Arsenic in Poultry Litter: Organic Regulations

Most of the arsenic used as an antibiotic in commercial broiler production ends up in the litter. Using this litter as a soil amendment is not prohibited by the National Organic Program, but 7CFR S205.203(c) of the Rule requires that "the producer must manage plant and animal materials to maintain or improve soil organic matter content in a manner that does not contribute to contamination of crops, soil, or water by plant nutrients, pathogenic organisms, heavy metals, or residues of prohibited substances." Poultry litter applied at agronomic levels, using good soil conservation practices, generally will not raise arsenic concentrations sufficiently over background levels to pose environmental or human heath risks. However, recent studies show that more than 70% of the arsenic in uncovered piles of poultry litter can be dissolved by rainfall and potentially leach into lakes or streams. Thus, organic producers must take care when they handle and apply poultry litter

A sound education: using podcasts to develop study skills

Coping with the demands of academic study at university level can be a challenging experience for many students, and effective study skills are crucial in achieving academic success. However, librarians and teachers in higher education will know that it is not always easy to engage students in developing their study skills. How can we find new ways of stimulating the interest of our students? An innovative approach to teaching and the exploitation of new technologies can provide solutions and ideas. Podcasting has been very popular in recent years for delivering entertainment, news and other information, but podcasts are also extensively used in education, enabling students to watch or listen at a time that suits them – at home, at work or while travelling. The Skills for learning website was established over ten years ago as part of the library service at Leeds Metropolitan University to support the teaching and learning of study skills. The website offers students a wide range of resources including topics such as academic writing, time management, group skills, reflection and how to do research. There is also a team of tutors who provide workshops and tutorials. We felt that a podcast series could provide an alternative and flexible way of delivering study skills support that might appeal to a new audience. The podcasts could also be used as a stimulus in classroom teaching. As they are usually released episodically, we hoped that subscribers or visitors to our podcast page would become ‘hooked’ on the series and want to tune in to future podcasts. All the podcasts were created in-house by members of the Skills for learning team

"The Functioning of the Payment System"

[From the Introduction]. Today, most payments consist of electronic transfer of information and book-entries. The domestic financial infrastructure in the EU is generally highly developed, with large and small value systems, central securities depositories, and modern exchanges. Until recently, the cross-border infrastructure was virtually non-existent. Central banks have traditionally played an important role in payment systems. This role has been based on both the operational and the oversight responsibilities of central banks

Revised age for CM Draconis and WD 1633+572: Toward a resolution of model-observation radius discrepancies

We report an age revision for the low-mass detached eclipsing binary CM Draconis and its common proper motion companion, WD 1633+572. An age of 8.5 $\pm$ 3.5 Gyr is found by combining an age estimate for the lifetime of WD 1633+572 and an estimate from galactic space motions. The revised age is greater than a factor of two older than previous estimates. Our results provide consistency between the white dwarf age and the system's galactic kinematics, which reveal the system is a highly probable member of the galactic thick disk. We find the probability that CM Draconis and WD 1633+572 are members of the thick disk is 8500 times greater than the probability that they are members of the thin disk and 170 times greater than the probability they are halo interlopers. If CM Draconis is a member of the thick disk, it is likely enriched in $\alpha$-elements compared to iron by at least 0.2 dex relative to the Sun. This leads to the possibility that previous studies under-estimate the [Fe/H] value, suggesting the system has a near-solar [Fe/H]. Implications for the long-standing discrepancies between the radii of CM Draconis and predictions from stellar evolution theory are discussed. We conclude that CM Draconis is only inflated by about 2% compared to stellar evolution predictions.Comment: Accepted to A&A, 7 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

European Heights in the Early 18th Century

We estimate the height of various European populations in the first half of the 18th century. English and Irish male heights are estimated at c. 65 inches (165 cm), and c. 66 inches (168 cm) respectively. These values are below those obtained from the only other sample available for the period pertaining to British and Irish men, namely those of runaway indentured and convict servants in colonial North America, whose height is estimated as between 66.4 and 67.0 inches (168,7 and 170,2 cm). At c. 64.5 inches (164 cm) Saxon, German and Scotch military heights appear to be near the bottom of the European height distribution in this period. The English were about as tall as Bohemians and French, but shorter than the Irish and Hungarians. A large decline in English heights is evident among the birth cohorts of 1725-29, suggesting that the subsistence crisis of this period must have had a substantial lasting impact on the nutritional status of the cohort born during a time of nutritional deprivation

Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, vol. 85

Covering Leg 85 of the cruises of the Drilling Vessel Glomar Challenger Los Angeles, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii March-April 1982. Includes six chapters: 1. INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND AND EXPLANATORY NOTES, DEEP SEA DRILLING PROJECT LEG 85, CENTRAL EQUATORIAL PACIFIC 2. SITE 571 3. SITE 572 4. SITE 573 5. SITE 574 6. SITE 57

How do adolescents talk about self-harm: a qualitative study of disclosure in an ethnically diverse urban population in England

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/13/572. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Quillen stratification for block varieties

AbstractThe classical results on stratifications for cohomology varieties of finite groups and their modules due to Quillen (Ann. Math. 94 (1971) 549–572; 573–602) and Avrunin–Scott (Invent. Math. 66 (1982) 277–286) carry over to the varieties associated with finitely-generated modules over p-blocks of finite groups, introduced in Linckelmann (J. Algebra 215 (1999) 460–480)