WHO LEAVES? INDIVIDUAL-BASED PREDICTIVE MODELING OF NON-END OF ACTIVE SERVICE ATTRITION FOR ENLISTED MARINES

Talent Management 2030 posits that the United States Marine Corps' manpower system hails from the industrial era and calls for broad modernization. This thesis serves as a proof of concept designed to implement modern predictive machine-learning algorithms and techniques to an age-old military manpower problem. Current Marine Corps attrition modeling is conducted using historical averages and does not account for individual attributes of each Marine. This study employs two machine-learning models, a Random Forest classifier and a multinomial logistic regression with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator predictor selection. It uses individual, disaggregated data and compares the prediction results to current Marine Corps attrition modeling processes. Two key findings are reported. First, the Random Forest classifier models outperform the current trailing average models at predicting aggregate attrition. One caveat is that these models have difficulty at correctly classifying non-end of active service attrition at the Marine level, achieving an average of 45% correct individual classification. Second, even though the machine-learning models provide superior prediction, they may not be managerially relevant because of the opportunity cost of construction due to the current database structure, data systems, and capabilities employed by Marine Corps manpower entities.NPS Naval Research ProgramThis project was funded in part by the NPS Naval Research Program.Outstanding ThesisMajor, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

What can we learn from b->s gamma?

We review some recent theoretical progress in the understanding of weak radiative B meson decay, and discuss the implications of present and improved measurements of b -> s gamma for supersymmetric models.Comment: Talk presented at Beauty '97, UCLA, October 13-17, 1997. 9 pages, LaTeX, 3 figures, references adde

Connecting with Collections: Research Internships promoting closer collaboration between University Museums

During 2013, the University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) introduced an innovative research internship initiative aimed at early career academic researchers. The Connecting with Collections (CwC) scheme offered six interns from British universities the opportunity to gain hands-on museum experience, while working independently on individual research projects within the collections of the UCM consortium. This paper presents: 1. An Overview of Connecting with Connections Scheme: programme rationale, aims and funding, recruitment and project choice. 2. Training and Opportunities: group training sessions, as well as snapshots of individual experiences within the museums and 3. Internship Outputs: including an end-of-internship Symposium and other outcomes for interns. It briefly surveys the six internship projects before drawing some conclusions about the CwC programme and highlighting some of the debates around the future direction of the internship scheme for UCM

Observation of Space-Charge-Limited Transport in InAs Nanowires

Recent theory and experiment have suggested that space-charge-limited transport should be prevalent in high aspect-ratio semiconducting nanowires. We report on InAs nanowires exhibiting this mode of transport and utilize the underlying theory to determine the mobility and effective carrier concentration of individual nanowires, both of which are found to be diameter-dependent. Intentionally induced failure by Joule heating supports the notion of space-charge-limited transport and proposes reduced thermal conductivity due to the nanowires polymorphism

Hybrid Internet Access

Access to the Internet is either too slow (dial-up SLIP) or too expensive (switched 56 kbps, frame relay) for the home user or small enterprise. The Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks and Hughes Network Systems have collaborated using systems integration principles to develop a prototype of a low-cost hybrid (dialup and satellite) network terminal which can deliver data from the Internet to the user at rates up to 160 kbps. An asymmetric TCP/IP connection is used breaking the network link into two physical channels: a terrestrial dial-up for carrying data from the terminal into the Internet and a receive-only satellite link carrying IP packets from the Internet to the user. With a goal of supporting bandwidth hungry Internet applications such as Mosaic Gopher, and FTP, this system has been designed to support an Intel 80386/486 PC, any commercial TCP/IP package, any unmodified host on the Internet, and any of the routers, etc., within the Internet.. The design exploits the following three observations: 1) satellites are able to offer high bandwidth connections to large geographical area, 2) a receiver-only VSAT is cheap to manufacture and easier to install than one which can also transmit, and 3) most computer users, especially those in a home environment, will want to consume much more information than they generate. IP encapsulation, or tunneling, issued to manipulate the TCP/IP protocols to route packets asymmetrically

