Pitfall Trap Collections of Ground Beetle Larvae (Coleoptera: Carabidae) in Kentucky Alfalfa Fields

Pitfall traps were installed in alfalfa fields to monitor the seasonality and abundance of immature ground beetles. Head capsule widths were determined by instar for Evarthrus sodalis, Harpalus pennsylvanicus, Chlaenius tricolor, Scarites subterraneus, Amara cupreolata, and A. impuncticollis. Seasonality of larval and adult catches indicated that E. sodalis, H. pennsylvanicus and A. impuncticollis overwinter in a larval diapause while A. cupreolata and S. subterraneus overwinter in the adult stage

NASA/GE quiet engine C acoustic test results

The acoustic investigation and evaluation of the C propulsion turbofan engine are discussed. The engine was built as a part of the Quiet Engine Program. The objectives of the program are as follows: (1) to determine the noise levels produced turbofan bypass engines, (2) to demonstrate the technology and innovations which will reduce the production and radiation of noise in turbofan engines, and (3) to acquire experimental acoustic and aerodynamic data for high bypass turbofan engines to provide a better understanding of noise production mechanisms. The goals of the program called for a turbofan engine 15 to 20 PNdB quieter than currently available engines in the same thrust class

An Enemy No Longer: The Canadian Military Presence in Japan during the Korean War, 1950-1955

In general, most Canadian historians have not paid much attention to their country’s relationship with Japan immediately after the Second World War. Having declined to participate in the American-run occupation of the country from 1945 to 1952, the argument goes, Ottawa was allegedly uninterested in rediscovering Japan. As a result, the consequences of Canada’s military deployment to Japan as part of the Korean War are usually ignored or simplified to the rowdy and salacious exploits of soldiers visiting the country on R&R. In this article, I argue that the war not only had a lasting impact on Japanese-Canadian relations by providing the Canadian armed forces with a critical logistical hub and leave centre for its forces in Korea, but also that it helped ordinary Canadian servicemembers transcend some of the more virulent anti-Japanese prejudices cultivated during the Second World War

A Black Ship on Red Shores: Commodore Matthew Perry, Prince Edward Island, and the Fishery Question of 1852-1853

In 1852 controversy arose between Great Britain and the United States over the right of American fishermen to ply their trade off the British North American colonies, necessitating the dispatch of an American warship under Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry to survey the fishing grounds and negotiate with the local authorities. This incident provides an opportunity to explore how Anglo-American diplomacy both helped prevent a resurgence of conflict after the end of the War of 1812 as well as how it influenced Perry’s later Japan expedition of 1853-1854, demonstrating the contemporary importance of the colonies as an Anglo-American geopolitical fault line.  En 1852 le droit des pêcheurs américains de pratiquer leur métier au large des colonies de l’Amérique du Nord britannique fit l’objet d’un différend entre la Grande-Bretagne et les États-Unis, qui nécessita l’envoi d’un navire de guerre américain sous le commandement du commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry pour procéder au levé des zones de pêche et négocier avec les autorités locales. Cet incident fournit l’occasion d’explorer comment  les relations diplomatiques entre Britanniques et Américains contribuèrent à prévenir la résurgence d’un conflit après la fin de la guerre de 1812, et comment elles eurent une incidence sur l’expédition subséquente de Perry au Japon en 1853-1854, ce qui démontre  l’importance contemporaine des colonies en tant que ligne de démarcation géopolitique entre la Grande-Bretagne et les États-Unis

Fun Behind the Wire?: Francis “Huck” O’Neill and the Canadian POW Experience in Hong Kong, 1941-1945

Many prior studies of Canadian POWs during the Pacific War have focused on the sadism and mistreatment of their Japanese jailors, helping to make this a dominant image of the conflict. This article moderates this view by discrediting the notion that Japanese soldiers were motivated by an omnipresent belief in “bushido,” as well as by studying newly discovered documents produced in captivity by Canadian Auxiliary Services Officer Francis O’Neill. It argues that Japanese conduct towards POWs was more variable than previously recognised and highlights moments of levity and fun as O’Neill and his fellow prisoners organised sporting events, games and theatrical productions

Bacteriology of Hemodialysis Fluids: Are Current Practices Meaningful?

