Annual fecundity, batch fecundity, and oocyte atresia of Atka mackerel (Pleurogrammus monopterygius) in Alaskan waters

Annual potential fecundity, batch fecundity, and oocyte atresia were estimated for Atka mackerel (Pleurogrammus monopterygius) collected in Alaskan waters during 1993−94. Atka mackerel were assumed to be determinate spawners on the basis of decreasing fecundity after batch spawning events. Histological examination of the ovaries indicated that oocytes in the vitellogenic stage and higher had been spawned in the current spawning season. For an average female of 40 cm, potential annual fecundity was estimated to be 41,994 eggs, average batch size (i.e., batch fecundity) was estimated to be 6689 eggs, and there were 6.13 batches per spawning season. Atresia was estimated by examining postspawning specimens and was found to be substantial. The average amount of atresia for a 40-cm fish was estimated to be 11,329 eggs, resulting in an estimated realized fecundity of only 30,664 eggs and 4.64 batches of eggs per spawning season

Cloud-Friendly, Virtual, Information Assurance and Cross Domain Services

Cloud is a powerful paradigm because it applies powerful virtual technology to logically abstract function away from the implementing infrastructure. The same physically distributed infrastructure is dynamically re-configured to create virtual machines optimized to execute the transaction of interest. Traditional transfer guard cross domain solutions are based on physical separation, and are therefore incompatible with this approach. Indeed, their continued mandated use negates the potential efficiencies targeted via cloud. Cloud cross-domain services, based on assured logical separation via hypervisors and other virtual technology can provide the solution. Success requires government-industry partnership to identify an open standard virtual cloud security layer. Success also requires convincing the certification and accreditation community that assurance arguments based on logical separation are valid.John Snevely; Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, 1400 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301Approved for public released; distribution is unlimite

The Effects of a Five-Week Exercise Intervention Using EMG Biofeedback on Scapular Stabilizer Muscle Activation and Scapular Kinematics

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a five-week EMG biofeedback intervention on scapular stabilizer muscle activation, and scapular kinematics, in a healthy population. Twenty males and females participated in the study (n = 10 exercise with biofeedback, n = 10 exercise only). Both groups participated in exercises targeted at activating the serratus anterior and lower trapezius muscles three days a week for five weeks. The exercise with biofeedback group completed a biofeedback session once a week. All subjects were tested at baseline (week 1), week 6, and week 8 for muscle activation of the upper trapezius (UT), lower trapezius (LT), and serratus anterior (SA), as well as scapular kinematics. Statistical analysis was performed using a three-way mixed analysis of variance, and demonstrated that there was no significance A three-way ANOVA revealed no significance for scapular posterior tilt (p = 0.212), upward rotation (p = 0.668), or external rotation (p = 0.880) for neither group. A three-way ANOVA revealed no significance with mean EMG amplitude (p = 0.249). Therefore the hypothesis was rejected. There was a trend toward increased scapular upward rotation for both groups, as well as a decrease in mean UT EMG amplitude for the exercise only group, although not statistically significant. Lowered UT activation is indicative of better musculature control, and could potentially lead to positive alterations in scapular kinematics, observed as increased upward rotation, external rotation, and posterior tilt). This is thought to lead to an increase in subacromial space, and in turn, lessen the risk of onset SIS. The results from this study could assist in the development of a preventative type of program for a healthy population that is at a heightened risk for developing SIS. There is little research investigating the optimal duration and frequency for a preventative type of program, and this protocol used in this study could be a good foundation for future research investigating viable preventative tools for the onset of SIS

Using senior citizen volunteers in public schools

A generation ago, the term school volunteer meant parent volunteer, and the roles of these volunteers were limited. Most elementary schools welcomed parents as chaperons for field trips, room mothers, and to assist with endless housekeeping and clerical tasks that freed the teacher to teach. They welcomed them at school to shelve and process books, collect money for photographs, and weigh and measure children. School volunteers were virtually non-existent in junior and senior high schools (NSVP, 1978). School volunteers today come from many sources and provide a wide range of services for many schools, even at the secondary level (Purcell, 1981). These volunteers are also directly involved in the very process of education itself - as visiting lecturers, kindergarten assistants, story tellers, readers of English themes, and, most of all, as tutors (Carter, 1974)

