History of Richmond Baptists, 1780-1860

Organized Baptist work began in Richmond in June, 1780. Several families belonging to the Boar Swamp Baptist Church in Henrico County had moved into the Richmond area. The distance, the road conditions, and the modes of travel made it difficult for these people to worship regularly at their church. Their pastor, Joshua Morris, also realized their problem, During the month of June, 1780, he met with these folks at the home of Mr. John Franklin, located on the northeast corner of Carrington and Pink Streets in the east end of Richmond. There were fourteen in attendance. Together they had prayer and religious conversation. It was at this meeting that the Richmond Baptist Church (now First Baptist) was constituted. The fourteen in attendance became the charter members. Of these, only four names have been preserved. These are Mr. John Franklin, at whose house the church was constituted and frequently met; Mr. John Williams; Mrs. Lewis; and Mrs. Martha Miller, at whose house the church also met periodically. Nothing else is known of this organizational meeting. Nevertheless , out of these humble beginnings has developed the Baptist ministry within the City of Richmond today

Thinking Outside the Box Turtle: Public Perceptions of an Imperiled Species

Eastern box turtles (Terrapene carolina carolina) experience negative impacts from human activities. Collection for the pet trade or mortalities caused by lawn mowers and vehicles are detrimental to populations, which have experienced rapid decline in Indiana. Understanding perceptions and attitudes held about species can help outreach. This study aims to observe how perceptions and fear response differ between a) genders, b) contact with box turtles, and c) conservation group membership. Mail surveys were administered to 1,378 residents of the Blue River Watershed in Southern Indiana. Respondents rated box turtles on 11 semantic differential pairs and reported their agreement towards a series of Likert-scale questions that measured conservation and fear related attitudes. While fear response was relatively low across groups, women had had a significantly higher fear response (1.71 out of 5) than men (1.53). Women had higher agreement that box turtles are important to the Blue River ecosystem (4.08 vs. 3.77). Respondents who had encountered a box turtle associated box turtles with positive phrases and had higher agreement to ecosystem importance (3.94 vs. 3.39). Members of conservation groups had significantly higher agreement to ecosystem importance (4.25) and approval of government spending on box turtle conservation (3.31) compared to non-members (3.81 and 2.94). There was no correlation between level of fear response and recognition of ecosystem importance. Exposure to box turtles can be a mechanism of instilling positive perceptions of the species. Outreach may not need to address “fearful” perceptions of this species for individuals to still value box turtle conservation

Aquaculture Extension Capacity in the USDA North-Central Region: Results from a Survey

We surveyed Agriculture and Natural Resources Extension staff across the USDA North-Central Region about aquaculture programming. Overall, 47%, 35%, and 15% of respondents indicated that stakeholders had contacted them about aquaponics, finfish aquaculture, and shrimp aquaculture, respectively. Approximately 8% of respondents indicated that they offered aquaculture or aquaponics programming; 45% and 55% indicated that they did not offer aquaculture and aquaponics programming, respectively, but were interested in offering it. These results indicate that there is interest in increasing Extension capacity in fish farming either by hiring new staff or through train-the-trainer models

Surface bidirectional reflectance properties of two southwestern Arizona deserts for wavelengths between 0.4 and 2.2 micrometers

Surface bidirectional reflectance characteristics are presented for the Sonora Desert and the Mohawk Valley at solar zenith angles of 13, 31, and 57 degs at wavelengths between 0.4 and 1.6 microns. Nadir reflectance values are presented for wavelengths between 0.4 and 2.2 microns for solar zenith angles of 13, 17.5, 27, 31, 45, 57, and 62 degs. Data were taken from a helicopter during May l985 in support of an Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), a Stratospheric Aerosol Gas Experiment (SAGE II), and an Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite validation experiment

Useful to Usable: Developing Usable Climate Science for Agriculture

The Useful to Usable (U2U) project was a six-year research and extension project funded by the United States Department of Agriculture to provide both useful and usable climate information for the agricultural (corn) sector in the Midwestern United States. The project adopted an extensive co-production of knowledge and decision-making approach that involved intense iteration with potential end-users, including farmers and a variety of pro- fessional agricultural advisors, through focus groups and surveys, feedback at outreach events, and frequent informal interactions to develop both decision support tools and delivery mechanisms that met stakeholder needs. This overview paper for this special issue illustrates some key ways that the co-production process informed the overall project. Subsequent papers in the special issue span the different objectives of the U2U project, including social, climate, and agronomic sciences. A brief overview of these papers is pre- sented here

Heisenberg-limited metrology with information recycling

Information recycling has been shown to improve the sensitivity of atom interferometers by exploiting atom-light entanglement. In this Rapid Communication, we apply information recycling to an interferometer where the input quantum state has been partially transferred from some donor system. We demonstrate that when the quantum state of this donor system is from a particular class of number-correlated Heisenberg-limited states, information recycling yields a Heisenberg-limited phase measurement. Crucially, this result holds irrespective of the fraction of the quantum state transferred to the interferometer input and also for a general class of number-conserving quantum-state-transfer processes, including ones that destroy the first-order phase coherence between the branches of the interferometer. This result could have significant applications in Heisenberg-limited atom interferometry, where the quantum state is transferred from a Heisenberg-limited photon source, and in optical interferometry where the loss can be monitored