REDUCING SOIL COMPACTION WITH SUMMER COVER CROPS

Soil compaction is commonly understood to be a serious and widespread concern for agricultural production and environmental health. Compaction and its consequences are particularly concerning given that soil regenerates so slowly- at a rate of fractions of a millimeter to 2.5 millimeters per year- that it can effectively be considered a nonrenewable resource.Addressing compaction with an alternative superior to subsoiling would benefit many producers. This study was designed to address some of the gaps in current understanding. The experiment evaluated the performance of three cover crops (tillage radish, fava bean, and sudangrass) with two distinct root systems (taproots and fibrous roots) planted on two different dates and grown with and without irrigation in Pierce County, WA. The Pacific Northwest maritime climate is generally cool but with warm, dry summers; soil texture ranged from loamy sand to silt loam.The results indicate that there was no significant effect from the cover crop, planting date, and irrigation treatments on bulk density, soil strength, or saturated hydraulic conductivity after a single year of crop growth. However, the addition of organic matter to the soil may decrease susceptibility to compaction. Significant remediation of compaction takes longer than one year

Beyond the Win: Pathways for Policy Implementation

When it comes to policy, a lot of attention is given to "the win." Whether it is something new and big like the Affordable Care Act, a piece of legislation in a large federal omnibus bill, or inclusion of critical language in a state policy, seeing the fruits of advocacy efforts put into law makes advocates and champions feel that their hard work, often many years in the making, has paid off.However, in reality, "the win" is just the beginning -- a necessary first step in a much longer and equally as fraught process of policy implementation. Once a policy is created, there are numerous factors that shape and determine how that policy is implemented -- and ultimately, the impact it will have -- regardless of how well the policy is formulated. Some of these factors include rulemaking, funding, capacity of local implementing agencies, and fights to repeal or modify wins, among many others.And, just as in the case of "the win," advocacy plays an important role in shaping implementation whether in advocating across these factors or participating in ongoing monitoring over time. Interestingly, while the role of advocacy in agenda setting, policy formulation, and policy adoption has been widely explored in theory and practice, the role of advocacy in the policy implementation process has received less attention in the literature.To learn more about the role of advocacy at the policy implementation stage, ORS Impact spoke with organizations that engage in, or provide funding for, advocacy efforts at the state and/or federal level. We focused on the following questions:When had advocates played a positive role in policy implementation?When had implementation not gone as well as expected, and what did advocates take away from that?Our conversations yielded important learnings about the unique characteristics of, and range of approaches to, advocacy efforts during the implementation phase. The two following scenarios illustrate some of the different types and levels of advocacy intervention, as well as the results they produce, to demonstrate the ways advocacy can play out when shifting from policymaking to implementation

Database (Lecture) Streams on the Cloud: Experience Report on Teaching an Undergrad Database Lecture During a Pandemic

This is an experience report on teaching the undergrad lecture Big Data Engineering at Saarland University in summer term 2020 online. We describe our teaching philosophy, the tools used, what worked and what did not work. As we received extremely positive feedback from the students, we will continue to use the same teaching model for other lectures in the future

Visible lesbians and invisible bisexuals: Appearance and visual identities among bisexual women

A number of feminist scholars have argued that dress and appearance can be used to critique the dominant culture and explore alternative subjectivities. Research on non-heterosexual visual identities has explored the role that appearance and clothing practices can play in the construction of individual identities and collective communities. However, bisexual women are largely invisible in these discussions. The minimal existing research suggests that bisexual women are unable to communicate their sexuality through their clothing and appearance. This study explored how bisexual women manage their bodies and appearance in relation to their bisexuality. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 20 self-identified bisexual women and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The participants reported particular visual aesthetics associated with an embodied lesbian identity; however, they reported no visual image of bisexual women. Nonetheless, despite their lack of access to a distinct visual identity, the women negotiated ways in which to incorporate their bisexual identity into their dress and appearance, and considered their bisexuality an important aspect of their identity, which they would like to be recognised and acknowledged

Staged limbal stem cell transplantation and keratoplasty surgeries as a treatment for gelatinous drop-like corneal dystrophy

Gelatinous drop-like corneal dystrophy (GDLD) is a rare autosomal recessive corneal dystrophy that has been associated with mutations in the TACSTD2 (M1S1) gene, which is normally expressed in corneal epithelial cells. GDLD is characterized by progressive deposition of amyloid in the corneal stroma with rapid recurrence in grafts after penetrating keratoplasty. We report of case of a patient with GDLD treated bilaterally with staged limbal stem cell transplantation and penetrating keratoplasty that resulted in long-term control of his disease. This case demonstrates that staged allogenic limbal stem cell transplantation, before or after penetrating keratoplasty, can be used to restore vision long-term in GDLD patients