2,020 research outputs found
Letter from J. E. Crichton to E[dward] T. Parsons, 1912 Aug 26.
The City of SeattleWashintonDEPARTMENT OF HEALTHAND SANITTIONAugust 26th, 1912.E.T. Parsons,Sierra Club,402 Mills Bldg.,San Francisco.Dear Sir:In answering your communications, received August 24th, I beg to state that your understanding of the matter regarding the Chicago - Milwaukee Railroad etc., is not exactly correct.We were opposed to the franchise being granted through a portion of our watershed. Our watershed, however, at the point of crossing by the railroad is narrow so that their camps were easily located outside of the shed. They were not to exceed a half mile from our watershed but yet entirely within the adjoining river basin.The typhoid rate did not increase at all and the figures which you give, 50 and 55, were unfortunately charged against this city by several eastern publications when they figured our total number of cases as being the number of deaths which had occurred in Seattle. This was done with no desire to injure this city but by mistake. Since that time, however, by careful control of typhoid we have been able to reduce the number of deaths more than ever so that last year the total number of deaths occurring in the entire city was 24, including about 40% shipped in from outside towns.We are allowing no habitation or industrial camp to exist in our watershed of any kind or character excepting those doing municipal work in the shed and one or two camps which, under06321 -2-E.T. Parsons.the condemnation award were allowed to finish logging certain lands. We have moved industrial camps and several hundred people entirely out of the watershed and today it is almost free from human life other than above. This district embraces 87,000 acres of land, nearly all owned and controlled by the City of Seattle.The Milwaukee Railroad was required to build as far hack from the river as possible and. to build a dike between the railroad track and the river so that by no possibility could anything from the rain reach the river without passing through soil and in all human probabilities being exposed to direct sunshine between the dike and the track. The bridges across the main river are specially constructed and are absolutely water tight. Anything from the bridges is carried across by gutters (water tight) down Into sinks at either end of the bridges.I am sending you a copy of our ordinance covering our Cedar River watershed. We have, however, a very strict State enactment which gives us complete control. We have two sanitary police men at all times in this district and in summer season we have three or four. The Milwaukee pays about half of the expense of this patrol.Respectfully,J. E. CrichtonCOMMISSIONER OF HEALTH.JEC/B06321 ORDINANCE NO. 27534.AN ORDINANCE amending Section 1 of Ordinance No. 19061, entitled An ordinance providing for the protection of the water supply of the City of Seattle, from pollution, and providing penalties for violations of the provisions of this ordinance , approved August 25th, 1908, for the propose of providing additional safeguards and protection to the water supply.EE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY OF SEATTLE AS FOLLOWS:Section 1. That Section 1 of Ordinance No. 19061, approved Aug. 25th, 1908, he and the same is hereby amended to read as follows:Section 1. For the purpose of protecting the water supply of the City of Seattle from pollution, it is hereby declared unlawful for any person or person to camp, picnic, loiter, trespass, fish or otherwise he within the Cedar River Watershed from which the city obtains its water supply, unless they are there performing municipal work, or have been authorized to go upon said grounds or waters legally, or by permission of the Commissioner of Health or for any person or persons, whether or not they are performing municipal work, or have been authorized to go upon said grounds or waters legally or by permission of the Commissioner of Health, as above provided, to deposit within said Cedar River Watershed any human excrement or other substance whatsoever deleterious to health, or to commit any act whatsoever tending to pollute the waters in said watershed.06321 A renewed attempt is being made by the municipal authorities of San Francisco to obtain from Congress a retification of an ill-con-sidered grant made by former Secretary of the Interior Garfield. This grant confers upon San Francisco conditionally the right, to flood Hetch-Hetchy Valley as a source of writ or-supply and of electric energy for the actual municipal purposes of the city and count; of San Francisco. At the hearing in Washington last winter it was shown that this would practically mean the dismemberment of the Yosemite National Park, because, as a sanitary precaution, it would ultimately require the sequestration of the northern half of the park which comprises by far the most notable