Cloning of the major 3-MC inducible phase I and phase II detoxification enzymes of plaice liver

cDNA's coding for cytochrome P4501A1 (CYP1A1), phenol UDP-glucuronosyltransferase (UDPGT) and glutathione S-transferase (GST-A) were cloned and sequenced from an expression library prepared from the liver of a 3-methylcholanthrene (3-MC) induced plaice. Plaice CYP1A1 and Phenol UDPGT display a high degree of structural conservation with homologous mammalian isoforms and their mRNAs were shown to be highly induced in liver after 3-MC treatment of fish. Expression of plaice GST-A, which displays closer homology to GSTs from plants and invertebrates than those of mammals, is repressed after 3-MC treatment.     

Product changes in multi-plant enterprises

Product change is a neglected form of locational adjustment. This exploratory study examines the changes that 64 multi-plant enterprises in the United Kingdom textile and clothing industries made to the products manufactured in their plants during a six year period. Transfers of products to and from plants and the introduction of products new to the enterprise were the most common types of change. The extension of manufacture of products to other plants and product abandonments occurred less frequently. Product change decisions were relatively important in comparison with the frequency of occurrence of other types of locational change. Altering the use made of particular locations gave an important flexibility to the operations of the companies. The most important reasons affecting the product changes were a desire to expand production of products already manufactured by the company, to introduce closely related products and to reorganise the location of products between plants. The degree of diversification, the investment strategy, the size, and the profitability of the enterprises were the most important characteristics of the companies influencing the frequencies with which the various types of product change occurred. Some types of plant were also found more likely to experience product changes than others: notably, the head office plants of parent companies, large plants, plants producing in declining industries, and recently opened plants.     

Changes in timber haul emissions in the context of shifting forest management and infrastructure

Background  

Although significant amounts of carbon may be stored in harvested wood products, the extraction of that carbon from the forest generally entails combustion of fossil fuels. The transport of timber from the forest to primary milling facilities may in particular create emissions that reduce the net sequestration value of product carbon storage. However, attempts to quantify the effects of transport on the net effects of forest management typically use relatively sparse survey data to determine transportation emission factors. We developed an approach for systematically determining transport emissions using: 1) -remotely sensed maps to estimate the spatial distribution of harvests, and 2) - industry data to determine landscape-level harvest volumes as well as the location and processing totals of individual mills. These data support spatial network analysis that can produce estimates of fossil carbon released in timber transport.     

Testing and evaluation of an integrated GPS/INS system for smallAUV navigation

A Small Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Navigation System (SANS) is being developed at the Naval Postgraduate School. The SANS is an integrated Global Positioning System/Inertial Navigation System (GPS/INS) navigation system composed of low-cost and small-size components. It is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of using a low-cost strap-down inertial measurement unit (IMU) to navigate between intermittent GPS fixes. The present hardware consists of a GPS/DGPS receiver, IMU, compass, water speed sensor, water depth sensor, and a data processing computer. The software is based on a 12-state complementary filter that combines measurement data from all sensors to derive a vehicle position/orientation estimate. This paper describes hardware and software design and testing results of the SANS. It is shown that results from tilt table testing and bench testing provide an effective means for tuning filter gains. Ground vehicle testing verifies the overall functioning of the SANS and exhibits an encouraging degree of accuracy     

Integrating GIS and data warehousing in a Web environment: A case study of the US 1880 Census

While the business intelligence sector, involving data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP) technologies, is experiencing strong growth in the IT marketplace, relatively little attention has been devoted to the problem of utilizing such tools in conjunction with GIS. This study contributes to the development of this research area by examining the issues involved in the design and implementation of an integrated data warehouse and GIS system that delivers analytical OLAP and mapping results in real‐time across the Web. The case study chosen utilizes individual records from the US 1880 population census, which have recently been made available by the North Atlantic Population Project. Although historical datasets of this kind present a number of challenges for data warehousing, the results indicate that the integrated approach adopted offers a much more flexible and powerful analytical methodology for this kind of large social science dataset than has hitherto been available.     

Spatial growth and spatial rationalization in multi-plant enterprises

This paper analyses the spatial growth and rationalization behaviour, over a six year period, of a representative sample of 64 multi-plant enterprises in the United Kingdom textile and clothing industries, and illustrates the findings with case studies. The companies which expanded outside their home region for the first time, did so as frequently by long distance growth as by short distance, and by opening branch plants as well as by acquiring firms. By far the most common spatial rationalization policy was plant closure combined with concentration of production on an existing site. A new concept of activity locations is proposed as a useful tool for designing and assessing spatial rationalization policies.     

Direct-Push Electrical Conductivity Logging for High-Resolution Hydrostratigraphic Characterization

Fine-scale hydrostratigraphic features often play a critical role in controlling ground water flow and contaminant transport. Unfortunately, many conventional drilling- and geophysics-based approaches are rarely capable of describing these features at the level of detail needed for contaminant predictions and remediation designs. Previous work has shown that direct-push electrical conductivity (EC) logging can provide information about site hydrostratigraphy at a scale of relevance for contaminant transport investigations in many unconsolidated settings. In this study, we evaluate the resolution and quality of that information at a well-studied research site that is underlain by highly stratified alluvial sediments. Geologic and hydrologic data, conventional geophysical logs, and particle-size analyses are used to demonstrate the capability of direct-push EC logging for the delineation of fine-scale hydrostratigraphic features in saturated unconsolidated formations. When variations in pore-fluid chemistry are small, the electrical conductivity of saturated media is primarily a function of clay content, and hydrostratigraphic features can be described at a level of detail (<2.5 cm in thickness) that has not previously been possible in the absence of continuous cores. Series of direct-push EC logs can be used to map the lateral continuity of layers with non-negligible clay content and to develop important new insights into flow and transport at a site. However, in sand and gravel intervals with negligible clay, EC logging provides little information about hydrostratigraphic features. As with all electrical logging methods, some site-specific information about the relative importance of fluid and sediment contributions to electrical conductivity is needed. Ongoing research is directed at developing direct-push methods that allow EC logging, water sampling, and hydraulic testing to be done concurrently.     

Enhancement of the inertial navigation system for the Morpheusautonomous underwater vehicles

This paper presents the design and development of an enhanced inertial navigation system that is to be integrated into the Morpheus autonomous underwater vehicle at Florida Atlantic University. The inertial measurement unit is based on the off-the-shelf Honeywell HG1700-AG25 3-axis ring-laser gyros and three-axis accelerometers and is aided with ground speed measurements obtained using an RDI Doppler-velocity-log sonar. An extended Kalman filter has been developed, which fuses together asynchronously the inertial and Doppler data, as well as the differential Global Positioning System positional fixes whenever they are available. A complementary filter was implemented to provide a much smoother and stable attitude estimate. Thus far, preliminary study has been made on characterizing the inertial navigation system-based navigation system performance, and the corresponding results and analyzes are provided