Abundance, distribution, and habitat of leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) off California, 1990−2003

Leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) are regularly seen off the U.S. West Coast, where they forage on jellyfish (Scyphomedusae) during summer and fall. Aerial line-transect surveys were conducted in neritic waters (<92 m depth) off central and northern California during 1990−2003, providing the first foraging population estimates for Pacific leatherback turtles. Males and females of about 1.1 to 2.1 m length were observed. Estimated abundance was linked to the Northern Oscillation Index and ranged from 12 (coefficient of variation [CV] =0.75) in 1995 to 379 (CV= 0.23) in 1990, averaging 178 (CV= 0.15). Greatest densities were found off central California, where oceanographic retention areas or upwelling shadows created favorable habitat for leatherback turtle prey. Results from independent telemetry studies have linked leatherback turtles off the U.S. West Coast to one of the two largest remaining Pacific breeding populations, at Jamursba Medi, Indonesia. Nearshore waters off California thus represent an important foraging region for the critically endangered Pacific leatherback turtle

Driver Accelerator Design for the 10 kW Upgrade of the Jefferson Lab IR FEL

An upgrade of the Jefferson Lab IR FEL is now under construction. It will provide 10 kW output light power in a wavelength range of 2-10 microns. The FEL will be driven by a modest-sized 80-210 MeV, 10 mA energy-recovering superconducting RF (SRF) linac. Stringent phase space requirements at the wiggler, low beam energy, and high beam current subject the design to numerous constraints. These are imposed by the need for both transverse and longitudinal phase space management, the potential impact of collective phenomena (space charge, wakefields, beam break-up (BBU), and coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR)), and interactions between the FEL and the accelerator RF system. This report addresses these issues and presents an accelerator design solution meeting the requirements imposed by physical phenomena and operational necessities.Comment: submission THC03 for LINAC200

The role of perceived risks on mobile payment adoption: Evidence from Asia

Mobile has become an expected method of payment irrespective of the geographical location or the level of technology adoption across the developed and developing countries. The differences of adoption rates between China and Japan are significant, warranting further research into the barriers to mobile payment. To fill this research gap, we propose and empirically test a theoretical model of mobile payment adoption by users in China, Taiwan, and Japan. A decision-tree method was used to analyse 726 questionnaire responses. The results reveal that innovators, early adopters, and the early majority categories are concerned about the performance risk of mobile payment adoption and innovators, early adopters, and the late majority categories are concerned about the security risk of mobile payment adoption. The findings will help 5G mobile services vendors develop consumer trust and increase the contributions of the mobile industry to GDP.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

REPLY TO COMMENTS OF NOLAN AND COOK

We appreciate and would like to respond to the comments made by Nolan and Cook. We make three points in our reply, which are directed at clarifying our position and responding to a few of Nolan and Cook\u27s assumptions. First, as a matter of clarification, the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) is not a measure of summer rainfall as Nolan and Cook (2010) imply. Instead it is a theoretical measure of soil-moisture, the value of which evolves over several months in response to fluxes of precipitation, evaporation, and runoff. In practice, PDSI is usually heavily weighted toward the precipitation side of the soil water balance. Second, with regard to archaeological facts, the known developmental trajectory of the greater Cahokia region is not quite as Nolan and Cook describe it. In their discussion of the timing of the precocious development of social complexity in the American Bottom, Nolan and Cook refer to the American Bottom during both the Edelhardt (A.D. 1000-1050) and Lohmann phases (A.D. 1050-1100) as being relatively wet but not the wettest areas in the Upper Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. However, Cahokia\u27s big bang dates to the end of the Edelhardt phase and continued through the Lohmann phase, so the overall climatic state of the Edelhardt phase is not at issue. Nolan and Cook\u27s Figure 2 supports the concept that the Cahokia area was extremely wet during the Lohmann phase as opposed to the Edelhardt phase

The Motion of a Body in Newtonian Theories

A theorem due to Bob Geroch and Pong Soo Jang ["Motion of a Body in General Relativity." Journal of Mathematical Physics 16(1), (1975)] provides the sense in which the geodesic principle has the status of a theorem in General Relativity (GR). Here we show that a similar theorem holds in the context of geometrized Newtonian gravitation (often called Newton-Cartan theory). It follows that in Newtonian gravitation, as in GR, inertial motion can be derived from other central principles of the theory.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure. This is the version that appeared in JMP; it is only slightly changed from the previous version, to reflect small issue caught in proo

A New Method for Calculating Arrival Distribution of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays above 10^19 eV with Modifications by the Galactic Magnetic Field

We present a new method for calculating arrival distribution of UHECRs including modifications by the galactic magnetic field. We perform numerical simulations of UHE anti-protons, which are injected isotropically at the earth, in the Galaxy and record the directions of velocities at the earth and outside the Galaxy for all of the trajectories. We then select some of them so that the resultant mapping of the velocity directions outside the Galaxy of the selected trajectories corresponds to a given source location scenario, applying Liouville's theorem. We also consider energy loss processes of UHE protons in the intergalactic space. Applying this method to our source location scenario which is adopted in our recent study and can explain the AGASA observation above 4 \times 10^{19} eV, we calculate the arrival distribution of UHECRs including lower energy (E>10^19 eV) ones. We find that our source model can reproduce the large-scale isotropy and the small-scale anisotropy on UHECR arrival distribution above 10^19 eV observed by the AGASA. We also demonstrate the UHECR arrival distribution above 10^19 eV with the event number expected by future experiments in the next few years. The interesting feature of the resultant arrival distribution is the arrangement of the clustered events in the order of their energies, reflecting the directions of the galactic magnetic field. This is also pointed out by Alvarez-Muniz et al.(2002). This feature will allow us to obtain some kind of information about the composition of UHECRs and the magnetic field with increasing amount of data.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to appear in the Astrophysical Journa

