A point for comparison: the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary

A reoccurring goal listed during the creation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) is to return the region to a former state. However, limited data is available that describes or characterizes this former condition. Data collected from ecosystems with comparatively limited anthropogenic impacts, can provide invaluable information in suggesting what former states may have looked like. One example is the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary which is located 180 kilometers off the coast of Texas. These relatively isolated and pristine banks are capped by substantial scleractinian coral communities, forming excellent habitat for over 200 species of fish. While fishing is permitted, it is limited by difficulty of access. In 2006, NOAA’s Biogeography Branch, in collaboration with the Sanctuary, initiated the first quantitative assessment of fish resources throughout the diveable portions of the Sanctuary. The sampling design and methodologies employed were identical to those that the Branch has utilized in other more impacted regions of the US Caribbean. Initial analyses reveal that fish density and species richness at the Sanctuary were almost two times greater than that found within the US Caribbean and biomass was approximately six times higher. This was due in large part to the presence of sizeable piscivores of the genera Mycteroperca and Dermatolepis. The Sanctuary is one of few minimally impacted locations remaining within the Tropical Western Atlantic. As such, these findings should be considered when attempting to establish a former state or evaluate effectiveness of an MPA in meeting its management goals.

Design of a pitching and surging point absorber.

The linear dynamics, operation, and engineering aspects of P.S. FROG, a point absorber wave energy conversion buoy, are summarized. The device consists of a floating flap or paddle facing the waves and reacting against them through an interior moving mass in an enlarged section at the bottom of the buoy.

The wave transmission coefficients and coupling loss factors of point connected structures

This analysis is concerned with the calculation of the elastic wave transmission coefficients and coupling loss factors between an arbitrary number of structural components that are coupled at a point. A general approach to the problem is presented and it is demonstrated that the resulting coupling loss factors satisfy reciprocity. A key aspect of the method is the consideration of cylindrical waves in two-dimensional components, and this builds upon recent results regarding the energetics of diffuse wavefields when expressed in cylindrical coordinates. Specific details of the method are given for beam and thin plate components, and a number of examples are presented. © 2002 Acoustical Society of America.

Scaling POMDPs for dialog management with composite summary point-based value iteration (CSPBVI)

Although partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have shown great promise as a framework for dialog management in spoken dialog systems, important scalability issues remain. This paper tackles the problem of scaling slot-filling POMDP-based dialog managers to many slots with a novel technique called composite point-based value iteration (CSPBVI). CSPBVI creates a "local" POMDP policy for each slot; at runtime, each slot nominates an action and a heuristic chooses which action to take. Experiments in dialog simulation show that CSPBVI successfully scales POMDP-based dialog managers without compromising performance gains over baseline techniques and preserving robustness to errors in user model estimation. Copyright © 2006, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.