The MAGIC collaboration has been performing Target of Opportunity observations of blazars, when seen flaring in optical by Tuorla blazar monitoring program. In past three years, there has been 5 optical alerts during good weather conditions and reasonable declination of the source. Three alerts have resulted in discovery of VHE gamma-rays from previously undetected source. We will introduce the...

The long-term trend in tropical forest area receives less scrutiny than the tropical deforestation rate. We show that constructing a reliable trend is difficult and evidence for decline is unclear, within the limits of errors involved in making global estimates. A time series for all tropical forest area, using data from Forest Resources Assessments (FRAs) of the United Nations Food and Agricul...

Comprehensive animal health surveillance programmes require components that ensure the overall sensitivity and timeliness of surveillance data. Participatory epidemiology (PE) is the application of participatory rural appraisal techniques to the collection of epidemiological intelligence. Participatory disease searching (PDS) is the use of PE techniques in active disease surveillance and outbre...

The typical approach taken by clinical studies examining the factors that affect mood is to use questionnaires in order to record the activities that impact the mood. However, recording activities in this manner suffers from a number of issues including floor effect and difficulty in recalling past activities. Our work instead has focused on using unobtrusive monitoring technology to study mood...

Evidence for the reliability and validity of two models of Ambulatory Monitoring, Inc. actigraphs was obtained by testing four instruments of each kind 10 times each on a precision pendulum. Correlation and coefficient of variation methods were used to analyze the data. Reliability coefficients of .98 were obtained for both models. Coefficient of variation methods yielded reliability coefficien...