Federal Broadband Law

The authors of this book have brought together a vast and varied array of experience. Mr. Thorne is the Vice President & Associate General Counsel for Bell Atlantic; Mr. Huber is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; and Mr. Kellogg is a Partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen & Todd. A reader will find the occasional use of technical jargon, such as domsats (domestic satellites), coax (coaxial cable), and syndex rules (syndicated exclusivity rules to protect syndicated, non-network programming) to be somewhat confusing. Telcos and cablecos are telephone and cable companies, respectively. Overall, however, technical jargon is well explained for such a comprehensive look at the hightech telecommunications field. After defining the telecosm as the universe of telecommunications and computers, the text moves into a comprehensive technical, regulatory, and legal analysis of the telecosm\u27s short- and long-term future

HadISD: a quality-controlled global synoptic report database for selected variables at long-term stations from 1973--2011

[Abridged] This paper describes the creation of HadISD: an automatically quality-controlled synoptic resolution dataset of temperature, dewpoint temperature, sea-level pressure, wind speed, wind direction and cloud cover from global weather stations for 1973--2011. The full dataset consists of over 6000 stations, with 3427 long-term stations deemed to have sufficient sampling and quality for climate applications requiring sub-daily resolution. As with other surface datasets, coverage is heavily skewed towards Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. The dataset is constructed from a large pre-existing ASCII flatfile data bank that represents over a decade of substantial effort at data retrieval, reformatting and provision. These raw data have had varying levels of quality control applied to them by individual data providers. The work proceeded in several steps: merging stations with multiple reporting identifiers; reformatting to netCDF; quality control; and then filtering to form a final dataset. Particular attention has been paid to maintaining true extreme values where possible within an automated, objective process. Detailed validation has been performed on a subset of global stations and also on UK data using known extreme events to help finalise the QC tests. Further validation was performed on a selection of extreme events world-wide (Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the cold snap in Alaska in 1989 and heat waves in SE Australia in 2009). Although the filtering has removed the poorest station records, no attempt has been made to homogenise the data thus far. Hence non-climatic, time-varying errors may still exist in many of the individual station records and care is needed in inferring long-term trends from these data. A version-control system has been constructed for this dataset to allow for the clear documentation of any updates and corrections in the future.Comment: Published in Climate of the Past, www.clim-past.net/8/1649/2012/. 31 pages, 23 figures, 9 pages. For data see http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadis

The Potential Role of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Infectious Disease Epidemics and Antibiotic Resistance

The industrialization of livestock production and the widespread use of nontherapeutic antimicrobial growth promotants has intensified the risk for the emergence of new, more virulent, or more resistant microorganisms. These have reduced the effectiveness of several classes of antibiotics for treating infections in humans and livestock. Recent outbreaks of virulent strains of influenza have arisen from swine and poultry raised in close proximity. This working group, which was part of the Conference on Environmental Health Impacts of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: Anticipating Hazards—Searching for Solutions, considered the state of the science around these issues and concurred with the World Health Organization call for a phasing-out of the use of antimicrobial growth promotants for livestock and fish production. We also agree that all therapeutic antimicrobial agents should be available only by prescription for human and veterinary use. Concern about the risk of an influenza pandemic leads us to recommend that regulations be promulgated to restrict the co-location of swine and poultry concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on the same site and to set appropriate separation distances

Fodder and fertilizer trees action research in Africa RISING sites

United States Agency for International Developmen

MaxAlign: maximizing usable data in an alignment

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The presence of gaps in an alignment of nucleotide or protein sequences is often an inconvenience for bioinformatical studies. In phylogenetic and other analyses, for instance, gapped columns are often discarded entirely from the alignment.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>MaxAlign is a program that optimizes the alignment prior to such analyses. Specifically, it maximizes the number of nucleotide (or amino acid) symbols that are present in gap-free columns – the alignment area – by selecting the optimal subset of sequences to exclude from the alignment.</p> <p>MaxAlign can be used prior to phylogenetic and bioinformatical analyses as well as in other situations where this form of alignment improvement is useful. In this work we test MaxAlign's performance in these tasks and compare the accuracy of phylogenetic estimates including and excluding gapped columns from the analysis, with and without processing with MaxAlign. In this paper we also introduce a new simple measure of tree similarity, Normalized Symmetric Similarity (NSS) that we consider useful for comparing tree topologies.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We demonstrate how MaxAlign is helpful in detecting misaligned or defective sequences without requiring manual inspection. We also show that it is not advisable to exclude gapped columns from phylogenetic analyses unless MaxAlign is used first. Finally, we find that the sequences removed by MaxAlign from an alignment tend to be those that would otherwise be associated with low phylogenetic accuracy, and that the presence of gaps in any given sequence does not seem to disturb the phylogenetic estimates of <it>other </it>sequences.</p> <p>The MaxAlign web-server is freely available online at http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/MaxAlign where supplementary information can also be found. The program is also freely available as a Perl stand-alone package.</p

