things. This meaning is interrogated via four case studies – each centred on a home and garden (including my own) and Anglo-Australians – by applying a methodology that is primarily self-referential and auto-ethnographic. Topics that emerge from the field data, including life stages (i.e., childhood-adulthood attachment), generational transfer, and experiential understanding or empathy, are examined and shown to offer support for a concept of place-attachment as entanglement. The thesis findings have implications for heritage practice. A framework of entanglement over interaction calls for recognition of intra-active assemblages in preference to intangible meanings; dynamism and multi-temporality over stasis and a distant past; the power of personal heritage alongside authorised, collective forms; and situated, relational ethics together with place-centred values

The social context of prehistoric extraction sites in the UK

PhD ThesisThe social context of mines and quarries is fundamental to the interpretation of Neolithic stone extraction. Why did communities choose to exploit certain raw materials in preference to others which were often more accessible? To address this 168 global ethnographic studies were analysed to identify common trends in traditional extraction practices and produce robust statistics about the material signatures of these sites. Repeated associations emerged between storied locations, social networks and the organisation of extraction practices on the one hand, and features of the material world on the other (e.g. landforms, extraction practices, structured deposition), suggesting that we can now probably identify sites which were mythologised/storied locations, those owned, seasonally used, and those practicing ritualised extraction - all leading to product objectification. A second stage of analysis compared the ethnography to 223 global archaeological sites which produced similar patterning in the material record, while suggesting limits to interpretation. These constraints led to a revision of the interpretive framework which was then used to analyse the published excavations of 79 flint mines and 51 axe quarries in the UK and Ireland. This analysis suggested that many extraction sites were special places, deliberately distant from settlements. They followed common practices and assemblages were carefully deposited which the framework suggests reflects technical skill and ritualised practices, but also exclusivity – the sites probably controlled by clans or technical specialists. Previous analyses, particularly of stone axes, demonstrates that many extraction site products travelled long distances, were often unused and deposited in non-settlement contexts. Conversely, artefacts knapped from expedient surface sources are generally discovered in a domestic setting, which confirms the special nature of extraction sites and their products. Overall, this statistically-robust ethnographic probability analysis provides a more confident foundation to model the social context of extraction sites through detailed analysis of their structures and assemblage

Passage to a Ringed World: The Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan

This NASA special publication is an overview of the Saturn system, and the continued exploration by the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens probe. Educational levels: High school, Informal education

Toward a Coordinated Global Observing System for Seagrasses and Marine Macroalgae

In coastal waters around the world, the dominant primary producers are benthic macrophytes, including seagrasses and macroalgae, that provide habitat structure and food for diverse and abundant biological communities and drive ecosystem processes. Seagrass meadows and macroalgal forests play key roles for coastal societies, contributing to fishery yields, storm protection, biogeochemical cycling and storage, and important cultural values. These socio-economically valuable services are threatened worldwide by human activities, with substantial areas of seagrass and macroalgal forests lost over the last half-century. Tracking the status and trends in marine macrophyte cover and quality is an emerging priority for ocean and coastal management, but doing so has been challenged by limited coordination across the numerous efforts to monitor macrophytes, which vary widely in goals, methodologies, scales, capacity, governance approaches, and data availability. Here, we present a consensus assessment and recommendations on the current state of and opportunities for advancing global marine macrophyte observations, integrating contributions from a community of researchers with broad geographic and disciplinary expertise. With the increasing scale of human impacts, the time is ripe to harmonize marine macrophyte observations by building on existing networks and identifying a core set of common metrics and approaches in sampling design, field measurements, governance, capacity building, and data management. We recommend a tiered observation system, with improvement of remote sensing and remote underwater imaging to expand capacity to capture broad-scale extent at intervals of several years, coordinated with stratified in situ sampling annually to characterize the key variables of cover and taxonomic or functional group composition, and to provide ground-truth. A robust networked system of macrophyte observations will be facilitated by establishing best practices, including standard protocols, documentation, and sharing of resources at all stages of workflow, and secure archiving of open-access data. Because such a network is necessarily distributed, sustaining it depends on close engagement of local stakeholders and focusing on building and long-term maintenance of local capacity, particularly in the developing world. Realizing these recommendations will produce more effective, efficient, and responsive observing, a more accurate global picture of change in vegetated coastal systems, and stronger international capacity for sustaining observations

