SLIDES: The Monumental Legacy of the Antiquities Act of 1906: The Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Context

Presenter: Professor Mark Squillace, Director, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado School of Law 35 slide

Mining Regulation and Takings

10 pages. Contains footnotes

Grazing in Wilderness Areas

Domestic livestock grazing is naturally in tension with wilderness. Wilderness areas are not truly untrammeled by man when they host managed livestock grazing. Yet the compromise that allowed livestock grazing in wilderness areas was surely one of the greatest in the history of the conservation movement. Without it, Congress might never have passed a wilderness bill or designated countless wilderness areas throughout the country. The grazing exception--and the Congressional Grazing Guidelines that afford specific protections for grazers--made it possible to secure bipartisan support for wilderness bills in even the most conservative western states. Notwithstanding this success, the ecology of some wilderness areas would plainly benefit from reducing or removing livestock, and modest changes to current law could accommodate such reductions without undermining the essential compromise that has allowed wilderness to flourish. In particular, as livestock grazing has declined in importance to the economy and the culture of the western public lands states, opportunities abound for the voluntary retirement of grazing rights. Unfortunately, the law has not yet evolved in a manner that can assure that the voluntary retirement of grazing rights can be made permanent. Without such assurances parties interested in purchasing grazing rights to protect wilderness areas are unlikely to step forward. This article reviews the history and legal status of livestock grazing on the wilderness lands. It includes a brief review of the beneficial and adverse impacts of livestock grazing on the ecological health of land systems and how those impacts might compromise wilderness values before discussing federal grazing policy, especially as applied to wilderness areas. It concludes with a modest plea to clarify the authority of the BLM and the Forest Service--the principal federal land management agencies--to reduce or remove livestock from wilderness lands where necessary to protect public lands resources, and to retire wilderness grazing rights permanently, where the existing permittee willingly accepts an offer to purchase such rights

Fine Motor Skills and the Occupations of Young Adults with Multiple Sclerosis

Objective: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common neurological diseases affecting adults of working age, and those of younger ages of onset have been increasingly recognized. Twenty-seven percent of people with MS (PwMS) are age 30 years old or younger. The burden of MS for young adults puts them at risk for poorer outcomes regarding their education, family planning, vocation, and social skills as they transition to adulthood. Fine motor (FM) skill impairment might impede performance within the daily occupations of young adults who are transitioning into adulthood. Few studies focus on the occupations and occupational performance of younger adults with MS. Method: Forty participants with MS between the ages of 18 to 30 were recruited to participate in a study. Two standardized measures were used to identify possible FM dexterity deficits and one standardized self-report was used to measure the perceived satisfaction and performance of occupations for this population. A semi-structured interview was conducted with a subgroup of 18 participants to understand the lived experiences of young adults with MS (YAwMS) and their FM performance during their occupations. Results: With quantitative and qualitative analysis, a relationship was suggested between FM scores and both perceived performance and satisfaction scores of an adapted performance measure. Conclusion: Young adults with MS perceive difficulties with occupations that are influenced by their FM status. It is recommended that occupational therapy professionals consider the motor skill needed to perform and complete occupations that specifically require FM skills

Design of telemetry update for reaction wheel unit

Bradford Engineering is currently one of the top suppliers of reaction wheels in Europe. To be able to hold that position they need to improve the reaction wheels to meet more stringent requirements for future missions when it comes to stability of the wheel’s speed and communication capabilities.A part of the updates needed in the reaction wheel to meet these challenges is a re-definition of the Field Programmable Gate Array [FPGA] capabilities in their current Wheel Drive Electronics [WDE] module. My contribution in this one year project consisted of work on documentation for current running missions and to establish the baseline for the update needed in the code running in the FPGA.The work with documentation consisted of an update on documents that needed to be provided to the costumer, Astrium: Radiation Analysis, Reliability Prediction, Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis [FMECA] and test procedures for the Reaction Wheel Unit [RWU] that is being used for qualifying purposes. This work had an additional value of providing me the necessary background about the product so that I could later work on the update of the FPGA.It was my task in the FPGA re design to evaluate the necessary changes that would be needed in the hardware so that an additional communication protocol is added, leaving enough capacity in the selected hardware to include an autonomous controller for wheel speed in the future. After this tradeoff on the hardware that needed to match the new requirements, I selected a new protocol interface so that it can be offered to the clients. This was later implemented in Very High SpeedIntegrated Circuit [VHDL].I did an additional study on the requirements for code development and I provided, together with this study, documentation explaining the steps needed to develop the code according to these requirements, so that once the full set of requirements is defined, the company could continue with the development, using the existing work.The overall result of a year of work at Bradford is a set of documents that I updated to meet the requirements of the costumer and a design on the new telemetry that can be used as the baseline for future versions of the RWU. The full design cycle is covered in the telemetry update, from definition of requirements to the verification using evaluation software. The whole process of VHDL design can be traced through the documents of the telemetry update that were provided