Sustainable Practices in the High Plains: A Study of Water Conservation Efforts and Well Ownership

Extreme demands for crop irrigation and droughts have stressed water supplies in Kansas, making the state increasingly reliant on its underground reserves of freshwater. As precipitation and the availability of surface water become less reliable, aquifers (reservoirs of groundwater) remain one of the only sources of water in the High Plains. Growing demands for water are tapping aquifers beyond their natural rates of replenishment, which has profound implications for sustaining communities in a region prone to drought. This dissertation investigates the water conservation efforts, environmental priorities, and water supply awareness of Kansas well owners, a key social group whose actual and potential water usage is pivotal to understanding and safeguarding groundwater formations. My main research goal is to learn how the reliance on different water supply infrastructures influences water usage. The central research question is: Does owning and using a well change the propensity to conserve water? This is a relevant question because previous research investigating the reproduction of conservation behaviors has not adequately explored how systems of water provision contribute to resource management decisions. To address this omission, I constructed one of the only datasets of well owners used in social scientific research by surveying well owners and non-well owners throughout Kansas (n = 864). Well owners are a key social group whose actual and potential water usage is pivotal to safeguarding groundwater formations, and researching well owners’ conservation efforts will be key to aquifer preservation and wider water management policies. Previous research has outlined how some demographic predictors like political views, age, and sex are tentatively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors; however, my work finds that a household’s water supply moderates several relationships associated with water conservation. This finding suggests that infrastructure contextualizes the adoption of conservation habits, and Kansans’ notions of environmentalism are recalibrated by their systems of water provision. The project provides quantitative and qualitative evidence that well owners embody a form of “groundwater citizenship,” an ethic of conserving and staying mindful of aquifers. Through this research, I seek to identify how infrastructure influences the decision to adopt environmentally-conscious watering practices, which will assist the development of more effective groundwater management policies, and, in turn, improve drought adaptation measures

Religion in rural central Thailand : an analysis of some rituals and beliefs

The preparation for the research of which this thesis is a result began in 1964, when Dr R.IL van Gulik lent a textbook and gramophone records for the study of the Thai language to a group of undergraduate students at the University of Utrecht. For more than two years these students held regular meetings during which they covered the greater part of the course. Most of them persevered with the study of this language because a plan had been developed to form an anthropological 'expedition' to a small community in Thailand. It was intended to set forth in 1967 and, once in the field, each member would gather data almost independently from other members of the group. In order to prevent duplication of work, and to spread the scope of the research as wide as possible, each member had to choose a certain topic within the anthropological discipline upon which to base fieldwork. One decided to concentrate upon decision-making and authority (the 'power structure' as it was then called), one would look closely at land-tenure, another would deal specifically with problems related to kinship and genealogy, whilst the author of this study would focus his attention upon the religious aspects of social life. Since these plans were conceived while the students involved had only recently commenced their academic studies, it was possible for some of them to map out several courses which would prepare them for the planned fieldwork. The author was thus able to incorporate the reading of Sanskrit and Pali texts and the History of Buddhism in t.he program of the §octoraal examination in cultural anthropology

Runtime monitoring of service based systems

With the growing popularity of web services the demand of highly reliable service based systems (SBS) is increasing. Formal verification and testing are performed to ensure the correctness of a system before it is deployed in a real environment. But the high complexity of complete fielded systems puts their effectiveness into questions. Runtime monitoring is the potential technique to cover the area not covered by formal verification and testing. This technique aims to assure the correctness of the current execution of a system. Substantial amount of research has been carried out in runtime monitoring to ensure the reliability of autonomous legacy software. However in service based system some significant complications arises as they focus on systems with no autonomous components, that make the approaches applied to monitor legacy software inadequate for service based system. In this thesis we present a framework for runtime monitoring of service based systems. We establish the necessity of introducing new types of inconsistencies beyond the classical inconsistencies that may occur during the execution of service based systems and develop reasoning mechanism to detect them at run time. In the proposed framework, the properties to be monitored include: (i) behavioural properties of the co-ordination process of the service based system, (ii) functional properties that express functional requirements for the individual services of a service based system or groups of such services, (ii) assumptions regarding the behaviour of the service based system and its constituent services and their effects on the state of the system and (iii) Quality-of- Service (QOS) properties for the service based systems and its constituent services. All types of properties are expressed in a property specification language which is based on event- calculus [Sha99]. The behavioural properties to be monitored at run-time are extracted automatically from the specification of the co-ordination process of a service-based system in BPEL [Bpe03] while the other types of properties to be monitored must be specified by the providers of the system. These properties must be specified in terms of: (i) events that can be observed at run-time and correspond to either operation invocation and response messages or the assignment of values to global variables used by the co-ordination process of the system, and (ii) conditions over the state of the co-ordination process of the system and/or the individual services deployed by it. These restrictions ensure that property monitoring can be based solely on events which are generated by virtue of the normal operation of the system without the need for instrumenting the individual services deployed by it. The property specification language that is used by this framework is a first-order logic language that incorporates special predicates to signify assertions about time and, to this end, it provides a very expressive framework for specifying properties of service based system, which may include temporal characteristics. At run-time, the framework deploys an event receiver that catches events which are exchanged by the different services and the co-ordination process of the system and stores them in an event database. This database is accessed by a monitor that can detect different types of violations of properties. These types are: (i) violations of functional properties and quality-of-service properties by the recorded behaviour of the service based system, (ii) violations and potential violations of behavioural properties, functional properties and quality- of-service properties by the expected system behaviour, and (iii) unjustified and potentially unjustified actions which the system has taken by wrongly assuming that certain pre-conditions associated with the undertaken actions were satisfied at run-time. The detection of these types of violations is fully automatic and is based on an algorithm that has been developed as a variant of algorithms for integrity constraint checking in temporal deductive databases [Ple93, Cho95]. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed monitoring framework and showed the effectiveness of the monitoring prototype through several case studies

Miscellaneous Filings, Volume 6

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