Celebrating Tahoe-Sierra

The Court\u27s ruling in Tahoe-Sierra is a realization of the current Court\u27s potential to reach a sensible result in a regulatory takings case. Tahoe-Sierra is a major victory for government regulators and environmentalists, but not because it eliminates the takings issue as a substantial concern. Tahoe-Sierra instead finds its significance in its restoration of balance to the Court\u27s takings jurisprudence, signified by a new Court majority with Justice Scalia relegated to a dissent. Without reversing the Court\u27s recent rulings in favor of landowners in takings cases, the Court makes clear that a majority of the Justices have never been prepared to endorse the kind of exaggerated readings of those earlier cases that property rights advocates have been proffering

BMP treatment technologies, monitoring needs, and knowledge gaps: status of the knowledge and relevance within the Tahoe Basin

This Technical memorandum fulfills Task 2 for Agreement 03-495 between El Dorado County and the Office of Water Programs at California State University Sacramento and their co-authors, Bachand & Associates and the University of California Tahoe Research Group: 1) a review of current stormwater treatment Best Management Practices (BMP) in the Tahoe Basin and their potential effectiveness in removing fine particles and reducing nutrient concentrations; 2) an assessment of the potential for improving the performance of different types of existing BMPs through retrofitting or better maintenance practices; 3) a review of additional promising treatment technologies not currently in use in the Tahoe Basin; and 4) a list of recommendations to help address the knowledge gaps in BMP design and performance. ... (PDF contains 67 pages

Reflections: Insights from studying gambling in its era of change: what the past 43 years have been about

The following presentation was delivered on October 14, 2012 to the graduating class at the 2012 UNR Executive Development Program in Lake Tahoe, Nevada

Additions to classical sequence of Pleistocene glaciations, Sierra Nevada, California

Two additions are proposed to Black-welder's classical sequence of four Pleistocene glaciations (Tioga, Tahoe, Sherwin, and McGee) of the Sierra Nevada. The younger, the Tenaya, lies between Tioga and Tahoe, giving a three-fold subdivision of the Wisconsin. The older, named Mono Basin, fills the long-recognized gap between Tahoe and Sherwin; it is possibly Illinoian. Evidence for the Mono Basin glaciation is scanty because its ice streams were less extensive than the subsequent Tahoe glaciers

Performance evaluation of a distributed storage service in community network clouds

Community networks are self-organized and decentralized communication networks built and operated by citizens, for citizens. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers now, for community networks, the possibility to collectively develop community clouds, building upon user-provided networks and extending toward cloud services. Cloud storage, and in particular secure and reliable cloud storage, could become a key community cloud service to enable end-user applications. In this paper, we evaluate in a real deployment the performance of Tahoe least-authority file system (Tahoe-LAFS), a decentralized storage system with provider-independent security that guarantees privacy to the users. We evaluate how the Tahoe-LAFS storage system performs when it is deployed over distributed community cloud nodes in a real community network such as Guifi.net. Furthermore, we evaluate Tahoe-LAFS in the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud platform, to compare and understand the impact of homogeneous network and hardware resources on the performance of the Tahoe-LAFS. We observed that the write operation of Tahoe-LAFS resulted in similar performance when using either the community network cloud or the commercial cloud. However, the read operation achieved better performance in the Azure cloud, where the reading from multiple nodes of Tahoe-LAFS benefited from the homogeneity of the network and nodes. Our results suggest that Tahoe-LAFS can run on community network clouds with suitable performance for the needed end-user experience.Peer ReviewedPreprin