Physical oceanography

The physical oceanography component of the AMLR program provided the means to identify contributing water masses and environmental influences within the AMLR study area, as well as to log meteorological and sea surface conditions annotated by the ship's position. The instrumentation and data collection programs served as host to the other scientific components of the program. AMLR 96 is the seventh field season for the collaboration of physical measurements with biological studies.Marine Scienc

Helping Junior Lawyers Thrive

There has been increased discussion over the past few years about the mental health of lawyers. Most previous studies have researched the extent and causes of psychological distress in law students and lawyers. There has been less attention on also understanding what helps lawyers to thrive and become happy, healthy and ethical members of the legal profession. Our research project, the Transition to Professional Practice Project, has focused on this latter aspect, looking specifically at Australian lawyers in their first year of practice. This can be a difficult and exciting time, but is always a critical period of discovery and change. We were interested to see how newcomers make the transition from student to legal professional and how they develop their professional identity, in the sense of developing their beliefs and practices about what it means to be a lawyer. Lawyers-to-be are often not given opportunities to explore these issues in law school, sometimes resulting in a collision of expectations and reality when first exposed to legal practice

Solar rejection in laser based underwater communication systems

This article provides a numerical study of the expected improvements in an underwater optical system given by a single-mode laser diode operating within a Fraunhofer line in a coastal water type. The system performance is examined for a silicon PIN direct-detection receiver in the euphotic zone. The solar irradiance, modelled as white noise, is evaluated when using a lithium niobate interference and a birefringent filter with different field-of-view (FOV) characteristics in a clear sky situation. The results of this analysis show the inverse dependence of the signal-to-noise (SNR) on the FOV, along with the significant improvement in the receiver sensitivity given by a narrow optical bandpass filter (OBPF)

The effect of ph and applied electrical potential on oil removal from a solid surface in the presence of four types of surfactant solutions

Effective aqueous-based cleaning depends on the appropriate selection of surfactant(s). and pH conditions. Experiments involving the detachment of oil droplets from a metal surface m the presence of surfactant solutions are undertaken to observe the variation of droplet shape, particularly contact angle, and the time required for droplet removal. In parallel, tests of oil removal from the same metal surface in an industrial ultrasonic bath have been conducted under similar conditions. Similar trends are found for both types of tests, that is, conditions for which droplets detach more quickly also correspond to conditions of greater oil removal in an ultrasonic bath. Experiments of drop removal time and cleaning effectiveness in surfactant solutions of altered pH are conducted to better understand the role surfactants adsorbed at the surface play in the detachment process. Negatively charged oil/aqueous interfaces exhibit more efficient cleaning as well as drop removal kinetics at high surfactant solution pH, while positively charged oil/water interfaces exhibit faster detachment at low pH. Experiments are conducted, in parallel, in which the surface to be cleaned is connected directly to a low voltage power supply. A similar cleaning procedure is performed in which the dependent variable is applied electrical potential. Applied electrical potential ranges from 0 to ±4 volts (current is limited to near zero) with respect to the surfactant solution. Trends indicate that surfactant solutions containing nonionic (Triton X-100) surfactants exhibit better cleaning and faster oil drop detachment as the applied electrical potential increases in the positive direction. Cationic (CTAB) surfactant solutions perform better cleaning as voltage increases in the negative direction. Amonic (SDS) surfactant solutions perform better as voltage increases regardless of the polanty. Tests involving a zwitterionic (Chaps) surfactant support the three previous case trends. The pH and applied electrical potential is interpreted by a mechanistic model focusing on the adsorption of surfactant ions at the aqueous/solid interface and the electrostatic repulsion/attraction to the oil drop

Laser Based Underwater Communication Systems

We report on recent progress in the field of visible light communications including direct modulation of blue laser devices at data rates beyond 10 Gbit/s, and the transmission of 2.5 Gbit/s OOK data through water. We also discuss the advantages of operating with single mode laser devices and matched filtering at the receiver in the context of applications with significant solar background. The system performance for two types of direct-detection receivers, a PIN detector and less conventional silicon Photomultiplier technology will be presented

Why Students Chose to Attend Parkland College

This slide presentation is the result of an ethnography assignment for Anthropology 103. This slide presentation offers some of the reasons provided by Parkland College students for why they chose Parkland. Focuses on athletics and international student population

FireFly Mosaic: A Vision-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networking System

Abstract — With the advent of CMOS cameras, it is now possible to make compact, cheap and low-power image sensors capable of on-board image processing. These embedded vision sensors provide a rich new sensing modality enabling new classes of wireless sensor networking applications. In order to build these applications, system designers need to overcome challanges associated with limited bandwith, limited power, group coordination and fusing of multiple camera views with various other sensory inputs. Real-time properties must be upheld if multiple vision sensors are to process data, com-municate with each other and make a group decision before the measured environmental feature changes. In this paper, we present FireFly Mosaic, a wireless sensor network image processing framework with operating system, networking and image processing primitives that assist in the development of distributed vision-sensing tasks. Each FireFly Mosaic wireless camera consists of a FireFly [1] node coupled with a CMUcam3 [2] embedded vision processor. The FireFly nodes run the Nano-RK [3] real-time operating system and communicate using the RT-Link [4] collision-free TDMA link protocol. Using FireFly Mosaic, we demonstrate an assisted living application capable of fusing multiple cameras with overlapping views to discover and monitor daily activities in a home. Using this application, we show how an integrated platform with support for time synchronization, a collision-free TDMA link layer, an underlying RTOS and an interface to an embedded vision sensor provides a stable framework for distributed real-time vision processing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first wireless sensor networking system to integrate multiple coordinating cameras performing local processing. I

Toxicokinetics of Kava

Kava is traditionally consumed by South Pacific islanders as a drink and became popular in Western society as a supplement for anxiety and insomnia. Kava extracts are generally well tolerated, but reports of hepatotoxicity necessitated an international reappraisal of its safety. Hepatotoxicity can occur as an acute, severe form or a chronic, mild form. Inflammation appears to be involved in both forms and may result from activation of liver macrophages (Kupffer cells), either directly or via kava metabolites. Pharmacogenomics may influence the severity of this inflammatory response

Voice Over Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have traditionally focused on low duty-cycle applications where sensor data are reported periodically in the order of seconds or even longer. This is due to typically slow changes in physical variables, the need to keep node costs low and the goal of extending battery lifetime. However, there is a growing need to support real-time streaming of audio and/or low-rate video even in wireless sensor networks for use in emergency situations and shortterm intruder detection. In this paper, we describe a real-time voice stream-capability in wireless sensor networks and summarize our deployment experiences of voice streaming across a large sensor network of FireFly nodes in an operational coal mine. FireFly is composed of several integrated layers including specialized low-cost hardware, a sensor network operating system, a real-time link layer and network scheduling. We are able to provide efficient support for applications with timing constraints by tightly coupling the network and task scheduling with hardware-based global time synchronization. We use this platform to support 2-way audio streaming concurrently with sensing tasks. For interactive voice, we investigate TDMA-based slot scheduling with balanced bi-directional latency while meeting audio timeliness requirements. Finally, we describe our experimental deployment of 42 nodes in a coal mine, and present measurements of the end-to-end throughput, jitter, packet loss and voice quality