The impact of grazing cattle on soil physical properties and nutrient concentrations in overland flow from pasture, Part B

This report has been prepared as part of the Environmental Research Technological Development and Innovation Programme 2000–2006. The programme is financed by the Irish Government under the National Development Plan 2000–2006.End of project reportThe loss of nutrients from agricultural land to water bodies is a serious concern in many countries. To gain information on the contribution of grazing animals to diffuse nutrient losses from pasture areas to water, this study looked at the impact of cattle on nutrient concentrations in overland flow and on soil hydrology (bulk density, macroporosity and resistance to penetration). Rainfall simulations to produce overland flow were conducted and soil physical measurements were taken on experimental plots assigned to one of two treatments: 1) cattle had unrestricted access to the plot; 2) cattle could graze the plot but they could neither walk on the plot area nor deposit excrements on it. Areas to which the cattle had free access were characterised by 57%-83% lower macroporosity, by 8%-17% higher bulk density and by 27%-50% higher resistance to penetration than areas from which the cattle were excluded. The nutrients in overland flow from grassland that were affected by the presence of grazing animals were mainly the particulate nitrogen, the organic phosphorus and the potassium concentrations. Overall, the presence of cattle had a longer lasting effect on the soil hydrological parameters measured than on the nutrient concentrations in overland flow.Environmental Protection Agenc

K-Best Solutions of MSO Problems on Tree-Decomposable Graphs

We show that, for any graph optimization problem in which the feasible solutions can be expressed by a formula in monadic second-order logic describing sets of vertices or edges and in which the goal is to minimize the sum of the weights in the selected sets, we can find the k best solution values for n-vertex graphs of bounded treewidth in time O(n + k log n). In particular, this applies to finding the k shortest simple paths between given vertices in directed graphs of bounded treewidth, giving an exponential speedup in the per-path cost over previous algorithms

Mini-Collagens in Hydra Nematocytes

We have isolated and characterized four collagen-related c-DNA clones (N-COL 1, N-COL 2, N-COL 3, N-COL 4) that are highly expressed in developing nematocytes in hydra. All four c-DNAs as well as their corresponding transcripts are small in size (600-1,000 bp). The deduced amino acid sequences show that they contain a central region consisting of 14 to 16 Gly-X-Y triplets. This region is flanked amino-terminal by a stretch of 14-23 proline residues and carboxy-terminal by a stretch of 6-9 prolines. At the NH2- and COOH-termini are repeated patterns of cysteine residues that are highly conserved between the molecules. A model is proposed which consists of a central stable collagen triple helix of 12-14 nm length from which three 9-22 nm long polyproline II type helices emerge at both ends. Disulfide linkage between cysteine- rich segments in these helices could lead to the formation of oligomeric network structures. Electrophoretic characterization of nematocyst extracts allows resolution of small proline-rich polypeptides that correspond in size to the cloned sequences

Learning Activities of IU Bloomington Students: Report of an Online Survey

This study attempts to determine what IUB undergraduates do and how much of it they do when they are academically engaged outside the classroom. We created an online survey and asked a random sample of IUB undergraduates to complete it, indicating what learning activities they engage in outside the classroom, how much time they spend on each activity, how they manage their time outside of class, and what factors interfere with their academic engagement. The results were analyzed both for the entire sample, and for various demographic subsets of the sample

Genetic sequencing using 16s rRNA for pathogen identification in retropharyngeal lymph nodes from wild elk

Cervical region lymph nodes collected by hunters from 43 wild hunter-harvested elk (Cervus elaphus) in Utah were submitted to the Utah Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory during fall 2009. We evaluated these lymph nodes as specimens for identification of bacterial pathogens using 16S rRNA genetic sequencing. Thirty-seven bacterial species were identified; each was found in 2 to 30 individual elk. Many common ruminant livestock pathogens were identified in elk; pathogens previously reported in elk were Pasteurella multocida and Streptococcus spp. Cervical region lymph nodes harvested from wild ruminants appear to be acceptable samples for genetic sequencing of bacteria

The impact of the grazing animal on phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium and suspended solids loss from grazed pastures, Part A

Teagasc wishes to acknowledge the support of the Environmental Research Technological Development and Innovation (ERTDI) Programme under the Productive Sector Operational Programme which was financed by the Irish Government under the National Development Plan 2000-2006.End of project reportIn Ireland 90% of the 4.2 million ha of farmland is grassland. Phosphorus deficiency limited grassland production in Ireland and this was corrected by chemical fertiliser use in the 1960s and 1970s. The increased inputs of fertilisers led to increased intensification of grassland with a doubling of grass yield and of grazing animal numbers, from about 3 million to over 6 million livestock units. There is little information on relative contribution of increased chemical fertiliser use compared to increased grazing animal numbers on phosphorus loss to water. The main objective of this study was to obtain information on nutrient loss, particularly phosphorus, in overland flow from cut and grazed grassland plots, with a range of soil test phosphorus levels over three years and implications.Environmental Protection Agenc

Using Information Communications Technologies to Implement Universal Design for Learning

The purpose of this paper is to assist Ministries of Education, their donors and partners, Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs), and the practitioner community funded by and working with USAID to select, pilot, and (as appropriate) scale up ICT4E solutions to facilitate the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), with a particular emphasis on supporting students with disabilities to acquire literacy and numeracy skills. The paper focuses primarily on how technology can support foundational skills acquisition for students with disabilities, while also explaining when, why, and how technologies that assist students with disabilities can, in some applications, have positive impacts on all students’ basic skills development. In 2018, USAID released the Toolkit for Universal Design for Learning to Help All Children Read, section 3.1 of which provides basic information on the role of technologies to support UDL principles and classroom learning. This paper expands upon that work and offers more extensive advice on using ICT4E1 to advance equitable access to high quality learning. Like the UDL toolkit, the audience for this guide is mainly Ministries of Education and development agencies working in the area of education, but this resource can also be helpful for DPOs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) wishing to pilot or spearhead ICT initiatives. Content for this paper was informed by expert interviews and reviews of field reports during 2018. These included programs associated with United Nations, Zero Project, World Innovation Summit, UNESCO Mobile Learning Awards, and USAID’s All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development. Relevant case studies of select education programs integrating technology to improve learning outcomes for students with disabilities were summarized for this document

An improved surrogate method for detecting the presence of chaos in gait

It has been suggested that the intercycle variability present in the time series of biomechanical gait data is of chaotic nature. However, the proper methodology for the correct determination of whether intercycle fluctuations in the data are deterministic chaos or random noise has not been identified. Our goal was to evaluate the pseudoperiodic surrogation (PPS) [Small et al., 2001. Surrogate test for pseudoperiodic time series data. Physical Review Letters 87(18), 188,101–188,104], and the surrogation algorithms of Theiler et al. [1992. Testing for nonlinearity in time series: the method of surrogate data. Physica D 58(1–4), 77–94] and of Theiler and Rapp [1996. Re-examination of the evidence for low-dimensional, nonlinear structure in the human electroencephalogram. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 98, 213–222], to determine which is the more robust procedure for the verification of the presence of chaos in gait time series. The knee angle kinematic time series from six healthy subjects, generated from a 2-min walk, were processed with both algorithms. The Lyapunov exponent (LyE) and the approximate entropy (ApEn) were calculated from the original data and both surrogates. Paired t-tests that compared the LyE and the ApEn values revealed significant differences between both surrogated time series and the original data, indicating the presence of deterministic chaos in the original data. However, the Theiler algorithm affected the intracycle dynamics of the gait time series by changing their overall shape. This resulted in significantly higher LyE and ApEn values for the Theiler-surrogated data when compared with both the original and the PPS-generated data. Thus, the discovery of significant differences was a false positive because it was not based on differences in the intercycle dynamics but rather on the fact that the time series was of a completely different shape. The PPS algorithm, on the other hand, preserved the intracycle dynamics of the original time series, making it more suitable for the investigation of the intercycle dynamics and the identification of the presence of chaos in the gait time series

Microstructural characterization of AISI 431 martensitic stainless steel laser-deposited coatings

High cooling rates during laser cladding of stainless steels may alter the microstructure and phase constitution of the claddings and consequently change their functional properties. In this research, solidification structures and solid state phase transformation products in single and multi layer AISI 431 martensitic stainless steel coatings deposited by laser cladding at different processing speeds are investigated by optical microscopy, Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), orientation imaging microscopy (OIM), ternary phase diagram, Schaeffler and TTT diagrams. The results of this study show how partitionless solidification and higher solidification rates alter the microstructure and phase constitution of martensitic stainless steel laser deposited coatings. In addition, it is shown that while different cladding speeds have no effect on austenite–martensite orientation relationship in the coatings, increasing the cladding speed has resulted in a reduction of hardness in deposited coatings which is in contrast to the common idea about obtaining higher hardness values at higher cladding speeds.

Bitopological Duality for Distributive Lattices and Heyting Algebras

We introduce pairwise Stone spaces as a natural bitopological generalization of Stone spaces—the duals of Boolean algebras—and show that they are exactly the bitopological duals of bounded distributive lattices. The category PStone of pairwise Stone spaces is isomorphic to the category Spec of spectral spaces and to the category Pries of Priestley spaces. In fact, the isomorphism of Spec and Pries is most naturally seen through PStone by first establishing that Pries is isomorphic to PStone, and then showing that PStone is isomorphic to Spec. We provide the bitopological and spectral descriptions of many algebraic concepts important for the study of distributive lattices. We also give new bitopological and spectral dualities for Heyting algebras, co-Heyting algebras, and bi-Heyting algebras, thus providing two new alternatives of Esakia’s duality