THE NEW CARISSA SHIPWRECK: AESTHETIC IMPACT ON COASTAL RECREATION

This paper uses a combination of techniques, including a stated-preference survey, random utility model, visitor count study, and benefits transfer, to estimate the aesthetic impact of the New Carissa shipwreck on coastal recreation. To our knowledge, this is the first study ever conducted on the recreation impacts of a shipwreck.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

A Membrane Approach to CO2 Capture

For the past eight years, Membrane Technology and Research, Inc. (MTR) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, has been developing membrane technology to capture CO2 from power plant flue gas. A 20 ton/day test system has been built and operated at two field sites. The technology is moving to the 200 ton/day (10 MWe) demonstration scale. A block diagram of the MTR process is shown in Figure 1. One innovation of this process is the use of a two-step membrane design where the second step uses a membrane operating with air sweep to selectively recycle CO2 to the boiler. The use of combustion air to provide driving force for CO2 separation significantly reduces the energy cost. Because the air to the boiler already contains CO2, the CO2 concentration in the flue gas leaving the boiler increases from 13% CO2 to as much as 20% CO2. The removal rate required by the first step membrane is then reduced and the concentration of CO2 in the membrane permeate is increase to the 60 to 75% range. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

I\u27d Rather Dance Outside : A Phenomenological Examination of Youth Experiences in Outdoor, Noncompetitive Physical Activity

Research has shown that youth with low levels of fitness or little interest in organized sports and traditional physical education are more likely to participate in noncompetitive outdoor physical activity. However, little is known about what influences youths’ decisions to participate in these activities. This study examined rural young adolescents’ experiences of participating in noncompetitive outdoor physical activity. In depth qualitative interviews were conducted with young adolescents aged 11-13 years (N = 24) from one rural middle school to elicit detailed descriptions of experiences of participation in outdoor physical activities. Interview transcripts were analyzed inductively and emergent themes related to young adolescents’ participation in outdoor, noncompetitive physical activity were identified. Twelve themes were categorized as either respondents’ relationship with the outdoors, activity preferences, and external conditions that determine participation. The results of the study indicate the presence of a complex dynamic relationship of social and physical environmental factors influencing young adolescents’ participation in outdoor activities. These include parental and peer influence, personal choice and enjoyment, spending time outdoors, appreciation for nature, availability of equipment, and previous experiences of participation. More research is needed to corroborate the results of the study and to better understand youths’ preferences for noncompetitive versus competitive physical activity

Building an Academic Community SmallSat Program

The US Coast Guard Academy (CGA), which educates future officers for service in the US Coast Guard, is developing a multifaceted program in SmallSats. The CGA space initiative includes undergraduate courses, such as a recently-created Remote Sensing course. It incorporates Virginia Space\u27s ThinSat Educational Program, providing hands-on experience in designing, building, and testing miniature satellites through space mission engineering; this involves collaboration between Science and Engineering and is extended to local high schools through their participation in SmallSat projects with CGA faculty and students. An important addition to the CGA space initiative is an MC3 ground station atop the Science Department building at CGA. It will be used to train cadets in satellite operations and ground station hardware, and to acquire data from satellites, allowing for training in cyber security and data analysis, and for use in student and faculty research projects. Sequential year-long senior student capstone projects in the Engineering Department to design, build, and test CubeSats, including new components and innovations, have already begun and will continue. Additional capstone projects involving CubeSats sensors, the use of UAVs, and remote sensing data analysis, including data from the CGA ground station, are planned in the Science Department with the 2020 implementation of a revised Science major