Mapping issue salience divergence in Europe from 1945 to the present

Issue salience is a fundamental component of party competition, yet we know little about when, where, or why parties’ issue emphases converge or diverge. I propose an original operationalization of issue salience divergence, the extent to which parties’ issue emphases differ from each other in an election, that generates values at the party-election and country-election levels. I leverage data from party manifestos to calculate scores for 2,308 party-election combinations of 381 unique parties in 426 elections across thirty European countries, the most comprehensive dataset to date. I find that issue salience divergence is generally low and has starkly decreased over time, but countries and parties differ substantially. As an initial step in understanding these differences, I propose and test initial expectations of how party and democracy age, electoral systems, and party type alter the incentives for divergent issue salience

Spaceborne memory organization, an associative data acquisition system, phase II Final report, Apr. - Dec. 1966

Spaceborne memory organization, associative data acquisition system design, and data compression technique

Application of the comparison principle to analysis of nonlinear systems

A comparison principle based on a Kamke theorem and Lipschitz conditions is presented along with its possible applications and modifications. It is shown that the comparison lemma can be used in the study of such areas as classical stability theory, higher order trajectory derivatives, Liapunov functions, boundary value problems, approximate dynamic systems, linear and nonlinear systems, and bifurcation analysis

Youth-Adult Differences in the Demand for Unionization: Are American, British and Canadian Workers All That Different?

This paper examines demand for union membership amongst young workers in Britain, Canada and the United States. The paper benchmarks youth demands for collective representation against those of adult workers and finds that a large and significant representation gap exists in all three countries. Using a model of representation advanced by Farber (1982) and Riddell (1993) we find that a majority of the union density differential between young and adult workers is due to supply-side constraints rather than a lower desire for unionisation on the part of the young. This finding lends credence to two conjectures made in the paper; the first is that tastes for collective representation do not differ among workers (either by nationality or by age) and second that union representation can be fruitfully modelled as an experience good. The experience good properties of union membership explain the persistence of union density differentials amongst youth and adults both over time and across countries

Upgrade of the Minos+ Experiment Data Acquisition for the High Energy NuMI Beam Run

The Minos+ experiment is an extension of the Minos experiment at a higher energy and more intense neutrino beam, with the data collection having begun in the fall of 2013. The neutrino beam is provided by the Neutrinos from the Main Injector (NuMI) beam-line at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). The detector apparatus consists of two main detectors, one underground at Fermilab and the other in Soudan, Minnesota with the purpose of studying neutrino oscillations at a base line of 735 km. The original data acquisition system has been running for several years collecting data from NuMI, but with the extended run from 2013, parts of the system needed to be replaced due to obsolescence, reliability problems, and data throughput limitations. Specifically, we have replaced the front-end readout controllers, event builder, and data acquisition computing and trigger processing farms with modern, modular and reliable devices with few single points of failure. The new system is based on gigabit Ethernet TCP/IP communication to implement the event building and concatenation of data from many front-end VME readout crates. The simplicity and partitionability of the new system greatly eases the debugging and diagnosing process. The new system improves throughput by about a factor of three compared to the old system, up to 800 megabits per second, and has proven robust and reliable in the current run.Comment: 3 page

Pathology and failure in the design and implementation of adaptive management

The conceptual underpinnings for adaptive management are simple; there will always be inherent uncertainty and unpredictability in the dynamics and behavior of complex ecological systems as a result non-linear interactions among components and emergence, yet management decisions must still be made. The strength of adaptive management is in the recognition and confrontation of such uncertainty. Rather than ignore uncertainty, or use it to preclude management actions, adaptive management can foster resilience and flexibility to cope with an uncertain future, and develop safe to fail management approaches that acknowledge inevitable changes and surprises. Since its initial introduction, adaptive management has been hailed as a solution to endless trial and error approaches to complex natural resource management challenges. However, its implementation has failed more often than not. It does not produce easy answers, and it is appropriate in only a subset of natural resource management problems. Clearly adaptive management has great potential when applied appropriately. Just as clearly adaptive management has seemingly failed to live up to its high expectations. Why? We outline nine pathologies and challenges that can lead to failure in adaptive management programs. We focus on general sources of failures in adaptive management, so that others can avoid these pitfalls in the future. Adaptive management can be a powerful and beneficial tool when applied correctly to appropriate management problems; the challenge is to keep the concept of adaptive management from being hijacked for inappropriate use