GIS Applications for Coal Mine Subsidence in the State of Colorado

The state of Colorado has an extensive history of subsurface coal mining. Due to the widespread extraction of coal, numerous subsidence events have occurred, causing both costly and potentially dangerous conditions. The two most common types of underground coal mines in Colorado are slope and shaft mines, which are prone to roof collapse that can propagate to the surface in the form of sinkholes and troughs. Sinkholes and troughs can occur over prolonged periods of time or as instantaneous events, which may leave landowners little reaction time and expensive repairs. As of January 2010, no spatial database existed that covered all subsidence events for the state of Colorado, which caused difficulties for developers, government agencies, and the general public when attempting to identify subsidence hazards. The Colorado Geologic Survey recognized the necessity of locating past subsidence events and has funded a project that utilizes a Geographic Information System (GIS), on an ESRI geodatabase platform, to identify and visualize such events. Subsidence events were collected from several primary sources including the Mine Subsidence Information Center (MSIC) at the Colorado Geological Survey (CGS), the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), the Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety (DRMS), and various historic article and newspaper clippings. Several hundred subsidence events were then organized and catalogued into a file geodatabase using automated and manual entry from spreadsheets, reports, and maps. This file geodatabase uses domains, both coded and range, to simplify and standardize common data input, which will allow an efficient flow of information into the geodatabase for future subsidence events. Hyperlinks were attached to subsidence events within the file geodatabase so that users can dynamically link to scanned documents and images about a specific subsidence event. Several GIS mapping interfaces were constructed, for data input, query, and analysis by the CGS, and for outside users to navigate the map and export reports and images of subsidence events in a user friendly format. The purpose of this project was to use proper documentation of past subsidence events to identify future subsidence hazards. The subsidence events GIS will allow users the ability to rapidly query and analyze historic subsidence data, view images of subsidence events, and export documents and reports of subsidence events, thereby optimizing the safe, efficient and economic planning of building developments

The fluid dynamics of swimming by jumping in copepods

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2010. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Royal Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface 8 (2011): 1090-1103, doi:10.1098/rsif.2010.0481.Copepods swim either continuously by vibrating their feeding appendages or erratically by repeatedly beating their swimming legs resulting in a series of small jumps. The two swimming modes generate different hydrodynamic disturbances and therefore expose the swimmers differently to rheotactic predators. We developed an impulsive stresslet model to quantify the jump-imposed flow disturbance. The predicted flow consists of two counterrotating viscous vortex rings of similar intensity, one in the wake and one around the body of the copepod. We showed that the entire jumping flow is spatially limited and temporally ephemeral owing to jump-impulsiveness and viscous decay. In contrast, continuous steady swimming generates two well-extended long-lasting momentum jets both in front of and behind the swimmer, as suggested by the well-known steady stresslet model. Based on the observed jump-swimming kinematics of a small copepod Oithona davisae, we further showed that jump-swimming produces a hydrodynamic disturbance with much smaller spatial extension and shorter temporal duration than that produced by a same-size copepod cruising steadily at the same average translating velocity. Hence, small copepods in jumpswimming are much less detectable by rheotactic predators. The present impulsive stresslet model improves a previously published impulsive Stokeslet model that applies only to the wake vortex.This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants NSF OCE-0352284 & IOS-0718506 and an award from WHOI’s Ocean Life Institute to H.J and by grants from the Danish Research Council for independent research and the Niels Bohr Foundation to T.K

Proposal: International Year of the Biosphere

‘The time is ripe to step up and expand current efforts to understand the great interlocking systems of air, water, and minerals, that nourish the Earth', wrote Gilbert F. White (President of the International Council of Scientific Unions' Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) and Mostafa K. Tolba (Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme) in Environmental Conservation (Vol. 6, No. 2, p. 88,1979

Die Basaalmetabolisme-snelheid van blanke en bantoeverpleegsters

No Abstrac

CIT equilibrium modeling

This paper discusses: HEQ improvements; divertor coil current distributions; expanded radius plasma; limiter coil currents; and shape control studies. This paper is viewgraph form. (LSP

From random walk to multifractal random walk in zooplankton swimming behaviour

EDITORIAL OFFICE, TAIPEI, TAIWAN, 11

Opinion Paragraph Writing Intervention for Students with Significant Disability

Increasingly, technology has been used to provide access to academic curricula for students with moderate to severe intellectual disability. In the current pilot study, we used a multiple probe across participants design to evaluate the effectiveness of a technology-based instructional package on the opinion writing skills of three middle school students with moderate and severe intellectual disability. Findings suggest that the intervention resulted in improved performance across all three participants and that all participants maintained performance at levels greater than baseline. Limitations and implications for practice and future research are discussed

Thirty-five year mortality following receipt of SV40- contaminated polio vaccine during the neonatal period

Early poliovirus vaccines, both inactivated and live attenuated, were inadvertently contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), a monkey virus known to be oncogenic for newborn hamsters. Although large epidemiologic studies have not identified an elevated cancer risk in persons who received SV40-contaminated vaccines, fragments of SV40 DNA have recently been identified in certain human tumours. We report the follow-up of a cohort of 1073 persons, unique because they received SV40-contaminated poliovirus vaccines as newborns in 1961–63. A previous report of the status of these subjects as of 1977–79 identified 15 deaths, none due to cancer. The present study utilized the National Death Index to identify deaths in the cohort for the years 1979–96. Expected deaths were calculated from Cleveland area sex-, age-, race- and year-specific mortality rates. Increased mortality from all causes was not found. 4 deaths from cancer were found compared to 3.16 expected (P= 0.77). However, 2 deaths from testicular cancer occurred, compared to 0.05 expected (P= 0.002), which may be a chance finding due to multiple comparisons. There were 2 deaths due to leukaemia, a non-significant finding, and no deaths due to tumours of the types putatively associated with SV40. Although these results are, for the most part, consistent with other negative epidemiologic investigations of risks from SV40-contaminated vaccines, further study of testicular cancer may be warranted, and it will be important to continue monitoring this cohort which is now reaching middle-age. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaig

Experimental Evaluation of the Radiation Protection Afforded by Typical Oak Ridge Homes Against Distributed Sources

The protection afforded against simulated fall-out radiation has been evaluated for several typical homes in the Oak Ridge area. Nine houses were chosen to represent a variety of construction materials, topographical conditions and sizes; they included three types of Oak Ridge Cemesto houses, one concrete-block house with a basement fall-out shelter, and two wood-frame houses. The protection factor (ratio of open-field exposure dose rate to exposure dose rate in the house) in all these houses ranged from 2 to 5 on the main floor and from 5 to 30 in the basements, except in the fall-out shelter, where the protection factor was greater than 100. The analysis showed that sloping lots. common to Oak Ridge, do not appreciably affect the protection factor for the main floor. Owing to the generally increased exposure of the basement walls on such lots, the protection factors in the basements were typically lower than in similar basements built on level lots. (auth