Unattended Period Research Articles

CPT Code Changes for 2007

<i>CPT</i> Code Changes for 2007

Aspects of the Breeding Biology of the Magellanic Penguin in the Falkland Islands

Abstract The breeding biology of the Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus), including the timing of laying, brooding and fledging, foraging trip lengths during incubation and brooding and diet in relation to breeding success, was investigated at Volunteer Beach in the north east of the Falkland Islands during the 2001/02 breeding season. Egg-laying dates were between 12 October and 1 November, with an overall hatching success of 65%. The length of foraging trips during incubation ranged from 2-15 days. Chicks were provisioned daily during the 23 day brood period, and then at a mean interval of two days during the unattended period, until fledging occurred in late January and early February. Successful pairs laid significantly earlier and undertook shorter foraging trips during incubation and brooding compared to unsuccessful pairs. The mean breeding success of 0.2 chicks/pair was low compared to the ten year mean at the study site and was possibly due to a lower abundance of squid, which is the pre...

Study for the Information Operations for Long Unattended Periods of Time at the Space System

The space systems are being operated in a uncertain space environment and are desired to have autonomous capability for long periods of time without frequent telecommunications with the ground station. At the same time, requirements for new set of satellite system set of projects/systems calling for "autonomous" operations for long unattended periods of time are emerging. Since, by the nature of space systems, it is desired to perform its mission flawlessly and also it is of extreme importance to have fault-tolerant sensors and actuators for the purpose of validating science measurement data for the mission success. This studies focused on the identification/demonstration of critical technology innovations that will be applied to the Validation Control System.

Attack on Chestnut-bellied Euphonia Nestlings by Army Ants

I report some observations of a Chestnut-bellied Euphonia (Euphonia pectoralis) nest in a lowland Atlantic Forest of southeastern Brazil during the early nestling period. During 7.5 hours of observations, the nest was attended 46.3% of the time, 45.6% by the female and 0.7% by the male. Unattended periods lasted 16–38 min. Parents visited the nest most of the time together at 36–59 min intervals. There were 1.06 feeding visits per nestling per hour. The two nestlings in the nest ended up preyed upon by army ants (Labidus praedator, Ecitoninae). The low height of the nest (0.8 m) may have facilitated its detection by the ants.

Techniques for pollution monitoring in remote sites: I. Near real-time rainfall pH and depth

A flow-through system for in situ, near real-time, sequential measurements of rainfall pH and depth was developed for monitoring of precipitation in sites lacking electric power. The system is easily fabricated from readily available instruments and materials, portable, relatively inexpensive and requires minimal maintenance. It also operates independently of AC power making it ideal for use in remote areas. Initial field testing of this system on Camels Hump, Vermont, took place over the period of July to August 1990, during which twenty-seven individual storm events were monitored. The system proved to be robust and reliable, providing rainfall pH and depth information with high (programmable) temporal resolution for unattended periods of up to a week.

Operating MSDOS in a Controlled Environment

Abstract Due to costs and performance PC architectures running MSDOS systems (IBM, 1986) are widespread. With the software platform available market is still growing. However from the point of view of security and operating systems concepts this architecture is all but outstanding. Most efforts to improve security have side effects on the compatibility. Starting with a secure state influence on security and integrity can only come from outside. Thus, keeping a computer system safe means control of external data and I/O operations. The presented approach for keeping the system safe in a MSDOS environment is performed by introducing an alternate special file system with security and integrity features. It is based upon a reliable boot procedure as a crucial point in system. As experience with alternate file systems for other purposes exist the approach can be qualified as feasible. As a further side effect of the method presented, unattended periods can be controlled to a remarkable extent.

Compact formats for seismic data storage

Seismic data are usually stored using a 32-bit floating-point format for each data sample after conversion of the field tapes to whatever internal format is used by the processing system. This procedure ensures that there is no possible loss of dynamic range as field data are always recorded with less than 32 significant bits, and also minimizes the amount of work that the central processing unit (CPU) has to do, as data may be transferred without conversion from the mass storage device. However, the increasing power of modern CPUs offers the possibility of using a compact format of less than 32 bits per sample in the mass storage medium, and using the CPU to expand the data to 32-bit floating-point format once it has been read in. This procedure reduces the input/output (I/O) load at the cost of increasing the CPU load, which is not unreasonable as CPU costs are at present decreasing much faster than I/O costs. Compact storage has a number of operational benefits: if more data can be fitted on to each tape, the number of tape changes per shift is reduced proportionately, and smaller tape libraries are required. Disc capacity is almost invariably a scarce resource, and any increase in seismic data storage capacity at zero capital cost will be met with broad smiles from the system manager. A further benefit accrues to processing centres which do not have operators on duty for 24 hours per day to mount and dismount tapes. The amount of work which can be done during the unattended period is often limited by the amount of data which can be stored on disc. Tape drives are often a bottleneck in system productivity and they are seldom used at their maximum speed. If processing can be done from disc, the tapes are used as spooling devices and can operate much closer to their maximum capacity. The actual increase in storage capacity will be smaller for tapes than for disc, as most internal tape formats are unblocked; they have an end-of-record gap consisting of half an inch of blank tape between each data trace. For a high density, 6250-bpi, 9-track tape, the data samples of a 1500-sample trace using 32 bits per sample will only occupy 1 inch of tape, so that each trace requires 1.5 inches of tape. Using a 16-bit format for the data samples would reduce the amount of tape needed to 1 inch, thus raising the number of traces fitting on to a reel by 50%. For disc, the storage capacity would be nearly doubled by using 16-bit data storage.

Insulation of a Sierra Stream by Snow Cover

without further attention except occasional addition of water. When the aquarium was finally cleaned to be used for another purpose, I made a thorough search through the bottom debris for shells of limpets living in it during the unattended period and found a variety of abnormal, stunted, and distorted shells. Many of these shells show unusual shapes, variation in thickness, and evidence of starts and stops in growth. Since this result was not anticipated, no attempt had been made to determine physical or chemical properties of the water while the aquarium was being maintained. As part of a taxonomic study on North American freshwater limpets, I have recently examined thousands of shells from hundreds of localities, both from museums and my own field collections, and have never seen a natural population exhibiting such gross abnormalities. The distorted shells (Fig. 1) presumably developed in a highly unfavorable environment and reflect the metabolic stress encountered by the snails. The shells also indicate a plasticity which may suggest that the precise shape in any one individual or population represents a local compromise between genetic potential and environmental influences and that minor variations are to be expected in populations of the same species occupying different habitats. Hence, species names based upon such minor variation should be viewed with some suspicion.