PROCESSING CONSERVATION INDICATORS WITH OPEN SOURCE TOOLS: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DIGITAL OBSERVATORY FOR PROTECTED AREAS

The European Commission has a commitment to open data and the support of open source software and standards. We present lessons learnt while populating and supporting the web and map services that underly the Joint Research Centre's Digital Observatory for Protected Areas. Challenges include: large datasets with highly complex geometries; topological inconsistencies, compounded by reprojection for equal-area calculations; multiple different representations of the same geographical entities, for example coastlines; licensing requirement to continuously update indicators to respond to monthly changes in the authoritative data. In order to compute and publish an array of indicators, we used a range of open source tools including GRASS, R, python, GDAL, PostGIS, geometry libraries for Hadoop, Geoserver, Geonode, and Mapserver. In addition we assessed the value of the commercial ArcGIS Pro software and the Google Earth Engine platform. We describe the lessons that we learnt in building and documenting a usable and repeatable workflow,highlighting weak spots and workarounds., Code for our processing workflows will be shared via github and key process flows will be shared via a VRE to allow reproducible research while complying with data redistribution restrictions from the data providers. Our final goal is to move the entire processing chain to open source tools and share it as a versioned resource

Disjoint difference families and their applications

Difference sets and their generalisations to difference families arise from the study of designs and many other applications. Here we give a brief survey of some of these applications, noting in particular the diverse definitions of difference families and the variations in priorities in constructions. We propose a definition of disjoint difference families that encompasses these variations and allows a comparison of the similarities and disparities. We then focus on two constructions of disjoint difference families arising from frequency hopping sequences and showed that they are in fact the same. We conclude with a discussion of the notion of equivalence for frequency hopping sequences and for disjoint difference families

An extensive English language bibliography on graph theory and its applications, supplement 1

Graph theory and its applications - bibliography, supplement

Examining the Effect of a School-based Creativity Program on Divergent Thinking and Academic Achievement in Middle School Students

This study aimed to investigate the potential transfer effects of domain-specific creativity training on domain-general divergent thinking indices of divergent thinking and investigate the potential effects of the school-based creativity program on the development of creativity in a middle school in the southeast region of the United States. The school-based creativity program is an initiative that uses literacy standards to position students as content creators, connecting directly to student interests. The creativity program includes capstone projects, such as songwriting, theater, dance, video game development, inventions, marketing, and design. In the 2020–2021 school year, 55.17% of the program’s capstone projects were music-related (2019–2020: 63%). I assessed online 75 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students. Of the seventh and eighth graders, one half of the students were partially in the school-based creativity program and the second half were not involved in the program. All sixth graders were enrolled in the program and considered one group, which I labeled as Full Creativity-Sixth Grade. Four types of data were collected and analyzed for this study: the Runco Creativity Assessment Battery, Georgia Milestones Achievement Scores (GMAS), music-based capstone projects, and interviews with the administrator and program coordinator from the creativity program. Quantitative results revealed that grade level did affect divergent thinking, with lower grades scoring less. However, the participants in the Full Creativity program had virtually no transfer effects, which was expected based on the extensive training literature. These results may have been influenced by the way divergent thinking was measured and the testing schedule, in which testing fatigue may have influenced the posttest results. To measure academic achievement, participants were divided into two groups based on their GMAS test scores for English/Language Arts (ELA) and Math (Low Achieving and High Achieving). There were no significant interactions between divergent thinking pre-and posttest scores and GMAS test scores in ELA or Math. After completing a content analysis of the students’ music capstone projects, two overarching themes were present: musical creativity and emotional expression. This dissertation describes the creativity program in detail and discusses how it relates to music education. Contributions, limitations, implications, and directions for future research address the effect of school-based creativity programs on divergent thinking and academic achievement

Montana Perpetuities Legislation—A Plea for Reform

Montana Perpetuities Legislation—A Plea for Refor

Almost Rerere: Learning to resolve conflicts in distributed projects

The concurrent development of applications requires reconciling conflicting code updates by different developers. Recent research on the nature of merge conflicts in open source projects shows that a significant fraction of merge conflicts have limited size (one or two lines of code) and are resolved with simple strategies that use code present in the merged versions. Thus the opportunity arises of supporting the resolution of merge conflicts automatically by learning the way in which developers fix them. In this paper we propose a framework for automating the resolution of merge conflicts which learns from the resolutions made by developers and encodes such knowledge into conflict resolution rules applicable to conflicts not seen before. The proposed approach is text-based, does not depend on the programming languages of the merged files and exploits a well-known and general language (search and replacement regular expressions) to encode the conflict resolution rules. Evaluation results on 14,872 conflicts from 25 projects show that the system can synthesize a resolution for 49% of the conflicts occurred during the merge process (89% if one considers conflicts that have at least one similar conflict in the data set) and can reproduce exactly the same solution that human developers have applied in 55% of the cases (62% for single line conflicts)