Apologia in Xenophon's Anabasis

Xenophon of Athens probably did not write his Anabasis until thirty years or more after the events which it describes. This remarkable gap, taken together with the absence of a prologue, the presence of a number of prominent themes and authorial concerns, and the complex literary construction of the work, has made the task of explaining it problematic. Situating the text in the context of Xenophon's later life and wide-ranging literary output, in this dissertation I argue that apologia is the defining element in the work. Through his elaborate narrative structure and representation of his own character, Xenophon is defending himself, his social class, and his teacher, Socrates. In Books 5 and 7 (of 7) he is occupied with a rigorous defence of his conduct on the retreat, answering charges of deceiving the soldiers, hubris, corruption, and mercenary service, while in Books 3 through to 7, he is defending the memory of Socrates. For from the point of his introduction into the text at the opening of Book 3, following the decapitation of the Greek High Command at the Greater Zab River, Xenophon the character is acting as a pupil of Socrates would have done had he found himself in similarly dire circumstances. His actions, counsel, and moral bearing during the course of the retreat are a testimony to the value of his teacher's training, and powerfully undermine the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth levelled against Socrates in 399. At the same time, the outstanding leadership performance on the retreat of Xenophon's character reflects on himself as the historical figure behind the exemplar. By highlighting its different forms and bringing out its pervasiveness, the dissertation demonstrates that apologia is the major factor in the formation of the text

Projection of Stabilized Aerial Imagery Onto Digital Elevation Maps for Geo-Rectified and Jitter-Free Viewing

As imagery is collected from an airborne platform, an individual viewing the images wants to know from where on the Earth the images were collected. To do this, some information about the camera needs to be known, such as its position and orientation relative to the Earth. This can be provided by common inertial navigation systems (INS). Once the location of the camera is known, it is useful to project an image onto some representation of the Earth. Due to the non-smooth terrain of the Earth (mountains, valleys, etc.), this projection is highly non-linear. Thus, to ensure accurate projection, one needs to project onto a digital elevation map (DEM). This allows one to view the images overlaid onto a representation of the Earth. A code has been developed that takes an image, a model of the camera used to acquire that image, the pose of the camera during acquisition (as provided by an INS), and a DEM, and outputs an image that has been geo-rectified. The world coordinate of the bounds of the image are provided for viewing purposes. The code finds a mapping from points on the ground (DEM) to pixels in the image. By performing this process for all points on the ground, one can "paint" the ground with the image, effectively performing a projection of the image onto the ground. In order to make this process efficient, a method was developed for finding a region of interest (ROI) on the ground to where the image will project. This code is useful in any scenario involving an aerial imaging platform that moves and rotates over time. Many other applications are possible in processing aerial and satellite imagery

Long-Term Trends of Northern Bobwhite Populations and Hunting Success on Private Shooting Plantations in Northern Florida and Southern Georgia

Nearly all broad-scale assessments (U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service [USDI-FWS], Breeding Bird Surveys, Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts, and state game agency harvest surveys) of northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) population trends during the past 30 to 50 years point to widespread declines at local, regional and national scales. Long-term records of populations that do not show long-term bobwhite declines are rare. Landowners and managers in the shooting plantation country between Tallahassee, Florida and Thomasville, Georgia have been recording quail hunting and bag records for many years. Such information can provide valuable insight into the long-term trends of bobwhite populations. We therefore analyzed bag records from 5 different properties where data had been collected for periods ranging from 14 to 80+ years. Trends from these data were completely opposite from long-term trends shown from other sources such as Breeding Bird Survey and Christmas Bird Count data. These data indicate that a long-term, continuous approach to habitat management (primarily burning with prescribed fire, and frequent soil disturbance from disking) can sustain abundant bobwhite populations and high-quality shooting. These data also call into question alternative hypotheses such as invasion of the red imported fire ant and range expansion of the coyote as being responsible for the long-term bobwhite decline. Both fire ants and coyotes are common in the Thomasville-Tallahassee area, yet, abundant bobwhite populations persist, presumably as a function of high-quality habitat management

Effects of Disking Versus Feed Patch Management on Northern Bobwhite Brood Habitat and Hunting Success

More than 60 years ago, Herbert Stoddard (1931:376) wrote there is little doubt that such methods [i.e., disking and harrowing] are more practical for Southeastern quail preserves than artificial plantings, which are costly on a large scale and not always effective. Incredibly, this statement, and testing it as an hypothesis, has been ignored by the bobwhite research community until the past 10 years. Therefore, we designed a pilot study to compare measures of northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) brood habitat (vegetation composition and arthropod biomass) and direct measures of hunting success (covey finds per half-day hunt) to test whether feed patches were really necessary for bobwhite habitat management in southern Georgia and northern Florida. We applied experimental treatments (disk only versus feed patch planting) by using shooting courses (150-250 ha each) on 2 southeastern shooting plantations during 1994, 1995 and 1996. Overall, results were equivocal between the feed patch and disking treatments; no consistent pattern or difference in brood habitat composition or hunting success was observed. One factor responsible for this pattern may be the relatively fine-grained scale (only 1-3% of the shooting courses were planted or disked) at which treatments were applied were insufficient to significantly influence bobwhite abundance. Further research using increased amounts of ground disturbance and planting (5%, 10%, 20%, etc.) will be required before the actual need for agricultural plantings can be determined in the context of their efficacy for bobwhite management. One potential result of these findings is that significant cost savings can be realized by disking rather than planting agricultural crop plants because at least 70% of the costs of planting are a function of seed, fertilizer and cultivation, whereas only about 30% are attributed to disking

Effects of Seasonal Fire Applications on Northern Bobwhite Brood Habitat and Hunting Success

Since the early part of the 20th century, land managers have used prescribed fire during February and March to maintain and enhance habitat for northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) in southern pine forests. During the past 2 decades, some managers have started to shift their use of fire to mimic more natural lightning-season (April to August) ignitions because these fires encourage flowering of plants in intact native ground cover, and are potentially more effective at hardwood control than winter fires. Therefore, we designed a short-term pilot study to evaluate whether seasonal applications of prescribed fire had any effect on bobwhite brood habitat (as measured by vegetation composition and arthropod biomass) or bobwhite abundance (as measured by hunting success) during the subsequent fall. During the first two years of our study (1994 and 1995), results showed that arthropod biomass and bobwhite hunting success were slightly greater on the shooting course burned during lightning-season (May) than the one burned during February and March. These results indicate that applications of lightning-season fire can be used, at least on a small scale (i.e., management blocks \u3c250 ha) in southern pine forests for hardwood control, and possibly enhancement of native ground cover without short-term negative impacts on northern bobwhites

Models of Inclusion in Child Care: Child Care that Works for Children with Emotional and/or Behavioral Challenges: Family Member Perceptions

Although 5-10% of employed parents care for a child with emotional or behavioral challenges (EBCs) (Emlen, 1997), family support resources are notably lacking. A recent focus group study of 41 working parents (Rosenzweig, Brennan, & Ogilvie, 2002) found child care to be particularly difficult to find and maintain for families that included children with EBCs. Participants reported a number of barriers to child care arrangements that could successfully meet their family\u27s needs. First, since few qualified providers had the expertise to meet the needs of children with EBCs, arrangements were difficult to find. A combination of the lack of quality care in general, and few qualified providers for children with emotional or behavioral problems, created a nearly impossible situation for working families looking for child care. The aim of the Models of Inclusion in Child Care study (MICC) was to identify and investigate programs and strategies that improve access for families of children with emotional or behavioral disorders to child care that is inclusive, family-centered, culturally competent, and of high quality

Application of wireless technologies to forward predict crop yields in the poultry production chain

Average bird weight is the primary measure of crop yield and is the basis for calculating payment for the grower by the wholesaler. Furthermore the profit per bird is very small. Thus very tight control of growing process is essential to ensure average bird weight is maximised. The important factors (air temperature, air humidity, Carbon Dioxide concentration and Ammonia concentration) that affect the intake of feed and water must be kept at their optimum during the progress of the growing cycle. These factors can be influenced by activating burners and opening the vents on walls of the growing house. It then follows that the burning and venting strategy will be influential on the average bird weight of the crop. Currently the burning and venting strategy is based on notional ideal levels and data from wall mounted sensors. This suffers from two fundamental problems; firstly the strategy is determined by ideals that may not be suitable for all growing houses and secondly the data is not measured from the chickens own airspace. Thus the management strategy is based on a model that may not reflect reality and on data that may not reflect reality  The “BOSCA” project addresses these problems by placing wireless environmental sensors into the chickens own airspace. This provides for direct measurement of the air experienced by the chickens and reports the recorded data in near real-time to a cloud based data management system. The sensor data is merged with the data from the growing house weighing scales in the cloud repository so a predictive model of average bird weight from the measured environmental data can be calibrated and validated. Furthermore, a timeshift can be applied to the environmental data during model calibration and validation so the average bird weight can be forward predicted by 72 hours (r2 up to 0.89 with neural networks). This gives the grower advance notice of a deviation from ideal feeding and watering conditions and the likely consequences of failing to take remedial action such as turning on the burners or venting the house

