CITIDEL Collection Building

The aim of this study is to facilitate the goals of the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Educational Library (CITIDEL) by increasing the number of collections available to it. This study will help in achieving this goal by focusing on four diverse collections

Why pair? Evidence of aggregative mating in a socially monogamous marine fish (Siganus doliatus, Siganidae)

© 2015 The Authors. Many species live in stable pairs, usually to breed and raise offspring together, but this cannot be assumed. Establishing whether pairing is based on mating, or an alternative cooperative advantage, can be difficult, especially where species show no obvious sexual dimorphism and where the act of reproduction itself is difficult to observe. In the tropical marine fishes known as rabbitfish (Siganidae), half of extant species live in socially monogamous, territorial pairs. It has been assumed that partnerships are for mating, but the reproductive mode of pairing rabbitfish is currently unconfirmed. Using passive acoustic telemetry to track movements of fishes belonging to one such species (Siganus doliatus), we provide the first evidence that paired adult fish undertake highly synchronized migrations with multiple conspecifics on a monthly cycle. All tagged individuals migrated along the same route in three consecutive months and were absent from home territories for 2–3 days just after the new moon. The timing and directionality of migrations suggest that S. doliatus may form spawning aggregations, offering the potential for exposure to multiple reproductive partners. The finding raises fundamental questions about the basis of pairing, mate choice and partnership longevity in this family

SimFusion: A Unified Similarity Measurement Algorithm for Multi-Type Interrelated Web Objects

In this paper, we use a Unified Relationship Matrix (URM) to represent a set of heterogeneous web objects (e.g., web pages, queries) and their interrelationships (e.g., hyperlink, user click-through relationships). We claim that iterative computations over the URM can help overcome the data sparseness problem (a common situation in the Web) and detect latent relationships among heterogeneous web objects, thus, can improve the quality of various information applications that require the combination of information from heterogeneous sources. To support our claim, we further propose a unified similarity-calculating algorithm, the SimFusion algorithm. By iteratively computing over the URM, the SimFusion algorithm can effectively integrate relationships from heterogeneous sources when measuring the similarity of two web objects. Experiments based on a real search engine query log and a large real web page collection demonstrate that the SimFusion algorithm can significantly improve similarity measurement of web objects over both traditional content based similarity-calculating algorithms and the cutting edge SimRank algorithm

Sediments and herbivory as sensitive indicators of coral reef degradation

© 2016 by the author(s). Around the world, the decreasing health of coral reef ecosystems has highlighted the need to better understand the processes of reef degradation. The development of more sensitive tools, which complement traditional methods of monitoring coral reefs, may reveal earlier signs of degradation and provide an opportunity for pre-emptive responses. We identify new, sensitive metrics of ecosystem processes and benthic composition that allow us to quantify subtle, yet destabilizing, changes in the ecosystem state of an inshore coral reef on the Great Barrier Reef. Following severe climatic disturbances over the period 2011-2012, the herbivorous reef fish community of the reef did not change in terms of biomass or functional groups present. However, fish-based ecosystem processes showed marked changes, with grazing by herbivorous fishes declining by over 90%. On the benthos, algal turf lengths in the epilithic algal matrix increased more than 50% while benthic sediment loads increased 37-fold. The profound changes in processes, despite no visible change in ecosystem state, i.e., no shift to macroalgal dominance, suggest that although the reef has not undergone a visible regime-shift, the ecosystem is highly unstable, and may sit on an ecological knife-edge. Sensitive, process-based metrics of ecosystem state, such as grazing or browsing rates thus appear to be effective in detecting subtle signs of degradation and may be critical in identifying ecosystems at risk for the future

Beyond Outerplanarity

We study straight-line drawings of graphs where the vertices are placed in convex position in the plane, i.e., convex drawings. We consider two families of graph classes with nice convex drawings: outer $k$-planar graphs, where each edge is crossed by at most $k$ other edges; and, outer $k$-quasi-planar graphs where no $k$ edges can mutually cross. We show that the outer $k$-planar graphs are $(\lfloor\sqrt{4k+1}\rfloor+1)$-degenerate, and consequently that every outer $k$-planar graph can be $(\lfloor\sqrt{4k+1}\rfloor+2)$-colored, and this bound is tight. We further show that every outer $k$-planar graph has a balanced separator of size $O(k)$. This implies that every outer $k$-planar graph has treewidth $O(k)$. For fixed $k$, these small balanced separators allow us to obtain a simple quasi-polynomial time algorithm to test whether a given graph is outer $k$-planar, i.e., none of these recognition problems are NP-complete unless ETH fails. For the outer $k$-quasi-planar graphs we prove that, unlike other beyond-planar graph classes, every edge-maximal $n$-vertex outer $k$-quasi planar graph has the same number of edges, namely $2(k-1)n - \binom{2k-1}{2}$. We also construct planar 3-trees that are not outer $3$-quasi-planar. Finally, we restrict outer $k$-planar and outer $k$-quasi-planar drawings to \emph{closed} drawings, where the vertex sequence on the boundary is a cycle in the graph. For each $k$, we express closed outer $k$-planarity and \emph{closed outer $k$-quasi-planarity} in extended monadic second-order logic. Thus, closed outer $k$-planarity is linear-time testable by Courcelle's Theorem.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

