Improving the Land Trust Model’s Impact on Environmental Conservation in Northern California

For years, the land trust sector of California and much of the United States has operated with a dollars and acres mentality that has prioritized fundraising as a result of acreage protected. Within California, nearly 5.8 million acres of land have been protected by 132 land trusts throughout the state. To accommodate for the diverse cross-section of land and the many needs of the population, land trusts take on numerous shapes and sizes. A unique aspect of this diversity is the rich agricultural and natural spaces found throughout the state. This mix of land and variety of land uses has led to some differences in the purpose and operation of trusts throughout the state. With this large range of land trusts, the goals remain the same: to protect and preserve lands across the state. To accomplish this and further impact the environmental conservation movement, trusts have been forced to move past the dollars and acres mentality and into a larger stewardship and education role. As organizations continue to transition into this role, they must look further and examine the sustainability of their work. Who are we conserving this land for if it continues a cycle of inequity and inaccessibility? The land trust model must continue its transition from dollars and acres but more importantly, it needs to ensure it is taking an active role in the various diversity, equity, and inclusion practices that are readily available in the sector. Examples that were highlighted from organizations in Northern California include the rematriation of land to native tribes and providing opportunities for under-resourced communities to utilize the open spaces protected by the trusts. Without a bigger tent of supporters, funders, and users, land trusts will grow unsustainably into the role of educator and steward. The greatest way to impact environmental conservation and climate change is to mobilize the greatest number of people from a diverse range of backgrounds

Robot Navigation in Unseen Spaces using an Abstract Map

Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and navigational gestures communicate a wealth of spatial information to the navigators of built environments; a wealth of information that robots typically ignore. We present a robot navigation system that uses the same symbolic spatial information employed by humans to purposefully navigate in unseen built environments with a level of performance comparable to humans. The navigation system uses a novel data structure called the abstract map to imagine malleable spatial models for unseen spaces from spatial symbols. Sensorimotor perceptions from a robot are then employed to provide purposeful navigation to symbolic goal locations in the unseen environment. We show how a dynamic system can be used to create malleable spatial models for the abstract map, and provide an open source implementation to encourage future work in the area of symbolic navigation. Symbolic navigation performance of humans and a robot is evaluated in a real-world built environment. The paper concludes with a qualitative analysis of human navigation strategies, providing further insights into how the symbolic navigation capabilities of robots in unseen built environments can be improved in the future.Comment: 15 pages, published in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (http://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2020.2993855), see https://btalb.github.io/abstract_map/ for access to softwar

HIGHER EDUCATION AND LIFE CHANCES: A STUDY OF OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENTS AND ATTITUDES AMONG SOME PUBLIC UNIVERSITY GRADUATES

This study investigates the post-graduate educational and occupational experiences of the 1968 and 1978 graduates of a state flagship university. First, it explores the influence of parental variables upon respondents\u27 choice of curriculum and of post-graduate study. Second, it examines the occupational placement of the respondents by cohort and by gender. Third, it explores the present attitudes of the respondents by cohort and gender. A stratified random sampling of the graduates (N = 433) via a mailed survey questionnaire shows that more men than women in the 1968 cohort return their forms. There is the suspicion that only those who view their occupational performance as successful returned their questionnaires. Therefore, many of the findings of this study must be placed in the context of this particular sample. The main results of this study suggest that the respondents\u27 gender and the educational resources of the respondents\u27 family of orientation are related to the selection of undergraduate curriculum such that males and students from less educationally-privileged families tend to major in more quantitative or technical disciplines. Second, I find that going on to professional school is a function of father\u27s occupational position. Third, there are differences in the occupational attainment process for male and female respondents in the sense that different explanatory factors are involved. Fourth, there are few differences in occupational and political attitudes of the respondents by cohort or gender

Fuel additive

A fuel additive comprising one or more complex oxides having a nominal compn. as set out in formula (1): AxB1-yMyOn; wherein A is selected from one or more group III elements including the lanthanide elements or one or more divalent or monovalent cations; B is selected from one or more elements with at. no. 22 to 24, 40 to 42 and 72 to 75; M is selected from one or more elements with at. no. 25 to 30; x is defined as a no. where 0 < x ≤ l; y is defined as a no. where 0 ≤ y < 0.5. [on SciFinder(R)

Anisotropic Energy Distribution in Three-Dimensional Vibrofluidized Granular Systems

We examine the energy distribution in a three-dimensional model granular system contained in an open cylinder under the influence of gravity. Energy is supplied to the system by a vibrating base. We introduce spatially resolved, partial particle-particle ``dissipations'' for directions parallel and perpendicular to the energy input, respectively. Energy balances show that the total (integrated) ``dissipation'' is less than zero in the parallel direction while greater than zero in the perpendicular directions. The energy supplied to the perpendicular directions is dissipated by particle-wall collisions. We further define a fractional energy transfer, which in the steady state represents the fraction of the power supplied by the vibrating base that is dissipated at the wall. We examine the dependence of the fractional energy transfer on the number of particles, the velocity of the vibrating base, the particle-particle restitution coefficient, and the particle-wall restitution coefficient. We also explore the influence of the system parameters on the spatially dependent partial dissipations.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, RevTeX forma

