In May Dr Eric von Wettberg visited the Ecole Nacional Superieure de Toulouse as a visiting faculty fellow to continue ongoing research on salt tolerance of wild alfalfa (Medicago truncatula) from the Mediterranean. In addition to lecturing on his work to colleagues and researchers at ENSAT, he presented new results at the Model Legume Meeting (a scientific conference on Medicago) in Sainte-Maxime, France.
• FIU/FTBG graduate student Tonya Fotinos (Von Wettberg lab) was recently awarded a Florida Native Plant Society conservation grant for her research on the genetic diversity in the federally endangered Keys Tree Cactus, Pilosocereus robinii. Populations from the Florida Keys have experienced a more than 80% decline in population in the past decade through habitat loss and environmental change. This grant will provide the laboratory supplies to develop molecular markers to determine whether remaining populations are reproducing sexually, and help identify good candidate populations for the on-going reintroduction efforts.
|• The publication of the book The Anatomy of Palms by Prof. Barry Tomlinson (Harvard University and National Tropical Botanic Garden), Dr. James W. Horn (currently at the Smithsonian Institution), and Fairchild’s Dr. Jack B. Fisher (recently retired) represents an important research contribution in structural botany and evolution in this large tropical plant family. The book is the result of a four year project at the Garden funded by the National Science Foundation (project number: 0515683) and provides the most complete account of palm anatomy ever produced. This study also provided an avenue to train one graduate student (Karen Laubengayer, MS) and additional research opportunities to a post-doctoral researcher (Dr. James W. Horn). The Oxford University website (http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199558926.do) provides additional information on the content and structure of this book. Copies of this work are for sale at the bookstore of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Image on bottom left: Leaf anatomy of Washingtonia. Bottom right: Dr. Jack Fisher teaching tropical botany at the Garden.|
|• Botanists from the Institute of Jamaica (Tracy Commock and Keron Campbell), the National Botanic Garden of Dominican Republic (Rosa Rodriguez, Teodoro Clase, and Brígido Peguero), and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (Melissa Abdo) performed a field expedition to the Dominican Republic between May 9th and 13th. During this visit the team collected plant material in limestone karst mogote habitats, helping to build upon baseline data that the National Botanic Garden of the Dominican Republic has collected to date. The expedition was supported by the MacArthur Foundation and was aimed at enhancing institutional collaborations among botanical institutions of the Caribbean Islands. Image on the right: The Director of the National Botanic Garden of the Dominican Republic Ricardo Garcia (left) greets Tracy Commock and Keron Campbell). Image on the bottom left: plant hunting limestone karst mogote habitats at "Los Haitises" National Park, from left to right: Rosa Rodriguez, Keron Campbell, Tracy Commock, and Teodoro Clase. Image on the bottom right: one of the mogotes at "Los Haitises" National Park where field studies where performed.|
• Our welcome to Nicolas Espinosa, Fairchild Challenge Alumnus and sophomore student of Florida International University who will be working with us as a research intern during this summer. Nicolas is majoring in Environmental Studies and during his High School years at South Plantation High School he was an active participant of the Fairchild Challenge. His internship is being funded by a NSF project on "Caribbean Cycads Biogeography, Conservation, and Systematics". During this internship Nicolas will be hosted by the Montgomery Botanical Center (in May, mentored by Dr. Patrick Griffith and Dr. Chad Husby), the herbarium of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (in June, mentored by Dr. Bret Jestrow and Dr. Javier Francisco-Ortega), and the Subtropical Horticulture Research Station of USDA (in July, mentored by Dr. Dayana Salas-Leiva and Dr. Alan Meerow). His research at Montgomery Botanical Center will focus on ex situ conservation methods. During his internship at the Fairchild Herbarium, Nicolas will gain experience in herbarium management and the use of optical microscopy techniques for systematics. Finally, his studies at USDA will be based on the use of DNA techniques to address phylogenetic questions. Nicolas joined this research team on May 9th. The image on the right shows Nicolas spraying soapy water on Caribbean Islands taxa of Zamia to control mealy bugs at the Montgomery Botanical Center.
