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Mbarara to Kasese distance, location, road map and direction
Mbarara is located in Uganda
at the longitude of 30.65 and latitude of -0.6. Kasese is located in Uganda
at the longitude of 30.01 and latitude of 0.22.
Distance between Mbarara and Kasese
The total straight line distance between Mbarara and Kasese is 115 KM
(kilometers) and 696.11 meters. The miles based distance from Mbarara to Kasese is 71.9
miles. This is a straight line distance and so most of the time the actual travel distance between Mbarara and Kasese may be higher or vary due to curvature of the road.
Mbarara To Kasese travel time
Mbarara is located around 115 KM away from Kasese so if you travel at the consistant speed of 50 KM per hour you can reach Kasese in 2.31 hours. Your Kasese travel time may vary due to your bus speed, train speed or depending upon the vehicle you use.
Mbarara To Kasese road map
Mbarara is located nearly south
side to Kasese. The given south direction from Mbarara is only approximate. The given google map shows the direction in which the blue color line indicates road connectivity to Kasese. In the travel map towards Kasese you may find enroute hotels, tourist spots, picnic spots, petrol pumps and various religious places. The given google map is not comfortable to view all the places as per your expectation then to view street maps, local places see our detailed map here.
Mbarara To Kasese driving direction
The following diriving direction guides you to reach Kasese from Mbarara. Our straight line distance may vary from google distance.
Travel Distance from Mbarara
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ScienceDaily (Nov. 25, 2009) — A journey that started with a box of bird feet carried three Montana State University graduate students into the gruesome world of raptors and led to their findings being published in a prominent journal.
Normally focused on dinosaurs, the students compared the claws and killing methods of four types of raptors and published a paper about their research in the Nov. 25th issue of PLoS ONE, a scientific journal published online by the Public Library of Science. The birds of prey that were studied live in North America and Europe and include eagles and hawks, owls, osprey and falcons.
"It was very surprising that it wasn't done before," lead author Denver Fowler said of the study.
"It was a very interesting project," said Elizabeth Freedman, one of two co-authors. "People just haven't noticed some of these things before."

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


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Interdisciplinary Middle Years Multimedia Model
The Interdisciplinary Middle Years Multimedia (IMYM) model grew out of the successful curriculum-based research and development project of the same name, which was piloted in the years _PHONE_.
The IMYM model demonstrated how the infusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) with promising instructional practices such as inquiry and constructivism could add value to teaching, learning, and assessing.
IMYM was assessed internally using action research strategies and externally by a Canadian educational research company. The IMYM model was piloted in nearly 100 rural and urban schools throughout Manitoba and is still being implemented voluntarily in schools and school divisions across the province.
Since 2005, the Literacy with ICT Across the Curriculum initiative carries on with the model first developed by IMYM.


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How to size your finger
- Cut a thin strip of paper.
- Wrap the paper around your finger.
- Make sure the paper is below the joint of your finger and close to your knuckle.
- Mark the spot where the paper meets.
- Measure the distance with a ruler.
Silicone rings do have some stretch but it is important your ring isn't too tight.
We sell male and female silicone rings in small, medium and large.
Click the button below to download the sizing chart.
If you're at all concerned about sizing just email us via _EMAIL_

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


text: This would make a good flag for New Zealand because it illustrates harmony between black and white. This suggests the order in which the Maori and European peoples arrived in new Zealand in so far as the Maoris were first in time and are represented in the upper black triangle, and the Europeans (pakeha) are represented by the white triangle. The use of red, black and white in the design is homage to the traditional Maori colours. This design retains the red stars with white outline from the Southern Cross on the current NZ flag. Thus preserving the best historical elements from the current flag. The silver fern in my flag is derived from that of the NZ rugby football union and is an internationally recognised symbol for NZ. It represents the unique natural environment of NZ and is an enduring symbol of growth, hope and strength. The Mountain (ie white triangle) reminds us of the international legacy and triumph of Sir Edmund Hilary upon the conquest of Mount Everest. Also, the white triangle represents the mountains of NZ and the black triangle symbolises its rich volcanic soil and the night sky.


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In the Central Valley most winter annual weeds start to germinate in late September or October and continue to germinate until late January, whenever soil moisture and temperature conditions permit. Survey for weed seedlings just after alfalfa is cut.
Recording weed survey results assists in weed management decisions, including herbicide choice and cultivation practices. Information collected over a period of years tells you how weed populations are changing and how effective your management operations have been.
How to survey
Walk through each field in a random pattern, rating the degree of infestation for each weed species. Use either a numeric scale of 1 to 5 (1 being the lightest, 5 being the heaviest), or rate as "light," "medium," or "heavy."
The need for treatment depends on weed species, their competitiveness, the potential market for the alfalfa, and toxicity to livestock. In addition, vigor of the alfalfa stand is a complicating factor; weakened stands will require treatment when denser ones won't.
PDF: To display a PDF document, you may need to use a PDF reader.


Antibacterial nano-objects
The emergence of drug resistant bacteria has been identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an emerging global health crisis. Antimicrobial polymers which mimic the structure of naturally accuring antibacterial peptides, represent a class of biocides that has become increasingly important as an alternative to existing biocides and in some cases even to antibiotics. The working mechanism of the large number of structurally different polymers is often not fully understood however usually involves the disruption of the bacterial membrane (See Figure). Importantly there is evidence that their is a low potential of building up resistant microbial strains. In this project the candidate will synthesis a range of antibacterial polymers [1,2] which will be assembled into nano-scale objects. Their antibacterial activity will be assessed against a range of clinically relevant bacterial strains.
The candidate will gain experience in the lastest polymerisation and materials characterisation techniques, experience in antibacterial assays and their interpretation, and imaging techniques such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
1. Cationic Acrylate Oligomers Comprising Amino Acid Mimic Moieties Demonstrate Improved Antibacterial Killing Efficiency, Journal of Materials Chemistry B 5 (3), 531-536 (2017)
2. Antibacterial Low Molecular Weight Cationic Polymers: dissecting the contribution of hydrophobicity, chain length and charge to activity, RSC advances 6 (19), 15469-15477 (2016)


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Downstream users are companies or individuals who use a chemical substance, either on its own or in a mixture, in the course of their industrial or professional activities.
Downstream users have a key role to play in advancing the safe use of chemicals by implementing safe use at their own site and communicating relevant information both to their suppliers and their customers.
Who is a downstream user?
Roles and obligations
Communication in the supply chain
Communication with suppliers
Effective communication between downstream users and suppliers at all stages in the REACH process ensures that relevant information is provided in the supply chain.
Communication with customers
Formulators need to communicate relevant safety information further down the supply chain to their own customers.
Chemical safety assessment
Downstream user chemical safety assessment
Downstream users may choose to carry out a chemical safety assessment if they use a substance outside the conditions described in the exposure scenario provided by the supplier, or if the use is advised against by the supplier.
Downstream user report
Downstream users have to report unsupported uses to ECHA in certain cases.


