Determining the Cost of an IPM Scouting Program

A simple model of an integrated pest management (IPM) program is presented. The model incorporates most common sources of income and expenditure encountered by scouting programs. It has been validated in the 30-county Kentucky IPM program using county- specific parameters and agrees very well with current pricing policies in those counties. This indicates that it should be a reliable indicator of future policies as labor and fuel costs rise. Other applications of the model are discussed

Biostratigraphic and Lithostratigraphic Analysis of the Hindsville Limestone (Mississippian) in Northwestern Arkansas

Several lithofacies can be recognized within the Hindsville Limestone (Mississippian) in its type area near Hindsville, Madison County, Arkansas. Lithofacies are based on petrographic analysis of matrix and constituent particles, particularly ooliths and skeletal grains. Hindsville deposition began with skeletal calcilutite incorporating chert rubble from the underlying Boone Formation. Increasing energy produced a sequence of skeletal calcarenites and oolites, and the end of Hindsville deposition was marked by a return to impure skeletal calcilutite. Conodonts recovered from the Hindsville Limestone include species of Cavusgnathus and Gnathodus. On the basis of reported ranges of these elements, the Hindsville appears to correlate with part of the Middle Chesterian Series In its type region

Speed limit enforcement as perceived by offenders: Implications for roads policing

Copyright@ 2010 The Authors. This is the post-print version of the article. The final published version may be accessed at the link below.Getting caught for speeding is an emotive issue. This paper analyzes an unexpected source of data captured by unprompted comments left at the end of a questionnaire by a sample of British drivers who all had penalty points on their licences, many for speeding.The paper’s relevance to roads policing is that perceived fairness of police procedures is crucial in shaping public support, and comments made by this sample of offending drivers indicated that speed limit enforcement through the operation of the speed camera system was often seen as unfair. Since roads policing is closely linked with this and with many drivers having penalty points on their licences, the views of such drivers could be instructive, given the continuing reliance on camera technology and the need for police to offer public reassurance. Finally, the implications for roads policing are considered.The data used in this paper are derived from a study funded by the Department for Transport (DfT)

Does the threat of disqualification deter drivers from speeding?

Road Safety Research Report, number 96, is available from the National Archives: Department for Transport, and can be accessed from the link below.It has long been recognised that driving speeds that are excessive and inappropriate to the conditions are a major contributory factor in road accidents, and a major issue for road safety. Restraining driving speeds has proved to be a difficult task, given the improvements over the years in both vehicle performance and road design. Within the traditional ‘three Es’ countermeasures of engineering, education and enforcement, recent years have seen the introduction of a wide range of engineering measures designed to bring about speed reduction, but these tend to be restricted to specific parts of the road network. New technologies such as Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) offer considerable promise, but mainly in the medium or longer term. Similarly, educative efforts to induce attitude and behaviour change in this context are bearing fruit, yet this is a long-term rather than short-term project. For the foreseeable future, enforcement will remain the principal means of influencing speed, by setting speed limits and imposing sanctions on drivers who are caught exceeding them. The number of licence endorsements has increased enormously in recent years. However, over the same period the number of disqualifications resulting from ‘totting-up’ points has decreased. This would seem to indicate that many drivers who accumulate up to 11 penalty points are either acting as if deterred by the threat of disqualification, or are avoiding disqualification in some other way. The extent to which penalty points act as a deterrent for the benefit of road safety in general is therefore an important issue, and this report describes work that has been carried out to study this issue by TRL and Brunel University, under contract to the Department for Transport

The Academy of Dental Materials: Providing roots and wings.

ObjectivesThe long history of the Academy of Dental Materials (ADM) is documented with its strategies (a) to rapidly communicate science among its members, (b) to establish special awards to stimulate new science, and (c) to develop new dental materials scientists.MethodsWe searched the history of the last 35 years of the ADM newsletters, transactions, journals, and officer notes. We document the (a) presidents, (b) meeting history, (c) membership growth, and (d) development of special awards through 2019 with the recent creation of the ADM Marshall Post-Doctoral Award.ResultsThere are 36 years of recent ADM history, 42 international meetings, membership growth to 400 individuals from 15 countries, service of 19 presidents, Paffenbarger annual Awardees since 1989, induction of >200 fellows, and recognition of the first winner of Marshall Post-Doctoral Award in 2018. New directions for recruiting members are suggested. Three potential new thrusts for the organization are presented: artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and intensive member mentoring.SignificanceThese suggestions for the ADM provide a path for the ADM to continue to adapt to the ever changing scientific landscape

The Large-scale Environments of Active Galactic Nuclei

It is now recognized that the energy released by accreting supermassive black holes observed as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) is integral in shaping the dynamics of baryons on up to cosmological scales, and AGN thus play a significant role in regulating the formation and evolution of galaxies. Studying the clustering properties of AGN reveals which environments they release this feedback energy into, testing models of AGN-galaxy coevolution and AGN structure. In this thesis, I leverage wide-area photometric and spectroscopic survey data to measure the clustering properties of various AGN samples containing millions of systems, placing tight constraints on the properties of their host dark matter halos. I first investigate the host halo properties of optically-selected red and blue quasars, finding no significant difference in their environments. Thus, quasars buried under mild dust columns likely do not represent a special phase of AGN-galaxy coevolution. On the other hand, I show that heavily obscured infrared-selected quasars occupy systematically more massive halos than their unobscured counterparts, suggesting that obscured quasars may represent a special phase of AGN-galaxy coevolution in which the black hole and galaxy are fed by common gas streams. Finally, I show that luminous low-frequency radio galaxies are hosted by massive galaxy groups over cosmic time, implying that jet-mode feedback dominates over quasar wind-mode feedback in groups and clusters

Proactive model to determine information technologies supporting expansion of air cargo network

Shippers and recipients expect transportation companies to provide more than just the movement of a package between points; certain information must be available to them as well, to enable forecasts and plans within the supply chain. The transportation companies also need the information flow that undergirds a transportation grid, to support ad-hoc routing and strategic structural re-alignment of business processes. This research delineates the information needs for an expanding air cargo network, then develops a new model of the information technologies needed to support expansion into a new country. The captured information will be used by shippers, recipients, and the transportation provider to better guide business decisions. This model will provide a method for transportation companies to balance the tradeoffs between the operating efficiencies, capital expenditures, and customer expectations of their IT systems. The output of the model is a list of technologies – optimized by cost – which meet the specific needs of internal and external customers when expanding air cargo networks into a new country

Investigating the Intelligibility of a Computer Vision System for Blind Users

Computer vision systems to help blind usersare becoming increasingly common yet often these systems are not intelligible. Our work investigates the intelligibility of a wearable computer vision system to help blind users locate and identify people in their vicinity. Providing a continuous stream of information, this system allows us to explore intelligibility through interaction and instructions, going beyond studies of intelligibility that focus on explaining a decision a computer vision system might make. In a study with 13 blind users, we explored whether varying instructions (either basic or enhanced) about how the system worked would change blind users’ experience of the system. We found offering a more detailed set of instructions did not affect how successful users were using the system nor their perceived workload. We did, however, find evidence of significant differences in what they knew about the system, and they employed different, and potentially more effective, use strategies. Our findings have important implications for researchers and designers of computer vision systemsfor blind users, as well more general implications for understanding what it means to make interactive computer vision systems intelligible