The Vava’u island group in the northern part of the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific has a growing reputation as a whale-watching destination. The pro-whaling organisation, the World Council of Whalers, with some local people, has, however, been actively promoting a resumption of whaling in Tonga. This study assesses the attitudes and characteristicsof ‘whale tourists’ to the islands. Seve...

We examined Cu contamination effects on macrobenthic communities and Cu concentration in invertebrates within Shelter Island Yacht Basin, San Diego Bay, California. Results indicate that at some sites, Cu in sediment has exceeded a threshold for "self defense" mechanisms and highlight the potential negative impacts on benthic faunal communities where Cu accumulates and persists in sediments. At...

A simple method that incorporates coupling between bath and system and between individual bath modes is proposed. In Ž . the new locally propagating gaussian LPG approximation, the bath is modeled by Gaussians at each system site that propagate in time. Each site couples to others by the overlap of their Gaussians. In a test case with weak but non-negligible coupling, LPG is nearly as rapid as ...

We present some techniques for planning in temporal domains specified with the recent standard languange PDDL2.1. These techniques are implemented in LPG, a fully-automated system that took part in the third International Planning Competition (Toulouse, 2002) showing excellent performance. The planner is based on a stochastic local search method and on a graph-based representation called “Tempo...

An attacker’s ability to control a maritime surface vessel by broadcasting counterfeit civil Global Positioning System (GPS) signals is analyzed and demonstrated. The aim of this work is to explore civil maritime transportation’s vulnerability to deceptive GPS signals and to develop a detection technique that is compatible with sensors commonly available on modern ships. It is shown that despit...

The bioavailability and toxicity of copper (Cu) in Shelter Island Yacht Basin (SIYB), San Diego, CA, USA, was assessed with simultaneous toxicological, chemical, and modeling approaches. Toxicological measurements included laboratory toxicity testing with Mytilus galloprovincialis (Mediterranean mussel) embryos added to both site water (ambient) and site water spiked with multiple Cu concentrat...

Recently we presented a method for modeling a quantum system to a bath that explicitly correlates the system with the individual bath modes. We do this through representation of the bath by locally propagating Gaussians (LPG), which change in position and momentum but remain Gaussian in form. The explicit correlation of the system to the bath modes enters through the simultaneous use of a di†er...

The ambient index and temperature effects on the spectral profiles of two sets of long period gratings (LPGs) of different periods were investigated. The shorter period LPGs were found to be more sensitive than the longer period LPGs over identical ambient index ranges but less sensitive over identical temperature ranges. The coupling wavelength shifts due to temperature are also seen to be lin...