Surface Erosion and Sedimentation Associated with Forest Land Use in Interior Alaska

Completion reportThe magnitude of sheet-rill erosion associated with various landscape manipulations is presented. The Universal Soil Loss Equation's usefulness for predicting annual sheet-rill erosion within interior Alaska is confirmed. Investigations of sheet-rill erosion indicate that removing the trees from forested areas with only minor ground cover disturbance did not increase erosion. Removing the ground cover, however, increased erosion 18 times above that on forested areas. Erosion is substantially reduced when disturbed areas are covered with straw mulch and fertilizer. Comparison of the actual erosion and the quantity of erosion predicted with the Universal Soil Loss Equation indicates that the equation overestimates annual erosion by an average of 21 percent. It overestimates individual storm erosion by an average of 174 percent. Data are also presented concerning sheet-rill erosion in a permafrost trail, distribution of the rainfall erosion index, and suggested cover and management factor values.This work was supported by the Institute of Northern Forestry, Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, USDA. The Institute of Water Resources, University of Alaska, provided facilities for this research

Higher homotopy operations and cohomology

We explain how higher homotopy operations, defined topologically, may be identified under mild assumptions with (the last of) the Dwyer-Kan-Smith cohomological obstructions to rectifying homotopy-commutative diagrams.Comment: 28 page

Submitting insect and mite specimens for identification

"University Extension provides an insect identification service to the public. If you properly submit specimens to us, we can promptly identify them and return to you with appropriate biological and control information."--First page.James W. Johnson (Department of Entomology, College of Agriculture)New 2/88/6

A study of the dissolution of hafnium in hydrofluoric acid

The purpose of this investigation was to obtain kinetic and electrochemical information concerning the reaction of hafnium with hydrofluoric acid in order to establish the mechanism of dissolution. This included the determination of dissolution rates, the difference effect, and dissolution potentials of hafnium in hydrofluoric acid --Abstract, page 1

“Beggaring the Nation”: Bodily Inscription and the Body Politic in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance

In Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance (1995), the ubiquity of bodily metaphor and description reveals a fundamental concern with the representational capacity of the body. Set in India and focussing primarily on the volatile period of the Emergency (1975-1977), the novel explores the way in which historical and political processes impinge upon the lives of, and inscribe the bodies of, individual citizens. In addition to providing a structural paradigm by charting the progression of the narrative, images of bodily decline, deterioration, and mutilation serve as signifiers of the violent regulatory practices of both the caste-system and the Indira Gandhi regime during the Emergency. Within a theoretical framework informed by the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and others, the regulatory practices of the state in A Fine Balance can be understood to produce not only docile bodies that are useful and obedient, but also abject bodies that disturb the coherence and stability of a social structure depicted as a healthy and pure body. Mistry’s representations of the body as an inscriptive surface thus problematize the attempts of the novel’s ruling Indira Gandhi regime to depict the Indian body politic as a coherent, homogenous, and corporeal totality. Ultimately, A Fine Balance suggests that it is only through an awareness of the diffuse interrelationships between individual subjects that we can begin to imagine the complex and heterogeneous network of linkages of which the nation is comprised