National Security in the Information Age: Are We Heading Toward Big Brother?

Symposium Welcome: Alexander McDaniel, Symposium Editor, University of Richmond Law Review, and Wendy C. Perdue, Dean of the University of Richmond School of Law. (9:00 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.) “How Does the Government Collect Data Through Surveillance?” Panel Discussion: William C. Banks, Distinguished Professor of Law at Syracuse University College of Law and Founding Director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism, and Jake Laperruque, Privacy Fellow with The Constitution Project. Professor Paul D. Crane, Associate Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, served as moderator. (9:15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.) “How Does the Government Retain and Destroy Data?” lecture: Douglas Cox, Associate Professor at CUNY School of Law. (10:45 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.) “How Does Data Impact the Courtroom?” Panel: Lt. Colonel Jeffrey Addicott (U.S. Army, ret.), Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law, and Paul Gill, Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Federal Public Defender, Eastern District of Virginia. Douglas A. Ramseur, Capital Defender with the Office of the Capital Defender in Central Virginia, served as moderator. (1:00 p.m.- 2:15 p.m.) Keynote Address: Thomas J. Ridge, former Pennsylvania Governor and the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. (2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

The Grizzly, April 21, 2016

Writers, Editors Debut Lantern • Re-vote Results in Rein and Thomas Winning Election • Politics Professor Publishes Book Review in Wall Street Journal • International Perspective: Balancing Changes During Freshman Year • Transgender Student Overcomes Challenges • Ursinus\u27 UCEA Goes Green • Opinions: Laws Addressing Pornography Must Adapt; Film Review: Batman v. Superman Rates 3 / 10 • Playing Big • What the Masters Means to Me • My Golden Friendship with The Bronze Titanhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1690/thumbnail.jp

The Grizzly, November 12, 2015

Highlighting a New Trend on Campus • Making Connections: Ursinus Prepares to Break Ground on a Structure Between Pfahler and Thomas • Acclaimed Literary Critic to Give Talk on Campus • Ursinus Brings Top Lawyer Aboard in New Position • International Perspective: How One Student Uses Dance to Connect Ethiopia and Ursinus • Can You Really Netflix and Chill Without Killing Your Grades? • Opinions: Are You a White Feminist?; Bridge of Spies • Defensive Lineman Unleashes Passion for Music • Field Hockey Upsets F&M for Titlehttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1677/thumbnail.jp

DeepWeeds: a multiclass weed species image dataset for deep learning

Robotic weed control has seen increased research of late with its potential for boosting productivity in agriculture. Majority of works focus on developing robotics for croplands, ignoring the weed management problems facing rangeland stock farmers. perhaps the greatest obstacle to widespread uptake of robotic weed control is the robust classification of weed species in their natural environment. the unparalleled successes of deep learning make it an ideal candidate for recognising various weed species in the complex rangeland environment. This work contributes the first large, public, multiclass image dataset of weed species from the Australian rangelands; allowing for the development of robust classification methods to make robotic weed control viable. The DeepWeeds dataset consists of 17,509 labelled images of eight nationally significant weed species native to eight locations across northern Australia. This paper presents a baseline for classification performance on the dataset using the benchmark deep learning models, Inception-v3 and ResNet-50. These models achieved an average classification accuracy of 95.1% and 95.7%, respectively. We also demonstrate real time performance of the ResNet-50 architecture, with an average inference time of 53.4 ms per image. These strong results bode well for future field implementation of robotic weed control methods in the Australian rangelands

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

The PREDICTS database: a global database of how local terrestrial biodiversity responds to human impacts

Biodiversity continues to decline in the face of increasing anthropogenic pressures such as habitat destruction, exploitation, pollution and introduction of alien species. Existing global databases of species’ threat status or population time series are dominated by charismatic species. The collation of datasets with broad taxonomic and biogeographic extents, and that support computation of a range of biodiversity indicators, is necessary to enable better understanding of historical declines and to project – and avert – future declines. We describe and assess a new database of more than 1.6 million samples from 78 countries representing over 28,000 species, collated from existing spatial comparisons of local-scale biodiversity exposed to different intensities and types of anthropogenic pressures, from terrestrial sites around the world. The database contains measurements taken in 208 (of 814) ecoregions, 13 (of 14) biomes, 25 (of 35) biodiversity hotspots and 16 (of 17) megadiverse countries. The database contains more than 1% of the total number of all species described, and more than 1% of the described species within many taxonomic groups – including flowering plants, gymnosperms, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. The dataset, which is still being added to, is therefore already considerably larger and more representative than those used by previous quantitative models of biodiversity trends and responses. The database is being assembled as part of the PREDICTS project (Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems – www.predicts.org.uk). We make site-level summary data available alongside this article. The full database will be publicly available in 2015

