Master agreement task order 2 - Analyses and limited evaluations of payload and landing system structures for the survivable soft landing of instrument payloads

Computer programs for analysis and evaluation of payload and landing system structures for soft landing of instrument package

Preliminary investigation of Phase Doppler derived flux measurements in a wind tunnel for the sampling of orchard spray drift

Air-assisted spray equipment used for horticultural cropping systems depend on high air velocities to project the spray as well as to open the canopy for greater droplet penetration and deposition. However, these sprayer-types are also at a heightened risk for spray drift as they possess the potential to place drift prone droplets in the atmosphere where they can be carried to off-target locations. Unfortunately, quantifying these droplets can be difficult and expensive using samplers such as high-volume air samplers, rotating rods and strings. However, while these measuring techniques may give some idea of flux, no particle information can be gained which is imperative to predicting the mass which may be the most prone to drift. In wind-tunnels and field studies, polyester and nylon strings have proven to be an efficient collecting surface. Therefore, it was the objective of this study to assess the potential for the use of a novel, field grade Phase Doppler Interferometer (PDI) as a replacement for strings as a sampler for driftable mass for orchard type sprayers

Predicting consistent foraging ecologies of migrating waterbirds: Using stable isotope and parasite measurements as indicators of landscape use

The emergence of novel human pathogens is frequently linked with zoonotic events and human-wildlife interactions that promote disease transmission. Consequently, surveillance of wildlife populations for candidate diseases that could spread to humans is beneficial, but requires widespread collections of numerous samples. A legitimate means to acquire large sample sizes of waterfowl is through cooperation between researchers and hunters, who also work in concert with natural resource managers, landowners, and agricultural entities -e.g., aquaculture facilities. In addition to understanding the occurrence and spread of parasites and pathogens by birds, these samples can be used to answer questions about the ecology of various waterbird species. Body mass and morphometric data on hunter-donated specimen are useful for understanding bird condition and other dynamics of birds; however, when breast meat is removed prior to the acquisition of specimen weight, samples might not be as desirable. Here, we evaluate the utility of data obtained from a bird species that might be targeted by hunters and subsequently used to learn about their disease dynamics. Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis) collected at aquaculture facilities were assessed for their stable isotope concentrations and parasites communities to learn about the birds’ foraging ecology. Discriminant analyses designed to classify birds by the aquaculture pond type from which they were collected included isotope data, Principal Components derived from parasite community data of 7 types, and birds’ body mass. We compared these to Double-crested Cormorants (Nannopterum auritum) feeding on catfish and found the two waterbird species exhibited different infracommunities of parasites Furthermore, some scaup demonstrated fish aquaculture pond type fidelity. Bird body mass was an important metric to include in analytical models when all parasite datatypes were not available. However, the combination of stable isotope concentrations and parasite infracommunity data (that includes prevalence, abundance, volume, and energy use) in models resulted in host ecology differentiation equal or better than models where bird body mass was included. Hunter-derived samples should be encouraged as a means for sample acquisition and be considered as an approach for aquaculture-wildlife conflict management as the information that can be obtained through these samples is multifaceted

Capsicum caballeroi M. Nee

Serranía Siberia, 20-35 km W of Comarpa (Prov. Santa Cruz) on the old Cochabamba-Santa Cruz road (Hwy 4)Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales; Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentin

A Pluralistic Theory of Wordhood

What are words and how should we individuate them? There are two main answers on the philosophical market. For some, words are bundles of structural-functional features defining a unique performance profile. For others, words are non-eternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical ancestry. These conceptions offer competing views of the nature of words, and it seems natural to assume that at most one of them can capture the essence of wordhood. This paper makes a case for pluralism about wordhood: the view that there is a plurality of acceptable conceptions of the nature of words, none of which is uniquely entitled to inform us as to what wordhood consists in

Exploiting Lexical Conceptual Structure for paraphrase generation

Abstract. Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) represents verbs as semantic structures with a limited number of semantic predicates. This paper attempts to exploit how LCS can be used to explain the regularities underlying lexical and syntactic paraphrases, such as verb alternation, compound word decomposition, and lexical derivation. We propose a paraphrase generation model which transforms LCSs of verbs, and then conduct an empirical experiment taking the paraphrasing of Japanese light-verb constructions as an example. Experimental results justify that syntactic and semantic properties of verbs encoded in LCS are useful to semantically constrain the syntactic transformation in paraphrase generation.