BIOPHYSICAL SIMULATION IN SUPPORT OF CROP PRODUCTION DECISIONS: A CASE STUDY IN THE BLACKLANDS REGION OF TEXAS

Economic feasibility of Texas Blacklands corn production in relation to sorghum, wheat, and cotton is studied. Biophysical simulation generated yield data are integrated with an economic decision model using quadratic programming. Given the various scenarios analyzed, corn is economically feasible for the Blacklands. A crop mix of half corn and half cotton production is selected under risk neutrality with wheat entering if risk aversion is present. Corn and grain sorghum production are highly substitutable. Profit effects attributed to changing corn planting dates are more pronounced than profit changes resulting from altering corn population or maturity class.Crop Production/Industries,

Improved strain-wire flowmeter has fast response time

Strain-sensitive resistance wires in a Wheatstone bridge arrangement form the sensing element of a flowmeter. The change in resistance of the wires is measured as a function of stream velocity. Thus the electrical output is a measure of both rapidly varying and steady fluid-flow rates

High-severity wildfire leads to multi-decadal impacts on soil biogeochemistry in mixed-conifer forests.

During the past century, systematic wildfire suppression has decreased fire frequency and increased fire severity in the western United States of America. While this has resulted in large ecological changes aboveground such as altered tree species composition and increased forest density, little is known about the long-term, belowground implications of altered, ecologically novel, fire regimes, especially on soil biological processes. To better understand the long-term implications of ecologically novel, high-severity fire, we used a 44-yr high-severity fire chronosequence in the Sierra Nevada where forests were historically adapted to frequent, low-severity fire, but were fire suppressed for at least 70 yr. High-severity fire in the Sierra Nevada resulted in a long-term (44 +yr) decrease (>50%, P < 0.05) in soil extracellular enzyme activities, basal microbial respiration (56-72%, P < 0.05), and organic carbon (>50%, P < 0.05) in the upper 5 cm compared to sites that had not been burned for at least 115 yr. However, nitrogen (N) processes were only affected in the most recent fire site (4 yr post-fire). Net nitrification increased by over 600% in the most recent fire site (P < 0.001), but returned to similar levels as the unburned control in the 13-yr site. Contrary to previous studies, we did not find a consistent effect of plant cover type on soil biogeochemical processes in mid-successional (10-50 yr) forest soils. Rather, the 44-yr reduction in soil organic carbon (C) quantity correlated positively with dampened C cycling processes. Our results show the drastic and long-term implication of ecologically novel, high-severity fire on soil biogeochemistry and underscore the need for long-term fire ecological experiments

Community Perspective on Consultation on Urban Stormwater Management: Lessons from Brownhill Creek, South Australia

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).There are salutary lessons from contrasting community consultation efforts in 2011 and 2015 to develop and gain support for an urban stormwater management plan for the Brownhill Creek catchment in Adelaide, South Australia. The 2011 process was a failure in the human dimension, precipitating loss of community confidence, unnecessarily entrained thousands of hours of time of residents who initiated a community action group for environmental conservation and caused a three-year delay to decision making. By contrast, the 2015 process was vastly improved, resulted in a landslide level of support for an obvious option not previously offered, achieved the required level of flood protection, saved Aus$5 million (14%) on the previously proposed option and protected a highly valued natural environment from an unnecessary dam. This paper presents a rarely heard perspective on these community consultation processes from a participating community environmental and heritage conservation action group (the Brownhill Creek Association) that was deeply engaged in reforming the Draft Brown Hill Keswick Creek Stormwater Management Plan. This reveals that the community needs to see that all options are considered and to have access to accurate information with which to assess them. It is also necessary that the proposed plan is consistent with existing agreed plans and policies developed through public consultation. Community concerns need to be heard, acknowledged and acted upon or responded to, and the consultation process needs to be transparently fair and democratic to win community support. A major contributor to success in the second consultation was that all community action groups were invited to meetings to discuss the purpose of the consultation and the methods to be used. Feedback was subsequently received before the process commenced to show what had changed and why any suggestions concerning the consultation process were not being adopted. This openness helped to mend the distrust of the first consultation process and is recommended as an essential early step in any public consultation process

