Nuclear and ionic charge distribution experiment on ISEE-1 and ISEE-3

The experimental work carried out under this contract is a continuation of that originally performed under Contracts NAS5-20062 and NAS5-26739. The data analyzed are from the Max-Planck Institut/Univ. of Maryland experiment on ISEE-1 and ISEE-3. Each spacecraft experiment consists of a nearly identical set of three sensors (designated the ULECA, ULEWAT, and ULEZEQ sensors) designed to measure the energy spectra and composition of suprathermal and energetic ions over a broad energy range (less than 3 keV/e to more than 20 MeV/nucleon). Since the launch of ISEE's 2 and 3, the MPI/Univ. of Maryland experiments have generally performed as expected except for a partial failure of the ULEWAT sensor on ISEE-1 in August 1978. A number of scientific studies have either been completed, initiated or are at various stages of completion. A brief summary of Primary Results is given, followed by a more detailed summary of the major accomplishments at the Univ. of Maryland

Social-Ecological Innovations and Outcomes of Community-Based Conservation in Africa: Implications for the Future

Community-based conservancies (CBCs) are growing in numbers throughout Africa, particularly in the arid and semi-arid (ASAL) regions where pastoralists raise livestock and live among much of Africa’s remaining wildlife. CBCs emerge around national parks and other protected areas of wildlife spaces apart from people. Community conservancies, in contrast to national parks, are land tenure and land use governance arrangements to conserve wildlife while providing for the livelihoods of African pastoralists. Some conservancies develop by communities in partnership with public agencies, while others are associated with non-government organizations and/or the private sector. Others are more top-down in origin, supported by large international donors and governments. Conservancies tend to develop in nation states that, until recently, have ignored the ASALs. Currently however, ASALs are converting to towns and croplands as human populations and consumption grow. Shifting market incentives encourage different livestock strategies away from local production to commercial livestock products. Energy extraction and renewable energy production are expanding into these areas, transforming landscapes, communities, and rural cultures. Formerly communal rangelands are increasingly privatizing and subdividing as pastoralists permanently settle. Fragmentation of communal lands is the result. We assess the goals of formation of community-based conservation, the partnerships, and outcomes for pastoralists

Producing Useful Knowledge for Sustainable Development

Africa makes a relatively minor contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions compared with developed nations, yet the African continent will be increasingly vulnerable to climate change processes in the coming decades. Critical challenges include meeting basic needs for food, water, shelter, and other necessities without undermining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Coordination efforts to address multiple global change related stressors has generally occurred at the national level and taken an external approach, with national governments favoring collaboration with foreign-based NGOs and other international institutions. However, the involvement of actors at the local level correlates with decisions that are better adapted to local social-cultural and environmental contexts, reducing implementation costs, and increasing trust, thereby increasing the equity and efficacy of decentralized approaches. This paper examines indigenous and local knowledge of climate change and its impacts. It addresses climate and environmental change from the perspectives of Kenyan pastoralists who identified a myriad of environmental issues that occur and interact at different scales. They also identified ways forward at several scales from the local to the global. The continued functioning of ecosystems for local populations will depend critically upon sound policy, planning, and practice that includes pastoralist leadership

Facilitating Emotional Self-Regulation in Preschool Children: Efficacy of the Early HeartSmarts Program in Promoting Social, Emotional and Cognitive Development

Developed by the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the Early HeartSmarts (EHS) program is designed to train teachers to guide and support young children (3 -- 6 years old) in learning emotional self-regulation and key age-appropriate socioemotional competencies, with the goal of facilitating their emotional, social and cognitive development. This work reports the results of an evaluation study conducted to assess the efficacy of the EHS program in a pilot implementation of the program carried out during the 2006 -- 2007 academic year in schools of the Salt Lake City School District. The study was conducted using a quasi-experimental longitudinal field research design with three measurement moments (baseline and pre- and post-intervention panels) using The Creative Curriculum Assessment (TCCA) instrument, a teacher-scored, 50-item instrument measuring student growth in four areas of development -- social/emotional, physical, cognitive and language development. Children in nineteen preschool classrooms were divided into intervention and control group samples (N = 66 and 309, respectively; mean age = 3.6 years), in which classes in the former were specifically selected to target children of lower socioeconomic and ethnic minority family backgrounds. Overall, there is compelling evidence of the efficacy of the EHS program in increasing total psychosocial development and each of the four development areas measured by the TCCA: the results of a series of ANCOVAs found a strong, consistent pattern of significant differences on the development measures favoring preschool children who received the EHS program over those in the control group who did not

