Farm-gate phosphorus balances and soil phosphorus concentrations on intensive dairy farms in the south-west of Ireland

peer-reviewedThis project was part funded by the European Research and Development Fund under INTERREG IIIB: Green Dairy Project Number 100 and partly by the Dairy Levy. Financial support for post-graduate students involved in this study was provided by the Teagasc Walsh Fellowship Scheme.Phosphorus (P) loss to water is a significant threat to water quality in Ireland. Agriculture is an important source of this P. There is concern about balancing agronomic requirements and environmental protection in regulations prescribing P management on farms. This study examined farm-gate (P) balances and soil test P (STP) concentrations on 21 dairy farms in the south west of Ireland over four years, from 2003 to 2006 inclusive. Stocking density on the farms averaged 2.4 (s.d. = 0.4) livestock units (LU) per ha. Annual mean import of P onto farms was 21.6 (1.9) kg P/ha. Fertilizer P accounted for 47% (0.041), concentrates 35% (0.060) and organic manures 18% (0.034) of imported P. The mean annual P balance per farm was 9.4 (1.2) kg/ha, ranging from –3 to 47 kg/ha and mean P use efficiency was 0.71 (0.05) ranging from 0.24 to 1.37. The mean STP per farm following extraction using Morgan’s solution was 8.15 (2.9) mg/L of soil and ranged from 4.4 (2.2) to 14.7 (6.4) mg/L. There was a positive relationship (R2 = 0.34; P < 0.01) between STP and P balance; farms with a deficit of P tended to have agronomically sub-optimal STP and vice versa. The high between- and withinfarm variation in STP indicates that farmers were either unaware or were not making efficient use of STP results, and consequently there was agronomically sub-optimal soil P status in some fields and potentially environmentally damaging excesses on others (often within one farm). There was considerable potential to improve P management practices on these farms with clear agronomic and environmental benefits.European UnionTeagasc Walsh Fellowship ProgrammeDairy Levy Fun

Eden, the Foreign Office and the war in Indo-China : October 1951 to July 1954

This thesis re-examines the part played by Churchill's peace time Administration in the settlement of the Indo-China war in 1954. Particular attention is paid to the Foreign Of t ice, 6S the government department responsible for Indo-China policy at the political level. The performance of Churchill's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, is also scrutinised: his personal contribution to the negotiating process at the Geneva Conference of April-July 1954 has been universally acclaimed and has survived the negative impact of the Suez crisis on his reputation as an international statesman. Drawing extensively on the official British archives, the role of Eden and British diplomacy in 1954 has been analysed from two complementary angles; firstly, as the culmination of policies and objectives generated and developed from the return of Eden to the Foreign Office in October 1951; and secondly, within the context of British foreign policy as a whole in the 1951-54 period. The first approach reveals that Eden's Indo-China policy prior to April 1954 was an unmitigated failure. Although he and his officials thereafter pursued a prudent, intelligent and ultimately successful course in resisting American plans for military intervention in Viet-Nam and working for a negotiated solution at the Geneva Conference, it is contended that the real art of crisis management is to avoid the crisis in the first place. In this connection, opportunities arose in 1952-53 for Britain to decisively influence the course of events in Indo-China, but these either went unnoticed or were consciously overlooked. The second approach reveals the constraints imposed on British Indo-China policy by ostensibly unconnected factors, most notably the problem of rearming West Germany within the framework of the European Defence Community (E. D.C.). By extension, it also reveals the reasons for the failure of British policy down to 1954. Until the April crisis, Indo-China was subordinated to the imperative of making West German rearmament operative. It is argued, for example, that Eden only agreed to include Indo-China on the agenda of the Geneva Conference out of concern that failure to do so would inflame anti-war feeling in France and lead to the downfall of what was believed to be the last pro-E. D.C. French government. Therefore, the convening of the Geneva Conference - the scene of one of Eden's most widely praised negotiating triumphs - had, in its Indo-China form, little to do with a preconceived commitment to bring peace to the area. It was instead a manifestation of the Cold War in Europe. Eden only came to see virtue in the Conference when the French were faced with military disaster at Dien Bien Phu and the United States threatened to internationalise the conflict. A negotiated settlement assumed importance in Bri Ush thinking as a means of denying the Americans a pretext for intervent ion. Eden concluded that a poor peace, even one based on so distasteful a compromise as partition in Viet-Nam, was better than a major escalation of the war. The negative British reaction to American calls for 'united action' in the spring of 1954 was based on a catalogue of evidence dating from 1951 which suggested that the United States might use a local crisis in Asia (a 'new' Korea) to launch a major war against China. The thesis also contains a number of sub-themes, the most important of which posits Indo-China as a case-study in terms of the efforts of Eden and British diplomacy to cope with the problem of sustaining a world role at a time of diminishing economic and military strength. Eden, contrary to traditional opinion, did not suffer from delusions of grandeur but had a considered programme for offsetting Britain's post-war decline

