Priority management actions for alien freshwater fish species in Australia

In Australia, alien freshwater fish are continuing to steadily increase in number of species (reported in this paper to be 43), abundance, and distribution. In general however, their impacts are not well quantified in either environmental or economic terms and current management to reduce their impacts is limited and lacking direction. Although carp Cyprinus carpio have received some attention, very little is known about the impacts and even the distribution of most species. There is a lack of recognition of the problem, inconsistency in legislation, policy, and approaches across jurisdictions, and no nationally coordinated on?the?ground management actions. Where legislation and policy is available it is not always used to good effect. This paper provides a synthesis of existing knowledge of alien fishes in Australia, suggests a new management approach, and recommends priority management actions

User cost in oil production

The assumption of an initial fixed mineral stock is superfluous and wrong. User cost (resource rent) in mineral production is the present value of expected increases in development cost. It can be measured as the difference between in-ground market value and development cost, or estimated approximately from current development cost. For private or national-income accounting, mineral reserves should be treated as a renewable inventory. Adjustment for change in inventory may increase or decrease the income of a mineral producer, but an increase is more likely.Supported by the National Science Foundation. Supported by the Center for Energy Policy Research of the M.I.T. Energy Laboratory

Not Your Typical Administrator

Presenters will examine the trend of “wearing many hats” in higher education leadership. For example, being both a department chair and faculty member. In addition, the notion of successfully managing up, the importance of understanding each role you have, and understanding your situational role and the communication we use will be discussed. Lastly, participants will engage in case study scenarios challenging participants to consider various administrative situations and identifying reasonable approaches based on which “hat” you are wearing

So Much Change!

Presenters will examine change and change management in higher education leadership. For example, creating and managing fully remote faculty. Additionally, presenters will examine the importance of flexibility, as roles and demands change within administration. Lastly, participants will discuss strategies for navigating change

Relativistic Wavepackets in Classically Chaotic Quantum Cosmological Billiards

Close to a spacelike singularity, pure gravity and supergravity in four to eleven spacetime dimensions admit a cosmological billiard description based on hyperbolic Kac-Moody groups. We investigate the quantum cosmological billiards of relativistic wavepackets towards the singularity, employing flat and hyperbolic space descriptions for the quantum billiards. We find that the strongly chaotic classical billiard motion of four-dimensional pure gravity corresponds to a spreading wavepacket subject to successive redshifts and tending to zero as the singularity is approached. We discuss the possible implications of these results in the context of singularity resolution and compare them with those of known semiclassical approaches. As an aside, we obtain exact solutions for the one-dimensional relativistic quantum billiards with moving walls.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure

Evaluating intelligent interfaces for post-editing automatic transcriptions of online video lectures

Video lectures are fast becoming an everyday educational resource in higher education. They are being incorporated into existing university curricula around the world, while also emerging as a key component of the open education movement. In 2007, the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) implemented its poliMedia lecture capture system for the creation and publication of quality educational video content and now has a collection of over 10,000 video objects. In 2011, it embarked on the EU-subsidised transLectures project to add automatic subtitles to these videos in both Spanish and other languages. By doing so, it allows access to their educational content by non-native speakers and the deaf and hard-of-hearing, as well as enabling advanced repository management functions. In this paper, following a short introduction to poliMedia, transLectures and Docència en Xarxa (Teaching Online), the UPV s action plan to boost the use of digital resources at the university, we will discuss the three-stage evaluation process carried out with the collaboration of UPV lecturers to find the best interaction protocol for the task of post-editing automatic subtitles.Valor Miró, JD.; Spencer, RN.; Pérez González De Martos, AM.; Garcés Díaz-Munío, GV.; Turró Ribalta, C.; Civera Saiz, J.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Evaluating intelligent interfaces for post-editing automatic transcriptions of online video lectures. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning. 29(1):72-85. doi:10.1080/02680513.2014.909722S7285291Fujii, A., Itou, K., & Ishikawa, T. (2006). LODEM: A system for on-demand video lectures. Speech Communication, 48(5), 516-531. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2005.08.006Gilbert, M., Knight, K., & Young, S. (2008). Spoken Language Technology [From the Guest Editors]. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 25(3), 15-16. doi:10.1109/msp.2008.918412Leggetter, C. J., & Woodland, P. C. (1995). Maximum likelihood linear regression for speaker adaptation of continuous density hidden Markov models. Computer Speech & Language, 9(2), 171-185. doi:10.1006/csla.1995.0010Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCHI New Zealand Chapter’s International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Design Centered HCI - CHINZ ’08. (2008). doi:10.1145/1496976Martinez-Villaronga, A., del Agua, M. A., Andres-Ferrer, J., & Juan, A. (2013). Language model adaptation for video lectures transcription. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. doi:10.1109/icassp.2013.6639314Munteanu, C., Baecker, R., & Penn, G. (2008). Collaborative editing for improved usefulness and usability of transcript-enhanced webcasts. Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI ’08. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357117Repp, S., Gross, A., & Meinel, C. (2008). Browsing within Lecture Videos Based on the Chain Index of Speech Transcription. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 1(3), 145-156. doi:10.1109/tlt.2008.22Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Intelligent User Interfaces - IUI ’12. (2012). doi:10.1145/2166966Serrano, N., Giménez, A., Civera, J., Sanchis, A., & Juan, A. (2013). Interactive handwriting recognition with limited user effort. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 17(1), 47-59. doi:10.1007/s10032-013-0204-5Torre Toledano, D., Ortega Giménez, A., Teixeira, A., González Rodríguez, J., Hernández Gómez, L., San Segundo Hernández, R., & Ramos Castro, D. (Eds.). (2012). Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages. Communications in Computer and Information Science. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-35292-8Wald, M. (2006). Creating accessible educational multimedia through editing automatic speech recognition captioning in real time. Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 3(2), 131-141. doi:10.1108/1741565068000005

Drinking patterns among medical in-patients with reference to MAST categories: a comparative study.

The aim of the study was to describe the drinking patterns and alcohol consumption of patients screened by the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (MAST) in a sample of medical patients from a general hospital of a French-speaking, wine-drinking country. Data were recorded using a structured interview administered to 103 consecutively admitted 20-75-year-old MAST-positive patients and 103 age-matched and sex-matched MAST-negative controls admitted to the same ward. Relevant differences between MAST-positive and MAST-negative patients included the frequent report of recent and total abstinence in MAST-positive patients (23% versus 4% in controls), their tendency to drink alone, and less often during mealtimes, at home, or with family or friends than MAST-negative patients. Alcohol consumption was significantly higher in MAST-positive patients of both sexes with 250 and 270 g per week being the optimal discriminative cut-off level of consumption for men and women, respectively (kappa coefficient, 0.70 and 0.81, respectively). Regular drinking was the predominant drinking status of both MAST-positive and MAST-negative patients. This study suggests that a screening test such as the MAST, developed in an English-speaking country may be useful in a French-speaking, wine-drinking country. The test identified patients with drinking patterns that are culturally abnormal, yet in certain respects similar to those of alcoholic patients from other drinking cultures. These findings therefore emphasize the worldwide relevance of the concept of the alcohol dependence syndrome in addition to the transcultural usefulness of alcoholism screening tests