A decision support system for planning and management of sustainable livestock production in the Midwest

Managing livestock operations in an environmentally sound way presents a major challenge to the livestock production industry. Excessive amounts of manure can cause major environmental problems if not properly managed. The contamination of surface and subsurface water supplies due to non-point source pollution from livestock production has increased public concern in regards to large livestock operations. Another source of pollution from livestock facilities is atmospheric pollution in the form of odor. Odorous gaseous, such as carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, and other gaseous from livestock operations are a health hazard and nuisance to neighboring populations. Analysis of the environmental impacts of livestock production has depended on the use of emerging geospatial information systems as well as biophysical models to predict agricultural non-point source pollution.;The overall goal of this research was to develop a DSS to facilitate analysis and management of environmental problems associated with livestock production. To accomplish this objective, a GIS-based decision support system (DSS) was developed that integrates a multi-criteria site selection model, a biophysical model, and an atmospheric dispersion model into a framework that can assist planners and decision-makers in selecting suitable land areas both for siting livestock operations and for manure application, and to analyze the potential water quality and regional atmospheric consequences of production practices. In this study, LPRDSS was used to assess areas in Taylor County, Iowa for siting large-scale swine confinement operations and to evaluate the impacts on water quality in the Hundred and Two Mile River watershed. The DSS was also used to assess potential regional air quality problems associated with those sites

An evaluation of a remedial spelling program in grade III

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1949. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

21st Century politics: new faces/new spaces

Politics has been described as a man’s game and a man’s place. Further, the design of houses of politics also embeds this dominant masculine ethos. Traditional Chambers have been large with only limited seating arrangements ensuring that only privileged elite can participate and both officials and the public are located at some distance and separate from the elected officials. Such a Chamber ensures that Members need to face each other and the dominant interaction is adversarial. Within this system however, women have been able to carve out new spaces, or use existing ones in different ways, to become more involved with the mechanisms of parliament and provide alternative routes to leadership. In doing so, they have introduced elements of the private domain (nurturing, dialogue and inclusion) to the public domain. The way in which space is used is fundamental and its treatment has consequences for individuals, organizations and societies (Clegg and Kornberger 2006). Dale’s (2005) work emphasises the social character of architecture which recognises the impact which it has on the behaviours of individuals and nowhere is this more pertinent than the way the Australian Parliament House operates. This paper draws on the experiences of Australian parliamentarians to examine the way in which the new Australian Parliament House shapes the way in which the Australian political cultural norms and practices are shaped and maintained. It also seeks to explore the way the Members of Parliament (MPs) experience these spaces and how some MPs have been able to bring new ways of utilising the space to ensure it is more accommodating to the men and women who inhabit this building at the apex of Australia’s political life. In doing so, such MPs are seeking to ensure that the practices and processes of Australia’s political system are reflective of the men and women who inhabit this national institution in the beginning of the 21st century

Sex for sale: an investigation into the status of Nepali women as a root cause of sex trafficking

Trafficking is a major part of the social and economic structure of Nepal. Currently, very high numbers of young girls are taken from Nepal into India as trafficked sex workers. It is estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 girls are trafficked to India each year (Poudel & Carryer, 2000). There are many factors contributing to the continued practice of sex trafficking in Nepal, including poverty, migration (due to both high levels of poverty in rural areas and the Maoist insurgency), and the low status of women in Nepali society. The current research is focused on the status of women as a contributing factor to trafficking. Nepali women are encouraged to accept their submissive position in life without complaint and are discouraged from trying to control men. Even though 50 percent of rural Nepali children are enrolled in primary school, only 23 percent of girls attend secondary school. Girls are often sent off to find work to supplement family income, denying them a chance to receive a full education. Even today, an educated Nepali woman is seen as a potential threat to her husband (Asian Development Bank, 2003)

Sex trafficking in Nepal: survivor characteristics and long-term outcomes

Sex trafficking, the coercion of girls and women into forced prostitution, is a global problem. South Asia is a particular trouble spot for trafficking. Source countries in this region include Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), and Nepal. Destination countries include India and Thailand (Farr, 2005). The present research focuses on sex trafficking from Nepal. Although accurate figures are difficult to obtain, the best estimate is that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepali girls and women are trafficked each year, primarily to India, and at least 200,000 Nepali girls and women currently work in Indian brothels (Huntington, 2002)

Two-frequency forced Faraday waves: Weakly damped modes and pattern selection

Recent experiments (Kudrolli, Pier and Gollub, 1998) on two-frequency parametrically excited surface waves exhibit an intriguing "superlattice" wave pattern near a codimension-two bifurcation point where both subharmonic and harmonic waves onset simultaneously, but with different spatial wavenumbers. The superlattice pattern is synchronous with the forcing, spatially periodic on a large hexagonal lattice, and exhibits small-scale triangular structure. Similar patterns have been shown to exist as primary solution branches of a generic 12-dimensional $D_6\dot{+}T^2$-equivariant bifurcation problem, and may be stable if the nonlinear coefficients of the bifurcation problem satisfy certain inequalities (Silber and Proctor, 1998). Here we use the spatial and temporal symmetries of the problem to argue that weakly damped harmonic waves may be critical to understanding the stabilization of this pattern in the Faraday system. We illustrate this mechanism by considering the equations developed by Zhang and Vinals (1997, J. Fluid Mech. 336) for small amplitude, weakly damped surface waves on a semi-infinite fluid layer. We compute the relevant nonlinear coefficients in the bifurcation equations describing the onset of patterns for excitation frequency ratios of 2/3 and 6/7. For the 2/3 case, we show that there is a fundamental difference in the pattern selection problems for subharmonic and harmonic instabilities near the codimension-two point. Also, we find that the 6/7 case is significantly different from the 2/3 case due to the presence of additional weakly damped harmonic modes. These additional harmonic modes can result in a stabilization of the superpatterns.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures; minor text revisions, corrected figure 8; this version to appear in a special issue of Physica D in memory of John David Crawfor

Living expenditures of a selected group of Illinois farm and small-town families, 1929-30

Cover title

Purification and characterization of zyxin, an 82,000-Dalton component of adherens junctions

Journal ArticleWe describe here the purification and characterization of a recently identified adherens junction protein that has an apparent molecular mass of 82 kDa on sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gels (Beckerle, M. C. (1986) J. Cell Biol. 103, 1679-1687). The 82-kDa protein was isolated from avian smooth muscle by a low ionic strength alkaline pH extraction followed by ammonium sulfate fractionation

Interaction between zyxin and α-actinin

Journal ArticleZyxin is an 82-kD protein first identified as a component of adhesion plaques and the termini of stress fibers near where they associate with the cytoplasmic face of the adhesive membrane. We report here that zyxin interacts with the actin cross-linking protein α-actinin