This is the HTCondor Administrator's Manual. Its purpose is to aid in the installation and administration of an HTCondor pool. For help on using HTCondor, see the HTCondor User's Manual.
An HTCondor pool is comprised of a single machine which serves as the central manager, and an arbitrary number of other machines that have joined the pool. Conceptually, the pool is a collection of resources (machines) and resource requests (jobs). The role of HTCondor is to match waiting requests with available resources. Every part of HTCondor sends periodic updates to the central manager, the centralized repository of information about the state of the pool. Periodically, the central manager assesses the current state of the pool and tries to match pending requests with the appropriate resources.
Each resource has an owner, the one who sets the policy for the use of the machine. This person has absolute power over the use of the machine, and HTCondor goes out of its way to minimize the impact on this owner caused by HTCondor. It is up to the resource owner to define a policy for when HTCondor requests will serviced and when they will be denied.
Each resource request has an owner as well: the user who submitted the job. These people want HTCondor to provide as many CPU cycles as possible for their work. Often the interests of the resource owners are in conflict with the interests of the resource requesters. The job of the HTCondor administrator is to configure the HTCondor pool to find the happy medium that keeps both resource owners and users of resources satisfied. The purpose of this manual is to relate the mechanisms that HTCondor provides to enable the administrator to find this happy medium.
The Different Roles a Machine Can Play
Every machine in an HTCondor pool can serve a variety of roles. Most machines serve more than one role simultaneously. Certain roles can only be performed by a single machine in the pool. The following list describes what these roles are and what resources are required on the machine that is providing that service:
Central Manager
There can be only one central manager for the pool. This machine is the collector of information, and the negotiator between resources and resource requests. These two halves of the central manager's responsibility are performed by separate daemons, so it would be possible to have different machines providing those two services. However, normally they both live on the same machine. This machine plays a very important part in the HTCondor pool and should be reliable. If this machine crashes, no further matchmaking can be performed within the HTCondor system, although all current matches remain in effect until they are broken by either party involved in the match. Therefore, choose for central manager a machine that is likely to be up and running all the time, or at least one that will be rebooted quickly if something goes wrong. The central manager will ideally have a good network connection to all the machines in the pool, since these pool machines all send updates over the network to the central manager.
Any machine in the pool, including the central manager, can be configured as to whether or not it should execute HTCondor jobs. Obviously, some of the machines will have to serve this function, or the pool will not be useful. Being an execute machine does not require lots of resources. About the only resource that might matter is disk space. In general the more resources a machine has in terms of swap space, memory, number of CPUs, the larger variety of resource requests it can serve.
Any machine in the pool, including the central manager, can be configured as to whether or not it should allow HTCondor jobs to be submitted. The resource requirements for a submit machine are actually much greater than the resource requirements for an execute machine. First, every submitted job that is currently running on a remote machine runs a process on the submit machine. As a result, lots of running jobs will need a fair amount of swap space and/or real memory.
The HTCondor Daemons
The following list describes all the daemons and programs that could be started under HTCondor and what they do:
This daemon is responsible for keeping all the rest of the HTCondor daemons running on each machine in the pool. It spawns the other daemons, and it periodically checks to see if there are new binaries installed for any of them. If there are, the condor_master daemon will restart the affected daemons. In addition, if any daemon crashes, the condor_master will send e-mail to the HTCondor administrator of the pool and restart the daemon. The condor_master also supports various administrative commands that enable the administrator to start, stop or reconfigure daemons remotely. The condor_master will run on every machine in the pool, regardless of the functions that each machine is performing.
This daemon represents a given resource to the HTCondor pool, as a machine capable of running jobs. It advertises certain attributes about machine that are used to match it with pending resource requests. The condor_startd will run on any machine in the pool that is to be able to execute jobs. It is responsible for enforcing the policy that the resource owner configures, which determines under what conditions jobs will be started, suspended, resumed, vacated, or killed. When the condor_startd is ready to execute an HTCondor job, it spawns the condor_starter.
This daemon is the entity that actually spawns the HTCondor job on a given machine. It sets up the execution environment and monitors the job once it is running. When a job completes, the condor_starter notices this, sends back any status information to the submitting machine, and exits.
This daemon represents resource requests to the HTCondor pool. Any machine that is to be a submit machine needs to have a condor_schedd running. When users submit jobs, the jobs go to the condor_schedd, where they are stored in the job queue. The condor_schedd manages the job queue. Various tools to view and manipulate the job queue, such as condor_submit, condor_q, and condor_rm, all must connect to the condor_schedd to do their work. If the condor_schedd is not running on a given machine, none of these commands will work.
The condor_schedd advertises the number of waiting jobs in its job queue and is responsible for claiming available resources to serve those requests. Once a job has been matched with a given resource, the condor_schedd spawns a condor_shadow daemon to serve that particular request.
This daemon runs on the machine where a given request was submitted and acts as the resource manager for the request.
This daemon is responsible for collecting all the information about the status of an HTCondor pool. All other daemons periodically send ClassAd updates to the condor_collector. These ClassAds contain all the information about the state of the daemons, the resources they represent or resource requests in the pool. The condor_status command can be used to query the condor_collector for specific information about various parts of HTCondor. In addition, the HTCondor daemons themselves query the condor_collector for important information, such as what address to use for sending commands to a remote machine.
This daemon is responsible for all the match making within the HTCondor system. Periodically, the condor_negotiator begins a negotiation cycle, where it queries the condor_collector for the current state of all the resources in the pool. It contacts each condor_schedd that has waiting resource requests in priority order, and tries to match available resources with those requests. The condor_negotiator is responsible for enforcing user priorities in the system, where the more resources a given user has claimed, the less priority they have to acquire more resources. If a user with a better priority has jobs that are waiting to run, and resources are claimed by a user with a worse priority, the condor_negotiator can preempt that resource and match it with the user with better priority.
A higher numerical value of the user priority in HTCondor translate into worse priority for that user. The best priority is 0.5, the lowest numerical value, and this priority gets worse as this number grows.
This daemon is used on both Linux and Windows platforms. On those platforms, the condor_startd frequently cannot determine console (keyboard or mouse) activity directly from the system, and requires a separate process to do so. On Linux, the condor_kbdd connects to the X Server and periodically checks to see if there has been any activity. On Windows, the condor_kbdd runs as the logged-in user and registers with the system to receive keyboard and mouse events. When it detects console activity, the condor_kbdd sends a command to the condor_startd. That way, the condor_startd knows the machine owner is using the machine again and can perform whatever actions are necessary, given the policy it has been configured to enforce.
The checkpoint server services requests to store and retrieve checkpoint files. If the pool is configured to use a checkpoint server, but that machine or the server itself is down, HTCondor will revert to sending the checkpoint files for a given job back to the submit machine.
This daemon handles management and execution of all grid universe jobs. The condor_schedd invokes the condor_gridmanager when there are grid universe jobs in the queue, and the condor_gridmanager exits when there are no more grid universe jobs in the queue.
This daemon runs on Windows platforms to manage password storage in a secure manner.
This daemon implements the high availability of a pool's central manager through monitoring the communication of necessary daemons. If the current, functioning, central manager machine stops working, then this daemon ensures that another machine takes its place, and becomes the


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Insider Guide: Thatching
In our second Insider Guide, we're turning our attention to thatching, a traditional roofing method which dates back over 2,500 years.
In itself, thatching has several advantages, not least its environmental credentials. It uses natural resources, and the harvesting of the materials it requires both encourages new growth and benefits wildlife. Thatching offers very good insulation, enabling the property to be warm in winter and cool in summer, and is also helpful for soundproofing. Importantly, also, a thatched roof gives a feeling of elegance and tradition to the appropriate dwelling, and can elevate the property's value.
The downsides to thatching include the effect on insurance premiums – being combustible, it can inflate the cost of buildings insurance. At Anglian Home Surveyors we recommend that homeowners seek suitable insurance from companies that specialise in insuring thatched properties as their rates are likely to be lower than those offered by general insurance companies. The costs of maintenance and replacement can also be higher than for a conventional slate roof.
The main types of thatch used in the UK and the commonly quoted probable life expectancies for the principal thatching materials are as follows:
- Water reed, often known as Norfolk reed, which has a lifespan of around 50 to 80 years
- Combed wheat reed, which will last 30 to 40 years
- Long straw, which requires a wire mesh cover and will last between 15 and 25 years
- Sedge, which is usually used for roof ridges and has a useful life of 10 to 12 years
There are exceptions to these rules, with some cases of water reed roofs lasting only 15 years and long straw roofs lasting 50 years plus. The quality of the thatcher, their experience in using the material, the quality of the material, the pitch of the roof and geographical or meteorological factors such as wind can all be a major factor in the lifespan of the thatching. The key is to choose the right thatcher, who in turn will ensure the correct thatch materials are used to meet the demands of the location and design of the property within the constraints of listed building or conservation area requirements.
Thatching deteriorates over time, and there are several factors which can contribute to this process. Microbial action is one of the main causes, and this can be accelerated by moisture, so it is preferable to keep the roof as dry as possible, and the growth of moss and lichens can be controlled through chemical treatments. When nesting, birds are a factor as they frequently pull out complete strands of straw, but potentially more of an issue are rodents – including rats, mice and squirrels – as they can chew the straw into smaller lengths. Covering the thatch with a well-maintained wire mesh can help to prevent much of this damage. It is also not unheard of for bats to be present in roof space, and if this is the case, it is important to consult Natural England or the Bat Conservation Trust as the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 states that it is an offence to disturb them when in situ.
With the increased risk of fire that thatching presents, precautions such as ensuring any bonfires and barbecues are kept well away from the building can help to keep everyone safe. It is useful to fit a spark guard to the chimney stack, to have the chimney swept once a year and to test all electrical installations regularly in order to reduce the risk of short circuiting.
It is also possible to apply fire-retardant materials either beneath or on top of the thatch for further protection. Any use of fire retardents or fire protection barriers to roof slopes in the case of a total re-thatch needs to be carefully considered because although they may slow the spread of fire they may lead to reduced ventilation which in turn may cause more rapid degradation of the thatching material used on your roof. It is generally recognised that flue liners reduce the risk of fire to thatch and should be fitted where appropriate to those flues being used.
It is vital to maintain thatching effectively as it does degrade over time. The most noticeable deterioration is the appearance of hollows and soft patches, and the ridges will gradually wear away over the course of 12 years. A qualified thatcher can carry our routine maintenance, and an annual inspection will uncover any issues that need attention.
As a homeowner, it is down to you to maintain thatching and ensure the safety of anyone who enters the property. If you're at all concerned about your thatched roof, or any other aspect of your property, why not call Raphael Stipic of Anglian Home Surveyors, a leading building surveyor in Cambridge, on 01223 661439?
It is important to obtain an independent survey of the condition of the thatch on the property you intend to purchase from an individual who does not have a vested interest in any potential financial outlay as a result of the survey.
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Extending approximately 650 km from east to west, the Nullarbor Plain runs from the south-western coast of South Australia to south-eastern Western Australia. It is bordered by the Great Australian Bight where it ends in steep cliffs. Its maximum altitude is about 200 m. Rainfall on the Nullarbor Plain is less than 250 mm a year and there is little surface water as most of it drains through porous limestone to form sink holes. Those, in turn, flow into underground caverns where subterranean lakes are formed. Discoveries of fossil bones and shells indicate that at one time the plain was part of the sea bed.
The Nullarbor is crossed by the Trans-Australian Railway (the train which traverses the route from Perth to Sydney is known as the Indian-Pacific after the oceans it conjoins) which contains the world's greatest length of straight track (479 km).
The first European to cross the Nullarbor Plain from east to west was Edward Eyre in 1841. The trek in the other direction was made by Alexander and John Forrest in 1870.
Despite a lot of belief that the plain's name is an aboriginal name, it actually comes from the Latin, meaning "no trees" (null arbor).


