An Examination of the Dynamics of a Rear-inflow Jet Associated with an Idealized Mesoscale Convective System

This study evaluates the main controls on the descent of the rear-inflow jet (RIJ), associated with a mesoscale convective system (MCS), toward the surface. This study employs the Cloud Model 1 (CM1), release 18.3, to simulate idealized MCSs. The model has a horizontal grid spacing of 1 km with 100 vertical levels, and utilizes doubly periodic lateral boundary conditions. The Morrison double-moment explicit moisture scheme is used and Coriolis accelerations are ignored. To initiate convection, a 2 K warm bubble is applied over a limited subset of the domain. Simulations in which the magnitude of vertical wind shear is perturbed, using base-state substitution, are then considered to examine how the descent of the RIJ is impacted. It was found that for greater magnitudes of 2.5 km vertical wind shear, the RIJ associated with the simulated MCS is more elevated and stronger than with weaker wind shear over the same layer. This can be attributed to better balance between the cold pool, line-normal vertical wind shear, and RIJ. Future work includes extending the wind shear-RIJ phase space to include other magnitudes, depths, and directions of wind shear as well as comparing this implementation of base-state substitution to other applications

Unfair Housing on the Internet: The Effect of the Communications Decency Act on the Fair Housing Act

The use of online advertisements is a relatively new, but rapidlygrowing phenomenon. Consumers have latched onto the idea of holding an online garage sale and its use has seen a marked increase. For example, online classified advertising services users increased eighty percent between 2004 and 2005. Consumers, however, sell more than baseball gloves and books online. One sector of the online advertisement market that has proven to be problematic is the sale of housing rental space. These advertisements would seemingly fit within the scope of the Fair Housing Act, which contains a provision regulating housing advertisements. However, these advertisements also fall within reach of the Communications Decency Act. These two statutes contain conflicting provisions, and it remains to be seen whether they can be harmonized. This article will first discuss the scopes of both the Fair Housing Act and the Communications Decency Act. It will then look at two cases that have addressed the intersection of the two statutes. Finally, this article will discuss the merits of each court\u27s decision and suggest a path for the future

Environments and Morphologies of Red Sequence Galaxies with Residual Star Formation in Massive Clusters

We present a photometric investigation into recent star formation in galaxy clusters at z ~ 0.1. We use spectral energy distribution templates to quantify recent star formation in large X-ray selected clusters from the LARCS survey using matched GALEX NUV photometry. These clusters all have signs of red sequence galaxy recent star formation (as indicated by blue NUV-R colour), regardless of cluster morphology and size. A trend in environment is found for these galaxies, such that they prefer to occupy low density, high cluster radius environments. The morphology of these UV bright galaxies suggests that they are in fact red spirals, which we confirm with light curves and Galaxy Zoo voting percentages as morphological proxies. These UV bright galaxies are therefore seen to be either truncated spiral galaxies, caught by ram pressure in falling into the cluster, or high mass spirals, with the photometry dominated by the older stellar population.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 11 pages, 11 figure

Instructional Gaming

This action research will investigate instructional games as a strategy to increase third grade students’ engagement and motivation. A researcher-created behavior checklist and survey will document students’ behavior and attitudes during baseline, intervention, and post intervention. Analysis will investigate changes in engagement, motivation, and grades due to the gaming intervention

Patterson Irrigation District

Presented at the 2002 USCID/EWRI conference, Energy, climate, environment and water - issues and opportunities for irrigation and drainage on July 9-12 in San Luis Obispo, California.Includes bibliographical references.Making accurate, informed operational decisions in water and energy management can have significant resource and fiscal impacts on irrigation districts. The need for accurate and reliable real-time and historical data is key in making these vital decisions. The use of every acre-foot of water and every kilowatt-hour of energy, resource management, has become the topic of scrutiny in today's world. The protection of these valuable water and energy resources, held in trust and managed by the irrigation district, on behalf of its' landowner constituents, is one of the vital functions of the Patterson Irrigation District (PIO). Plant Control and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems can provide the link between data and effective District operations and management. This case study will outline the initial development, expansion and subsequent upgrade of the Patterson Irrigation District's Plant Control and SCADA systems, the role in data acquisition and daily district operations, the benefits the district and its water users have accrued from accurate real-time and historical data and finally, the lessons learned in the development, implementation and evolution of a state-of-the-art Plant Control and SCADA system for irrigation district use. In its first full year of operation, 1999, historical data verified an increase of 23% in total Station #1 pumping plant efficiency on a kW-hr per acre-foot basis

A photometrically and spectroscopically confirmed population of passive spiral galaxies

We have identified a population of passive spiral galaxies from photometry and integral field spectroscopy. We selected z < 0.035 spiral galaxies that have WISE colours consistent with little mid-infrared emission from warm dust. Matched aperture photometry of 51 spiral galaxies in ultraviolet, optical and mid-infrared show these galaxies have colours consistent with passive galaxies. Six galaxies form a spectroscopic pilot study and were observed using the Wide-Field Spectrograph to check for signs of nebular emission from star formation. We see no evidence of substantial nebular emission found in previous red spiral samples. These six galaxies possess absorption-line spectra with 4000 Å breaks consistent with an average luminosity-weighted age of 2.3 Gyr. Our photometric and integral field spectroscopic observations confirm the existence of a population of local passive spiral galaxies, implying that transformation into early-type morphologies is not required for the quenching of star formation

