Informational report: Bycatch reduction devices used in the Pink Shrimp trawl fishery

The California Fish and Game Commission (Commission) has the authority to require one or any combination of Bycatch Reduction Device (BRD) types in the trawl fishery within California waters for Pacific ocean shrimp (Pandalus jordani), most commonly referred to as pink shrimp. The purpose of this report is to provide the Commission with the best available information about the BRDs used in the pink shrimp trawl fishery. The mandatory requirement for BRDs occurred in California in 2002, and in Oregon and Washington in 2003, resulting from an effort to minimize bycatch of overfished and quota managed groundfish species. Three types of BRDs currently satisfy the requirement for this device in the California fishery: 1) the Nordmøre grate (rigid-grate excluder); 2) soft-panel excluder; and 3) fisheye excluder; however, the design, specifications, and efficacy differ by BRD type. Although no data has been collected on BRDs directly from the California pink shrimp fishery, extensive research on the efficacy and differences among BRD types has been conducted by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) since the mid-1990s. Rigid-grate excluders are widely considered to be the most effective of the three BRD types at reducing groundfish bycatch. Over 90 percent of the Oregon pink shrimp fleet use rigid-grate excluders. The majority of the current California pink shrimp fleet also uses rigid-grate excluders, according to a telephone survey conducted by the California Department of Fish and Game (Department) in 2007-2008 of pink shrimp fishermen who have been active in the California fishery in recent years. Hinged rigid-grate excluders have been developed in recent years to reduce the bending of the BRD on vessels that employ net reels to stow and deploy their trawl nets, and they have been used successfully on both single- and double-rig vessels in Oregon. Soft-panel excluders have been demonstrated to be effective at reducing groundfish bycatch, although excessive shrimp loss and other problems have also been associated with this design. Fisheye excluders have been used in the California fishery in the past, but they were disapproved in Oregon and Washington in 2003 because they were found to be less effective at reducing groundfish bycatch than other designs. The reputation of the United States west coast pink shrimp fishery as one of the cleanest shrimp fisheries in the world is largely attributed to the effectiveness of BRDs at reducing groundfish bycatch. Nevertheless, BRD research and development is still a relatively new field and additional modifications and methods may further reduce bycatch rates in the pink shrimp fishery.(PDF contains 12 pages.)

Case study: Encouraging use of mobile devices at East Berkshire College

Case study about East Berkshire College and how they are encouraging the use of mobile devices to empower student learning and prepare students for the workplace.

Reuse of software components orientated to iOS mobile devices

Within the next few pages, I will try to give a wide description of the project that I have been doing for IK4-Ikerlan. For the last six months, I have been working in developing a socket-based application for Apple devices. These devices work under the iOS operative system, which is programmed in Objective-C, a language similar to C. Although I did not have the chance to develop this application for Apple TV, I was able to create an application for iPhone and another one for iPad. The only difference between both applications was the screen resolution, but we decided to make them separately, as it would be really hard to combine both resolutions, and wallpapers, everything in the same workspace. Finally, it is necessary to add that the main goal was not to create a new application for iOS, but to translate an Android application into iOS. To achieve this, it is required to translate Java code into Objective- C, which is the language used to develop applications for all kinds of Apple devices. Fortunately, there is a tool created by Google, which helped us with this exercise. This tool is called j2ObjC, and it is still being developed.