FIRE: Agent of Change

Self immolation protests have been used over the course of history for expressions of personal protest and religious persecution, but more recent ones have been focused on political protest and been chained to revolution as in Tunisia. Even in the face of constant harassment and repression, Mohamed Bouazizi was a compassionate man. He chose to react with violence on no one but himself in response to the harassment he had experienced all his life. Having used every channel of complaint available to him and receiving no respite from his woes, Mohamed Bouazizi self immolated. Social networks are not a new thing, but the addition of social media to social networks is, and the incredibly visual image of his burning as well as video of violent reaction from security forces on the very first protests by his friends and family were uploaded to Twitter and Facebook and told the story in an almost minute by minute accounting of the beginnings of a revolution. Without the social media component there would not have been a Tunisian revolution for there would have been no Twitter to upload a photo to, nowhere to share the picture that was taken of Bouazizi’s self immolation. Like no other revolution before it social media was the tipping point, and the peaceful Tunisian uprising that began as a small protest in the city of Sidi Bouzid had begun

On the independence ratio of distance graphs

A distance graph is an undirected graph on the integers where two integers are adjacent if their difference is in a prescribed distance set. The independence ratio of a distance graph $G$ is the maximum density of an independent set in $G$. Lih, Liu, and Zhu [Star extremal circulant graphs, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 12 (1999) 491--499] showed that the independence ratio is equal to the inverse of the fractional chromatic number, thus relating the concept to the well studied question of finding the chromatic number of distance graphs. We prove that the independence ratio of a distance graph is achieved by a periodic set, and we present a framework for discharging arguments to demonstrate upper bounds on the independence ratio. With these tools, we determine the exact independence ratio for several infinite families of distance sets of size three, determine asymptotic values for others, and present several conjectures.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 6 table

Iron charge states observed in the solar wind

Solar wind measurements from the ULECA sensor of the Max-Planck-Institut/University of Maryland experiment on ISEE-3 are reported. The low energy section of approx the ULECA sensor selects particles by their energy per charge (over the range 3.6 keV/Q to 30 keV/Q) and simultaneously measures their total energy with two low-noise solid state detectors. Solar wind Fe charge state measurements from three time periods of high speed solar wind occurring during a post-shock flow and a coronal hole-associated high speed stream are presented. Analysis of the post-shock flow solar wind indicates the charge state distributions for Fe were peaked at approx +16, indicative of an unusually high coronal temperature (3,000,000 K). In contrast, the Fe charge state distribution observed in a coronal hole-associated high speed stream peaks at approx -9, indicating a much lower coronal temperature (1,400,000 K). This constitutes the first reported measurements of iron charge states in a coronal hole-associated high speed stream

Wildlife Conservation and the Role of the Indigenous Communities Living around Conservation Areas

The Indigenous Kenyan Maasai community has coexisted with the wildlife surrounding it for decades from Nairobi National Park, Maasai Mara and Amboseli. These parks border Maasai lands. Although the northern, eastern, and western perimeters of the Nairobi National Park are fenced, the southern part is not. It is at this point that the Maasai community’s land meets the park. This area also acts as a wildlife dispersal area where wildlife can freely migrate to other parks, including Maasai Mara and Amboseli. The park is only 117sq kms and its vitality depends on the plains to the south where the Maasai live so that the animals can migrate in and out. Without that open space, the park would be little more than a zoo. The fact is that approximately 60 to 80 percent of wildlife in Kenya is outside formally protected areas. For the Maasai community, wildlife poses an enormous threat. As herbivores migrate during the wet season, they are followed by predators such as lions. Livestock are an easy target for them. A lion attack can be devastating, ruining family lives and livelihoods. Lions have traditionally been the Maasai tribe’s greatest adversaries; they are a deadly threat to the cattle and other livestock that are both an integral part of the Maasai culture and the tribe’s greatest source of wealth. Despite the ongoing livestock predation, lions may be the tribe’s strongest hope of preserving their way of life. With these in mind, it becomes imperative that we think of systems for better correlation between all aspects of conservation and understand that the wildlife, livestock, and the surrounding pastoral communities play a key role in each other’s survival

A Design Process Framework to Deal with Non-functional Requirements in Conceptual System Designs

To simultaneously satisfy the user needs and project-specific technical requirements, it is imperative that complex engineering systems are designed using contemporary, systematic approaches. This study presents a framework that combines Axiomatic Design and Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to ensure that designers can concurrently satisfy the functional and non-functional requirements along with the design constraints of conceptual system designs. A conceptual design case of an autonomous battery charging system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is presented as an illustrative case study. The results showed that the approach can aid decision-making processes by systematic evaluation and comparison of conceptual designs such that the selected solutions satisfy user needs whilst also realising both functional and non-functional requirements of the system