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UNIT 14-H Entomology Project: Unit 1
Welcome to Unit I of 4-H Entomology. We hope that this unit
and the activities it contains will help you to become more
interested in insects and the different ways they live. The
objectives of 4-H Entomology Unit I are to:
- Learn what insects are and how they fit into the scientific classification system.
- Identify the main parts of a grasshopper.
- Make a killing jar to use when collecting insects for your insect display.
- Learn the correct way to label insect specimens.
- Collect, pin, and label 25 different kinds of insects.
- Keep records of the activities you complete in this project.
- Do three of the optional activities listed
- Help other 4-H club members by giving entomology talks and demonstrations.
To receive a printed copy of Unit 1, please contact your local cooperative extension office.
Educational programs of the Kentucky Cooperative Service serve all people regardless of race, color, age, sex, religion, disability, or national origin.
Issued in furtherance of Cooperative Extension work, Acts of May 8 and June 30, 1914, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, C. Oran Little, Director of Cooperative
Extension Service, University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Kentucky State University, Frankfort.
This publication was originally prepared by R.A. Scheibner. Revised by Stephanie Bailey and Lee Townsend.
University of Kentucky Entomology Contact:
S225 Agricultural Science Center - North
U of KY Dept. of Entomology
Lexington, KY 40546-0091
This web page was designed by Truett Cohorn. Any suggestions or comments are welcomed, mail to:
Original Document June 1, 1996.
Last Updated October 3, 2000.


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To help the U.S. Department of Transportation promote a safe, economically efficient, and environmentally sustainably freight transportation system, the Department's National Freight Advisory Committee (NFAC) will provide advice and recommendations to the Secretary on matters related to freight transportation in the United States including:
- implementation of the freight transportation requirements of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (P.L. 112-141);
- establishment of the National Freight Network;
- development of a National Freight Strategic Plan;
- development of strategies to help States implement State Freight Advisory Committees and State Freight Plans;
- development of measures of conditions and performance in freight transportation;
- development of freight transportation investment, data, and planning tools; and
- legislative recommendations.


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N.V. Pundarikanthan and C. Santhi, Centre for Water Resources, Anna University, Madras, India
Irrigation scheduling is one of the managerial activities that aim at effective and efficient utilization of water. A number of research findings and techniques related to irrigation scheduling are available today. Despite this, irrigation scheduling is only at inception level in most developing countries. This paper illustrates the status of irrigation scheduling and the constraints in the practice of scheduling at the field level from the perspective of a developing country, taking the case of Tamil Nadu in India.
The growing competition for water between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors has increased the concern for the sustainability of the irrigated agriculture system. The need for increasing agricultural production demands an increase in the irrigated area regardless of the water resources availability for irrigation. Water has thus become a limiting factor in many of the irrigation projects. This necessitates an efficient and effective utilization of water through various water conserving methods.
Irrigation scheduling is a means of conserving water which helps in making decisions on allocation of quantity and timing of water supply commensurate with crop needs. It is one of the key activities that has the potential to improve performance of the system, especially its productivity, equity and stability (Chambers, 1983).
Research has made available a large number of findings useful for irrigation scheduling, such as those of crop water requirement estimation methods (Doorenbos and Pruitt, 1977), soil moisture depletion and allied procedures, water stress indicators, water and crop yield functional relationships, and the use of remote sensing techniques. These water-saving methods and techniques are not widely practised in developing countries, particularly in the southern part of India. Irrigation systems are fascinating and complex in nature, in the sense that each of these systems has its own characteristics in its physical conditions, climatic events, design criteria, institutional arrangements, resource availability, water rights, operational rules and sociocultural practices, and these characteristics are mostly interactive in nature. The introduction of any new procedure or technique and the degree of its success largely depend upon these system characteristics (Vaidhyanathan and Janagarajan, 1988). There are wide variations between the developed and developing countries in terms of these characteristics and therefore scheduling is still at inception levels in most of the developing countries like India. This paper addresses some of the constraints in the practice of irrigation scheduling at field level, from a perspective of irrigation systems in a developing country, taking the case of Tamil Nadu in south India. The irrigation systems in Tamil Nadu are jointly managed by the irrigation agency (above the outlet) and the farmers (below the outlet). Although there exists no well defined policy or management framework for scheduling in the state of Tamil Nadu, the prevailing practices such as crop localization, monsoon dependent water allocation, and duty based design and water distribution pose constraints in the practice of scheduling. These constraints are discussed in detail.
CONSTRAINTS IN PRACTISING IRRIGATION SCHEDULING
The concept of localization has been in practice for a long time in India. All along, the accepted practice has been to include all cultivable land under command in the ayacut. Once the land is identified as 'commendable' under an irrigation system, it remains as such forever in the revenue records and is eligible to draw water from the system forever. No special permit is necessary season after season and thus it confers permanency in irrigation. In general, the command areas are localized as 'wet' (for water intensive crops such as paddy, sugar cane and banana) and 'irrigated dry' (for crops such as groundnut, onion and cotton), leaving decisions on crop choices to farmers. This strategy constrains scheduling in two ways.
· This localization policy permits farmers to take the freedom of crop choices, even though it is authorized for a particular crop. Farmers grow one or more crops in a diversified manner according to their family needs, local expertise and market fluctuations.
· The localization policy, by way of conferring rights for water along with land, gives the farmers a notion that they acquire the riparian rights on the use of water, and they try to seek legal remedies whenever changes are introduced in the interests of better water management.
Localization, therefore, gives little scope for the government agency for revising the crop policy or operational procedures. For example, the Sathanur Irrigation System in Tamil Nadu is localized for groundnut, an irrigated dry (ID) crop, in the direct command of 14 750 ha. Farmers, however, prefer to grow paddy (for family needs or due to land suitability) and sugar cane (for high returns) in addition to the ID crop. These are grown in 30-35% of the command in a scattered way. Likewise, banana (a crop of high profitability) is grown in 15% of the command area of 34 794 ha in the Tamiravaruni System. The diversified cropping system constrains the regularization of water delivery.
Water allocation strategy
The strategy for water allocation and use of irrigation water in the south Indian systems has been neither demand based nor supply based, but location based (Mohanakrishnan, 1990). Seasonal and in-seasonal allocations depend on the resources available, crop seasons and priorities for water allocations prevailing in the particular location of the system. The irrigation engineers, usually the executive or assistant executive engineers, make the allocation decisions according to the 'water duty' specified at the heads of the main and branch/distributary canals and the command area under those canals. (Water duty is locally denoted as the number of acres that can be irrigated with a cusec of water during crop period.)
In general, the crop seasons are planned to coincide with the monsoons (southwest monsoon between June and September and northeast monsoon between October and December) in most of the irrigation systems in south India. For example, in a few systems like the Tamiravaruni and the Periyar - Vaigai in Tamil Nadu, the reservoirs fill with the progress of the monsoon and cultivation starts as the monsoon proceeds. Here there are two complex situations that make crop planning and allocation decisions difficult:
· Inflow may dwindle after an initial promise of a good monsoon:
· The monsoon may break a little late, and the initial promise is by itself not good.
In the first case, the current practice is to reduce the supply after the initial crop period, and this might affect the crop growth. In the second case, the date of release is postponed, anticipating the strengthening of the monsoon to the extent that the crop does not become affected. The allocation decisions thus cannot be made without some risk. Even the decisions as to when the season starts and when it ends, the important decisions at the macro level are not very easy to make. Farmers also make their decisions on crop choices and planting dates in the face of uncertainty of occurrence of rainfall and the building up of storage in the reservoir. This argument emphasizes that the 'timeliness dimension' is very complex in the case of scheduling in systems in which the crop seasons are monsoon based.
Nevertheless, under these situations, while preparing the schedule, the system manager makes assumptions regarding the extent of crop area, timings of land preparation and the transplantation. These assumptions do not coincide with the actual field practices, requiring a revision in the schedule. There is no in-built feedback mechanism to revise the schedule on a real-time basis.
Water distribution strategy
In south India, irrigation systems are jointly managed by the government agency and farmers. The responsibility of water distribution up to the outlet is in the hands of the government agency, and the beneficiaries take over the responsibility below the outlet.
Water is distributed at different parts of the canal network, such as branch canal and outlets, by the agency according to the duty specified. Distribution below the outlet in practice is generally to stand in queue when the lands below each turn-out are fed one after the other from head to tail. This is mostly done by mutual consent by a group of farmers. This kind of distribution practice followed by the farmers works satisfactorily as long as there is adequate waters, but it is very difficult during scarcities, leaving the tailenders to suffer.
Experience has shown that there are difficulties in the jointly managed irrigation systems. These are described below:
Systematic Scheduling: It has been noticed that in many systems the main system scheduling done by the irrigation agency and the on-farm scheduling practices adopted by the farmers do not match in terms of time of operation (Santhi, 1994). Examples of this situation can be seen in terms of the Sathanur irrigation project. The distributary canals are scheduled to be operated for a duration varying from 5 to 10 days according to the size of the command, whereas the on-farm schedule is prepared on a weekly basis (7 days) specifying timings for individual farmers (with the assistance of the Agricultural Engineering Department). This suggests that a systematic scheduling based on a bottom-up approach or top-down approach on a service agreement basis is very important for field implementation. This has been tried on a small scale in the Thindal area of the Lower Bhavani Irrigation System in Tamil Nadu through a farmers' association with the assistance of the Irrigation Community Organizers (ICOs) and it has been found to work well in the past decade. Once the water is delivered in the outlets by the irrigation agency, the farmers irrigate their farms according to the timings specified for them. The ICOs act as catalysts between the agencies involved and farmers. The ICOs assist the farmers in on-farm development works as well.
Revealed Farmer-Agency Perception: There are two aspects to the farmer-agency perception that are relevant here: one is that of


