A Method for siting and prioritizing the removal of derelict vessels in Florida Coastal Waters: test applications in the Florida Keys

Increased boating activities and new waterfront developments have contributed an estimated 3,000 dismantled, abandoned, junked, wrecked, derelict vessels to Florida coastal waters. This report outlines a method of siting and prioritizing derelict vessel removal using the Florida Keys as a test area. The data base was information on 240 vessels, obtained from Florida Marine Patrol files. Vessel location was plotted on 1:250,000 regional and 1:5,000 and 1:12,000 site maps. Type of vessel, length, hull material, engine, fuel tanks, overall condition, afloat and submerged characteristics, and accessibility, were used to derive parametric site indices of removal priority and removal difficulty. Results indicate 59 top priority cases which should be the focus of immediate clean up efforts in the Florida Keys. Half of these cases are rated low to moderate in removal difficulty; the remainder are difficult to remove. Removal difficulty is a surrogate for removal cost: low difficulty -low cost, high difficulty - high cost. The rating scheme offers coastal planners options of focusing removal operations either on (1) specific areas with clusters of high priority derelict vessels or on (2) selected targeted derelicts at various, specific locations. (PDF has 59 pages.

Using audio feedback with distance learning students to enhance their learning on a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education programme

Our aim is to investigate the use of audio feedback for formative assessment on a Postgraduate Certificate Higher Education in Teaching and Supporting Learning (PG Cert HE) programme. The case study draws on the experience of the participants who undertook this programme at a distance, as well as the reflections of the teaching team. Our study aims to address some of these issues and provide educators with an account of how audio feedback might be successfully integrated into distance learning programmes

A postmortem investigation of the Type IIb supernova 2001ig

We present images taken with the GMOS instrument on Gemini-South, in excellent (<0.5 arcsec) seeing, of SN 2001ig in NGC 7424, ~1000 days after explosion. A point source seen at the site of the SN is shown to have colours inconsistent with being an H II region or a SN 1993J-like remnant, but can be matched to a late-B through late-F supergiant with A_V<1. We believe this object is the massive binary companion responsible for periodic modulation in mass loss material around the Wolf-Rayet progenitor which gave rise to significant structure in the SN radio light curve.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters. Fig. 1 resolution degraded to meet size limitations; full resolution version available from http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/sdr/pubs/sn2001ig_gmos.ps.g

Speaking the same language: developing a language-aware feedback culture

Research suggests that feedback as part of assessment is often not delivered effectively. A key aspect of effective feedback delivery is that students need to understand feedback and also feel motivated to act on it. This article explores how educational developers can incorporate a language-aware approach to feedback when working with staff involved in learning and teaching in order to enable staff to make appropriate linguistic choices when providing feedback so that it is more comprehensible and motivational for students. It describes a piece of action research which explored and evaluated two teaching activities used on a PG Cert HE with staff at a post-1992 university, designed to promote critical awareness of the language used when giving feedback. We report on the staff evaluation of the activities devised and piloted, and consider how this project could be taken forward in future

Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration

This report represents a compilation, analysis and summarization of data collected on the South Platte Management Area and deals primarily with game bird data collected by personnel of Project W-37-R. History, general description, and methods of operation are discussed, and recommendations for future operations given. Briefly, the South Platte Management Area is located in Logan and Sedgwick counties, comprising over 11, 400 acres of state-owned land in four separate segments. The largest segment (more than 12,000 acres of deeded and leased land) lies along the South Platte River from Proctor to Red Lion. This, and a second area of 240 acres, near the town of Sedgwick, known as Sedgwick Bar, were acquired using Federal Aid Funds, primarily for the purpose of providing wintering and resting sites for migratory waterfowl which frequent this section of northeastern Colorado in greater numbers in winter than anywhere else in the state. These areas are used as public shooting grounds during the regular open seasons. Most of the discusssions in this report pertain to these two areas. The third and fourth segments of the management area are Sand Draw, some ten miles south of Julesburg, and the Smith Property near Crook. Both were acquired to provide all-year habitat for upland game birds, primarily pheasants, with some of the land farmed on a percentage basis and part of the grain left standing for winter feed

Waterfowl - water temperature relations in winter

Submitted to Office of Water Resources Research, U.S. Department of the Interior.Bibliography: page 60.Project A-006-COLO, Grant agreement nos. 14-01-0001-1074, 1625, 3006

Enhancing Female Prisoners’ Access to Education

The rate of female incarceration continues to surge, resulting in over 714,000 women currently being held behind bars worldwide. Females generally enter carceral facilities with low educational profiles, and educational programming inside is rarely a high priority. Access to education is a proven contributor to women’s social and economic empowerment and can minimise some of the obstacles they encounter after being released from custody. Support for the intellectual potential of incarcerated female ‘students’ can address intersecting inequalities that impede access to social protection, public services and sustainable infrastructure.&nbsp; Policymakers, academics and activists concerned with gender equality must begin by focusing on academic and vocational program development for female prisoners, built through strong community partnerships, and inclusive of trauma informed supports

Measurement of retinal vessel widths from fundus images based on 2-D modeling

Changes in retinal vessel diameter are an important sign of diseases such as hypertension, arteriosclerosis and diabetes mellitus. Obtaining precise measurements of vascular widths is a critical and demanding process in automated retinal image analysis as the typical vessel is only a few pixels wide. This paper presents an algorithm to measure the vessel diameter to subpixel accuracy. The diameter measurement is based on a two-dimensional difference of Gaussian model, which is optimized to fit a two-dimensional intensity vessel segment. The performance of the method is evaluated against Brinchmann-Hansen's half height, Gregson's rectangular profile and Zhou's Gaussian model. Results from 100 sample profiles show that the presented algorithm is over 30% more precise than the compared techniques and is accurate to a third of a pixel

Optic nerve head segmentation

Reliable and efficient optic disk localization and segmentation are important tasks in automated retinal screening. General-purpose edge detection algorithms often fail to segment the optic disk due to fuzzy boundaries, inconsistent image contrast or missing edge features. This paper presents an algorithm for the localization and segmentation of the optic nerve head boundary in low-resolution images (about 20 /spl mu//pixel). Optic disk localization is achieved using specialized template matching, and segmentation by a deformable contour model. The latter uses a global elliptical model and a local deformable model with variable edge-strength dependent stiffness. The algorithm is evaluated against a randomly selected database of 100 images from a diabetic screening programme. Ten images were classified as unusable; the others were of variable quality. The localization algorithm succeeded on all bar one usable image; the contour estimation algorithm was qualitatively assessed by an ophthalmologist as having Excellent-Fair performance in 83% of cases, and performs well even on blurred image