Birds observed at Ghubrah Bowl, Saiq Plateau and Jabal Shams, Northern Oman; 19 March-26 April 2005 with comments on their status and population

The current study was part of a series of environment related studies of the Jabal Akhdar sponsored by the Sultan Qaboos University, Al Khoud, Sultanate of Oman. The present study aimed to establish the range, habitat, status and population of breeding species in the area, review the historical perspective and list migrant and visitor species noted during the survey

Flora, fauna and natural habitats recorded during field observations along the Shabab 1 Pipeline (Abqaiq to Rub al Khali) and in the Shaybah Oilfield, Rub al Khali, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia: 24 May - 1 June 2010

During the period 24 May to 1 June 2010 observations were made of the flora, fauna and habitats of two study areas in the Rub al Khali in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Firstly the route of an existing pipeline, known as Shabab 1, which runs from the Jafurah desert south of Abqaiq to a point 211 km west of the Shaybah oil field, a distance of 422 km. Secondly the Shaybah oilfield area (administered by Saudi ARAMCO), paying particular attention to the sites listed at paragraph 6. (See also the map at Fig. 1.) In the following paragraphs the two sites are often identified simply as Shabab and Shaybah

Automated analysis of weighted voting games

Weighted voting games (WVGs) are an important mechanism for modeling scenarios where a group of agents must reach agreement on some issue over which they have different preferences. However, for such games to be effective, they must be well designed. Thus, a key concern for a mechanism designer is to structure games so that they have certain desirable properties. In this context, two such properties are PROPER and STRONG. A game is PROPER if for every coalition that is winning, its complement is not. A game is STRONG if for every coalition that is losing, its complement is not. In most cases, a mechanism designer wants games that are both PROPER and STRONG. To this end, we first show that the problem of determining whether a game is PROPER or STRONG is, in general, NP-hard. Then we determine those conditions (that can be evaluated in polynomial time) under which a given WVG is PROPER and those under which it is STRONG. Finally, for the general NP-hard case, we discuss two different approaches for overcoming the complexity: a deterministic approximation scheme and a randomized approximation method

Alaska Native Technical Assistance and Resource Center: Final Report

Too often, federal and state justice programs directed at rural, predominately Alaska Native villages do not sufficiently coordinate planning and funding, and are not tailored to fit local cultures and needs. The language and institutional contexts of granting agencies and requests for proposals for grants frame justice problems and their solutions in ways that may or may not relate to the experiences of Alaska Native villages. The Alaska Native Technical Resource Center (ANTARC) was designed as a three-year project to improve village capacity to identify problems and educate the university and granting agencies about the nature of their justice problems and the resources needed to implement solutions. The initial group involved the Justice Center and four rural communities — Gulkana, Kotlik, Wainwright, and Yakutat — with representatives from the communities chosen by village leaders. This report examines ANTARC's evolution, considers its implementation, evaluates the results, and presents recommendations for promoting effective change in Alaska Native villages.Bureau of Justice Assistance, United States Department of Justice Award No. 1999-LB-VX-002Introduction / The Evolution of Antarc / Structure of the Project / Implementation / Evaluating Results / Concluding Recommendations / References / Appendix 1: Proceedings of the March 1999 Antarc Workshop / Appendix 2: Proceedings of the November 1999 Antarc Workshop / Appendix 3: Capra Training Materials / Appendix 4: Evaluation Training Workshop Material

Michael Jennings folio

An English-language folio of poetry, entitled Sometime Before Words Perhaps, by Michael Jennings

Effect of Attentional Capture and Cross-Modal Interference in Multisensory Cognitive Processing

Despite considerable research, the effects of common types of noise on verbal and spatial information processing are still relatively unknown. Three experiments, using convenience sampling were conducted to investigate the effect of auditory interference on the cognitive performance of 24 adult men and women during the Stroop test, perception of object recognition and spatial location tasks, and the perception of object size, shape, and spatial location tasks. The data were analyzed using univariate analysis of variance and 1-way multivariate analysis of variance. The Experiment 1 findings indicated reaction time performance for gender and age group was affected by auditory interference between experimental conditions, and recognition accuracy was affected only by experimental condition. The Experiment 2a results showed reaction time performance for recognizing object features was affected by auditory interference between age groups, and recognition accuracy by experimental condition. The Experiment 2b results demonstrated reaction time performance for detecting the spatial location of objects was affected by auditory interference between age groups. In addition, reaction time was affected by the type of interference and spatial location. Further, recognition accuracy was affected by interference condition and spatial location. The Experiment 3 findings suggested reaction time performance for assessing part-whole relationships was affected by auditory interference between age groups. Further, recognition accuracy was affected by interference condition between experimental groups. This study may create social change by affecting the design of learning and workplace environments, the neurological correlates of auditory and visual stimuli, and the pathologies of adults such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Microstructure versus Size: Mechanical Properties of Electroplated Single Crystalline Cu Nanopillars

We report results of uniaxial compression experiments on single-crystalline Cu nanopillars with nonzero initial dislocation densities produced without focused ion beam (FIB). Remarkably, we find the same power-law size-driven strengthening as FIB-fabricated face-centered cubic micropillars. TEM analysis reveals that initial dislocation density in our FIB-less pillars and those produced by FIB are on the order of 10^(14)  m^(-2) suggesting that mechanical response of nanoscale crystals is a stronger function of initial microstructure than of size regardless of fabrication method

An efficient and versatile approach to trust and reputation using hierarchical Bayesian modelling

In many dynamic open systems, autonomous agents must interact with one another to achieve their goals. Such agents may be self-interested and, when trusted to perform an action, may betray that trust by not performing the action as required. Due to the scale and dynamism of these systems, agents will often need to interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. Each agent must therefore be capable of assessing and identifying reliable interaction partners, even if it has no personal experience with them. To this end, we present HABIT, a Hierarchical And Bayesian Inferred Trust model for assessing how much an agent should trust its peers based on direct and third party information. This model is robust in environments in which third party information is malicious, noisy, or otherwise inaccurate. Although existing approaches claim to achieve this, most rely on heuristics with little theoretical foundation. In contrast, HABIT is based exclusively on principled statistical techniques: it can cope with multiple discrete or continuous aspects of trustee behaviour; it does not restrict agents to using a single shared representation of behaviour; it can improve assessment by using any observed correlation between the behaviour of similar trustees or information sources; and it provides a pragmatic solution to the whitewasher problem (in which unreliable agents assume a new identity to avoid bad reputation). In this paper, we describe the theoretical aspects of HABIT, and present experimental results that demonstrate its ability to predict agent behaviour in both a simulated environment, and one based on data from a real-world webserver domain. In particular, these experiments show that HABIT can predict trustee performance based on multiple representations of behaviour, and is up to twice as accurate as BLADE, an existing state-of-the-art trust model that is both statistically principled and has been previously shown to outperform a number of other probabilistic trust models