Trust and influence in the Gulf of Mexico's fishery public management network

© 2019 by the authors. Sustainable fishery management is a complex multi-sectoral challenge requiring substantial interagency coordination, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. While scholars of public management network theory and natural resource management have identified trust as one of the key ideational network properties that facilitates such interaction, relatively few studies have operationalized and measured the multiple dimensions of trust and their influence on collaboration. This article presents the results of an exploratory study examining the Gulf of Mexico fishery management network comprised of more than 30 stakeholder organizations. Using an empirically validated survey instrument, the distribution of four types of trust, three gradations of influence, and the degree of formality and informality in actor communications were assessed across the fishery public management network. The analysis reveals generally low levels of interorganizational procedural trust and a high degree of network fragmentation along the international border. Civil servants based at U.S. organizations reported nearly no interactions with Mexican agencies, and vice versa. Rational (calculative) trust was the most important in bringing about reported change in other organizations, while dispositional distrust and affnitive (relational) trust also had significant effects. The results suggest that, although transactional interorganizational relationships prevail in Gulf of Mexico fishery governance, well-developed professional relationships contribute meaningfully to the reported success of public fishery network management and warrants further policy attention in order to help ensure sustainability

Assessing the influence of international environmental treaty secretariats using a relational network approach

The influential role of international treaty secretariats in coordinating bureaucracies across jurisdictional boundaries has been highlighted in recent years. While we now better understand how their influence occurs, the field still faces a substantial difficulty in answering the basic quantitative question of “how influential?” By employing network analysis, we devised and tested a survey to quantify secretariat influence within an international environmental regime. We applied the survey tool to two transboundary fisheries governance networks in North America and here focus on the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (GLFC) as our primary case study. The results demonstrate a high ability of treaty secretariat to influence the management decisions of federal and state/provincial agencies. Primary interview data collected with the GLFC secretariat staff helps explain this finding. This study advances the reconceptualization of secretariat influence via relational metrics, and offers a way to estimate secretariat influence despite their typically veiled modes of operation

The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST

The Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST) is an 18,000 square meter radio telescope situated some 40 km from the city of Canberra, Australia. Its operating band (820-850 MHz) is now partly allocated to mobile phone communications, making radio astronomy challenging. We describe how the deployment of new digital receivers (RX boxes), Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based filterbanks and server-class computers equipped with 43 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) has transformed MOST into a versatile new instrument (the UTMOST) for studying the dynamic radio sky on millisecond timescales, ideal for work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). The filterbanks, servers and their high-speed, low-latency network form part of a hybrid solution to the observatory's signal processing requirements. The emphasis on software and commodity off-the-shelf hardware has enabled rapid deployment through the re-use of proven 'software backends' for its signal processing. The new receivers have ten times the bandwidth of the original MOST and double the sampling of the line feed, which doubles the field of view. The UTMOST can simultaneously excise interference, make maps, coherently dedisperse pulsars, and perform real-time searches of coherent fan beams for dispersed single pulses. Although system performance is still sub-optimal, a pulsar timing and FRB search programme has commenced and the first UTMOST maps have been made. The telescope operates as a robotic facility, deciding how to efficiently target pulsars and how long to stay on source, via feedback from real-time pulsar folding. The regular timing of over 300 pulsars has resulted in the discovery of 7 pulsar glitches and 3 FRBs. The UTMOST demonstrates that if sufficient signal processing can be applied to the voltage streams it is possible to perform innovative radio science in hostile radio frequency environments.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

The UTMOST Survey for Magnetars, Intermittent pulsars, RRATs and FRBs I: System description and overview