scenic fratures. There are a number of reasons why public spirited men throughout the United States should urge congress to revoke the grant and to place Yosemite as well as the Yellowstone under the sole disposition of Congress. The proved existence of a number of excellent watersupplies, available by purchase or condemnation, exhibits the municipal. authorities of San Francisco in the undignified endeavor to drive a sharp bargain at the nation\u27s expanse, and all under cover of a petty quarrel between the municipality and a water company. Chairman Mondell of the Public Lands Committee found in his report that the city, has failed to establish its contention that the Hetch-Hetchy is the only reasonably available source of water supply in the Sierras . Why then should irreparable injury be inflicted upon One of the nation\u27s fairest possessions? Because it will produce a relief from taxation now imposed for lighting streets and public buildings is one of the answers of the city engineer.\u27 It seems incredible that a project so inherently selfish can be seriously urged upon the notice of Congress.06321 One vho has followed the European development of alpine winter sports, tobogganning, skining, curling etc., as for instance at Saint Moritz, is bound to anticipate a similar development in the United States. Yosemite valley end especially the Tuolumne Meadows are tho preordained alpine winter resorts for the entire Pacific Coast region south of Seattle and Portland. The ignorant objection that snow, cold, and the attitude will prevent people from ever going into the Sierra Nevada in winter is sufficiently answered with the fact that thousands now engage in winter sports at the some attitudes in the Alps. With the increase of the population and the improvement of hotel and travelling facilities the Yosemite National Park must inevitably become a winter as [illegible] as a summer resort. Now is the time to say to San Francisco\u27s politicians: You shall not destroy our present joys nor our national hopes of the future with a selfish and foolish municipal project! Selfish, because the chief object is to save the city taxes with Hetch-Hetohy water power; foolish, because the modern science of sanitation demands that a municipal water supply, from whatever source, shall be filtered. Yosemite National Park can not be at the same time a public resort and the source of an unfiltered water supply. All public spirited men should unite in petitioning Congress to revoke the Garfield grant, which threatens to entail universal public loss for a doubtful local benefit. Thwarted in its selfish scheme San Francisco will follow the example of enlightened communities and provide a safe filtered supply from one of the many sources nearer home.0632
The Role of the British Grassland Society in Technology Transfer
Since its formation in 1945, the British Grassland Society (BGS) has been active in disseminating information to the grassland and associated sectors of agriculture and has adapted to a change from production-based agriculture to its current output mix of private and public goods. The BGS has as its remit: (a) improved production and utilisation of grass and forage crops for the promotion of agriculture and the public benefit, and (b) the advancement of education and research in grass and forage crop production and utilisation, and the publication of results
INTELLIGENT RESOURCE DISCOVERY USING ONTOLOGYBASED RESOURCE PROFILES
Successful resource discovery across heterogeneous repositories is highly dependent on the semantic and syntactic homogeneity of the associated resource descriptions in each repository. Ideally, consistent resource descriptions are easily extracted from each repository, expressed using standard syntactic and semantic structures, and managed and accessed within a distributed, flexible, and scalable software framework. In practice however, seldom do all three of these elements exist. To help address this situation, the Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed an extensible, standards-based resource description scheme that provides the necessary description and management facilities for the discovery of resources across heterogeneous repositories. The OODT resource description scheme can be used across scientific domains to describe any resource. It uses a small set of generally accepted, broadly-scoped descriptors while also providing a mechanism for the inclusion of domain-specific descriptors. In addition, the OODT scheme can be used to capture hierarchical, relational and recursive relationships between resources. In this paper we expand on prior work and describe an intelligent resource discovery framework that consists of separate software and data architectures focusing on the standard resource description scheme. We illustrate intelligent resource discovery using a case study that provides efficient search across distributed repositories using common interfaces and a hierarchy of resource descriptions derived from a complex, domain-specific ontology