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Vol. 4, No. 1 – June 2006
USGS Activities Related to Human Health
Human Exposure to Mercury in Ukraine
An integrated environmental/human health study is underway in Gorlovka, Ukraine, where elevated levels of mercury occur
primarily due to past mercury mining and processing activities. Mine waste from mercury production, and current domestic and
industrial use of coal from local sources, contribute to elevated levels of mercury in the environment. The study,
Feasibility of Assessing Health Risks from Long-term Mercury Exposure in Gorlovka, Ukraine, funded by the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation, has been incorporated into U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS) project work on Health Effects of Energy Resources. The goals of the work in Gorlovka are to define levels of
human exposure to mercury, assess possible health effects to exposed individuals, and determine the feasibility of larger
scale epidemiologic studies.
The project involves U.S. participants from the USGS, the Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology, and Sciences International, Inc., as well as Ukrainian scientists from
the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine Institute for Occupational Health, and
Donetsk National Technical University. During a field visit to
Gorlovka in August 2005, samples of hair, nails, blood, and urine were taken from a group of 30 workers at a mercury
recycling facility on the site of the defunct Nikitovka mercury extraction plant. The scientists also collected environmental samples to
assess mercury levels and potential exposure near the mercury mines and over a larger portion of Gorlovka. Further sampling
will focus on Gorlovka residents lacking occupational mercury exposure, and residents of a nearby control municipality. This
research has the potential to be an important human health case study of mercury exposure.
Navajo Students Assist in Coal Combustion and Air Quality Study
USGS scientists are collaborating with the Navajo Nation
Division of Health on respiratory health issues related to coal combustion products in ambient air and indoor air quality
where coal is burned industrially and for home heating. USGS researchers will be assisted by Navajo students this summer
(2006) to collect air samples. The samples will be analyzed and compared with samples collected this winter.
USGS Scientist Named Director of the International Medical Geology Association's North American Regional Division
The USGS's Joe Bunnell has accepted the nomination as Director of the newly established North American Regional Division
of the International Medical Geology Association (IMGA). The IMGA, formally
inaugurated in January 2006, now has established Regional Divisions throughout the world. The Association grew out of
interest in Medical Geology that continues to expand worldwide at an increasingly rapid rate. The IMGA should enable the
community to better respond to numerous opportunities, to rapidly pass information to those interested in Medical Geology
issues, and to make critical decisions that will benefit this emerging scientific discipline.
Special Session (4.0W) Soils and Human Health, 18th World Congress of Soil Science, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 9-15,
This special session of the World Congress symposium will show the importance of soils and soil properties for human
health. Relevant topics include the influence of soil and climatic factors on the content of essential nutrients or naturally
occurring toxic substances in plant products, impacts of soil pollution on human health, and the spreading of infectious
diseases via atmospheric transport of soil dust. The symposium is a contribution to the ICSU initiative on "Science for
Conference Web Site
Sponsors: Inst.-Plt. Sci.; U.S. Geological Survey; Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Special Session (U07) Health on the Rocks, Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting, Beijing, China, July 24-27, 2006
In 2005 we witnessed and experienced the effects of several natural disasters. These events caused significant loss of
life, devastation to the environment, and extensive financial loss and damage to infrastructure. Yet, in 2005 we also saw
geoscientists and public health officials become more aware of the relationships between natural geological factors and
health in man and animals. This awareness has led to ongoing attempts to understand the influence of ordinary environmental
factors on the geographic distribution of various trace elements (I, F, As, Se, Pb, Hg, Co, etc.) that may adversely affect a
population's health. The 2006 WPGM is the ideal setting to discuss the status of medical geology investigations worldwide,
particularly of those in the western Pacific region. We are seeking submissions that inform and educate as well as lay the
groundwork for future collaborations and data sharing.
Sponsors: U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Geological Survey
Second National Conference on USGS Health-Related Research, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia, September 12-14, 2006
Collaboration between the public health and earth science communities can lead to solutions for existing and emerging
environmental health problems. Organizations and individuals interested in environmental and earth science factors affecting
human health will be interested in attending this conference, which is designed to provide a broad forum for discussion,
bringing together a variety of interested parties, including policy makers, scientists, resource managers, Congressional
staffers, and representatives from Federal and State governments and non-governmental organizations.
Conference Web Site
Sponsor: U.S. Geological Survey
Special Session (SP01) Natural Dust and Human Health, 7th International Symposium on Environmental Geochemistry, Beijing,
China, September 24-27, 2006
The session will bring together specialists from several disciplines to review the current status of research into
naturally-occurring atmospheric aerosols, the nature of fine aerosol dust, variations in its toxicity and its interaction
with live tissue, the effects of prolonged exposure to natural toxic dusts, and the epidemiology of lung disease and
dust-related conditions in human populations. This session will provide insights into a relatively neglected scientific field
of societal importance, with the potential to form the basis of a state-of-the art publication on the subject.
Session Web Site
Sponsors: University of London, UK, University of Bristol, UK, and U.S. Geological Survey
Medical Mineralogy and Geochemistry Short Course, Menlo Park, California, December 9-10, 2006
The objectives of this workshop are to introduce geochemists and mineralogists to the concepts and problems involved with
the interactions between geomaterials and the human body, to highlight the importance of mineralogy and crystal chemistry in
understanding health issues, and to promote links between mineralogists and geochemists working on medical problems as well
as medical scientists working on problems involving geomaterials.
Course Web Site
Sponsors: U.S. Geological Survey; University of Wisconsin-Madison; Stony Brook University, New York
- U.S. Geological Survey, in press, Navajo coal and air quality in Shiprock, New Mexico:
U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2006-3094.
- Ayotte, J.D.; Baris, Dalsu; Cantor, K.P.; Colt, Joanne; Robinson, G.R., Jr.; Lubin, J.H.; Karagas, Margaret; Hoover,
R.N.; Fraumeni, J.F., Jr.; and Silverman, D.T., 2006, Bladder cancer mortality and private well use in New
England--An ecological study: Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, v. 60, p. 168-172.
- Ayotte, J.D.; Nolan, B.T.; Nuckols, J.R.; Cantor, K.P.; Robinson, G.R., Jr.; Baris, Dalsu; Hayes, Laura; Karagas,
Margaret; Bress, William; Silverman, D.T.; and Lubin, J.H., 2006, Modeling
the probability of arsenic in groundwater in New England as a tool for exposure assessment: Environmental Science and
Technology, v. 40, no. 11, p. 3578-3585, DOI/10.1021/es051972f.
- Barringer, J.L., Szabo, Zoltan, Schneider, Donald, Atkinson, W.D., and Gallagher, R.A., 2006, Mercury in ground water, septage, leach-field effluent, and
soils in residential areas, New Jersey coastal plain: Science of The Total Environment, v. 361, p. 144-162.
- Chrosniak, L.D., Smith, L.N, McDonald, C.G., Jones, B.F., and Flinn, J.M., 2006, Effects of enhanced zinc and copper in drinking water on spatial
memory and fear conditioning: Journal of Geochemical Exploration, v. 88, p. 91-94,
- Fitzgerald, A.A., Smith, L.N., Thompson, J.H., Chrosniak, L.D., Conko, K.M., Jones, B.F., and Flinn, J.M., 2005, The
effects of copper on zinc-related cognitive deficiencies as assessed by the Morris water maze, in Proceedings of
the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Washington, D.C.
- Flinn, J.M., Hunter, D., Linkous, D.H., Lanzirotti, A., Smith, L.N., Brightwell, J., and Jones, B.F., 2005, Enhanced zinc consumption causes memory deficits and increased
brain levels of zinc: Physiology and Behavior, v. 83, no. 5


text:
Understanding Intellectual Property is important to protect new ideas on their journey to the healthcare marketplace. DigitalHealth.London can provide information, contacts, and resources that will help you during this process.
In the first instance, innovators from universities and NHS organisations should contact their local technology transfer team or commercial department.
The Intellectual Property Office provides advice and guidance on all forms of Intellectual Property and how to apply for protection.
Intellectual Property advice from Julian Hitchcock, Intellectual Property and Regulatory Lawyer at Denoon Legal
Defining aspects of Intellectual Property landscape for health tech:
- Absence of patent protection for software in the EU including UK (unless some form of technical effect, but this is not straightforward).
- Software is deemed to be a literary work therefore can be protected by copyright. However there is a problem in that a literary loophole exists whereby you can change the code slightly, even if the function is the same.
- There is a rich licensing environment around databases. Be sure you are using databases lawfully.
- Common pitfalls:
- Hubris. Energy is a good thing, but be realistic.
- Open source software. Using open source software may restrict your ability to commercialise. Check the Ts & Cs.
- Ownership of copyright in code. The author of the code is the owner of the copyright. Be sure to get an assignment from the software developers, this can be a simple agreement in writing.
- Confidentiality is key. Have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in place.
- Do an FTO. A thorough FTO (freedom to operate) is of huge value to investors.
- Know the regulatory route to market. Be compliant with regulations from the start.


