Can the Results of Biodiversity-Ecosystem Productivity Studies Be Translated to Bioenergy Production?

Biodiversity experiments show that increases in plant diversity can lead to greater biomass production, and some researchers suggest that high diversity plantings should be used for bioenergy production. However, many methods used in past biodiversity experiments are impractical for bioenergy plantings. For example, biodiversity experiments often use intensive management such as hand weeding to maintain low diversity plantings and exclude unplanted species, but this would not be done for bioenergy plantings. Also, biodiversity experiments generally use high seeding densities that would be too expensive for bioenergy plantings. Here we report the effects of biodiversity on biomass production from two studies of more realistic bioenergy crop plantings in southern Michigan, USA. One study involved comparing production between switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) monocultures and species-rich prairie plantings on private farm fields that were managed similarly to bioenergy plantings. The other study was an experiment where switchgrass was planted in monoculture and in combination with increasingly species-rich native prairie mixtures. Overall, we found that bioenergy plantings with higher species richness did not produce more biomass than switchgrass monocultures. The lack of a positive relationship between planted species richness and production in our studies may be due to several factors. Non-planted species (weeds) were not removed from our studies and these non-planted species may have competed with planted species and also prevented realized species richness from equaling planted species richness. Also, we found that low seeding density of individual species limited the biomass production of these individual species. Production in future bioenergy plantings with high species richness may be increased by using a high density of inexpensive seed from switchgrass and other highly productive species, and future efforts to translate the results of biodiversity experiments to bioenergy plantings should consider the role of seeding density

Road Work: Racial Profiling and Drug Interdiction on the Highway

Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: Today... the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that\u27s involved with that. 4 Williams condemned racial profiling - As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It never has been con-doned in the State Police and it never will be condoned in the State Police - but he said that the illegal drug trade is ethnically balkanized: If you\u27re looking at the methamphetamine market, that seems to be controlled by motorcycle gangs, which are basically predominantly white. If you\u27re looking at heroin and stuff like that, your involvement there is more or less Jamaicans. \u27 Hours later, still on Sunday, Governor Christine Todd Whitman fired Williams from his job as superintendent of the New Jersey State Police because his comments... are inconsistent with our efforts to enhance public confidence in the State Police. 6 Six months later Colonel Williams sued the state for damages, arguing (among other claims) that his statements about race and drugs reflected well-known facts, and pointing out that the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy website told visitors that in Trenton, New Jersey, crack dealers are predominantly African-American males, powder cocaine dealers are predominantly Latino, heroin traffickers are mostly Latinos, and the marijuana market is controlled by Jamaicans.

Road Work: Racial Profiling and Drug Interdiction on the Highway

Hypocrisy about race is hardly new in America, but the content changes. Recently the spotlight has been on racial profiling. The story of Colonel Carl Williams of the New Jersey State Police is a wellknown example. On Sunday, February 28, 1999, the Newark Star Ledger published a lengthy interview with Williams in which he talked about race and drugs: Today . . . the drug problem is cocaine or marijuana. It is most likely a minority group that\u27s involved with that. Williams condemned racial profiling - As far as racial profiling is concerned, that is absolutely not right. It never has been condoned in the State Police and it never will be condoned in the State Police - but he said that the illegal drug trade is ethnically balkanized: If you\u27re looking at the methamphetamine market, that seems to be controlled by motorcycle gangs, which are basically predominantly white. If you\u27re looking at heroin and stuff like that, your involvement there is more or less Jamaicans. Hours later, still on Sunday, Governor Christine Todd Whitman fired Williams from his job as superintendent of the New Jersey State Police because his comments . . . are inconsistent with our efforts to enhance public confidence in the State Poiice. Six months later Colonel Williams sued the state for damages, arguing (among other claims) that his statements about race and drugs reflected well-known facts, and pointing out that the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy website told visitors that in Trenton, New Jersey, crack dealers are predominantly African-American males, powder cocaine dealers are predominantly Latino, heroin traffickers are mostly Latinos, and the marijuana market is controlled by Jamaicans

Domain Structure and Magnetoresistance in Co2MnGe Zigzag Structures

AbstractWe report a clear manifestation of the negative contribution to the magnetoresistance due to domain walls in Co2MnGe-Heusler submicron zigzag wires in which the domain structure, domain size and domain wall density can be well controlled. The magnetic behavior of these systems results from the interplay between the intrinsic magneto-crystalline (K4) anisotropy, growth induced uniaxial (KU = 4.7x103 J/m3) anisotropy and shape anisotropy (KS), as observed by magnetic-force microscopy (MFM) and longitudinal Kerr hysteresis loop measurements. Magnetoresistance measurements were performed by the four-point method under a field applied in the plane of the wires at a temperature of 300K. In these structures, domain wall-creation and annihilation occur in a coherent way. As a result, clear jumps of the resistance are detected during the transition from single-domain- to multi-domain states. At room temperature a value RDW = -2.5 mΩ was obtained; this result is the same order of magnitude as other experimental and theoretical findings. The negative resistive contribution due to the domain wall is also discussed and compared with the existing theoretical models

Fortalecimiento del vínculo afectivo y corresponsabilidad en padres, madres y cuidadores del nivel de sala materna y caminadores del Jardín Infantil La Paz de la Secretaria Distrital de Integración Social

