Economic Potential of Conservation Farming Annual Winter Forages for the Stocker Cattle Grazing Enterprise

The objective was to determine the expected net value of a no-till forage production and grazing system. Reduction in fuel and machinery costs offset the costs of herbicide application. The net value of the no-till system is $31 per acre, and is quite sensitive to relative differences in cattle performance.Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Smokejumper Magazine, October 2015

This issue of the National Smokejumper Association (NSA) Smokejumper Magazine contains the following articles: First Glossy Issue: USFS Making Best Decision Going From Round to Square Chute? (C. Sheley), Archie Keith’s Long Journey (Historic), 1946 season McCall review (Historic), Spilt Beans (LeRoy Cook). Smokejumper Magazine continues Static Line, which was the original title of the NSA quarterly magazine.https://dc.ewu.edu/smokejumper_mag/1092/thumbnail.jp

Breaking the habit - the peculiar 2016 eruption of the unique recurrent nova M31N 2008-12a

Since its discovery in 2008, the Andromeda galaxy nova M31N 2008-12a has been observed in eruption every single year. This unprecedented frequency indicates an extreme object, with a massive white dwarf and a high accretion rate, which is the most promising candidate for the single-degenerate progenitor of a type-Ia supernova known to date. The previous three eruptions of M31N 2008-12a have displayed remarkably homogeneous multi-wavelength properties: (i) From a faint peak, the optical light curve declined rapidly by two magnitudes in less than two days; (ii) Early spectra showed initial high velocities that slowed down significantly within days and displayed clear He/N lines throughout; (iii) The supersoft X-ray source (SSS) phase of the nova began extremely early, six days after eruption, and only lasted for about two weeks. In contrast, the peculiar 2016 eruption was clearly different. Here we report (i) the considerable delay in the 2016 eruption date, (ii) the significantly shorter SSS phase, and (iii) the brighter optical peak magnitude (with a hitherto unobserved cusp shape). Early theoretical models suggest that these three different effects can be consistently understood as caused by a lower quiescence mass-accretion rate. The corresponding higher ignition mass caused a brighter peak in the free-free emission model. The less-massive accretion disk experienced greater disruption, consequently delaying re-establishment of effective accretion. Without the early refueling, the SSS phase was shortened. Observing the next few eruptions will determine whether the properties of the 2016 outburst make it a genuine outlier in the evolution of M31N 2008-12a

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Quantitative Fish Dynamics

By Terrance J. Quinn II & Richard B. Deriso Quantitative Fish Dynamics Biological Resource Management Series . Oxford University Press , Oxford , 1999 . ISBN 0-19-507631-1 , £70.00. Hard cover, acid-free paper, xviii + 542 pp. , 98 tables, 108 figures. Detailed index; extensive list of references; the print in some figures is very small (e.g. Fig. 8.6)

Global Biodata Resources: Challenges to long-term sustainability of a crucial data infrastructure

