Purdue Conference on Active Nonproliferation

Design a small modular reactor that is easily transportable for use in disaster relief as well as remote military outposts. A rail shippable reactor gives quick and easy transportation from one part of a country to another. The reactor must have a three MWe production capacity to ensure the reactor has the performance to power larger government facilities, such as hospitals and water treatment plants. The reactor must have enough fuel for a six-month minimum fuel cycle. Atmospheric cooling only provides the ability to reject heat to the atmosphere, minimizing the weight requirements. Uranium fuel will have a maximum of 19.75% enrichment, to minimize proliferation concerns with the reactor

Far-Persons

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

Sustained and transient contrast in human subjects

Twelve educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents and twelve 'normal' adolescents participated as subjects (Ss) in an experiment to determine the effect of mental age and sequence of stimulus presentation upon transient and sustained contrast effects. In Phase I of the experiment, all Ss pressed a button to obtain reinforcement on a mult (VI-25 sec., VI-25 sec.) schedule. Components 1 and 2 of the multiple schedule were signaled by a blue or yellow light respectively. Six EMR Ss (Group MR-1) and six normals (Group N-l) received an alternating sequence of the two components. Groups MR-2 and N-2 received a non-alternating sequence of the two components. Following demonstration of stable baseline performance in Phase I, all Ss were switched to a mult (VI-25, EXT) schedule in Phase II. Analysis of data from Phase II revealed a systematic increase of response rate to the constant component, between sessions, accompanied by a decrease in response rate to the EXT component between sessions. This sustained contrast effect was evident in each of the four groups. There was no evidence of transient contrast occurring within component presentations (cycles) in any of the groups. A transient sequential contrast effect was demonstrated between cycles within sessions for groups MR-2 and N-2. No significant effects as a function of mental age was found for either sequential or sustained contrast.Psychology, Department o

Technologies for Repository Interoperation and Access Control

Over the past several years, network-accessible repositories have been developed by various academic, government, and industrial organizations to provide access to software and related resources. Allowing distributed maintenance of these repositories while enabling users to access resources from multiple repositories via a single interface has brought about the need for interoperation. Concerns about intellectual property rights and export regulations have brought about the need for access control. This paper describes technologies for interoperation and access control that have been developed as part of the National High-performance Software Exchange (NHSE) project, as well as their deployment in a freely available repository maintainer's toolkit called Repository in a Box. The approach to interoperation has been to participate in the development of and to implement an IEEE standard data model for software catalog records. The approach to access control has been to extend the data mod..

Data from: Model selection as a tool for phylogeographic inference: an example from the willow Salix melanopsis

Phylogeographic inference has typically relied on analyses of data from one or a few genes to provide estimates of demography and population histories. While much has been learned from these studies, all phylogeographic analysis is conditioned on the data, and thus, inferences derived from data that represent a small sample of the genome are unavoidably tenuous. Here, we demonstrate one approach for moving beyond classic phylogeographic research. We use sequence capture probes and Illumina sequencing to generate data from >400 loci in order to infer the phylogeographic history of Salix melanopsis, a riparian willow with a disjunct distribution in coastal and the inland Pacific Northwest. We evaluate a priori phylogeographic hypotheses using coalescent models for parameter estimation, and the results support earlier findings that identified post-Pleistocene dispersal as the cause of the disjunction in S. melanopsis. We also conduct a series of model selection exercises using IMa2, Migrate-n and ∂a∂i. The resulting ranking of models indicates that refugial dynamics were complex, with multiple regions in the inland regions serving as the source for postglacial colonization. Our results demonstrate that new sources of data and new approaches to data analysis can rejuvenate phylogeographic research by allowing for the identification of complex models that enable researchers to both identify and estimate the most relevant parameters for a given system