Evaluation of a Pound Net Leader Designed to Reduce Sea Turtle Bycatch

Offshore pound net leaders in the southern portion of Chesapeake Bay in Virginia waters were documented to incidentally take protected loggerhead, Caretta caretta, and Kemp’s ridley, Lepidochelys kempii, sea turtles. Because of these losses, NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in 2004 closed the area to offshore pound net leaders annually from 6 May to 15 July and initiated a study of an experimental leader design that replaced the top two-thirds of the traditional mesh panel leader with vertical ropes (0.95 cm) spaced 61 cm apart. This experimental leader was tested on four pound net sites on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay in 2004 and 2005. During the 2 trial periods, 21 loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles were found interacting with the control leader and 1 leatherback turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, was found interacting with the experimental leader. Results of a negative binomial regression analysis comparing the two leader designs found the experimental leader significantly reduced sea turtle interactions (p=0.03). Finfish were sampled from the pound nets in the study to assess finfish catch performance differences between the two leader designs. Although the conclusions from this element of the experiment are not robust, paired t-test and Wilcoxon signed rank test results determined no significant harvest weight difference between the two leaders. Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests did not reveal any substantive size selectivity differences between the two leaders

Pushing the Bounds of Typology: Jewish Carnality and the Eucharist in Jörg Ratgeb\u27s Herrenberg Altarpiece

Jörg Ratgeb’s Herrenberg Altarpiece (1518-1519) depicts well-established examples of Christian iconography, but appears to reconfigure and intensify traditional subjects and subject matter through the inclusion of overt anti-Judaic references. In this paper, my focus is the strong anti-Judaic subject matter of the Herrenberg Altarpiece and the local context in which, and for which, it was created. The anti-Jewish representations are investigated by exploring Christian perceptions of biblical and contemporary Jews, identifying social tensions in Swabia that may have influenced how Jews were depicted, and recognizing the ways in which the trope of Jewish wantonness may have served a politico-religious agenda in the region. Given the Eucharistic overtones of the altarpiece, I also argue that anxieties in Christian practice concerning the presence of Christ’s true body and blood in the consecrated Eucharist could be, and often were, exacerbated by Christian perceptions of Jews and “judaizing.

Equilibration between edge states in the fractional quantum Hall effect regime at high imbalances

We experimentally study equilibration between edge states, co-propagating at the edge of the fractional quantum Hall liquid, at high initial imbalances. We find an anomalous increase of the conductance between the fractional edge states at the filling factor $\nu=2/5$ in comparison with the expected one for the model of independent edge states. We conclude that the model of independent fractional edge states is not suitable to describe the experimental situation at $\nu=2/5$.Comment: 4 page

Aharonov-Bohm cages in the GaAlAs/GaAs system

Aharonov-Bohm oscillations have been observed in a lattice formed by a two dimensional rhombus tiling. This observation is in good agreement with a recent theoretical calculation of the energy spectrum of this so-called T3 lattice. We have investigated the low temperature magnetotransport of the T3 lattice realized in the GaAlAs/GaAs system. Using an additional electrostatic gate, we have studied the influence of the channel number on the oscillations amplitude. Finally, the role of the disorder on the strength of the localization is theoretically discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 11 EPS figure

Then What? Quantifying SBAE Teacher Career-Decisions Post-Migration

Complex career decisions, such as teacher mobility, are often reduced to stigmatizing labels that do little to account for the state of teaching as a profession or credit those engaging in migratory decisions as making healthy career choices. Through our study, we focused on understanding workforce mobility, teaching as an unstaged profession, and the current quantifications existing around SBAE teacher migration. We drew on over 100 years of data from California as we quantitatively explored and synthesized the career decisions of migrating SBAE teachers. This snapshot offers a means of understanding the Teacher Career Cycle (Fessler & Christensen, 1992) in light of the implications for the teaching career as a series of choices rather than a stretch of time at an individual school. Implications of this conceptualization of migration stretch beyond SBAE to administration and those tasked with supporting the career trajectory of SBAE teachers across the United States

Ritual and Status: Mortuary Display at the Household Level at the Middle Horizon Wari Site of Conchopata, Peru

