Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of Natural Resource Sciences. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2009/06/08). Includes bibliographical references.

This study was undertaken for two reasons. The first was that the New Zealand Falcon was largely unstudied, and research on its basic biology would provide a base-line for further work. The second was that the topic covered a number of disciplines which meant that, as an academic exercise, the scope was broad rather than narrowly specialised. The easiest projects to write up are those in which there are so many data that the figures almost speak for themselves or those in which there are so few data that one is free to speculate. Unfortunately most of the chapters in this study fall into a middle category in which the samples are small and statistical probabilities are marginal. Also, in trying to maintain a broad approach I have been compelled to sacrifice depth and so each chapter tends to reveal more questions than it answers. While writing, I have been acutely aware of the differences between potential readers. Overseas raptor specialists on the one hand may know little about New Zealand's avifauna and ecology, and New Zealand biologists, familiar with New Zealand, may know little about the ways of raptors. Therefore a short glossary of terms has been included. Briefly, the study has set out to answer a few straightforward questions such as 'Is the Falcon monotypic?', 'What is it related to?', 'Why are the females larger?', 'What do they eat?', 'How do they hunt?', 'How big is their range?', 'What is their breeding biology?', 'Will they breed in captivity?', 'What do they die of?', 'Where are they?', 'How many are there?'. Some of these questions, such as the diet, can be answered with some precision; others, such as the problem of sexual dimorphism, can only be answered in a general way. Because I was strongly advised at the start of this project that a study of the New Zealand Falcon was not feasible, I started a subsidiary project on the Australasian Harrier (Circus approximans). This was soon abandoned and although the results have been published (Fox 1977b) they have not been included in this thesis. Certain portions of this thesis, such as 'Rangle' (Chapter 5.15 -5.19), 'Diet values and food consumption' (5.8-5.11) and 'The shape of nesting territories' (8.9) have already been published or are in press, but for the sake of continuity have been kept as an integral part of the thesis. To a certain extent I have been handicapped by lack of raptor specialists in New Zealand with whom I could discuss my work. Another aspect of New Zealand's isolation is the difficulty in obtaining certain literature. Thus Chapter Four has suffered from my not having access to Noel Snyder's and James Wiley's recent monograph on Sexual Dimorphism. The compensation for this isolation has been the' privilege of working on such a magnificent, and unstudied, raptor.

This study was undertaken for two reasons. The first was that the New Zealand Falcon was largely unstudied, and research on its basic biology would provide a base-line for further work. The second was that the topic covered a number of disciplines which meant that, as an academic exercise, the scope was broad rather than narrowly specialised. The easiest projects to write up are those in which there are so many data that the figures almost speak for themselves or those in which there are so few data that one is free to speculate. Unfortunately most of the chapters in this study fall into a middle category in which the samples are small and statistical probabilities are marginal. Also, in trying to maintain a broad approach I have been compelled to sacrifice depth and so each chapter tends to reveal more questions than it answers. While writing, I have been acutely aware of the differences between potential readers. Overseas raptor specialists on the one hand may know little about New Zealand's avifauna and ecology, and New Zealand biologists, familiar with New Zealand, may know little about the ways of raptors. Therefore a short glossary of terms has been included. Briefly, the study has set out to answer a few straightforward questions such as 'Is the Falcon monotypic?', 'What is it related to?', 'Why are the females larger?', 'What do they eat?', 'How do they hunt?', 'How big is their range?', 'What is their breeding biology?', 'Will they breed in captivity?', 'What do they die of?', 'Where are they?', 'How many are there?'. Some of these questions, such as the diet, can be answered with some precision; others, such as the problem of sexual dimorphism, can only be answered in a general way. Because I was strongly advised at the start of this project that a study of the New Zealand Falcon was not feasible, I started a subsidiary project on the Australasian Harrier (Circus approximans). This was soon abandoned and although the results have been published (Fox 1977b) they have not been included in this thesis. Certain portions of this thesis, such as 'Rangle' (Chapter 5.15 -5.19), 'Diet values and food consumption' (5.8-5.11) and 'The shape of nesting territories' (8.9) have already been published or are in press, but for the sake of continuity have been kept as an integral part of the thesis. To a certain extent I have been handicapped by lack of raptor specialists in New Zealand with whom I could discuss my work. Another aspect of New Zealand's isolation is the difficulty in obtaining certain literature. Thus Chapter Four has suffered from my not having access to Noel Snyder's and James Wiley's recent monograph on Sexual Dimorphism. The compensation for this isolation has been the' privilege of working on such a magnificent, and unstudied, raptor.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Australian National University, 2003. / Title from PDF title page (viewed May 12, 2005). Includes bibliographical references.

