Mapping the Future of Oil and Gas Development in Relation to the Conservation of Greater Sage Grouse

The effects of oil and gas development on the conservation of greater sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is of concern in the Northeastern portion of their current range that coincides partially with grouse Management Zones I, II, and IV.  Although some research has reported on these effects, much remains uncertain.  This is often the case with ecological studies where cause-effect relationships are complex, multivariate, and involve landscape perspectives.  Gaining an understanding of the effects of the development on grouse requires predicting where that development is expected to occur on a landscape level.  We gathered the “reasonable foreseeable development” spatial data from the USDI’s Bureau of Land Management that were available for Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Northwestern Colorado.  These data were disparate across the study area, and we standardized them across mapping units to establish consistent and quantitative categories.  We describe the GIS processes used to accomplish that and to display the number of wells per township as projected in the BLM data.  The data were then overlain with the priority areas for conservation for greater sage grouse.  Our data, metadata, and data processing (standardization) documentation will be made available on the web via the Landscape Conservation Management and Analysis Portal (LCMAP— https://www. sciencebase.gov/ catalog/?community=LC+MAP+-+Landscape+Conservation+Management +and+Analysis+Portal).  Companion research to model the risk to greater sage grouse from oil and gas development has also begun.  This uses artificial intelligence and Bayesian belief network software to represent knowledge and its uncertainty as presented in the scientific literature, and we present our conceptual model

Clebsch-Gordan Construction of Lattice Interpolating Fields for Excited Baryons

Large sets of baryon interpolating field operators are developed for use in lattice QCD studies of baryons with zero momentum. Operators are classified according to the double-valued irreducible representations of the octahedral group. At first, three-quark smeared, local operators are constructed for each isospin and strangeness and they are classified according to their symmetry with respect to exchange of Dirac indices. Nonlocal baryon operators are formulated in a second step as direct products of the spinor structures of smeared, local operators together with gauge-covariant lattice displacements of one or more of the smeared quark fields. Linear combinations of direct products of spinorial and spatial irreducible representations are then formed with appropriate Clebsch-Gordan coefficients of the octahedral group. The construction attempts to maintain maximal overlap with the continuum SU(2) group in order to provide a physically interpretable basis. Nonlocal operators provide direct couplings to states that have nonzero orbital angular momentum.Comment: This manuscript provides an anlytical construction of operators and is related to hep-lat/0506029, which provides a computational construction. This e-print version contains a full set of Clebsch-Gordan coefficients for the octahedral grou

Approach to the Continuum Limit of the Quenched Hermitian Wilson-Dirac Operator

We investigate the approach to the continuum limit of the spectrum of the Hermitian Wilson-Dirac operator in the supercritical mass region for pure gauge SU(2) and SU(3) backgrounds. For this we study the spectral flow of the Hermitian Wilson-Dirac operator in the range $0\le m\le 2$. We find that the spectrum has a gap for $0 < m \le m_1$ and that the spectral density at zero, $\rho(0;m)$, is non-zero for $m_1\le m\le 2$. We find that $m_1\to 0$ and, for $m \ne 0, \rho(0;m)\to 0$ (exponential in the lattice spacing) as one goes to the continuum limit. We also compute the topological susceptibility and the size distribution of the zero modes. The topological susceptibility scales well in the lattice spacing for both SU(2) and SU(3). The size distribution of the zero modes does not appear to show a peak at a physical scale.Comment: 19 pages revtex with 9 postscript figures included by eps

The Ursinus Weekly, April 28, 1941

Causes of cancer told to pre-meds by Pfahler • Manchester to sub for Wallace May 6 • Besse Howard will speak at forum Wednesday on topic, Spring, 1941 • Sub-frosh to view Ursinus this Saturday • May hop to feature music of Woody Leh • \u27Unity in diversity\u27 will be conference theme on May 7 • The Ursinus weekend travelogue around the circuit • Play \u27Lightnin\u27 centers around Calivada Hotel • Sixteen visit medical centers on excursion to New York • Five attend chemistry conference at Villanova • Powers of God are subject of vespers • Herber is pre-legal prexy • Meistersingers plan spring concert, May 1 • French Club to hear talk on prestige of French tongue • Debaters elect Lownes prexy; mixed team meets Drexel • Kriebel, Hartman to present reviews of Hilton and Brittain • Class of 1940 makes the grade in business and graduate work • IRC elects Byron president; discusses plans for next year • Local draft boards to weigh claims of students for deferment • Baseballers lose to Mules 3-2; trounce Dickinson 12-2 • Irvin paces track squad to victory over Delaware clan by 65-61 score • Netmen blank Lions in season opener • Co-ed net squad defeats Penn and Albright lassies • Zulick and Baberick win as Moravian beats golfers 3-2 • Freshman girls lead race in class softball league • Doc Baker heads old English game at Ursinus • Carter\u27s articles appear in historical dictionary • Hobos and bums to have poverty ball Saturday • Y officers to be inducted in service on Sundayhttps://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/weekly/1816/thumbnail.jp

