Extractable nitrogen and microbial community structure respond to grassland restoration regardless of historical context and soil composition.

Grasslands have a long history of invasion by exotic annuals, which may alter microbial communities and nutrient cycling through changes in litter quality and biomass turnover rates. We compared plant community composition, soil chemical and microbial community composition, potential soil respiration and nitrogen (N) turnover rates between invaded and restored plots in inland and coastal grasslands. Restoration increased microbial biomass and fungal : bacterial (F : B) ratios, but sampling season had a greater influence on the F : B ratio than did restoration. Microbial community composition assessed by phospholipid fatty acid was altered by restoration, but also varied by season and by site. Total soil carbon (C) and N and potential soil respiration did not differ between treatments, but N mineralization decreased while extractable nitrate and nitrification and N immobilization rate increased in restored compared with unrestored sites. The differences in soil chemistry and microbial community composition between unrestored and restored sites indicate that these soils are responsive, and therefore not resistant to feedbacks caused by changes in vegetation type. The resilience, or recovery, of these soils is difficult to assess in the absence of uninvaded control grasslands. However, the rapid changes in microbial and N cycling characteristics following removal of invasives in both grassland sites suggest that the soils are resilient to invasion. The lack of change in total C and N pools may provide a buffer that promotes resilience of labile pools and microbial community structure

Changing time: Possible effects on peak electricity generation

This article considers the possible effects on electricity costs of implementing The Brighter Evenings Bill, 2012, which would move Ireland to Central European Time (CET). The results suggest that such a change would produce very limited savings in peak de mand for electricity and possibly some increase in off peak electricity costs. Moving time zone in the other direction would result in some limited savings on both counts. The effects of changing time zone on the cost of electricity would be likely to be s mall so that other considerations are likely to be more important in any such decision

Regional natural resource management plan

[Extract] This plan builds on, updates and refines earlier NRM planning work in the region. The 2005 Southern Gulf Catchment Natural Resource Management Plan provided a comprehensive assessment of the natural resource values and issues in the Southern Gulf region and provided a long list of actions to address them. SG NRM’s work was aligned to this plan, but because the plan’s scope was so large, and because it did not provide a good guide for prioritising actions in the face of limited resources, the plan fell into abeyance. In 2014, the Australian Government provided funding to update the region’s NRM plan to incorporate climate change considerations through its Regional Natural Resource Management Planning for Climate Change Fund. Although there has been much progress in the region, many of NRM issues remain the same as they were in 2005. SG NRM therefore determined that the revised plan would draw on the good foundations of the earlier plan, but that its scope would be more strategic and its objectives more achievable. Therefore, it was decided that the scope of this plan is to• Update the 2005 Southern Gulf Catchment Natural Resource Management Plan • Incorporate climate change considerations• Acknowledge the range of NRM issues across in the Southern Gulf region, including issues that have arisen since 2005• Provide action plans to address these issues, focusing on the role of SG NRM and what it can achieve through its partnerships with the Southern Gulf community. SG NRM will use this plan as a guiding document to plan its investments and effort. The plan may also be used by Southern Gulf stakeholders to identify constructive approaches to addressing NRM issues in the region and potential partnerships with SG NRM. However, the plan does not commit either SG NRM or its partners to any specific action

Experimental Philosophy--An Emerging Discipline

This poster will explain the nature of a newly emerging field in philosophy called experimental philosophy (“X-phi”) and its presence on Boise State’s campus. BSU’s X-phi group operates via gathering data from “everyday” people, sorting and statistically analyzing the data, then reviewing trends identified people’s intuitions about certain concepts (e.g. know-how, intentional action, moral correctness, etc.). We are exploring the concept of Honesty—a concept that has, to date, not been adequately analyzed. To distinguish theories developed as a result of this research, X-phi employs the term “folk theory”, literally referring to the theory that the majority of people are found to hold. It’s then interdisciplinarily informative determine where these folk theories match up, or fail to, with existing philosophical theories. X-phi is still establishing itself in the greater academic community, but is proving its worth; philosopher and professor at Tufts University, Daniel Dennett, acknowledges in a recently published book review that “some of the work has yielded interesting results that certainly defy complacent assumptions common among philosophers.” BSU’s X-Phi group has been active on campus for two years; this poster will report the group’s evolution, current work, and explain what X-Phi is in general

Results from the Atacama B-mode Search (ABS) Experiment

The Atacama B-mode Search (ABS) is an experiment designed to measure cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization at large angular scales ($\ell>40$). It operated from the ACT site at 5190~m elevation in northern Chile at 145 GHz with a net sensitivity (NEQ) of 41 $\mu$K$\sqrt{\rm s}$. It employed an ambient-temperature sapphire half-wave plate rotating at 2.55 Hz to modulate the incident polarization signal and reduce systematic effects. We report here on the analysis of data from a 2400 deg$^2$ patch of sky centered at declination $-42^\circ$ and right ascension $25^\circ$. We perform a blind analysis. After unblinding, we find agreement with the Planck TE and EE measurements on the same region of sky. We marginally detect polarized dust emission and give an upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r<2.3$ (95% cl) with the equivalent of 100 on-sky days of observation. We also present a new measurement of the polarization of Tau A and introduce new methods associated with HWP-based observations.Comment: 38 pages, 11 figure

Mechanical design and development of TES bolometer detector arrays for the Advanced ACTPol experiment

The next generation Advanced ACTPol (AdvACT) experiment is currently underway and will consist of four Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometer arrays, with three operating together, totaling ~5800 detectors on the sky. Building on experience gained with the ACTPol detector arrays, AdvACT will utilize various new technologies, including 150mm detector wafers equipped with multichroic pixels, allowing for a more densely packed focal plane. Each set of detectors includes a feedhorn array of stacked silicon wafers which form a spline profile leading to each pixel. This is then followed by a waveguide interface plate, detector wafer, back short cavity plate, and backshort cap. Each array is housed in a custom designed structure manufactured from high purity copper and then gold plated. In addition to the detector array assembly, the array package also encloses cryogenic readout electronics. We present the full mechanical design of the AdvACT high frequency (HF) detector array package along with a detailed look at the detector array stack assemblies. This experiment will also make use of extensive hardware and software previously developed for ACT, which will be modified to incorporate the new AdvACT instruments. Therefore, we discuss the integration of all AdvACT arrays with pre-existing ACTPol infrastructure.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference proceeding

A Simple and Practical Approach to Unit Testing: The JML and JUnit Way

Writing unit test code is labor-intensive, hence it is often not done as an integral part of programming. However, unit testing is a practical approach to increasing the correctness and quality of software; for example, the Extreme Programming approach relies on frequent unit testing. In this paper we present a new approach that makes writing unit tests easier. It uses a formal specification language\u27s runtime assertion checker to decide whether methods are working correctly, thus automating the writing of unit test oracles. These oracles can be easily combined with hand-written test data. Instead of writing testing code, the programmer writes formal specifications (e.g., pre- and postconditions). This makes the programmer\u27s task easier, because specifications are more concise and abstract than the equivalent test code, and hence more readable and maintainable. Furthermore, by using specifications in testing, specification errors are quickly discovered, so the specifications are more likely to provide useful documentation and inputs to other tools. We have implemented this idea using the Java Modeling Language (JML) and the JUnit testing framework, but the approach could be easily implemented with other combinations of formal specification languages and unit test tools