Methods to set land salinity resource condition targets for the south west : case studies from Australia and New Zealand

This Resource Management Technical Report provides background to methods to set targets on land salinity in the South West Natural Resource Management (NRM) region of Western Australia. Case studies from Australia and New Zealand have been reviewed to determine what approaches should be used. Resource Condition Targets (RCTs) are required for land salinity, soil condition and remnant vegetation

Reducing the Potential for Falls Among Community Dwelling Older Adults

This research study used a pre-test and post-test design to determine if a nursing educational intervention would reduce the potential for falls among the community dwelling elderly. The participants (N=15) were: (a) age 65 or older, (b) mentally competent, (c) predisposed to falls, and (d) living independently. Four instruments were utilized to collect data: (a) the Folstein mini-mental state examination (MMSE), (b) a fall predisposition scale, (c) a home assessment checklist (Tideikaar, 1987), and (d) interview questions. Statistics were used to evaluate findings. The results show that a nursing educational intervention had a positive impact to help reduce the risk of falling

Optimizing Memory Efficiency for Convolution Kernels on Kepler GPUs

Convolution is a fundamental operation in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language processing, image processing, etc. Recent successes of convolutional neural networks in various deep learning applications put even higher demand on fast convolution. The high computation throughput and memory bandwidth of graphics processing units (GPUs) make GPUs a natural choice for accelerating convolution operations. However, maximally exploiting the available memory bandwidth of GPUs for convolution is a challenging task. This paper introduces a general model to address the mismatch between the memory bank width of GPUs and computation data width of threads. Based on this model, we develop two convolution kernels, one for the general case and the other for a special case with one input channel. By carefully optimizing memory access patterns and computation patterns, we design a communication-optimized kernel for the special case and a communication-reduced kernel for the general case. Experimental data based on implementations on Kepler GPUs show that our kernels achieve 5.16X and 35.5% average performance improvement over the latest cuDNN library, for the special case and the general case, respectively

Status and Tenure for Academic Law Librarians: A Survey

The debate surrounding the issue of faculty and academic status for librarians has captured the attention of contributors to library literature for many years. This ongoing concern eventually led to collective action: in 1959, a report of the University Libraries Section of the Academic Status Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) “strongly recommended” professional librarians be granted academic status and privileges. Opinion pieces have since abounded, with some convinced that the perceived benefits attached to “faculty status” are the due of the librarian, while others are just as strongly convinced that “status” too often comes with added responsibilities and few rewards. In June 2001, the ACRL board reaffirmed a statement supporting the granting of faculty status for librarians. The 2001 ACRL statement reinforces the view that faculty status for librarians is a double-edged sword. If this statement is applied by universities or law schools, librarians will find themselves being evaluated alongside their teaching faculty colleagues. Full-time jobs and lack of release time and funding for research activities put librarians at a disadvantage when being evaluated in a large faculty pool, and they may find themselves trying to satisfy two sets of criteria: those relating to their primary job performance as librarians and those needed to meet “faculty” standards. The law librarians at Texas Tech School of Law Library do not now have faculty or other professional status. In considering whether to seek such status, some discussion among the librarians ensued as to whether they would benefit. In order to make a determination regarding this question, a nationwide survey was conducted to assess the current state of law librarian status and tenure, with results which may have considerable value to universities and colleges considering granting faculty status to their librarians