Chapter 9: Aquatic Macroinvertebrates, Section A: Aquatic Macroinvertebrates (Exclusive of Mosquitoes)

Final Report. Excerpt (Chapter 9, Section A) from The Des Plaines River Wetlands Demonstration Project, Volume II, Baseline Survey, edited by Donald L. Hey and Nancy S. PhilippiReport issued on: October 1985INHS Technical Report prepared for Wetlands Research, Inc

DID VIETNAM VETERANS GET SICKER IN THE 1990s? THE COMPLICATED EFFECTS OF MILITARY SERVICE ON SELF-REPORTED HEALTH

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.

Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or wartheatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.Public economics, social security and public pensions, health, education, welfare,labour, demographic economics

SiO2-rich condrules in ordinary chondrites

The solar system abundances of Mg, Fe, and Si dictate that chondritic meteorites are silica-deficient compared to most terrestrial or lunar igneous rocks; thus olivine-orthopyroxene assemblages are commonly observed in ordinary chondrites. However, in the unequilibrated H-chondrites Sharps, Bremervorde, and Dhajala, we have observed chondrules and fragments which contain either tridymite or cristobalite as a major phase

Efficient Global Sensitivity Analysis of Structural Vibration for a Nuclear Reactor System Subject to Nonstationary Loading

The structures associated with the nuclear steam supply system (NSSS) of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) include significant epistemic and aleatory uncertainties in the physical parameters, while also being subject to various non-stationary stochastic loading conditions over the life of a nuclear power plant. To understand the influence of these uncertainties on nuclear reactor systems, sensitivity analysis must be performed. This work evaluates computational design of experiment strategies, which execute a nuclear reactor equipment system finite element model to train and verify Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate models. The surrogate models are then used to perform both global and local sensitivity analyses. The significance of the sensitivity analysis for efficient modeling and simulation of nuclear reactor stochastic dynamics is discussed

Simplified Automatic Fault Detection in Wind Turbine Induction Generators

This paper presents a simplified automated fault detection scheme for wind turbine induction generators with rotor electrical asymmetries. Fault indicators developed in previous works have made use of the presence of significant spectral peaks in the upper sidebands of the supply frequency harmonics; however, the specific location of these peaks may shift depending on the wind turbine speed. As wind turbines tend to operate under variable speed conditions, it may be difficult to predict where these fault‐related peaks will occur. To accommodate for variable speeds and resulting shifting frequency peak locations, previous works have introduced methods to identify or track the relevant frequencies, which necessitates an additional set of processing algorithms to locate these fault‐related peaks prior to any fault analysis. In this work, a simplified method is proposed to instead bypass the issue of variable speed (and shifting frequency peaks) by introducing a set of bandpass filters that encompass the ranges in which the peaks are expected to occur. These filters are designed to capture the fault‐related spectral information to train a classifier for automatic fault detection, regardless of the specific location of the peaks. Initial experimental results show that this approach is robust against variable speeds and further shows good generalizability in being able to detect faults at speeds and conditions that were not presented during training. After training and tuning the proposed fault detection system, the system was tested on “unseen” data and yielded a high classification accuracy of 97.4%, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed approach

Using New Selection Tools

The goal of most beef production systems is to increase or at least maintain profitability. Producers can attempt to increase profitability in a variety of ways that might include reducing feed costs, changing their marketing program, or perhaps by changing the performance of their herd through genetic improvement. Focusing on this latter option, there are two primary genetic tools available: selection and mating where selection refers to the selection of breeding animals and mating includes which females are mated to which bulls, for example, crossbreeding systems. This paper focuses on the former, the selection of the appropriate animals for a production system with the goal to improve profitability. The best tool available for making selection decisions is expected progeny differences (EPD). Over the years the number of EPD available to guide producers in making selection decisions has grown from 5 to over 15 in most cases. Simply put, the amount of information that the breeder must sift through to try to make a good selection decision has become overwhelming. The producer must determine which EPD have the greatest influence on their income and their expenses, and by how much—a daunting task. Historically this task has depended on the “intuition” and experience of the breeder. For instance, they know that selection for heavier weaning weight will increase the weight of calves sold at weaning, but that blind selection for weaning weight will also increase calving difficulty and if replacements are kept, likely increase cow size and feed costs. Breeders have been performing a balancing act with little concrete information on how important each of those traits is to their profitability. Fortunately, there are several tools that have recently become available to ease the process of combining the costs and the revenues of beef production with EPD to make selection decisions that will produce progeny which are more profitable

Supervised normalization of microarrays

Motivation: A major challenge in utilizing microarray technologies to measure nucleic acid abundances is ‘normalization’, the goal of which is to separate biologically meaningful signal from other confounding sources of signal, often due to unavoidable technical factors. It is intuitively clear that true biological signal and confounding factors need to be simultaneously considered when performing normalization. However, the most popular normalization approaches do not utilize what is known about the study, both in terms of the biological variables of interest and the known technical factors in the study, such as batch or array processing date

Correlated Isotope Fractionation and Formation of Purple FUN Inclusions

Allende coarse-grained inclusions characterized by a distinct purple color and high spinel contents (≤ 50 vol.%) exhibit a higher frequency of FUN isotopic anomalies (≈20%) than the general CAI population (≤6%). We used the ion microprobe to measure Mg, Si, Cr and Fe isotopic compositions of three Purple Spinel-rich Inclusions (PSI = ψ) which are petrographically similar to Type B CAl to investigate: 1) variations in isotopic fractionation within inclusions, including secondary phases; 2) correlated isotopic fractionation; and 3) excess ^(26)Mg

Resolving domination in graphs

summary:For an ordered set $W =\lbrace w_1, w_2, \cdots , w_k\rbrace$ of vertices and a vertex $v$ in a connected graph $G$, the (metric) representation of $v$ with respect to $W$ is the $k$-vector $r(v|W) = (d(v, w_1),d(v, w_2) ,\cdots , d(v, w_k))$, where $d(x,y)$ represents the distance between the vertices $x$ and $y$. The set $W$ is a resolving set for $G$ if distinct vertices of $G$ have distinct representations with respect to $W$. A resolving set of minimum cardinality is called a minimum resolving set or a basis and the cardinality of a basis for $G$ is its dimension $\dim G$. A set $S$ of vertices in $G$ is a dominating set for $G$ if every vertex of $G$ that is not in $S$ is adjacent to some vertex of $S$. The minimum cardinality of a dominating set is the domination number $\gamma (G)$. A set of vertices of a graph $G$ that is both resolving and dominating is a resolving dominating set. The minimum cardinality of a resolving dominating set is called the resolving domination number $\gamma _r(G)$. In this paper, we investigate the relationship among these three parameters