Management Strategies Used by Construction Managers to Reduce Employee Absenteeism

Employee absenteeism results in millions of working days lost in the United Kingdom, which reduces employee productivity and profitability for small construction companies. Construction managers lacking strategies to reduce employee absenteeism experience lowered organizational profitability and employee productivity. Grounded in Maslow\u27s hierarchy of needs theory, the purpose of this qualitative, multiple case study was to explore strategies middle managers use in the construction industry in South Wales to reduce employee absenteeism. The participants consisted of 6 middle managers from 3 small construction companies who successfully reduced employee absenteeism. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company documents, and training materials. Data were analyzed using Yin’s 5-step process and thematic analysis. Three themes emerged from the analysis: employee motivation, employee management, and human resource management. A key recommendation includes construction managers adopting a combination of motivation and human resource management strategies to reduce employee absenteeism. The implications for positive social change include the potential for construction managers to create employment opportunities for local people, and sustain employment, resulting in increased profits for small construction companies that can increase economic stimuli for local communities

Numerically optimized coronagraph designs for the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) concept

The primary science goal of the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx), one of four candidate flagship missions under investigation, is to image and spectrally characterize Earth-like exoplanets. It is well known that pupil obscurations degrade coronagraphic performance and complicate coronagraph design, so HabEx is planned to have an off-axis, unobscured primary mirror. We utilize the circular symmetry of the aperture to investigate 1D-radial coronagraph optimization methods that are prohibitively time-consuming or intractable in 2D, such as diffractive pupil remapping and concurrent, multi-plane optimization. We also directly constrain sensitivities to dynamic, low-order Zernike aberrations, which are separable in polar coordinates and can thus be propagated as 1D-radial integrals. The mask technologies in our designs claim heritage from the extensive modeling and testbed experiments performed by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) project. In this paper, we detail our optimization methods and outline future work to complete our design survey

Numerically optimized coronagraph designs for the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) concept

The primary science goal of the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx), one of four candidate flagship missions under investigation, is to image and spectrally characterize Earth-like exoplanets. It is well known that pupil obscurations degrade coronagraphic performance and complicate coronagraph design, so HabEx is planned to have an off-axis, unobscured primary mirror. We utilize the circular symmetry of the aperture to investigate 1D-radial coronagraph optimization methods that are prohibitively time-consuming or intractable in 2D, such as diffractive pupil remapping and concurrent, multi-plane optimization. We also directly constrain sensitivities to dynamic, low-order Zernike aberrations, which are separable in polar coordinates and can thus be propagated as 1D-radial integrals. The mask technologies in our designs claim heritage from the extensive modeling and testbed experiments performed by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) project. In this paper, we detail our optimization methods and outline future work to complete our design survey

Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap

The ICEF Roadmap on Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation explores high potential opportunities for using artificial intelligence (AI) to fight climate change, including GHG emissions monitoring, the power sector, manufacturing, materials innovation, the food system and road transport. The roadmap also examine barriers and risks, and policies for addressing them. It concludes with findings and recommendations

ESA Voyage 2050 White Paper: Detecting life outside our solar system with a large high-contrast-imaging mission

In this white paper, we recommend the European Space Agency plays a proactive role in developing a global collaborative effort to construct a large high-contrast imaging space telescope, e.g. as currently under study by NASA. Such a mission will be needed to characterize a sizable sample of temperate Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby Sun-like stars and to search for extraterrestrial biological activity. We provide an overview of relevant European expertise, and advocate ESA to start a technology development program towards detecting life outside the Solar system

The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) Mission Concept Study Final Report

The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or HabEx, has been designed to be the Great Observatory of the 2030s. For the first time in human history, technologies have matured sufficiently to enable an affordable space-based telescope mission capable of discovering and characterizing Earthlike planets orbiting nearby bright sunlike stars in order to search for signs of habitability and biosignatures. Such a mission can also be equipped with instrumentation that will enable broad and exciting general astrophysics and planetary science not possible from current or planned facilities. HabEx is a space telescope with unique imaging and multi-object spectroscopic capabilities at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet (UV) to near-IR. These capabilities allow for a broad suite of compelling science that cuts across the entire NASA astrophysics portfolio. HabEx has three primary science goals: (1) Seek out nearby worlds and explore their habitability; (2) Map out nearby planetary systems and understand the diversity of the worlds they contain; (3) Enable new explorations of astrophysical systems from our own solar system to external galaxies by extending our reach in the UV through near-IR. This Great Observatory science will be selected through a competed GO program, and will account for about 50% of the HabEx primary mission. The preferred HabEx architecture is a 4m, monolithic, off-axis telescope that is diffraction-limited at 0.4 microns and is in an L2 orbit. HabEx employs two starlight suppression systems: a coronagraph and a starshade, each with their own dedicated instrument