Notes on Bird Sightings in Nebraska

1997 Report for Wauneta area, Chase County. I have seen 49 species, including 20 Turkey Vultures, many Wild Turkeys, a covey of Northern Bobwhite near my house, a Ruby-throated Hummingbird in my garden flowers such as Gilia, and a Black-headed Grosbeak—a first for my acreage. On 6 September, a male Northern Cardinal brought two young to one of the seven water pans I keep for birds and animals. Other species listed in the area: Great Blue Heron, Gadwall, American Kestrel, Ring-necked Pheasant, Killdeer, Rock Dove, Mourning Dove, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Common Nighthawk, Chimney Swift, Belted Kingfisher, Red-headed Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, Eastern Phoebe, Western Kingbird, Eastern Kingbird, Horned Lark, Cliff swallow, Barn Swallow, Blue Jay, American Crow, House Wren, American Robin, Northern Mockingbird, Brown Thrasher, Cedar Waxwing, European Starling, Bell\u27s Vireo, Yellow-breasted Chat, Blue Grosbeak, Dickcissel, Lark Sparrow, Baird\u27s Sparrow, Red-winged Blackbird, Meadowlark sp., Common Grackle, Brown-headed Cowbird, Orchard Oriole, House Finch, American Goldfinch, Evening Grosbeak, House Sparrow. --L. Iola Pennington, RR 2, Box 119, Wauneta, NE 6904

Doe 1 v. City of Murrieta: How the California Court of Appeal Missed the Mark on Vicarious Liability for Sexual Torts Committed by On-Duty Police Officers

The California Supreme Court held that the first situation involves such a powerful use of authority that the city employing the officer can be held vicariously liable for his sexual torts. However, in Doe 1 v. City of Murrieta, the California Court of Appeal decided that the City cannot be held vicariously liable in the second situation

Decision-making and problem-solving methods in automation technology

The state of the art in the automation of decision making and problem solving is reviewed. The information upon which the report is based was derived from literature searches, visits to university and government laboratories performing basic research in the area, and a 1980 Langley Research Center sponsored conferences on the subject. It is the contention of the authors that the technology in this area is being generated by research primarily in the three disciplines of Artificial Intelligence, Control Theory, and Operations Research. Under the assumption that the state of the art in decision making and problem solving is reflected in the problems being solved, specific problems and methods of their solution are often discussed to elucidate particular aspects of the subject. Synopses of the following major topic areas comprise most of the report: (1) detection and recognition; (2) planning; and scheduling; (3) learning; (4) theorem proving; (5) distributed systems; (6) knowledge bases; (7) search; (8) heuristics; and (9) evolutionary programming

Conference on Automated Decision-Making and Problem Solving, the Third Day: Issues Discussed

A conference held at Langley Research Center in May of 1980 brought together university experts from the fields of Control Theory, Operations Research, and Artificial Intelligence to explore current research in automation from both the perspective of their own particular disciplines and from that of interdisciplinary considerations. Informal discussions from the final day of the those day conference are summarized

Brain GABA and Glutamate Concentrations Following Chronic Gabapentin Administration: A Convenience Sample Studied During Early Abstinence From Alcohol.

Gabapentin (GBP), a GABA analog that may also affect glutamate (Glu) production, can normalize GABA and Glu tone during early abstinence from alcohol, effectively treating withdrawal symptoms and facilitating recovery. Using in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy, we tested the degree to which daily GBP alters regional brain GABA and Glu levels in short-term abstinent alcohol-dependent individuals. Regional metabolite levels were compared between 13 recently abstinent alcohol-dependent individuals who had received daily GBP for at least 1 week (GBP+) and 25 matched alcohol-dependent individuals who had not received GBP (GBP-). Magnetic resonance spectra from up to five different brain regions were analyzed to yield absolute GABA and Glu concentrations. GABA and Glu concentrations in the parieto-occipital cortex were not different between GBP- and GBP+. Glu levels in anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and basal ganglia did not differ between GBP- and GBP+. However, in a subgroup of individuals matched on age, sex, and abstinence duration, GBP+ had markedly lower Glu in the frontal white matter (WM) than GBP-, comparable to concentrations found in light/non-drinking controls. Furthermore, lower frontal WM Glu in GBP+ correlated with a higher daily GBP dose. Daily GBP treatment at an average of 1,600 mg/day for at least 1 week was not associated with altered cortical GABA and Glu concentrations during short-term abstinence from alcohol, but with lower Glu in frontal WM. GBP for the treatment of alcohol dependence may work through reducing Glu in WM rather than increasing cortical GABA