• Under the supervision of our Herbarium Curator Dr. Brett Jestrow, botanists from the the Institute of Jamaica (Tracy Commock and Keron Campbell) undertook an intensive workshop on DNA methods for plant biodiversity assessment between May 16th - 18th. The workshop included an introduction to DNA isolation, PCR, and sequencing techniques with an overview of phylogenetic methods and related resources. As a result of the workshop, we achieved our goal of establishing the foundation for future collaborative projects focused on threatened endemic plant species from Jamaica. Image on the left (from left to right): Brett Jestrow, Keron Campbell, Tracy Commock, Melissa Abdo, and Marlon Rumble.
As part of the educational activities of our NSF funded project on Caribbean cycads and in coordination with the Fairchild Challenge program, the Montgomery Botanical Center hosted students from Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School on May 3. The students were led by teacher Marie Remy. These activities were part of the Environmental Immersion Day Option of the Fairchild Challenge. The visit focused mostly on the "Cycad Biology" program of the Montgomery Botanical Center.
|• A new article by FIU/FTBG conservation Biologist Dr. Kenneth Feeley was published as the cover article in the new issue of the prestigious journal Ecology. The article, entitled "Directional changes in the species composition of a tropical forest", examines changes in the composition of tree species growing on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Dr. Feeley shows that over the past 25 years there has been a remarkably consistent and directional pattern of increasing abundances of drought tolerant species at the expense of more drought insensitive tree species. The cause(s) of this change remains uncertain but the most likely culprits are either long-term changes in climate leading to reduced water availability (i.e., increasing temperatures adn reduced rainfall), or alternatively the compositional changes may be the ongoing legacy of an extreme El Nino drought that occurred in the early 1980's.|
• FIU/FTBG graduate student Evan Rehm (Feeley lab) will spend May 2011 initiating his dissertation research project in the Andean highlands of southern Peru. Specifically he will be working with local collaborators to establish longt erm vegetation and seed dispersal monitoring plots at the ecotone between montane cloud forest and puna grasslands. Evan will leave Peru in June and July in order to attend the Organization for Tropical Studies course in Tropical Ecology at Costa Rica. Evan will return to Peru briefly in August in order to complete the summer field season of work before returning to FIU for the fall semester.
• FIU/FTBG graduate student Catherine Bravo (Feeley lab) will spend May – August in her home country of Peru in order research patterns of carbon allocation in cloudforest plant species. This research will help inform our understandings of the impacts of global climate change on carbon sequestration in tropical forests and will form the foundation of Catherine’s thesis project.
• FIU/FTBG graduate student Brian Machovia (Feeley lab) will remain in Miami over the summer in order to focus on his dissertation research investigating patterns of land conversion for Banana production in Central and South America. This research will be conducted primarily through the analysis of time series of remotely-sensed data (e.g., satellite and aerial images) combined with environmental data layers (e.g., temperature, precipitation, soil type, and topography), supplemented with field based data to be collected in the future. Bananas are one of the most widespread an important of all tropical crops yet their impact on the environment remains woefully understudied.
• FIU/FTBG Conservation Biologist Dr. Kenneth Feeley will spend May-July in southern Peru. In addition to assisting his graduate students, Evan Rehm, Catherine Bravo, and Brian Machovia. Dr. Feeley will be initiating a new series of field projects aimed at experimentally manipulating environmental conditions (temperature, precipitation, radiation) in the high puna grasslands above Cusco and monitoring the consequences for the establishment of cloud forest tree species. Understanding the role of environmental filters in limiting the distribution of cloud forest species is an important piece of data required to predict how this critical ecosystem will respond to climate change and other anthropogenic disturbances. Dr. Feeley will also take several exploratory trips throughout southern and central in order to scout new field sites and establish relationships with potential collaborators.


Only Words? Not this ‘UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE’
Sam Green uses visual poetry and other universal languages—music, gesture, and movement—to tell the story of Esperanto.
To call Sam Green’s Esperanto documentary The Universal Language a film about a “failed experiment” would itself be en epic fail. It’s a film about hope, dreams, and a visionary in search of a better world. It’s a paean to a 19th- and 20th-century mass movement that may seem as odd and foolish in retrospect as it was vital and necessary in its time. It’s a love-letter to optimists, written in the strangely pragmatic language of Esperantists. It was developed in conjunction with a few other chapters of Sam Green’s vivid and engaging live-cinema performance Utopia in Four Movements, which premiered at Sundance in 2010 and has now played all over the world. Green has added a new chapter to his work on utopian thinkers, with the debut of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-commissioned Yo La Tengo-accompanied The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller May 1 during the San Francisco International Film Festival. We spoke with Green, whose Universal Language film is still traveling the festival circuit, last week. (Join us April 26 as we celebrate Sam Green and other Fandor filmmakers in the San Francisco International Film Festival with a cocktail party at Public Works, SF.)
