An investigation of honey bee Drone Congregation Area formation in rural and semi-rural locations in New Zealand : a thesis presented in part fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Science in Zoology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Male honey bees gather in Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs), and meet with queens to mate in flight. Because they mate on the wing, investigation of these areas using current techniques is not easily facilitated in some areas, which limits research. This study investigates an improved method of studying DCAs in difficult areas; studies the landscape characteristics of DCA locations, and measures pheromone attraction between drones, and honeybee queens and workers, to ascertain any chemical contribution towards DCA formation. Using a camera equipped Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) holding an artificial honey bee queen with 9-Oxo-2-Decenoic Acid (9ODA), trials were conducted to investigate the different flight behaviours of honey bee drones on their mating flights, and the formation of DCAs. The use of the UAV was found to be successful in carrying out DCA research especially in inaccessible areas. Using this method, drone honey bee mating flight activity was investigated in several distinct areas; hill and valley areas; urban park areas, and flat agricultural areas. The data were analysed using Geographic Information System software ArcGIS 10.4.1. Different patterns of drone activity were found in the different areas suggesting that in hill and valley areas where well defined DCAs exist, landscape features played an important part in their location but that in flat areas, landscape features were not shown to play a part in DCA formation and instead, apiary-dependant DCAs dominated, and away from these apiaries, the abundance of drones flying at random in the flat areas (as opposed to being confined in a hill and valley area) would ensure mating. The results also suggest that contrary to some research, DCAs in hill and valley areas have flexible boundaries that may vary in response to other factors such as queen flight behaviour. In order to find out whether chemical influences could contribute to the formation of DCAs, a four- arm olfactometer test was carried out to investigate drone attractiveness to queens, and drone attractiveness to other drones. Contrary to my expectations, drones and queens were not attracted to other drones but rather to workers, perhaps because only sexually immature drones were available for the tests. The study overall confirms the usefulness of using a UAV in difficult areas; demonstrates a significant difference in the spatial dynamics of drone mating flight in different landscape areas, and concludes that DCA boundaries may be constructs that depend on the mating flight parameters of the queen rather than drones only. Further research, especially on the queen’s mating flight parameters is suggested

Supportive discipline is here to stay : Texas high schools make headway against the school-to-prison pipeline

The discipline models employed in U.S. schools tend to swing back and forth like a slow pendulum. Following the tragic shootings at Columbine in 1999, districts around the U.S. began to employ policies now known as zero tolerance. By the middle of the 2000s decade, Texas school districts and state legislators — progressive and conservative alike — realized that zero tolerance no longer worked. Together, lawmakers, regional education service centers and school districts began to roll back zero tolerance. Gradually, educators implemented aa variety of supportive discipline methods across the state. By the time of the 2014 Federal letter from the civil rights offices in the Education and Justice Departments, Texas schools had already made great headway in reducing exclusionary discipline while simultaneously improving student behavior. Texas can be a model for other states. This is a 6800 word piece of longform journalism, written to be suitable for publication in a magazine such as Texas Monthly or The New YorkerJournalis

The Strength Effects of Saturating Paper Containing Synthetic Fiber

One of the most important objectives in the papermaking process is to produce paper with good strength properties. Some specialty paper grades need strength properties which exceed those attainable when only wood fiber is present in the final product. To achieve the additional strength, various additives and fibers can be added to the furnish, or supplementary processes can be performed on the paper. The objective to this thesis was to determine the strength effects of saturating paper containing nylon stock, and to attempt to correlate the strength relationship between the two strength enhancing parameters. To observe the effects of nylon fiber properties, standard paper samples were produced with three different levels of nylon addition: 0, 15, and 30%. The amount of latex added to the sheets by the saturation process was also varied, to determine the latex bonding effects on strength. The results of the experimentation showed that both the tear strength and the stretching ability of paper increased when nylon was added to the furnish. The tensile and burst strength of the paper was found to decrease with nylon addition, however. The nylon addition was also found to significantly decrease sheet formation, which affected testing results. The improved bonding created by the saturation process was found to increase all the strength properties tested, with burst strength showing the largest improvements. Before implementing either procedure, a careful cost versus property improvement analysis must be completed in order to determine if their use would truly be beneficial

Design of an embedded iris recognition system for use with a multi-factor authentication system.

