Search for: All records

On September 18, 1996, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) became the first national monument managed by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and one of the first to protect a landscape based partly on its opportunity for scientific discovery. Its creation was a watershed moment in public land management, because to meet the mandates for its first monument, BLM opted to implement unprecedented support of resource investigations for numerous natural and cultural sciences, including establishing its first ever in-house paleontological field program. The rationale for this was taken directly from the establishing presidential proclamation (6920) which called out GSENM’s untapped paleontological treasure trove as “world-class.” The proclamation also singled out the Late Cretaceous vertebrate fossil record of the Kaiparowits Plateau, largely known at the time through the pioneering work of Drs. Jeff Eaton and Rich Cifelli, who had spent years teasing out the mammalian evolutionary story preserved within. Their work on Mesozoic mammals, alongside sporadic work by other institutions (mainly the University of Utah and Brigham Young University) in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrated that the Kaiparowits Plateau also held a substantial macrovertebrate record that included beautifully preserved dinosaur skeletons. However, a lack of coordinated effort and the difficult nature of fieldwork in the rugged badlands led to what can only be described as desultory results. The leverage that came with monument status, including logistical and financial support provided by BLM, made this resource more accessible to the paleontological community, stimulating a sudden burst of new field research and discovery. Initial, coordinated, and collaborative fossil inventories started in 2000 by joint BLM, Utah Museum of Natural History, Museum of Northern Arizona, and Utah Geological Survey teams led to a cascade of discoveries, including sites preserving plants, invertebrates, trace fossils, microvertebrates, and macrovertebrates, contextualized by new geological insights. Many of these new fossil finds represent species entirely new to science, with some sites preserving intact snapshots of Late Cretaceous ecosystems that are unmatched globally. Unique geologic conditions resulted in spectacular preservation, sometimes even including soft tissue traces. This renaissance in North American Late Cretaceous paleontology would not have been possible without the focused resources and effort facilitated by the creation of GSENM and the subsequent prioritization of inventory and basic research in its mission. In addition to the science, the public benefits of these efforts have been immense, providing opportunities for direct involvement in the scientific process through volunteer programs, training for several generations of future paleontologists and geologists, innumerable educational programs, and exposure in national and international media outlets through articles, television, and interviews. The collaborative and far-reaching paleontological effort at GSENM has highlighted an often overlooked aspect of public lands management: the importance of US public lands for scientific discovery and education. 

DIFUSE is a National Science Foundation-funded project at Dartmouth College that develops flexible and reusable data science modules. To disseminate our work, we organized a workshop where faculty participants explored modules and the design process. We identify factors that led participants to join the workshop, their goals for incorporating data science in their courses, and their impacts on their practice. We report and interpret quantitative and qualitative outcomes through participants’ surveys and interviews, finding that the workshop was very successful in increasing participants’ resources and experience levels and promoting change of practices. Further, participants who engaged in continued collaboration, adapting or creating modules for their own courses, reaped deeper changes in practice. 

Abstract Low‐velocity anomalies in the upper mantle beneath eastern North America, including the Northern Appalachian Anomaly (NAA), the Central Appalachian Anomaly (CAA), and the weaker Southern Coastal Anomaly (SCA), have been characterized by many continent‐scale and regional seismic studies. Different models have been proposed to explain their existence beneath the passive margin of eastern North America, variously invoking the past passage of hot spot tracks, modern upwelling due to edge‐driven convection, or other processes. Depending on the nature and origin of these anomalies, they may influence, and/or be influenced by, the mantle transition zone (MTZ) structure beneath them. Previous receiver function studies have identified an overall thinner MTZ beneath the eastern margin of the US than beneath the continental interior. In this study, we resolve the MTZ geometry beneath these low‐velocity anomalies in unprecedented detail using the scattered wavefield migration technique. We find substantially thinned MTZ beneath the NAA and the CAA, and a moderately thinned MTZ beneath the SCA. In all cases, the thinning is achieved via a minor depression of the 410‐km discontinuity and a major uplift of the 660‐km discontinuity, which suggests the presence of a series of MTZ‐penetrating deep upwellings beneath eastern North America. The upwellings beneath eastern North America and a similar style upwelling beneath Bermuda may initiate from ponded thermally buoyant materials below the MTZ fed by hot return flows from the descending Farallon slab in the deep mantle. 

