Independent technical investigation of the Puna Geothermal Venture unplanned steam release, June 12 and 13, 1991, Puna, Hawaii

This document reviews the events that led up to and occurred during the unplanned steam release from Puna Geothermal Venture's Kapoho State 8 geothermal well in 1991.For the Honorable Lorraine R. Inouye, Mayor, County of Hawaii and the Honorable William W. Paty, Chairperson, Board of Land and Natural Resources

Scaling up: Achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology

The first report commissioned by Ufi Charitable Trust. It investigates opportunities for and barriers to the application of digital technology to adult learning. It focuses on possible ways to transform the UK’s vocational education and training system, identifying three main priorities for funding by the Ufi Charitable Trust: * increasing the capability of those involved in running the vocational learning system * exploiting networks to bring together learners, learning content and learning professionals * harnessing computers to support individualised and differentiated learning

Adalimumab in the treatment of pediatric patients with chronic noninfectious anterior uveitis

Introduction: Adalimumab is established as an effective treatment for pediatric noninfectious uveitis refractory to methotrexate. However current use of the medication is empiric, according to fixed-dosing regimens and a significant proportion of patients will be nonresponsive or suboptimally responsive to adalimumab. Areas covered: There remains considerable scope to improve outcomes through tailoring treatment according to individual patient responsiveness. Monitoring of anti-drug antibodies and serum drug trough levels may assist in predicting which patients are likely to have a poor response to adalimumab and enable tailoring of regimens to individual patients. Expert opinion: We propose use of these biomarkers to individualize therapy in suboptimally responding patients, and present an algorithm of treatment escalation for pediatric noninfectious uveitis

Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays from dark matter annihilation

Annihilation of clumped superheavy dark matter provides an interesting explanation for the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. The predicted anisotropy signal provides a unique signature for this scenario.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of Dark Matter 2002: Sources and Detection of Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Univers

Implications of Legal Pluralism for Natural Resource Management

Summaries This article illustrates the implications of legal pluralism for our understanding of natural resource management and policies toward resource tenure, using the example of water rights. There is widespread recognition that property rights play a fundamental role in shaping how people manage natural resources. But many conceptions of property rights have focused only on static definitions, usually as defined in statutory law. The legal anthropological perspective highlights the coexistence and interaction between multiple legal orders such as state, customary, religious, project and local laws, all of which provide bases for claiming property rights. These multiple legal frameworks also facilitate considerable flexibility for people to manoeuvre in their use of natural resources, thus helping to cope with uncertainty. In many parts of the world, water rights are dynamic, flexible and subject to frequent negotiations because of uncertain water supply, damages to intake structures due to floods and landslides, and social, economic and political changes. The article demonstrates how multiple, flexible and dynamic legal orders are more responsive to these uncertainties and changes than a single, fixed legal system with a static property regim

Zika Virus Outside Africa

This should be considered an emerging pathogen

Visual storytelling using National Capability data

UKCEH held a visualisation-training event with three aims: (i) Increasing capacity in UK-SCAPE and in HEIs for scientific staff to create engaging visualisations from their research (ii) Fostering awareness of UK-SCAPE data and knowledge (iii) Supporting collaboration between staff funded on UK-SCAPE and researchers in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The training was attended by 23 UKCEH and 17 HEI staff. Attendees were invited to join a series of 5 workshops. These workshops covered design principles, using design software, designing infographics as well as how to bring data into design software. There workshops were complemented with a frameing workshop at the beginning, a practical ‘drop-in’ workshop, and an evaluation workshop at the end. Feedback from participants highlighted: (i) An increased awareness of UK-SCAPE data, particularly amongst HEI participants (ii) Self-reported increase in design skills, knowledge and confidence (iii) Lack of time is a common barrier to producing visualisations, that still needs to be addressed (iv) Lack of access/knowledge of the right tools for visualisation was no longer reported as a barrier for any of the participants at the end of the course

Plutonic foundation of a slow-spreading ridge segment : oceanic core complex at Kane Megamullion, 23°30′N, 45°20′W

