Ilse and Robert Goldschmidt with their parents Albert Goldschmidt and Elly nee Schoenbeck grandfather Albert Schoenbeck and great grandmother Sophie Schoenbeck nee Mahler. Portraits Family

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Portrait of the engineer and geneologist Robert Goldschmidt Portraits Men

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Albert Einstein with Robert Andrews Millikan, Albert Michelson and unidentified men; Pasadena, California Portraits Groups; Men

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Portrait of Elly Goldschmidt and her children Ilse and Robert. Portraits Family

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Ilse and Robert Goldschmidt with their parents Albert Goldschmidt and Elly nee Schoenbeck grandfather Albert Schoenbeck and great grandmother Sophie Schoenbeck nee Mahler. Portraits Family

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Portrait of the engineer and geneologist Robert Goldschmidt Portraits Men

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The conservation status of the world’s reptiles

Effective and targeted conservation action requires detailed information about species, their distribution, systematics and ecology as well as the distribution of threat processes which affect them. Knowledge of reptilian diversity remains surprisingly disparate, and innovative means of gaining rapid insight into the status of reptiles are needed in order to highlight urgent conservation cases and inform environmental policy with appropriate biodiversity information in a timely manner. We present the first ever global analysis of extinction risk in reptiles, based on a random representative sample of 1500 species (16% of all currently known species). To our knowledge, our results provide the first analysis of the global conservation status and distribution patterns of reptiles and the threats affecting them, highlighting conservation priorities and knowledge gaps which need to be addressed urgently to ensure the continued survival of the world’s reptiles. Nearly one in five reptilian species are threatened with extinction, with another one in five species classed as Data Deficient. The proportion of threatened reptile species is highest in freshwater environments, tropical regions and on oceanic islands, while data deficiency was highest in tropical areas, such as Central Africa and Southeast Asia, and among fossorial reptiles. Our results emphasise the need for research attention to be focussed on tropical areas which are experiencing the most dramatic rates of habitat loss, on fossorial reptiles for which there is a chronic lack of data, and on certain taxa such as snakes for which extinction risk may currently be underestimated due to lack of population information. Conservation actions specifically need to mitigate the effects of human-induced habitat loss and harvesting, which are the predominant threats to reptiles.

Solomon Robert Kagan papers undated, 1920-1955

Contains correspondence, printed material, and photographs relating to Jews in the medical profession, used as a basis for Kagan's several works on Jews in medicine, including the correspondence of members of the American Physicians Fellowship Committee of the Israel Medical Association; includes also correspondence relating to the Near East and the internationalization of Jerusalem, 1945-1954; and personal correspondence. Among the correspondents are Bernard M. Baruch and Christian A. Herter.

Faster Algorithms for Incremental Topological Ordering.Robert Tarjan

We present two online algorithms for maintaining a topological order of a directed acyclic graph as arcs are added, and detecting a cycle when one is created. Our first algorithm takes O(m 1/2) amortized time per arc and our second algorithm takes O(n 2.5/m) amortized time per arc, where n is the number of vertices and m is the total number of arcs. For sparse graphs, our O(m 1/2) bound improves the best previous bound by a factor of logn and is tight to within a constant factor for a natural class of algorithms that includes all the existing ones. Our main insight is that the two-way search method of previous algorithms does not require an ordered search, but can be more general, allowing us to avoid the use of heaps (priority queues). Instead, the deterministic version of our algorithm uses (approximate) median-finding; the randomized version of our algorithm uses uniform random sampling. For dense graphs, our O(n 2.5/m) bound improves the best previously published bound by a factor of n 1/4 and a recent bound obtained independently of our work by a factor of logn. Our main insight is that graph search is wasteful when the graph is dense and can be avoided by searching the topological order space instead. Our algorithms extend to the maintenance of strong components, in the same asymptotic time bounds.

Averting biodiversity collapse in tropical forest protected areas

The rapid disruption of tropical forests probably imperils global biodiversity more than any other contemporary phenomenon(1-3). With deforestation advancing quickly, protected areas are increasingly becoming final refuges for threatened species and natural ecosystem processes. However, many protected areas in the tropics are themselves vulnerable to human encroachment and other environmental stresses(4-9). As pressures mount, it is vital to know whether existing reserves can sustain their biodiversity. A critical constraint in addressing this question has been that data describing a broad array of biodiversity groups have been unavailable for a sufficiently large and representative sample of reserves. Here we present a uniquely comprehensive data set on changes over the past 20 to 30 years in 31 functional groups of species and 21 potential drivers of environmental change, for 60 protected areas stratified across the world's major tropical regions. Our analysis reveals great variation in reserve `health': about half of all reserves have been effective or performed passably, but the rest are experiencing an erosion of biodiversity that is often alarmingly widespread taxonomically and functionally. Habitat disruption, hunting and forest-product exploitation were the strongest predictors of declining reserve health. Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them. These findings suggest that tropical protected areas are often intimately linked ecologically to their surrounding habitats, and that a failure to stem broad-scale loss and degradation of such habitats could sharply increase the likelihood of serious biodiversity declines.

