The spatial temporal regime of stream flow of the conterminous U.S. in connection with indices of global atmospheric circulation

Long-term stream flow records (1929-1988) from seventy one U.S. Geological Survey gauging stations with drainage area in range 1000-10000 sq mi were analyzed using multivariate statistics. Factor analysis of average annual flow revealed seven patterns of river runoff within seven distinct regions of the territory. This factor model reflected 69% variance of the initial matrix. The second set of stream flow records (1939-1972) from ninety-seven gauging stations was used as control. This set contains all seventy one from first one and additional stations with shorter observation period. Factor analysis of this expended set again yielded seven factors (69% variance of the initial matrix) with very similar spatial distribution of gauging stations.

Every group of watersheds obtained as a factor was presented by one gauging station with time series of annual discharges (1- 05474000, 2- 14321000, 3- 07019000, 4- 0815000, 5- 11186001, 6- 01666000, 7- 06800500) as the most typical for group. For the same time interval, streams represented by all patterns have increasing values (i. e. the positive difference between two time subintervals); but only the positive linear trend for patterns 1 and 7 are statistically significant. 

For the seven typical flow records, monthly average values were obtained from three to five seasons composed from different ensembles of months. 

For each annual time series of the typical seven stream flow patterns, regression equations were obtained from indices of global atmospheric circulation (AO, NAO, NPO and AAO). The equations contain from one to five variables (predictors) and have coefficients of correlation from 32% to 73%. 
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Maine public lands 1781-1795, claims, trespassers, and sales

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityIn 1781 the General Court of the new State of Massachusetts launched a program for the administration of its unappropriated land in the District of Maine, a program which encompassed three main phases: the clarification of pre-Revolutionary claims, the quieting of squatters, and the sale of the land that still belonged to the Commonwealth. Fourteen years later it ended a period by ordering the Land Committee which had been appointed in 1783 to stop selling those lands. During this period the Legislature and the Committees it appointed made significant progress in each of these fields. Despite the fact that the Province Government had devised a particularly efficient land grant system, 1781 found claims in Maine confused - authorities which controlled the area before Massachusetts bought it had not always handled these grants well, and Massachusetts itself had not followed its own system closely immediately before the Revolution. The Land Committees and the General Court settled some claim disputes during this period, but some remained to be resolved in later years. A 1791 act, not tested thoroughly before the period ended, established a method of restoring improperly claimed land to the State. [TRUNCATED

History games for secondary schools

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1947. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Virtue & strife: Encouraging positive trends in self-concept and societal empathy through competitive multiplayer game design

“Know thyself.” – Socrates Discovering who you are as an individual within the vast multitude of people in the world is a task that takes a lifetime. What we think and what we do as cognitive, creative and social human beings is what makes us different and unique, but fully understanding what that encompasses is a difficult and sometimes fruitless pursuit of self-reflection. For centuries, philosophers, psychologists and many of history’s great thinkers alike have tackled the concept of “self” and contemplated the value of morality versus our inner demons. The goal of my thesis is to explore the relationship between game design and philosophy, and how understanding this relationship can promote a contemplative but non-critical growth in self-concept for players. Using competitive multiplayer game models, distilled iconography and a culmination of several personality tests, I created a video game design document that outlines the rules, general design, character building system and appendices of the hypothetical multiplayer video game, “Virtue & Strife”. I aim to innovate on character building in games as well as addressing several psychological and sociological goals. These goals pertain to the illumination self-awareness, the encouragement of positive self-image, and the spread of empathy and the acceptance of oneself and others. For one example, player characters will be given aspects that they cannot change and are challenged to adapt to

State of Maine Property Tax Reform

In January, 1997, Governor Angus King established a 10 person committee representing a broad cross-section of citizens interest to investigate what changes are needed in the Maine tax system to address the issue of high property taxes. The Governor\u27s Select Committee on Property Tax Reform (the Committee ) was charged with examining how to reduce the burden of the property tax. The Committee was asked to recommend steps the State and local governments in Maine could take to reduce the burden of the property tax as well as changes in the way that the property tax is administered and collected to relieve the apparent burden of the tax. The Governor charged the Committee not to consider drastically reducing state government expenditures in favor of local governments and not to increase the overall burden of taxes. The Committee was advised to keep in mind the relatively high taxes Maine imposes on businesses, compared to neighboring states

Pathways of Anaerobic Carbon Cycling Across an Ombrotrophic–Minerotrophic Peatland Gradient

