Ground water and surface water under stress

Presented at Ground water and surface water under stress: competition, interaction, solutions: a USCID water management conference on October 25-28, 2006 in Boise, Idaho.Includes bibliographical references.The A&B Irrigation District in south-central Idaho supplies water to irrigate over 76,000 acres. The district's 14,660-acre Unit A is supplied with water from the Snake River. Unit B is comprised of 62,140 acres of land irrigated by pumping groundwater from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer (ESPA) using 177 deep wells. Pumping depths range from 200 to 350 feet. Water from Unit B wells is distributed to irrigated lands via a system of short, unlined lateral canals averaging about 3/4-mile in length with capacities of 2 to 12 cfs. During the period from 1975 to 2005, the average level of the ESPA under the A&B Irrigation District dropped 25 ft and as much as 40 ft in some locations. This has forced the district to deepen some existing wells and drill several new wells. To help mitigate the declining aquifer, the district and its farmers have implemented a variety of irrigation system and management improvements. Improvements have involved a concerted effort by the district, landowners, and local and federal resource agencies. The district has installed variable speed drives on some supply wells, installed a SCADA system to remotely monitor and control well pumps, and piped portions of the open distribution laterals. This has permitted farmers to connect farm pressure pumps directly to supply well outlets. Farmers have helped by converting many of their surface irrigation application systems to sprinklers, moving farm deliveries to central locations to reduce conveyance losses, and installing systems to reclaim irrigation spills and return flows

An Update and Report Failure of Surgical Syndactyly Repair in Harlequin Ichthyosis.

Harlequin ichthyosis (HI) is a rare congenital skin disorder caused by irregular epidermal differentiation. Syndactyly in HI is associated with thick hyperkeratotic skin flexion and angulation deformity of the hand and fingers resulting in limited function of the upper extremity. Traditional syndactyly release is limited as full-thickness skin grafts typically used in reconstruction are composed of diseased skin and require donor sites in a patient predisposed for adverse wound healing. This case report is a follow-up to a previous viewpoint written about digital escharotomies in a newborn with HI and outlines a second and fourth webspace syndactyly release with a dermal substitute. Despite early evidence of adequate release and improved hand function, recurrence of syndactyly was observed within 4 months of surgical release. Our experience described within this case report may suggest the limitations and possible alternatives of surgical release of syndactyly in the HI population

Dynamic Controllability of Temporally-flexible Reactive Programs

In this paper we extend dynamic controllability of temporally-flexible plans to temporally-flexible reactive programs. We consider three reactive programming language constructs whose behavior depends on runtime observations; conditional execution, iteration, and exception handling. Temporally-flexible reactive programs are distinguished from temporally-flexible plans in that program execution is conditioned on the runtime state of the world. In addition, exceptions are thrown and caught at runtime in response to violated timing constraints, and handled exceptions are considered successful program executions. Dynamic controllability corresponds to a guarantee that a program will execute to completion, despite runtime constraint violations and uncertainty in runtime state. An algorithm is developed which frames the dynamic controllability problem as an AND/OR search tree over possible program executions. A key advantage of this approach is the ability to enumerate only a subset of possible program executions that guarantees dynamic controllability, framed as an AND/OR solution subtree

Gruß aus Graz. Urturm.

Uhrturm gegen Süde

Northern Ireland and Brexit: the European Economic Area option. EPC Discussion Paper, 7 April 2017

On 23 June 2016 voters in the United Kingdom (UK) voted on whether to remain in or leave the European Union (EU). The overall UK vote was 51.9% in favour of leaving. As a consequence, the UK government has recently triggered Article 50 TEU and is preparing to begin the formal process of withdrawal. In doing so, consideration is being given to the terms of the 'divorce' as well as the nature and content of the UK's post-'Brexit' relationship with the EU. In Northern Ireland, 56% voted to remain in the EU. Brexit poses major challenges for Northern Ireland. It threatens to hinder access to the EU market and especially cross-border trade with the rest of Ireland, disrupt significantly integrated cross-border markets and supply- and production-chains, and impede the movement of workers and people more generally across the border. It raises questions about the future of the Common Travel Area and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement as well as cooperation on policing and criminal justice matters. The challenges cannot be easily dismissed. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, James Brokenshire, has admitted with regard to the movement of goods across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: 'I agree with those who say that this presents one of the most complex challenges in our preparations for Exit'.1 In some ways the most obvious way to mitigate some of the key impacts of Brexit on Northern Ireland is for Northern Ireland to join the European Economic Area (EEA). This paper sets out the case and addresses the difficulties.2 The uniquenes

