CONSTRAINING THE MEAN RESIDENCE TIME AND FLOWPATH OF GROUNDWATER THROUGH COAL SEAMS USING NOBLE GASES

Noble gases, specifically 4He concentrations, can be a useful tool for determining the rates of groundwater recharge, subsurface residence times, and groundwater flowpaths, especially in difficult to model complex formations such as fractured aquifers. This thesis focused on developing an approach to determine the age of formation waters within coalbed methane (CBM) reservoirs in the Powder River Basin (PRB). Specifically, the work explored the difficulties and corrections required to use the 4He in-growth method to determine the residence time of groundwater in the fractured coal seams in this area. Coal seams are considered the primary aquifer of the PRB with groundwater being recharged by water from the west and flowing toward the basin center. Using the noble gas geochemistry of coal seam solids to conduct experimental work to determine the diffusional rates of 4He from coal seam solids using step-heating experiments and bulk releases I was able to determine the 4He accumulation rates in coal seams from the PRB. I then compared the data to produced formation waters and free gas samples, in combination with numerical modeling approaches, to develop an approach for determining the residence times of formation waters in this area. The results of this work provide important insights on the flowpaths along which groundwater recharges into the PRB.Chevron USA, Inc.NSF EAR EAGER Award 1249255No embarg

The disjointed moment : marking, mapping, and making the real in William Eggleston\u27s election eve (1976).

This thesis analyzes the photographic book Election Eve (1976) produced by photographer William Eggleston. Eggleston’s photographs represent a complex network of connections between material objects and the potential truth of depiction. The often-nondescript locations that Eggleston photographed in Sumter County, GA in October 1976 appear specific at the outset, but quickly lose their adherence to the supposed realities that they depict. Since his first major exhibition in the mid 1970s, Eggleston’s photographs have presented difficulty because they from often-disparate material sources. Despite of the complexity of Eggleston’s engagement with both art and non-art photography, scholarship continues describe Eggleston’s “snapshot aesthetic” as a means of the visualization of things like identities or the banality of its subjects. Yet his practice, typified by Election Eve, is in fact aligned with an attempt to assert the material presence of the photographic object and the role it plays in the construction of reality. Often, this follows Roland Barthes’s concept of the “reality effect” in which photographs become reality’s surrogates because they appear to prove what reality says about itself. In the course of my investigation, I outline several socio-historical uses of the photograph such as the in archives discussed by Allan Sekula, the private family snapshot analyzed by Roland Barthes, and the middleclass photo albums and slideshows analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu. These likewise function in accordance with the reality effect. My purpose is to position Election Eve in relation to its formal sources in order to better understand how the photograph is expected to participate in the world. In relation to Election Eve, this is to elucidate the ways in which the book both represents and asserts its concomitant realities through its deployment and subversion of the photograph’s assumed functions. Additionally, I will locate Eggleston’s formal and aesthetic predilections in the context of several of his contemporaries who likewise engage in a radical deployment of color photography’s amateur baggage. These include William Christenberry, Eve Sonneman, and Stephen Shore. Christenberry’s Brownie snapshots of rural Hale County Alabama, Sonneman’s diptychs exploring time and space in relation to the photographic moment, and Shore’s road trip documents of the towns and cities along US highways will aid in an understanding of the photographic object’s use as a physical marker and delineator of truth. This discussion of photography’s materialism is further guided by several theoretical signposts. This includes Bruno Latour’s conception of the Thing, a site where concepts and concerns can gather together. The photograph is such a Thing: its material presence represents a gathering place for the often-contentious negotiations made between the world and its depictions and the consensual production of reality. In this sense, the materialism of Election Eve is a product of its ability to affect rather than reflect the world. Instead of a series of images that describe the identities of established places, Election Eve constitutes a set of objects whose material forms, such as the individual print or the leather-bound album, engage, subvert, and reassess the historical and social uses and definitions of the photograph and its relationship to reality. This is typified through the role the photograph plays as a landmark and the broader connections between mapped places and the material form of the map. In this way, photographs of roads and road signs, buildings and fields, come together as a web of points that mark off, map, and finally make their own reality. Taken together, the experience of shuffling through the pages, from one decrepit porch to another, from a sunlit but empty diner to a deserted parking lot and a red clay cemetery, provides a sense of anchored reality despite the relative anonymity of content. Apart from their function as seemingly transparent vehicles for history, identity, and the colors of reality, Eggleston’s book and its photographs are a network of signposts and landmarks that point to themselves as a place whose material presence is also the presence of reality