Segurança de contentores em ambiente de desenvolvimento contínuo

The rising of the DevOps movement and the transition from a product economy to a service economy drove significant changes in the software development life cycle paradigm, among which the dropping of the waterfall in favor of agile methods. Since DevOps is itself an agile method, it allows us to monitor current releases, receiving constant feedback from clients, and improving the next software releases. Despite its extraordinary development, DevOps still presents limitations concerning security, which needs to be included in the Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment pipelines (CI/CD) used in software development. The massive adoption of cloud services and open-source software, the widely spread containers and related orchestration, as well as microservice architectures, broke all conventional models of software development. Due to these new technologies, packaging and shipping new software is done in short periods nowadays and becomes almost instantly available to users worldwide. The usual approach to attach security at the end of the software development life cycle (SDLC) is now becoming obsolete, thus pushing the adoption of DevSecOps or SecDevOps, by injecting security into SDLC processes earlier and preventing security defects or issues from entering into production. This dissertation aims to reduce the impact of microservices’ vulnerabilities by examining the respective images and containers through a flexible and adaptable set of analysis tools running in dedicated CI/CD pipelines. This approach intends to provide a clean and secure collection of microservices for later release in cloud production environments. To achieve this purpose, we have developed a solution that allows programming and orchestrating a battery of tests. There is a form where we can select several security analysis tools, and the solution performs this set of tests in a controlled way according to the defined dependencies. To demonstrate the solution’s effectiveness, we program a battery of tests for different scenarios, defining the security analysis pipeline to incorporate various tools. Finally, we will show security tools working locally, which subsequently integrated into our solution return the same results.A ascensão da estratégia DevOps e a transição de uma economia de produto para uma economia de serviços conduziu a mudanças significativas no paradigma do ciclo de vida do desenvolvimento de software, entre as quais o abandono do modelo em cascata em favor de métodos ágeis. Uma vez que o DevOps é parte integrante de um método ágil, permite-nos monitorizar as versões actuais, recebendo feedback constante dos clientes, e melhorando as próximas versões de software. Apesar do seu extraordinário desenvolvimento, o DevOps ainda apresenta limitações relativas à segurança, que necessita de ser incluída nas pipelines de integração contínua ou implantação contínua (CI/CD) utilizadas no desenvolvimento de software. A adopção em massa de serviços na nuvem e software aberto, a ampla difusão de contentores e respectiva orquestração bem como das arquitecturas de micro-serviços, quebraram assim todos os modelos convencionais de desenvolvimento de software. Devido a estas novas tecnologias, a preparação e expedição de novo software é hoje em dia feita em curtos períodos temporais e ficando disponível quase instantaneamente a utilizadores em todo o mundo. Face a estes fatores, a abordagem habitual que adiciona segurança ao final do ciclo de vida do desenvolvimento de software está a tornar-se obsoleta, sendo crucial adotar metodologias DevSecOps ou SecDevOps, injetando a segurança mais cedo nos processos de desenvolvimento de software e impedindo que defeitos ou problemas de segurança fluam para os ambientes de produção. O objectivo desta dissertação é reduzir o impacto de vulnerabilidades em micro-serviços através do exame das respectivas imagens e contentores por um conjunto flexível e adaptável de ferramentas de análise que funcionam em pipelines CI/CD dedicadas. Esta abordagem pretende fornecer uma coleção limpa e segura de micro-serviços para posteriormente serem lançados em ambientes de produção na nuvem. Para atingir este objectivo, desenvolvemos uma solução que permite programar e orquestrar uma bateria de testes. Existe um formulário onde podemos seleccionar várias ferramentas de análise de segurança, e a solução executa este conjunto de testes de uma forma controlada de acordo com as dependências definidas. Para demonstrar a eficácia da solução, programamos um conjunto de testes para diferentes cenários, definindo as pipelines de análise de segurança para incorporar várias ferramentas. Finalmente, mostraremos ferramentas de segurança a funcionar localmente, que posteriormente integradas na nossa solução devolvem os mesmos resultados.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

Located Lexicon: a project that explores how user generated content describes place

This extended conference paper explores the use and potential of location data in social media contexts. The research involved a series of experiments undertaken to assess the extent to which location information is present in exchanges, directly or indirectly. A prototype application was designed to exploit the insight obtained from the data-gathering experiments. This enabled us to develop a method and toolkit for searching, extracting and visualising mass-generated data for open source use. Ultimately, we were able to generate insights into data quality and ‘scale of query’ for emerging pedagogical research in learning swarms and distributed learners

Missouri S&T Magazine Summer 2002

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/alumni-magazine/1060/thumbnail.jp