Last update Thu Jun 2 16:47:03 2011
12. Lesson 3: Customize the Interface
After an application framework has been generated with AppExpress, it is usually necessary to customize the user interface. This typically is an ongoing process; as your application evolves, you can add and remove interface elements. In this lesson you perform the initial stage of customization. You will: AppExpress generates an SDI application framework with a full set of resources. TMLRead needs only a subset of the standard user interface, so most of the work in this lesson involves trimming down the interface. At the end of the lesson you will have a modified version of TMLRead, supporting only the commands that are needed.
Before starting this lesson, start the IDDE and open the project tmlread.prj found in directory samples\tutorial\lesson3\start.
Launching ResourceStudio
An application's resources are contained in a resource script file, which includes descriptions of menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface elements. The resource script file is edited with ResourceStudio. To launch ResourceStudio:
 1. Open the Project window by pressing Ctrl+Shift+P.
 2. In the Project window, double-click on tmlread.rc.
 3. When asked if you want to use ResourceStudio to edit this file, click Yes. ResourceStudio starts, with its Shell window minimized. (The Shell window is a control center from which you can create and open resource files. You will use it later in this lesson.)
The Browser window of ResourceStudio opens (Figure 12-1). The window controls editing of the resources within an individual resource file. On startup, its upper-left pane contains a list of resource types found in tmlread.rc.
[Figure 12-1 The Browser window of ResourceStudio]
The TML Reader is only able to read and display TML files; it cannot edit or write them. Thus, you can remove menu items related to editing and saving.
Customizing the Menu
In this section you customize TMLRead's menu.
Within ResourceStudio are several individual editors, each capable of editing a single type of resource. For example, the Dialog editor is used to edit dialog box resources, and the Menu editor to edit menu resources. By default, the editors use the right pane of the Browser window.
To start the Menu editor:
 1. Click on Menu in the Browser window's upper-left pane.
 2. Double-click on IDR_MAINFRAME in the lower-left pane.
The Menu editor opens in the Browser window (Figure 12-2). Its menu replaces the Browser window's menu, and its toolbar appears at the top of the right pane.
[Figure 12-2 The Menu editor in the Browser window]
As the Menu editor opens, the Property Sheet also opens (Figure 12-2). This window is used to edit resource and resource element properties and options.
[Figure 12-3 The Property Sheet]
The Test Menu pop-up window also opens simultaneously with the Menu editor (Figure 12-2). It is a top-level window whose menu is identical to the one you are editing. This window does nothing when you choose menu items that are not top-level menu items or submenus.
Because changes you make to the menu in the Browser window are immediately reflected in the menu of the Test Menu window, you can verify your changes as you make them.
[Figure 12-4 The Test Menu window]
Now you can remove unnecessary menus and menu items.
 1. Click on "MENUITEM New" to select this menu item.
 2. Press Delete.
 3. Repeat the above steps to delete:
 - "MENUITEM Save"
 - "MENUITEM Save As"
 - "POPUP Edit"
 - "MENUITEM Index"
 - "MENUITEM Using Help" and the following "SEPARATOR"
If you make a mistake, you can correct it by choosing Undo from the Edit menu.
To close the Menu editor, choose Close Editing from the File menu, or press Escape. The Browser window menu and toolbar return. The right pane shows a preview of the menu.
Although we have removed menu items for commands that will not be supported, at present it would still be possible to access some of those commands through their accelerators. In the next section we remove those commands from the accelerator table.
Customizing the Accelerator Table
To start the Accelerator Table editor:
 1. Click on Accelerator in the Browser window's upper-left pane.
The Accelerator Table editor opens in the Browser window (shown in Figure 12-5). As with the Menu editor, the Accelerator Table editor's menu replaces the Browser window's menu, and its toolbar appears at the top of the right pane.
[Figure 12-5 The Accelerator Table editor in the Browser window]
Removing accelerators is quite similar to removing menu items. To remove the unnecessary accelerators:
 1. Click on ID_FILE_NEW.
 2. Press Delete.
 3. Repeat the above steps for all the accelerators, leaving only ID_FILE_OPEN and ID_FILE_PRINT.
As in the Menu editor and elsewhere in ResourceStudio, if you make a mistake, you can correct it by choosing Undo from the Edit menu.
To close the Accelerator Table editor, press Escape.
Commands may be sent to TMLRead in one other way: by clicking on buttons in the toolbar. In the next section we replace the toolbar bitmap with one containing only commands that are supported by TMLRead.
Importing a New Toolbar Bitmap
Before importing a new toolbar bitmap, delete the current toolbar bitmap:
 1. Click on Bitmap in the Browser window's upper-left pane.
 2. Click on IDR_MAINFRAME in the lower left-pane.
 3. Press Shift+ Delete.
You must now copy a bitmap from another resource script file. To do this, you open a second Browser window to view the contents of a resource script file containing the new toolbar bitmap. Then you copy the bitmap to the clipboard and paste it into tmlread.rc.
 1. Double-click the ResourceStudio icon to restore the Shell window.
 2. In the Shell window, choose Open from the File menu.
 3. Select the file newbar.rc and click OK.
 4. In the upper-left pane of the new Browser window, click on Bitmap.
 5. In the lower-left pane, click on IDB_NEWBAR. A preview of the bitmap appears in the right pane (Figure 12-6).
 [Figure 12-6 New toolbar bitmap]
 6. Choose Copy from the Edit menu. The bitmap is copied to the clipboard.
 7. Choose Close from the File menu. The second Browser window closes. Activate the Browser window containing tmlread.rc by clicking on it.
 8. Choose Paste from the Edit menu. The bitmap is added to your application's resources.
The new toolbar does not presently have the correct resource ID. For the application framework to use it correctly, this toolbar's resource ID must be identical to that of the application's menu and accelerator table resources. To set the new bitmap's resource ID:
 1. Click on the Property Sheet to bring it to the front. The Property Sheet shows the resource ID and memory options for the bitmap resource.
 2. From the ID drop-down list, select IDR_MAINFRAME.
The initial resource customization is now complete. Next you exit ResourceStudio and make a minor adjustment to update the source code that loads the toolbar.
Exiting ResourceStudio
To save your work and exit Resource Studio:
 1. Choose Save from the Browser window's File menu.
 2. Choose Close from the File menu. The Browser window closes, but the Shell window and Property Sheet remain open.
 3. Choose Exit from the Shell window's File menu.
Setting Up the New Toolbar
The MFC framework uses a single bitmap to represent a set of toolbar buttons. The correspondence between the button images in the bitmap and the commands they represent is established in an array in the source code. Because you have replaced the original toolbar bitmap, you also must update this array.
 1. In the Project window, double-click on mainfrm.cpp. A Source window opens, displaying the frame window class's source code.
 2. Scroll downward a few lines until you find the following code:
 // toolbar buttons -IDs are command buttons
 static UINT BASED_CODE buttons[] = {
 // same order as in the bitmap 'toolbar. bmp'
 3. Remove and rearrange lines until the array looks like this:
 // toolbar buttons -IDs are command buttons
 static UINT BASED_CODE buttons[] = {
 // same order as in the new toolbar bitmap
 4. Save the code by choosing Save from the Source window's File menu.
The buttons[] array now contains the command IDs of the three toolbar buttons. The ID_SEPARATOR entries indicate where spaces should be placed between the button images when drawing the toolbar.
In the last section you build the application and view the results of your labor.
Building and Running the Application
To build and run the application, choose Execute Program from the IDDE Project menu. Because no executable has yet been built, the IDDE automatically builds TMLRead and then runs it. (When you try to run an existing executable that needs to be rebuilt, the IDDE asks if you want to rebuild the program before running it.)
The source files are recompiled, the resource script is compiled by the resource compiler, and all the object files and resources are linked together to create the final application. Then the ID


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The BBC was present at the convention doing some great work with archives. George Wright, Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and Development and his team are working with sixty years worth of World Service archives, that's around 500 terrabytes of audio.
The aim of the work is to help users find what they need more easily. The historical importance of the collection is considerable and it will become far more useful once it has been properly tagged with data that is searchable.
The archives have almost no metadata, so the team has created a speech recognition system which goes through the archive and adds tags so that users can navigate. Along with the machine recognition, listeners are volunteering to correct and add tags to ensure that it is all correct.
The R&D team at the BBC built its speech recognition system on top of existing open source software. The audio from BBC World Service has its own idiosyncracies that make speech recognition a tricky prospect for accuracy. If you have heard past broadcasts from the global radio network, you'll spot that people spoke English in a quite different way in the 50s in comparison with the language used today. Add this to the difficulties in recognising proper nouns and foreign words and you can see what the software is up against.
Once the material is tagged properly, it can be used in a number of ways for re-broadcasting, primary source research and to add value to future broadcasts. The archive material is mostly programming and features rather than news reports, but the standard of interviews and the historical value of the archive is unquestionable.
Check out the video where Wright describes the process of tagging audio and how the BBC's history and future has a strong tradition of collaboration and engineering.
You can find more of our video coverage and catch up with the future of broadcasting from IBC here.


