Kootenai River Fisheries Investigation; Stock Status of Burbot, 2003-2004 Annual Report.

The main objective of this investigation was to monitor movement and spawning activity of burbot Lota lota in the Kootenai River, Idaho and British Columbia, Canada during the winter of 2003-2004. Due to low precipitation and snow pack, as well as low levels of Lake Koocanusa, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers refrained from releasing discharges >113 m{sup 3}/s from Libby Dam for most of the winter. This situation provided suitable conditions for burbot migration and spawning in the mainstem river. Hoop nets captured 19 burbot, which ranged from 447 mm to 760 mm TL (mean = 630 mm) and weighed from 420 g to 4,032 g (mean = 1,937 g) with a mean W{sub r} of 99. One burbot (burbot 214) was captured for the fifth time since its first capture in 2000, and each capture was near Ambush Rock (rkm 244.4-244.8). Eleven burbot were tagged with five-month duration external sonic transmitters, and a 12th burbot, tagged with a 14-month transmitter, has been monitored since 2001. During the post-spawn period, three sonic-tagged burbot exhibited downstream and sedentary movement patterns, while five remained at Ambush Rock. Concentrations of tagged burbot near Ambush Rock (rkm 244.5) during January and February 2004 (eight tagged fish) may suggest that this area is critical spawning habitat. The appearance of burbot at Ambush Rock during the spawning period and upstream movements of tagged fish (PIT and sonic tagged) in previous years during the low discharges help validate results suggesting that discharges <113 m{sup 3}/s will permit burbot migration and may increase spawning habitat. Though it seems apparent that the Ambush Rock area is an important burbot spawning ground, no adult burbot were recaptured after the spawning period and no burbot larva were caught, despite considerable sampling efforts during the winter of 2003-2004

An Experimental Analysis Of the Demand For Payday Loans

The payday loan industry is one of the fastest growing segments of the consumer financial services market in the United States. We design an environment similar to the one that payday loan customers face and then conduct a laboratory experiment to examine what effect, if any, the existence of payday loans has on individuals\u27 abilities to manage and to survive financial setbacks. Our primary objective is to examine whether access to payday loans improves or worsens the likelihood of financial survival in our experiment. We also test the degree to which people\u27s use of payday loans affects their ability to survive financially. We find that payday loans help the subjects to absorb expenditure shocks and therefore survive financially. However, subjects whose demand for payday loans exceeds a certain threshold level are at a greater risk than a corresponding subject in the treatment in which payday loans do not exist

A Wireless MIMO Channel Probing Approach for Arbitrary Antenna Arrays

This paper introduces a method for experimentally probing indoor wireless channels to compute MIMO transfer function matrices, . The data is gathered using rotating transmit and receive antennas to observe the multipath ray structure of the channel. can be computed for any arbitrary transmit and receive array sizes and geometries using the single probe data set. Estimating is crucial for spacetime coding communications algorithm performance analysis. Example results are presented. 1

Comparison of Length-at-Date Criteria and Genetic Run Assignments for Juvenile Chinook Salmon Caught at Sacramento and Chipps Island in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta of California

There are four distinct runs of Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) in the Central Valley, named after their primary adult return times: fall, late-fall, winter, and spring run. Estimating the run-specific composition of juveniles entering and leaving the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is crucial for assessing population status and processes that affect juvenile survival through the Delta. Historically, the run of juvenile Chinook Salmon captured in the field has been determined using length-at-date criteria (LDC); however, LDC run assignments may be inaccurate if there is high overlap in the run-specific timing and size of juveniles entering and leaving the Delta. In this study, we use genetic run assignments to assess the accuracy of LDC at two trawl locations in the Sacramento River (Delta entry) and at Chipps Island (Delta exit). Fin tissues were collected from approximately 7,500 juvenile Chinook Salmon captured in trawl samples between 2007 and 2011. Tissues were analyzed using 21 microsatellites to determine genetic run assignments for individuals, which we compared with LDC run assignments. Across years, there was extensive overlap among the distributions of run-specific fork lengths of genetically identified juveniles, indicating that run compositions based on LDC assignments would tend to underestimate fall-run and especially late-fall-run compositions at both trawl locations, and greatly overestimate spring-run compositions (both locations) and winter-run compositions (Chipps Island). We therefore strongly support ongoing efforts to include tissue sampling and genetic run identification of juvenile Chinook Salmon at key monitoring locations in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River system