We describe the ongoing `Survey for Magnetars, Intermittent pulsars, Rotating radio transients and Fast radio bursts' (SMIRF), performed using the newly refurbished UTMOST telescope. SMIRF repeatedly sweeps the southern Galactic plane performing real-time periodicity and single-pulse searches, and is the first survey of its kind carried out with an interferometer. SMIRF is facilitated by a robotic scheduler which is capable of fully autonomous commensal operations. We report on the SMIRF observational parameters, the data analysis methods, the survey's sensitivities to pulsars, techniques to mitigate radio frequency interference and present some early survey results. UTMOST's wide field of view permits a full sweep of the Galactic plane to be performed every fortnight, two orders of magnitude faster than previous surveys. In the six months of operations from January to June 2018, we have performed $\sim 10$ sweeps of the Galactic plane with SMIRF. Notable blind re-detections include the magnetar PSR J1622$-$4950, the RRAT PSR J0941$-$3942 and the eclipsing pulsar PSR J1748$-$2446A. We also report the discovery of a new pulsar, PSR J1705$-$54. Our follow-up of this pulsar with the UTMOST and Parkes telescopes at an average flux limit of $\leq 20$ mJy and $\leq 0.16$ mJy respectively, categorizes this as an intermittent pulsar with a high nulling fraction of $< 0.002$Comment: Submitted to MNRAS, comments welcom

Five new real-time detections of Fast Radio Bursts with UTMOST

We detail a new fast radio burst (FRB) survey with the Molonglo Radio Telescope, in which six FRBs were detected between June 2017 and December 2018. By using a real-time FRB detection system, we captured raw voltages for five of the six events, which allowed for coherent dedispersion and very high time resolution (10.24 $\mu$s) studies of the bursts. Five of the FRBs show temporal broadening consistent with interstellar and/or intergalactic scattering, with scattering timescales ranging from 0.16 to 29.1 ms. One burst, FRB181017, shows remarkable temporal structure, with 3 peaks each separated by 1 ms. We searched for phase-coherence between the leading and trailing peaks and found none, ruling out lensing scenarios. Based on this survey, we calculate an all-sky rate at 843 MHz of $98^{+59}_{-39}$ events sky$^{-1}$ day$^{-1}$ to a fluence limit of 8 Jy-ms: a factor of 7 below the rates estimated from the Parkes and ASKAP telescopes at 1.4 GHz assuming the ASKAP-derived spectral index $\alpha=-1.6$ ($F_{\nu}\propto\nu^{\alpha}$). Our results suggest that FRB spectra may turn over below 1 GHz. Optical, radio and X-ray followup has been made for most of the reported bursts, with no associated transients found. No repeat bursts were found in the survey.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, submitted to MNRA

Detection of a glitch in the pulsar J1709-4429

We report the detection of a glitch event in the pulsar J1709$-$4429 (also known as B1706$-$44) during regular monitoring observations with the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (UTMOST). The glitch was found during timing operations, in which we regularly observe over 400 pulsars with up to daily cadence, while commensally searching for Rotating Radio Transients, pulsars, and FRBs. With a fractional size of $\Delta\nu/\nu \approx 52.4 \times10^{-9}$, the glitch reported here is by far the smallest known for this pulsar, attesting to the efficacy of glitch searches with high cadence using UTMOST.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

The UTMOST survey for magnetars, intermittent pulsars, RRATs, and FRBs – I. System description and overview

We describe the ongoing ‘survey for magnetars, intermittent pulsars, rotating radio transients, and fast radio bursts’ (SMIRF), performed using the newly refurbished UTMOST telescope. SMIRF repeatedly sweeps the southern Galactic plane performing real-time periodicity and single pulse searches, and is the first survey of its kind carried out with an interferometer. SMIRF is facilitated by a robotic scheduler which is capable of fully autonomous commensal operations. We report on the SMIRF observational parameters, the data analysis methods, the survey’s sensitivity to pulsars, techniques to mitigate radio frequency interference, and present some early survey results. UTMOST’s wide field of view permits a full sweep of the Galactic plane to be performed every fortnight, two orders of magnitude faster than previous surveys. In six months of operations from 2018 January to June, we have performed ∼10 sweeps of the Galactic plane with SMIRF. Notable blind redetections include the magnetar PSR J1622−4950, the RRAT PSR J0941−3942 and the eclipsing pulsar PSR J1748−2446A. We also report the discovery of a new pulsar, PSR J1659−54. Our follow-up of this pulsar at an average flux limit of ≤20 mJy, categorizes this as an intermittent pulsar with a high nulling fraction of <0.002