The Prairie Post Quarterly Newsletter of the High Plains Regional Climate Center- July 2016

Inside this issue: Message from the interim director........................................1 Staff spotlight...........................1 Research update......................2 Product highlight....................3 Partnership spotlight.............3 AWDN information.................4 Update on regional climate conditions..................................4 Outreach/engagement.........5 Recent and upcoming travel and activities.............................

Estimating the abundance of banded kokopu (galaxias fasciatus gray) in small streams by nocturnal counts under spotlight illumination

The abundance of banded kokopu (Galaxias fasciatus Gray) in small streams has usually been determined by the labour intensive and invasive method of electric fishing. Recently, nocturnal counts under spotlight illumination have been used to determine presence or absence and relative abundance of banded kokopu, but the proportion of the population seen was unknown. We compared 20 spotlight counts of banded kokopu in approximately 20 m reaches in streams in the North Island, New Zealand, to population estimates determined by removal electric fishing in the same reaches. Spotlight counts were related to population estimates over a range of densities, and on average, spotlight counts were 64% of the population estimates. Though we tried to separate age-0 fish from older fish visually in the spotlight counts, the size frequency distribution of the fish caught by electric fishing showed that the visual separation was not reliable. In addition, visual counts were generally inefficient for age-0 fish (40-70 mm total length), as only about 40% were observed. Banded kokopu were also recorded in streams using time-lapse video recordings with a camera sensitive to low light levels. Diel activity showed two major peaks, one in the early morning from 0400 h to 0900 h, and the other in the afternoon and evening from 1300 h to 1900 h. Fish were less disturbed by the observer.s approach after dark than during the day, so we suggest that from dusk to about 2200 h is the best time for visual counts of banded kokopu by spotlight in summer months

Transcribing Content from Structural Images with Spotlight Mechanism

Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution. Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling, respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of STN framework.Comment: Accepted by KDD2018 Research Track. In proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'18

Spotlight: Tom Buchanan

The ICCTE-J editorial team is pleased to welcome Dr. Thomas Buchanan to the work of online journal publishing in service to the ICCTE community. Tom is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at George Fox University

In the Spotlight

In September, 10 advanced practice nurses from the Department of Surgery gathered for a lunchtime kick-off meeting to form a Nurse Practitioners (NPs) & Physician Assistants (PAs) Professionalism and Scholarship Working Group. This initiative is an important career development component and has been meeting on a monthly basis to discuss issues in clinical practice, explore potential clinical research projects, foster CV development, and address professional practice concerns. Thus far, two projects have been submitted for small grant consideration, several presentations have been developed and two members are collaborating on publishing an online continuing education module for NPs. All Department of Surgery NPs and PAs are invited. Please contact: [email protected]

Facilitating Access of Aids Drugs While Maintaining Strong Patent Protection

The AIDS pandemic has thrust the subject of patent protection into the spotlight, a spotlight that has attracted the attention of broad audience including interested parties from the political, legal, and medical communities. Can the United States\u27 scheme of strong patent protection for pharmaceutical products withstand the increased attention

In the Spotlight

From September 16 – 19, 2015, the Department of Surgery will host the 89th Annual Meeting of the Halsted Society in Philadelphia. The organization, founded in June 1924, was named after Dr. William Stewart Halsted, the first Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins. Today the Halsted Society is a vigorous organization of professional men and women who strive to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Halsted and further the scientific principles and ideals for which he stood. Jefferson members Drs. Ernest Rosato (2nd from left), Charles Yeo, Stephen Dunn, and Nicholas Cavarocchi, along with initiate member Dr. Jordan Winter (far left), will represent Jefferson during the three-day meeting which includes scientific sessions at the Hyatt at the Bellevue and the Dorrance Hamilton Building on the Jefferson campus. The local program will kick off with a welcome by Mark Tykocinski, MD, Dean of Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University, followed by over a dozen talks by Department of Surgery faculty members. Highlights of the social program include a lecture and viewing of Thomas Eakins’ famous “The Gross Clinic” painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a dinner at the College of Physicians (site of the Mütter Museum and Samuel D. Gross Library)

Shellfish Spotlight: 2008

Each year Granite State shellfishers search shallow briny waters in search of delicious mussels, clams, or oysters for the dinner table. Those who are skilled often are rewarded with full buckets, but few shellfishers realize that good harvests in New Hampshire’s Seacoast owe much to activities occurring far upstream. The quality of the water and amount of available nutrients that sustain a clam or oyster is directly related to the condition of the rivers and streams that drain the land. The Hampton-Seabrook Estuary is fed by approximately 46 square miles of surrounding land. An even larger system, the Piscataqua River Estuary that includes Great Bay, is supplied by a watershed that is 1,023 square miles. Development within the coastal watershed area has profound impacts on the amount of contaminants flowing to the sea. Sediment washed from roadways and bare soil flows downstream and collects in the estuary where it smothers shellfish beds in extreme cases. Nutrients, primarily nitrogen, are contributed by wastewater treatment plants, septic systems, and land use activities such as lawn fertilizing. Excessive nutrients threaten the ecological balance of the estuaries and thus the survival of shellfish populations. Finally, bacteria from failing septic systems, pet waste, or damaged sewer systems create a human health hazard in estuarine waters. Because shellfish filter great amounts of water to take in food and oxygen, they absorb contaminants from the water that accumulate in their flesh. Therefore, a watershed that flushes large amounts of contaminants downstream will deliver many of these contaminants to shellfish and reduce their numbers or often make them unsafe to eat. It is this close relationship between coastal watershed function and shellfish health that caused the New Hampshire Estuaries Project (NHEP), and many partnering agencies, to monitor shellfish in New Hampshire and make their restoration and maintenance a priority. The NHEP Manage- ment Plan includes many strategies that improve water quality throughout the watershed that will in turn improve shellfish populations and open more harvesting areas