Designing websites with eXtensible web (xWeb) methodology

Today, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, representing and interchanging data among various enterprises systems and databases in the context of complex web enterprises information systems (EIS). Conversely, for web EIS (such as e-commerce and portals) to be successful, it is important to apply a high level, model driven solutions and meta-data vocabularies to design and implementation techniques that are capable of handling heterogonous schemas and documents. For this, we need a methodology that provides a higher level of abstraction of the domain in question with rigorously defined standards that are to be more widely understood by all stakeholders of the system. To-date, UML has proven itself as the language of choice for modeling EIS using OO techniques. With the introduction of XML Schema, which provides rich facilities for constraining and defining enterprise XML content, the combination of UML and XML technologies provide a good platform (and the flexibility) for modeling, designing and representing complex enterprise contents for building successful EIS. In this paper, we show how a layered view model coupled with a proven user interface analysis framework (WUiAM) is utilized in providing architectural construct and abstract website model (called eXtensible Web, xWeb), to model, design and implement simple, user-centred, collaborative websites at varying levels of abstraction. The uniqueness xWeb is that the model data (web user interface definitions, website data descriptions and constraints) and the web content are captured and represented at the conceptual level using views (one model) and can be deployed (multiple platform specific models) using one or more implementation models

Characteristics of Mid-Frequency Sensorineural Hearing Loss Progression.

OBJECTIVES:To characterize the progression of mid-frequency sensorineural hearing loss (MFSNHL) over time. METHODS:A retrospective chart review spanning 2012 to 2017 was performed at a tertiary care audiology and neurotology center. Our cohort included 37 patients met the criteria for MFSNHL also known as "cookie bite hearing loss." It was defined as having a 1, 2, and 4 kHz average pure tone audiometry greater than 10 dB in intensity compared with the average threshold at 500 Hz and 8 kHz. RESULTS:Average age at initial presentation was 11.8 years (range, 8 mo to 70 yr). Across all individuals, the average mid-frequency threshold was 47 dB, compared with 27 dB at 500 Hz and 8 kHz. Twenty-three patients (62%) had multiple audiograms with 4-year median follow up time. Average values across all frequencies (0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 kHz) in the initial audiogram was 37 dB, compared with an average of 39 dB demonstrated on final audiogram. Of those with serial audiograms, only five patients demonstrated threshold changes of 10 dB or more. Of these five patients, only one was found to have clinical worsening of MFSNHL. CONCLUSIONS:MFSNHL is an uncommon audiometric finding with unspecified long-term outcomes. We demonstrated that most patients (96%) with MFSNHL do not experience clinical worsening of their hearing threshold over almost 4 years of follow up. Future prospective studies aimed at collecting longer-term data are warranted to further elucidate the long-term trajectory of MFSNHL patients

Origin of adiabatic and non-adiabatic spin transfer torques in current-driven magnetic domain wall motion

A consistent theory to describe the correlated dynamics of quantum mechanical itinerant spins and semiclassical local magnetization is given. We consider the itinerant spins as quantum mechanical operators, whereas local moments are considered within classical Lagrangian formalism. By appropriately treating fluctuation space spanned by basis functions, including a zero-mode wave function, we construct coupled equations of motion for the collective coordinate of the center-of-mass motion and the localized zero-mode coordinate perpendicular to the domain wall plane. By solving them, we demonstrate that the correlated dynamics is understood through a hierarchy of two time scales: Boltzmann relaxation time when a non-adiabatic part of the spin-transfer torque appears, and Gilbert damping time when adiabatic part comes up.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Review of methods applicable to the assessment of mold exposure to children.

This article presents discussion of the assessment of the exposure of children to fungi, substances derived from fungi, and the environmental conditions that may lead to exposure. The principles driving investigations of fungal contamination and subsequent exposure are presented as well as guidelines for conducting these investigations. A comprehensive description of available research sampling and analysis techniques is also presented

Interview with Lydia Groves

An interview with Lydia Groves regarding her experiences in a one-room school house.https://scholars.fhsu.edu/ors/1063/thumbnail.jp