Remote sensing in Michigan for land resource management

The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan is conducting a program whose goal is the large-scale adoption, by both public agencies and private interests in Michigan, of NASA earth-resource survey technology as an important aid in the solution of current problems in resource management and environmental protection. During the period from June 1975 to June 1976, remote sensing techniques to aid Michigan government agencies were used to achieve the following major results: (1) supply justification for public acquisition of land to establish the St. John's Marshland Recreation Area; (2) recommend economical and effective methods for performing a statewide wetlands survey; (3) assist in the enforcement of state laws relating to sand and gravel mining, soil erosion and sedimentation, and shorelands protection; (4) accomplish a variety of regional resource management actions in the East Central Michigan Planning and Development Region. Other tasks on which remote sensing technology was used include industrial and school site selection, ice detachment in the Soo Harbor, grave detection, and data presentation for wastewater management programs

New Analysis Indicates No Thermal Inversion in the Atmosphere of HD 209458b

An important focus of exoplanet research is the determination of the atmospheric temperature structure of strongly irradiated gas giant planets, or hot Jupiters. HD 209458b is the prototypical exoplanet for atmospheric thermal inversions, but this assertion does not take into account recently obtained data or newer data reduction techniques. We re-examine this claim by investigating all publicly available Spitzer Space Telescope secondary-eclipse photometric data of HD 209458b and performing a self-consistent analysis. We employ data reduction techniques that minimize stellar centroid variations, apply sophisticated models to known Spitzer systematics, and account for time-correlated noise in the data. We derive new secondary-eclipse depths of 0.119 +/- 0.007%, 0.123 +/- 0.006%, 0.134 +/- 0.035%, and 0.215 +/- 0.008% in the 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 micron bandpasses, respectively. We feed these results into a Bayesian atmospheric retrieval analysis and determine that it is unnecessary to invoke a thermal inversion to explain our secondary-eclipse depths. The data are well-fitted by a temperature model that decreases monotonically between pressure levels of 1 and 0.01 bars. We conclude that there is no evidence for a thermal inversion in the atmosphere of HD 209458b.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Ap

Eighty years of food-web response to interannual variation in discharge recorded in river diatom frustules from an ocean sediment core.

Little is known about the importance of food-web processes as controls of river primary production due to the paucity of both long-term studies and of depositional environments which would allow retrospective fossil analysis. To investigate how freshwater algal production in the Eel River, northern California, varied over eight decades, we quantified siliceous shells (frustules) of freshwater diatoms from a well-dated undisturbed sediment core in a nearshore marine environment. Abundances of freshwater diatom frustules exported to Eel Canyon sediment from 1988 to 2001 were positively correlated with annual biomass of Cladophora surveyed over these years in upper portions of the Eel basin. Over 28 years of contemporary field research, peak algal biomass was generally higher in summers following bankfull, bed-scouring winter floods. Field surveys and experiments suggested that bed-mobilizing floods scour away overwintering grazers, releasing algae from spring and early summer grazing. During wet years, growth conditions for algae could also be enhanced by increased nutrient loading from the watershed, or by sustained summer base flows. Total annual rainfall and frustule densities in laminae over a longer 83-year record were weakly and negatively correlated, however, suggesting that positive effects of floods on annual algal production were primarily mediated by "top-down" (consumer release) rather than "bottom-up" (growth promoting) controls

Feature-Guided Black-Box Safety Testing of Deep Neural Networks

Despite the improved accuracy of deep neural networks, the discovery of adversarial examples has raised serious safety concerns. Most existing approaches for crafting adversarial examples necessitate some knowledge (architecture, parameters, etc.) of the network at hand. In this paper, we focus on image classifiers and propose a feature-guided black-box approach to test the safety of deep neural networks that requires no such knowledge. Our algorithm employs object detection techniques such as SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) to extract features from an image. These features are converted into a mutable saliency distribution, where high probability is assigned to pixels that affect the composition of the image with respect to the human visual system. We formulate the crafting of adversarial examples as a two-player turn-based stochastic game, where the first player's objective is to minimise the distance to an adversarial example by manipulating the features, and the second player can be cooperative, adversarial, or random. We show that, theoretically, the two-player game can con- verge to the optimal strategy, and that the optimal strategy represents a globally minimal adversarial image. For Lipschitz networks, we also identify conditions that provide safety guarantees that no adversarial examples exist. Using Monte Carlo tree search we gradually explore the game state space to search for adversarial examples. Our experiments show that, despite the black-box setting, manipulations guided by a perception-based saliency distribution are competitive with state-of-the-art methods that rely on white-box saliency matrices or sophisticated optimization procedures. Finally, we show how our method can be used to evaluate robustness of neural networks in safety-critical applications such as traffic sign recognition in self-driving cars.Comment: 35 pages, 5 tables, 23 figure

