9,941 research outputs found
The Limnology of Two Dissimilar Subarctic Streams and Implications of Resource Development
Because of the relatively undeveloped condition of arctic and subarctic
Alaska, an opportunity is presented to draw up water quality management
plans before extensive perturbation. These plans cannot, unfortunately , be based upon those drawn up for more temperate regions where much is known about natural stream conditions, for in these Alaskan areas,
little is known about the natural physical, chemical, and biological cycles of streams or about their ability to handle the stresses that will be exerted on them should development take place.
The Chena River, in subarctic, interior Alaska, near the city of Fairbanks,
has been studied to evaluate the impact of pending construction
and operation of flood control structures (Frey, Mueller and Berry, 1970).
This river however has already been developed, especially along its lower
reaches where the city of Fairbanks is situated.
The watersheds of the two streams chosen for this study roughly parallel
each other, although the Chatanika River watershed is about twice
as long as that of Goldstream Creek. In addition to the dissimilarity
in size, these two streams also differ in regard to terrain, at least
along the respective stretches that were studied. The Goldstream Creek
study area runs through a bog and extensive muskeg. The Chatanika River,
however, was for the most part sampled in the area of mountainous terrain.
The intent of this study was to obtain comprehensive physical and
chemical data, to survey the resident invertebrates, and to evaluate the
assimilative capabilities of both streams.This project was supported in part by funds (Proj. B-017-ALAS) provided
by the United States Department of the Interior, Office of Water
Resources Research, as authorized under the Water Resources Act of 1964,
as amended. Equal support was provided by the State of Alaska as research funds (University of Alaska 234-2503)
Thermal Tolerances of Interior Alaskan Arctic Grayling (Thymallus arcticus)
The work upon which this report is based was supported in part by
funds (Project A-041-ALAS) provided by the United States Department of
the Interior, Office of Water Resources Research, as authorized under
the Water Resources Act of 1964, as amended
How important are labor markets to the welfare of the poor in Indonesia?
A majority of the poor in Indonesia come from agricultural and self-employed households. Moreover, the largest single contribution to poverty reduction between 1990 and 1993 came from within-sector welfare gains to self-employed farm households. Data show that the role of the labor market in reducing poverty has increased since the mid-1980s. Wage labor markets can be expected to play an increasingly important impact on the welfare of Indonesia's poor as the economy continues to undergo structural change, and as the workforce moves out of agriculture into manufacturing and services. Because poverty remains largely an agricultural and self-employed phenomenon, the most direct way to reduce poverty is to focus on improving the operation of product, land, and capital markets. At the same time, labor market policy can play an important role in the Government's poverty reduction efforts by helping to facilitate labor mobility across sectors. But if they reduce labor mobility, labor market policies can be counterproductive to Indonesia's poverty reduction efforts. Recent empirical evidence suggests that increases in the minimum wage may have hurt employment growth, particularly among small firms. As such, using minimum wage policy to ensure high wages to a limited number of workers will almost certainly diminish the poverty reducing potential of the labor markets.Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Rural Poverty Reduction,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Assessment,Health Economics&Finance,Safety Nets and Transfers
A Survey of Lentic Waters with Respect to Dissolved and Particulate Lead
Some of the strongest temperature inversions in the world occur at
Fairbanks, Alaska. Benson (1970) has reported that a temperature gradient
of 10 to 30C/1OO m is common in the winter inversions that form at
Fairbanks. Air pollution is especially severe during these inversions
when it is accompanied by the formation of ice crystals in the air, a
condition known as ice fog. This phenomenon occurs when the temperature
drops below -20F (-35C) (Benson, 1970), and it intensifies with time if
the inversion is not broken.
The ice crystals in this fog have been found to adsorb dust and gasses,
including the lead halides which are present in the air as a result of the
combustion of tetraethyl lead and/or other lead-hydrocarbon compounds used
as anti-knock additives in automotive gasoline. Lazrus et al. (1970) have
found lead concentrations in precipitation to be highly significantly correlated
with the amount of gasoline used in the area sampled.
There are two factors that bring the concentration of lead to high
levels in ice fogs. Evaporation of the ice crystals tends to concentrate
pollutants in the air mass, especially over the core area of the city
where precipitation is retarded by the heating effect of the city. Also,
during the extreme cold weather accompanying this phenomenon, many people
allow their cars to idle when they are parked to increase performance and
for reasons of personal comfort.
Eventually, much of the pollutants suspended in the ice fog is precipitated and causes unnaturally high levels of lead in the snow. (Winchester et al., 1967). It is suspected that some of this particulate
lead collected in the snow may be carried along with the associated surface
runoff into 1entic (standing) surface waters during thawing. The
objectives of this project were:
1. to measure the amount of dissolved and particulate lead in a
number of selected 1entic waters in the Fairbanks area, and
2. to measure the amount of lead that has been incorporated into net plankton organisms located in the selected lentic waters.The work upon which this report is based was supported by funds (Project A-035-ALAS) provided by the United States Department of the Interior, Office of Water Resources Research, as authorized under the
Water Resources Act of 1964, as amended
Computational determination of (3,11) and (4,7) cages
A (k,g)-graph is a k-regular graph of girth g, and a (k,g)-cage is a
(k,g)-graph of minimum order. We show that a (3,11)-graph of order 112 found by
Balaban in 1973 is minimal and unique. We also show that the order of a
(4,7)-cage is 67 and find one example. Finally, we improve the lower bounds on
the orders of (3,13)-cages and (3,14)-cages to 202 and 260, respectively. The
methods used were a combination of heuristic hill-climbing and an innovative
backtrack search
Development of an Operational Northern Aquatic Ecosystem Model: Completion Report
OWRR Contract No. 14-31-0001-5217 Grant No. C-6169The work upon which this completion report is based was supported
by funds provided by the U. S. Department of the Interior, Office of
Water Research and Technology as authorized under the Water Resources
Research Act of 1964, Public Law 88-379, as amended
Towards the improvement of self-service systems via emotional virtual agents
Affective computing and emotional agents have been found to have a positive effect on human-computer interactions. In order to develop an acceptable emotional agent for use in a self-service interaction, two stages of research were identified and carried out; the first to determine which facial expressions are present in such an interaction and the second to determine which emotional agent behaviours are perceived as appropriate during a problematic self-service shopping task. In the first stage, facial expressions associated with negative affect were found to occur during self-service shopping interactions, indicating that facial expression detection is suitable for detecting negative affective states during self-service interactions. In the second stage, user perceptions of the emotional facial expressions displayed by an emotional agent during a problematic self-service interaction were gathered. Overall, the expression of disgust was found to be perceived as inappropriate while emotionally neutral behaviour was perceived as appropriate, however gender differences suggested that females perceived surprise as inappropriate. Results suggest that agents should change their behaviour and appearance based on user characteristics such as gender
The DRM Dilemma: Re-Aligning Rights Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (‘DMCA’) prevents unauthorized copying and distribution of digital copyright works by regulating devices that can be used to circumvent Digital Rights Management (‘DRM’) measures that are used to restrict access to those works. A significant problem is that those devices, like many new technologies, have the potential to be used for both socially harmful and socially beneficial purposes. There is no obvious way for Congress to regulate circumvention devices to prevent the social harms, while at the same time facilitating the social benefits they might provide. Recent judicial interpretations of the DMCA have unsurprisingly erred on the side of harm-prevention to the detriment of potentially legitimate uses of circumvention devices. Unlike previous scholarship, this article suggests that the answer to this dilemma is not necessarily to amend the DMCA to bolster legitimate use exceptions to the anti-circumvention provisions. Instead, this article advocates resolving the problem through a new approach that takes socially beneficial uses of circumvention technologies outside the scope of the DMCA altogether. The idea is to create a new administrative complaints mechanism that would support those seeking to make such uses of digitally encrypted copyright works by imposing legal obligations on copyright holders to facilitate those uses. This approach has the added benefit of generating a significant amount of data about emerging social norms relating to the boundaries of the fair use doctrine that could be fed back into legislative and judicial processes as copyright law develops in the future
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