Insights from 20 years of temperature parallel measurements in Mauritius around the turn of the 20th century

There is considerable import in creating more complete, better understood holdings of early meteorological data. Such data permit an improved understanding of climate variability and long-term changes. Early records are particularly incomplete in the tropics, with implications for estimates of global and regional temperature. There is also a relatively low level of scientific understanding of how these early measurements were made and, as a result, of their homogeneity and comparability to more modern techniques and measurements. Herein we describe and analyse a newly rescued set of long-term, up to six-way parallel measurements undertaken over 1884–1903 in Mauritius, an island situated in the southern Indian Ocean. Data include (i) measurements from a well-ventilated room, (ii) a shaded thermograph, (iii) instruments housed in a manner broadly equivalent to a modern Stevenson screen, (iv) a set of measurements by a hygrometer mounted in a Stevenson screen, and for a much shorter period (v) two additional Stevenson screen configurations. All measurements were undertaken within an ∼ 80 m radius of each other. To our knowledge this is the first such multidecadal multi-instrument assessment of meteorological instrument transition impacts ever undertaken, providing potentially unique insights. The intercomparison also considers the impact of different ways of deriving daily and monthly averages. The long-term comparison is sufficient to robustly characterize systematic offsets between all the instruments and seasonally varying impacts. Differences between all techniques range from tenths of a degree Celsius to more than 1 ∘C and are considerably larger for maximum and minimum temperatures than for means or averages. Systematic differences of several tenths of a degree Celsius also exist for the different ways of deriving average and mean temperatures. All differences, except two average temperature series pairs, are significant at the 0.01 level using a paired t test. Given that all thermometers were regularly calibrated against a primary Kew standard thermometer maintained by the observatory, this analysis highlights significant impacts of instrument exposure, housing, siting, and measurement practices in early meteorological records. These results reaffirm the importance of thoroughly assessing the homogeneity of early meteorological records

Dog Ownership Enhances Symptomatic Responses to Air Pollution in Children with Asthma

BACKGROUND: Experimental data suggest that asthma exacerbation by ambient air pollutants is enhanced by exposure to endotoxin and allergens; however, there is little supporting epidemiologic evidence. METHODS: We evaluated whether the association of exposure to air pollution with annual prevalence of chronic cough, phlegm production, or bronchitis was modified by dog and cat ownership (indicators of allergen and endotoxin exposure). The study population consisted of 475 Southern California children with asthma from a longitudinal cohort of participants in the Children’s Health Study. We estimated average annual ambient exposure to nitrogen dioxide, ozone, particulate matter < 10, 2.5, and 10–2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM(10), PM(2.5), and PM(10–2.5), respectively), elemental and organic carbon, and acid vapor from monitoring stations in each of the 12 study communities. Multivariate models were used to examine the effect of yearly variation of each pollutant. Effects were scaled to the variability that is common for each pollutant in representative communities in Southern California. RESULTS: Among children owning a dog, there were strong associations between bronchitic symptoms and all pollutants examined. Odds ratios ranged from 1.30 per 4.2 μg/m(3) for PM(10–2.5) [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.91–1.87) to 1.91 per 1.2 μg/m(3) for organic carbon (95% CI, 1.34–2.71). Effects were somewhat larger among children who owned both a cat and dog. There were no effects or small effects with wide CIs among children without a dog and among children who owned only a cat. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that dog ownership, a source of residential exposure to endotoxin, may worsen the relationship between air pollution and respiratory symptoms in asthmatic children