Mosquitoes of Iowa: Diptera: Culicidae

The Culicidae, or mosquitoes, constitute a large and widely distributed family of medically important insects. The blood sucking habits of the females, coupled with the ability of some to transmit disease organisms, make them extremely serious pests of man and domestic animals.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/specialreports/1059/thumbnail.jp

The potential for voluntary instruments to achieve conservation planning goals : the case of conservancies in South Africa

Spatial prioritizations and gap analyses are increasingly undertaken to allocate conservation resources. Most spatial prioritizations are conducted without specifying the conservation instruments to be implemented and gap analyses typically assess formally protected areas but increasingly include private land conservation instruments. We examine conservancies to see if these voluntary instruments contribute towards achieving goals of South African conservation planning initiatives. We conducted a nationwide survey and interviews with conservancy members in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape. Conservancies have potential for assisting South Africa to achieve conservation planning goals at national and local scales but their inclusion in spatial prioritizations and gap analyses predicates improved protection for nature, operational refinement and increased support. We sound a warning to conservation planning initiatives that incorporate voluntary instruments on private land, and present recommendations for strengthening such instruments to make them more effective. Our findings may assist conservation planners elsewhere to design more effective conservation planning initiatives focused on private land

Examining Factors Influencing Use of a Decision Aid in Personnel Selection

In this research, two studies were conducted to examine factors influencing reliance on a decision aid in personnel selection. Specifically, this study examined the effect of feedback, validity of selection predictors, and presence of a decision aid on the use of the aid in personnel selection. The results demonstrate that when people are provided with the decision aid, their predictions were significantly more similar to the predictions made by the aid than people who were not provided with the aid. This suggests that when people are provided with an aid, they will use it to some degree. This research also shows that when provided with a decision aid with high cue validity, people will increase their reliance on the decision aid over multiple decisions

Hydrogen bond topology and the ice VII/VIII and Ih/XI proton ordering phase transitions

Ice Ih, ordinary ice at atmospheric pressure, is a proton-disordered crystal that when cooled under special conditions is believed to transform to ferroelectric proton-ordered ice XI, but this transformation is still subject to controversy. Ice VII, also proton disordered throughout its region of stability, transforms to proton-ordered ice VIII upon cooling. In contrast to the ice Ih/XI transition, the VII/VIII transition and the crystal structure of ice VIII are well characterized. In order to shed some light on the ice Ih proton ordering transition, we present the results of periodic electronic density functional theory calculations and statistical simulations. We are able to describe the small energy differences among the innumerable H-bond configurations possible in a large simulation cell by using an analytic theory to extrapolate from electronic DFT calculations on small unit cells to cells large enough to approximate the thermodynamic limit. We first validate our methods by comparing our predictions to the well-characterized ice VII/VIII proton ordering transition, finding agreement with respect to both the transition temperature and structure of the low-temperature phase. For ice Ih, our results indicate that a proton-ordered phase is attainable at low temperatures, the structure of which is in agreement with the experimentally proposed ferroelectric Cmc2_1 structure. The predicted transition temperature of 98 K is in qualitative agreement with the observed transition at 72 K on KOH-doped ice samples