Compressing Word Embeddings

Recent methods for learning vector space representations of words have succeeded in capturing fine-grained semantic and syntactic regularities using vector arithmetic. However, these vector space representations (created through large-scale text analysis) are typically stored verbatim, since their internal structure is opaque. Using word-analogy tests to monitor the level of detail stored in compressed re-representations of the same vector space, the trade-offs between the reduction in memory usage and expressiveness are investigated. A simple scheme is outlined that can reduce the memory footprint of a state-of-the-art embedding by a factor of 10, with only minimal impact on performance. Then, using the same `bit budget', a binary (approximate) factorisation of the same space is also explored, with the aim of creating an equivalent representation with better interpretability.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figures, submitted to ICONIP-2016. Previous experimental results were submitted to ICLR-2016, but the paper has been significantly updated, since a new experimental set-up worked much bette

Assessing movements of three buoy line types using DSTmilli Loggers: Implications for entanglements of bottlenose dolphins in the crab pot fishery

A study was conducted in October 2006 in the Charleston, South Carolina area to test the movements of three different buoy line types to determine which produced a preferred profile that could reduce the risk of dolphin entanglement. Tests on diamond-braided nylon commonly used in the crab pot fishery were compared with stiffened line of Esterpro and calf types in both shallow and deep water environments using DSTmilli data loggers. Loggers were placed at intervals along the lines to record depth, and thus movements, over a 24 hour period. Three observers viewed video animations and charts created for each of the six trial days from the collected logger data and provided their opinions on the most desirable line type that fit set criteria. A quantitative analysis (ANCOVA) of the data was conducted taking into consideration daily tidal fluctuations and logger movements. Loggers tracking the tides had an r2 value approaching 1.00 and produced little movement other than with the tides. Conversely, r2 values approaching 0.00 were less affected by tidal movement and influenced by currents that cause more erratic movement. Results from this study showed that stiffened line, in particular the medium lay Esterpro type, produced the more desirable profiles that could reduce risk of dolphin entanglement. Combining the observer’s results with the ANCOVA results, Esterpro was chosen nearly 60% of the time as opposed to the nylon line which was only chosen 10% of the time. ANCOVA results showed that the stiffened lines performed better in both the shallow and deep water environments, while the nylon line only performed better during one trial in a deep water set, most probably due to the increased current velocities experienced that day. (58pp.)(PDF contains 68 pages

No classical limit of quantum decay for broad states

Though the classical treatment of spontaneous decay leads to an exponential decay law, it is well known that this is an approximation of the quantum mechanical result which is a non-exponential at very small and large times for narrow states. The non exponential nature at large times is however hard to establish from experiments. A method to recover the time evolution of unstable states from a parametrization of the amplitude fitted to data is presented. We apply the method to a realistic example of a very broad state, the sigma meson and reveal that an exponential decay is not a valid approximation at any time for this state. This example derived from experiment, shows the unique nature of broad resonances

Space spider crane

A space spider crane for the movement, placement, and or assembly of various components on or in the vicinity of a space structure is described. As permanent space structures are utilized by the space program, a means will be required to transport cargo and perform various repair tasks. A space spider crane comprising a small central body with attached manipulators and legs fulfills this requirement. The manipulators may be equipped with constant pressure gripping end effectors or tools to accomplish various repair tasks. The legs are also equipped with constant pressure gripping end effectors to grip the space structure. Control of the space spider crane may be achieved either by computer software or a remotely situated human operator, who maintains visual contact via television cameras mounted on the space spider crane. One possible walking program consists of a parallel motion walking program whereby the small central body alternatively leans forward and backward relative to end effectors

Identifying Retweetable Tweets with a Personalized Global Classifier

In this paper we present a method to identify tweets that a user may find interesting enough to retweet. The method is based on a global, but personalized classifier, which is trained on data from several users, represented in terms of user-specific features. Thus, the method is trained on a sufficient volume of data, while also being able to make personalized decisions, i.e., the same post received by two different users may lead to different classification decisions. Experimenting with a collection of approx.\ 130K tweets received by 122 journalists, we train a logistic regression classifier, using a wide variety of features: the content of each tweet, its novelty, its text similarity to tweets previously posted or retweeted by the recipient or sender of the tweet, the network influence of the author and sender, and their past interactions. Our system obtains F1 approx. 0.9 using only 10 features and 5K training instances.Comment: This is a long paper version of the extended abstract titled "A Personalized Global Filter To Predict Retweets", of the same authors, which was published in the 25th ACM UMAP conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, in July 201