Ireland--The Healing Process

As you are aware, the quarrel on our island has gone on for several centuries. Looking at the example of the conflict in Ireland, there are two mentalities in our quarrel - the Nationalist and the Unionist. The real political challenge to the Unionist mindset occurred when Nationalist Ireland essentially said: Look, your objective is an honorable objective, the protection and preservation of your identity. Geography, history, and the size of the Unionist tradition guarantee that the problem cannot be solved without them, nor against them. If we can leave aside our quarrel while we work together in our common interest, spilling our sweat and not our blood, we will break down the barriers of centuries, too, and the new Ireland will evolve based on agreement and respect for difference, just as the rest of the European Union has managed to achieve over the years--the healing process. That is the philosophy that I hope, at last, is going to emerge in your neighboring island of Ireland. I look forward to our island being the bridge between the United States of America and the United States of Europe

Poorly connected groups

We investigate groups whose Cayley graphs have poor\-ly connected subgraphs. We prove that a finitely generated group has bounded separation in the sense of Benjamini--Schramm--Tim\'ar if and only if it is virtually free. We then prove a gap theorem for connectivity of finitely presented groups, and prove that there is no comparable theorem for all finitely generated groups. Finally, we formulate a connectivity version of the conjecture that every group of type $F$ with no Baumslag-Solitar subgroup is hyperbolic, and prove it for groups with at most quadratic Dehn function.Comment: 14 pages. Changes to v2: Proof of the Theorem 1.2 shortened, Theorem 1.4 added completing the no-gap result outlined in v

Poincar\'e profiles of groups and spaces

We introduce a spectrum of monotone coarse invariants for metric measure spaces called Poincar\'{e} profiles. The two extremes of this spectrum determine the growth of the space, and the separation profile as defined by Benjamini--Schramm--Tim\'{a}r. In this paper we focus on properties of the Poincar\'{e} profiles of groups with polynomial growth, and of hyperbolic spaces, where we deduce a connection between these profiles and conformal dimension. As applications, we use these invariants to show the non-existence of coarse embeddings in a variety of examples.Comment: 55 pages. To appear in Revista Matem\'atica Iberoamerican

CoRe: A way to build pedagogical content knowledge for beginning teachers

Research has shown that one of the factors which enables teachers to be effective is their rich pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Beginning teachers need support to develop this PCK and recent research in the field has proposed a conceptual tool known as “content representations”, or CoRes, as a model for doing this. The study reported here brought together science and technology experts in content and pedagogy, early career secondary teachers, and researchers to design a CoRe to assist development of teacher PCK. The study then researched the early career teachers’ use of the CoRe in their planning and delivery of a unit in their classrooms to examine the effect of the CoRe on teaching and learning, and on the development of the teachers’ PCK

An investigation into the efficiency of nitrogen fixation in Sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia scop.) : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Plant Science at Massey University.

Earlier reports have indicated that growth of the forage legume sainfoin (Onobrychis viciifolia Scop.) is limited by its capacity to fix adequate quantities of N2 . Symbiotic N2 fixation and development of sainfoin up to the flowering stage was studied under glasshouse conditions. Growth and development of plants that were dependent solely on fixed N2 for their N requirements, were compared with plants supplied with abundant combined (nitrate) N. The effect of a low rate of combined N on symbiotic N2 fixing activity and plant growth was also investigated. From an early stage, plants dependent on symbiotic N2 fixation had lower relative growth rates than plants supplied with combined N, indicating that the N2 fixing system of sainfoin was not capable of providing enough N to meet the requirements of the plant, or that N2 fixation required an energy input greater than that for the assimilation of mineral N. The mode of N nutrition was found to influence the dry matter distribution in sainfoin to a greater extent than reported for most other legumes. Plants dependent on symbiotic N2 fixation allocated a substantially greater proportion of dry matter to root and nodule growth and consequently had lower top:root + nodule ratios than plants provided with combined N. Sainfoin was found to produce abundant nodules, and had a relatively high nodule weight in relation to total plant weight, compared to other legumes. Specific nodule activity, however, was found to be relatively low, and possible reasons for this are discussed. For plants dependent on symbiotic N2 fixation, total plant N, and hence N2 fixation appeared to be the major factor limiting plant growth. Evidence was obtained which indicated that the N2 fixing system of sainfoin may be relatively inefficient. The observed ratio of C2 H2 reduced:N2 fixed, was higher than the theoretical ratio, and appeared to be high relative to other legumes, which suggested possiblewastage of energy by the N2 fixing enzyme. The addition of a low rate of combined Nhad the effect of immediately reducing N2 [C2 H2 ] fixing activity, and the combined N appeared to substitute for, rather than supplement, symbiotic N2 fixation, further indicating an inefficient symbiotic N2 fixing system. Leaf area ratio was found to be lower in sainfoin dependent on N2 fixation than reported values for other N2 fixing legumes; this suggests that sainfoin is less efficient at intercepting photosynthetically active radiation. Leaf area was highly correlated withtotal plant N, and there was evidence that this link was via energy supply to the symbiotic N2 fixing system. Thus leaf area may have been limiting N2 fixation and hence total plant. N. Overall, a mutual dependence between the ability of the root nodules to fix N2 and the ability of the leaves to supply energy was indicated. There was evidence that both of these factors may play a role in limiting the growth of sainfoin, relative to other more productive legumes, such as lucerne

