The Impact of a Summer Workshop: Staff Orientation at Mesa Community College

The Arizona Collaborative for Excellence in the Preparation of Teachers (ACEPT) is a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project to reform teacher preparation in Arizona. One of the major modes for initiating both collaboration and reform between and among university and community college staff has been the Summer Faculty Enhancement Workshops developed and offered by ACEPT co-principal investigators each summer since 1996. The summer of 1999 featured five workshops, one of which was the Geology Summer Workshop which brought participants into close contact with eighteen reformed practices appropriate for large lecture style classes. One of the nineteen participants was Ray Grant, Department of Science Chair at Mesa Community College, one of the collaborating institutions in ACEPT. This report describes what Ray, as department chair, did as a follow-up to the summer workshop. What occurred completely transformed the Department of Science staff orientation meeting held just prior to the fall semester. Some of the surprising events are described in this report. The transformation of the staff meeting not only speaks to the impact of the Geology Summer Workshop, but also suggests creative roles for staff orientation meetings in community college settings

Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Larval Fish Mortality and Vertical Chlorophyll Structures: Reexamination of the Stable Ocean Hypothesis in the Southern California Current

The natural mortality of fishes is an important component for understanding population dynamics. The larval stages of pelagic fishes living in the open ocean are particularly vulnerable to high rates of mortality, and fluctuations in these rates are thought to exert a large influence on the number of fish maturing into the spawning population. Early stage larval fishes are thought to undergo a critical period after hatching when they must find food or succumb to starvation. While the availability of suitable food for larval fishes is, on average, too low in the open ocean to support survival, patchy distributions of planktonic food can be vital habitat. The stable ocean hypothesis describes how wind mixing can influence this habitat through dilution of plankton patches and increase the mortality of larval fishes. In this dissertation, I reexamined the stable ocean hypothesis from three perspectives to understand how it might influence several key components of the California Current Ecosystem. First, I calculated larval mortality rates for five fishes (northern anchovy, Pacific sardine, Pacific hake, Pacific mackerel, and jack mackerel) from 1979 to 2015. Then I compared the mortality rates to indices of storm events and calm periods as a proxy for water column mixing and planktonic patchiness. Contrary to expectations, storm events did not negatively influence the survival of any of these species. In fact, mortality for Pacific hake decreased with an increased number of storms. Next, I examined the effect that storm events had on the vertical distribution of chlorophyll layers. I found that storms tended to decrease the occurrence of high-concentration chlorophyll layers in the water column. Finally, changes to the planktonic community composition within the chlorophyll layer was assessed. Significant variability associated with years and regions was found among sampled community compositions. Furthermore, a proxy for larval fish food exhibited considerable variability; however, the variability was not explained by the region, season, or year. Moreover, there were two peaks in biomass much higher the median value of the food proxy biomass and these events were dominated by potentially noxious algal species that may have negative implications for larval fish survival. Overall, evidence was found to support the notion that winds may influence the plankton communities larval fish rely upon, but, little support was found for a direct link to larval mortality. The stable ocean hypothesis may be important for fish recruitment in the California Current Ecosystem, but its influence appeared to be minimal on seasonal, regional, and interannual scales

Using sources of opportunity to compensate for receiver mismatch in HF arrays

© 2001 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.The spatial processing performance of adaptive sensor arrays is often limited by the nonidentical frequency responses of the receivers in the array over the passband of interest. Addressed here is the problem of estimating digital compensation for mismatches between receiver passbands in high frequency (HF) antenna arrays using interference sources of opportunity. A mathematical model of ionospherically-propagated multipath HF interference is used to develop an adaptive algorithm which estimates the receiver frequency response corrections for each receiver. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is experimentally demonstrated and compared against (1) a commonly used least squares technique, and (2) a highly accurate calibration system using data collected by the receiving antenna array of the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar near Alice Springs in central AustraliaFabrizio, G.A.; Gray, D.A.; Turley, M.D

Suicide and self-harm in Britain: researching risk and resilience using UK surveys

