Hydrologists and ecologists have been working in the Everglades on integrating a long-term hydrologic data network and a short-term ecological database to support ecological models of the habitat of the snail kite, a threatened and endangered bird. Data mining techniques, including artificial neural network (ANN) models, were applied to simulate the hydrology of snail kite habitat in the Water ...

Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is a novel solution in the field of renewable energy technologies. However, unlike for conventional wind turbines, the effects of AWE systems on the wind environment have not yet been studied in much detail. We have developed a computational framework using Large Eddy Simulation to investigate the interaction between kite systems and the atmospheric boundary layer. Si...

The string theory is a fast moving subject, both physics wise and in the respect of mathematics. In order to keep up with the discipline it is important to move with new ideas which are being stressed. Here I wish to give extracts from new papers of ideas which I have recently found interesting. There are six papers which are involved: I ."Strings formulated directly in 4 dimensions " A. N...

Little is known about the magnitude of the effects of lead shot ingestion alone or combined with poisons (e.g., in bait or seeds/granules containing pesticides) on population size, growth, and extinction of non-waterbird avian species that ingest these substances. We used population models to create example scenarios demonstrating how changes in these parameters might affect three susceptible s...

Airborne wind energy systems are capable of extracting energy from higher wind speeds at higher altitudes. The configuration considered in this paper is based on a tethered kite flown in a pumping orbit. This pumping cycle generates energy by winching out at high tether forces and driving a generator while flying figures-of-eight, or lemniscates, as crosswind pattern. Then, the tether is reeled...

Monitoring natural populations is often a necessary step to establish the conservation status of species and to help improve management decisions. Nevertheless, many monitoring programs do not effectively address primary sources of variability in monitoring data, which ultimately may limit the utility of monitoring in identifying declines and improving management. To illustrate the importance o...

BACKGROUND This study analyses kite surfing related off shore rescue missions in Cape Town, South Africa with the aim of providing more information on the frequency, pattern, and severity of kite surfing related injuries. METHODS The observation period for this study started on October 1, 2003 and ended on May 1, 2004 and included 30 air rescue missions. Data and information were collected pr...

Many bloodstream infections (BSI) in patients with central venous catheters (CVC) are not catheter-related (CR). Assessment of catheter involvement without catheter withdrawal has not been studied in candidemia. We assessed the value of conservative techniques to evaluate catheters as the origin of candidemia in patients with CVC in a prospective cohort study (superficial Gram stain and culture...

Continuing arguments presented [1] or announced [2][3] in Complex Systems, zero-divisor (ZD) foundations for scale-free networks (evinced, in particular, in the “fractality” of the Internet) are decentralized. Spandrels – quartets of ZD-free or “hidden” box-kite-like structures (HBK’s) in the 2N+1-ions – are “exploded” from (and uniquely linked to) each standard box-kite in the 2N-ions, N ≥ 4. ...