The Kyle Mammoth Project: An Archaeological, Paleoecological and Taphonomic Analysis

In 1964 the remains of a Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was unearthed near the small farming community of Kyle, Saskatchewan. The salvage excavation that was conducted by the Natural History Museum of Saskatchewan (now the Royal Saskatchewan Museum) uncovered roughly twenty percent of a single animal which was determined to have died of natural causes twelve thousand years ago. No further analysis was ever conducted on the remains until now. The combination of a radiocarbon date that was obtained in 1964 that concluded a time frame congruent with Clovis occupation in North America and known Clovis occupation within the area surrounding Kyle prompted a more thorough taphonomic analysis to be conducted on the remains. The objective for the analysis was to use the identification of postmortem taphonomic markers such as intentional bone breakage patterns and cutmarks as a proxy for human intervention with the Kyle mammoth. An additional antemortem analysis was included to account for a healed lesion that was discovered on a thoracic vertebra. The cause of the lesion, although not concluded, raises questions as to human association with this particular mammoth as well as a pathological aspect relating to a well-documented phenomenon that occurred in Eurasian Woolly Mammoths. The addition of an osteological analysis sheds light on the species, sex, and age at death of the animal and an archaeological and paleocological background supplements the notion of human and proboscidean interactions by shedding light on the environment surrounding the area of Kyle roughly 12,000 years ago and the possibility of the two species coexisting in southwestern Saskatchewan

NASA-Langley helicopter tower instrumentation systems

Background information is presented for the helicopter rotor test facility, in preface to a more detailed discussion of major subsystems equipment, including error considerations, frequency response, and display instrumentation

Visual comparative case analytics

Criminal Intelligence Analysis (CIA) faces a challenging task in handling high-dimensional data that needs to be investigated with complex analytical processes. State-of-the-art crime analysis tools do not fully support interactive data exploration and fall short of computational transparency in terms of revealing alternative results. In this paper we report our ongoing research into providing the analysts with such a transparent and interactive system for exploring similarities between crime cases. The system implements a computational pipeline together with a visual platform that allows the analysts to interact with each stage of the analysis process and to validate the result. The proposed Visual Analytics (VA) workflow iteratively supports the interpretation of obtained clustering results, the development of alternative models, as well as cluster verification. The visualizations offer a usable way for the analyst to provide feedback to the system and to observe the impact of their interaction

Making machine intelligence less scary for criminal analysts: reflections on designing a visual comparative case analysis tool

A fundamental task in Criminal Intelligence Analysis is to analyze the similarity of crime cases, called CCA, to identify common crime patterns and to reason about unsolved crimes. Typically, the data is complex and high dimensional and the use of complex analytical processes would be appropriate. State-of-the-art CCA tools lack flexibility in interactive data exploration and fall short of computational transparency in terms of revealing alternative methods and results. In this paper, we report on the design of the Concept Explorer, a flexible, transparent and interactive CCA system. During this design process, we observed that most criminal analysts are not able to understand the underlying complex technical processes, which decrease the users' trust in the results and hence a reluctance to use the tool}. Our CCA solution implements a computational pipeline together with a visual platform that allows the analysts to interact with each stage of the analysis process and to validate the result. The proposed Visual Analytics workflow iteratively supports the interpretation of the results of clustering with the respective feature relations, the development of alternative models, as well as cluster verification. The visualizations offer an understandable and usable way for the analyst to provide feedback to the system and to observe the impact of their interactions. Expert feedback confirmed that our user-centred design decisions made this computational complexity less scary to criminal analysts

An Ultra-High-Density, Transcript-Based, Genetic Map of Lettuce.

We have generated an ultra-high-density genetic map for lettuce, an economically important member of the Compositae, consisting of 12,842 unigenes (13,943 markers) mapped in 3696 genetic bins distributed over nine chromosomal linkage groups. Genomic DNA was hybridized to a custom Affymetrix oligonucleotide array containing 6.4 million features representing 35,628 unigenes of Lactuca spp. Segregation of single-position polymorphisms was analyzed using 213 F7:8 recombinant inbred lines that had been generated by crossing cultivated Lactuca sativa cv. Salinas and L. serriola acc. US96UC23, the wild progenitor species of L. sativa The high level of replication of each allele in the recombinant inbred lines was exploited to identify single-position polymorphisms that were assigned to parental haplotypes. Marker information has been made available using GBrowse to facilitate access to the map. This map has been anchored to the previously published integrated map of lettuce providing candidate genes for multiple phenotypes. The high density of markers achieved in this ultradense map allowed syntenic studies between lettuce and Vitis vinifera as well as other plant species

Buoyant Venus station mission feasibility study for 1972 and 1973 launch opportunities. Volume 3 - Configuration definition. Part 2 - Appendixes Final report

Buoyant Venus station mission study for 1972 - 1973 launch period - backup data including atmospheric models, heat shield requirements, etc