The Kyle Mammoth Project: An Archaeological, Paleoecological and Taphonomic Analysis

In 1964 the remains of a Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) was unearthed near the small farming community of Kyle, Saskatchewan. The salvage excavation that was conducted by the Natural History Museum of Saskatchewan (now the Royal Saskatchewan Museum) uncovered roughly twenty percent of a single animal which was determined to have died of natural causes twelve thousand years ago. No further analysis was ever conducted on the remains until now. The combination of a radiocarbon date that was obtained in 1964 that concluded a time frame congruent with Clovis occupation in North America and known Clovis occupation within the area surrounding Kyle prompted a more thorough taphonomic analysis to be conducted on the remains. The objective for the analysis was to use the identification of postmortem taphonomic markers such as intentional bone breakage patterns and cutmarks as a proxy for human intervention with the Kyle mammoth. An additional antemortem analysis was included to account for a healed lesion that was discovered on a thoracic vertebra. The cause of the lesion, although not concluded, raises questions as to human association with this particular mammoth as well as a pathological aspect relating to a well-documented phenomenon that occurred in Eurasian Woolly Mammoths. The addition of an osteological analysis sheds light on the species, sex, and age at death of the animal and an archaeological and paleocological background supplements the notion of human and proboscidean interactions by shedding light on the environment surrounding the area of Kyle roughly 12,000 years ago and the possibility of the two species coexisting in southwestern Saskatchewan

NASA-Langley helicopter tower instrumentation systems

Background information is presented for the helicopter rotor test facility, in preface to a more detailed discussion of major subsystems equipment, including error considerations, frequency response, and display instrumentation

Visual comparative case analytics

Criminal Intelligence Analysis (CIA) faces a challenging task in handling high-dimensional data that needs to be investigated with complex analytical processes. State-of-the-art crime analysis tools do not fully support interactive data exploration and fall short of computational transparency in terms of revealing alternative results. In this paper we report our ongoing research into providing the analysts with such a transparent and interactive system for exploring similarities between crime cases. The system implements a computational pipeline together with a visual platform that allows the analysts to interact with each stage of the analysis process and to validate the result. The proposed Visual Analytics (VA) workflow iteratively supports the interpretation of obtained clustering results, the development of alternative models, as well as cluster verification. The visualizations offer a usable way for the analyst to provide feedback to the system and to observe the impact of their interaction

Making machine intelligence less scary for criminal analysts: reflections on designing a visual comparative case analysis tool

A fundamental task in Criminal Intelligence Analysis is to analyze the similarity of crime cases, called CCA, to identify common crime patterns and to reason about unsolved crimes. Typically, the data is complex and high dimensional and the use of complex analytical processes would be appropriate. State-of-the-art CCA tools lack flexibility in interactive data exploration and fall short of computational transparency in terms of revealing alternative methods and results. In this paper, we report on the design of the Concept Explorer, a flexible, transparent and interactive CCA system. During this design process, we observed that most criminal analysts are not able to understand the underlying complex technical processes, which decrease the users' trust in the results and hence a reluctance to use the tool}. Our CCA solution implements a computational pipeline together with a visual platform that allows the analysts to interact with each stage of the analysis process and to validate the result. The proposed Visual Analytics workflow iteratively supports the interpretation of the results of clustering with the respective feature relations, the development of alternative models, as well as cluster verification. The visualizations offer an understandable and usable way for the analyst to provide feedback to the system and to observe the impact of their interactions. Expert feedback confirmed that our user-centred design decisions made this computational complexity less scary to criminal analysts

Public preferences for using quantitative faecal immunochemical test (FIT) vs colonoscopy (CC) as diagnostic test for colorectal cancer: Evidence from an online survey

Background: There has been interest in using the non-invasive, home-based quantitative faecal immunochemical test (FIT) to rule out colorectal cancer (CRC) in high-risk symptomatic patients. Aim: To elicit public preferences for FIT versus colonoscopy (CC) and its delivery in primary care. Design & setting: A cross-sectional online survey in England. Method: A total of 1057 adults (without CRC symptoms and diagnosis) aged 40–59 years were invited from an English online survey panel. Responders were asked to imagine they had been experiencing CRC symptoms that would qualify them for a diagnostic test. Participants were presented with choices between CC and FIT in ascending order of number of CRCs missed by FIT (from 1–10%). It was measured at what number of missed CRCs responders preferred CC over FIT. Results: While 150 participants did not want either of the tests when both missed 1% CRCs, the majority (n = 741, 70.0%) preferred FIT to CC at that level of accuracy. However, this preference reduced to 427 (40.4%) when FIT missed one additional cancer. Women were more likely to tolerate missing CRC when using FIT. Having lower numeracy and perceiving a higher level of risk meant participants were less likely to tolerate a false negative test. Most of those who chose FIT preferred to return it by mail (62.2%), to be informed about normal test results by letter (42.1%), and about abnormal test results face to face (32.5%). Conclusion: While the majority of participants preferred FIT over CC when both tests had the same sensitivity, tolerance for missed CRCs was low

Buoyant Venus station mission feasibility study for 1972 and 1973 launch opportunities. Volume 3 - Configuration definition. Part 2 - Appendixes Final report

Buoyant Venus station mission study for 1972 - 1973 launch period - backup data including atmospheric models, heat shield requirements, etc