XMM-Newton Archival Study of the ULX Population in Nearby Galaxies

We present the results of an archival XMM-Newton study of the bright X-ray point sources (L_X > 10^38 erg/s) in 32 nearby galaxies. From our list of approximately 100 point sources, we attempt to determine if there is a low-state counterpart to the Ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) population, searching for a soft-hard state dichotomy similar to that known for Galactic X-ray binaries and testing the specific predictions of the IMBH hypothesis. To this end, we searched for "low-state" objects, which we defined as objects within our sample which had a spectrum well fit by a simple absorbed power law, and "high-state" objects, which we defined as objects better fit by a combined blackbody and a power law. Assuming that ``low-state'' objects accrete at approximately 10% of the Eddington luminosity (Done & Gierlinski 2003) and that "high-state" objects accrete near the Eddington luminosity we further divided our sample of sources into low and high state ULX sources. We classify 16 sources as low-state ULXs and 26 objects as high-state ULXs. As in Galactic black hole systems, the spectral indices, Gamma, of the low-state objects, as well as the luminosities, tend to be lower than those of the high-state objects. The observed range of blackbody temperatures for the high state is 0.1-1 keV, with the most luminous systems tending toward the lowest temperatures. We therefore divide our high-state ULXs into candidate IMBHs (with blackbody temperatures of approximately 0.1 keV) and candidate stellar mass BHs (with blackbody temperatures of approximately 1.0 keV). A subset of the candidate stellar mass BHs have spectra that are well-fit by a Comptonization model, a property similar of Galactic BHs radiating in the "very-high" state near the Eddington limit.Comment: 54 pages, submitted to ApJ (March 2005), accepted (May 2006); changes to organization of pape

SmallSat Platform Development for Coast Guard Academy Collaborative Space-Based Research

Collaborations utilizing small spacecraft in near earth orbit between the U. S. Coast Guard Academy (CGA), Naval Research Lab (NRL), the U. S. Naval Academy (USNA), and the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) have initiated scientific and engineering space-based experiments. Sourced opportunities like the VaSpace ThinSat missions have provided a platform for payload, sensor, and experiment development that would have otherwise been resource prohibitive. We have constructed an impedance probe payload for launch in Fall 2020 derived from the existing ‘Space PlasmA Diagnostic suitE’ (SPADE) mission operating from NASA’s International Space Station. Currently both space and laboratory plasmas are investigated with AC impedance measurements using a radio frequency antenna. Plasma electron density data collected from the ThinSat will however use an innovative surface-mounted dipole antenna to gather the required sheath-plasma and plasma resonance information. On that same launch, a compact multispectral ‘Pixel Sensor’ with a 450 nm – 1000 nm spectral range will add to the existing Inertial Motion Unit, Temperature Sensor, Infrared Sensor, and Energetic Particle Detector baselined in previous launches. Our engineering team has begun to design, build, and test a solar panel deployment and de-orbiting mechanism for a CubeSat with the USNA’s Aerospace Engineering Department that utilizes a miniature motor for deployment actuation. For the motor to produce the required torque, a gear ratio of 20:1 is necessary. Impedance probe optimization, de-orbiting mechanism automation, and data collection obstacles, solutions, and procedures will be reported

Using the Forest to See the Trees: Exploiting Context for Visual Object Detection and Localization

Recognizing objects in images is an active area of research in computer vision. In the last two decades, there has been much progress and there are already object recognition systems operating in commercial products. However, most of the algorithms for detecting objects perform an exhaustive search across all locations and scales in the image comparing local image regions with an object model. That approach ignores the semantic structure of scenes and tries to solve the recognition problem by brute force. In the real world, objects tend to covary with other objects, providing a rich collection of contextual associations. These contextual associations can be used to reduce the search space by looking only in places in which the object is expected to be; this also increases performance, by rejecting patterns that look like the target but appear in unlikely places. Most modeling attempts so far have defined the context of an object in terms of other previously recognized objects. The drawback of this approach is that inferring the context becomes as difficult as detecting each object. An alternative view of context relies on using the entire scene information holistically. This approach is algorithmically attractive since it dispenses with the need for a prior step of individual object recognition. In this paper, we use a probabilistic framework for encoding the relationships between context and object properties and we show how an integrated system provides improved performance. We view this as a significant step toward general purpose machine vision systems.United States. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NEGI-1582-04-0004)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Grant Number N00014-06-1-0734)National Science Foundation (U.S.). (Contract IIS-0413232)National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowshi