Leroy L. Peters Obituary

Leroy Lynn Peters, of Wamego, KS, died Sunday, July 23, 2006, at the Wamego City Hospital after an extended illness. Peters was born on June 21, 1931, to Lester L. and Mildred (Wade) Peters in Deerfield, MO. He attended Walnut, MO, schools and graduated from Walnut High School in 1949. He was a U.S. Army veteran, having served during the Korean War. On May 23, 1954, he married Barbara Jane Clark in Walnut. He earned a B.S. degree in biological science in 1955 and an M.S. degree in entomology in 1956, both from Kansas State University. In 1971, he earned his Ph.D. in entomology from the University of Missouri–Columbia. His dissertation topic was “Influence of Corn Amylase on Angoumois Grain Moth Biology”. Peters worked as a survey entomologist for the state of Kansas (1958–1964) and was employed as an instructor and assistant professor of entomology at the University of Missouri–Columbia (1964–1971). From 1972 to 1991, he served as associate professor and then professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s South Central Research and Extension Center, near Clay Center. His research and extension responsibilities emphasized management of field crop insects. Peters’ programming efforts included management of chinch bugs and greenbugs on grain sorghum, corn rootworms, and stored grain insects

Economic Value Added for New Ventures and Small Business

Historically,   Economic    Value  Added   (EVA)   was   a  financial    tool   reserved  for   large corporations and mature businesses. However, EVA can be particularly useful for small businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors. The value, computed from uncomplicated and available financial data, can direct the tactical and strategic  activities  of the firm  toward value producing projects, help regulate spending, and serve as an exit indicator for firms that may  never  become  successful

EC92-1555-C Insect Pest Management Strategies for Yards and Gardens

Extension circular 92-1555-C: This circular discusses how integrated pest management can be applied to insect and mite management in yards and gardens

Caustics in turbulent aerosols

Networks of caustics can occur in the distribution of particles suspended in a randomly moving gas. These can facilitate coagulation of particles by bringing them into close proximity, even in cases where the trajectories do not coalesce. We show that the long-time morphology of these caustic patterns is determined by the Lyapunov exponents lambda_1, lambda_2 of the suspended particles, as well as the rate J at which particles encounter caustics. We develop a theory determining the quantities J, lambda_1, lambda_2 from the statistical properties of the gas flow, in the limit of short correlation times.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

High electrical conductance enhancement in Au-nanoparticle decorated sparse single-wall carbon nanotube networks

The authors thank the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council for funding through the Imperial College London/Queen Mary Unive

The Automated Root Exudate System (ARES): a method to apply solutes at regular intervals to soils in the field.

Root exudation is a key component of nutrient and carbon dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems. Exudation rates vary widely by plant species and environmental conditions, but our understanding of how root exudates affect soil functioning is incomplete, in part because there are few viable methods to manipulate root exudates in situ. To address this, we devised the Automated Root Exudate System (ARES), which simulates increased root exudation by applying small amounts of labile solutes at regular intervals in the field. The ARES is a gravity-fed drip irrigation system comprising a reservoir bottle connected via a timer to a micro-hose irrigation grid covering c. 1 m2; 24 drip-tips are inserted into the soil to 4-cm depth to apply solutions into the rooting zone. We installed two ARES subplots within existing litter removal and control plots in a temperate deciduous woodland. We applied either an artificial root exudate solution (RE) or a procedural control solution (CP) to each subplot for 1 min day-1 during two growing seasons. To investigate the influence of root exudation on soil carbon dynamics, we measured soil respiration monthly and soil microbial biomass at the end of each growing season. The ARES applied the solutions at a rate of c. 2 L m-2 week-1 without significantly increasing soil water content. The application of RE solution had a clear effect on soil carbon dynamics, but the response varied by litter treatment. Across two growing seasons, soil respiration was 25% higher in RE compared to CP subplots in the litter removal treatment, but not in the control plots. By contrast, we observed a significant increase in microbial biomass carbon (33%) and nitrogen (26%) in RE subplots in the control litter treatment. The ARES is an effective, low-cost method to apply experimental solutions directly into the rooting zone in the field. The installation of the systems entails minimal disturbance to the soil and little maintenance is required. Although we used ARES to apply root exudate solution, the method can be used to apply many other treatments involving solute inputs at regular intervals in a wide range of ecosystems

Ab initio molecular dynamics calculations of ion hydration free energies

We apply ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) methods in conjunction with the thermodynamic integration or "lambda-path" technique to compute the intrinsic hydration free energies of Li+, Cl-, and Ag+ ions. Using the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof functional, adapting methods developed for classical force field applications, and with consistent assumptions about surface potential (phi) contributions, we obtain absolute AIMD hydration free energies (Delta G(hyd)) within a few kcal/mol, or better than 4%, of Tissandier 's [J. Phys. Chem. A 102, 7787 (1998)] experimental values augmented with the SPC/E water model phi predictions. The sums of Li+/Cl- and Ag+/Cl- AIMD Delta G(hyd), which are not affected by surface potentials, are within 2.6% and 1.2 % of experimental values, respectively. We also report the free energy changes associated with the transition metal ion redox reaction Ag++Ni+-> Ag+Ni2+ in water. The predictions for this reaction suggest that existing estimates of Delta G(hyd) for unstable radiolysis intermediates such as Ni+ may need to be extensively revised.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures. This version is essentially the one published in J. Chem. Phy

Gold Standard Online Debates Summaries and First Experiments Towards Automatic Summarization of Online Debate Data

Usage of online textual media is steadily increasing. Daily, more and more news stories, blog posts and scientific articles are added to the online volumes. These are all freely accessible and have been employed extensively in multiple research areas, e.g. automatic text summarization, information retrieval, information extraction, etc. Meanwhile, online debate forums have recently become popular, but have remained largely unexplored. For this reason, there are no sufficient resources of annotated debate data available for conducting research in this genre. In this paper, we collected and annotated debate data for an automatic summarization task. Similar to extractive gold standard summary generation our data contains sentences worthy to include into a summary. Five human annotators performed this task. Inter-annotator agreement, based on semantic similarity, is 36% for Cohen's kappa and 48% for Krippendorff's alpha. Moreover, we also implement an extractive summarization system for online debates and discuss prominent features for the task of summarizing online debate data automatically.Comment: accepted and presented at the CICLING 2017 - 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic

G94-1210 Borers of Shade Trees and Ornamental Plants

This publication describes the important shade tree and ornamental borers in Nebraska and discusses their management. Nearly all shade trees are subject to borer attack. If damage is severe, young trees are likely to decline or die