Wind ethanol agriculture & Trump

“I don’t just want to hope the wind blows,” said President Donald Trump. The U.S. Cellular Center in Cedar Rapids was ringing with cheers after many remarks made during Trump’s speech on June 21st, but the cheers after this remark were sparse

The Flora of The Tasco Lake Region, Sheridan County, Kansas

It has been customary in writing theses dealing with taxonomic problems to collect data from an entire county. Having had occasion to collect botanical specimens from the Tasco Lake for work in biology at the Sheridan High School, the wealth of plant life to be found here became apparent. The area ranges from xerophytic forms on the uplands to the hydrophytic forms in the lake and marshes. Many of the latter have never been reported from Western Kansas. Collections in preserving fluid were made of the water forms found and specimens of the landforms were mounted on regulation-sized sheets properly classified. Duplicate specimens of both were presented to the Botany Department of the Fort Hays Kansas State College. The investigation covering a period of twenty months, comprising the growing seasons of 1934 and 1930, has made possible a thorough study of the flora of this region . So far as is known , no detailed study has been made of this area; and , moreover, this will hold for most of western Kansas, which therefore presents a fertile field for the investigator. It can be said without question that Western Kansas botanical studies have been very few and that much in the way of valuable botanical research is now needed . The result is that many erroneous ideas are prevalent in other states in regard to our plains region. This is due to the lack of scientific information based upon careful study . In all probability there is no other half section in Western Kansas where plant life would be any more constant and represent so large a number of species as the one reported upon in this thesis. This is due mainly to the topography, types of soil, and abundant water supply as a result of the perpetual springs and the 6.5-acre lake completed in 1925. The survey of plant life of this particular area was taken for the following reasons: (1) to add to the information concerning the taxonomy of Western Kansas plant life; (2) to make a n intensive study of a small area where there is an abundance and wide variety of xerophytic, mesophytic, and hydrophytic plant life

The Biochemical Characteristics of Yersinia enterocolitica and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis

Bibliography: p. 5-6

Small venues, big heart

When you think about cities or towns with fantastic music scenes, places like Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, and Los Angeles probably come to mind. Music in Ames may not fill the Rose Bowl Stadium, but that doesn’t mean it’s not thriving

Protecting their land

Environmentalists, the Sioux tribe, and rural farmers. Three groups that may not always have a lot in common have been coming together to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, also known as the Bakken Pipeline

Beyond beauty

Three women share how pageants changed their lives

The Hox protein conundrum: The “specifics” of DNA binding for Hox proteins and their partners

Homeotic genes (Hox genes) are homeodomain-transcription factors involved in conferring segmental identity along the anterior-posterior body axis. Molecular characterization of HOX protein function raises some interesting questions regarding the source of the binding specificity of the HOX proteins. How do HOX proteins regulate common and unique target specificity across space and time? This review attempts to summarize and interpret findings in this area, largely focused on results from in vitro and in vivo studies in Drosophila and mouse systems. Recent studies related to HOX protein binding specificity compel us to reconsider some of our current models for transcription factor-DNA interactions. It is crucial to study transcription factor binding by incorporating components of more complex, multi-protein interactions in concert with small changes in binding motifs that can significantly impact DNA binding specificity and subsequent alterations in gene expression. To incorporate the multiple elements that can determine HOX protein binding specificity, we propose a more integrative Cooperative Binding model