Attitudes of Georgia Irrigators Regarding the Use of Water Meters

The primary purpose of this paper is to provide information, in terms of these three stages, about the position of Georgia irrigators with regard to the adoption of water meters. Understanding where farmers are in the HEM can be useful to policy makers in deciding the mix of promotion, incentives, and regulation needed to encourage the adoption of water meters. Working Paper # 2003-00

EFFECTS OF ALTERNATIVE IRRIGATION ALLOCATIONS ON WATER USE, NET RETURNS, AND MARGINAL USER COSTS

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The impact of oceanic near-inertial waves on climate

Author Posting. © American Meteorological Society, 2013. This article is posted here by permission of American Meteorological Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Climate 26 (2013): 2833–2844, doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00181.1.The Community Climate System Model, version 4 (CCSM4) is used to assess the climate impact of wind-generated near-inertial waves (NIWs). Even with high-frequency coupling, CCSM4 underestimates the strength of NIWs, so that a parameterization for NIWs is developed and included into CCSM4. Numerous assumptions enter this parameterization, the core of which is that the NIW velocity signal is detected during the model integration, and amplified in the shear computation of the ocean surface boundary layer module. It is found that NIWs deepen the ocean mixed layer by up to 30%, but they contribute little to the ventilation and mixing of the ocean below the thermocline. However, the deepening of the tropical mixed layer by NIWs leads to a change in tropical sea surface temperature and precipitation. Atmospheric teleconnections then change the global sea level pressure fields so that the midlatitude westerlies become weaker. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the real air-sea flux of NIW energy is poorly constrained by observations; this makes the quantitative assessment of their climate impact rather uncertain. Thus, a major result of the present study is that because of its importance for global climate the uncertainty in the observed tropical NIW energy has to be reduced.This research was funded as part of the Climate Process Team on internal wave-driven mixing with NSF Grant Nr E0968771 at NCAR.2013-11-0

Georgia Norms for the Teacher Motivation Diagnostic Questionnaire

One purpose of this study was to establish Georgia norms for the Teacher Motivation Diagnostic Questionnaire (TMDQ), an instrument designed to assess four specific aspects of teacher motivation. The four aspects included (a) Principal Expectations, the beliefs teachers have about how much principals value student achievement, (b) Future Utility, how much teachers believe improvement in student achievement would benefit them, (c) Self-Concept of Ability, how much confidence teachers have that they can improve student achievement, and (d) Attitude Toward Principal, the attitudes teachers have about the principal. Another purpose of the study was to determine if there were statistically significant differences in the means of the Georgia sample and the means of a national sample. Two mailings were used for collecting data. For the first mailing questionnaires were sent to 200 randomly selected public elementary and secondary schools in Georgia. At the request of the principal, teachers in each school were asked to complete the questionnaire, as well as some background questions. A second mailing utilized the same procedures. Raw score data were converted into normative scores, which included means, standard deviations, percentile ranks, and z scores. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was used to determine if a statistically significant difference existed. Results revealed that in all four aspects of teacher motivation as measured by the TMDQ, the means of the Georgia sample were statistically significantly higher than the national sample

Closing candelight service

Abstract not availabl

Reconciling Police Power Prerogatives, Public Trust Interests, and Private Property Rights Along Laurentian Great Lakes Shores

The United States has a north coast along its ‘inland seas’—the Laurentian Great Lakes. The country enjoys more than 4,500 miles of Great Lakes coastal shoreline, almost as much as its ocean coastal shorelines combined, excluding Alaska. The Great Lakes states are experiencing continued shorefront development and redevelopment, and there are growing calls to better manage shorelands for enhanced resiliency in the face of global climate change. The problem is that the most pleasant, fragile, and dangerous places are in high demand among coastal property owners, such that coastal development often yields the most tenacious of conflicts between public interests and private property rights. Indeed, those conflicts implicate fundamental debates over the state’s authorities and prerogatives to regulate privately owned shoreland (the police power), the public’s interest in coastal resources (the public trust doctrine), and private property owners’ rights to use and to exclude others from their shorelands (referred to collectively here as the private property doctrine). While not tidal, standing water levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate over time substantially. As a result, the lakes have beaches much like ocean coasts, and the public trust doctrine is aptly applied to them, albeit awkwardly. All of the eight Great Lakes states have long acknowledged the applicability of the public trust doctrine to their Great Lakes bottomlands and shorelands. In doing so, they have accepted the now-conventional understanding that the doctrine originated in ancient Roman law. Even so, recent critiques of the public trust doctrine assert that it has been misinterpreted and that its historical pedigree is not so strong or aptly applied to American coasts, especially along Great Lakes coasts. These critiques do not address the historical pedigree and robustness of the police power doctrine, or, more importantly, the pedigree and robustness of contemporary notions of private property rights. If the public trust doctrine is indeed lacking upon reconsideration, how does it fare in comparison to these other doctrines? This Article lays the foundation for an extended study of the public trust doctrine as it applies to Great Lakes shores. We provide an overview of the public trust doctrines of all eight Great Lakes states, noting for illustration and, where appropriate, particulars for the State of Michigan, which enjoys more than 60% of the combined U.S. Great Lakes coastline. To explain our motivations in undertaking this study, the Article first briefly reviews the importance of the lakes to the State of Michigan and the other Great Lakes states more broadly and then frames shoreland management as one of the resource management imperatives those states face. The Article then reviews the historical origins, the contemporary contours, and the ongoing debates surrounding the police power, public trust, and private property doctrines separately. Building on that foundation, we then analyze how courts and legislatures have reconciled those doctrines through application in coastal settings broadly. First, we find that the public trust doctrines of the Great Lakes states fall well within the boundaries of the origins and application of that doctrine throughout the nation’s history, even though the Lakes are not tidal. Second, we find that the concept of a ‘moveable freehold’ inherent in the public trust doctrine—that the boundary separating state-owned submerged public trust land from privately owned upland along the shore—reflects natural dynamic shoreline processes, not arbitrary governmental rulemaking, and is well established and accepted by all Great Lakes states. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this Article, we find that all three doctrines—public trust, police powers, and private property rights—trace their roots to English common law and even ancient Roman law, but all are in fact distinctly American doctrines. All three doctrines were first fully articulated in the context of unique American institutions, values, and conflicts. Each has evolved over time as American institutions, values, and conflicts have similarly evolved. Thus, despite detractors’ assertions to the contrary, the public trust doctrine is no less robust or aptly applied to Great Lakes coasts than is either the police power or private property rights doctrine. In fact, despite case law and commentary rhetoric that can be dogmatically extreme, efforts to understand and reconcile these doctrines in practice generally strike a pragmatic balance between the private rights inherent in shoreland property ownership and the public interest in common access to and use of submerged lands and the foreshore. Following our analysis of these doctrines from a broad perspective, we conclude by providing a brief overview of the several public trust doctrines as adapted by all of the Great Lakes states and finally identifying a number of questions for further study

Living with limited water in southwest Nebraska

Presented at the Central Plains irrigation short course and exposition on February 5-6, 2001 at the Holiday Inn in Kearney, Nebraska

Immunizations for Adults and Children

Vaccines represent the most important medical advance of the twentieth century. The time has passed when large numbers of children and adults suffered serious, life threatening illness from viruses including poliovirus, measles virus, influenza viruses, hepatitis B virus and varicella zoster virus or faced lifelong disability or death from bacterial infections including Hemophilus influenzae, meningococcus and pneumococcus, all infections that can be prevented now by effective vaccines