Predicting Risk for Deer-Vehicle Collisions Using a Social Media Based Geographic Information System

As an experiment investigating social media as a data source for making management decisions, photo sharing websites were searched for data on deer sightings. Data about deer density and location are important factors in decisions related to herd management and transportation safety, but such data are often limited or not available. Results indicate that when combined with simple rules, data from photo sharing websites reliably predicted the location of road segments with high risk for deer-vehicle collisions as reported by volunteers to an internet site tracking roadkill. Use of Google Maps as the GIS platform was helpful in plotting and sharing data, measuring road segments and other distances, and overlaying geographical data. The ability to view satellite images and panoramic street views proved to be a particularly useful. As a general conclusion, the two independently collected sets of data from social media provided consistent information, suggesting investigative value to this data source. Overlaying two independently collected data sets can be a useful step in evaluating or mitigating reporting bias and human error in data taken from social media

The Effects of Biogeotextiles on the Stabilization of Roadside Slopes in Lithuania.

Soil erosion, Water erosion, Soil conservation, Geotextiles, Geotextile mats, Roadside slopes, Vegetation cover, Biogeotextiles , Palm mat geotextiles - Borassus aethiopum - Mauritia flexuosa - Buriti mats - BORASSUS Project - LithuaniaBiogeotextiles constructed from the leaves of Borassus aethiopum and Mauritia flexuosa are investigated at the Kaltinėnai Research Station of the Lithuanian Institute of Agriculture, which is participating in the EU-funded BORASSUS Project. Biogeotextiles are potentially excellent biodegradable and environmentally-friendly materials useful for soil conservation. Field studies on a steep (21–25°) roadside slope in Lithuania suggest biogeotextile mats are an effective and sustainable soil conservation technique. Biogeotextiles have a potential as a biotechnical soil conservation method for slope stabilization and protection from water erosion on steep industrial slopes and may be integrated with the use of perennial grasses to optimize protection from water erosion. The investigations demonstrated that a cover of Borassus and Buriti mats improved the germination and growth of sown perennial grasses. The biomass of perennial grasses increased by 52.0–63.4% under cover of Borassus mats and by 18.6–28.2% under cover of Buriti mats. Over 2 years, the biogeotextiles (Borassus and Buruti, respectively) decreased soil losses from bare fallow soil by 90.8% and 81.5% and from plots covered by perennial grasses by 87.9% and 79.0%, respectively

Maternal haemoglobin concentrations before and during pregnancy and stillbirth risk: A population-based case-control study

Background: Results of previous studies on the association between maternal haemoglobin concentration during pregnancy and stillbirth risk are inconclusive. It is not clear if haemoglobin concentration before pregnancy has a role. Using prospectively collected information from pre-pregnancy and antenatal visits, we investigated associations of maternal haemoglobin concentrations before and during pregnancy and haemoglobin dilution with stillbirth risk. Methods: In a population-based case-control study from rural Golestan, a province in northern Iran, we identified 495 stillbirths (cases) and randomly selected 2,888 control live births among antenatal health-care visits between 2007 and 2009. Using logistic regression, we estimated associations of maternal haemoglobin concentrations, haemoglobin dilution at different stages of pregnancy, with stillbirth risk. Results: Compared with normal maternal haemoglobin concentration (110-120g/l) at the end of the second trimester, high maternal haemoglobin concentration (≥140g/l) was associated with a more than two-fold increased stillbirth risk (OR = 2.31, 95% CI [1.30-4.10]), while low maternal haemoglobin concentration (<110g/l) was associated with a 37% reduction in stillbirth risk. Haemoglobin concentration before pregnancy was not associated with stillbirth risk. Decreased haemoglobin concentration, as measured during pregnancy (OR = 0.61, 95% CI [0.46, 0.80]), or only during the second trimester (OR = 0.75, 95% CI [0.62, 0.90]), were associated with reduced stillbirth risk. The associations were essentially similar for preterm and term stillbirths. Conclusions: Haemoglobin concentration before pregnancy is not associated with stillbirth risk. High haemoglobin level and absence of haemoglobin dilution during pregnancy could be considered as indicators of a high-risk pregnancy. © 2016 The Author(s)

Algorithmic Superactivation of Asymptotic Quantum Capacity of Zero-Capacity Quantum Channels

