A Crisis Management Guide for Ilalko Elementary School

The current building level emergency procedmes manual for Ilalko Elementary School in the Auburn School District in the State of Washington was reviewed and critiqued. The manual contains the school\u27s emergency preparedness policies and procedmes to be implemented in the event of a disaster. The results of the review showed a need for updating policies and practices at the building level as well as creating additional resources to guide the school should other disasters occur which were not addressed in the current manual. A handbook was also created to increase teacher response effectiveness in the event of an emergency situation

An Empirical Assessment of the Arcpro Visual Magnitude Viewshed Plugin

Numerous viewshed analyses have been developed over the past few decades, but the uptake of these within industry has largely remained stagnant. This project involves ground-truthing one of the more recent viewshed analysis variants (Chamberlain and Meitner 2012, 2015) to assess reliability and application. This viewshed analysis was developed as a plug-in for the ESRI ArcGIS Pro software, making it readily accessible by anyone with an ArcGIS license. The validation of this software was recently conducted using an empirical approach to measure the accuracy of the analysis in the GIS versus real- world. Results demonstrate extremely high validity in controlled conditions, this degree of validity decreased substantially in highly variable terrain. This variability likely stems from measurement controls that are difficult to produce in real-world contexts. In this paper, the analysis, procedures and lessons learned are provided, as well as a call for additional empirical testing of viewshed analyses more broadly

The Regulation of Biological Pollution: Preventing Exotic Species Invasions from Ballast Water Discharged into California Coastal Waters

In Part I of this article, we describe ballast water\u27s use, its contribution to biological invasions, and the technical approaches that could be used to combat the problem. In Part II, we describe opportunities for employing existing laws and regulations to manage ballast discharges in California. We first discuss the limitations of international, federal and state laws that have tried to address ballast discharges of exotic organisms as a shipping issue. We then consider the potential for regulating ballast discharges under federal and state laws aimed at controlling water pollution, protecting wildlife, ensuring the assessment, disclosure and mitigation of environmental impacts, and providing for the planning and management of coastal zone development. While we evaluate these laws in terms of their potential application in California, the federal laws and, in many cases, corresponding state laws could be applied in other coastal regions. We conclude by summarizing how existing regulations may provide a comprehensive overall framework for achieving effective regulation of ballast water discharges

CIDI-Lung-Seg: A Single-Click Annotation Tool for Automatic Delineation of Lungs from CT Scans

Accurate and fast extraction of lung volumes from computed tomography (CT) scans remains in a great demand in the clinical environment because the available methods fail to provide a generic solution due to wide anatomical variations of lungs and existence of pathologies. Manual annotation, current gold standard, is time consuming and often subject to human bias. On the other hand, current state-of-the-art fully automated lung segmentation methods fail to make their way into the clinical practice due to their inability to efficiently incorporate human input for handling misclassifications and praxis. This paper presents a lung annotation tool for CT images that is interactive, efficient, and robust. The proposed annotation tool produces an "as accurate as possible" initial annotation based on the fuzzy-connectedness image segmentation, followed by efficient manual fixation of the initial extraction if deemed necessary by the practitioner. To provide maximum flexibility to the users, our annotation tool is supported in three major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS X). The quantitative results comparing our free software with commercially available lung segmentation tools show higher degree of consistency and precision of our software with a considerable potential to enhance the performance of routine clinical tasks.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to appear in the proceedings of 36th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2014

Stomatopoda (Crustacea: Hoplocarida) from the Shallow, Inshore Waters of the Northern Gulf of Mexico (Apalachicola River, Florida to Port Aransas, Texas)

Six species representing the order Stomatopoda are reported from the shallow, inshore waters (passes, bays, and estuaries) of the northern Gulf of Mexico limited to a depth of 10 m or less, and by the Apalachicola River (Florida) in the east and Port Aransas (Texas) in the west. With the exception of the “live bottom” gonodactylid, Neogonodactylus bredini (Manning), these predatory crustaceans usually inhabit burrows in mud, sand-mud, and sand substrata in coastal and shelf waters. The species treated in this paper are Neogonodactylus bredini (Manning), Lysiosquilla scabricauda (Lamarck), Bigelowina biminiensis (Bigelow), Coronis scolopendra Latreille, Squilla empusa Say, and Gibbesia neglecta (Gibbes). The questionable record of Squilla rugosa Bigelow by Archer (1948) is discussed. A review of the life history, ecology, distribution, and new northern Gulf of Mexico records is provided here for each of these species. Figures and an illustrated key are also presented

Range Extensions and Review of the Caprellid Amphipods (Crustacea: Amphipoda: Caprellidae) from the Shallow, Coastal Waters from the Suwanee River, Florida, to Port Aransas, Texas, with an Illustrated Key

Eight species of the amphipod family Caprellidae sensu Myers and Lowry, 2003 are currently known to occur in the shallow, near shore waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico (GOM), from the Suwannee River, Florida, to Port Aransas, Texas, and to depths of 10 m. They include: Phtisica marina, Hemiaegina minuta, Paracaprella pusilla, Paracaprella tenuis, Deutella incerta, Caprella equilibra, Caprella penantis, and Caprella scaura. Another species, Caprella andreae, is also suspected to occur in this region due to its close association with sea turtles, which nest on the sand beaches of the northern GOM. The occurrence of these 9 species in the northern GOM is discussed; known distributions, new records, synonymies, diagnoses, and remarks on life history and ecology are also presented. In addition, new northern GOM records for 7 of these species are provided along with a simplified identification key

Ecological knowledge, leadership, and the evolution of menopause in killer whales

This is the final version of the article. Available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.There is another record in ORE for this publication: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/16488Classic life-history theory predicts that menopause should not occur because there should be no selection for survival after the cessation of reproduction [1]. Yet, human females routinely live 30 years after they have stopped reproducing [2]. Only two other species-killer whales (Orcinus orca) and short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) [3, 4]-have comparable postreproductive lifespans. In theory, menopause can evolve via inclusive fitness benefits [5, 6], but the mechanisms by which postreproductive females help their kin remain enigmatic. One hypothesis is that postreproductive females act as repositories of ecological knowledge and thereby buffer kin against environmental hardships [7, 8]. We provide the first test of this hypothesis using a unique long-term dataset on wild resident killer whales. We show three key results. First, postreproductively aged females lead groups during collective movement in salmon foraging grounds. Second, leadership by postreproductively aged females is especially prominent in difficult years when salmon abundance is low. This finding is critical because salmon abundance drives both mortality and reproductive success in resident killer whales [9, 10]. Third, females are more likely to lead their sons than they are to lead their daughters, supporting predictions of recent models [5] of the evolution of menopause based on kinship dynamics. Our results show that postreproductive females may boost the fitness of kin through the transfer of ecological knowledge. The value gained from the wisdom of elders can help explain why female resident killer whales and humans continue to live long after they have stopped reproducing.This research was funded by a Natural Environment Research Council grant (NE/K01286X/1) to D.P.C., D.W.F., and M.A.C