FERAL HOGS-BOON OR BURDEN

Feral hogs (Sus scrofa L. ) have long been considered a pest by most land managers because of the potential range and pasture damage that can result from their feeding habits. In recent years however, second only to deer, feral hogs have become the most sought after big game animal in California. Their great reproductive capacity coupled with the ruggedness of their preferred habitat has allowed the California State Fish and Game Department to set liberal seasons and bag limits. The freedom to work within the states liberal framework has prompted some private land managers to look at controlled harvest programs with several objectives in mind. Using paid hunting as the main means of control, thus providing additional revenue for the landowner, such programs would aim at keeping the herds within the carrying capacity of the range, so that minimal damage is done to the vegetation and soil as well as keeping interspecific competition in check. Reviewed here is a description of how such a program is carried out on the Dye Creek Preserve

Probabilistic active learning : an online framework for structural health monitoring

A novel, probabilistic framework for the classification, investigation and labelling of data is suggested as an online strategy for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). A critical issue for data-based SHM is a lack of descriptive labels (for measured data), which correspond to the condition of the monitored system. For many applications, these labels are costly and/or impractical to obtain, and as a result, conventional supervised learning is not feasible. This fact forces a dependence on outlier analysis, or one-class classifiers, in practical applications, as a means of damage detection. The model suggested in this work, however, allows for the definition of a multi-class classifier, to aid both damage detection and identification, while using a limited number of the most informative labelled data. The algorithm is applied to three datasets in the online setting; the Z24 bridge data, a machining (acoustic emission) dataset, and measurements from ground vibration aircraft tests. In the experiments, active learning is shown to improve the online classification performance for damage detection and classification

‘We Are Not As They Think About Us’: Exploring Omani EFL Learners’ ‘Selves’ in Digital Social Spaces

This paper reports a research study of Omani EFL learners’ motivation to engage in social technologies through the medium of English, adopting Dörnyei’s (2009) L2 Motivational Self System as the main theoretical framework, whilst exploring other emergent context-sensitive motivational driving forces. The purpose of the research study was to explore identities and self-perceptions of Omani nationals using social media to learn English, an under-researched context. Reflective focused group discussions were conducted with 14 university-age students, along with individually composed language learning histories. The data of the research lends substantial support to the relevance of the L2 Motivational Self System in the Omani context, highlighting, in particular, the emerging collective national and religious identities of young Omani nationals. The paper argues for the need to deepen and broaden our understanding of the association of English social technologies and the national and religious affiliations of learners

Applying a Pattern Language to Develop Application-level Gateways

Developers of communication applications must address recurring design challenges related to efficiency, extensibility, and robustness. These challenges are often independent of application-specific requirements. Successful developers resolve these challenges by applying appropriate patterns and pattern languages. Traditionally, however, these patterns have been locked in the heads of expert developers or buried deep within complex system source code. The primary contribution of this paper is to describe a pattern language that underlies object-oriented communication software. In addition to describing each pattern in this language, the paper illustrates how knowledge of the relationships and trade-offs among the patterns helps guide the construction of reusable communication frameworks and applications. 1 Introduction Communication software is the set of services and protocols that makes possible modern distributed systems and applications, such as web services, distributed objects,..