Revealing the Appetite of the Marine Aquarium Fish Trade: The Volume and Biodiversity of Fish Imported into the United States

The aquarium trade and other wildlife consumers are at a crossroads forced by threats from global climate change and other anthropogenic stressors that have weakened coastal ecosystems. While the wildlife trade may put additional stress on coral reefs, it brings income into impoverished parts of the world and may stimulate interest in marine conservation. To better understand the influence of the trade, we must first be able to quantify coral reef fauna moving through it. Herein, we discuss the lack of a data system for monitoring the wildlife aquarium trade and analyze problems that arise when trying to monitor the trade using a system not specifically designed for this purpose. To do this, we examined an entire year of import records of marine tropical fish entering the United States in detail, and discuss the relationship between trade volume, biodiversity and introduction of non-native marine fishes. Our analyses showed that biodiversity levels are higher than previous estimates. Additionally, more than half of government importation forms have numerical or other reporting discrepancies resulting in the overestimation of trade volumes by 27%. While some commonly imported species have been introduced into the coastal waters of the USA (as expected), we also found that some uncommon species in the trade have also been introduced. This is the first study of aquarium trade imports to compare commercial invoices to government forms and provides a means to, routinely and in real time, examine the biodiversity of the trade in coral reef wildlife species

Adherence measurements and corrosion resistance in primer/hot-dip galvanized steel systems

This paper focuses on the adherence during ageing of a primer (made of polyester resins crosslinked with melamine) applied onto hot-dip galvanized (HDG) steel for coil coating application and its influence on corrosion protection. A chromium-free surface treatment, composed of fluorotitanic acid, phosphoric acid, manganese phosphate, and vinylphenol was applied on the HDG steel to obtain high corrosion resistance and high adherence of a polyester and melamine primer. The influence of the manganese phosphate on the corrosion and adherence was investigated. To measure the adherence between the metal and the primer, a three-point flexure test was set up. The adherence was then linked with corrosion resistance during ageing, using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy

Perception of aperiodicity in pathological voice

Although jitter, shimmer, and noise acoustically characterize all voice signals, their perceptual importance in naturally produced pathological voices has not been established psychoacoustically. To determine the role of these attributes in the perception of vocal quality, listeners were asked to adjust levels of jitter, shimmer, and the noise-to-signal ratio in a speech synthesizer, so that synthetic voices matched naturally produced tokens. Results showed that, although listeners agreed well in their judgments of the noise-to-signal ratio, they did not agree with one another in their chosen settings for jitter and shimmer. Noise-dependent differences in listeners' ability to detect changes in amounts of jitter and shimmer implicate both listener insensitivity and inability to isolate jitter and shimmer as separate dimensions in the overall pattern of aperiodicity in a voice as causes of this poor agreement. These results suggest that jitter and shimmer are not useful as independent indices of perceived vocal quality, apart from their acoustic contributions to the overall pattern of spectrally shaped noise in a voice. (c) 2005 Acoustical Society of America

Dependence of Conditioner Power Input on Mowing Machine Material Feed Rate

Rosana G. Moreira, Editor-in-Chief; Texas A&M UniversityThis is a Technical Paper from International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR, Commission Internationale du Genie Rural) E-Journal Volume 5 (2003): F. Kumhala, M. Kroulik, and V. Prosek. Dependence of Conditioner Power Input on Mowing Machine Material Feed Rate. Vol. V. July 2003

Quantitative analysis of RD-14M large LOCA test B9401 calculations

The results obtained in a more-than-a-decade application of thermal-hydraulic system codes to the analysis of experiments performed in Integral Test Facilities (ITF) and Separate Effect test Facilities (SETF) including the participation to several International Standard Problems (ISP) and Standard Problem Exercises (SPE), organized by OECD/NEA/CSNI (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development / Nuclear Energy Agency / Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations) and by IAEA (international Atomic Energy Agency), respectively, suggested the need for new methods and procedures for code application. The words nodalization-qualification, qualitative-accuracy-evaluation, quantitative-accuracy-evaluation, and acceptability-thresholds were introduced. The present document deals with accuracy quantification at the transient level in relation to the Large Break Loss of Coolant Accident (LB-LOCA) test B9401 performed in RD-14M facility availbale at the Manitoba Research center of AECL in Canada. The FFTBM (Fast Fourier Transform Based method) developed at UNIPI was applied and a hierarchy of calculation quality by various participants was determined