Keyframe: It’s really been a pleasure to watch your filmmaking, thinking, art and presentation evolve and grow over the years, and to see you emerge from the pack of documentary filmmakers to become such a stylized (I hate to use this word) ‘auteur.’ Was there an ‘aha’ moment for you in shifting to live presentation? With live music? (And I ask, because I saw elements of The Universal Language first as a live performance, in Utopia in Four Movements, workshopped at the Exploratorium in SF before debuting at Sundance, where I saw it again…!)
Sam Green: An aha moment? Actually there were a couple. One came when a guy named David Dorfman got in touch with me a couple of years ago. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’s a pretty well-known choreographer. He said that he wanted to do a dance piece on the Weather Underground and wanted to talk about my film. I was a bit dismissive in my thoughts: ‘A dance piece on the Weather Underground? What a crazy idea!’ I had really struggled w/ that film to get all of the facts straight and to make it as clear as humanly possible. I felt a real historical responsibility. How could you do any of that with dance??? What about all the complex ideas that would need to be communicated? So needless to say, I didn’t have much hope for the piece. But when I saw it later at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, I was actually blown away (no pun intended). It was fantastic! There weren’t any facts or figures, but it was still very powerful and deeply moving. Through light and movement and gesture and mood, David had been able to say a helluva lot. And it got me thinking about how different forms create different expectations with audiences. So when you see a documentary film on TV or go to see a doc in a theater, you expect a certain amount of linearity and clarity. That’s what we’ve come to associate with a documentary film. When you go to see a dance piece, you have a very different set of expectations. You expect a dance piece to speak to you in a much more abstract and poetic language. So seeing David Dorfman’s Underground was a pivotal moment for me. I became curious about different forms and the broader ways one can communicate with an audience. Another aha moment was seeing the live version of Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain. I loved that film and the ‘liveness’ was a huge part of the movie’s magic.
Keyframe: The music and soundtrack—between the Quavers and Dave Cerf’s sounds—really convey an ‘elegiac’ tone, as I know others have commented. Can you talk about your musical collaborators and how you come up with sound ideas to contrast and support your visual and narrative ideas?
When you see a documentary film on TV or go to see a doc in a theater, you expect a certain amount of linearity and clarity. That’s what we’ve come to associate with a documentary film. When you go to see a dance piece, you have a very different set of expectations. You expect a dance piece to speak to you in a much more abstract and poetic language.
Green: I’m a huge fan of the Quavers and Todd Griffin’s music. With Esperanto, there’s something wonderful and inspiring about the language and the movement around it. There’s also something that strikes me as quite melancholy. It might be that because I’m Jewish I’m predestined to respond to certain emotional chords like this one. In any event, I worked with Todd and Dave Cerf for the score to The Universal Language. Todd ended up doing most of the tracks. By now we know each other well and have developed a very good and satisfying collaboration; we go back and forth a bunch of times on each track. Sometimes I drive him a little crazy. But Todd is very good at understanding what I mean when I say something nutty sounding like ‘Can you make that track a little bit more ‘smiley’?’
Keyframe: Esperanto, as a subject, offers you so many opportunities to reflect on the century past’s idealists and where the urge to transform large swaths of the public to a notion/religion/ideology came from. Can you offer a short primer for readers of this Q&A on Zamenhof’s original impulse and where it came from? And please remind us of the forces who literally killed human beings over their desire to speak Esperanto together. Those were startling facts.
Ludwig Zamenhof grew up in the town of Bialystok, Poland, where there were four major ethnicities: Jews, Russians, Germans, and Poles. They all spoke different languages, and they all hated each other. There were even terrible pogroms. As a young man, Zamenhof had this inspiration that if people could speak a common language, they would see each other more as people—that this would help us to overcome war and racism. It was a wonderful vision.