Faraday Cup Array Integrated with a Readout IC and Method for Manufacture Thereof

A detector array and method for making the detector array. The array includes a substrate including a plurality of trenches formed therein, and includes a plurality of collectors electrically isolated from each other, formed on the walls of the trenches, and configured to collect charge particles incident on respective ones of the collectors and to output from said collectors signals indicative of charged particle collection. The array includes a plurality of readout circuits disposed on a side of the substrate opposite openings to the collectors. The readout circuits are configured to read charge collection signals from respective ones of the plurality of collectors

Human gut Bacteroidetes can utilize yeast mannan through a selfish mechanism

Yeasts, which have been a component of the human diet for at least 7000 years, possess an elaborate cell wall α-mannan. The influence of yeast mannan on the ecology of the human microbiota is unknown. Here we show that yeast α-mannan is a viable food source for Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (Bt), a dominant member of the microbiota. Detailed biochemical analysis and targeted gene disruption studies support a model whereby limited cleavage of α-mannan on the surface generates large oligosaccharides that are subsequently depolymerized to mannose by the action of periplasmic enzymes. Co-culturing studies showed that metabolism of yeast mannan by Bt presents a ‘selfish’ model for the catabolism of this recalcitrant polysaccharide. This report shows how a cohort of highly successful members of the microbiota has evolved to consume sterically-restricted yeast glycans, an adaptation that may reflect the incorporation of eukaryotic microorganisms into the human diet

A Comparison of Embedded and Nonembedded Print Coverage of the U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

This study examines the impact of embedded versus nonembedded (unilateral) news coverage during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. A content analysis was conduycted of the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune news coverage of the invasion and occupation examining whether embedded and nonembedded new reports were different and, if so, how. News reports were examined for differences in tone toward the military, trust in the military, framing, and authoritativeness. The results of the study revealed significant differences in overall tone toward the military, trust in military personnel, framing, and authoritativeness between embedded and nonembedded articles.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

The GCR2 Gene Family Is Not Required for ABA Control of Seed Germination and Early Seedling Development in Arabidopsis

BACKGROUND: The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) regulates diverse processes of plant growth and development. It has recently been proposed that GCR2 functions as a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) for ABA. However, the structural relationships and functionality of GCR2 have been challenged by several independent studies. A central question in this controversy is whether gcr2 mutants are insensitive to ABA, because gcr2 mutants were shown to display reduced sensitivity to ABA under one experimental condition (e.g. 22 degrees C, continuous white light with 150 micromol m(-2) s(-1)) but were shown to display wild-type sensitivity under another slightly different condition (e.g. 23 degrees C, 14/10 hr photoperiod with 120 micromol m(-2) s(-1)). It has been hypothesized that gcr2 appears only weakly insensitive to ABA because two other GCR2-like genes in Arabidopsis, GCL1 and GCL2, compensate for the loss of function of GCR2. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: In order to test this hypothesis, we isolated a putative loss-of-function allele of GCL2, and then generated all possible combinations of mutations in each member of the GCR2 gene family. We found that all double mutants, including gcr2 gcl1, gcr2 gcl2, gcl1 gcl2, as well as the gcr2 gcl1 gcl2 triple mutant displayed wild-type sensitivity to ABA in seed germination and early seedling development assays, demonstrating that the GCR2 gene family is not required for ABA responses in these processes. CONCLUSION: These results provide compelling genetic evidence that GCR2 is unlikely to act as a receptor for ABA in the context of either seed germination or early seedling development