Irrigation management transfer in the Columbia Basin: lessons and international implications

Irrigation management, Farmer managed irrigation systems, Privatization, Irrigation efficiency, Irrigation effects, Project appraisal, Financing, Developing countries, Farm Management, Financial Economics,

Virus-transformed pre-B cells show ordered activation but not inactivation of immunoglobulin gene rearrangement and transcription

Virus-transformed pre-B cells undergo ordered immunoglobulin (Ig) gene rearrangements during culture. We devised a series of highly sensitive polymerase chain reaction assays for Ig gene rearrangement and unrearranged Ig gene segment transcription to study both the possible relationship between these processes in cultured pre-B cells and the role played by heavy (H) chain (mu) protein in regulating gene rearrangement. Our analysis of pre-B cell cultures representing various stages of maturity revealed that transcription of each germline Ig locus precedes or is coincident with its rearrangement. Cell lines containing one functional rearranged H chain allele, however, continue to transcribe and to rearrange the allelic, unrearranged H chain locus. These cell lines appear to initiate but not terminate rearrangement events and therefore provide information about the requirements for activating rearrangement but not about allelic exclusion mechanisms

Student Law Office Conference: A Platform for Student Engagement with Clinical Legal Education?

I was one of a group of students from Northumbria University who organised the first student conference on clinical legal education on Saturday 4th December 2004. This short article is intended to explain why we thought such a conference was necessary and whether it was worthwhile

Influences on Father Involvement: Testing for Unique Contributions of Religion and Spirituality

The role of the father in children\u27s development historically has been neglected. Studies examining family processes were primarily limited to mothers, under the assumption that mothers\u27 influences encapsulated what (little) effects could also be attributed to the father. Although theory and research have begun to address fathers\u27 roles in families in earnest, there is still much work to be done, particularly in regard to understanding the determinants of father involvement. One direction that has received attention from researchers is towards a conceptualization of environmental and contextual influences on fathers\u27 interactions with their families. The goal of this study was to examine the influences of religion and spirituality on fathers\u27 roles in the family system. In this study, 174 fathers and their children ages 8-14 completed a battery of measures. Fathers reported on their personality, marriage quality, spiritual and religious lives, and involvement in parenting. Children also reported on fathers\u27 involvement, marital conflict, and father-child attachment. Analyses were conducted to examine the extent to which more specific measures of spirituality (e.g., sanctification of parenting, religious coping) predicted father-child relations relative to global measures of religion (e.g., nominal measures of attendance, or one-item ratings of religiosity). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the relationships among fathers\u27 personality, marriage quality, spirituality, father involvement, and father-child attachment. Results indicated that more specific measures tended to be better predictors of father-child relationships. However, spirituality was not found to predict father involvement or father-child attachment when marriage quality and fathers\u27 personality were included in the model. The latter two constructs predicted both involvement and attachment, with spirituality as a covariate of marriage quality and personality. Therefore, spirituality may play a role in shaping marital quality and/or encouraging the manifestation of certain adaptive aspects of personality. Future research is called for that examines temporal relationships among these predictors. Further examination of how fathers\u27 religious and spiritual lives are associated with their children\u27s development will provide insight into how schools, churches, and families can best work to ultimately encourage positive family functioning

Active learning and the Irish treebank

We report on our ongoing work in developing the Irish Dependency Treebank, describe the results of two Inter annotator Agreement (IAA) studies, demonstrate improvements in annotation consistency which have a knock-on effect on parsing accuracy, and present the final set of dependency labels. We then go on to investigate the extent to which active learning can play a role in treebank and parser development by comparing an active learning bootstrapping approach to a passive approach in which sentences are chosen at random for manual revision. We show that active learning outperforms passive learning, but when annotation effort is taken into account, it is not clear how much of an advantage the active learning approach has. Finally, we present results which suggest that adding automatic parses to the training data along with manually revised parses in an active learning setup does not greatly affect parsing accuracy