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absolute dating definition biology
absolute dating definition biologySome scientists prefer the terms chronometric or calendar dating, as use of the word "absolute" implies an unwarranted certainty and precision. Absolute dating. Lesson title: women and more curious, relative and absolute dating is the preceding articles is via radioactive decay and Biology definition of absolute dating. Discover how scientists determine the age of fossils, rocks, and other geologic phenomena by using the known half-lives of isotopes within each. Imagine braving the desert heat for days or even weeks as you dig for dinosaur bones. You find something extraordinary and want to know as much.
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in June and July it emerges, usually after rain, and can kill people and animals at a distance.
In his book The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals, zoologist Karl Shuker discusses the death worm at length, including the possibility that it might be able to give electric shocks under the right conditions. Among the reports he recounts are some that sound very interesting in this regard, including that of a visiting geologist poking an iron rod into the sand, who dropped dead with no warning. A death worm emerged from the place where the geologist had been prodding the sand. I'm going to add "don't poke an iron rod into the sand of the Gobi Desert" to my list of warnings.
The Gobi is a cold desert and has bitter winters, but it's still a desert, which means it's arid, which means the death worm probably isn't a type of earthworm or amphibian—nothing that needs a lot of moisture to stay alive. On the other hand, two types of earthworms have recently been discovered in the Gobi, and there are a few amphibians, especially frogs, that have evolved to live in areas that don't receive much rain. In episode 156, about some animals of Mongolia, we talk about the Mongolian death worm again if you want to know a little more. Some parts of the Gobi get more moisture than others and may be where the death worm lives.
Shuker suggests it might be a kind of amphisbaenid. Amphisbaenids are legless lizards that look more like worms than snakes. They move more like worms than snakes too, and spend a lot of their lives burrowing in search of worms or insects. No known species of amphisbaenid can generate electric shocks, but then again, only one of the over 2,000 known species of catfish generates electricity.
It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that electrogenesis might develop in a reptile, assuming that's what the death worm is. Sand isn't a good conductor of electricity, but wet sand is. The death worm might ordinarily use weak electrical pulses to stun its small prey, but if it emerges after rain because its tunnels are temporarily flooded, it might feel vulnerable above ground and be more likely to discharge electrically as a warning when approached.
Of course, as always, until we have a body—until we know for sure that the Mongolian death worm is a real animal and not a folktale, we can't do more than speculate. But it is interesting to think about.
As far as I can find, no living reptiles or birds show any electrical abilities akin to those in fish and other aquatic animals. But electroreceptors in fish were only discovered in the 1950s. There's a lot we still don't know. Always another mystery to solve!
Thanks for listening!
Episode 009: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker
*Re-record coming soon! The original file got corrupted* –Kate, Aug. 3, 2021
This week we take a look at (and listen to) the ivory-billed woodpecker and its close relative, the imperial woodpecker. Is it alive? Is it extinct?
A pair of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Photo taken in 1935:
Frames from the alleged ivory-billed woodpecker video taken in 2004. Not super clear there, guys.
left to right: imperial woodpecker, ivory-billed woodpecker, and pileated woodpecker:
A pair of stuffed imperial woodpeckers:
A still from the 1958 video of a female imperial woodpecker. She's so cute! Her crest bobs around as she moves.
Show transcript:
A lot of people who aren't otherwise into birds have heard of the ivory-billed woodpecker because of the 2004 and 2005 sightings, which were widely reported in the press. Before we talk about that, let's get some background and discuss the bird itself.
There are actually two ivory-billed woodpeckers, the American bird and the Cuban. Originally they were listed as separate species. They're big birds, glossy black in color with white markings. The male has a red crest with a black stripe up the front while the female's crest is all black. They need vast areas of undisturbed forest to thrive, something that's in short supply these days.
By the early 20th century, the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker was already restricted to pine forests in the northeast of Cuba due to habitat loss. By the late 1940s it was rare. In 1956 some small populations were still around, but while conservation was urged, the Cuban revolution in 1959 stopped any conservation progress. The last positive sighting was in 1989. The Cuban government designated the area of its sighting as protected, but no one's seen a bird since.
Another bird, the imperial woodpecker, is the largest woodpecker in the world. It's over two feet long, or 61 cm, with a wingspan of probably around three feet, or about a meter—maybe more. The female's crest curls forward charmingly.
Until the early 1950s, the imperial woodpecker was reasonably widespread although people did shoot it sometimes. Then companies started logging in the imperial woodpecker's territory. One old man remembered a forester telling locals that the birds destroyed trees and even gave them poison to spread on feeding sites. But the imperial woodpecker only feeds and nests in trees that are already dead or dying. It was never a threat to healthy trees. The last confirmed sighting of the imperial woodpecker was in 1956.
No photographs of a living imperial woodpecker exist. Then researcher Martjan Lammertink found mention in a 1962 letter of video taken of a bird in 1956 by dentist and amateur birder William Rhein. Rhein had become reclusive in his old age and moved with no forwarding address at least once, but Lammertink managed to track Rhein down in 1997, when he was in his late 80s. Rhein died in 1999.
Once Lammertink found him, Rhein produced 85 seconds of 16 mm movie footage he'd taken back in the 1950s, which showed a female imperial woodpecker hitching up a tree and flying away. From those 85 seconds, researchers learned a lot about the bird, helped by a 2010 expedition that pinpointed the exact location where the footage was shot.
There have been numerous sightings of imperial woodpeckers since the 1950s, but the list is discouraging. The sightings taper off slowly in different areas over the decades. The most recent was 2005, but it hasn't been verified and no photographs were taken.
These days, the areas where imperial woodpeckers once lived are now dangerous to explore due to drug cartels, which grow marijuana and opium poppies in remote clearings with armed guards.
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the American ivory-billed woodpecker's story is pretty much the same. It's an impressive bird, as much as 21 inches long, or 53 cm, with a two and a half foot wingspan, or 76 cm. It likes hardwood swamps and pine forests and was once found throughout the southeastern United States. But as forests were cleared, its habitat grew smaller and more fragmented.
It was thought extinct as early as the 1920s, but then someone spotted a pair in Florida—and promptly shot them. Another bird was shot in Louisiana in 1932. By 1938, almost the only known ivory-billed woodpeckers were living in a forest in northeastern Louisiana.
To explain what happened, I need to back up a little. In 1913, the president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company bought almost 83,000 acres of timberland in Louisiana, with further purchases over the next few years that brought the total acreage to about 130,000. He designated the area as a refuge. By this he meant the trees could only be harvested with his permission, mostly for use in his sewing machines, and hunting was not allowed. It was called the Singer Tract, or just Singer by the locals, who continued to use the property as they had for decades—cutting trees for fuel and hunting game for food.
In 1920, Singer got tired of this and offered the property to the Louisiana Fish and Game Department, which hired wardens to enforce trespassing and game laws. The area is frequently called an old-growth forest, but in actuality much of it consisted of abandoned cotton plantations that had been reclaimed by forests.
Interest in the ivory-billed woodpecker had been growing ever since it had been discovered after its supposed extinction in the 1920s. In 1935, Cornell University sent a team of researchers to the Singer Tract to look for the birds. The team brought film and recording equipment instead of guns. They found the woodpeckers and took pictures and sound recordings.
The expedition was so successful that one of its members returned in 1937 to study the ivory-billed woodpecker for three years. Also in 1937, Singer sold 6,000 acres to a lumber company, and in 1939 he sold timber rights to the rest of the acreage to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company.
In 1940, the Audubon Society convinced a Louisiana senator to introduce a bill to establish a national park protecting what remained of the Singer Tract. There was no money to fund the