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

Impact of in-sewer degradation of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) population markers on a population model

A key uncertainty of wastewater-based epidemiology is the size of the population which contributed to a given wastewater sample. We previously developed and validated a Bayesian inference model to estimate population size based on 14 population markers which: (1) are easily measured and (2) have mass loads which correlate with population size. However, the potential uncertainty of the model prediction due to in-sewer degradation of these markers was not evaluated. In this study, we addressed this gap by testing their stability under sewer conditions and assessed whether degradation impacts the model estimates. Five markers, which formed the core of our model, were stable in the sewers while the others were not. Our evaluation showed that the presence of unstable population markers in the model did not decrease the precision of the population estimates providing that stable markers such as acesulfame remained in the model. However, to achieve the minimum uncertainty in population estimates, we propose that the core markers to be included in population models for other sites should meet two additional criteria: (3) negligible degradation in wastewater to ensure the stability of chemicals during collection; and (4)

CHANGES IN SURFACE ELECTROMYOGRAPHY AND RATE OF FORCE DEVELOPMENT FOLLOWING MAXIMAL ECCENTRIC AND CONCENTRIC EXERCISE

BACKGROUND: The purpose of this study was to examine the time-course in recovery of rapid force characteristics following maximal eccentric (ECC) or concentric (CON) contractions. METHODS: Seventeen strength-trained college-aged males completed this randomized, cross-over study. Subjects completed 6 sets of 10 repetitions of maximal unilateral ECC or CON contractions of the elbow flexors on an isokinetic dynamometer at 60°/s with 2 min rest between sets. Peak rate of force development (pRFD) and peak rate of electromyography (EMG) rise (pRER) were assessed instantaneously during a 10 ms window during a maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) at 90° of elbow flexion before (PRE), immediately after (POST), 1-hour (POST1), 24- (POST24), 48- (POST48), and 72-hours (POST72) post-exercise. Separate 2 (condition) × 6 (time) repeated measures ANOVAs were run for each dependent variable. RESULTS: There was no significant interaction effect for pRFD (p=0.257), however, there were significant main effects for condition (p=0.001) and time (p\u3c0.001). Post-hoc analysis revealed that when collapsed across time, pRFD was significantly lower in ECC (2681.7±725.1 N s-1) than CON (3063.1±673.6 N s-1; p=0.001). When collapsed across condition, pRFD was significantly greater at PRE (3754.0±1366.5 N⸱s-1) when compared to all other time points (p\u3c0.001-0.002). pRFD was reduced at POST (2337.5±679.9 N s-1) and POST1 (2454.4±788.1 N s-1) when compared to POST24 (2866.9±887.9 N s-1; p=0.001-0.012), POST48 (2907.6±1128.7 N s-1; p=0.007-0.027), and POST72 (2914.0±1014.9 N s-1; p=0.003-0.005). There was a significant interaction effect for pRER (p=0.028) by which, during ECC, pRER decreased from PRE (1.06±0.61 mV/s) to POST (0.77±0.41 mV/s; p=0.051), remained depressed at POST1 (0.72±0.48 mV/s; p=0.004) before recovering to baseline at POST24 (1.11±0.61 mV/s; p=0.033), which did not differ from POST48 (1.03±0.63 mV/s; p=0.863) or POST72 (1.15±0.47 mV/s; p=0.645). pRER was significantly lower in ECC at POST and POST1 when compared to CON (POST: 0.98±0.41 mV/s; POST1: 1.09±0.63 mV/s; p=0.043-0.048). During CON, pRER was significantly greater at PRE (1.35±0.87 mV/s) when compared to POST72 (0.95±0.47 mV/s; p=0.035). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the present study suggest that pRER may be more sensitive than pRFD at discriminating contraction-specific changes in neuromuscular function following an acute bout of exercise