Preliminary report on the hydrography and oyster growing conditions in Choctawhatchee Bay, July 11-13, 1961

The hydrographic conditions in an estuary such as Choctavhatchee Bay, are complex and dynamic. Temperature and salinity measurements taken at any estuarine sampling station are subject to wide fluctuation depending on local tide and weather conditions. In this respect, the following report is only a preliminary indication of the hydrographic conditions existing in Choctawhatchee Bay while this data is being collected. Choctawhatchee Bay is approximately 32 miles long and from three and a half to six miles wide. Large portions of the western half of Choctawhatchee Bay are militarily restricted. The unrestricted area from Valpariso south to Buccaroo Point receives large volumes of treated sewage from Eglin Air Force Base and associated housing developments. The Florida State Board of Health considers the oysters in this area to be polluted.Since the primary purpose of this survey was to ascertain the optimum oyster growing and harvesting areas, only the eastern half of the bay was surveyed. Conclusions of that survey are reported. (10pp.

The capability of the ultraviolet imaging telescope for observing interstellar dust

The Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT) was designed to be able to obtain deep images of nearby galaxies with a single frame. This ability makes it ideal for many imaging problems of the interstellar dust. The instrument has a forty arc-minute field of view with two arc-second resolution. It has 11 ultraviolet filters and a grating which is used as a grism for full field spectroscopy. In a thirty minute exposure (one orbital night) the limiting magnitude for hot objects is V = 25, or a UV mag of 22 for point sources and a UV mag of 26 for extended sources. Programs are planned for the observation of dust in reflection nebulae H II regions, planetaries, dark nebulae, the diffuse galactic light, and dust in other galaxies are planned. The UIT was integrated into the Astro Spacelab Payload and is scheduled to be launched on the Columbia in Nov. 1989

Fundamental Flaws in Feller's Classical Derivation of Benford's Law

Feller's classic text 'An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications' contains a derivation of the well known significant-digit law called Benford's law. More specifically, Feller gives a sufficient condition ("large spread") for a random variable $X$ to be approximately Benford distributed, that is, for $\log_{10}X$ to be approximately uniformly distributed modulo one. This note shows that the large-spread derivation, which continues to be widely cited and used, contains serious basic errors. Concrete examples and a new inequality clearly demonstrate that large spread (or large spread on a logarithmic scale) does not imply that a random variable is approximately Benford distributed, for any reasonable definition of "spread" or measure of dispersionComment: 7 page

Bayesian Posteriors Without Bayes' Theorem

The classical Bayesian posterior arises naturally as the unique solution of several different optimization problems, without the necessity of interpreting data as conditional probabilities and then using Bayes' Theorem. For example, the classical Bayesian posterior is the unique posterior that minimizes the loss of Shannon information in combining the prior and the likelihood distributions. These results, direct corollaries of recent results about conflations of probability distributions, reinforce the use of Bayesian posteriors, and may help partially reconcile some of the differences between classical and Bayesian statistics.Comment: 6 pages, no figure