Fishing in the Dark: Science, Values and Deep Water Fisheries Research

This research sought to assesss the safeguards protecting scientific objectivity in New Zealand deep-water fisheries science decision-making fora. Managing depleted, slow-growing and poorly-understood stocks demands particularly accurate, objective scientific information. New Zealand's Ministry of Fisheries undertakes deep-water fisheries management in an nformation-poor, high-stakes context. This context means neither of the two strictly separate policy and scientific advice processes is able, in isolation, to provide advice confidently. Preliminary investigations suggested that to enable the Ministry to meet the ongoing need for management of deep-water fishing, science fora are effectively taking on a quasi-policy role. This research investigated whether deep-water fisheries science processes have sufficient safeguards to protect the objectivity of scientific decision-making in this difficult climate, thereby ensuring maximum accuracy in their advice. Twentytwo personal interviews were conducted with key informants, and analysed using grounded theory. Themes thus revealed were analysed in light of concepts from economics, philosophy of science and institutional analysis literature. Research suggested that the scientific process is ill-suited for handling non-scientific judgements, and the spread of non-scientific considerations into scientific fora is risking the objectivity of scientific analysis which is critical for fisheries management. Imbalanced stakeholder representation in scientific fora further imperils objectivity in these fora, with potentially significant implications for sustainable fisheries management

Human Response to Aircraft-Noise-Induced Building Vibration

The effects of noise induced building structure vibration and the rattle of objects on human response to aircraft flyover noise were investigated in a series of studies conducted in both the field and the laboratory. The subjective detection thresholds for vibration and rattle were determined as well as the effect of vibration and rattle upon aircraft noise annoyance

Review of subjective measures of human response to aircraft noise

The development of aircraft noise rating scales and indexes is reviewed up to the present time. Single event scales, multiple event indexes, and their interrelation with each other, are considered. Research requirements for further refinement and development of aircraft noise rating quantification factors are discussed

Model of aircraft noise adaptation

Development of an aircraft noise adaptation model, which would account for much of the variability in the responses of subjects participating in human response to noise experiments, was studied. A description of the model development is presented. The principal concept of the model, was the determination of an aircraft adaptation level which represents an annoyance calibration for each individual. Results showed a direct correlation between noise level of the stimuli and annoyance reactions. Attitude-personality variables were found to account for varying annoyance judgements

Mislabeling seafood does not promote sustainability : a comment on Stawitz et al (2016)

Recently, Stawitz et al. collated existing primary literature on DNA identification of finfish products and conducted a series of analyses to explore the environmental and economic ripples of species substitution. While we agree that the assessment of the impacts of seafood mislabeling is paramount, we show that the main conclusion of the study, which hints at a positive ecological impact arising from misnaming traded finfish species, is not warranted by the data, and may inadvertently cause damage to public perceptions of seafood provision, sustainability, and marine resource management

Meat trade: need for international standardization?

Extensive substitution and undeclared species have been recently detected in meat products in South Africa, Europe and Asia. Here we review the methodologies utilized in the identification of species in red meat products and highlight the advantages and drawbacks of these methods. The problem is of a different nature in countries with easily accessible game meat and poor or nonexistent monitoring systems in place. Recommendations are drawn for meat DNA testing in these two scenarios.Web of Scienc

Overcoming data sparsity

Unilever is currently designing and testing recommendation algorithms that would make recommendations about products to online customers given the customer ID and the current content of their basket. Unilever collected a large amount of purchasing data that demonstrates that most of the items (around 80%) are purchased infrequently and account for 20% of the data while frequently purchased items account for 80% of the data. Therefore, the data is sparse, skewed and demonstrates a long tail. Attempts to incorporate the data from the long tail, so far have proved difficult and current Unilever recommendation systems do not incorporate the information about infrequently purchased items. At the same time, these items are more indicative of customers' preferences and Unilever would like to make recommendations from/about these items, i.e. give a rank ordering of available products in real time. Study Group suggested to use the approach of bipartite networks to construct a similarity matrix that would allow the recommendation scores for different products to be computed. Given a current basket and a customer ID, this approach gives recommendation scores for each available item and recommends the item with the highest score that is not already in the basket. The similarity matrix can be computed offline, while recommendation score calculations can be performed live. This report contains the summary of Study Group findings together with the insights into properties of the similarity matrix and other related issues, such as recommendation for the data collection

Concorde noise-induced building vibrations John F. Kennedy International Airport

The outdoor and indoor noise levels resulting from aircraft flyovers and certain nonaircraft events were recorded at six home sites along with the associated vibration levels in the walls, windows, and floors of these test homes. Limited subjective tests conducted to examine the human detection and annoyance thresholds for building vibration and rattle caused by aircraft noise showed that both vibration and rattle were detected subjectively in several houses for some operations of both the Concorde and subsonic aircraft. Preliminary results indicate that the relationship between window vibration and aircraft noise is: (1) linear, with vibration levels being accurately predicted from OASPL levels measured near the window; (2) consistent from flyover to flyover for a given aircraft type under approach conditions; (3) no different for Concorde than for other conventional jet transports (in the case of window vibrations induced under approach power conditions); and (4) relatively high levels of window vibration measured during Concorde operations are due more to higher OASPL levels than to unique Concorde source characteristics

Chauffeur braking

An experienced driver will `feather' the brakes so as to unwind the suspension compliance and stop the vehicle with only just enough torque in the brakes to hold the vehicle stationary on any gradient, or against the residual torque from an automatic transmission’s torque converter. An optimal stopping problem that minimises the total jerk was formulated and solved. This model was extended by including a linear relationship between the brake pressure and the acceleration of the car where the coefficients are estimated by linear regression. Finally, a Kalman filter estimates the state of the car using the tone wheel