The First Foretelling

This is an original work. It is a full length novel. The main character is Zeso Eliza Greylin

The First Foretelling

This is an original work. It is a full length novel. The main character is Zeso Eliza Greylin

A Project to Study Urban Earthquake Risk Worldwide

In 1998, the Secretariat of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and GeoHazards International (GHI) launched the understanding Urban Seismic Risk around the World (UUSRAW) project. The 18-month project established an internet network of 74 seismically active cities worldwide to compare their earthquake hazard and to share their experiences and resources in working to reduce the impact of future earthquakes. In each city, a local scientist or municipal officer gathered the information necessary to conduct the comparative assessment using the Earthquake Disaster Risk Index (Davidson, 1997), a composite index used to assesses risk based on several factors. The comparative assessment and other project results, including a compilation of city profiles that systematically describe the key elements of each participating city’s earthquake risk and its risk management practices, as well as a compilation of more than 60 risk management efforts from 27 cities, will be included in a formal report published by the United Nations. Although work continues in developing a technically sound, widely accepted assessment of the earthquake risk and risk management practices of cities worldwide, the UUSRAW project represents a significant first step in establishing a worldwide network of earthquake professionals and helping cities share experiences and learn from each other more effectively

The genetics of ray pattern variation in Caenorhabditis briggsae

BACKGROUND: How does intraspecific variation relate to macroevolutionary change in morphology? This question can be addressed in species in which derived characters are present but not fixed. In rhabditid nematodes, the arrangement of the nine bilateral pairs of peripheral sense organs (rays) in tails of males is often the most highly divergent character between species. The development of ray pattern involves inputs from hometic gene expression patterns, TGFβ signalling, Wnt signalling, and other genetic pathways. In Caenorhabditis briggsae, strain-specific variation in ray pattern has provided an entrée into the evolution of ray pattern. Some strains were fixed for a derived pattern. Other strains were more plastic and exhibited derived and ancestral patterns at equal frequencies. RESULTS: Recombinant inbred lines (RILs) constructed from crosses between the variant C. briggsae AF16 and HK104 strains exhibited a wide range of phenotypes including some that were more extreme than either parental strain. Transgressive segregation was significantly associated with allelic variation in the C. briggsae homolog of abdominal B, Cb-egl-5. At least two genes that affected different elements of ray pattern, ray position and ray fusion, were linked to a second gene, mip-1. Consistent with this, the segregation of ray position and ray fusion phenotypes were only partially correlated in the RILs. CONCLUSIONS: The evolution of ray pattern has involved allelic variation at multiple loci. Some of these loci impact the specification of ray identities and simultaneously affect multiple ray pattern elements. Others impact individual characters and are not constrained by covariance with other ray pattern elements. Among the genetic pathways that may be involved in ray pattern evolution is specification of anteroposterior positional information by homeotic genes

Canadian Shoppers in Northwest Washington State

The purpose of this project was to record the proportion of Canadian vehicles in prominent retail destination parking lots along the I-5 corridor in northwest Washington State. These destinations were located in Blaine, Lynden, Ferndale, Bellingham, Burlington and Marysville. Data collection was executed by dividing the locations into northern and southern zones, with each zone visited by a two-person team following a prescribed route. The teams collected data within specific mapped sections of parking lots by counting the number of cars with Canadian and U.S. license plates with the use of tally counter devices. Additionally, an I-5 overpass is located within each zone in order to look at southbound I-5 traffic at locations both north and south of Bellingham at an identical time of day. Generally, the intent is to visit every site on each of three consecutive days, Thursday through Saturday. On each field day, data collection starts prior to mid-day and is scheduled to finish by late afternoon. The information collected is then compiled in an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis

Healthcare IT Adoption under Different Government Models: Debating the HITECH Impacts

Governments around the world are investing in healthcare as they attempt to increase access to care and the quality of care, while simultaneously lowering the costs of providing care. Many of these investments are in healthcare IT (HIT). The IT software industry is preparing for intensive competition for their HIT packages and workers in response to government and private industry investments. Yet different national healthcare models have produced widely differing healthcare outcomes and HIT adoption rates, with the U.S. performing poorly on both. The objective of this panel is to provide insights based on HIT research conducted in multiple healthcare contexts under different national government models, and then to engage the panel audience in debating the prospects for success of three IT-enabled healthcare delivery reforms being government-funded in the U.S. over the next 5 years. Our larger goal is to provide a forum for information sharing that will motivate other IS researchers across the global IS research community to contribute to the design of solutions and the capturing of best practices that will address some of the key goals of IT-enabled healthcare reform: improved access and quality, and decreased costs

Classification of non-indigenous species based on their impacts: Considerations for application in marine management

Assessment of the ecological and economic/societal impacts of the introduction of non-indigenous species (NIS) is one of the primary focus areas of bioinvasion science in terrestrial and aquatic environments, and is considered essential to management. A classification system of NIS, based on the magnitude of their environmental impacts, was recently proposed to assist management. Here, we consider the potential application of this classification scheme to the marine environment, and offer a complementary framework focussing on value sets in order to explicitly address marine management concerns. Since existing data on marine NIS impacts are scarce and successful marine removals are rare, we propose that management of marine NIS adopt a precautionary approach, which not only would emphasise preventing new incursions through pre-border and at-border controls but also should influence the categorisation of impacts. The study of marine invasion impacts requires urgent attention and significant investment, since we lack the luxury of waiting for the knowledge base to be acquired before the window of opportunity closes for feasible management