GRAINS AND OILSEEDS OUTLOOK FOR 1999

Crop Production/Industries,

GRAINS AND OILSEEDS OUTLOOK FOR 2003

Crop Production/Industries,

Documentation of Concrete Slabs Prior to Pours

Concrete slabs in multi-level commercial building projects contain many components that become no longer visible once concrete has been poured. As building designs advance and continue to locate components in concrete, it is important to document what these slabs contain in order to verify accurate craftsmanship and allow for improved future construction workflows and building modernizations. This paper explores current industry needs for proficient documentation as well as practices to achieve this. A case study was conducted, testing four devices that analyzed feasibility factors for realistic implementation by a contractor such as cost, interoperability, and level of skill required for operation. Collectively, two options were determined for ideal ways to document concrete slabs, dependent on details of the construction project in review

Impact of Burkholderia phytofirmans strain PsJN on the ex vitro acclimatization and in vitro propagation of tissue cultured Dionaea muscipula (Venus fly trap)

Dionaea muscipula, Venus fly trap, is an endangered plant that is propagated primarily through tissue culture. Tissue cultured plants must be acclimatized to their new environments when removed from their test tubes and the ensuing stress can result in plant mortality. A plant growth promoting rhizobacterium, Burkholderia phytofirmans strain PsJN, has been utilized in biotic hardening of tissue cultured plants and in the amelioration of stresses, particularly drought stress in potted plants. We investigated whether this bacterium could improve either propagation or acclimatization of tissue cultured Venus fly traps. Standardized inoculations were performed by adjusting cell density of inoculant by spectrophotometry. In ex vitro acclimatization, inoculation with the bacteria significantly improved survival but only in nonsterile soil media. Initial in vitro inoculations produced negative interactions with significant reduction in propagules and biomass in the plant and bacterial growth on the media. A modified plant tissue culture media using maltose instead of sucrose as a sugar source was created to address this problem. Inoculated plants grown in the maltose media were not significantly different than the mock inoculated controls in terms of biomass, traps produced and propagules produced. Additionally the bacteria did not visibly grow on media supplemented with maltose rather than sucrose as a sugar source. Plant infection was confirmed through fluorescence microscopy. Colony density estimates for both rhizosphere and endosphere populations of the bacteria in tissue cultured plants were generated using plate counting. These findings indicate that Burkholderia phytofirmans strain PsJN may be useful in reduction of mortality during acclimatization of Dionaea muscipula, but only in nonsterile growth situations or when drought stress is expected. The use of alternative tissue culture media using maltose when propagating biotized fly traps in vitro is an improvement over sucrose containing media. Further work must be done to determine whether mortality reduction by strain PsJN is the result of stress reduction by the endophyte or competitive inhibition of an unknown microbial agonist

Limitations on expression involved in the materials and certain techniques of ceramic sculpture

None provided

Multi-objective robust topology optimization with dynamic weighting

A common robust topology optimization is formulated as a weighted sum of expected and variance of the objective functions for the given uncertainties. This has recently been applied to topology optimization with uncertainties in loading, [1]. Figure 1(a) shows the Pareto front of solutions found using uniformly distributed weightings. This front suffers from crowding for weight values 0.625. In the general case, the two goals of multi-objective optimization are; to find the most diverse set of Pareto optimal solutions, and, to discover solutions as close as possible to the true Pareto front. This paper presents schemes to achieve both these goals