Thirty-Year Case Study Showing a Negative Relationship Between Population and Reproductive Indices of Eastern Wild Turkeys in Georgia

Some Eastern wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo silvestris) studies have interpreted low reproductive success in an established population as support for the idea that as populations stabilize reproduction decreases. However, no study has previously documented a negative relationship between population size and reproductive success for the wild turkey. Thus, we examined the hypothesis that reproduction (poults/hen) decreased as population size (turkeys seen/hour) increased in Georgia. Using 30 years of data collected by two independent survey methods, linear regression analysis indicated a negative relationship between population size and reproduction (r2 = 0.6389, P ≤ 0.001) for wild turkeys in Georgia from 1979 through 2008. Findings of a negative relationship such as in our case study adds more information and justification for researchers to further investigate the potential mechanisms of density–dependent processes in turkey reproduction through designed experiments with controls

The implementation research institute: Training mental health implementation researchers in the United States

Abstract Background The Implementation Research Institute (IRI) provides two years of training in mental health implementation science for 10 new fellows each year. The IRI is supported by a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R25 grant and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Fellows attend two annual week-long trainings at Washington University in St. Louis. Training is provided through a rigorous curriculum, local and national mentoring, a ‘learning site visit’ to a federally funded implementation research project, pilot research, and grant writing. Methods This paper describes the rationale, components, outcomes to date, and participant experiences with IRI. Results IRI outcomes include 31 newly trained implementation researchers, their new grant proposals, contributions to other national dissemination and implementation research training, and publications in implementation science authored by the Core Faculty and fellows. Former fellows have obtained independent research funding in implementation science and are beginning to serve as mentors for more junior investigators. Conclusions Based on the number of implementation research grant proposals and papers produced by fellows to date, the IRI is proving successful in preparing new researchers who can inform the process of making evidence-based mental healthcare more available through real-world settings of care and who are advancing the field of implementation science

CMBPol Mission Concept Study: Foreground Science Knowledge and Prospects

We report on our knowledge of Galactic foregrounds, as well as on how a CMB satellite mission aiming at detecting a primordial B-mode signal (CMBPol) will contribute to improving it. We review the observational and analysis techniques used to constrain the structure of the Galactic magnetic field, whose presence is responsible for the polarization of Galactic emissions. Although our current understanding of the magnetized interstellar medium is somewhat limited, dramatic improvements in our knowledge of its properties are expected by the time CMBPol flies. Thanks to high resolution and high sensitivity instruments observing the whole sky at frequencies between 30 GHz and 850 GHz, CMBPol will not only improve this picture by observing the synchrotron emission from our galaxy, but also help constrain dust models. Polarized emission from interstellar dust indeed dominates over any other signal in CMBPol's highest frequency channels. Observations at these wavelengths, combined with ground-based studies of starlight polarization, will therefore enable us to improve our understanding of dust properties and of the mechanism(s) responsible for the alignment of dust grains with the Galactic magnetic field. CMBPol will also shed new light on observations that are presently not well understood. Morphological studies of anomalous dust and synchrotron emissions will indeed constrain their natures and properties, while searching for fluctuations in the emission from heliospheric dust will test our understanding of the circumheliospheric interstellar medium. Finally, acquiring more information on the properties of extra-Galactic sources will be necessary in order to maximize the cosmological constraints extracted from CMBPol's observations of CMB lensing. (abridged)Comment: 43 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

D-brane potentials in the warped resolved conifold and natural inflation

In this paper we obtain a model of Natural Inflation from string theory with a Planckian decay constant. We investigate D-brane dynamics in the background of the warped resolved conifold (WRC) throat approximation of Type IIB string compactifications on Calabi-Yau manifolds. When we glue the throat to a compact bulk Calabi-Yau, we generate a D-brane potential which is a solution to the Laplace equation on the resolved conifold. We can exactly solve this equation, including dependence on the angular coordinates. The solutions are valid down to the tip of the resolved conifold, which is not the case for the more commonly used deformed conifold. This allows us to exploit the effect of the warping, which is strongest at the tip. We inflate near the tip using an angular coordinate of a D5-brane in the WRC which has a discrete shift symmetry, and feels a cosine potential, giving us a model of Natural Inflation, from which it is possible to get a Planckian decay constant whilst maintaining control over the backreaction. This is because the decay constant for a wrapped brane contains powers of the warp factor, and so can be made large, while the wrapping parameter can be kept small enough so that backreaction is under control.Comment: 41 pages, 3 appendices, 1 figure, PDFLaTex; various clarifications added along with a new appendix on b-axions and wrapped D5 branes;version matches the one published in JHE

