The Purple Martin

The Return of the Purple Martin in British Columbia

In British Columbia, purple martins (Progne subicolis) have increased from a few pairs nesting on southern Vancouver Island in the 1980s, to more than 140 pairs on Vancouver Island and the lower mainland in 1998. The increase is attributed to a volunteer-run nest box program initiated in the 1980s and carried on today. Threats to the species’ recovery include volunteer “burnout,” small numbers,...

Ecological Energetics of an Abundant Aerial Insectivore, the Purple Martin

The atmospheric boundary layer and lower free atmosphere, or aerosphere, is increasingly important for human transportation, communication, environmental monitoring, and energy production. The impacts of anthropogenic encroachment into aerial habitats are not well understood. Insectivorous birds and bats are inherently valuable components of biodiversity and play an integral role in aerial trop...

The Cameron-Martin theorem

Martin Rama

Tunisia’s unemployment rate has been among the highest in the world for almost two decades. This article claims that such a high rate reflects measurement problems rather than labor market inefficiency. After discussing the reasons why unemployment rates may not be comparable across countries and reviewing the tools that are available to analyze unemployment in a specific country, the article p...

Ryan Martin

The focus of my research is extremal graph theory and random combinatorial structures. I have also worked in a variety of other areas, including intersecting hypergraphs, the theory of positional games and Ramsey theory. Combinatorics, and particularly graph theory, has a wide variety of applications. My own research in the edit distance of graphs has applications in biology and computer scienc...