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2008. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems 9 (2008): Q05014, doi:10.1029/2007GC001645.We mapped the Kane megamullion, an oceanic core complex on the west flank of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge exposing the plutonic foundation of a ∼50 km long, second-order ridge segment. The complex was exhumed by long-lived slip on a normal-sense detachment fault at the base of the rift valley wall from ∼3.3 to 2.1 Ma (Williams, 2007). Mantle peridotites, gabbros, and diabase dikes are exposed in the detachment footwall and in outward facing high-angle normal fault scarps and slide-scar headwalls that cut through the detachment. These rocks directly constrain crustal architecture and the pattern of melt flow from the mantle to and within the lower crust. In addition, the volcanic carapace that originally overlay the complex is preserved intact on the conjugate African plate, so the complete internal and external architecture of the paleoridge segment can be studied. Seafloor spreading during formation of the core complex was highly asymmetric, and crustal accretion occurred largely in the footwall of the detachment fault exposing the core complex. Because additions to the footwall, both magmatic and amagmatic, are nonconservative, oceanic detachment faults are plutonic growth faults. A local volcano and fissure eruptions partially cover the northwestern quarter of the complex. This volcanism is associated with outward facing normal faults and possible, intersecting transform-parallel faults that formed during exhumation of the megamullion, suggesting the volcanics erupted off-axis. We find a zone of late-stage vertical melt transport through the mantle to the crust in the southern part of the segment marked by a ∼10 km wide zone of dunites that likely fed a large gabbro and troctolite intrusion intercalated with dikes. This zone correlates with the midpoint of a lineated axial volcanic high of the same age on the conjugate African plate. In the central region of the segment, however, primitive gabbro is rare, massive depleted peridotite tectonites abundant, and dunites nearly absent, which indicate that little melt crossed the crust-mantle boundary there. Greenschist facies diabase and pillow basalt hanging wall debris are scattered over the detachment surface. The diabase indicates lateral melt transport in dikes that fed the volcanic carapace away from the magmatic centers. At the northern edge of the complex (southern wall of the Kane transform) is a second magmatic center marked by olivine gabbro and minor troctolite intruded into mantle peridotite tectonite. This center varied substantially in size with time, consistent with waxing and waning volcanism near the transform as is also inferred from volcanic abyssal-hill relief on the conjugate African plate. Our results indicate that melt flow from the mantle focuses to local magmatic centers and creates plutonic complexes within the ridge segment whose position varies in space and time rather than fixed at a single central point. Distal to and between these complexes there may not be continuous gabbroic crust, but only a thin carapace of pillow lavas overlying dike complexes laterally fed from the magmatic centers. This is consistent with plate-driven flow that engenders local, stochastically distributed transient instabilities at depth in the partially molten mantle that fed the magmatic centers. Fixed boundaries, such as large-offset fracture zones, or relatively short segment lengths, however, may help to focus episodes of repeated melt extraction in the same location. While no previous model for ocean crust is like that inferred here, our observations do not invalidate them but rather extend the known diversity of ridge architecture.NSF Grants OCE-0118445, OCE-0624408 and OCE-0621660 supported this research. B. Tucholke was also supported by the Henry Bryant Bigelow Chair in Oceanography at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Generating a checking sequence with a minimum number of reset transitions

Given a finite state machine M, a checking sequence is an input sequence that is guaranteed to lead to a failure if the implementation under test is faulty and has no more states than M. There has been much interest in the automated generation of a short checking sequence from a finite state machine. However, such sequences can contain reset transitions whose use can adversely affect both the cost of applying the checking sequence and the effectiveness of the checking sequence. Thus, we sometimes want a checking sequence with a minimum number of reset transitions rather than a shortest checking sequence. This paper describes a new algorithm for generating a checking sequence, based on a distinguishing sequence, that minimises the number of reset transitions used.This work was supported in part by Leverhulme Trust grant number F/00275/D, Testing State Based Systems, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada grant number RGPIN 976, and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant number GR/R43150, Formal Methods and Testing (FORTEST)