An estimate of the number of tropical tree species

The high species richness of tropical forests has long been recognized, yet there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the actual number of tropical tree species. Using a pantropical tree inventory database from closed canopy forests, consisting of 657,630 trees belonging to 11,371 species, we use a fitted value of Fisher's alpha and an approximate pantropical stem total to estimate the minimum number of tropical forest tree species to fall between similar to 40,000 and similar to 53,000, i.e., at the high end of previous estimates. Contrary to common assumption, the Indo-Pacific region was found to be as species-rich as the Neotropics, with both regions having a minimum of similar to 19,000-25,000 tree species. Continental Africa is relatively depauperate with a minimum of similar to 4,500-6,000 tree species. Very few species are shared among the African, American, and the Indo-Pacific regions. We provide a methodological framework for estimating species richness in trees that may help refine species richness estimates of tree-dependent taxa.

Estructura, diversidad florística y estimación de carbono almacenado en tres bosques del municipio El Castillo, Río San Juan, Nicaragua, 2012

La planificación y manejo integral de fincas es un mod elo con tendencias productivas, en Nicaragua la ausencia de metodologías sencillas, flexibles, con alta factibilidad económica y confiabilidad de los resultados, es un factor determinante de la aceptación e implementación de los planes de manejo a nivel de finca. El presente estudio se realizó con la finalidad de contribuir información de metodología para inventarios forestales y resultados florísticos en el almacenamiento de carbono, en tres fincas productivas del bosque húmedo tropical del municipio El Castillo, Río San Juan. El estudio se estableció en tres etapas metodológicas: planificación de trabajo, fase de campo y almacenamiento de datos (procesamiento). Para cumplir los objetivos se implementó un inventario forestal por muestreo sistemático con diferentes intensidades de muestreo en cada finca, se establecieron parcelas de 10m x 50m (0.05 ha), para comparar la diversidad entre fincas se utilizó igual tamaño de parcelas (0.3 ha), mediante el índice de Margalef (riqueza) e índice de Shannon-Weiner (equidad), se analizó la estructura horizontal mediante el cálculo de abundancia, área basal y volumen por hectárea, para la estimación de carbono se optó por el método no destructivo utilizando la ecuación general de biomasa (Brown, 1997) y el factor de carbono según IPCC, 2005. Las variables estudiadas son: nombre botánico de la especie arbórea, DAP (1.30m sobre el suelo ) mayor a 10 cm y altura fustal. Se identificaron 31 familias botánicos, 57 géneros y 68 especies, las familias más representativas, según el número de especie son, Moraceae, Rubiaceae, Fabaceae, Sapotaceae, Anonaceae, Burseraceae, Cumbretaceae, Lauraceae, Meliaceae, Vochysiaceae, Mimosaceae, alta presencia de especies indicadoras de bosques alterados o secundarios y bajo número de especies comerciales. No obstante el estudio de muestra alta riqueza en las tres fincas sin diferencias significativas (X²= 0,916; P>0,05) y baja equidad en La Pavona y La Perilla, por el contrario La Primavera presenta mejor representatividad de las especies. El bosque con mayor área basal y volumen (desarrollo estructural), fue La Pavona (26.51 m2ha-1 y 365.39 m3 ha-1), también almacenó mayor carbono por hectárea (195.66Mg C ha-1), básicamente los resultado de carbono son similares entre las tres fincas (La Perilla con 184.38 MgC ha-1 y La Primavera con 192.21 MgC ha-1), también se encontró alta relación entre el estado de desarrollo (clases naturales de edades), abundancia, volumen y el almacenamiento de carbono por la alta cantidad de biomasa.

La filosofía educativa de Juan Luis Vives

Juan Luis Vives como hombre de las letras, la filosofía, las humanidades y la educación en el Renacimiento, fue inspirador del presente trabajo de conclusión de la etapa formativa de la Licenciatura de Filosofía, pues sus ideas, sus escritos y sobre todo su vida son un modelo integral de pensamiento y de comportamiento que sigue actualmente vigente y puede brindar aportes al hombre del siglo XXI. El tema de estudio del presente trabajo es la filosofía educativa del valenciano, en el contexto de su pensamiento humanista y de las corrientes que conformaron la época renacentista.