Vehicle Detection for RCTA/ANS (Autonomous Navigation System)

Using a stereo camera pair, imagery is acquired and processed through the JPLV stereo processing pipeline. From this stereo data, large 3D blobs are found. These blobs are then described and classified by their shape to determine which are vehicles and which are not. Prior vehicle detection algorithms are either targeted to specific domains, such as following lead cars, or are intensity- based methods that involve learning typical vehicle appearances from a large corpus of training data. In order to detect vehicles, the JPL Vehicle Detection (JVD) algorithm goes through the following steps: 1. Take as input a left disparity image and left rectified image from JPLV stereo. 2. Project the disparity data onto a two-dimensional Cartesian map. 3. Perform some post-processing of the map built in the previous step in order to clean it up. 4. Take the processed map and find peaks. For each peak, grow it out into a map blob. These map blobs represent large, roughly vehicle-sized objects in the scene. 5. Take these map blobs and reject those that do not meet certain criteria. Build descriptors for the ones that remain. Pass these descriptors onto a classifier, which determines if the blob is a vehicle or not. The probability of detection is the probability that if a vehicle is present in the image, is visible, and un-occluded, then it will be detected by the JVD algorithm. In order to estimate this probability, eight sequences were ground-truthed from the RCTA (Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliances) program, totaling over 4,000 frames with 15 unique vehicles. Since these vehicles were observed at varying ranges, one is able to find the probability of detection as a function of range. At the time of this reporting, the JVD algorithm was tuned to perform best at cars seen from the front, rear, or either side, and perform poorly on vehicles seen from oblique angles

Hunting Success and Northern Bobwhite Density on Tall Timbers Research Station: 1970-2001

Hunting success, defined as number of coveys found/hr of hunting, has been used as an index of population size of northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus). However, the relationship between hunting success and bobwhite density has not been documented on individual study areas. We related estimates of bobwhite density on a 445-ha section of Tall Timbers Research Station (TTRS) to the number of coveys flushed/hr of hunting, 1970–2001. To estimate density of bobwhites, we captured bobwhites in baited-funnel traps for a 2–3 week period and recaptured 15–20% of banded birds by systematically hunting the study area using pointing bird dogs. Bobwhite population sizes, calculated using a bias-corrected Peterson estimate, were converted to densities because of changes in study area size over time. Annual density estimates and hunting success ranged from 0.7–4.8 bobwhites/ha and 0.5–2.9 covey finds/hr over the study period, respectively. We assessed the variance in bobwhite abundance explained by year and hunting success using multiple linear regression. There was a significant positive relationship between covey finds/hr and bobwhite density (t25 = 9.070, P = \u3c0.0001). Covey finds/hr explained the greatest amount of variation (r2 = 0.77) in density. Our data suggest that if hunting procedures are standardized over time, hunting success may be used to index bobwhite abundance, and potentially provide crude estimates of population density

Comparison of Two Methods for Quantifying Northern Bobwhite Habitat Use

Habitat use is an important ecological parameter that is used to make informed decisions about quail management and research. Statistical methods for quantifying habitat use are numerous, but few objective criteria are available to support the selection of a particular analytical approach. Therefore, we compared breeding season habitat use by radio-marked northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) at 2 study sites in Mississippi with 2 widely used statistical methods; Chi-square goodness-of-fit test with Bonferroni confidence intervals, and compositional analysis. These statistical methods produced similar results for both study areas; however, more detailed habitat use information was provided by compositional analysis when performed using the customary hierarchical approach. Therefore, for analysis of radio-marked quail, we recommend this method due to its effective hierarchical approach, improved statistical validity, and ability to incorporate other population parameters (e.g .. survival) into statistical models of habitat use by northern bobwhites