An approach to the use of macrophytes for monitoring standing waters

Under the EC Water Framework Directive (WFD), each Member State is required to devise a comprehensive national monitoring programme for surface waters, incorporating hydromorphological, physico-chemical and biological elements. This paper describes one aspect of the biota - the macrophyte flora - to classify standing waters and to monitor their water quality. The evolution of this method is described and suggestions for its future development are made

Adaptive Sentence Boundary Disambiguation

Labeling of sentence boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for many natural language processing tasks, including part-of-speech tagging and sentence alignment. End-of-sentence punctuation marks are ambiguous; to disambiguate them most systems use brittle, special-purpose regular expression grammars and exception rules. As an alternative, we have developed an efficient, trainable algorithm that uses a lexicon with part-of-speech probabilities and a feed-forward neural network. After training for less than one minute, the method correctly labels over 98.5\% of sentence boundaries in a corpus of over 27,000 sentence-boundary marks. We show the method to be efficient and easily adaptable to different text genres, including single-case texts.Comment: This is a Latex version of the previously submitted ps file (formatted as a uuencoded gz-compressed .tar file created by csh script). The software from the work described in this paper is available by contacting [email protected]

Monitoring the Thermal Power of Nuclear Reactors with a Prototype Cubic Meter Antineutrino Detector

In this paper, we estimate how quickly and how precisely a reactor's operational status and thermal power can be monitored over hour to month time scales, using the antineutrino rate as measured by a cubic meter scale detector. Our results are obtained from a detector we have deployed and operated at 25 meter standoff from a reactor core. This prototype can detect a prompt reactor shutdown within five hours, and monitor relative thermal power to three percent within seven days. Monitoring of short-term power changes in this way may be useful in the context of International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Reactor Safeguards Regime, or other cooperative monitoring regimes.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Developing professional HR practice and teaching in the university sector

This submission for the award of Doctor of Professional Studies comprises a collection of the candidate's published work and selected strategy papers with an accompanying context statement. The key methodology used for constructing this submission is reflective practice and represents further developments in the writer's thinking through the process of compiling this context statement. The author has been introduced to recent work by Whitehead and Mcniff(2006) that gives him confidence that he can make this claim for a doctoral level award based on his learning journey thus far. In this sense it marks a new beginning in the way in which he will develop his approach to research. Significantly being able to put the "I" into this work, as demonstrated from page 5 onwards, has had a liberating effect on his writing. The publications presented however demonstrate the employment of a range of methodologies including action research, postal surveys with quantitative analysis, qualitative approaches using structured interviews and focus groups. This statement and the accompanying examples of public works is a narrative that traces the career path of a human resource professional, academic and practitioner as he moves from being a practitioner, to being an academic leader and teacher, to being a senior policy maker and then returning to his current role as an academic and teacher. He shares an emerging body of theory supported by a range of selected publications. The central theme of this account is how an HR practitioner tries to live out his values and beliefs as he seeks to influence the practice and development of both his colleagues and students within a rapidly changing world. Some of these changes come from the external environment, for example, the reducing resources threatening the viability of universities coping with large numbers of students. Other changes are within the writer himself as he moves from being an academic to being a policy maker and demonstrates what Mcniff and Whitehead (2006) would term his "living contradictions". The story tells how he has attempted to address this contradiction through maintaining the integrity of his values by working through a range of issues that are the subject of supporting publications: • How to cope with increasing number of students without compromising quality • How can academics best prepare and support students independent study • How to ensure learning resources are allocated in a fair and equitable way • How to support staff and colleagues in encouraging them to disseminate good practice • How to use case studies as a method for both inquiry and development of practice in the context of supporting the human resource function in small business • How to create HR strategy in a collaborative and inclusive way • How to encourage employment diversity in the small business sector • How to develop rewards for teachers that also have benefits for student learning

A General Expression for Symmetry Factors of Feynman Diagrams

The calculation of the symmetry factor corresponding to a given Feynman diagram is well known to be a tedious problem. We have derived a simple formula for these symmetry factors. Our formula works for any diagram in scalar theory ($\phi^3$ and $\phi^4$ interactions), spinor QED, scalar QED, or QCD.Comment: RevTex 11 pages with 10 figure

Study of radiatively sustained cesium plasmas for solar energy conversion

The results of a study aimed at developing a high temperature solar electric converter are reported. The converter concept is based on the use of an alkali plasma to serve as both an efficient high temperature collector of solar radiation as well as the working fluid for a high temperature working cycle. The working cycle is a simple magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) Rankine cycle employing a solid electrode Faraday MHD channel. Research milestones include the construction of a theoretical model for coupling sunlight in a cesium plasma and the experimental demonstration of cesium plasma heating with a solar simulator in excellent agreement with the theory. Analysis of a solar MHD working cycle in which excimer laser power rather than electric power is extracted is also presented. The analysis predicts a positive gain coefficient on the cesium-xenon excimer laser transition

An Estimation of the Efficient Size of Sugarcane Enterprises for Farmers in Trinidad

This research paper provides an estimation of the efficient size of operation for sugarcane farmers in Trinidad. The estimates were based on a sample of two hundred and twenty-seven farmers selected from a cost of sugarcane production survey. To identify the efficient size of operation the ordinary least square estimation technique was used. The identification of the efficient size of operation allowed a test of the hypothesis that the minimum point on the long run average cost curve was significantly greater than the average enterprise size of six acres. The long run total cost curve was estimated and the cubic functional form provided the best fit based on both the adjusted R2 and the result from the Wald test. The results of the estimation process indicated that the optimal size was 32 acres of sugarcane and that 98% of the farmers operated at less than this size.Cost function, cost elasticity, efficient size, sugar-cane, Trinidad, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Heteroskedasticity-Robust Inference in Finite Samples

Since the advent of heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors, several papers have proposed adjustments to the original White formulation. We replicate earlier findings that each of these adjusted estimators performs quite poorly in finite samples. We propose a class of alternative heteroskedasticity-robust tests of linear hypotheses based on an Edgeworth expansions of the test statistic distribution. Our preferred test outperforms existing methods in both size and power for low, moderate, and severe levels of heteroskedasticity.

Muon Collider Overview: Progress and Future Plans

Besides continued work on the parameters of a 3-4 and 0.5 TeV CoM collider, many studies are now concentrating on a machine near 100 GeV that could be a factory for the s-channel production of Higgs particles. We mention the research on the various components in such muon colliders, starting from the proton accelerator needed to generate pions from a heavy-Z target and proceeding through the phase rotation and decay channel, muon cooling, acceleration, storage in a ring and the collider detector. We also mention theoretical and experimental R&D plans for the next several years that should lead to a better understanding of the design and feasibility issues for all of the components. This note is a summary of a report updating the progress on the R&D since the Feasibility Study of Muon Colliders presented at the Workshop Snowmass'96.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, LaTex EPAC format; to be published Proceedings of the EPAC98 Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, June 1998. Additional information and articles at http://www.cap.bnl.gov/mumu