Drought, Climate Change, and Colorado\u27s Policy Discussion: Participation or Procrastination?

Water, drought and even climate change policy problems are attracting increasing attention, but actual response is not as clear. This presentation describes unease over the pace of discussion about rules of the game while play proceeds

Water banking in Colorado: an experiment in trouble?

Presented during the USCID water management conference held on October 13-16, 2004 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The theme of the conference was "Water rights and related water supply issues."Includes bibliographical references.This presentation reports on the progress and problems of the Arkansas River Basin Water Bank Pilot Program in Colorado. The term "water banking" has been used to describe a variety of ways of trading use of water; the legislature's choice in Colorado was a non-profit brokerage mechanism trading only stored surface water. This experiment in modifying traditional prior appropriation law reduces transactions costs and delays in transfers of water. to increase flexibility for the benefit of the holders of agricultural water. Such flexibility is expected to become increasingly desirable in conditions of scarcity and shifts from structural to non-structural approaches to supply. The Colorado experiment is described. to try to explain how a great theory with substantial appeal in principle has been so far socially unacceptable (as of the time of paper submission). The goal is to alert irrigation people to another case of social management being critical to success. regardless of technical charms.Proceedings sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Central Utah Project Completion Act Office and the U.S. Committee on Irrigation and Drainage

Changing allocation of irrigation water

Presented at Ground water and surface water under stress: competition, interaction, solutions: a USCID water management conference on October 25-28, 2006 in Boise, Idaho.Includes bibliographical references.Integrated water management in the Bear New forms of water transfer are beginning to appear, after decades of calls for increased flexibility in allocation as well as reduction of impacts from the traditional Western practice of "buy-and-dry" - moving water from farming to cities by ending irrigation forever on subject lands. Colorado's interest in improved water transfers increased with recent severe drought, continuing high growth rates of urban and ex-urban populations, and examination of needs for future water supply by the Statewide Water Supply Initiative (SWSI). Colorado does not want a state water plan, but has invested in improving water information and assessment of supply and demand. This study exposed potential shortfalls and may have accelerated competition for agricultural water. Colorado is experimenting with a water bank, but the first effort was severely limited in application and design, and normal agricultural innovation practices were not employed. Now, new forms are being developed in and out of the SWSI. The Statewide Water Supply Initiative "phase 2" technical roundtables narrowed several issues, including alternatives to "buy-and-dry". Three basic additional kinds of water transfers appear to meet demands, and a small set of principles for water transfers are recommended. This paper reviews the three forms and the principles, and the presentation will report preliminary results from further inquiry into potential problems from use of the more flexible transfer forms. Anticipation of problems is desirable to maximize the certainty and predictability of new transfer forms, in order to help make them attractive compared to "buy-and-dry", and to more accurately compare costs and benefits and their distribution

Prevalence of iron deficiency in 62,685 women of seven race/ethnicity groups: The HEIRS Study.

BackgroundFew cross-sectional studies report iron deficiency (ID) prevalence in women of different race/ethnicity and ages in US or Canada.Materials and methodsWe evaluated screening observations on women who participated between 2001-2003 in a cross-sectional, primary care-based sample of adults ages ≥25 y whose observations were complete: race/ethnicity; age; transferrin saturation; serum ferritin; and HFE p.C282Y and p.H63D alleles. We defined ID using a stringent criterion: combined transferrin saturation <10% and serum ferritin <33.7 pmol/L (<15 μg/L). We compared ID prevalence in women of different race/ethnicity subgrouped by age and determined associations of p.C282Y and p.H63D to ID overall, and to ID in women ages 25-44 y with or without self-reported pregnancy.ResultsThese 62,685 women included 27,079 whites, 17,272 blacks, 8,566 Hispanics, 7,615 Asians, 449 Pacific Islanders, 441 Native Americans, and 1,263 participants of other race/ethnicity. Proportions of women with ID were higher in Hispanics and blacks than whites and Asians. Prevalence of ID was significantly greater in women ages 25-54 y of all race/ethnicity groups than women ages ≥55 y of corresponding race/ethnicity. In women ages ≥55 y, ID prevalence did not differ significantly across race/ethnicity. p.C282Y and p.H63D prevalence did not differ significantly in women with or without ID, regardless of race/ethnicity, age subgroup, or pregnancy.ConclusionsID prevalence was greater in Hispanic and black than white and Asian women ages 25-54 y. p.C282Y and p.H63D prevalence did not differ significantly in women with or without ID, regardless of race/ethnicity, age subgroup, or pregnancy

Rare variants in tenascin genes in a cohort of children with primary vesicoureteric reflux

Primary vesicoureteral reflux (PVUR) is the most common malformation of the kidney and urinary tract and reflux nephropathy is a major cause of chronic kidney disease in children. Recently, we reported mutations in tenascin XB (TNXB) as a cause of PVUR with joint hypermobility

Transatlantic Patterns of Risk Regulation: Implications for International Trade and Cooperation

This report presents a study commissioned by the European Parliament to compare regulatory standards in the EU and the US in four key sectors (food safety, automobiles, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals), chosen for their relevance both to consumer protection and transatlantic trade, and focusing on whether different approaches to risk regulation may lead to different levels of protection. How risks are regulated in the US and the EU can affect domestic outcomes (such as the benefits and costs of protecting consumers, health and environment), and can also foster or limit the opportunities for international trade

Machine Learning in Automated Text Categorization

The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last ten years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert manpower, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.Comment: Accepted for publication on ACM Computing Survey

Mercury sources to Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey : highly contaminated remote coastal lakes, Washington State, USA

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Water, Air, & Soil Pollution 208 (2009): 275-286, doi:10.1007/s11270-009-0165-y.Mercury concentrations in largemouth bass and mercury accumulation rates in age-dated sediment cores were examined at Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey in Washington State. Goals of the study were to compare concentrations in fish tissues at the two lakes with lakes in a larger statewide dataset and evaluate factors influencing lake loading at Ozette and Dickey, which may include: catchment disturbances, coastal mercury cycling, and the role of trans-Pacific Asian mercury. Mercury fish tissue concentrations at the lakes were among the highest recorded in Washington State. Wet deposition and historical atmospheric monitoring from the area show no indication of enhanced deposition from Asian sources or coastal atmospheric processes. Sediment core records from the lakes displayed rapidly increasing sedimentation rates coinciding with commercial logging. The unusually high mercury flux rates and mercury tissue concentrations recorded at Lake Ozette and Lake Dickey appear to be associated with logging within the catchments

A simple device for studying macromolecular crystals under moderate gas pressures (0.1-10 MPa)

A simple device for studying crystalline samples under moderate gas pressure (0.1-10 MPa) has been developed. The device employs a modified Cajon ultra-torr fitting to ensure a gas-tight seal around an X-ray capillary. The cell accommodates standard X-ray capillaries that require no modification. The device is straightforward to utilize and samples can be mounted with routine techniques and pressurized in a matter of seconds. In a subsequent development, a complete purging and pressurization system has been designed and constructed for use on beamline 7-1 at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. This paper describes the construction of both the pressure cell and the delivery system and presents results of the use of this cell for the preparation of xenon derivatives to be used in phase determination by the multiple isomorphous replacement method