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The hydroelastic interaction of water waves and the finite-length ice sheet with a gap is investigated in this study. The ice sheet is treated as an elastic thin plate with free-edge boundary conditions. The analytical solutions are obtained using the eigenfunction expansion method. Effects of the gap location on water-wave propagation and hydroelastic responses of the ice sheet are analyzed. Local minima and maxima are found in the transmission coefficient curve. Enhanced wave elevation in the gap and hydroealstic response of the ice sheet can be observed at specific wave frequencies. The wave resonance effect in the gap is also discussed.
With climate change, Arctic shipping routes have attracted great interest from researchers and the industry (Smith and Stephenson, 2013). The interaction of water waves and sea ice is becoming a hot subject at present. On wave-ice interaction problems, early researches have widely considered the situation of semi-infinite or finite sea ice in water waves, by assuming the sea ice to be perfect and continuous (e.g. Fox and Squire (1990), Fox and Squire (1994),, Meylan and Squire (1993), Meylan and Squire (1994), Sahoo et al. (2001), and Teng et al. (2001)). It is also common that an ice sheet may have cracks or a polynya in it, which brings more difficulties to the hydrodynamic analysis. Squire and Dixon (2001) found that the crack can behave as a steep low-pass filter that allows an easier passing through of long waves. The perfect transmission can also occur at some specific wave periods. Shi et al. (2019) found that both the length and distribution of the polynya have important effects on wave reflection and transmission. dependent on the relative position of the submerged body to elastic plate edges. Ren et al. (2016) studied the wave excited motion of a floating body between two semi-infinite ice sheets and observed standing waves in the polynya. Li et al. (2018) considered a circular cylinder submerged below an ice sheet with a crack. The results revealed that the location of the crack played an important role in the body motion.


how the XML is formatted. If you use the XmlSerializer regularly, then this should look familiar. The rule on OrderItem will check if the object is marked as dirty. If so, it tells the parent order to recalculate its total, and changes the dirty flag back to false. Notice also how the full type names are specified in this XML. Rules are always associated with a type. The rule names are also the same, but since they're on different types, it's OK.
RuleExec makes the job of coding a lot easier. We don't have to worry about running the parser ourselves or doing any of the set up work that was done in the previous section. The code below will create an Order, add an OrderItem to it, and change the number of units on that item:
Order o = new Order();
OrderItem oi = o.NewItem(2.3f, 2);
oi.Units = 5;
Console.WriteLine(" Total: " + o.Total);
Console.WriteLine(" Total: " + o.Total);
Looks much easier, huh? Here is the resulting output of this code:
 Total: 4.6
 Total: 11.5
Priorities and Halting
While working on my Guess Word game, I found that it is not guaranteed which order rules will be run in. They are not even run in the same order that they were entered into the RuleSet. Sometimes, it is necessary to run rules in a particular order. The solution to this is to use a priority.

The priority attributes in this rule set indicate that Rule1 should run before Rule2. While it may seem that Rule1 will run before Rule2 anyway, this is not guaranteed. To guarantee the order, we specify the priority. In this particular case, forward-chaining would take over and recognize that we changed the Bar property. If Rule2 runs before Rule1, the worst that could happen is that the rule set is run twice. But, imagine you have several rules, all changing properties. Unless you use priorities, the rules could end up running many more times than they have to.
Another feature that is needed is halting. Rules in Workflow Foundation are allowed to have halt commands. These commands can be inserted anywhere into a set of then or else actions. What puzzles me about this is that conditions and loops are not allowed in then or else actions, so there's always a sequential flow. Anything after a halt would therefore be unreachable. With this in mind, it is safe to make halting an attribute on a rule.
Obviously, halts are false by default, and do not need to be specified. The same goes for priority. By default, all priorities are zero, and the Workflow Foundation decides the order that they're run in.
The new Windows Workflow Foundation in.NET 3.0 adds a rules library that can be quite useful. There are times when you're writing an application that you feel that you'll need rules, but not workflow. That's the reason I've put together this library. Microsoft has included a rule-writing GUI that will end up writing a.rules file that pairs with your original source code. This is nice for the workflow environment, but the serialization is not in a human-readable format. Using my CodeDom expression parser, I have made it possible to write rules in the application configuration. My intention was to introduce people to this rules library, and to give them the ability to embed rules into their application.
What's Inside
Here's a listing of the files inside:
 - CodeDomExpParser - My CodeDom expression parser library.
 - DmCodeDom - CodeDom helper library.
 - Assignment.cs - Creates a CodeAssignmentStatement.
 - Declaration.cs - Creates a CodeVariableDeclarationStatement.
 - DmCdStmt.cs - Base class.
 - ExprStmt.cs - Creates a CodeExpressionStatement.
 - ForLoop.cs - Creates a CodeIterationStatement.
 - IfElse.cs - Creates a CodeConditionStatement.
 - DmCodeDom.TestHarness - NUnit test harness for the DmCodeDom library.
 - TestDmCd.cs - Contains code that was mentioned in the article.
 - DmRules
 - Configuration\DmRulesConfigHandler.cs - A configuration section handler to read the rules from the application configuration.
 - DmRule.cs - Represents a rule.
 - DmRuleSet.cs - Holds all the rules.
 - DmRuleTypeSet.cs - Pairs a rule with a type.
 - RuleExec.cs - Static helper class for running rules.
 - DmRules.TestHarness - NUnit test harness for DmRules.
 - BaseObject.cs - A base class that has the IsDirty property.
 - Order.cs - The Order class used above.
 - OrderItem.cs - The OrderItem class used above.
 - TestDmRules.cs - Contains code that was used in the article.
 - 0.1 : 2006-06-20 : Initial version
 - Updated the CodeDomExpParser library to work with.NET 2.0. Created the initial version of DmRules with the capability to run rules per type. The primary consideration for the future of the library is forward-chaining across types.
 - 0.2 : 2006-07-10 : Added priorities and halting
 - Rules are not guaranteed to run in any particular order. Assigning a priority can fix this problem. Sometimes, it is necessary to halt processing of other rules, a halt command has been added for this.
About the Author
Dustin Metzgar
Software Developer Microsoft
United States United States
No Biography provided
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Comments and Discussions
QuestionHow do i assign a string to a variable. Pin
asp.anjan20-Nov-10 19:09
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AnswerRe: How do i assign a string to a variable. Pin
asp.anjan21-Nov-10 9:44
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QuestionDynamic Rule to validate Object Pin
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GeneralRe: Dynamic Rule to validate Object Pin
Dustin Metzgar22-Apr-08 18:18
memberDustin Metzgar22-Apr-08 18:18
GeneralRe: Dynamic Rule to validate Object Pin
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memberdukekujo23-Apr-08 18:03
GeneralGraphic way to write rules Pin
Steve Strong17-Feb-08 16:42
memberSteve Strong17-Feb-08 16:42
GeneralUse System.Workflow.Activities.Rules.Parser Pin
Deyan Petrov21-Sep-06 2:52
memberDeyan Petrov21-Sep-06 2:52
GeneralRe: Use System.Workflow.Activities.Rules.Parser Pin
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GeneralRe: Use System.Workflow.Activities.Rules.Parser Pin
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GeneralToo Complicated Pin
Tim McCurdy27-Jun-06 2:51
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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AnswerRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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GeneralRe: Too Complicated Pin
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Article Copyright 200