Peatland soils represent globally significant stores of carbon, and understanding carbon cycling pathways in these ecosystems has important implications for global climate change. We measured aceticlastic and autotrophic methanogenesis, sulfate reduction, denitrification, and iron reduction in a bog, an intermediate fen, and a rich fen in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for one growing season. In 3-d anaerobic incubations of slurried peat, denitrification and iron reduction were minor components of anaerobic carbon mineralization. Experiments using 14C-labeled methanogenic substrates showed that methanogenesis in these peatlands was primarily through the aceticlastic pathway, except early in the growing season in more ombrotrophic peatlands, where the autotrophic pathway was dominant or codominant. Overall, methane production was responsible for 3-70% of anaerobic carbon mineralization. Sulfate reduction accounted for 0-26% of anaerobic carbon mineralization, suggesting a rapid turnover of a very small sulfate pool. A large percentage of anaerobic carbon mineralization (from 29% to 85%) was unexplained by any measured process, which could have resulted from fermentation or possibly from the use of organic molecules (e.g., humic acids) as alternative electron acceptors

Natural climate solutions for the United States

Limiting climate warming t

Vestigialization of an Allosteric Switch: Genetic and Structural Mechanisms for the Evolution of Constitutive Activity in a Steroid Hormone Receptor

An important goal in molecular evolution is to understand the genetic and physical mechanisms by which protein functions evolve and, in turn, to characterize how a protein's physical architecture influences its evolution. Here we dissect the mechanisms for an evolutionary shift in function in the mollusk ortholog of the steroid hormone receptors (SRs), a family of biologically essential transcription factors. In vertebrates, the activity of SRs allosterically depends on binding a hormonal ligand; in mollusks, however, the SR ortholog (called ER, because of high sequence similarity to vertebrate estrogen receptors) activates transcription in the absence of ligand and does not respond to steroid hormones. To understand how this shift in regulation evolved, we combined evolutionary, structural, and functional analyses. We first determined the X-ray crystal structure of the ER of the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas (CgER), and found that its ligand pocket is filled with bulky residues that prevent ligand occupancy. To understand the genetic basis for the evolution of mollusk ERs' unique functions, we resurrected an ancient SR progenitor and characterized the effect of historical amino acid replacements on its functions. We found that reintroducing just two ancient replacements from the lineage leading to mollusk ERs recapitulates the evolution of full constitutive activity and the loss of ligand activation. These substitutions stabilize interactions among key helices, causing the allosteric switch to become “stuck” in the active conformation and making activation independent of ligand binding. Subsequent changes filled the ligand pocket without further affecting activity; by degrading the allosteric switch, these substitutions vestigialized elements of the protein's architecture required for ligand regulation and made reversal to the ancestral function more complex. These findings show how the physical architecture of allostery enabled a few large-effect mutations to trigger a profound evolutionary change in the protein's function and shaped the genetics of evolutionary reversibility.</p

Quantifying Peat Carbon Accumulation in Alaska Using a Process-Based Biogeochemistry Model

This study uses an integrated modeling framework that couples the dynamics of hydrology, soil thermal regime, and ecosystem carbon and nitrogen to quantify the long-term peat carbon accumulation in Alaska during the Holocene. Modeled hydrology, soil thermal regime, carbon pools and fluxes, and methane emissions are evaluated using observation data at several peatland sites in Minnesota, Alaska, and Canada. The model is then applied for a 10,000 year (15 ka to 5 ka; 1 ka = 1000 cal years before present) simulation at four peatland sites. We find that model simulations match the observed carbon accumulation rates at fen sites during the Holocene (R2 = 0.88, 0.87, 0.38, and -0.05 using comparisons in 500 year bins). The simulated (2.04 m) and observed peat depths (on average 1.98 m) were also compared well (R2 = 0.91). The early Holocene carbon accumulation rates, especially during the Holocene thermal maximum (HTM) (35.9 g Cm-2 yr-1), are estimated up to 6 times higher than the rest of the Holocene (6.5 g Cm-2 yr-1). Our analysis suggests that high summer temperature and the lengthened growing season resulted from the elevated insolation seasonality, along with wetter-than-before conditions might be major factors causing the rapid carbon accumulation in Alaska during the HTM. Our sensitivity tests indicate that, apart from climate, initial water table depth and vegetation canopy are major drivers to the estimated peat carbon accumulation. When the modeling framework is evaluated for various peatland types in the Arctic, it can quantify peatland carbon accumulation at regional scales