To assess the impact of low-altitude jet overflights on parental care, we examined nest attendance, time-activity budgets, and provisioning rates of 21 Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) pairs breeding along the Tanana River, Alaska in 1995 and 1996. Several intrinsic and extrinsic factors influenced attributes of nesting behavior. Female nest attendance declined substantially with progression of the nesting cycle, while male attendance patterns were consistent throughout the nesting cycle. Further, although females typically performed most of the incubating, male attendance at the nest area varied considerably among breeding pairs. Both prey item delivery rates and estimated prey mass delivery rates increased with brood size. Prey item delivery rates per nestling, however, decreased with increasing brood size; yet estimated prey mass delivery rates per nestling did not vary with brood size. Peregrine Falcons apparently maintained constant provisioning rates per nestling as brood size increased by increasing average prey size. We found evidence that nest attendance and time-activity budgets of Peregrine Falcons differed during periods of overflights compared with reference nests, but differences depended on stage of the nesting cycle and gender. Males had lower nest ledge attendance during periods when overflights occurred than males from reference nests when data from the incubation and early nestling-rearing stages of the nesting cycle were combined. Females apparently compensated for lower male ledge attendance by attending the ledge more during overflown periods compared to females from reference nests, although this trend was not significant. During late nestling-rearing, however, females perched in the nest area less during periods when overflights occurred than females from reference nests. We did not see a relationship between nest attendance and the number of overflights, the cumulative number of exposures experienced by each nesting pair, or the average sound exposure level of overflights. Nor did we find evidence that nestling provisioning rates were affected by overflights. Low altitude jet overflights did not markedly affect nest attendance, time-activity budgets, or nestling provisioning rates of breeding Peregrine Falcons. / Graduation date: 1999

During the last twenty years marked declines in Peregrine Falcon populations have occurred in many parts of the world (Hickey, 1969). During recent years the peregrine has been placed on the list of Endangered Species. Several factors have been suggested as the cause of its decline. These include changing climatic conditions (Porter and White, 1973), human disturbance (Mattox, pers. comm.), and introduction of chlorinated hydrocarbons as pesticides into the environment (Ratcliffe, 1970). The third factor, introduction of chlorinated hydrocarbons, has occurred on the American, European and Asian continents. Even peregrines nesting in locations far from human population concentrations are exposed to chemical pollutants on migratory flights south, in nesting areas and in the wintering range. Most of the small birds utilized by the peregrine as prey in the north also migrate south every winter, many moving into farming areas where insecticides are frequently used. By feeding in these areas the passerines accumulate substantial amounts of chlorinated hydrocarbons which are stored in fat tissues. As the peregrines feed on these small birds, body levels of chlorinated hydrocarbons gradually increase. If subsequent levels·are high enough, they may cause death (Porter, 1972). In most cases, however, lethal levels are never reached: instead the lower levels produce eggshell thinning and breakage (Porter and Wiemeyer, 1969) which may be an important reason for world-wide decline in peregrine populations (Hickey and Roelle, 1969). Peregrines in the western United States have shown a 20% decrease in eggshell thickness since DDT was introduced (Enderson and Craig, 1974).

In order to examine the potential impact of military jet overflights and other disturbances on productivity of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus), we observed behavioral reactions of peregrines to disturbances at nests along the Tanana River, Alaska during the 1995-1997 breeding seasons. Military jets conducted low-altitude flights over a sample of nests under observation in each year (experimental nests), while other nests were not intentionally overflown (reference nests). Other disturbances occurred at random. Animal noise monitors (ANMs), which collect and store data on noise disturbance levels, were deployed at each observed nest. A total of 878 above-threshold (��� 85 dB) overflights were recorded by the ANMs during the course of the study. A total of 401 close (defined as ��� 1000 m slant distance from the nest) overflights by subsonic F-16, F-15, A-10, Harrier, Jaguar, or Tornado jet aircraft were recorded during observations. Close overflights by military jets accounted for 63% of all observed potential disturbances at experimental nests; they accounted for 2.6% of all observed potential disturbances at reference nests. Other potential disturbances at reference nests included civilian fixed-wing aircraft (41%), boats (33%), avian predators (17%), helicopters (5%), and mammalian predators (1%). Peregrine falcons responded differently to animate and inanimate sources of disturbance, and responded most intensely and most frequently to other raptors, particularly conspecifics. Flight reactions were common, but not in response to inanimate sources. Among inanimate potential disturbances, falcons responded most intensely to boats (6% of reactions involved flight), and least intensely to helicopters (3%) and fixed-wing aircraft (2%). Intensity of reactions to military jets was indistinguishable from that to either boats or other aircraft. Intense behavioral responses (including flight reactions) to military jet overflights were rarely observed in this study, even at slant distances <500 m, and no intense behavioral responses were observed at slant distances >550 m. Peregrine falcon productivity (number of fledglings produced per nesting attempt) in the study area was within the normal range for Interior Alaska and the Tanana River. Dose of jet aircraft disturbance was not correlated with productivity. Productivity was, however, negatively correlated with reactivity of both individual falcons and mated pairs. Those falcons that responded more intensely to overflights tended to have lower productivity. The sensitivity of breeding peregrine falcons to low-altitude jet overflights is a better indicator of subsequent productivity than actual dose of overflights. This is likely a reflection of lower parental quality/investment among breeding pairs with high reactivity (i.e., younger, less experienced parents are less likely to be productive). / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-56).