The Impossible Films of Vera, Countess of Cathcart

This essay revisits the cause célèbre occasioned when a British novelist, playwright, and divorcée was denied entry into the United States in early 1926 on the grounds of “moral turpitude.” The Countess of Cathcart made international headlines after being detained at Ellis Island for admitting to an affair with a married man, but she was also quickly championed, feared, and ridiculed by various individuals, groups, and institutions that sought to exploit her short-lived notoriety toward different ends. The cinema was one determining context for some of these contestations over the rethink women’s involvement in early motion-picture production outside a history of the titles that were actually produced. By attending to the regulatory concerns about the films that women such as the Countess of Cathcart might have made, this essay proposes a historiographical practice that refuses to limit women’s film history to a inventory of what we can safely establish as having occurred in the past

TEACHERS AS WRITERS: OPENING THE DOOR TO DIALOGISM

In an attempt to put better writing instruction into practice by learning from past mistakes, the author explores the potential benefits and perils that teachers who regularly write bring to their instruction and the promise and enactment of dialogical writing

Dorothy Davenport Reid

When she moved to Southern California as an actress with the Nestor Film Company in late 1911, Dorothy Davenport became one of the first members of the early film colony soon to be known as Hollywood. One early biography appearing in Moving Picture Stories reported that the actress had remained with the eastern branch of that company until late 1912 (31). However, a photograph in the Los Angeles Public Library shows the personnel of the Nestor Company in Pasadena, California, on December 23, 1911, with Dorothy Davenport a prominent member of the stock company. While at Nestor, which soon became a unit of Universal Pictures, she met actor Wallace Reid, whom she married in October of 1913. Both were popular players at Universal during the mid-teens, but Reid’s career accelerated after 1915 when he signed a long-term contract with the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company and starred in a number of Cecil B. DeMille films, the year before the company merger that produced Famous-Players Lasky. Davenport Reid performed screen work less and less after giving birth to a son in 1917, though she was often featured in fan magazine stories about the Reids’ domestic life, like the 1921 Photoplay article “Where Bill Lives!

Development of topographic maps and rear steering control for an agricultural vehicle through incorporation of posture and attitude measurements

The two articles contained in this work investigate the relationship between an agricultural vehicle\u27s posture and attitude with (a) its surroundings and (b) machine performance. In the first case, a self-propelled agricultural sprayer was equipped with four RTK DGPS receivers and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to measure vehicle attitude and field elevation as the vehicle was driven across a field. Data was collected in a stop-and-go fashion as well as at three different speeds on a field area with varying topography. Using ordinary kriging, digital elevation models (DEMs) were interpolated from the elevation measurements and elevation plus attitude measurements. The resulting DEMs were compared to each other to evaluate the effect of including attitude measurement on DEM accuracy. At the widest swath width, the DEMs generated with attitude measurements had substantially lower error measures than those DEMs generated without attitude measurements. These results provide evidence that support the feasibility of using vehicle-based measurements collected during typical field operations for accurate DEM development. In the second case, a steering controller was designed and implemented on a self-propelled agricultural sprayer with four-wheel steering (4WS). The goals of this controller were to reduce the off-tracking error of the rear wheels and control turning radius during lateral shifts to reduce chemical application error. The vehicle was driven along marked courses of different shapes to test the steering controller\u27s performance. A computer simulation provided an estimate of chemical application rates across the spray boom during lateral shift maneuvers. During hillside operations, the controller was able to reduce the area damaged by the rear wheels from 107.35 m2 using two-wheel steer (2WS) to 0.32 m2 with Active Rear Steering (ARS) control. During 90-degree turns, the controller reduced the area damaged by rear wheels from 49.34 m2 in 2 WS to 1.15 m2 with ARS. This reduction in rear wheel off-tracking could lead to a reduction in crop damage through turns and during hillside operation, as well as reduced chemical application errors during turns