Understory influence on leafroller pupunations in Hawke's bay organic apple orchard

Leafrollers (Tortricidae) were collected from apple foliage and understorey vegetation in six commercial organic apple orchards in Hawke’s Bay over one season. Assessments were made of plant species present in the understorey at the time of collection. All leafroller larvae were reared to adults on artificial diet to identify leafroller species and parasitoids. Nearly half (47%) of all leafrollers collected in these orchards were located in the understorey, highlighting the importance of understorey and its management for the control of leafroller. Dock, clover and dandeliontype plants contributed 25% to the overall understorey, yet hosted 75% of the leafrollers collected from the understorey. Dolichogenidea sp. was the most abundant parasitoid (79%) attacking leafrollers found amongst the apple foliage, whereas Glyptapanteles demeter was dominant in the understorey (61%). Generally the number of leafrollers in an orchard was proportional to the abundance of broadleaf weeds and inversely proportional to parasitis

Application of the group-theoretical method to physical problems

The concept of the theory of continuous groups of transformations has attracted the attention of applied mathematicians and engineers to solve many physical problems in the engineering sciences. Three applications are presented in this paper. The first one is the problem of time-dependent vertical temperature distribution in a stagnant lake. Two cases have been considered for the forms of the water parameters, namely water density and thermal conductivity. The second application is the unsteady free-convective boundary-layer flow on a non-isothermal vertical flat plate. The third application is the study of the dispersion of gaseous pollutants in the presence of a temperature inversion. The results are found in closed form and the effect of parameters are discussed

Infinite systems of non-colliding generalized meanders and Riemann-Liouville differintegrals

Yor's generalized meander is a temporally inhomogeneous modification of the $2(\nu+1)$-dimensional Bessel process with $\nu > -1$, in which the inhomogeneity is indexed by $\kappa \in [0, 2(\nu+1))$. We introduce the non-colliding particle systems of the generalized meanders and prove that they are the Pfaffian processes, in the sense that any multitime correlation function is given by a Pfaffian. In the infinite particle limit, we show that the elements of matrix kernels of the obtained infinite Pfaffian processes are generally expressed by the Riemann-Liouville differintegrals of functions comprising the Bessel functions $J_{\nu}$ used in the fractional calculus, where orders of differintegration are determined by $\nu-\kappa$. As special cases of the two parameters $(\nu, \kappa)$, the present infinite systems include the quaternion determinantal processes studied by Forrester, Nagao and Honner and by Nagao, which exhibit the temporal transitions between the universality classes of random matrix theory.Comment: LaTeX, 35 pages, v3: The argument given in Section 3.2 was simplified. Minor corrections were mad

Level models of continuing professional development evaluation: a grounded review and critique

Continuing professional development (CPD) evaluation in education has been heavily influenced by ‘level models’, deriving from the work of Kirkpatrick and Guskey in particular, which attempt to trace the processes through which CPD interventions achieve outcomes. This paper considers the strengths and limitations of such models, and in particular the degree to which they are able to do justice to the complexity of CPD and its effects. After placing level models within the broader context of debates about CPD evaluation, the paper reports our experience of developing such models heuristically for our own evaluation practice. It then draws on positivist, realist and constructivist traditions to consider some more fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to which they give rise. The paper concludes that level models can be used in a number of ways and with differing emphases, and that choices made about their use will need to reflect both theoretical choices and practical considerations

Fitting the integrated Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies

Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade. Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models, and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies, such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in a galaxy, finer details ofdust properties and dust-star geometry, and the influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (sedfitting.org), where the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the text and keep it up to date over the coming years.Comment: 54 pages, 26 figures, Accepted for publication in Astrophysics & Space Scienc

Energy loss due to defect formation from 206Pb recoils in SuperCDMS germanium detectors

The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment at the Soudan Underground Laboratory studied energy loss associated with defect formation in germanium crystals at mK temperatures using in situ 210Pb sources. We examine the spectrum of 206Pb nuclear recoils near its expected 103 keV endpoint energy and determine an energy loss of (6:08 ± 0:18)%, which we attribute to defect formation. From this result and using TRIM simulations, we extract the first experimentally determined average displacement threshold energy of 19.7+0.6−0.5 eV for germanium. This has implications for the analysis thresholds of future germanium-based dark matter searches