Aim The main aim of this study was to raise awareness of surveys that could be used to inform self-harm and suicide prevention work. We asked: What UK survey datasets are available for research? What aspects of people’s lives are associated with self-harm and attempted suicide? How do statistical findings resonate with people’s lived experience? What implications do they see? Findings Survey analyses revealed that risk factors for self-harm are wide ranging and include: Mental health Physical health and health behaviours Social relationships Stressful events Employment and financial circumstances Identity and demographics Many different factors are independently associated with self-harm. There is a dose relationship, with more exposure to a factor linked with increased risk. Risks are cumulative that is, exposure to multiple factors is associated with greater risk. Through facilitated consultation, men with lived experience, bereaved family members, and practitioners identified recommendations for responding to suicidal distress in men. These related to the following three main areas: 1. Recognising need: who is ‘ill enough’? Permission - men said that they often did not know they were entitled to help Ask - people who outwardly appear to be functioning may not be Persistence - ask and offer help more than once. 2. Facilitating access: right words, time and place What is available - support is needed with ongoing stress as well as for crises Find the words - men wanted examples of how to ask for help Allow time - employers expect recovery to be swift, some men felt rushed to come off medications or were discharged from services they still needed. 3. Adjusting delivery: equal engagement Power - some were uncomfortable with service dynamics, preferring peer support Every service contact counts - negative contacts had particular impact Safe spaces - may be different for men and women. Methods There were three strands of work: Secondary analysis of nine survey series, spanning more than twenty years Linkage of 144,000 survey participants to information on whether they were alive in 2013 and whether they had taken their own life Facilitated consultation, through depth interviews with people with lived experience

Order estimation and discrimination between stationary and time-varying (TVAR) autoregressive models

Copyright © 2007 IEEEFor a set of T independent observations of the same N-variate correlated Gaussian process, we derive a method of estimating the order of an autoregressive (AR) model of this process, regardless of its stationary or time-varying nature. We also derive a test to discriminate between stationary AR models of order m,AR(m), and time-varying autoregressive models of order m,TVAR(m). We demonstrate that within this technique the number T of independent identically distributed data samples required for order estimation and discrimination just exceeds the maximum possible order mmax, which in many cases is significantly fewer than the dimension of the problem NYuri I. Abramovich, Nicholas K. Spencer, and Michael D. E. Turle

A Novel Technique for the Simultaneous Collection of Reflection and Transmission Data from Thin Films in the Extreme Ultraviolet

Studies of thin films in the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) are difficult given that most materials readily absorb photons of these energies. By depositing a thin film of the material of interest on a silicon photodiode, transmission measurements can be made throughout the EUV. If the measurements are made in a range of low absorption, the extinction coefficient, k, can be found with relative ease. However, if the material’s absorption is considerable, reflection measurements are needed to supplement the transmission data in order to find the optical constants n and k. The technique developed allows for reflection and transmission measurements to be taken simultaneously, which combined, account for all of the measurable photons from the original beam: (those which cannot be counted are photons absorbed into the thin film material). Also, the technique presented allows for data to be collected from practically all angles of incidence. This technique has been applied to a thin film of scandium oxide (d=65 nm), with measurements taken over wavelengths from 2.5-25 nm, and at angles of incidence 12 degrees from grazing to normal

Time-varying autoregressive (TVAR) models for multiple radar observations

©2007 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.We consider the adaptive radar problem where the properties of the (nonstationary) clutter signals can be estimated using multiple observations of radar returns from a number of sufficiently homogeneous range/azimuth resolution cells. We derive a method for approximating an arbitrary Hermitian covariance matrix by a time-varying autoregressive model of order m, TVAR(m), that is based on the Dym-Gohberg band-matrix extension technique which gives the unique TVAR(m) model for any nondegenerate covariance matrix. We demonstrate that the Dym-Gohberg transformation of the sample covariance matrix gives the maximum-likelihood (ML) estimate of the TVAR(m) covariance matrix. We introduce an example of TVAR(m) clutter modeling for high-frequency over-the-horizon radar that demonstrates its practical importanceYuri I. Abramovich, Nicholas K. Spencer, and Michael D. E. Turle

The Effects of Oxidation on the Refractive Index of Uranium Thin Films in the Extreme Ultraviolet

We measured the transmittance and reflectance of two samples in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The samples were prepared with approximately 20 nm of UOx with one reactively sputtered onto a diode, and one allowed to oxidize naturally on an identical diode. Fitting the reflectance data to the Parratt model yielded a more precise thickness of the UOx film. This thickness combined with a simple analysis of the transmission measurements provides estimates for the imaginary part of the index of refraction for UOx at approximately every tenth of a nanometer from about 3 nm to 30 nm with emphasis in the 12- to 13-nm range. Using these values, a first approximation for the real part of the refractive index has also been calculated. These values provide researchers with information for modeling, design, and fabrication of optical systems in the extreme ultraviolet

Geology Is: A Geosciences Program for High School Students

Project Geology Is arose out of a desire to fill an apparent gap in science education at the secondary level. It was noted that, over the years, the traditional secondary science sequence of biology, chemistry, and physics has several very weak aspects