On La Cienega (After Schiller's 'A Maid From Afar') [poem]

PoemAustralia Council, La Trobe University, National Library of Australia, Holding Redlich, Arts Victori

Conference Tutorials-An Opportunity For Continuing Education

The Educational Services Committee of the IEEE Communications Society has sponsored eleven tutorial short courses at its major conferences over the past six years. The experience gained in developing and presenting these tutorials is shared with others so that they may be in a better position to sponsor similar continuing education activities in the future. The conference tutorial is one example of a continuing education activity that can be sponsored by an IEEE Group or Society as a service to its members. Copyright © 1978 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc

‘The Elephant Has Left the Room’: Jacket magazine and the Internet

Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the free international Internet-only magazine emJacket/em single-handed in 1997. Jacket quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia. In late 2010 John Tranter gave it to the University of Pennsylvania, where it continues to flourish. This memoir traces John Tranter’s publication of literary materials on the Internet including the technical and literary problems faced by emJacket/em, and outlines the many other projects that resulted in the Internet publication of over fifty thousand mostly Australian poems, articles, reviews, interviews and photographs

Source of Lake Vostok Cations Constrained with Strontium Isotopes

Lake Vostok is the largest sub-glacial lake in Antarctica. The primary source of our current knowledge regarding the geochemistry and biology of the lake comes from the analysis of refrozen lake water associated with ice core drilling. Several sources of dissolved ions and particulate matter to the lake have been proposed, including materials from the melted glacier ice, the weathering of underlying geological materials, hydrothermal activity and underlying, ancient evaporitic deposits. A sample of Lake Vostok Type 1 accretion ice has been analyzed for its 87Sr/86Sr signature as well as its major cation and anion and Sr concentrations. The strontium isotope ratio of 0.71655 and the Ca/Sr ratio in the sample strongly indicate that the major source of the Sr is from aluminosilicate minerals from the continental crust. These data imply that at least a portion of the other cations in the Type 1 ice also are derived from continental crustal materials and not hydrothermal activity, the melted glacier ice, or evaporitic sources

Trickle or treat: the dynamics of nutrient export from polar glaciers

Cold-based polar glacier watersheds contain well-defined supraglacial, ice-marginal, and proglacial elements that differ in their degree of hydrologic connectivity, sources of water (e.g., snow, ice, and/or sediment pore water), meltwater residence times, allochthonous and autochthonous nutrient, and sediment loads. We investigated 11 distinct hydrological units along the supraglacial, ice marginal, and proglacial flow paths that drain Joyce Glacier in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica. We found that these units play unique and important roles as sources and/or sinks for dissolved inorganic nitrogen and dissolved inorganic phosphorus and for specific fractions of dissolved organic matter (DOM) as waters are routed from the glacier into nutrient-poor downstream ecosystems. Changes in nutrient export from the glacial system as a whole were observed as the routing and residence times of meltwater changed throughout the melt season. The concentrations of major ions in the proglacial stream were inversely proportional to discharge, such that there was a relatively constant “trickle” of these solutes into downstream ecosystems. In contrast, NO3− concentrations generally increased with discharge, resulting in delivery of episodic pulses of dissolved inorganic nitrogen-rich water (“treats”) into those same ecosystems during high discharge events. DOM concentrations or fluorescence did not correlate with discharge rate, but high variability in DOM concentrations or fluorescence suggests that DOM may be exported downstream as episodic treats, but with spatial and/or temporal patterns that remain poorly understood. The strong, nutrient-specific responses to changes in hydrology suggest that polar glacier drainage systems may export meltwater with nutrient compositions that vary within and between melt seasons and watersheds. Because nutrient dynamics identified in this study differ between glacier watersheds with broadly similar hydrology, climate, and geology, we emphasize the need to develop conceptual models of nutrient export that thoroughly integrate the biogeochemical an

Guidelines for the use and reuse of animals for teaching within veterinary medical education programs

Use and reuse of animals for educational purposes could adversely affect animal welfare. Guidelines for quantifying, monitoring and planning the use and reuse of animals have been developed. Within this framework animals are assigned points for usage, with more points being allocated to procedures that may have a greater adverse effect on animal welfare. Usage of individual animals is limited to a maximum of 8 points in a calendar week, 24 points in a month or 60 points within a 16-week study period and any associated examination period. Advantages and disadvantages of the system are discussed while modification is expected as knowledge emerges on the impact of procedures on animal welfare

Environmentally clean access to Antarctic subglacial aquatic environments

Subglacial Antarctic aquatic environments are important targets for scientific exploration due to the unique ecosystems they support and their sediments containing palaeoenvironmental records. Directly accessing these environments while preventing forward contamination and demonstrating that it has not been introduced is logistically challenging. The Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling (WISSARD) project designed, tested and implemented a microbiologically and chemically clean method of hot-water drilling that was subsequently used to access subglacial aquatic environments. We report microbiological and biogeochemical data collected from the drilling system and underlying water columns during sub-ice explorations beneath the McMurdo and Ross ice shelves and Whillans Ice Stream. Our method reduced microbial concentrations in the drill water to values three orders of magnitude lower than those observed in Whillans Subglacial Lake. Furthermore, the water chemistry and composition of microorganisms in the drill water were distinct from those in the subglacial water cavities. The submicron filtration and ultraviolet irradiation of the water provided drilling conditions that satisfied environmental recommendations made for such activities by national and international committees. Our approach to minimizing forward chemical and microbiological contamination serves as a prototype for future efforts to access subglacial aquatic environments beneath glaciers and ice sheets