Who Speaks for the River?: The Oldman River Dam and the Search for Justice by Robert Girvan

Cory T. Shaman reviews Who Speaks for the River?: The Oldman River Dam and the Search for Justice by Robert Girvan

Week 52 Influenza Forecast for the 2012-2013 U.S. Season

This document is another installment in a series of near real-time weekly influenza forecasts made during the 2012-2013 influenza season. Here we present some of the results of forecasts initiated following assimilation of observations for Week 52 (i.e. the forecast begins December 30, 2012) for municipalities in the United States. The forecasts were made on January 4, 2013. Results from forecasts initiated the five previous weeks (Weeks 47-51) are also presented

Achieving Operational Hydrologic Monitoring of Mosquitoborne Disease

West Nile virus transmission in Florida can be monitored by using modeled hydrology

The inverted complex Wishart distribution and its application to spectral estimation

AbstractThe inverted complex Wishart distribution and its use for the construction of spectral estimates are studied. The density, some marginals of the distribution, and the first- and second-order moments are given. For a vector-valued time series, estimation of the spectral density at a collection of frequencies and estimation of the increments of the spectral distribution function in each of a set of frequency bands are considered. A formal procedure applies Bayes theorem, where the complex Wishart is used to represent the distribution of an average of adjacent periodogram values. A conjugate prior distribution for each parameter is an inverted complex Wishart distribution. Use of the procedure for estimation of a 2 × 2 spectral density matrix is discussed

A Team Approach to Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) in Schools

Cortical visual impairment (CVI) is presently the fastest growing cause of visual impairment in children. The influx of children with CVI entering school districts requires Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams to gain expertise about CVI and learn best practices to work with these children. CVI experts agree that a collaborative transdisciplinary team can best serve the complex needs of the children. Written by an occupational therapist, this project designs a CVI manual, A Team Approach to CVI in Schools, which reviews current literature and provides support for client centered, occupational based education for children with CVI. The literature review points to a shortage of research-based guidance for working with children with CVI. Although recent CVI literature offers new strategies for improving the vision of children with CV, this CVI manual fills the need for a school guide that focuses on the children\u27s broad school participation by addressing the transactional components of child, context, occupation, and teacher/therapist in designing effective school programs. The manual strives to build capacity of school IEP teams to work collaboratively and effectively with children with CVI by increasing the teams\u27 knowledge base about CVI and helping the children participate fully in school. Best practices in education for children with CVI are presented in the areas of school evaluation, programming, and student engagement in meaningful activities within daily routines

Generalized Levinson–Durbin sequences, binomial coefficients and autoregressive estimation

AbstractFor a discrete time second-order stationary process, the Levinson–Durbin recursion is used to determine the coefficients of the best linear predictor of the observation at time k+1, given k previous observations, best in the sense of minimizing the mean square error. The coefficients determined by the recursion define a Levinson–Durbin sequence. We also define a generalized Levinson–Durbin sequence and note that binomial coefficients form a special case of a generalized Levinson–Durbin sequence. All generalized Levinson–Durbin sequences are shown to obey summation formulas which generalize formulas satisfied by binomial coefficients. Levinson–Durbin sequences arise in the construction of several autoregressive model coefficient estimators. The least squares autoregressive estimator does not give rise to a Levinson–Durbin sequence, but least squares fixed point processes, which yield least squares estimates of the coefficients unbiased to order 1/T, where T is the sample length, can be combined to construct a Levinson–Durbin sequence. By contrast, analogous fixed point processes arising from the Yule–Walker estimator do not combine to construct a Levinson–Durbin sequence, although the Yule–Walker estimator itself does determine a Levinson–Durbin sequence. The least squares and Yule–Walker fixed point processes are further studied when the mean of the process is a polynomial time trend that is estimated by least squares