Species Profiles: Life Histories and Environmental Requirements of Coastal Fishes and Invertebrates (Mid-Atlantic): Bay anchovy

The bay anchovy occurs along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to Yucatan, Mexico (Hildebrand 1963), except for the Florida Keys where it is apparently absent (Daly 1970). (PDF contains 22 pages

Obliquities of Kepler Stars: Comparison of Single- and Multiple-Transit Systems

The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering the obliquity distribution of a population of transiting planetary systems, and apply it to a sample of 70 Kepler Objects of Interest. With ~95% confidence we find that the obliquities of stars with only a single detected transiting planet are systematically larger than those with multiple detected transiting planets. This suggests that a substantial fraction of Kepler's single-transiting systems represent dynamically hotter, less orderly systems than the "pancake-flat" multiple-transiting systems.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted to Ap

The Oedipal Logic of Ecological Awareness

The Anthropocene is the radical intersection of human history and geological time. Humans have belatedly realised that they have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. This creeping realisation has an Oedipal logic, that is to say, it is a strange loop in which one level of activity—industrial agriculture and the swiftly ensuing industrial revolutionﾗcrosses into an entirely new level of planetary force and, following from that, an uncanny recognition of this force. This essay argues that the Oedipal logic is embedded in the technical, logistical and philosophical framework of agriculture as such. Indeed, the Theban plays (of which Oedipus Tyrannus is one) dwell on the fact of agricultural society as a form of uncanny existence. This essay argues that the principal reason for the uncanniness is the reduction of being to non-contradiction. Exit strategies from this logic (and its concomitant logistics) cannot cleave to a view of beings that is reductionist in any sense. Thus the potential for using Deleuze and Guattari to exit modernity is limited. What is required is a deconstruction of existing (agri)cultures and logics, rather than an attempt to push past them or avoid them, since as in the story of Oedipus, the attempt to push past and avoid is precisely what brings about the cataclysm

Realist Magic

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues, Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality

Beyond COUNTER: Using IP Data to Evaluate Our Users

Traditional library statistics, whether counting our collections, our users, or our services, are typically concerned with answering questions such as “What?” or “How much?” or “When?” COUNTER-compliant statistics, the very welcome and useful standard for electronic resource providers, have allowed libraries to bring that same paradigm to bear on their digital collections, answering such questions as “What journals and e-books are our users downloading?” “How often are they searching this database?”, and even “When do they access this content?” However, what COUNTER and other traditional methods often fail to do is provide data that would allow libraries to answer questions such as “Who is using our resources?” and “Where are they when they access our licensed content?” By gathering detailed usage data by IP address from several electronic resource providers, and comparing those datasets with a well-developed network infrastructure, one can take steps to determine the “who” and “where” questions of e-resource usage at the University of Virginia