Thermal Energy for Lunar In Situ Resource Utilization: Technical Challenges and Technology Opportunities

Oxygen production from lunar raw materials is critical for sustaining a manned lunar base but is very power intensive. Solar concentrators are a well-developed technology for harnessing the Sun s energy to heat regolith to high temperatures (over 1375 K). The high temperature and potential material incompatibilities present numerous technical challenges. This study compares and contrasts different solar concentrator designs that have been developed, such as Cassegrains, offset parabolas, compound parabolic concentrators, and secondary concentrators. Differences between concentrators made from lenses and mirrors, and between rigid and flexible concentrators are also discussed. Possible substrate elements for a rigid mirror concentrator are selected and then compared, using the following (target) criteria: (low) coefficient of thermal expansion, (high) modulus of elasticity, and (low) density. Several potential lunar locations for solar concentrators are compared; environmental and processing-related challenges related to dust and optical surfaces are addressed. This brief technology survey examines various sources of thermal energy that can be utilized for materials processing on the lunar surface. These include heat from nuclear or electric sources and solar concentrators. Options for collecting and transporting thermal energy to processing reactors for each source are examined. Overall system requirements for each thermal source are compared and system limitations, such as maximum achievable temperature are discussed

Zero temperature string breaking in lattice quantum chromodynamics

The separation of a heavy quark and antiquark pair leads to the formation of a tube of flux, or "string", which should break in the presence of light quark-antiquark pairs. This expected zero-temperature phenomenon has proven elusive in simulations of lattice QCD. We study mixing between the string state and the two-meson decay channel in QCD with two flavors of dynamical sea quarks. We confirm that mixing is weak and find that it decreases at level crossing. While our study does not show direct effects of internal quark loops, our results, combined with unitarity, give clear confirmation of string breaking.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. With small clarifications and two additions to references. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Accelerating Bayesian hierarchical clustering of time series data with a randomised algorithm

We live in an era of abundant data. This has necessitated the development of new and innovative statistical algorithms to get the most from experimental data. For example, faster algorithms make practical the analysis of larger genomic data sets, allowing us to extend the utility of cutting-edge statistical methods. We present a randomised algorithm that accelerates the clustering of time series data using the Bayesian Hierarchical Clustering (BHC) statistical method. BHC is a general method for clustering any discretely sampled time series data. In this paper we focus on a particular application to microarray gene expression data. We define and analyse the randomised algorithm, before presenting results on both synthetic and real biological data sets. We show that the randomised algorithm leads to substantial gains in speed with minimal loss in clustering quality. The randomised time series BHC algorithm is available as part of the R package BHC, which is available for download from Bioconductor (version 2.10 and above) via http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.10/bioc/html/BHC.html. We have also made available a set of R scripts which can be used to reproduce the analyses carried out in this paper. These are available from the following URL. https://sites.google.com/site/randomisedbhc/

Pennsylvania Folklife Vol. 18, No. 4

• Discord in the Garden • The Folk Festival Seminars: Crafts and Customs of the Year • What to Read on the Amish • Soup\u27s On! • Festival Highlights • Folk Festival Program • Folk Festival Geisinger • Four Interviews with Powwowers • The First Historian of the Pennsylvania Germans • The Public Sale Sixty Years Ago • The Long Shingle • Quilts and Quilting: Folk-Cultural Questionnaire No. 12https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/pafolklifemag/1036/thumbnail.jp

Domain Wall Fermions with Exact Chiral Symmetry

We show how the standard domain wall action can be simply modified to allow arbitrarily exact chiral symmetry at finite fifth dimensional extent. We note that the method can be used for both quenched and dynamical calculations. We test the method using smooth and thermalized gauge field configurations. We also make comparisons of the performance (cost) of the domain wall operator for spectroscopy compared to other methods such as the overlap-Dirac operator and find both methods are comparable in cost.Comment: revtex, 37 pages, 11 color postscript figure