Biodata resources under threatResearch in the life sciences is data-driven and critically dependent on data integration and analysis enabled by open-access biodata resources. These resources are crucial to biological, life science, and biomedical research as well as to the commercial biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors; they have substantial impacts both in fundamental and applied research, and they underpin and amplify the research investments made by funders, primarily through increased research efficiency and reduced duplication of effort. Worldwide life sciences data resources are now a major global research infrastructure that researchers, clinicians, and private sector scientists depend on to support their work. This infrastructure is growing rapidly as funders adopt open access policies that require researchers to archive their data and as technological advances enable generation of higher data volumes and more types of data. Despite being an established and vitally important infrastructure, biodata resources are primarily funded through fixed-term and often competitive mechanisms by research funding bodies, with funding for many at risk from budget reductions or changes in strategy. The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) was founded and is driven by global research funding bodies to aid coordination of support for the life sciences data infrastructure among funders globally and to promote the development of longer-term and more stable funding solutions for crucial resources.The Global Biodata CoalitionThe GBC works with funders to understand the biodata resource infrastructure, to engage with resource managers and researchers, and to move towards more internationally coordinated, sustainable and more streamlined mechanisms to support biodata resources. Further interests encompass the processes and consequences of open biodata, in particular credit-giving for data contributions and processing; inclusion of data scientists from all parts of the world; and opportunities of interdisciplinarity.GBC activities span engagement with stakeholders, such as funders, biodata resource managers and users; exploration and definition of the funding and biodata resource landscape, and the mobilisation of change that improves sustainability and coordination of biodata resources.Understanding the global biodata infrastructureCollectively, life science data resources around the world form a vast, distributed, and interconnected infrastructure, arguably forming the largest infrastructure in biology. These resources are critical for ensuring the reproducibility and integrity of the entire life sciences research enterprise, but the infrastructure as a whole is poorly described. GBC is currently undertaking two activities to understand the infrastructure, and thereby provide context for funders in supporting this infrastructure over time: an inventory of all global biodata resources globally, and identification of global core biodata resources, which are those resources within the infrastructure that are, as a collection, most crucial for life sciences and biological research worldwide.Open biodata resources archive and provide analysis of basic research data that describes and documents biodiversity, taxonomy, and biogeography. Loss or diminution of these key resources would have a detrimental impact on biodiversity research.In this talk we will describe the Global Biodata Coalition and the challenges of sustaining the global infrastructure of linked biodata resources, focusing in particular on the role of the globally accessible open access resources as the foundation for global and regional research on biodiversity

The Global Biodata Coalition: Towards a sustainable biodata infrastructure

Progress in life and biomedical sciences depends absolutely on biodata resources—databases comprising biological data and services around those databases. Supporting scientists in data operations and spanning management, analysis and publication of newly generated data and access to pre-existing reference data, these biodata resources together comprise a critical infrastructure for life science and biomedical research. Familiar scientific infrastructures—for example the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) or the Square Kilometer Array, are distinct, constructed, physical entities that are centrally funded and managed at one or more identifiable locations. By contrast, the primary infrastructure of the life sciences—comprised of databases and other biological data resources—is globally distributed, virtually connected, funded from multiple sources, and is not managed as a coordinated entity. While this configuration supports innovation, it lends itself poorly to the long-term sustainability of individual biodata resources and of the infrastructure as a whole. The Global Biodata Coalition (GBC) brings together life science research funding organisations that recognise these challenges and acknowledge the threat that the lack of sustainability poses. They agree to work together to find ways to improve sustainability.In the presentation, we will provide an overview of the global biodata resource infrastructure, focusing in particular on challenges to providing sustained long-term funding to the resources that comprise the infrastructure. This will provide a global context to other presentations in the session, which focus on biodata resources in Australia.Covering some of the work that GBC has carried out to understand and classify biodata resources and the entire biodata resource infrastructure, we will outline the Global Core Biodata Resource programme and Inventory project and also introduce the stakeholder consultation processes around approaches to sustainability and open data. Finally, we  will lay out the path GBC is taking to engage researchers, informaticians, funding organisations and other stakeholders in moving towards greater sustainability for these critical resource

Collaborative Groups Both Help and Hurt learning, but Group Composition Has No Effect on a Group\u27s Success or Failure as Defined by Personality Characteristics.

We examined the effect of collaborative group structures by varying personality types in triads on a free recall task. The triads were based upon varied levels of dominance. Collaborative projects are popular classroom engagement tools and lead to greater learning though re-exposure to items and through error pruning (Rajaram, 2011). Students often request engagement, yet balk at group collaborations with group members taking over and others simply getting run over. Students were sorted into triads with either a strong, neutral, or low dominance personality receiving an extra item for their recall. These items increased the odds of social contagion. Two participants in each group were dominance neutral. The success of group work was confirmed by collaboration recall, F(1,17)= 23.405, p \u3c .001. Post collaboration scores increased from pre-collaboration (M= 51.5, SE=1.65), to post-collaboration (M=56.77, SE=1.24). Collaboration led to false recall with the dominant-neutral members increasing by one third (M= -1.07143, SE=.28640), t(13)= -3.741, p= .002. There was no interaction of personality types and social contagion, F(1,17) = .387, p\u3e.05. This suggests that all groups will create memories that are not true or accurate in group projects, yet that effect is consistent across all groups no matter the dominance