The ecology of Atlantic white cedar wetlands: a community profile

This monograph on the ecology of Atlantic white cedar wetlands is one of a series of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service profiles of important freshwater wetland ecosystems of the United States. The purpose of the profile is to describe the extent, components, functioning, history, and treatment of these wetlands. It is intended to provide a useful reference to relevant scientific information and a synthesis of the available literature. The world range of Atlantic white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) is limited to a ribbon of freshwater wetlands within 200 km of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, extending from mid-Maine to mid-Florida and Mississippi. Often in inaccessible sites and difficult to traverse, cedar wetlands contain distinctive suites of plant species. Highly valued as commercial timber since the early days of European colonization of the continent, the cedar and its habitat are rapidly disappearing. This profile describes the Atlantic white cedar and the bogs and swamps it dominates or codominates throughout its range, discussing interrelationships with other habitats, putative origins and migration patterns, substrate biogeochemistry, associated plant and animal species (with attention to those that are rare, endangered, or threatened regionally or nationally), and impacts of both natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Research needs for each area are outlined. Chapters are devoted to the practices and problems of harvest and management, and to an examination of a large preserve recently acquired by the USFWS, the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina

Circumventing the Electoral College: Why the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact Survives Constitutional Scrutiny Under the Compact Clause

It’s Election Night 2016. Brian Williams stands by at NBC, waiting to give the first returns of the night. “Kentucky to Christie,” Williams triumphantly announces to kick off the evening’s festivities. Kentucky turns flush red on NBC’s virtual election map. Williams continues: “Maryland to Clinton.” Now comes the hard part for Williams. Clinton won Maryland by an incredible two-to-one margin. NBC viewers intently watch the map, expecting to see the Old Line State turn blue. Instead, Maryland sits idly in its static grey color. This election has something new. Confused NBC viewers keep watching, waiting for Williams to provide an explanation. “We’d love to tell you who will win Maryland now, but unfortunately we can’t,” Williams says. “We’ll have to wait until all votes nationwide have been counted.” Realizing that many of his viewers are likely perplexed by this new electoral voting system, Williams starts explaining the newly enacted National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVC), in which several states have agreed to allocate their Electoral College delegates to the winner of the national vote, as opposed to the traditional state vote. Debate about the Electoral College has raged through the years, but it came to the forefront of national political attention after the 2000 presidential election produced the fourth electoral “misfire” in United States history. In 2001, law professors Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar introduced the idea of state legislatures allocating their respective electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Five years later, the organization “National Popular Vote,” consisting of a bipartisan group of prominent current and former congressmen, held its initial press conference in Washington, D.C. to explain the legislation that would soon be introduced in all 50 U.S. states. National Popular Vote introduced the NPVC, which, if adopted by enough states, would essentially replace the constitutionally mandated Electoral College with a direct national popular vote. Significantly, this law would be enacted by a horizontal agreement among the states, not a constitutional amendment. At the time of this writing, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have enacted the National Popular Vote Compact (NPVC). Cumulatively, these jurisdictions equal 132 of the necessary 270 electoral votes for the NPVC’s provisions to go into effect. If the NPVC is triggered and becomes binding law, the chief election official in each member state will add up the total number of national popular votes for each candidate, and the state’s certifying official will then appoint that state’s slate of electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Member states are permitted to withdraw from the NPVC, but cannot do so after July 20th in the year of a presidential election. As this article will later explain, each state is entitled to choose how it wants to allocate its electoral votes. Thus, constitutional scrutiny of the NPVC centers on the manner in which it will be enacted, not whether each state has the individual power to change its method of electoral vote allocation. Part II of this article will discuss the formation of the Electoral College, the roles that both state and federal governments play in the election of the President, and the emergence of the NPVC as an alternative to a constitutional amendment. Part III surveys the history of the Compact Clause, which would be implicated by enactment of the NPVC. Part IV then takes a detailed look at the principles of federalism that are inherent in the Electoral College, explores the roles of presidential electors, and concludes that under existing Compact Clause precedent, the NPVC does not require Congressional consent in order for it to be effective

Causal contribution and dynamical encoding in the striatum during evidence accumulation.

A broad range of decision-making processes involve gradual accumulation of evidence over time, but the neural circuits responsible for this computation are not yet established. Recent data indicate that cortical regions that are prominently associated with accumulating evidence, such as the posterior parietal cortex and the frontal orienting fields, may not be directly involved in this computation. Which, then, are the regions involved? Regions that are directly involved in evidence accumulation should directly influence the accumulation-based decision-making behavior, have a graded neural encoding of accumulated evidence and contribute throughout the accumulation process. Here, we investigated the role of the anterior dorsal striatum (ADS) in a rodent auditory evidence accumulation task using a combination of behavioral, pharmacological, optogenetic, electrophysiological and computational approaches. We find that the ADS is the first brain region known to satisfy the three criteria. Thus, the ADS may be the first identified node in the network responsible for evidence accumulation

Exponential families, Kahler geometry and quantum mechanics

Exponential families are a particular class of statistical manifolds which are particularly important in statistical inference, and which appear very frequently in statistics. For example, the set of normal distributions, with mean {\mu} and deviation {\sigma}, form a 2-dimensional exponential family. In this paper, we show that the tangent bundle of an exponential family is naturally a Kahler manifold. This simple but crucial observation leads to the formalism of quantum mechanics in its geometrical form, i.e. based on the Kahler structure of the complex projective space, but generalizes also to more general Kahler manifolds, providing a natural geometric framework for the description of quantum systems. Many questions related to this "statistical Kahler geometry" are discussed, and a close connection with representation theory is observed. Examples of physical relevance are treated in details. For example, it is shown that the spin of a particle can be entirely understood by means of the usual binomial distribution. This paper centers on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, and on the question of its potential generalization through its geometrical formulation

Approaches to optimize Uzbekistan's investment in irrigation technologies

For many decades, Uzbekistan has been one of the largest cotton producers in the world. The irrigation water needed for these high production levels has been delivered by the massive diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which naturally flowed into the Aral Sea. This diversion for agriculture was the main cause of the rapid decline of the Aral Sea, which is at only 10% of its original size today. The traditional method of irrigation, which relies on simple open canal systems, is highly inefficient for managing the region’s critical and limited water resource. It has been qualitatively estimated, for example, that irrigation water lost to evaporation and system inefficiencies is quite large. With the future availability of water at risk for agriculture in Central Asia, primarily due to the loss of glacial volume from global warming, along with declines in seasonal snowpack, it is clear that new approaches to water management are needed. Any serious efforts to restore the Aral Sea and its ecological services would also reduce supplies of irrigation water for Uzbekistan. While regional conflict over water is unlikely, it must be considered since Uzbekistan is a downstream country among several that rely on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for most of their water supplies. To insure against these risks to cotton poduction and the underlying economy, better irrigation technologies are needed across Uzbekistan. However, these technologies can be quite expensive, especially given that water is still nearly free. In this case study we explore the use of real options nalysis (ROA) to look for optimal investment strategies in efficient irrigation technologies in light of variable climate and policy uncertainties