A report submitted by Ted Pass to the Research and Creative Productions Committee on September 25, 1990 on the current practices for monitoring bacterial contamination of fluids employed in the preparation and execution of hemodialysis therapy

Socially Optimal Mining Pools

Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is successful, the earned rewards are appropriately split among all pool participants. Currently a dozen of different pooling strategies (i.e., methods for distributing the rewards) are in use for Bitcoin mining. We here propose a formal model of utility and social welfare for Bitcoin mining (and analogous mining systems) based on the theory of discounted expected utility, and next study pooling strategies that maximize the social welfare of miners. Our main result shows that one of the pooling strategies actually employed in practice--the so-called geometric pay pool--achieves the optimal steady-state utility for miners when its parameters are set appropriately. Our results apply not only to Bitcoin mining pools, but any other form of pooled mining or crowdsourcing computations where the participants engage in repeated random trials towards a common goal, and where "partial" solutions can be efficiently verified

Non-malleable encryption: simpler, shorter, stronger

In a seminal paper, Dolev et al. [15] introduced the notion of non-malleable encryption (NM-CPA). This notion is very intriguing since it suffices for many applications of chosen-ciphertext secure encryption (IND-CCA), and, yet, can be generically built from semantically secure (IND-CPA) encryption, as was shown in the seminal works by Pass et al. [29] and by Choi et al. [9], the latter of which provided a black-box construction. In this paper we investigate three questions related to NM-CPA security: 1. Can the rate of the construction by Choi et al. of NM-CPA from IND-CPA be improved? 2. Is it possible to achieve multi-bit NM-CPA security more efficiently from a single-bit NM-CPA scheme than from IND-CPA? 3. Is there a notion stronger than NM-CPA that has natural applications and can be achieved from IND-CPA security? We answer all three questions in the positive. First, we improve the rate in the scheme of Choi et al. by a factor O(λ), where λ is the security parameter. Still, encrypting a message of size O(λ) would require ciphertext and keys of size O(λ2) times that of the IND-CPA scheme, even in our improved scheme. Therefore, we show a more efficient domain extension technique for building a λ-bit NM-CPA scheme from a single-bit NM-CPA scheme with keys and ciphertext of size O(λ) times that of the NM-CPA one-bit scheme. To achieve our goal, we define and construct a novel type of continuous non-malleable code (NMC), called secret-state NMC, as we show that standard continuous NMCs are not enough for the natural “encode-then-encrypt-bit-by-bit” approach to work. Finally, we introduce a new security notion for public-key encryption that we dub non-malleability under (chosen-ciphertext) self-destruct attacks (NM-SDA). After showing that NM-SDA is a strict strengthening of NM-CPA and allows for more applications, we nevertheless show that both of our results—(faster) construction from IND-CPA and domain extension from one-bit scheme—also hold for our stronger NM-SDA security. In particular, the notions of IND-CPA, NM-CPA, and NM-SDA security are all equivalent, lying (plausibly, strictly?) below IND-CCA securit

Balanced Literacy in an Urban School District

This is the authors' accepted manuscript, post peer-review. The publisher's official version is available electronically from: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JOER.98.5.272-280.Balanced literacy is a philosophical orientation that assumes that reading and writing achievement are developed through instruction and support in multiple environments using various approaches that differ by level of teacher support and child control. This study describes one urban school district’s real-world attempt to create a balance between reading and writing, between teacher-directed and student-centered activities, and between skillsbased and meaning based approaches to literacy instruction. A triangulation strategy using multiple methods of data collection, including classroom observations, inventories of the physical environment of classrooms and school buildings, teacher surveys, and student interviews, was used to measure balanced literacy components. Results suggest that teacherdirected instruction, a fundamental aspect of balanced literacy, was implemented less often than either independent reading or writing activities. Teachers appeared to be allocating instructional time as directed by district administrators, and they were implementing components of a balanced literacy program. Additionally, most school buildings had a physical environment supportive of balanced literacy. However, the amount of time devoted to instruction and modeling effective reading and writing strategies seemed too limited for a group of students with poorly developed reading and writing skills