The EU is unlikely to embrace shale gas as an alternative to Russian gas imports

The reliance of European states on gas imports from Russia has been one of the key underlying factors shaping the EU’s response to the Ukraine crisis. However could the use of shale gas help to reduce the EU’s energy dependence on Russia? Corey Johnson assesses the varying policy responses in European countries, noting that while some states such as Poland have been vocal in their support for shale gas, it is unlikely to enable a significant shift away from Russian gas in the short-term

Wetlands Area and Embankment Design for Stimulating Duck Nesting Habitat and Success in Sioux County, North Dakota

For this project an embankment will be built in Sioux County, North Dakota, T129N, R85W, and Section 7. The purpose of this embankment is to develop wetlands areas for duck habitat and nesting in south-central North Dakota. The embankment will be constructed from compacted soils taken from two locations that are within a half mile from the proposed embankment location to create a lower transport cost. The embankment will contain a weir that will be approximately 115 feet in length with five feet on each side embedded into the embankment for stability. The weir will be constructed from steel sheet piles and be driven into the ground at a depth of twice the weir’s height. The embankment will inhibit the flow of a small creek located about 1.6 miles west of ND Highway 31, and create up to a 22 acre wetlands area. The size of the wetlands area is dependent on the water level at any given time. This data was calculated in the stage capacity section of this project. The purpose of this report is to construct a final design for the embankment. The environmental/biological, geological, and economical aspects of the site has been assessed. This project will document the hydrological characteristics of the area by discussing about soil and flow rates affected by each soil type. ArcGIS 9 was used for visualizing and creating the site data and area contours used in this report. An inflow hydrograph was calculated using data from the Hydrology Manual for North Dakota to calculate the maximum inflow. The soil and hydrological characteristics of the proposed area where the embankment will be constructed will be collected from the Natural Resources Conservation Service county soil survey website. These data will help in deciding if the area can support a wetlands area successfully. The main concern for the project design is to increase the nesting and habitat areas for ducks. The wetlands area will be constructed to create a habitat for ducks to build nests and live successfully. The wetlands area will include three or four bays located mainly in the corners of the wetland that will create sufficient cover for the ducks. The number and size of the bays will be depended on by the water level. An economic analysis was also conducted to estimate a final cost of the embankment. The embankment is projected to cost approximately $522,000

Taking Care in the Digital Realm: Hmong Story Cloths and the Poverty of Interpretation on HmongEmboridery.org

This essay examines Hmong story cloths exhibited on the HmongEmbroidery.org virtual museum in order to consider 1.) transnational Hmong diasporic experience post-Vietnam, 2.) the problems with interpretation as a critical mode of scholarship seeking mastery, and 3.) the work of digital archives in accounting for displacement and loss. The Hmong, an indigenous group originally living in East Asia, created many of the story cloths exhibited on HmongEmbroidery.org in Thai refugee camps following the Vietnam War, during which they assisted the United States CIA against the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao. Displaced by enemy forces from their homes through violent means and surviving in precarious conditions, Hmong women embroidered their stories onto cloth. Because Hmong language did not become an alphabet until the 1950s, and because traumatic accounts often exist outside of language, the story cloths largely remain uninterpretable, even as they account for Hmong experience. Interpreting the story cloths, in most cases, would only project exterior frames of reference onto their meanings. In this way, Hmong story cloths account for Hmong experience, history, and displacement while revealing the poverty of interpretation when taken up as a critical reading strategy assuming mastery. This essay reads closely in a descriptive mode, showing how HmongEmbroidery.org’s story cloth exhibits demonstrate the importance and urgency of digital humanities projects that archive experiences of displacement and make them accessible to transnational audiences vis-à-vis the internet

The Instructional Practices of K-8 Teachers with Interactive Whiteboards: A Descriptive Case Study

The interactive whiteboard (IWB) has become an established component in K-12 classrooms. Although multimedia features are incorporated in interactive whiteboards, research has provided mixed results on teachers\u27 strategic use. This study addressed the following questions: 1) What instructional strategies were observed in a sample of classrooms equipped with IWB technology and how they compared to CREP norms?; 2) How were the interactive whiteboards observed being used in the sample classrooms implementing IWB technology?; and 3) What levels of concern, attitudes, and perceptions did teachers indicate toward IWB implementation and use in the sample classrooms? Strategies used by 19 teachers to implement the affordances of interactive whiteboard technology into thier teaching practices were examined. Levels of teacher concerns towards the implementation of IWB technology were also identified. Multi-class observations were used to capture the overall use of instructional strategies by teachers with interactive whiteboards. Teacher demographics included grade levels, subject areas anda years of teaching experience. Observation and survey methods were used to collect data. The School Observation Measure (SOM), Stages of Concerns Questionnaire (SoCQ), IWBTeacher Activity Observation Tool, and a Teacher Evaluation Survey were used to gather quantitative and qualitative data. Descriptive statistics were calculated for all variables. Raw scores were converted to percentages to develop SoCQ profiles. Results indicated that levels of student engagement were low when compared to normed data. Teachers in initial stages of IWB implementation used direct instruction and acted as coach/facilitator as instructional strategies more often than other strategies. During the initial stages, basic office applications were used more often than the unique affordances of IWB systems. Intensity levels of concerns toward collaboration during the initial stages of IWB adoption were high. In addition, the emergence and resolution of concerns about IWB appear to follow development patterns indicated inprevious research studies