This paper describes in detail the design, manufacturing and testing of an embedded iris scanner for use with a multifactor authentication system. The design process for this project included hardware design from part selection to board design to populating. Additionally, this process included the entirety of the software development, though the iris recognition process was largely based on other works. The functional requirements for the overall multi-factor authentication system were to have three authentication methods with a thirty second window to complete all three. The system acceptance accuracy was required to be greater than 75%. Those requirements therefore dictate that the iris scanner module must also have an acceptance accuracy higher than 75% and perform iris recognition in a few seconds so that the user can gain admittance in the allotted window of time. While the hardware has been verified and tested, further development and testing is necessary on the software and image processing. This work is funded by the Department of Energy’s Kansas City National Security Campus, operated by Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, LLC under contract number DE-NA0002839

Trade booms, trade busts and trade costs

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of bilateral trade flows for 130 country pairs across the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania for the period from 1870 to 2000 and demonstrate an overriding role for declining trade costs in the pre-World War I trade boom. In contrast, for the post-World War II trade boom we identify changes in output as the dominant force. Finally, the entirety of the interwar trade bust is explained by increases in trade costs

What are we learning from business training and entrepreneurship evaluations around the developing world?

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. We undertake a critical review of these studies with the goal of synthesizing the emerging lessons and understanding the limitations of the existing research and the areas in which more work is needed. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the length, content, and types of firms participating in the training programs evaluated. Many evaluations suffer from low statistical power, measure impacts only within a year of training, and experience problems with survey attrition and measurement of firm profits and revenues. Over these short time horizons, there are relatively modest impacts of training on survivorship of existing firms, but stronger evidence that training programs help prospective owners launch new businesses more quickly. Most studies find that existing firm owners implement some of the practices taught in training, but the magnitudes of these improvements in practices are often relatively modest. Few studies find significant impacts on profits or sales, although a couple of the studies with more statistical power have done so. Some studies have also found benefits to microfinance organizations of offering training. To date there is little evidence to help guide policymakers as to whether any impacts found come from trained firms competing away sales from other businesses versus through productivity improvements, and little evidence to guide the development of the provision of training at market prices. We conclude by summarizing some directions and key questions for future studies

Observations on Instabilities of Cavitating Inducers

Hydraulic systems involving cavitating turbomachines are known to be susceptible to instabilities at certain critical operating conditions. Two distinct classes of cavitating inducer instabilities have been reported in the literature (Refs. 1-6). The purpose of this note is to report on some preliminary observations of these phenomena. The experiments were performed in the Dynamic Pump Test Facility (DPTF) at the California Institute of Technology (Refs. 7, 8). Results will be presented for two different inducers operating at different flow coefficients, [symbol] ([symbol]= mean axial velocity/inducer tip velocity- [equation]) and cavitation numbers, [symbol] ([symbol]=[equation]; where [equation] are the inlet and vapor pressures, and [symbol] is the liquid density). In general, the instabilities occurred just before the head breakdown. After head breakdown, the system tended to become stable again, although there were some indications of a second region of instability at very small cavitation numbers. Impeller IV is a quarter scale model of the Low Pressure Oxidizer Turbo-Pump (LPOTP) of the space shuttle main engine (Refs. 7, 8). The cavitation performance of this impeller is presented in Figure 1. Some of the mean operating states for which large, constant amplitude oscillations occurred in all the pressures and mass flow rates are indicated by stars. The cavitation in each of the blade passages oscillated in unison. This unstable behavior is termed auto-oscillation. The frequency of the auto-oscillations ranged from 28 to 35 Hz. As might be expected, there does exist a marginal region of operation for which the auto-oscillations have a time varying amplitude. These non-steady oscillations occurred as sporadic bursts of auto-oscillation. It was this feature that makes the boundaries of the auto-oscillation region difficult to define. In addition to the auto-oscillation observations on Impeller IV, two instances of "rotating cavitation" were observed and are labeled by boxes in Figure 1. The presence of rotating cavitation was determined by means of a stroboscope slaved to the rotational speed of the inducer. Rotating cavitation appeared as a non-stationary cavitation patterns which rotated with respect to the "fixed" inducer. (More recent testing has also revealed the existence of a stationary form of rotating cavitation sometime referred to as alternate blade cavitation.) The large amplitude disturbances in the upstream pressure and mass flow rates which characterized auto-oscillation were not observed during rotating cavitation. This suggests the rotating cavitation is most intimately associated with the dynamic characteristics of the cavitating inducer itself irrespective of the hydraulic system in which it resides