Vegetarianism

Ethical vegetarians maintain that vegetarianism is morally required. The principal reasons offered in support of ethical vegetarianism are: (i) concern for the welfare and well-being of the animals being eaten, (ii) concern for the environment, (iii) concern over global food scarcity and the just distribution of resources, and (iv) concern for future generations. Each of these reasons is explored in turn, starting with a historical look at ethical vegetarianism and the moral status of animals

Integrated Ecosystem Assessment: Lake Ontario Water Management

BACKGROUND: Ecosystem management requires organizing, synthesizing, and projecting information at a large scale while simultaneously addressing public interests, dynamic ecological properties, and a continuum of physicochemical conditions. We compared the impacts of seven water level management plans for Lake Ontario on a set of environmental attributes of public relevance. METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS: Our assessment method was developed with a set of established impact assessment tools (checklists, classifications, matrices, simulations, representative taxa, and performance relations) and the concept of archetypal geomorphic shoreline classes. We considered each environmental attribute and shoreline class in its typical and essential form and predicted how water level change would interact with defining properties. The analysis indicated that about half the shoreline of Lake Ontario is potentially sensitive to water level change with a small portion being highly sensitive. The current water management plan may be best for maintaining the environmental resources. In contrast, a natural water regime plan designed for greatest environmental benefits most often had adverse impacts, impacted most shoreline classes, and the largest portion of the lake coast. Plans that balanced multiple objectives and avoided hydrologic extremes were found to be similar relative to the environment, low on adverse impacts, and had many minor impacts across many shoreline classes. SIGNIFICANCE: The Lake Ontario ecosystem assessment provided information that can inform decisions about water management and the environment. No approach and set of methods will perfectly and unarguably accomplish integrated ecosystem assessment. For managing water levels in Lake Ontario, we found that there are no uniformly good and bad options for environmental conservation. The scientific challenge was selecting a set of tools and practices to present broad, relevant, unbiased, and accessible information to guide decision-making on a set of management options

Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot

Long-term baselines on biodiversity change through time are crucial to inform conservation decision-making in biodiversity hotspots, but environmental archives remain unavailable for many regions. Extensive palaeontological, zooarchaeological and historical records and indigenous knowledge about past environmental conditions exist for China, a megadiverse country experiencing large-scale biodiversity loss, but their potential to understand past human-caused faunal turnover is not fully assessed. We investigate a series of complementary environmental archives to evaluate the quality of the Holocene–historical faunal record of Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, for establishing new baselines on postglacial mammalian diversity and extinction dynamics. Synthesis of multiple archives provides an integrated model of long-term biodiversity change, revealing that Hainan has experienced protracted and ongoing human-caused depletion of its mammal fauna from prehistory to the present, and that past baselines can inform practical conservation management. However, China's Holocene–historical archives exhibit substantial incompleteness and bias at regional and country-wide scales, with limited taxonomic representation especially for small-bodied species, and poor sampling of high-elevation landscapes facing current-day climate change risks. Establishing a clearer understanding of the quality of environmental archives in threatened ecoregions, and their ability to provide a meaningful understanding of the past, is needed to identify future conservation-relevant historical research priorities

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT APPLICATION TO CYBER PROTECTION TEAM DEFENSE OPERATIONS

The Congruence Model describes the idea that a team can only succeed when the defined components of people, structure, work, and culture all fit together. A key concept of The Congruence Model also identifies the interconnected relationships between components to understand how changes in one area affect performance in others. This model does not, however, include tacit knowledge as a core factor when assessing overall congruency. The research described in this study used data points from real-world Cyber Protection Team member input to build scope-complete behavior models that replicate the pathologies between organization components. Cyber Protection Teams—a subset of teams within the Cyber Mission Force—provided the vehicle to analyze how teams capture, develop, and maintain knowledge in day-to-day defensive cyberspace operations. The intended benefit of our research introduces tacit knowledge as the fifth contributing factor in The Congruence Model to identify prescriptions for knowledge management practices that positively interact with existing components to improve overall organization efficiency.Chief Petty Officer, United States NavyPetty Officer First Class, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Out of the Picture: Mrs. Krebs, Mother Stein, and Soldier’s Home

Theorizes that Gertrude Stein served as a source for “Soldier’s Home.” Examines the development of Hemingway’s relationship with Stein in the 1920s, concluding that the story reflects Hemingway’s desire to break from Stein’s influence as teacher and “surrogate mother” as a result of their differing opinions on war and sexuality

Performance

ABSTRACT: Bioinformatics in general and bioimaging in particular are characterized by large, often distributed datastores. Datastores involve more than just a database, as relational databases cannot, for example, store and protect an image. This paper examines the effects of network performance on a bioimaging datastore when it is locally connected, LAN connected, and WAN connected. Issues of node configuration are also considered