What People Drink and Where They Drink It Can Inform Us About Their Personality

Folk wisdom and research on personality inferences suggest one should be able to judge a person\u27s personality based on their behaviour related to alcohol consumption. In a sample of Australians (N = 1,232), we compared the utility of knowing where and what people prefer to consume alcohol to understand people\u27s personality (broadly construed). Where people drank had limited utility; predicting hopelessness in those who drank at home more than at a licensed venue and the consumption of spirits for those high in extraversion at a licensed venue. In contrast, there were several differences in people\u27s personality across drink preferences. For example, neuroticism was higher in cider and spirit drinkers than beer and wine drinkers. Results are framed within the personality inference literature and qualified by (1) the traditional beer-drinking culture of our sample and (2) the complex relationships between personality and any behaviour, including habits surrounding alcohol consumption

Place Categorization and Semantic Mapping on a Mobile Robot

In this paper we focus on the challenging problem of place categorization and semantic mapping on a robot without environment-specific training. Motivated by their ongoing success in various visual recognition tasks, we build our system upon a state-of-the-art convolutional network. We overcome its closed-set limitations by complementing the network with a series of one-vs-all classifiers that can learn to recognize new semantic classes online. Prior domain knowledge is incorporated by embedding the classification system into a Bayesian filter framework that also ensures temporal coherence. We evaluate the classification accuracy of the system on a robot that maps a variety of places on our campus in real-time. We show how semantic information can boost robotic object detection performance and how the semantic map can be used to modulate the robot's behaviour during navigation tasks. The system is made available to the community as a ROS module

A Relational Database for the Discovery of Genes Encoding Amino Acid Biosynthetic Enzymes in Pathogenic Fungi

Fungal phytopathogens continue to cause major economic impact, either directly, through crop losses, or due to the costs of fungicide application. Attempts to understand these organisms are hampered by a lack of fungal genome sequence data. A need exists, however, to develop specific bioinformatics tools to collate and analyse the sequence data that currently is available. A web-accessible gene discovery database (http://cogeme.ex.ac.uk/biosynthesis.html) was developed as a demonstration tool for the analysis of metabolic and signal transduction pathways in pathogenic fungi using incomplete gene inventories. Using Bayesian probability to analyse the currently available gene information from pathogenic fungi, we provide evidence that the obligate pathogen Blumeria graminis possesses all amino acid biosynthetic pathways found in free-living fungi, such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Phylogenetic analysis was also used to deduce a gene history of succinate-semialdehyde dehydrogenase, an enzyme in the glutamate and lysine biosynthesis pathways. The database provides a tool and methodology to researchers to direct experimentation towards predicting pathway conservation in pathogenic microorganisms

The Erdős-Ko-Rado properties of various graphs containing singletons

Let G=(V,E) be a graph. For r≥1, let be the family of independent vertex r-sets of G. For vV(G), let denote the star . G is said to be r-EKR if there exists vV(G) such that for any non-star family of pair-wise intersecting sets in . If the inequality is strict, then G is strictly r-EKR. Let Γ be the family of graphs that are disjoint unions of complete graphs, paths, cycles, including at least one singleton. Holroyd, Spencer and Talbot proved that, if GΓ and 2r is no larger than the number of connected components of G, then G is r-EKR. However, Holroyd and Talbot conjectured that, if G is any graph and 2r is no larger than μ(G), the size of a smallest maximal independent vertex set of G, then G is r-EKR, and strictly so if 2r<μ(G). We show that in fact, if GΓ and 2r is no larger than the independence number of G, then G is r-EKR; we do this by proving the result for all graphs that are in a suitable larger set Γ′Γ. We also confirm the conjecture for graphs in an even larger set Γ″Γ′

Vitamin D Supplementation in Australia: Implications for the Development of Supplementation Guidelines

High rates of vitamin D deficiency and testing have been reported in Australia, yet there are few reports regarding vitamin D supplement use. Australian wholesale sales data was obtained for vitamin D supplements for the period 2000–2011. There has been a threefold increase in supplement sales over the past decade, whereby over A$94 million supplements containing vitamin D in Australia were sold during the year 2010. There were eighty-nine manufacturers that produce a variety of 195 vitamin D products. The amount of vitamin D in these products varies considerably, from 40 to 1000 IU per unit, although supplements containing only vitamin D had the highest amount of vitamin D. There was a trend for sales to increase in winter months. Given the potential public health benefits of vitamin D, there is an urgent need for a better understanding of supplementation use and for the development of supplementation