Using a model derived from McAnany's (1995) study of ancient Mayan ancestor veneration, this study evaluated the patterns of treatment of the dead, and corresponding sociopolitical implications, at the Middle Horizon (A.D. 500-1000) site of Conchopata, a secondary center of the Wari Empire located in Ayacucho, Peru. In addition to residential zones, public plazas, ceramic workshops, and temples, Conchopata has yielded an abundant sample of tombs and burial contexts including two multi-roomed mortuary complexes. This study explores how burial practices and mortuary complexes within domestic contexts related to ancestor veneration by high-status households.Several types of analyses were conducted. First, 40 architectural spaces from five zones were analyzed to assess spatial variability in household status and wealth, activities, and function. Second, a multidimensional scaling analysis of 38 architectural spaces was undertaken to establish room function and identify special activities. Third, a multidimensional scaling analysis of 31 burial contexts was carried out to identify patterns within the burial population and distinguish status differences in burial treatments. Finally, architectural spaces and burial contexts were compared across zones in terms of artifact proportions and presence/absence of features and artifact types. The results suggest that all five zones investigated were residential zones composed of high-status households. These households contained at least one room where mortuary ceremonies and rituals were conducted. Both high-status and low-status tombs were identified within the domestic domain, including a special category of infant/child burials. The practice of ancestor veneration at Conchopata was confirmed by evidence for protracted burial rites, continued interaction with the dead, and other criteria of the McAnany model. High-status households engaged in a specific form of ancestor veneration involving continued interaction with the ancestors through offering holes and post-burial rituals. Although all high-status households engaged in similar types of deathways, two households placed considerably greater investment in activities surrounding the dead by constructing multi-roomed mortuary complexes within their residences. Overall, the type of ancestor veneration evidenced at Conchopata differs markedly from that of the Maya (in which important ancestors were flaunted) as well as from the late prehispanic chullpa and Inka practices

The channels of technology acquisition in commercial firms, and the NASA dissemination program

Technology acquisition in commercial firms, and NASA dissemination progra

Flux Jumping and a Bulk-to-Granular Transition in the Magnetization of a Compacted and Sintered MgB2 Superconductor

The recent discovery of intermediate-temperature superconductivity (ITC) in MgB2 by Akimitsu et al. and its almost simultaneous explanation in terms of a hole-carrier-based pairing mechanism by Hirsch, has triggered an avalanche of studies of its structural, magnetic and transport properties. As a further contribution to the field we report the results of field (H) and temperature (T) dependent magnetization (M) measurements of a pellet of uniform, large-grain sintered MgB2. We show that at low temperatures the size of the pellet and its critical current density, Jc(H) - i.e. its M(H) - ensure low field flux jumping, which of course ceases when M(H) drops below a critical value. With further increase of H and T the individual grains decouple and the M(H) loops drop to lower lying branches, unresolved in the usual full M(H) representation. After taking into account the sample size and grain size, respectively, the bulk sample and the grains were deduced to exhibit the same magnetically determined Jc s (e.g. 105 A/cm2, 20 K, 0T) and hence that for each temperature of measurement Jc(H) decreased monotonically with H over the entire field range, except for a gap within the grain-decoupling zone.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, Changes: Fig 6 Vertical scale an order of magnitude out (changed figure and associated text). Also corrected typo in last sectio

Gypsum-DL: an open-source program for preparing small-molecule libraries for structure-based virtual screening

Computational techniques such as structure-based virtual screening require carefully prepared 3D models of potential small-molecule ligands. Though powerful, existing commercial programs for virtual-library preparation have restrictive and/or expensive licenses. Freely available alternatives, though often effective, do not fully account for all possible ionization, tautomeric, and ring-conformational variants. We here present Gypsum-DL, a free, robust open-source program that addresses these challenges. As input, Gypsum-DL accepts virtual compound libraries in SMILES or flat SDF formats. For each molecule in the virtual library, it enumerates appropriate ionization, tautomeric, chiral, cis/trans isomeric, and ring-conformational forms. As output, Gypsum-DL produces an SDF file containing each molecular form, with 3D coordinates assigned. To demonstrate its utility, we processed 1558 molecules taken from the NCI Diversity Set VI and 56,608 molecules taken from a Distributed Drug Discovery (D3) combinatorial virtual library. We also used 4463 high-quality protein-ligand complexes from the PDBBind database to show that Gypsum-DL processing can improve virtual-screening pose prediction. Gypsum-DL is available free of charge under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0

Sandstone Consolidation III Year End Report

Two areas of cap rock occurrence have been mapped, one in the upper Texas Coast and the other in South Texas. These may be related to ancient delta systems. Two high-resistivity zones have been identified in Brazoria County. The nature of the high-resistivity intervals remains enigmatic. Most of the carbonate they contain is microscopically and isotopically skeletal in origin. Few authigenic components have been identified. Isotopic data suggest minimal recycling of pore waters between shale and sandstone. Hydrolysis reactions and reactions between key pairs of minerals have been written. The goal is to plot formation waters on stability diagrams for these reaction pairs and to correlate log activity ratios with the presence or absence of cap rock and deep secondary porosity. Mineral compositions are based on microprobe data from earlier Sandstone Consolidation projects and new data collected in this project. Methods have been developed to estimate thermodynamic functions for most of these minerals at elevated temperatures. Methods differ depending on the mineral class and availability of published thermodynamic data.Bureau of Economic Geolog