Addressing Inequity to Achieve the Maternal and Child Health Millennium Development Goals: Looking Beyond Averages.

Inequity in access to and use of child and maternal health interventions is impeding progress towards the maternal and child health Millennium Development Goals. This study explores the potential health gains and equity impact if a set of priority interventions for mothers and under fives were scaled up to reach national universal coverage targets for MDGs in Tanzania. We used the Lives Saved Tool (LiST) to estimate potential reductions in maternal and child mortality and the number of lives saved across wealth quintiles and between rural and urban settings. High impact maternal and child health interventions were modelled for a five-year scale up, by linking intervention coverage, effectiveness and cause of mortality using data from Tanzania. Concentration curves were drawn and the concentration index estimated to measure the equity impact of the scale up. In the poorest population quintiles in Tanzania, the lives of more than twice as many mothers and under-fives were likely to be saved, compared to the richest quintile. Scaling up coverage to equal levels across quintiles would reduce inequality in maternal and child mortality from a pro rich concentration index of -0.11 (maternal) and -0.12 (children) to a more equitable concentration index of -0,03 and -0.03 respectively. In rural areas, there would likely be an eight times greater reduction in maternal deaths than in urban areas and a five times greater reduction in child deaths than in urban areas. Scaling up priority maternal and child health interventions to equal levels would potentially save far more lives in the poorest populations, and would accelerate equitable progress towards maternal and child health MDGs

Excel Study Guide & Help/User Manual for DA 3410 Students

We used Excel to do some basic data analysis tasks to see whether it is a reasonable alternative to using a statistical package for the same tasks. We concluded that Excel is a poor choice for statistical analysis beyond textbook examples, the simplest descriptive statistics, or for more than a very few columns. The problems we encountered that led to this conclusion are in four general areas: • Missing values are handled inconsistently, and sometimes incorrectly. • Data organization differs according to analysis, forcing you to reorganize your data in many ways if you want to do many different analyses. • Many analyses can only be done on one column at a time, making it inconvenient to do the same analysis on many columns at the same time. • Output is poorly organized, sometimes inadequately labeled, and there is no record of how an analysis was accomplished. Excel is convenient for data entry, and for quickly manipulating rows and columns prior to statistical analysis. However when you are ready to do the statistical analysis, we recommend the use of a statistical package such as SAS, SPSS, Stata, Systat or Minitab

Study Guide Mathematical Modeling for Decision Making II DA 3410

The mission of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command is to organize, train, educate, man, equip, fund, administer, mobilize, deploy and sustain Army special operations forces to successfully conduct worldwide special operations, across the range of military operations, in support of regional combatant commanders, American ambassadors and other agencies as directed

ADVANCING FROM THE MODERN QUEST FOR MIRACLES TO A POST MODERN SCIENCE OF THE MIRACULOUS

The mechanical model of the Universe that so dominated the modern era effectively banished the deep wondrous and miraculous to a distant realm outside daily existence and experience of psyche and creation. Modern religion responded by defining miracles as essentially "divine interventions contradicting nature's laws." Bur what if existence itself is miraculous and wondrous and our capacity for awe, reverence, gratitude and "isness" itself were the true meaning of the miraculous? Is this not what the mystics teach and what post-modern science is destined (0 teach us as well?Approached with an appropriate sense of wonder, we can see the depth of the miraculous within nature and within human nature in particular. Modern science removed the fantasy that we and our earth occupy the physical center of the universe, but post-modern science has demonstrated that we do live right in the middle of the scale of things, and we have the creative powers (0 discover our place in the scheme of things. Reawakening awareness of the sacredness of being, the sacredness of existence, enlivens our sciences to recognize the light of the multitude of divine sparks. Awakening wonder empowers compassion, and sparks our creativity (0 heal the damage we have done by believing we were masters of the world, when we are actually embedded in the web of creation.We will explore these and other questions about the miraculous within nature In general and within human nature in particular