Land Application of Domestic Sludge in Cold Climates

Aerobically digested sludge from the Fairbanks sewage treatment plant was worked into the soil on several plots at the University of Alaska in the summer of 1978. Some of the sludge had been air dried for up to six months prior to application while some was taken directly from the thickener. Applications varied from 12 to 100 tons of solids/acre. For sludge applied in July and August, the fecal coliform count decayed by several orders of magnitude by the middle of September.. There was no significant movement of fecal coliform bacteria either vertically or laterally. Lime was used to raise the pH of one plot to 12, completely killing the fecal coliform bacteria within several days. The nutrient distribution demonstrated the potential for enriching soils by sludge addition. The main purpose of the study was to investigate the feasibility of this concept for remote military sites. Air drying followed by land application may represent a viable means of sludge disposal.This study was performed for the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (USA CRREL) and was funded under DA Project 4A762720A896, Environmental Quality for Construction and Operation of Military Facilities, Task 02, Pollution Abatement Systems

A Conversation with Seymour Geisser

Seymour Geisser received his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the City College of New York in 1950, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematical Statistics at the University of North Carolina in 1952 and 1955, respectively. He then held positions at the National Bureau of Standards and the National Institute of Mental Health until 1961. From 1961 until 1965, he was Chief of the Biometry Section at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases, and also held the position of Professorial Lecturer at the George Washington University from 1960 to 1965. From 1965 to 1970, he was the founding Chair of the Department of Statistics at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and in 1971, he became the founding Director of the School of Statistics at the University of Minnesota, remaining in that position until 2001. He held visiting professorships at Iowa State University, 1960; University of Wisconsin, 1964; University of Tel-Aviv (Israel), 1971; University of Waterloo (Canada), 1972; Stanford University, 1976, 1977, 1988; Carnegie Mellon University, 1976; University of the Orange Free State (South Africa), 1978, 1993; Harvard University, 1981; University of Chicago, 1985; University of Warwick (England), 1986; University of Modena (Italy), 1996; and National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), 1998. He was the Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991, 1994, 1999, and the Schor Scholar, Merck Research Laboratories, 2002-2003. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342307000000131 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

IMPLICATIONS OF TAXING QUOTA VALUE IN AN INDIVIDUAL TRANSFERABLE QUOTA FISHERY

Taxing pure rents is usually considered the least distortionary method for raising revenues. In the literature on fishery economics, the term "rent" is regularly employed, suggesting that pure rents exist in that sector. Indeed, with the recent development of individual transferable quotas, the resulting market value of quota has been treated as reflecting pure resource rents. In this paper, the view that the market value of quota represents a pure rent that can be readily extracted in a nondistortionary manner by the taxing authority is challenged because that argument ignores both economic incentives and political realities.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

IMPLICATIONS OF TAXING QUOTA VALUE IN AN INDIVIDUAL TRANSFERABLE QUOTA FISHERY: REPLY

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Bank capital ratios, asset growth, and the stock market

In recent quarters, the capital strength of the U.S. banking system has been improving rapidly in response to both regulatory pressures and business incentives. This article examines the different methods by which individual bank holding companies have increased their capital ratios and the relative rewards garnered by these strategies in the stock market.Bank capital ; Stock market ; Bank holding companies

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

Microsatellite Analysis of Trophy Largemouth Bass from Arkansas Reservoirs

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC) has introduced Florida largemouth bass (FLMB; Micropterus salmoides floridanus) to water bodies historically containing the northern largemouth bass (NLMB; Micropterus salmoides salmoides) subspecies since the late 1970s in an attempt to produce a trophy LMB fishery. Since 2006, the AGFC has been biannually sampling reservoirs stocked with FLMB to determine levels of admixture. Here, total sampling efforts between 2006 and 2011 have been combined, and LMB heavier than 2,268 g (5 lb) were analyzed in an effort to investigate distribution of bass by their genetic composition designated as trophy LMB by the AGFC. Of the 148 trophy LMB sampled, 123 possessed FLMB alleles (83.1%). Thirty-two of the heaviest 50 (64.0%) LMB sampled, including a potential state record that was nullified, were genetically confirmed to be FLMB. Distributions of trophy bass within reservoirs were preferentially represented by Fx-FLMB and FLMB

North Slope Borough water study: a background for planning

The Planning and Research Section of Alaska Dept. of Natural Resources initiated this pilot water study with the North Slope Borough and the University of Alaska's Arctic Environmental Information and Data Center and Institute of Water Resources. Traditional and present water uses in the eight North Slope Borough villages are examined to assist in evaluating and planning for present and future water use, treatment, and disposal requirements.Prepared for Alaska Department of Natural Resources Planning and Research Sectio

An appetite for learning : increasing employee demand for skills development

Raising the demand for skills amongst individuals in the workforce is critical if the UK is to meet its 2020 Ambition. This edition of Praxis highlights a number of policy interventions that the evidence suggests can work, and proposes a policy framework for describing and understanding these. The paper aims to stimulate wider debate about the policy interventions most likely to address the barriers to learning faced by the UK workforce. To this end the UK Commission welcomes readers' responses to the following questions, prompted by this paper

Update of Distribution of the Chestnut Lamprey in Arkansas

Most lamprey species other than sea lampreys have been poorly studied in North America. The chestnut lamprey, Ichthyomyzon castaneus, has a distribution within the Mississippi River and Hudson Bay drainage systems, and the Great Lakes. Since the text Fishes of Arkansas was published in 1988, few papers have been published to update the statewide distribution of this lamprey. We incorporated our electrofishing sampling results with gray and published literature to describe the distribution of this species in the drainage basins of the State of Arkansas. Reported are records of 250 chestnut lamprey specimens, over a 90 year period, from 47 different waterbodies in the state