The backreaction of anti-D3 branes on the Klebanov-Strassler geometry

We present the full numerical solution for the 15-dimensional space of linearized deformations of the Klebanov-Strassler background which preserve the SU(2) X SU(2) X Z_2 symmetries. We identify within this space the solution corresponding to anti-D3 branes, (modulo the presence of a certain subleading singularity in the infrared). All the 15 integration constants of this solution are fixed in terms of the number of anti-D3 branes, and the solution differs in the UV from the supersymmetric solution into which it is supposed to decay by a mode corresponding to a rescaling of the field theory coordinates. Deciding whether two solutions that differ in the UV by a rescaling mode are dual to the same theory is involved even for supersymmetric Klebanov-Strassler solutions, and we explain in detail some of the subtleties associated to this.Comment: 41 pages, 5 figures, LaTe

LightBox: Full-stack Protected Stateful Middlebox at Lightning Speed

Running off-site software middleboxes at third-party service providers has been a popular practice. However, routing large volumes of raw traffic, which may carry sensitive information, to a remote site for processing raises severe security concerns. Prior solutions often abstract away important factors pertinent to real-world deployment. In particular, they overlook the significance of metadata protection and stateful processing. Unprotected traffic metadata like low-level headers, size and count, can be exploited to learn supposedly encrypted application contents. Meanwhile, tracking the states of 100,000s of flows concurrently is often indispensable in production-level middleboxes deployed at real networks. We present LightBox, the first system that can drive off-site middleboxes at near-native speed with stateful processing and the most comprehensive protection to date. Built upon commodity trusted hardware, Intel SGX, LightBox is the product of our systematic investigation of how to overcome the inherent limitations of secure enclaves using domain knowledge and customization. First, we introduce an elegant virtual network interface that allows convenient access to fully protected packets at line rate without leaving the enclave, as if from the trusted source network. Second, we provide complete flow state management for efficient stateful processing, by tailoring a set of data structures and algorithms optimized for the highly constrained enclave space. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that LightBox, with all security benefits, can achieve 10Gbps packet I/O, and that with case studies on three stateful middleboxes, it can operate at near-native speed.Comment: Accepted at ACM CCS 201

DBI Inflation using a One-Parameter Family of Throat Geometries

We demonstrate the possibility of examining cosmological signatures in the DBI inflation setup using the BGMPZ solution, a one-parameter family of geometries for the warped throat which interpolate between the Maldacena-Nunez and Klebanov-Strassler solutions. The warp factor is determined numerically and subsequently used to calculate cosmological observables including the scalar and tensor spectral indices, for a sample point in the parameter space. As one moves away from the KS solution for the throat the warp factor is qualitatively different, which leads to a significant change for the observables, but also generically increases the non-Gaussianity of the models. We argue that the different models can potentially be differentiated by current and future experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures; v2: section 4 expanded, references added; v3: typos fixe

Water Quality at Caddo Lake, Center for Invasive Species Eradication: Final Report

Giant salvinia, a highly invasive aquatic fern native to South America, poses a serious threat to Texas’ waters and has done so since its discovery in the state in the 1990s. If left unmanaged, giant salvinia can cause a multitude of impacts including loss of recreational use, reductions in biodiversity, decreases in water quality, and monetary losses due to control costs and lost revenues. To counter this threat, the Center for Invasive Species Eradication (CISE) was created in 2010 with funding support from then U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) to advance the knowledge about this species and treatment options and hopefully enable eradication of this noxious non-native plant species in Texas. Special focus of the Center’s efforts was placed on Caddo Lake. It is Texas’ only natural lake and has been plagued by giant salvinia since 2006. Levels of the invader present have risen and fallen with changes in weather and lake levels yet the threat it poses remains despite considerable treatment efforts