Improving the Automatic Inversion of Digital ISIS-2 Ionogram Reflection Traces into Topside Vertical Electron-Density Profiles

The topside-sounders on the four satellites of the International Satellites for Ionospheric Studies (ISIS) program were designed as analog systems. The resulting ionograms were displayed on 35-mm film for analysis by visual inspection. Each of these satellites, launched between 1962 and 1971, produced data for 10 to 20 years. A number of the original telemetry tapes from this large data set have been converted directly into digital records. Software, known as the TOPside Ionogram Scalar with True-height (TOPIST) algorithm has been produced that enables the automatic inversion of ISIS-2 ionogram reflection traces into topside vertical electron-density profiles Ne(h). More than million digital Alouette/ISIS topside ionograms have been produced and over 300,000 are from ISIS 2. Many of these ISIS-2 ionograms correspond to a passive mode of operation for the detection of natural radio emissions and thus do not contain ionospheric reflection traces. TOPIST, however, is not able to produce Ne(h) profiles from all of the ISIS-2 ionograms with reflection traces because some of them did not contain frequency information. This information was missing due to difficulties encountered during the analog-to-digital conversion process in the detection of the ionogram frame-sync pulse and/or the frequency markers. Of the many digital topside ionograms that TOPIST was able to process, over 200 were found where direct comparisons could be made with Ne(h) profiles that were produced by manual scaling in the early days of the ISIS program. While many of these comparisons indicated excellent agreement (<10% average difference over the entire profile) there were also many cases with large differences (more than a factor of two). Here we will report on two approaches to improve the automatic inversion process: (1) improve the quality of the digital ionogram database by remedying the missing frequency-information problem when possible, and (2) using the above-mentioned comparisons as teaching examples of how to improve the original TOPIST software

Evolution of the Velocity Ellipsoids in the Thin Disk of the Galaxy and the Radial Migration of Stars

Data from the revised Geneva--Copenhagen catalog are used to study the influence of radial migration of stars on the age dependences of parameters of the velocity ellipsoids for nearby stars in the thin disk of the Galaxy, assuming that the mean radii of the stellar orbits remain constant. It is demonstrated that precisely the radial migration of stars, together with the negative metallicity gradient in the thin disk,are responsible for the observed negative correlation between the metallicities and angular momenta of nearby stars, while the angular momenta of stars that were born at the same Galactocentric distances do not depend on either age or metallicity. (abridged)Comment: Astronomy Reports, Vol. 86 No. 9, P.1117-1126 (2009

Relationship between the Velocity Ellipsoids of Galactic-Disk Stars and their Ages and Metallicities

The dependences of the velocity ellipsoids of F-G stars of the thin disk of the Galaxy on their ages and metallicities are analyzed based on the new version of the Geneva-Copenhagen Catalog. The age dependences of the major, middle, and minor axes of the ellipsoids, and also of the dispersion of the total residual veltocity, obey power laws with indices 0.25,0.29,0.32, and 0.27 (with uncertainties \pm 0.02). Due to the presence of thick-disk objects, the analogous indices for all nearby stars are about a factor of 1.5 larger. Attempts to explain such values are usually based on modeling relaxation processes in the Galactic disk. With increasing age, the velocity ellipsoid increases in size and becomes appreciably more spherical, turns toward the direction of the Galactic center, and loses angular momentum. The shape of the velocity ellipsoid remains far from equilibrium. With increasing metallicity, the velocity ellipsoid for stars of mixed age increases in size, displays a weak tendency to become more spherical, and turns toward the direction of the Galactic center (with these changes occurring substantially more rapidly in the transition through the metallicity [Fe/H]= -0.25). Thus, the ellipsoid changes similarly to the way it does with age; however, with decreasing metallicity, the rotational velocity about the Galactic center monotonically increases, rather than decreases(!). Moreover, the power-law indices for the age dependences of the axes depend on the metallicity, and display a maximum near [Fe/H]=-0.1. The age dependences of all the velocity-ellipsoid parameters for stars with equal metallicity are roughly the same. It is proposed that the appearance of a metallicity dependence of the velocity ellipsoids for thin-disk stars is most likely due to the radial migration of stars.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted 2009, Astronomy Reports, Vol. 53 No. 9, P.785-80

Optimal Principal Component Analysis in Distributed and Streaming Models

We study the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) problem in the distributed and streaming models of computation. Given a matrix $A \in R^{m \times n},$ a rank parameter $k < rank(A)$, and an accuracy parameter $0 < \epsilon < 1$, we want to output an $m \times k$ orthonormal matrix $U$ for which $$|| A - U U^T A ||_F^2 \le \left(1 + \epsilon \right) \cdot || A - A_k||_F^2,$$ where $A_k \in R^{m \times n}$ is the best rank-$k$ approximation to $A$. This paper provides improved algorithms for distributed PCA and streaming PCA.Comment: STOC2016 full versio