BALD EAGLE (HALIAEETUS LEUCOCEPHALUS) POPULATION PRODUCTIVITY AND DENSITY DEPENDENT EFFECTS IN MICHGAN, 1961-2010

The bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) population in Michigan has undergone a significant recovery following the ban of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), and its subsequent derivatives, mainly dichlorodiphenyl-dichloroethylene (p,p'-DDE). This recovery however, has not been uniform throughout the state. Michigan is a heterogeneous habitat, causing the best-fit, experienced breeding pairs to settle in high quality breeding areas first. This high quality habitat mainly occurs in the inland regions of Michigan. These areas experienced the greatest productivity until the 1990's, quickly recovering from the detrimental effects of DDT. Great Lakes breeding areas, particularly Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, are now more productive than inland breeding areas. These Great Lakes breeding pairs however, are the least efficient breeders with greater amounts of changeover between nesting pairs within one breeding area in comparison to inland pairs. A constant turnover of breeding pairs may overshadow any underlying effects causing decreased reproductive fitness in Great Lakes adults

Weak measurement takes a simple form for cumulants

A weak measurement on a system is made by coupling a pointer weakly to the system and then measuring the position of the pointer. If the initial wavefunction for the pointer is real, the mean displacement of the pointer is proportional to the so-called weak value of the observable being measured. This gives an intuitively direct way of understanding weak measurement. However, if the initial pointer wavefunction takes complex values, the relationship between pointer displacement and weak value is not quite so simple, as pointed out recently by R. Jozsa. This is even more striking in the case of sequential weak measurements. These are carried out by coupling several pointers at different stages of evolution of the system, and the relationship between the products of the measured pointer positions and the sequential weak values can become extremely complicated for an arbitrary initial pointer wavefunction. Surprisingly, all this complication vanishes when one calculates the cumulants of pointer positions. These are directly proportional to the cumulants of sequential weak values. This suggests that cumulants have a fundamental physical significance for weak measurement

On Nie-Tan operator and type-reduction of interval type-2 fuzzy sets

Type-reduction of type-2 fuzzy sets is considered to be a defuzzification bottleneck because of the computational complexity involved in the process of type-reduction. In this research, we prove that the closed-form Nie-Tan operator, which outputs the average of the upper and lower bounds of the footprint of uncertainty, is actually an accurate method for defuzzifing interval type-2 fuzzy sets

Testing microtubular SOFCs in unmanned air vehicles (UAVs)

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) powered by microtubular SOFCs (mSOFCs) are described for comparison with polymer fuel cells (PEFCs). Using propane as fuel, 7mm diameter mSOFCs have been tested in a 2m wingspan aircraft with a total weight of 6kg. The start-up time was 12 minutes to deliver 250W in a fuel cell/battery hybrid drive system. Tubes were YSZ cermet anode supported, with 10 µm YSZ electrolyte, 6µm SDC interlayer coated with 50µm LSCF cathode. Silver wires were used as interconnects. Pure propane fuel gas was mixed with air in a CPOX reactor using catalytic fuel processing mesh. A polymeric fuel inlet manifold gave cold sealing at the tube inlet ends which projected out of the hot box. Cathode air was provided in counterflow, preheated over an anode off-gas catalyst. The fuel utilization was 55%, output power of 250W. The fuel cell was incorporated in a hybrid electrical system with lithium polymer battery and inserted in a Skywalker X8 UAV with 500g of propane in an aluminum tank

Optical Readout in a Multi-Module System Test for the ATLAS Pixel Detector

The innermost part of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, CERN, will be a pixel detector. The command messages and the readout data of the detector are transmitted over an optical data path. The readout chain consists of many components which are produced at several locations around the world, and must work together in the pixel detector. To verify that these parts are working together as expected a system test has been built up. In this paper the system test setup and the operation of the readout chain is described. Also, some results of tests using the final pixel detector readout chain are given.Comment: 6 pages, 10 figures, Pixel 2005 proceedings preprin

An automated pattern recognition system for the quantification of inflammatory cells in hepatitis-C-infected liver biopsies

This paper presents an automated system for the quantification of inflammatory cells in hepatitis-C-infected liver biopsies. Initially, features are extracted from colour-corrected biopsy images at positions of interest identified by adaptive thresholding and clump decomposition. A sequential floating search method and principal component analysis are used to reduce dimensionality. Manually annotated training images allow supervised training. The performance of Gaussian parametric and mixture models is compared when used to classify regions as either inflammatory or healthy. The system is optimized using a response surface method that maximises the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. This system is then tested on images previously ranked by a number of observers with varying levels of expertise. These results are compared to the automated system using Spearman rank correlation. Results show that this system can rank 15 test images, with varying degrees of inflammation, in strong agreement with five expert pathologists