Bioclimatic, ecological, and phenotypic intermediacy and high genetic admixture in a natural hybrid of octoploid strawberries

Premise of the Study: Hybrid zones provide "natural laboratories" for understanding the processes of selection, reinforcement, and speciation. We sought to gain insight into the degree of introgression and the extent of ecological-phenotypic intermediacy in the natural hybrid strawberry, Fragaria x ananassa subsp. cuneifolia. Methods: We used whole-plastome sequencing to identify parental species-specific (Fragaria chiloensis and F. virginiana) chloroplast single-nucleotide polymorphisms and combined the use of these with nuclear microsatellite markers to genetically characterize the hybrid zone. We assessed the potential role of selection in the observed geographic patterns by bioclimatically characterizing the niche of the hybrid populations and phenotypically characterizing hybrid individuals of known genomic constitution. Key Results: Significant admixture and little overall maternal bias in chloroplast or nuclear genomes suggest a high degree of interfertility among the parental and hybrid species and point to a long history of backcrossing and genetic mixing in the hybrid zone. Even though hybrids were phenotypically intermediate to the parental species, there was a discernible fingerprint of the parental genotype within hybrid individuals. Thus, although the pattern of introgression observed suggests geographic limitations to gene flow, it may be reinforced by selection for specific parental traits in the bioclimatically intermediate habitat occupied by the hybrid. Conclusions: This work uncovered the genetic complexity underlying the hybrid zone of the wild relatives of the cultivated strawberry. It lays the foundation for experimental dissection of the causes of genomic introgression and nuclear-cytoplasmic disassociation, and for understanding other parts of Fragaria evolutionary history.Keywords: Population genetic structure, Morphology, Hybrid zone, Microsatellites, Introgressio

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)

Stellar physics and evolution calculations enable a broad range of research in astrophysics. Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) is a suite of open source libraries for a wide range of applications in computational stellar astrophysics. A newly designed 1-D stellar evolution module, MESA star, combines many of the numerical and physics modules for simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from very-low mass to massive stars, including advanced evolutionary phases. MESA star solves the fully coupled structure and composition equations simultaneously. It uses adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated timestep controls, and supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP. Independently usable modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and atmosphere boundary conditions. Each module is constructed as a separate Fortran 95 library with its own public interface. Examples include comparisons to other codes and show evolutionary tracks of very low mass stars, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets; the complete evolution of a 1 Msun star from the pre-main sequence to a cooling white dwarf; the Solar sound speed profile; the evolution of intermediate mass stars through the thermal pulses on the He-shell burning AGB phase; the interior structure of slowly pulsating B Stars and Beta Cepheids; evolutionary tracks of massive stars from the pre-main sequence to the onset of core collapse; stars undergoing Roche lobe overflow; and accretion onto a neutron star. Instructions for downloading and installing MESA can be found on the project web site (http://mesa.sourceforge.net/).Comment: 110 pages, 39 figures; submitted to ApJS; visit the MESA website at http://mesa.sourceforge.ne

The genome of ε15, a serotype-converting, Group E1 Salmonella enterica-specific bacteriophage

AbstractThe genome sequence of the Salmonella enterica serovar Anatum-specific, serotype-converting bacteriophage ε15 has been completed. The nonredundant genome contains 39,671 bp and 51 putative genes. It most closely resembles the genome of φV10, an Escherichia coli O157:H7-specific temperate phage, with which it shares 36 related genes. More distant relatives include the Burkholderia cepacia-specific phage, BcepC6B (8 similar genes), the Bordetella bronchiseptica-specific phage, BPP-1 (8 similar genes) and the Photobacterium profundum prophage, P Pφpr1 (6 similar genes).ε15 gene identifications based on homologies with known gene families include the terminase small and large subunits, integrase, endolysin, two holins, two DNA methylase enzymes (one adenine-specific and one cytosine-specific) and a RecT-like enzyme. Genes identified experimentally include those coding for the serotype conversion proteins, the tail fiber, the major capsid protein and the major repressor. ε15's attP site and the Salmonella attB site with which it interacts during lysogenization have also been determined