Oyster Bed Mapping in the Great Bay Estuary, 2012-2013

Six major oyster beds (reefs) in New Hampshire are mapped periodically to assess wild oyster populations in the Great Bay Estuary. Data on the spatial extent of the beds are combined with density and other measures to estimate the abundances of live oysters. The first objective of the present project was to determine the spatial extent of these six oyster beds, and to compare the 2012/2013 data with previous mapping efforts. A second objective was twofold: to map the extent of live oyster bottom at selected recent oyster restoration sites, and to map areas where oyster beds have been known to occur historically but not recently. Towed underwater video methods, as used in previous oyster mapping efforts in New Hampshire, were used for this project. All recorded video was classified into three categories: ”reef” (\u3e20% shell cover and live oysters visible); ”sparse shell” ( Two of the natural beds (Nannie Island [2012: 32.4 ac] and Oyster River [2012: 1.6 ac]) had similar total bottom area coverage compared to most previous mapping efforts. Three beds (Adams Point [2012: 15.9 ac], Squamscott River [2012: 7.7 ac] and Woodman Point [2012: 15.4 ac]) had substantially greater area coverage compared to previous surveys. In all three cases, however, the increases were likely due to additional adjacent areas being surveyed. In contrast to the others, the Piscataqua River bed appears to have substantially decreased in bottom area coverage (2012: 7.0 ac) compared to previous surveys. Selected oyster restoration sites were also video surveyed in 2013 to determine bottom area coverage that could be considered “reef” and therefore considered as part of the overall oyster resource in New Hampshire. Restoration sites in the Lamprey River, Oyster River (3 sites), and at Fox Point in Little Bay were imaged. Due to poor image quality, full bottom area coverage could not be determined for any of the sites. Nonetheless, substantial areas of at least “sparse shell” bottom, and live oysters in some areas were recorded at all sites. These restoration sites as well as additional sites are scheduled for video surveying and quantitative sampling in 2013. The third focus of the project was to survey areas where oyster beds historically occurred. Of the four general areas surveyed, live oyster reefs were found in two areas: Lamprey River (0.9 ac) and mid-Great Bay (35.2 ac). In sum, these two areas represent a major addition to the known live oyster bottom in the state. Moreover, these findings strongly suggest that live oyster reefs may be in other areas where oysters have not been known to exist in recent years. Overall, this project has added substantially to our knowledge of where live oysters occur in New Hampshire as well as the total bottom area coverage. A total of 120 acres of bottom area classified as “reef” was mapped. Additionally, the extent (perhaps 100 ac or more) of bottom area that had sparse shell but apparently few or no live oysters in mid-Great Bay bed and in the Nannie Island/Woodman Point area is important because these areas represent excellent oyster restoration opportunities. However, they will need to be mapped in more detail to sufficiently design future projects

Health-insurance Coverage for Low-wage Workers, 1979-2010 and Beyond

This paper uses data from the Current Population Surveys for 1980 through 2011 to review trends in health-insurance coverage rates for low-wage workers (defined as workers in the bottom fifth of the wage distribution in each survey year). In 2010, over 38 percent of low-wage workers lacked health insurance from any source, up from 16 percent in 1979. The biggest reason for the decline in coverage is the erosion of employer-provided health insurance, either through a worker's own employer or as a dependent on another family member's employer-provided policy. Over the last three decades, the role of public insurance in providing coverage for low-wage workers has increased, though not nearly enough to offset the declines in private insurance. In 2010, about 10 percent of low-wage workers had coverage through Medicaid, double the share in 1979. While a great deal of uncertainty still surrounds the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its likely impact on employers and workers, reasonable estimates based on consensus projections suggest that the ACA will have a substantial positive effect on health-insurance coverage rates for low-wage workers. Even so, the ACA will likely leave an important share of low-wage workers, especially low-wage Latino, African American, and Asian workers, as well as many immigrant workers, without coverage. At the same time, if the ACA is blocked -- in the courts or in Congress -- there is every indication that coverage rates for low-wage workers will continue their long, steady decline

Designing multifunctional chemical sensors using Ni and Cu doped carbon nanotubes

We demonstrate a "bottom up" approach to the computational design of a multifunctional chemical sensor. General techniques are employed for describing the adsorption coverage and resistance properties of the sensor based on density functional theory (DFT) and non-equilibrium Green's function methodologies (NEGF), respectively. Specifically, we show how Ni and Cu doped metallic (6,6) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) may work as effective multifunctional sensors for both CO and NH3.Comment: 24th International Winterschool on Electronic Properties of Novel Material