Remote sensing in Michigan for land resource management

An extensive program was conducted to establish practical uses of NASA earth resource survey technology in meeting resource management problems throughout Michigan. As a result, a broad interest in and understanding of the usefulness of remote sensing methods was developed and a wide variety of applications was undertaken to provide information needed for informed decision making and effective action

The Clinical and Epidemiological Peculiarities of Short Stature during childhood in the Odessa Region (Ukraine)

The clinical and epidemiological examination of children who present to a children’s clinic in the Odessa region (Ukraine) demonstrates under diagnoses of short stature, including Growth Hormone Deficiency (GHD). Optimization of GHD management is a significant challenge in primary health care in Ukraine. Parent awareness of GHD and education on the importance of treatment adherence, up-to-date training for medical staff, more emphasis on using the national growth charts for growth monitoring, increased family and social support to the patient, and social media development are strategies needed to improve primary health care medicine in developing nations. There is a need for database and registries for monitoring various possible ethnicity-specific growth responses and adverse effects. Ukraine-specific databases or registries may help provide epidemiological data for GHD in the Ukrainian context

The Role of Extraversion, IQ and Contact in the Own-Ethnicity Face Recognition Bias.

While IQ is weakly related to the overall face recognition (Shakeshaft & Plomin, 2015), it plays a larger role in the processing of misaligned faces in the composite face task (Zhu et al., 2010). This type of stimuli are relatively novel and may reflect the involvement of intelligence in the processing of infrequently encountered faces, such as those of other-ethnicities. Extraversion is associated with increased eye contact which signifies less viewing of diagnostic features for Black faces. Using an old/new recognition paradigm, we found that IQ negatively correlated with the magnitude of the own-ethnicity bias (OEB) and that this relationship was moderated by contact with people from another ethnicity. We interpret these results in terms of IQ enhancing the ability to process novel stimuli by utilising multiple forms of coding. Extraversion was positively correlated with the OEB in White participants and negatively correlated with the OEB in Black participants suggesting that extraverts have lower attention to diagnostic facial features of Black faces, leading to poorer recognition of Black faces in both White and Black participants, thereby contributing to the relative OEB in these participants. The OEB is dependent on participant variables such as intelligence and extraversion

The Role of Genetic Polymorphism of IL-4 (C-589T) and TNfa (G-308A) and Regular Passive Smoking in Clinical Manifestations of Pneumonia in Infants

Objective: This study set out to investigate the relationship between molecular-genetic mechanisms that modulate cytokine in infants whose parents expose them to cigarette smoke and those that do not expose their infants to cigarette smoke with the possible effects on the severity of pneumonia at presentation to hospital. Exposure to cigarette smoke in infants changed the likelihood of the severity of pneumonia. The results suggest a possible link between the duration of clinical manifestation of pneumonia within infants that are exposed to cigarette smoke. Infants who are exposed to cigarette smoke had higher plasma concentrates in both IgE and CRP. Among infants with the mutant variant of the TNF-α (G-308A) gene, infants from households where both parents smoked or had a father who smoked had longer duration of clinical signs of pneumonia than did infants with no exposure to tobacco smoke. The plasma concentration of IgE in infants in families where one or both parents smoke was significantly higher than in infants with no smoke exposure. The study begins to develop evidence that if the newborn infant is exposed to tobacco smoke either directly from their mother or from others in the household including automobiles, the severity of pneumonia is increased. Both nurses and pediatricians should reinforce the consequences of smoke around the baby to all parents at every opportunity

Remote sensing in Michigan for land resource management

The utilization of NASA earth resource survey technology as an important aid in the solution of current problems in resource management and environmental protection in Michigan is discussed. Remote sensing techniques to aid Michigan government agencies were used to achieve the following results: (1) provide data on Great Lakes beach recession rates to establish shoreline zoning ordinances; (2) supply technical justification for public acquisition of land to establish the St. John's Marshland Recreation Area; (3) establish economical and effective methods for performing a statewide wetlands survey; (4) accomplish a variety of regional resource management actions in the Upper Peninsula; and (5) demonstrate improved soil survey methods. The project disseminated information on remote sensing technology and provided advice and assistance to a number of users in Michigan