Mechanical Properties Of Sediment Determine Burrowing Success And Influence Distribution Of Two Lugworm Species

We apply new perspectives on how organisms burrow by examining the association of in situ variation in sediment mechanical properties with burrowing ability and species distribution of two sympatric lugworms, Abarenicola pacifica and Abarenicola claparedi. We quantified the sediment\u27s resistance to penetration and its grain size distribution at sites inhabited by each species. Abarenicola pacifica individuals were found in significantly harder to penetrate, more heterogeneous sediments. We compared worm burrowing ability using reciprocal transplant experiments. Worms from firmer sediments, A. pacifica, were able to make successful steep burrows in sediments characteristic of either species. In contrast, A. claparedi individuals often failed to complete successful burrows in the firmer A. pacifica sediment. To examine how morphological differences could explain these patterns, we compared body wall musculature and measured how well individuals support their own bodies when draped over a cantilever. Lugworms from the firmer sediment had thicker body wall musculature and held their bodies more rigidly than did worms from softer sediments. Additionally, we observed subtle differences in the papillae on the proboscises\u27 surfaces, which could affect worm–sediment interactions, but we found no differences in the chaetae of the two species. Abarenicola claparedi produced more mucus, which could be important in shoring up burrow walls in their shifting, sandy habitat. This study presents the first example of using field-based experiments to determine how sediment mechanical properties and worm burrowing ability could act to determine organismal distribution. Our findings have broader ecological implications because of the role of lugworms as ecosystem engineers

Empirical and modeled synoptic cloud climatology of the Arctic Ocean

A daily climatology of the atmospheric circulation of the Arctic and the associated cloud conditions were determined. These are used for comparisons with the variability of general circulation model, generated circulation, and cloud cover for the same region

Scalable Named Entity Identification in Classical Studies

The Perseus Project and the Collections and Archives of Tufts University propose to develop infrastructure for finding references to particular people and places from classical antiquity in several ancient and modern languages in primary and secondary source collections. We will offer and publish open-source, stand alone services and Fedora repository disseminators for searching, browsing, and visualizing entities within the Tufts Digital Library. Under a creative commons license, we will publish knowledge sources such as: linguistic data to identify forms of the most common 60,000 proper classical names in seven languages; knowledge base of the 30,000 people and places most prominent in texts; indices associating c. 200,000 passages with particular entities and an association network of 500,000 tagged names for named entity identification systems; automatically generated index of classical people and places identified in a 1 billion-word testbed of both scholarly and general cultural documents

New methods for working with old languages: Corpus Linguistics and the future of Textual Scholarship

We are seeking DFG/NEH support to allow us to host workshops in the US in the summer of 2009 and in Germany in the summer of 2010 in order to explore the application of emerging analytical technologies to classics in particular and the humanities in general. These workshops will focus not only on emerging services (such as named entity recognition, syntactic and morphological analysis, text mining) and knowledge structures (such as domain-specific ontologies), but on the new forms of scholarly knowledge and intellectual analysis that arise as a result. The 2009 workshop will produce a series of papers that document the state of language technologies in the field of classical philology and propose a roadmap for a more general cyberinfrastructure for the study of historical linguistic sources. These papers will circulate during the 2009-10 academic year and lay the foundation for the 2010 workshop in Germany, which will engage other humanities disciplines

Derived Equivalences of K3 Surfaces and Twined Elliptic Genera

We use the unique canonically-twisted module over a certain distinguished super vertex operator algebra---the moonshine module for Conway's group---to attach a weak Jacobi form of weight zero and index one to any symplectic derived equivalence of a projective complex K3 surface that fixes a stability condition in the distinguished space identified by Bridgeland. According to work of Huybrechts, following Gaberdiel--Hohenegger--Volpato, any such derived equivalence determines a conjugacy class in Conway's group, the automorphism group of the Leech lattice. Conway's group acts naturally on the module we consider. In physics the data of a projective complex K3 surface together with a suitable stability condition determines a supersymmetric non-linear sigma model, and supersymmetry preserving automorphisms of such an object may be used to define twinings of the K3 elliptic genus. Our construction recovers the K3 sigma model twining genera precisely in all available examples. In particular, the identity symmetry recovers the usual K3 elliptic genus, and this signals a connection to Mathieu moonshine. A generalization of our construction recovers a number of the Jacobi forms arising in umbral moonshine. We demonstrate a concrete connection to supersymmetric non-linear K3 sigma models by establishing an isomorphism between the twisted module we consider and the vector space underlying a particular sigma model attached to a certain distinguished K3 surface.Comment: 62 pages including 7 pages of tables; updated references and minor editing in v.2; to appear in Research in the Mathematical Science

The Moonshine Module for Conway's Group

We exhibit an action of Conway's group---the automorphism group of the Leech lattice---on a distinguished super vertex operator algebra, and we prove that the associated graded trace functions are normalized principal moduli, all having vanishing constant terms in their Fourier expansion. Thus we construct the natural analogue of the Frenkel--Lepowsky--Meurman moonshine module for Conway's group. The super vertex operator algebra we consider admits a natural characterization, in direct analogy with that conjectured to hold for the moonshine module vertex operator algebra. It also admits a unique canonically-twisted module, and the action of the Conway group naturally extends. We prove a special case of generalized moonshine for the Conway group, by showing that the graded trace functions arising from its action on the canonically-twisted module are constant in the case of Leech lattice automorphisms with fixed points, and are principal moduli for genus zero groups otherwise.Comment: 54 pages including 11 pages of tables; minor revisions in v2, submitte

Working with Text in a Digital Age

This Institute will provide 30 participants with three weeks in which (1) to develop hands on experience with TEI-XML, (2) to apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the Humanities, and (3) to rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists (e.g., an expansion in opportunities for tangible contributions and significant research by undergraduates, new collaborations that transcend boundaries of language and culture, and increased opportunities for the general public both to contribute to our understanding of the past). A two-day conference on the theme of the Institute will then follow in the summer of 2013 with an open call for contributions and will provide both a venue for and a challenge to the issues/ideas raised during the initial Institute and their importance for the digital humanities

Appendix - Some spectroscopic observations of the interaction between a plasma wind and a dipole magnetic field

Spectroscopic studies on seeded plasma interaction with magnetic dipole fiel

Handbook for the estimation of microwave propagation effects: Link calculations for earth-space paths (path loss and noise estimation)

A single model for a standard of comparison for other models when dealing with rain attenuation problems in system design and experimentation is proposed. Refinements to the Global Rain Production Model are incorporated. Path loss and noise estimation procedures as the basic input to systems design for earth-to-space microwave links operating at frequencies from 1 to 300 GHz are provided. Topics covered include gaseous absorption, attenuation by rain, ionospheric and tropospheric scintillation, low elevation angle effects, radome attenuation, diversity schemes, link calculation, and receiver noise emission by atmospheric gases, rain, and antenna contributions

Adaptive processing for LANDSAT data

Analytical and test results on the use of adaptive processing on LANDSAT data are presented. The Kalman filter was used as a framework to contain different adapting techniques. When LANDSAT MSS data were used all of the modifications made to the Kalman filter performed the functions for which they were designed. It was found that adaptive processing could provide compensation for incorrect signature means, within limits. However, if the data were such that poor classification accuracy would be obtained when the correct means were used, then adaptive processing would not improve the accuracy and might well lower it even further