Cladistically modeling Oldowan Assemblages: Preliminary insights and issues

Phylogenetics are useful for modeling cultural evolutionary relationships between taxa and can be used to reveal patterns of change reflected in the archaeological record. Lithic technology represents an ideal subject for phylogenetic analyses of culture because of its ubiquitous use in hunter-gatherer and early hominin populations, its ecological and memetic malleability, and the vast literature regarding the roughly 3.3 million-year-old lithic archaeological record. The Lower Paleolithic (~3.3-0.6 Ma) archaeological record provides important insight into early hominin evolution and behavior regarding landscape use, migration, and cognitive complexity. Although Lower Paleolithic stone-tools are less morphologically diverse than subsequent technologies, a considerable amount of measurable variation can be found within and between Lower Paleolithic assemblages. There have been relatively few attempts to phylogenetically model Lower Paleolithic technologies, and in the case of Oldowan (Mode 1) core-tools there have been no issued attempts. The core-tool component of the Oldowan Technological Complex represents one of the best targets for measuring behavioral variation in stone-tool production and cultural evolutionary relationships over the 800,000 year period (2.6-1.8 Ma) of the Lower Pleistocene before the advent of the Acheulean technological complex. This poster presents the results of a phylogenetic analysis which models data from fifteen (15) Mode 1 stone-tool assemblages from Africa and Eurasia. These preliminary results illustrate a low level of homoplasy and show that Oldowan core-tools from discrete assemblages can act as meaningful taxa in phylogenetic analyses. This poster also highlights several issues with phylogenetically modeling Lower Paleolithic technology and suggests future ways to improve upon this by including the use of more complex Lower Paleolithic typological systems, and the creation of a comprehensive, organized and universally available Lower Paleolithic information database

Peer Attention Modeling with Head Pose Trajectory Tracking Using Temporal Thermal Maps

Human head pose trajectories can represent a wealth of implicit information such as areas of attention, body language, potential future actions, and more. This signal is of high value for use in Human-Robot teams due to the implicit information encoded within it. Although team-based tasks require both explicit and implicit communication among peers, large team sizes, noisy environments, distance, and mission urgency can inhibit the frequency and quality of explicit communication. The goal for this thesis is to improve the capabilities of Human-Robot teams by making use of implicit communication. In support of this goal, the following hypotheses are investigated: ● Implicit information about a human subject’s attention can be reliably extracted with software by tracking the subject’s head pose trajectory, and ● Attention can be represented with a 3D temporal thermal map for implicitly determining a subject’s Objects Of Interest (OOIs). These hypotheses are investigated by experimentation with a new tool for peer attention modeling by Head Pose Trajectory Tracking using Temporal Thermal Maps (HPT4M). This system allows a robot Observing Agent (OA) to view a human teammate and temporally model their Regions Of Interest (ROIs) by generating a 3D thermal map based on the subject’s head pose trajectory. The findings in this work are that HPT4M can be used by an OA to contribute to a team search mission by implicitly discovering a human subject’s OOI type, mapping the item’s location within the searched space, and labeling the item’s discovery state. Furthermore, this work discusses some of the discovered limitations of this technology and hurdles that must be overcome before implementing HPT4M in a reliable real-world system. Finally, the techniques used in this work are provided as an open source Robot Operating System (ROS) node at github.com/HPT4M with the intent that it will aid other developers in the robotics community with improving Human-Robot teams. Furthermore, the proofs of principle and tools developed in this thesis are a foundational platform for deeper investigation in future research on improving Human-Robot teams via implicit communication techniques

Continuity properties of vectors realizing points in the classical field of values

For an $n$-by-$n$ matrix $A$, let $f_A$ be its "field of values generating function" defined as $f_A\colon x\mapsto x^*Ax$. We consider two natural versions of the continuity, which we call strong and weak, of $f_A^{-1}$ (which is of course multi-valued) on the field of values $F(A)$. The strong continuity holds, in particular, on the interior of $F(A)$, and at such points $z \in \partial F(A)$ which are either corner points, belong to the relative interior of flat portions of $\partial F(A)$, or whose preimage under $f_A$ is contained in a one-dimensional set. Consequently, $f_A^{-1}$ is continuous in this sense on the whole $F(A)$ for all normal, 2-by-2, and unitarily irreducible 3-by-3 matrices. Nevertheless, we show by example that the strong continuity of $f_A^{-1}$ fails at certain points of $\partial F(A)$ for some (unitarily reducible) 3-by-3 and (unitarily irreducible) 4-by-4 matrices. The weak continuity, in its turn, fails for some unitarily reducible 4-by-4 and untiarily irreducible 6-by-6 matrices.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Linear and Multilinear Algebra 201

Learning the Lay of the Land: Defining and Documenting Where Instruction Happens in Order to Target Program Improvement

Before libraries can demonstrate impact and value of instructional offerings on a large scale, it behooves us to be able to articulate which students receive instruction, with what frequency and in which courses. The WSU Libraries historically maintained records of instruction to assist in statistical reporting to ARL; the approach however did not assist in identifying targets for program improvement. As a result the Library Instruction Session Database (LISD) an open access web application, was designed to assist in recording of instructional offerings, providing visualizations and tabulations of the colleges, departments, and courses reached, aimed at assisting in analysis of instructional reach