Psicología Comunitaria-Servicio SocialEn el Jardín Infantil La Paz, agentes externos mencionaban que una de las problemáticas que se evidenciaba en el lugar era la escasa interacción que las madres tenían con sus hijos, dejando exclusivamente la lactancia materna como proceso nutricional, desconociendo la importancia que esta tiene en el fortalecimiento del vínculo afectivo, por tal razón, el objetivo del presente trabajo se inspiró en generar una propuesta que aportara al fortalecimiento de los vínculos afectivos y la corresponsabilidad de ser padres, entre la familia, las-os cuidadores y los niños y niñas de 0 a 2 años de edad a través de la sala amiga del Jardín La Paz de la Secretaria Distrital de Integración Social del territorio de Pardo Rubio. El diseño metodológico que se implemento fue el de investigación-Acción (IA), utilizando como instrumentos la observación participante, las entrevistas, los encuentros formales e informales, diarios de campo y encuentros de formación con padres y madres de familia. A través de diversas intervenciones tanto con maestras-niños y niñas como con padres-madres de familia se da cumplimiento a los indicadores de logro y metas planteados como generar conciencia en los padres sobre la importancia de la lactancia materna para el desarrollo integral del niño, el fortalecimiento del vínculo afectivo para procesos de socialización y la corresponsabilidad en los padres- maestras, los cuales lograron impacto en las familias pertenecientes al jardín, promoviendo además la participación activa en las salas amigas.PregradoPsicólog

Height and clonality traits determine plant community responses to fertilization

Fertilization via agricultural inputs and nutrient deposition is one of the major threats to global terrestrial plant richness, yet we still do not fully understand the mechanisms by which fertilization decreases plant richness. Tall clonal species have recently been proposed to cause declines in plant species richness by increasing in abundance in response to fertilization and competing strongly with other species. We tested this hypothesis in a fertilization experiment in a low productivity grassland by using a novel experimental manipulation of the presence vs. absence of clonal species and by examining the role of height within these treatments. We found that fertilization decreased species richness more in the presence than absence of clonal species. We also found that only tall species increased in biomass in response to fertilization. In the absence of clonal species, fertilization increased biomass of tall non clonal species. However, in the presence of clonal species, fertilization decreased tall non clonal biomass and only tall clonal biomass increased. Fertilization caused almost all short species to be lost in the presence, but not the absence, of clonal species and caused greater declines in the mean and variance of light levels in the presence of clonal species. These results show that the traits of species in a community can determine the magnitude of species loss due to fertilization. The strongly negative effect of tall clonals on species richness in fertilized plots is likely a result of their capacity to decrease light levels to a greater extent and more uniformly than non clonal species, and thereby drive the exclusion of short species. These results help clarify the mechanisms whereby fertilization decreases grassland plant species richness and suggest that efforts to prevent the loss of species under fertilized conditions may be most effective when they focus on controlling the biomass of tall clonal species

The End of History? Using a Proof Assistant to Replace Language Design with Library Design

Functionality of software systems has exploded in part because of advances in programming-language support for packaging reusable functionality as libraries. Developers benefit from the uniformity that comes of exposing many interfaces in the same language, as opposed to stringing together hodgepodges of command-line tools. Domain-specific languages may be viewed as an evolution of the power of reusable interfaces, when those interfaces become so flexible as to deserve to be called programming languages. However, common approaches to domain-specific languages give up many of the hard-won advantages of library-building in a rich common language, and even the traditional approach poses significant challenges in learning new APIs. We suggest that instead of continuing to develop new domain-specific languages, our community should embrace library-based ecosystems within very expressive languages that mix programming and theorem proving. Our prototype framework Fiat, a library for the Coq proof assistant, turns languages into easily comprehensible libraries via the key idea of modularizing functionality and performance away from each other, the former via macros that desugar into higher-order logic and the latter via optimization scripts that derive efficient code from logical programs

Age-related differences in emotional reactivity, regulation, and rejection sensitivity in adolescence

Although adolescents’ emotional lives are thought to be more turbulent than those of adults, it is unknown whether this difference is attributable to developmental changes in emotional reactivity or emotion regulation. Study 1 addressed this question by presenting healthy individuals aged 10–23 with negative and neutral pictures and asking them to respond naturally or use cognitive reappraisal to down-regulate their responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Results indicated that age exerted both linear and quadratic effects on regulation success but was unrelated to emotional reactivity. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings using a different reappraisal task and further showed that situational (i.e., social vs. nonsocial stimuli) and dispositional (i.e., level of rejection sensitivity) social factors interacted with age to predict regulation success: young adolescents were less successful at regulating responses to social than to nonsocial stimuli, particularly if the adolescents were high in rejection sensitivity. Taken together, these results have important implications for the inclusion of emotion regulation in models of emotional and cognitive development.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award BCS-0224342)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award MH076137)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award HD069178)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Award MH094056

"The daily grunt": middle class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports.

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the UK and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s,such luminaries as Labov (1969) and Trudgill (1975) were at pains to point out to educationalists, with some success, that this 'deficit 'view of working-class children's communicative competence is not a helpful one. However, a close reading of recent think-tank reports and policy papers on language and literacy teaching in schools reveals that the linguistic deficit hypothesis has resurfaced and is likely to influence present-day educational policy and practice. In this paper I examine in detail the findings, claims and recommendations of the reports and I argue that they are biased, poorly researched and reflect the vested interests of certain specialist groups, such as speech and language therapists and companies who sell literacy materials to schools. I further argue that we need to, once again, inject the debate with the social dimensions of educational failure, and we need to move away from the pathologisation of working-class children's language patterns