Graphs model relationships across real-world entities in web graphs, social network graphs, and road network graphs. Graph algorithms analyze and transform a graph to discover graph properties or to apply a computation. For instance, a pagerank algorithm computes a rank for each page in a webgraph, and a community detection algorithm discovers likely communities in a social network, while a shortest path algorithm computes the quickest way to reach a place from another, in a road network. In Domains such as social information systems, the number of edges can be in billions or trillions. Such large graphs are processed on distributed computer systems or clusters. Graph algorithms can be executed on multi-core CPUs, GPUs with thousands of cores, multi-GPU devices, and CPU+GPU clusters, depending on the size of the graph object. While programming such algorithms on heterogeneous targets, a programmer is required to deal with parallelism and and also manage explicit data communication between distributed devices. This implies that a programmer is required to learn CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, etc., and also the details of the hardware architecture. Such codes are error prone and di cult to debug. A Domain Speci c Language (DSL) which hides all the hardware details and lets the programmer concentrate only the algorithmic logic will be very useful. With this as the research goal, Falcon, graph DSL and its compiler have been developed. Falcon programs are explicitly parallel and Falcon hides all the hardware details from the programmer. Large graphs that do not t into the memory of a single device are automatically partitioned by the Falcon compiler. Another feature of Falcon is that it supports mutation of graph objects and thus enables programming dynamic graph algorithms. The Falcon compiler converts a single DSL code to heterogeneous targets such as multi-core CPUs, GPUs, multi-GPU devices, and CPU+GPU clusters. Compiled codes of Falcon match or outperform state-of-the-art graph frameworks for di erent target platforms and benchmarks.

Sepsis characterized by severe bloodstream bacterial infection that results in high mortality rates and medical expenses has become a global healthcare challenge. The current clinical sepsis diagnosis is based on blood culture and requires a long waiting time, delaying effective treatments. The emerging sepsis diagnosis shortens the turn-around of time but requires an efficient bacteria separation from the blood beforehand. In this master’s degree project, a new filter-based method of separating bacteria from the blood is investigated to meet the clinical need for future sepsis diagnosis. The separation device is controlled within the size of a centrifuge falcon tube and integrated with a slanted filter inside. Through a centrifuge, blood cells and bacteria are maneuvered toward the filter and separated by it. Using the optimal design, at concentrations as low as 100 CFU/mL, the device can recover around 30% of bacteria of E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and S. aureus from 1 mL of whole blood within 60 minutes, and reject 99.4% RBCs from going through the filter. Bacteria recovery at 10 CFU/mL concentration demonstrated all-positive results, making this new separation method a promising candidate for future clinic needs in sepsis diagnosis. / Sepsis, som kännetecknas av svår bakterieinfektion i blodomloppet och leder till hög dödlighet och medicinska kostnader, har blivit en global utmaning inom hälso- och sjukvården. Den nuvarande kliniska diagnosen av sepsis baseras på blododling och kräver lång väntetid, vilket försenar effektiva behandlingar. Den framväxande diagnosmetoden för sepsis förkortar väntetiden men kräver effektiv separation av bakterier från blodet. I detta masterprojekt undersöks en ny filterbaserad metod för att separera bakterier från blodet för att möta den kliniska efterfrågan inom framtida sepsisdiagnostik. Separationsenheten kontrolleras inom storleken av en falcon-rör och är integrerad med en lutande filterinsats. Genom en centrifug manövreras blodceller och bakterier mot filtret och separeras av det. Genom att använda den optimala designen kan enheten återhämta cirka 30% av bakterierna E. coli, K. pneumoniae och S. aureus från 1 ml helblod med koncentrationer så låga som 100 CFU/ml inom 60 minuter, och avvisa 99,4% av de röda blodkropparna från att passera genom filtret. Återhämtningen av bakterier vid en koncentration av 10 CFU/ml visade helt positiva resultat, vilket gör denna nya separationsmetod till en lovande kandidat för framtida kliniska behov inom sepsisdiagnostik.