The year of ecology

The keynote speaker comments on the advent of the “Year of Ecology,” with concerns that some of the current environmental rhetoric fails to understand the science behind pest control and the current practices of food production and food processing. In regard to pests, 4tThroughout history man has always made value judgements about other organisms that share our world, and always decides in favor of himself. It is a concern that we will almost certainly lose some of the more useful chemical tools used in pest control, as a result of the emotional concern about pollution, and it is already becoming increasingly difficult to get registration and residue tolerance for new pesticides. All pest control measures are going to continue to be under attack. The solution is to continue to depend up on the scientific method: do basic research, get the facts, and leave emotions out of our decisions, and lastly, speak out

Defending OC-SVM based IDS from poisoning attacks

Machine learning techniques are widely used to detect intrusions in the cyber security field. However, most machine learning models are vulnerable to poisoning attacks, in which malicious samples are injected into the training dataset to manipulate the classifier's performance. In this paper, we first evaluate the accuracy degradation of OC-SVM classifiers with 3 different poisoning strategies with the ADLA-FD public dataset and a real world dataset. Secondly, we propose a saniti-zation mechanism based on the DBSCAN clustering algorithm. In addition, we investigate the influences of different distance metrics and different dimensionality reduction techniques and evaluate the sensitivity of the DBSCAN parameters. The ex-perimental results show that the poisoning attacks can degrade the performance of the OC-SVM classifier to a large degree, with an accuracy equal to 0.5 in most settings. The proposed sanitization method can filter out poisoned samples effectively for both datasets. The accuracy after sanitization is very close or even higher to the original value.</p

Selection mechanisms affect volatility in evolving markets

Financial asset markets are sociotechnical systems whose constituent agents are subject to evolutionary pressure as unprofitable agents exit the marketplace and more profitable agents continue to trade assets. Using a population of evolving zero-intelligence agents and a frequent batch auction price-discovery mechanism as substrate, we analyze the role played by evolutionary selection mechanisms in determining macro-observable market statistics. In particular, we show that selection mechanisms incorporating a local fitness-proportionate component are associated with high correlation between a micro, risk-aversion parameter and a commonly-used macro-volatility statistic, while a purely quantile-based selection mechanism shows significantly less correlation.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, to appear in proceedings of GECCO 2019 as a full pape

Lifting Bell inequalities

A Bell inequality defined for a specific experimental configuration can always be extended to a situation involving more observers, measurement settings, or measurement outcomes. In this article, such "liftings" of Bell inequalities are studied. It is shown that if the original inequality defines a facet of the polytope of local joint outcome probabilities then the lifted one also defines a facet of the more complex polytope

Informing Business-Related Educational Needs Through Facilitated Roundtable Discussions with Forest Landowners and Service Providers

Following a daylong symposium featuring tax-oriented presentations, attendees participated in facilitated roundtable discussions centered on identification of educational needs and challenges associated with the symposium subject matter. Participants discussed their educational needs; challenges related to local, state, and federal tax laws; and recommendations for policy changes. Qualitative data gathered from participants will inform future educational programming and guide discussions about potential policy changes

WISE J163940.83-684738.6: A Y Dwarf identified by Methane Imaging

We have used methane imaging techniques to identify the near-infrared counterpart of the bright WISE source WISEJ163940.83-684738.6. The large proper motion of this source (around 3.0arcsec/yr) has moved it, since its original WISE identification, very close to a much brighter background star -- it currently lies within 1.5" of the J=14.90+-0.04 star 2MASS16394085-6847446. Observations in good seeing conditions using methane sensitive filters in the near-infrared J-band with the FourStar instrument on the Magellan 6.5m Baade telescope, however, have enabled us to detect a near-infrared counterpart. We have defined a photometric system for use with the FourStar J2 and J3 filters, and this photometry indicates strong methane absorption, which unequivocally identifies it as the source of the WISE flux. Using these imaging observations we were then able to steer this object down the slit of the FIRE spectrograph on a night of 0.6" seeing, and so obtain near-infrared spectroscopy confirming a Y0-Y0.5 spectral type. This is in line with the object's near-infrared-to-WISE J3--W2 colour. Preliminary astrometry using both WISE and FourStar data indicates a distance of 5.0+-0.5pc and a substantial tangential velocity of 73+-8km/s. WISEJ163940.83-684738.6 is the brightest confirmed Y dwarf in the WISE W2 passband and its distance measurement places it amongst the lowest luminosity sources detected to date.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, 20 September 201

Determination of timber and land tax basis for your forest land

This Forestry and Natural Resources Fact Sheet 107 by Clemson University Extension Services provides information on the determination of timber and land tax basis for your forest land