The superactivation of zero-capacity quantum channels makes it possible to use two zero-capacity quantum channels with a positive joint capacity for their output. Currently, we have no theoretical background to describe all possible combinations of superactive zero-capacity channels; hence, there may be many other possible combinations. In practice, to discover such superactive zero-capacity channel-pairs, we must analyze an extremely large set of possible quantum states, channel models, and channel probabilities. There is still no extremely efficient algorithmic tool for this purpose. This paper shows an efficient algorithmical method of finding such combinations. Our method can be a very valuable tool for improving the results of fault-tolerant quantum computation and possible communication techniques over very noisy quantum channels.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figures, Journal-ref: Information Sciences (Elsevier, 2012), presented in part at Quantum Information Processing 2012 (QIP2012), v2: minor changes, v3: published version; Information Sciences, Elsevier, ISSN: 0020-0255; 201

The Emperor Goose: An Annotated Bibliography

This bibliography contains more than 500 published and unpublished references relevant to the emperor goose (Chen canagica). The referenced works date from the early exploration of Beringia and Alaska through the formal description of the species in 1802 to 1993

Publishing cooperative and work-integrated education literature: The Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education

The Asia-Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education (APJCE) was founded in 1999, with the first volume published in 2000. The journal strongly adhered to the philosophy of having freely and readily accessible information, and opted to be a free, fully online, open access journal. Over the last 12 years, the journal has grown and has become well-established in the cooperative (co-op) and work-integrated learning (WIL) community. The number of publications per year has steadily increased and the number of submissions has shown strong growth, especially in the last three years. APJCE articles are increasingly cited in other journals and significant book publications, and both its author and user bases have become more international. This article will discuss the advantages from the APJCE perspective of being an open access journal and provide an analysis of the growth of APJCE. The article will also discuss the performance of the journal in the context of co-op/WIL literature internationally and discuss some recent developments for the journal

A new evolutionary search strategy for global optimization of high-dimensional problems

Global optimization of high-dimensional problems in practical applications remains a major challenge to the research community of evolutionary computation. The weakness of randomization-based evolutionary algorithms in searching high-dimensional spaces is demonstrated in this paper. A new strategy, SP-UCI is developed to treat complexity caused by high dimensionalities. This strategy features a slope-based searching kernel and a scheme of maintaining the particle population's capability of searching over the full search space. Examinations of this strategy on a suite of sophisticated composition benchmark functions demonstrate that SP-UCI surpasses two popular algorithms, particle swarm optimizer (PSO) and differential evolution (DE), on high-dimensional problems. Experimental results also corroborate the argument that, in high-dimensional optimization, only problems with well-formative fitness landscapes are solvable, and slope-based schemes are preferable to randomization-based ones. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Ontological imagination: transcending methodological solipsism and the promise of interdisciplinary studies

This text is a presentation of the notion of ontological imagination. It constitutes an attempt to merge two traditions: critical sociology and science and technology studies - STS. By contrasting these two intellectual traditions, I attempt to bring together: a humanist ethical-political sensitivity and a posthumanist ontological insight. My starting point is the premise that contemporary world needs new social ontology and new critical theory based on it in order to overcome the unconsciously adapted, “slice-based” modernist vision of social ontology. I am convinced that we need new ontological frameworks of the social combined with a research disposition which I refer to as ontological imagination

Joint perceptual decision-making: a case study in explanatory pluralism.

Traditionally different approaches to the study of cognition have been viewed as competing explanatory frameworks. An alternative view, explanatory pluralism, regards different approaches to the study of cognition as complementary ways of studying the same phenomenon, at specific temporal and spatial scales, using appropriate methodological tools. Explanatory pluralism has been often described abstractly, but has rarely been applied to concrete cases. We present a case study of explanatory pluralism. We discuss three separate ways of studying the same phenomenon: a perceptual decision-making task (Bahrami et al., 2010), where pairs of subjects share information to jointly individuate an oddball stimulus among a set of distractors. Each approach analyzed the same corpus but targeted different units of analysis at different levels of description: decision-making at the behavioral level, confidence sharing at the linguistic level, and acoustic energy at the physical level. We discuss the utility of explanatory pluralism for describing this complex, multiscale phenomenon, show ways in which this case study sheds new light on the concept of pluralism, and highlight good practices to critically assess and complement approaches