Crop ontology in support of conservation and use of banana genetic resources
Poster presented at Workshop on Crop Ontology and Phenotyping Data Interoperability. Montpellier (France), 31 Mar-4 Apr 201
Data-constrained assessment of ocean circulation changes since the middle Miocene in an Earth system model
Since the middle Miocene (15 Ma, million years ago), the Earth's climate has undergone a long-term cooling trend, characterised by a reduction in ocean temperatures of up to 7–8 ∘C. The causes of this cooling are primarily thought to be due to tectonic plate movements driving changes in large-scale ocean circulation patterns, and hence heat redistribution, in conjunction with a drop in atmospheric greenhouse gas forcing (and attendant ice-sheet growth and feedback). In this study, we assess the potential to constrain the evolving patterns of global ocean circulation and cooling over the last 15 Ma by assimilating a variety of marine sediment proxy data in an Earth system model. We do this by first compiling surface and benthic ocean temperature and benthic carbon-13 (δ13C) data in a series of seven time slices spaced at approximately 2.5 Myr intervals. We then pair this with a corresponding series of tectonic and climate boundary condition reconstructions in the cGENIE (“muffin” release) Earth system model, including alternative possibilities for an open vs. closed Central American Seaway (CAS) from 10 Ma onwards. In the cGENIE model, we explore uncertainty in greenhouse gas forcing and the magnitude of North Pacific to North Atlantic salinity flux adjustment required in the model to create an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) of a specific strength, via a series of 12 (one for each tectonic reconstruction) 2D parameter ensembles. Each ensemble member is then tested against the observed global temperature and benthic δ13C patterns. We identify that a relatively high CO2 equivalent forcing of 1120 ppm is required at 15 Ma in cGENIE to reproduce proxy temperature estimates in the model, noting that this CO2 forcing is dependent on the cGENIE model's climate sensitivity and that it incorporates the effects of all greenhouse gases. We find that reproducing the observed long-term cooling trend requires a progressively declining greenhouse gas forcing in the model. In parallel to this, the strength of the AMOC increases with time despite a reduction in the salinity of the surface North Atlantic over the cooling period, attributable to falling intensity of the hydrological cycle and to lowering polar temperatures, both caused by CO2-driven global cooling. We also find that a closed CAS from 10 Ma to present shows better agreement between benthic δ13C patterns and our particular series of model configurations and data. A final outcome of our analysis is a pronounced ca. 1.5 ‰ decline occurring in atmospheric (and ca. 1 ‰ ocean surface) δ13C that could be used to inform future δ13C-based proxy reconstructions.</p
A Gravitational Theory of the Quantum
The synthesis of quantum and gravitational physics is sought through a
finite, realistic, locally causal theory where gravity plays a vital role not
only during decoherent measurement but also during non-decoherent unitary
evolution. Invariant set theory is built on geometric properties of a compact
fractal-like subset of cosmological state space on which the universe is
assumed to evolve and from which the laws of physics are assumed to derive.
Consistent with the primacy of , a non-Euclidean (and hence non-classical)
state-space metric is defined, related to the -adic metric of number
theory where is a large but finite Pythagorean prime. Uncertain states on
are described using complex Hilbert states, but only if their squared
amplitudes are rational and corresponding complex phase angles are rational
multiples of . Such Hilbert states are necessarily -distant from
states with either irrational squared amplitudes or irrational phase angles.
The gappy fractal nature of accounts for quantum complementarity and is
characterised numerically by a generic number-theoretic incommensurateness
between rational angles and rational cosines of angles. The Bell inequality,
whose violation would be inconsistent with local realism, is shown to be
-distant from all forms of the inequality that are violated in any
finite-precision experiment. The delayed-choice paradox is resolved through the
computational irreducibility of . The Schr\"odinger and Dirac equations
describe evolution on in the singular limit at . By contrast,
an extension of the Einstein field equations on is proposed which reduces
smoothly to general relativity as . Novel proposals for
the dark universe and the elimination of classical space-time singularities are
given and experimental implications outlined
- …