1 Introduction
Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq) is an alternative or complementary technique to MNase-seq, DNase-seq, and FAIRE-seq for chromatin accessibility analysis. The results obtained from ATAC-seq are similar to those from DNase-seq and FAIRE-seq. ATAC-seq is gaining popularity because it does not require cross-linking, has higher signal to noise ratio, requires a much smaller amount of biological material and is faster and easier to perform, compared to other techniques1.
To help researchers quickly assess the quality of ATAC-seq data, we have developed the ATACseqQC package for easily making diagnostic plots following the published guidelines1. In addition, it has functions to preprocess ATACseq data for subsequent peak calling.
2 Quick start
Here is an example using ATACseqQC with a subset of published ATAC-seq data1. Currently, only bam input file format is supported.
First install ATACseqQC and other packages required to run the examples. Please note that the example dataset used here is from human. To run analysis with dataset from a different species or differnt assembly, please install the corresponding BSgenome, TxDb and phastCons. For example, to analyze mouse data aligned to mm10, please install BSgenome.Mmusculus.UCSC.mm10, TxDb.Mmusculus.UCSC.mm10.knownGene and phastCons60way.UCSC.mm10. Please note that phstCons60way.UCSC.mm10 is optional, which can be obtained according to the vignettes of GenomicScores.
BiocManager::install(c("ATACseqQC", "ChIPpeakAnno", "MotifDb", "GenomicAlignments",
 "BSgenome.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19", "TxDb.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19.knownGene",
## load the library
## input the bamFile from the ATACseqQC package
bamfile <- system.file("extdata", "GL1.bam",
 package="ATACseqQC", mustWork=TRUE)
bamfile.labels <- gsub(".bam", "", basename(bamfile))
2.1 IGV snapshot
Source code of IGVSnapshot function is available in extdata folder. To call the function, please try
source(system.file("extdata", "IGVSnapshot.R", package = "ATACseqQC"))
2.2 Estimate the library complexity
_TAG_(bamfile, outPath=NULL)
2.3 Fragment size distribution
First, there should be a large proportion of reads with less than 100 bp, which represents the nucleosome-free region. Second, the fragment size distribution should have a clear periodicity, which is evident in the inset figure, indicative of nucleosome occupacy (present in integer multiples).
## generate fragement size distribution
fragSize <- fragSizeDist(bamfile, bamfile.labels)
2.4 Nucleosome positioning
2.4.1 Adjust the read start sites
Tn5 transposase has been shown to bind as a dimer and inserts two adaptors into accessible DNA locations separated by 9 bp2.
Therefore, for downstream analysis, such as peak-calling and footprinting, all reads in input bamfile need to be shifted. The function shiftGAlignmentsList can be used to shift the reads. By default, all reads aligning to the positive strand are offset by +4bp, and all reads aligning to the negative strand are offset by -5bp1.
The adjusted reads will be written into a new bamfile for peak calling or footprinting.
## bamfile tags to be read in
possibleTag <- combn(LETTERS, 2)
possibleTag <- c(paste0(possibleTag[1, ], possibleTag[2, ]),
 paste0(possibleTag[2, ], possibleTag[1, ]))
bamTop100 <- scanBam(BamFile(bamfile, yieldSize = 100),
 param = ScanBamParam(tag=possibleTag))[[1]]$tag
tags <- names(bamTop100)[lengths(bamTop100)==100]
## [1] "AS" "MD" "XG" "NM" "XM" "XN" "XO" "YS" "YT"
## files will be output into outPath
outPath <- "splited"
## shift the coordinates of 5'ends of alignments in the bam file
seqlev <- "chr1" ## subsample data for quick run
which <- as(seqinfo(Hsapiens)[seqlev], "GRanges")
gal <- readBamFile(bamfile, tag=tags, which=which, asMates=TRUE, bigFile=TRUE)
shiftedBamfile <- file.path(outPath, "shifted.bam")
gal1 <- shiftGAlignmentsList(gal, outbam=shiftedBamfile)
2.4.2 Promoter/Transcript body (PT) score
PT score is calculated as the coverage of promoter divided by the coverage of its transcript body. PT score will show if the signal is enriched in promoters.
txs <- transcripts(TxDb.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19.knownGene)
pt <- PTscore(gal1, txs)
plot(pt$log2meanCoverage, pt$PT_score,
 xlab="log2 mean coverage",
 ylab="Promoter vs Transcript")
2.4.3 Nucleosome Free Regions (NFR) score
NFR score is a ratio between cut signal adjacent to TSS and that flanking the corresponding TSS. Each TSS window of 400 bp is first divided into 3 sub-regions: the most upstream 150 bp (n1), the most downstream of 150 bp (n2), and the middle 100 bp (nf). Then the number of fragments with 5' ends overlapping each region are calculated for each TSS. The NFR score for each TSS is calculated as NFR-score = log2(nf) - log2((n1+n2)/2). A plot can be generated with the NFR scores as Y-axis and the average signals of 400 bp window as X-axis, very like a MA plot for gene expression data.
nfr <- NFRscore(gal1, txs)
plot(nfr$log2meanCoverage, nfr$NFR_score,
 xlab="log2 mean coverage",
 ylab="Nucleosome Free Regions score",
 main="NFRscore for 200bp flanking TSSs",
 xlim=c(-10, 0), ylim=c(-5, 5))
2.4.4 Transcription Start Site (TSS) Enrichment Score
TSS enrichment score is a raio between aggregate distribution of reads centered on TSSs and that flanking the corresponding TSSs. TSS score = the depth of TSS (each 100bp window within 1000 bp each side) / the depth of end flanks (100bp each end). TSSE score = max(mean(TSS score in each window)). TSS enrichment score is calculated according to the definition at Transcription start site (TSS) enrichment values are dependent on the reference files used; cutoff values for high quality data are listed in the following table from
tsse <- TSSEscore(gal1, txs)
## [1] 26.87021
plot(100*(-9:10-.5), tsse$values, type="b",
 xlab="distance to TSS",
 ylab="aggregate TSS score")
2.4.5 Split reads
The shifted reads will be split into different bins, namely nucleosome free, mononucleosome, dinucleosome, and trinucleosome. Shifted reads that do not fit into any of the above bins will be discarded. Splitting reads is a time-consuming step because we are using random forest to classify the fragments based on fragment length, GC content and conservation scores3.
By default, we assign the top 10% of short reads (reads below 100_bp) as nucleosome-free regions and the top 10% of intermediate length reads as (reads between 180 and 247 bp) mononucleosome. This serves as the training set to classify the rest of the fragments using random forest. The number of the tree will be set to 2 times of square root of the length of the training set.
## run program for chromosome 1 only
txs <- txs[seqnames(txs) %in% "chr1"]
genome <- Hsapiens
## split the reads into NucleosomeFree, mononucleosome,
## dinucleosome and trinucleosome.
## and save the binned alignments into bam files.
objs <- splitGAlignmentsByCut(gal1, txs=txs, genome=genome, outPath = outPath,
## list the files generated by splitGAlignmentsByCut.
## [1] "NucleosomeFree.bam" "NucleosomeFree.bam.bai" "dinucleosome.bam"
## [4] "dinucleosome.bam.bai" "inter1.bam" "inter1.bam.bai"
## [7] "inter2.bam" "inter2.bam.bai" "inter3.bam"
## [10] "inter3.bam.bai" "mononucleosome.bam" "mononucleosome.bam.bai"
## [13


"The term bisbigliando (Italian, 'whispering'; abbrev. Bisbigl. or bisb.) indicates an unmeasured rapid tremolo between two or more strings played quietly in the middle and upper registers of the harp." [p.360, Gould2011
A bisbigliando is played with both hands by plucking the interval or chord, one note after the other, rapidly, lightly and continuously. The playing technique of a bisbigliando is quite different to the normal playing technique. Normally the harpist would first place the fingers on the string, then press them and then release to create a full sound. When playing a bisbigliando, the harpist hardly places the fingers on the strings before playing. He/She plucks the strings very fast and lightly to minimize buzzing and to create a continuous sound. Bisbigliando is a quiet effect, since its production does not allow enough muscle strength for a full sound.
Due to its production a bisbigliando is a quiet effect, however the whispering sound carries well, provided that it is not obscured by thick instrumentation from accompanying instruments.
A bisbigliando is notated as a tremolo chord with the term Bisbigliando written above or below. If the bisbigliando label is omitted, the harpist might play a measured repetition of the chord instead of a bisbigliando. [Gould2011
Bisbigliando, both hands play the same chord:
Bisbigliando, the hands play alternating chords:
The direction of the bisbigliando can be notated with arpeggio lines placed before each cord. If no direction is given the harpist will play each chord upwards, starting from the lowest note in each hand.
If a specific order of notes is wanted the bisbigliando must be notated out in full:
Both Luciano Berio and Toru Takemitsu use the following notation to indicate a random bisbigliando. The notated pitches should be repeated rapidly and continuously in a random order.
Additional remarks
A bisbigliando can also be produced with one hand, however, its speed will be diminished by a considerable extent. Due to the low speed the resulting sound is less continuous and the notes will be perceived rather as a fast repetition of a sequence than as a bisbigliando whisper.


text:
About the Cost Breakdown Structure Template
When talking about a project's financial aspects, a company or an organization has to create a structure to lay out and apply measurable cost controls.
Organizations also call this CBS. This is a hierarchical representation or a breakdown of various costs in a specific project. It represents the costs of components in the WBS or the Work Breakdown Structure. A solid structure like CBS allows an easier understanding of how a project is tracking against a plan.
Why is cost breakdown structure important?
Budget or finances are an integral element in a project; thus, thorough planning and structure to avoid leaving out any essential aspect in the whole project. The following are some key points explaining the essence of CBS in a project.
- You can have better control over your budget and other costs. Splitting spending into categories allows you to have a clearer view and management of project costs. You can have an overview of what you are committing to concerning the specific spending cost within the cost category.
- Having an excellent CBS gives you better insights into how much you are allocating within different cost categories. This will provide you with ideas on the financing aspect and when making vital business decisions for the project.
- You can have the CBS as a reference for pricing. Having an excellent background into the actual cost from an earlier budget increases the quality of the project's cost estimate.
- With CBS, you will have a clearer view and understanding of underspending or overspending. Also, when you see strange trends in your project plan in the costing aspect, you can immediately make decisions for improvement.
What is the difference between CBS and WBS?
Cost Breakdown Structure or CBS is closely related to Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS illustrates all the tasks that need to be accomplished within a project. Meanwhile, the CBS tackles all about the cost aspects that must be purchased within tasks. These two must go hand in hand for better project outcomes. There can be instances when organizations do not utilize CBS, leaving the WBS to function as both the operational and financial hierarchy of a project. While using a single hierarchy for both can be feasible, it is also prone to project failures. Organizations tend to compromise on both sides, making project performance suffer.
How to create a cost breakdown structure?
You can utilize a built-in cost breakdown structure template and formula-driven estimation tools in creating project budgets. The first step in creating an efficient project cost structure is to determine the following key elements:
- Cost drivers: specific units, items, specific works, or services
- Amounts: the amount of work or time, number of items, amounts of materials
- Hidden or overhead costs: these are costs that do not bring any direct value; however, they will indirectly influence work processes.
You can also group the cost data into two parameters:
- By time periods: Organizations can use this data grouping in their CBS to estimate weekly, monthly, and quarterly costs. This is usually combined with the workflow steps and provides a total for the entire project.
- By cost types: This approach is used when the purpose is to define the manageability of specific cost elements and to figure out ways to decrease total costs.
Cost types can also come in various categories in building CBS:
- Labor costs
- Outsourcing and subcontracting costs
- Material costs
- Overhead costs
- Logistics costs
Creating an effective and efficient cost breakdown structure can be a handful and a tedious task. However, this structure is essential for future communication with your clients and better understanding how to manage costs in the project process.