Collaborative Tools Used to Organize a Library Camp Unconference

From July to October, 2008, Laura Crossett, Joseph Kraus and Steve Lawson organized the Library Camp of the West (http://librarycampwest.pbwiki.com/). This was an unconference that took place on October 10, 2008 at the University of Denver. The authors used many technology tools to organize the event, such as email, wikis, blogs, two tools from Google, the Doodle scheduling Website, Flickr and more. This article will explain how they used those tools to prepare for the unconference

An Empirical Method for Establishing Positional Confidence Intervals Tailored for Composite Interval Mapping of QTL

BACKGROUND: Improved genetic resolution and availability of sequenced genomes have made positional cloning of moderate-effect QTL realistic in several systems, emphasizing the need for precise and accurate derivation of positional confidence intervals (CIs) for QTL. Support interval (SI) methods based on the shape of the QTL likelihood curve have proven adequate for standard interval mapping, but have not been shown to be appropriate for use with composite interval mapping (CIM), which is one of the most commonly used QTL mapping methods. RESULTS: Based on a non-parametric confidence interval (NPCI) method designed for use with the Haley-Knott regression method for mapping QTL, a CIM-specific method (CIM-NPCI) was developed to appropriately account for the selection of background markers during analysis of bootstrap-resampled data sets. Coverage probabilities and interval widths resulting from use of the NPCI, SI, and CIM-NPCI methods were compared in a series of simulations analyzed via CIM, wherein four genetic effects were simulated in chromosomal regions with distinct marker densities while heritability was fixed at 0.6 for a population of 200 isolines. CIM-NPCIs consistently capture the simulated QTL across these conditions while slightly narrower SIs and NPCIs fail at unacceptably high rates, especially in genomic regions where marker density is high, which is increasingly common for real studies. The effects of a known CIM bias toward locating QTL peaks at markers were also investigated for each marker density case. Evaluation of sub-simulations that varied according to the positions of simulated effects relative to the nearest markers showed that the CIM-NPCI method overcomes this bias, offering an explanation for the improved coverage probabilities when marker densities are high. CONCLUSIONS: Extensive simulation studies herein demonstrate that the QTL confidence interval methods typically used to positionally evaluate CIM results can be dramatically improved by accounting for the procedural complexity of CIM via an empirical approach, CIM-NPCI. Confidence intervals are a critical measure of QTL utility, but have received inadequate treatment due to a perception that QTL mapping is not sufficiently precise for procedural improvements to matter. Technological advances will continue to challenge this assumption, creating even more need for the current improvement to be refined

Refining genetically inferred relationships using treelet covariance smoothing

Recent technological advances coupled with large sample sets have uncovered many factors underlying the genetic basis of traits and the predisposition to complex disease, but much is left to discover. A common thread to most genetic investigations is familial relationships. Close relatives can be identified from family records, and more distant relatives can be inferred from large panels of genetic markers. Unfortunately these empirical estimates can be noisy, especially regarding distant relatives. We propose a new method for denoising genetically - inferred relationship matrices by exploiting the underlying structure due to hierarchical groupings of correlated individuals. The approach, which we call Treelet Covariance Smoothing, employs a multiscale decomposition of covariance matrices to improve estimates of pairwise relationships. On both simulated and real data, we show that smoothing leads to better estimates of the relatedness amongst distantly related individuals. We illustrate our method with a large genome-wide association study and estimate the "heritability" of body mass index quite accurately. Traditionally heritability, defined as the fraction of the total trait variance attributable to additive genetic effects, is estimated from samples of closely related individuals using random effects models. We show that by using smoothed relationship matrices we can estimate heritability using population-based samples. Finally, while our methods have been developed for refining genetic relationship matrices and improving estimates of heritability, they have much broader potential application in statistics. Most notably, for error-in-variables random effects models and settings that require regularization of matrices with block or hierarchical structure.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOAS598 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

'What did i do wrong?' An empirical evaluation of sample preparation methodologies in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-mass spectrometry imaging

© 2019 MO Rourke. Aim: This guide aims to broaden the uptake of MALDI-MSI biomedical research by removing the initial 'lag phase' associated with empirical determination in sample preparation and data analysis. Methods: Samples from several tissue types were prepared for lipid, protein and peptide MSI analysis. Broadly, samples were cryo sectioned, mounted onto conductive MALDI slides and sublimed with an analyte specific matrix, recrystallised and analyzed in a Bruker UltrafleXtreme MALDI TOF/TOF. Results/conclusion: Here we present a general guide that serves as the first comprehensive, explanatory index for curation and verification of both sample preparation and data generation during the MALDI-MSI process. Lay abstract The field of mass spectrometry tissue imaging is a complex field that is designed to provide a map of the molecules on the surface of tissue sections. It often requires a significant investment of time and resources before useful data can be generated; therefore, this paper provides a visual troubleshooting guide that will act as a reference point for a range of sample preparation mistakes and explanations for unusual or suboptimal data. Elimination of the lag phase associated with the development of new techniques will help to expedite the growth and application of this technology