In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2024). https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.416 

<p>This is an example line of NSF COLDEX MARFA ice penetrating radar data (CLX/MKB2o/R66a) that has been processed to provide azimuthal information about radar echos from below, and to the front and back of the aircraft. The input was 1 meter slow time resampled coherent range record with phase intact. The data were pulse compressed and an azimuth fast Fourier transform was used to convert to azimuth angles in 1 km chunks, then slices at -19°, +19˚ and nadir were selected for these numpy arrays. These can be displayed as an RGB image with Blue = nadir, red = forward and green = rear</p> <p>The nadir slice should dominate specular echos, as seen with englacial reflecting horizons; where this trades to more balanced returns across all three channels, scattering dominates, as with rough bed rock or volume scattering. A gmt text file contains information about where this transition occurs in the ice column.</p> <p>Details in delay Doppler processing can be found in <a href="http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/mro/mro-m-sharad-5-radargram- v1/mrosh_2001/document/rgram_processing.pdf">Campbell et al., 2014</a>; the idea for using this approach for looking at englacial structure was discussed by <a href="https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2856">Arenas-Pingarrón, Á. et al., 2023</a>. Details of HiCARs/MARFA focused processing can be found in <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2007.897416">Peters et al., 2007</a>.</p> 

Abstract ObjectivesTo develop CigStopper, a real-time, automated medical billing prototype designed to identify eligible tobacco cessation care codes, thereby reducing administrative workload while improving billing accuracy. Materials and MethodsChatGPT prompt engineering generated a synthetic corpus of physician-style clinical notes categorized for CPT codes 99406/99407. Practicing clinicians annotated the dataset to train multiple machine learning (ML) models focused on accurately predicting billing code eligibility. ResultsDecision tree and random forest models performed best. Mean performance across all models: PRC AUC = 0.857, F1 score = 0.835. Generalizability testing on deidentified notes confirmed that tree-based models performed best. DiscussionCigStopper shows promise for streamlining manual billing inefficiencies that hinder tobacco cessation care. ML methods lay the groundwork for clinical implementation based on good performance using synthetic data. Automating high-volume, low-value tasks simplify complexities in a multi-payer system and promote financial sustainability for healthcare practices. ConclusionCigStopper validates foundational methods for automating the discernment of appropriate billing codes for eligible smoking cessation counseling care. 

ABSTRACT Spatial processes, particularly scale‐dependent feedbacks, may play important and underappreciated roles in the dynamics of bistable ecosystems. For example, self‐organised spatial patterns can allow for stable coexistence of alternative states outside regions of bistability, a phenomenon known as a Busse balloon. We used partial differential equations to explore the potential for such dynamics in coral reefs, focusing on how herbivore behaviour and mobility affect the stability of coral‐ and macroalgal‐dominated states. Herbivore attraction to coral resulted in a Busse balloon that enhanced macroalgal resilience, with patterns persisting in regions of parameter space where nonspatial models predict uniform coral dominance. Thus, our work suggests herbivore association with coral (e.g., for shelter) can prevent reefs from reaching a fully coral‐dominated state. More broadly, this study illustrates how consumer space use can prevent ecosystems from undergoing wholesale state transitions, highlighting the importance of explicitly accounting for space when studying bistable systems. 

Abstract Eddy viscosity is employed throughout the majority of numerical fluid dynamical models, and has been the subject of a vigorous body of research spanning a variety of disciplines. It has long been recognized that the proper description of eddy viscosity uses tensor mathematics, but in practice it is almost always employed as a scalar due to uncertainty about how to constrain the extra degrees of freedom and physical properties of its tensorial form. This manuscript borrows techniques from outside the realm of geophysical fluid dynamics to consider the eddy viscosity tensor using its eigenvalues and eigenvectors, establishing a new framework by which tensorial eddy viscosity can be tested. This is made possible by a careful analysis of an operation called tensor unrolling, which casts the eigenvalue problem for a fourth‐order tensor into a more familiar matrix‐vector form, whereby it becomes far easier to understand and manipulate. New constraints are established for the eddy viscosity coefficients that are guaranteed to result in energy dissipation, backscatter, or a combination of both. Finally, a testing protocol is developed by which tensorial eddy viscosity can be systematically evaluated across a wide range of fluid regimes.