Study of evaporation from soil surfaces: progress report no. 6

CER60RAS60.November 1960.Includes bibliographical references (page 14).Colorado contributing project to Western Regional Project W-32 Basic Hydrologic Factors Relating to Water Conservation

Social identity in serious sport event space

Sport events offer valuable experiences in distinctive settings, and serve as settings for social identity formation. Drawing on the literature from a range of disciplines, events characteristics are seen to provide spaces for the co-creation of values, liminality, communitas, flow experiences and authenticity. It is suggested that sport events facilitate career progression in relation to serious leisure and the development of social identification. The paper provides further insight about the nature of event experiences with implications for event management

Proximate tourists and major sport events in everyday leisure

The local and the everyday provide a base resource for an individual to draw upon selectively in the reflexive construction of their leisure lifestyles. Through processes of tourism, however, these everyday spaces can become transformed into tourist products such as through the staging of major sports events. Research often recognises the social impacts sport tourism events can have on host communities yet assume homogeneity across these communities without considering the differentiated leisure lifestyles which characterise them. This paper explores the interplay between the hosting of major sports events and leisure spaces, community and practices of local established sporting communities who are connected to the event through their socio-cultural proximity to the leisure lifestyle and physical proximity to the event setting. The study draws upon qualitative data from interviews with 19 cyclists who live in Adelaide, the host city of the Tour Down Under, an annual professional cycle race and festival. The findings explore the ways in which local cyclists experience the event as proximate tourists drawing upon their knowledge of everyday sporting spaces, local resources and their insider status to inform their identities. The findings examine the ways in which they maintain connections with local places throughout the staging of the event, and highlight some of the tensions this creates in their on-going everyday leisure practices. It argues that organisers of major sports events should utilise the pool of resident participant experts offered through local sports clubs and communities and ensure they benefit from their hosting

The dynamism of salt crust patterns on playas

Playas are common in arid environments and can be major sources of mineral dust that can influence global climate. These landforms typically form crusts that limit evaporation and dust emission, modify surface erosivity and erodibility, and can lead to over prediction or under prediction of (1) dust-emission potential and (2) water and heat fluxes in energy balance modeling. Through terrestrial laser scanning measurements of part of the Makgadikgadi Pans of Botswana (a Southern Hemisphere playa that emits significant amounts of dust), we show that over weeks, months, and a year, the shapes of these surfaces change considerably (ridge thrusting of >30 mm/week) and can switch among continuous, ridged, and degraded patterns. Ridged pattern development changes the measured aerodynamic roughness of the surface (as much as 3 mm/week). The dynamic nature of these crusted surfaces must be accounted for in dust entrainment and moisture balance formulae to improve regional and global climate models

Calcutta Botanic Garden and the colonial re-ordering of the Indian environment

This article examines three hand-painted colour maps that accompanied the annual report of the Calcutta Botanic Garden for 1846 to illustrate how the Garden’s layout, uses and functions had changed over the previous 30 years. The evolution of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the first half of the nineteenth-century reflects a wider shift in attitudes regarding the relationship between science, empire and the natural world. On a more human level the maps result from, and illustrate, the development of a vicious personal feud between the two eminent colonial botanists charged with superintending the garden in the 1840s

How Good a Deal Was the Tobacco Settlement?: Assessing Payments to Massachusetts

We estimate the increment in Massachusetts Medicaid program costs attributable to smoking from December 20, 1991, to 1998. We describe how our methods improve upon earlier estimates of analogous costs at the national level. Current costs to the Massachusetts Medicaid program approximate the payments to Massachusetts under the tobacco settlement of November 1998. Whether these payments are viewed as appropriate compensation for Medicaid costs over time depends upon the rate of increase in future health care costs, the rate of decline in smoking, the proportion of smoking that should be attributed to the actions of the tobacco companies and the liklihood that state would have prevailed at trial. The costs to the Medicaid program are dwarfed by the internal costs to smokers themselves.

An Ontology for Description of Drug Discovery Investigations

SummaryThe paper presents an ontology for the description of Drug Discovery Investigation (DDI). This has been developed through the use of a Robot Scientist “Eve”, and in consultation with industry. DDI aims to define the principle entities and the relations in the research and development phase of the drug discovery pipeline. DDI is highly transferable and extendable due to its adherence to accepted standards, and compliance with existing ontology resources. This enables DDI to be integrated with such related ontologies as the Vaccine Ontology, the Advancing Clinico-Genomic Trials on Cancer Master Ontology, etc. DDI is available at http://purl.org/ddi/wikipedia or http://purl.org/ddi/home</jats:p

Rhenium Complexes Bearing Tridentate and Bidentate Phosphinoamine Ligands in the Production of Biofuel Alcohols via the Guerbet Reaction

We report a variety of rhenium complexes supported by bidentate and tridentate phosphinoamine ligands and their use in the formation of the advanced biofuel isobutanol from methanol and ethanol. Rhenium pincer complexes 1–3 are effective catalysts for this process, with 2 giving isobutanol in 35% yields, with 97% selectivity in the liquid fraction, over 16 h with catalyst loadings as low as 0.07 mol %. However, these catalysts show poorer overall selectivity, with the formation of a significant amount of carboxylate salt solid byproduct also being observed. Production of the active catalyst 1d has been followed by 31P NMR spectroscopy, and the importance of the presence of base and elevated temperatures to catalyst activation has been established. Complexes supported by diphosphine ligands are inactive for Guerbet chemistry; however, complexes supported by bidentate phosphinoamine ligands show greater selectivity for isobutanol formation over carboxylate salts. The novel complex 7 was able to produce isobutanol in 28% yield over 17 h. The importance of the N–H moiety to the catalytic performance has also been established, giving further weight to the hypothesis that these catalysts operate via a cooperative mechanism