Disposition of precipitation: Supply and Demand for Water Use by New Tree Plantations

As the greatest rainwater users among all vegetative land covers, tree plantations have been employed strategically to mitigate salinity and water-logging problems. However, large-scale commercial tree plantations in high rainfall areas reduce fresh water inflows to river systems supporting downstream communities, agricultural industries and wetland environmental assets. A bio-economic model was used to estimate economic demand for water by future upstream plantations in a sub-catchment (the 2.8 million ha Macquarie valley in NSW) of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Given four tree-product values, impacts were simulated under two settings: without and with the requirement that permanent water entitlements be purchased from downstream entitlement holders before establishing a tree plantation. Without this requirement, gains in economic surplus from expanding tree plantations exceeded economic losses by downstream irrigators, and stock and domestic water users, but resulted in reductions of up to 154 GL (gigalitres) in annual flows to wetland environments. With this requirement, smaller gains in upstream economic surplus, added to downstream gains, could total $330 million while preserving environmental flows. Extending downstream water markets to new upstream tree plantations, to equilibrate marginal values across water uses, helps ensure water entitlements are not diminished without compensation. Outcomes include better economic-efficiency, social-equity and environmental-sustainability.Environmental Economics and Policy, forest, environmental services, catchment, water sources, interception, entitlement, supply, demand, market, economic surplus, evapo-transpiration, urban water, irrigation, wetlands.,

Flax Culture in South Dakota

Summary 1. South Dakota ranks fourth among the states in flax production.2. The total production for this state is rapidly decreasing and the industry will soon be lost if measures are not taken to prevent it. 3. Careful attention to the essentials, such as variety, rotations, soil preparation, selection and treatment of seed, time, rate and depth of seeding, weed prevention and disease prevention will make it possible to produce flax permanently and profitably. 4. Flax commonly grown in South Dakota is all of the small seeded, blue flowered European type. Several pedigreed varieties have been· selected by the North Dakota and Minnesota experiment stations. Of these, North Dakota Resistant No. 52 (S. D. 29) has yielded best at Highmore and Select Russian N. D. 1215 (S. D. 686) has yielded highest at Newell.5. Clean plump seed is necessary. This can be had by setting off a portion of the field for seed purposes and removing any weeds by hand and by thorough cleaning of seed.\u3c6\u3e6. Common diseases of flax are wilt, rust and canker. Rust can be avoided by early seeding. Wilt and canker can be combated by treating seed and sowing on new land or land where flax has not been grown for several years.\u3c7\u3e. Long rotations are desirable. The flax crop should follow pasture, meadow or clean cultivated crop.*\u3e Flax requires a firm seed bed. This helps insure even germination and even maturity.9. Flax should be sown as early as convenient. April seeding has given best average yields at Cottonwood, Eureka and Highmore.10. Two pecks per acre or a little less is probably the best rate of seeding. Experiments have not been conducted long enough to settle this point definitely.11. Shallow seeding, about one inch deep, is best as deeper seeding may not come up.12. Flax is a good crop for irrigated lands, but care should be taken not to over-irrigate or irrigate too late.13. Flax can be harvested with a· header if thoroughly ripe and dry, but a binder is usually preferable so that the bundles can be set up in small shocks to dry thoroughly before threshing.14. Flax must be dry when threshed as damp flax will not thresh cleanly and the seed is liable to heat damage in the bin.15. Flaxseed is used mainly for the manufacture of linseed oil and oil cake. The straw is a valuable byproduct which can be used for making tow, paper and paper products