Topoclimatological and snowhydrological survey of Switzerland

The author has identified the following significant results. Low temperature zones depend on the topography and the terrain coverage type (besides the meteorological situation). The usual pattern of cold zones at the bottom of the valleys, warmer belts along the valley slopes, and cold mountain tops is modified by the terrain coverage type. Rural and forested areas normally have different surface temperatures, but along a vertical profile the temperature decrease (or increase) is often of the same order of magnitude. Because there is also a close correlation between the topography and terrain coverage (high percentage of forested areas at the valley slopes up to the timber line, much less along the valley floors), the surface temperature of the warm slope zone is increased compared to a valley profile with uniform coverage

GEMINI: A Natural Language System for Spoken-Language Understanding

Gemini is a natural language understanding system developed for spoken language applications. The paper describes the architecture of Gemini, paying particular attention to resolving the tension between robustness and overgeneration. Gemini features a broad-coverage unification-based grammar of English, fully interleaved syntactic and semantic processing in an all-paths, bottom-up parser, and an utterance-level parser to find interpretations of sentences that might not be analyzable as complete sentences. Gemini also includes novel components for recognizing and correcting grammatical disfluencies, and for doing parse preferences. This paper presents a component-by-component view of Gemini, providing detailed relevant measurements of size, efficiency, and performance.Comment: 8 pages, postscrip

Perovskite Photodiode for Wearable Electronics

Photodetectors are sensing devices that have been used for a broad range electromagnetic wave sensing applications. We are currently investigating the use of photovoltaic cells for implantable and wearable applications [1] [2]. In this work, we have demonstrated the use of CH3NH3PbI3-xClx perovskite materials for photo sensing applications in wearable electronic devices. Our photodetectors were fabricated from two different structures. The first involves the formation of a thin film perovskite material that is sandwiched between bottom and top contact electrodes, while the second involves using hole and electron transport layers between the bottom and top electrodes. Despite a poorer device stability, our experimental results confirmed that devices without an interlayer yield superior performance. Furthermore, AFM results show that the perovskite film formed on top of the PEDOT: PSS layer is non-uniform with more crystalline domains, while it has better surface coverage on top of bare ITO substrates [3] [4]

Partial covering of emission regions of Q 0528-250 by intervening H2_2 clouds

We present an analysis of the molecular hydrogen absorption system at z$_{\rm abs}$ = 2.811 in the spectrum of the blazar Q0528-250. We demonstrate that the molecular cloud does not cover the background source completely. The partial coverage reveals itself as a residual flux in the bottom of saturated H_2 absorption lines. This amounts to about (2.22$\pm$0.54)% of the continuum and does not depend on the wavelength. This value is small and it explains why this effect has not been detected in previous studies of this quasar spectrum. However, it is robustly detected and significantly higher than the zero flux level in the bottom of saturated lines of the Ly-alpha forest, (-0.21$\pm$0.22)%. The presence of the residual flux could be caused by unresolved quasar multicomponents, by light scattered by dust, and/or by jet-cloud interaction. The H$_2$ absorption system is very well described by a two-component model without inclusion of additional components when we take partial coverage into account. The derived total column densities in the H$_2$ absorption components A and B are logN(H$_2$)[cm$^{-2}$] = 18.10$\pm$0.02 and 17.82$\pm$0.02, respectively. HD molecules are present only in component B. Given the column density, logN(HD)= 13.33$\pm$0.02, we find N(HD)/2N(H$_2$)=(1.48$\pm$0.10)x10$^{-5}$, significantly lower than previous estimations. We argue that it is crucial to take into account partial coverage effects for any analysis of H$_2$ bearing absorption systems, in particular when studying the physical state of high-redshift interstellar medium.Comment: Accepted for MNRA

Probing Charged Higgs Boson Couplings at the FCC-hh Collider

Many of the new physics models predicts a light Higgs boson similar to the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM) and also extra scalar bosons. Beyond the search channels for a SM Higgs boson, the future collider experiments will explore additional channels that are specific to extended Higgs sectors. We study the charged Higgs boson production within the framework of two Higgs doublet models (THDM) in the proton-proton collisions at the FCC-hh collider. With an integrated luminosity of 500 fb$^{-1}$ at very high energy frontier, we obtain a significant coverage of the parameter space and distinguish the charged Higgs-top-bottom interaction within the THDM or other new physics models with charged Higgs boson mass up to 1 TeV.Comment: 22 pages, 26 figures, 6 table