Status of the Wild Turkey in Southwestern Illinois in 1970

Wild-trapped turkey were first released in southwestern Illinois in 1959. This, and subsequent releases have established a huntable population of wild turkey in the area. Until 1970, no evaluation of the status of the bird had been made. This study was conducted in June, July, August and September, 1970, to determine the distribution, productivity and relative abundance of the wild turkey in Alexander, Jackson, Union and Williamson Counties and to make recommendations for future management of the population. Information was supplied by rural mail carriers, Illinois Department of Conservation and U. S. Forest Service personnel and local residents together with field work by the author. Densities were rated high in six areas; moderate densities were found adjacent to and between areas of high density; low density areas were also documented. Considerable range expansion from the original wild-trapped release sites was noted. Areas for future range expansion were limited by habitat, land use and human disturbances, and by physical barriers. Productivity was found to sufficiently high to maintain or increase populations. Rainfall and flooding were severe enough during the peak of hatching and the period of young poults to be potentially restrictive to productivity. Recommendations for future management practices include: use of one standardized roadside census and the establishment of spring gobbler counts to determine population trends; censuses by rural mail carriers, but for a shorter period of time; additional brood studies to evaluate brood survival; continued resident interviews to monitor range and population changes

Conformal Gravity: Dark Matter and Dark Energy

This short review examines recent progress in understanding dark matter, dark energy, and galactic halos using theory that departs minimally from standard particle physics and cosmology. Strict conformal symmetry (local Weyl scaling covariance), postulated for all elementary massless fields, retains standard fermion and gauge boson theory but modifies Einstein-Hilbert general relativity and the Higgs scalar field model, with no new physical fields. Subgalactic phenomenology is retained. Without invoking dark matter, conformal gravity and a conformal Higgs model fit empirical data on galactic rotational velocities, galactic halos, and Hubble expansion including dark energy.Comment: 9 pp in revtex format. References added with minor text revision

Cosmological implications of conformal field theory

Requiring all massless elementary fields to have conformal scaling symmetry removes a conflict between gravitational theory and the quantum theory of elementary particles and fields. Extending this postulate to the scalar field of the Higgs model, dynamical breaking of both gauge and conformal symmetries determines parameters for the interacting fields. In uniform isotropic geometry a modified Friedmann cosmic evolution equation is derived with nonvanishing cosmological constant. Parameters determined by numerical solution are consistent with empirical data for redshifts $z\leq z_*=1090$, including luminosity distances for observed type Ia supernovae and peak structure ratios in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The theory does not require dark matter.Comment: 8 pages Conclusions about the early universe which must be reexamined have been removed. Manuscript revised and reformatted. Accepted for publication in Modern Physics Letters A (2011

1953 oil and gas well drilling statistics

Includes The development of underground storage in Ohio, by J.J. Schmidt, K.C. Cottingham and Rotary vs cable tool drilling in Ohio, by Robert L. Alkire

LHCb's Potential to Measure Flavour-Specific CP-Asymmetry in Semileptonic and Hadronic Bs0B^0_s Decays

"The CP asymmetry in Bs-Bsbar mixing, denoted as a^s_{fs}, is sensitive to new weak phases in the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model. This can be probed through a measurement of the time-dependent charge asymmetry A^s_{fs}(t) in flavour-specific decays. This note describes the LHCb strategy to measure a^s_{fs} using a time-dependent method, in flavour untagged decays of Bs->Ds mu nu and Bs->Ds pi. We also investigate a measurement of the difference of a^s_{fs} and a^d_{fs} in Bs->Ds mu nu and Bd->Dmu nu decays which allows to control the systematic uncertainty that arise from detection asymmetries.

Is It Time We Changed How We Measure Length of Stay for Hip and Knee Arthroplasty?

Patient length of stay (LOS) for lower limb arthroplasty is a frequently quoted outcome measure. However, the use of mean values in days is prone to being skewed by outliers. Between January 2013 and December 2015, patient LOS for primary hip and knee replacement was collected in 1,168 patients. There were two groups: pre- and postinstitution of the Rapid Recovery Program. The hypothesis was that reducing LOS would highlight proportionate differences when using hours as the measuring unit. Statistical analysis confirmed a significant reduction in LOS between the Enhanced Recovery Program and Rapid Recovery Program ( < 0.001). Use of the median LOS reduces the impact of outliers. Use of hours as the unit of measure of LOS enabled analysis of the time of day of discharge. With decreasing LOS and day-case arthroplasty, a measurement in median hours should become the standard to allow for the detection of subtle changes

Resonance Contributions to the Electromagnetic Low Energy Constants of Chiral Perturbation Theory

The effective chiral Lagrangian of the strong and electromagnetic interactions of the pseudoscalar mesons at low energies depends on a set of low energy constants. We determine the contributions to the electromagnetic coupling constants at order $O(e^2 p^2)$, which arise from resonances within a photon loop. We give some implications of our results, in particular we discuss in detail the effects on the corrections to Dashen's theorem.Comment: LaTex (uses epsfig.sty), 35 pages including 3 Postscript figures. The complete paper is also available via anonymous ftp at ftp://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/ , or via www at http://www-ttp.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/cgi-bin/preprints/ ; slightly enlarged version. Accepted for publication in Nucl. Phys.

Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) - Optical Telescope Assembly (OTA) Status

The WFIRST Mission is the next large astrophysical observatory for NASA after the James Webb Space Telescope and is the top priority mission from the 2010 National Academy of Sciences' decadal survey. The WFIRST OTA includes the inherited primary and secondary mirrors with precision metering structures that are to be integrated to new mirror assemblies to provide optical feeds to the two WFIRST science instruments. We present here: (1) the results for the review of the inherited hardware for WFIRST through a thorough technical pedigree process, (2) the status of the effort to establish the capability of the telescope to perform at a cooler operational temperature of 265K, and (3) the status of the work in requirement development for OTA to incorporate the inherited hardware, and (4) the path forward