Shellfish Outreach Project

The purpose of the Shellfish Outreach project was to disseminate educational information to the greater seacoast community on the value of aquaculture, status and opportunities in shellfishing, and hands-on local conservation strategies in an exciting visual and experiential manner. The entire project was designed to combine three primary methods of distributing information to the public: traveling programs, curriculum design, and field experience. Audiences for all three programs were to receive maps, updated shellfish-related information, and/or details promoting environmentally sound aquaculture practices. Subject matter covered during these programs was designed to focus on basic shellfish biology and natural history, the history of the seacoast shellfish fishery, current status and concerns, education on predator control, proper collecting techniques, and what people need to know to collect shellfish safely on the New Hampshire coast

Marvin: A Heuristic Search Planner with Online Macro-Action Learning

This paper describes Marvin, a planner that competed in the Fourth International Planning Competition (IPC 4). Marvin uses action-sequence-memoisation techniques to generate macro-actions, which are then used during search for a solution plan. We provide an overview of its architecture and search behaviour, detailing the algorithms used. We also empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of its features in various planning domains; in particular, the effects on performance due to the use of macro-actions, the novel features of its search behaviour, and the native support of ADL and Derived Predicates

A Reflective Evaluation of Group Assessment

There is a general agreement in the literature that groupwork helps to develop important interpersonal and personal skills (Race, 2001; Visram & Joy, 2003; Elliot & Higgins, 2005; Kench et al, 2008). However, one of the problems with groupwork for both students and lecturers is how the work should be assessed (Parsons & Kassabova, 2002). The possibility of having ‘free-riders’ and the difficulty of fairly awarding marks to reflect the level of students’ contribution to a group output are some of the key problem areas in groupwork assessment (Race, 2001). Peer assessment is seen as one of the methods to deal with these problems. It can generally involve students assessing each other’s level of contribution to the group’s output (Visram & Joy, 2003). This paper provides our reflection on the use of peer assessment on a student group project

A taxonomic revision of Camptocerus Dejean (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae)

The Neotropical ambrosia beetle genus Camptocerus Dejean was revised. Monophyly of the genus was tested using 66 morphological characters in a cladistic analysis. Camptocerus was recovered as monophyletic and 31 species were recognized. Six new synonyms were discovered: C. auricomus Blandford 1896 (= C. striatulus Hagedorn 1905), C. inoblitus (Schedl) 1939 (= C. morio (Schedl) 1952), C. niger (Fabricius) 1801 (= C. tectus Eggers 1943), C. opacicollis (Eggers) 1929 (= C. infidelis Wood 1969; = C. uniseriatus Schedl 1972), C. suturalis (Fabricius) 1801 (= C. cinctus Chapuis 1869). Two species were removed from synonymy: C. charpentierae Schedl and C. hirtipennis Schedl. Twelve new species of Camptocerus were described: C. coccoformus (Brazil, Ecuador), C. distinctus (Ecuador), C. doleae (Ecuador), C. igniculus (Brazil), C. mallopterus (Ecuador), C. noel (widely distributed across Amazonia), C. petrovi (Ecuador), C. pilifrons (Ecuador), C. pseudoangustior (widely distributed across Amazonia), C. satyrus (Brazil), C. unicornus (Brazil) and C. zucca (Ecuador). Lectotypes are here designated for the following species: Camptocerus auricomus Blandford, Camptocerus squammiger Chapuis, Hylesinus gibbus Fabricius, Hylesinus suturalis Fabricius, Hylesinus fasciatus Fabricius. A key, diagnosis, distribution, host records and images were provided for each species

Approximation in reflexive Banach spaces and applications to the invariant subspace problem

We formulate a general approximation problem involving reflexive and smooth Banach spaces, and give its explicit solution. Two applications are presented— the first is to the Bounded Completion Problem involving approximation of Hardy class functions, while the second involves the construction of minimal vec- tors and hyperinvariant subspaces of linear operators, generalizing the Hilbert space technique of Ansari and Enflo

Studies of waveform requirements for intermediate mass-ratio coalescence searches with advanced detectors

The coalescence of a stellar-mass compact object into an intermediate-mass black hole (intermediate mass-ratio coalescence; IMRAC) is an important astrophysical source for ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers in the so-called advanced configuration. However, the ability to carry out effective matched-filter based searches for these systems is limited by the lack of reliable waveforms. Here we consider binaries in which the intermediate-mass black hole has mass in the range 24 - 200 solar masses with a stellar-mass companion having masses in the range 1.4 - 18.5 solar masses. In addition, we constrain the mass ratios, q, of the binaries to be in the range 1/140 < q < 1/10 and we restrict our study to the case of circular binaries with non-spinning components. We investigate the relative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the three different phases of the coalescence: inspiral, merger and ringdown. We show that merger and ringdown contribute to a substantial fraction of the total SNR over a large portion of the mass parameter space, although in a limited portion the SNR is dominated by the inspiral phase. We further identify three regions in the IMRAC mass-space in which: (i) inspiral-only searches could be performed with losses in detection rates L in the range 10% < L < 27%, (ii) searches based on inspiral-only templates lead to a loss in detection rates in the range 27% < L < 50%$, and (iii) templates that include merger and ringdown are essential to prevent losses in detection rates greater than 50%. We investigate the effectiveness with which the inspiral-only portion of the IMRAC waveform space is covered by comparing several existing waveform families in this regime. Our results reinforce the importance of extensive numerical relativity simulations of IMRACs and the need for further studies of suitable approximation schemes in this mass range.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure