Review of \u3ci\u3eWaiting for Coyote\u27s Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff\u3c/i\u3e By Jerry Wilson

This book documents its author\u27s move to the bluffs of the Missouri River valley in southeastern South Dakota and his experiences and personal reflections during twenty-five years of life there. In the spirit of Aldo Leopold\u27s A Sand County Almanac, Jerry Wilson weaves together observations about the natural and human history of the bluffs and reflections-derived from his experiences on the South Dakota bluffs and his childhood on an Oklahoma farm-about how to live ethically on the land and toward its creatures. In so doing, he fashions an intimate tapestry of the Missouri River bluffs and woodlands that are often underappreciated in the Plains. Each of the book\u27s five sections is divided into four chapters-each an extended essay. The first section, Rehomesteading the Prairie, recounts how Wilson and his family purchased forty acres of bluffland and built a geo-solar home. Section two, Into the Woods, describes personal experiences related to woodlands, water, and darkness. The third and longest section (seventy-one pages), All my Relatives, devotes chapters to human predecessors on the bluff, both Native and Euro-American, and the animals and plants that live there. Prairie Home includes reflections about snow and winter, stones, gardening, and efforts at restoring the bluff land prairie. The final section, The Bluff and Beyond, examines practices of land degradation (especially the loss of the family farm) that Wilson attributes to the arrogance of human attitudes toward the land. In the penultimate chapter, Battles beyond the Bluff, Wilson extends his own ethic of land stewardship to struggles over a broader array of social and environmental issues across the state and region. The book ends with a diary of observations of nature on the bluff through the course of a year

Review of \u3ci\u3eWaiting for Coyote\u27s Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff\u3c/i\u3e By Jerry Wilson

This book documents its author\u27s move to the bluffs of the Missouri River valley in southeastern South Dakota and his experiences and personal reflections during twenty-five years of life there. In the spirit of Aldo Leopold\u27s A Sand County Almanac, Jerry Wilson weaves together observations about the natural and human history of the bluffs and reflections-derived from his experiences on the South Dakota bluffs and his childhood on an Oklahoma farm-about how to live ethically on the land and toward its creatures. In so doing, he fashions an intimate tapestry of the Missouri River bluffs and woodlands that are often underappreciated in the Plains. Each of the book\u27s five sections is divided into four chapters-each an extended essay. The first section, Rehomesteading the Prairie, recounts how Wilson and his family purchased forty acres of bluffland and built a geo-solar home. Section two, Into the Woods, describes personal experiences related to woodlands, water, and darkness. The third and longest section (seventy-one pages), All my Relatives, devotes chapters to human predecessors on the bluff, both Native and Euro-American, and the animals and plants that live there. Prairie Home includes reflections about snow and winter, stones, gardening, and efforts at restoring the bluff land prairie. The final section, The Bluff and Beyond, examines practices of land degradation (especially the loss of the family farm) that Wilson attributes to the arrogance of human attitudes toward the land. In the penultimate chapter, Battles beyond the Bluff, Wilson extends his own ethic of land stewardship to struggles over a broader array of social and environmental issues across the state and region. The book ends with a diary of observations of nature on the bluff through the course of a year

A re-assessment of the distribution of Virginia\u27s warbler in the Black Hills of South Dakota

Virginia’s Warbler (Oreothlypis virginiae) reaches the northeastern limit of its breeding range in the southern Black Hills of South Dakota, where it is considered a species of conservation concern. This population occurs in pine–juniper–shrub habitat in several canyons in extreme western Custer County. Additional such habitat occurs in the southern Black Hills south and east of the documented breeding populations, but these areas have received few systematic surveys, and whether Virginia’s Warbler occupies them was uncertain. Therefore, to define the species’ distribution in the South Dakota Black Hills more precisely, we surveyed with the aid of broadcast song and reviewed other reports. Virginia’s Warblers occurred in appropriate habitats all along the southwestern front (approximately 30 km total) of the Black Hills in Custer County but did not occur in similar habitat along the southeastern front, approximately 25 km distant. The species’ relative abundance in previously and newly identified pine–juniper–shrub habitats was similar. Virginia’s Warbler occurrence was positively associated with shrub cover (primarily mountain-mahogany, Cercocarpus montanus), pine overstory, and slopes of \u3e15°. Its association with the Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus) was negative, with the Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) tended toward positive, and with the Dusky Flycatcher (Empidonax oberholseri) was variable (negative along the southwestern front but weakly positive across all sites). These data extend the documented breeding range of Virginia’s Warbler in South Dakota by more than 20 km to the southeast. To clarify conservation priorities for this species at the northeastern limit of its range, future studies should delineate local and landscape-level characteristics of this population’s habitat more precisely and address its source–sink population dynamics

On groups and counter automata

We study finitely generated groups whose word problems are accepted by counter automata. We show that a group has word problem accepted by a blind n-counter automaton in the sense of Greibach if and only if it is virtually free abelian of rank n; this result, which answers a question of Gilman, is in a very precise sense an abelian analogue of the Muller-Schupp theorem. More generally, if G is a virtually abelian group then every group with word problem recognised by a G-automaton is virtually abelian with growth class bounded above by the growth class of G. We consider also other types of counter automata.Comment: 18 page

The Effect of Soy Food Intake on Mineral Status in Premenopausal Women

Background: Soy foods have been substituted for meat in recent years because of proposed health benefits. Research indicates, however, that soy protein and phytate in soy products inhibit the absorption of divalent cations. Methods: Our study was primarily designed to determine the effect of consuming two to three servings per day of soy foods, providing *19 g protein and *36 mg isoflavones, on iron and zinc status in premenopausal women during a 10-weeks period. As secondary outcomes, we also tested the effect of soy foods on biochemical markers of bone and thyroid hormones. Nonsmoking women (18–28 years) without chronic disease, anemia, pregnancy, or irregular menstrual cycles were randomly assigned to either the soy food (SF, n = 31) or animal food (AF, n = 32) group. Blood and urine samples and 3-day dietary records were collected at baseline and postintervention. Results: At baseline, iron and zinc status, bone markers, and thyroid hormones were not different between groups. After intervention, no significant changes were observed in hemoglobin, transferrin saturation, serum iron, ferritin, or transferrin receptor (TFR) concentrations. Plasma zinc, but not serum alkaline phosphatase, significantly decreased in both groups ( - 0.8 lmol/L). The change in bone-specific alkaline phosphatase was significant between SF (1.5 U/L) and AF ( - 0.7 U/L) groups. No significant changes were observed in bone resorption, thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), or free thyroxine after soy food intake. Conclusions: Incorporating *19 g soy protein from soy foods for 10 weeks had no significant effect on iron or zinc status, bone resorption or formation, or thyroid hormone status in premenopausal women

The TIGRE gamma-ray telescope

TIGRE is an advanced telescope for gamma-ray astronomy with a few arcmin resolution. From 0.3 to 10 MeV it is a Compton telescope. Above 1 MeV, its multi-layers of double sided silicon strip detectors allow for Compton recoil electron tracking and the unique determination for incident photon direction. From 10 to 100 MeV the tracking feature is utilized for gamma-ray pair event reconstruction. Here we present TIGRE energy resolutions, background simulations and the development of the electronics readout system

Blackjack Players Demonstrate the Near Miss Effect

The effect of the ‘near-miss’ as a potential conditioned reinforcer in slot machine play has recently been the subject of behavioral research on gambling. The present study extends prior research by examining this effect during the game of blackjack. Participants consisted of college undergraduates with no history of problematic gambling. Their verbal ratings of closeness to winning were recorded and examined for each of 50 hands of standard blackjack per session. Results indicated that as the number difference between the dealer and player’s hands decreased, closeness to win rating increased. Also for each participant, non-bust losses were rated closer to winning than losses where the player busted

Measuring Practicing Clinicians’ Information Literacy: An Exploratory Analysis in the Context of Panel Management

BACKGROUND: As healthcare moves towards technology-driven population health management, clinicians must adopt complex digital platforms to access health information and document care. OBJECTIVES: This study explored information literacy, a set of skills required to effectively navigate population health information systems, among primary care providers in one Veterans' Affairs (VA) medical center. METHODS: Information literacy was assessed during an 8-month randomized trial that tested a population health (panel) management intervention. Providers were asked about their use and comfort with two VA digital tools for panel management at baseline, 16 weeks, and post-intervention. An 8-item scale (range 0-40) was used to measure information literacy (Cronbach's α=0.84). Scores between study arms and provider types were compared using paired t-tests and ANOVAs. Associations between self-reported digital tool use and information literacy were measured via Pearson's correlations. RESULTS: Providers showed moderate levels of information literacy (M= 27.4, SD 6.5). There were no significant differences in mean information literacy between physicians (M=26.4, SD 6.7) and nurses (M=30.5, SD 5.2, p=0.57 for difference), or between intervention (M=28.4, SD 6.5) and control groups (M=25.1, SD 6.2, p=0.12 for difference). Information literacy was correlated with higher rates of self-reported information system usage (r=0.547, p=0.001). Clinicians identified data access, accuracy, and interpretability as potential information literacy barriers. CONCLUSIONS: While exploratory in nature, cautioning generalizability, the study suggests that measuring and improving clinicians' information literacy may play a significant role in the implementation and use of digital information tools, as these tools are rapidly being deployed to enhance communication among care teams, improve health care outcomes, and reduce overall costs

Ensemble prediction for nowcasting with a convection-permitting model—I: description of the system and the impact of radar-derived surface precipitation rates

A key strategy to improve the skill of quantitative predictions of precipitation, as well as hazardous weather such as severe thunderstorms and flash floods is to exploit the use of observations of convective activity (e.g. from radar). In this paper, a convection-permitting ensemble prediction system (EPS) aimed at addressing the problems of forecasting localized weather events with relatively short predictability time scale and based on a 1.5 km grid-length version of the Met Office Unified Model is presented. Particular attention is given to the impact of using predicted observations of radar-derived precipitation intensity in the ensemble transform Kalman filter (ETKF) used within the EPS. Our initial results based on the use of a 24-member ensemble of forecasts for two summer case studies show that the convective-scale EPS produces fairly reliable forecasts of temperature, horizontal winds and relative humidity at 1 h lead time, as evident from the inspection of rank histograms. On the other hand, the rank histograms seem also to show that the EPS generates too much spread for forecasts of (i) surface pressure and (ii) surface precipitation intensity. These may indicate that for (i) the value of surface pressure observation error standard deviation used to generate surface pressure rank histograms is too large and for (ii) may be the result of non-Gaussian precipitation observation errors. However, further investigations are needed to better understand these findings. Finally, the inclusion of predicted observations of precipitation from radar in the 24-member EPS considered in this paper does not seem to improve the 1-h lead time forecast skill