Green: So Ludwig Zamenhof grew up in the town of Bialystok, Poland (incidentally, that’s where Dziga Vertov was from, and Alan Berliner‘s family as well, but that’s a different story). During Zamenhof’s time, there were four major ethnicities in Bialystok: Jews, Russians, Germans and Poles. They all spoke different languages, and they all hated each other. There were even terrible pogroms where lots of people were killed. So it was a very bad climate. And as a young man, Zamenhof had this inspiration that if people could speak a common language, they would see each other more as people—that this would help us to overcome war and racism. It was a wonderful vision. He spent many years putting together the language and actually published a book laying out the grammar and vocabulary in 1887. The word Esperanto fittingly means ‘one who hopes.’ With Espernato it was kind of a ‘right place, right time’ scenario. The early 20th century was a time when people believed in the power of grand social experiments to transform the world. Many of these blossomed during that time: communism, mass production, the League of Nations. So Esperanto fit into that. And during the early part of the 20th century, there was a thriving world-wide movement of people who spoke the language and believed that it would become a ‘second language’ for the world.
There still is a world-wide movement of people who speak the language today. But their hopes and expectations for Esperanto are more nuanced and perhaps tempered.
Keyframe: It truly is moving to see such a wide variety of human faces—Japanese, Swedish, a New Caledonian, Israeli, Finn (the list goes on)—seeking true understanding through a shared language. The way your camera pauses on those faces pre-interview lets us fall in love with them a bit. Do you do your own camerawork? And, secondly: gestures, facial expressions, human movement (we can tell when someone is tired and shuffling, wearied, in any language): Are these our true Universal language? In a sense, the way your film looks at people tells us this. I ask, also, because I believe your partner works in dance, so am curious if that’s had an influence on you.
Green: This is a good question. I actually love that non-verbal kind of communication in documentary. The gestures and facial expressions that people make can often be far more revealing and communicative than what a person is saying. So there’s a motif throughout the film of portraits of Esperanto speakers that Andy Black and I shot at a World Esperanto Congress in Yokohama Japan.
I’ve always been struck by how profoundly diverse the Esperanto movement today is. And also the fact that Esperanto speakers are across the board nice people. No matter where they are from, they are nice. So I wanted these portraits to evoke some of that. And just showing the people in some ways is a much more compelling portrait of the language than what they might say about it—how they might sell the language themselves.
Keyframe: Though we may want to believe we are the sole operators of our destinies, we live in another highly socially engineered era, the digital age. What do you predict will be the backlash against this one?
Green: Hmmmm. A complicated question. The digital age is amazing and in many ways really is a utopia. Look at Wikipedia, or even Google images. I love Google images and feel like it’s now become a fantastic cultural treasure on the level of the Royal Library of Alexandria.
But this is all a double-edged sword. People interact different with digital media than they do with traditional (tactile?) media. I know I do. In many ways, the digital media is throwaway stuff. There’s so much of it. I find myself approaching a song or movie on my computer with much less patience and sustained attention than I would a film in a theater or an album on a record player.
Digital media is also far less social in the how it’s consumed. And this is something I definitely think people are reacting against. People seem hungry for live events still and the kind of human interaction and in-the-moment-ness that comes with that. Look at Pop-Up Magazine in SF. It’s phenomenally popular. This is the inspiration for the ‘live documentaries’ I’ve been doing. I love the magic of cinema—the feeling when the lights go down and you are in a room full of strangers and you give yourself completely to the movie. You are subsumed by this odd collective experience. By doing live cinema events, a filmmaker can keep his or her work in that context.
Todd [Griffin] is very good at understanding what I mean when I say something nutty sounding like ‘Can you make that track a little bit more ‘smiley’?’
Keyframe: Are the linguists weighing in on your film? Where’s Noam Chomsky on all this?
Green: Lingusts are often very dismissive of Esperanto. Many think that Esperanto can’t possibly be a ‘real’ language—hell, some eye doctor in Poland just made the whole thing up!
There are other lingusts though that are interested in Esperanto and appreciate that it raises interesting questions about the nature of language and culture. And it also says much about language inequality in the world today—the way language is shaped by power and politics.
Keyframe: Please remind me of what the Esperanto word for ‘female scoundrel’ is. Do you yourself have favorite Esperanto swear words?
Green: The word for female scoundrel is Inacxo. There are lots of Esperanto words in general that I like. They often have a cool, sci-fi-ish sound to em. The word for the United States is Usono. ‘Hello’ is Saluton. Those are cool words!
Keyframe: How can viewers find the hip-hop tune created by the native Esperanto speaker that closes your film?
Green: Oh man, love that song. Who knew that a hip-hop song in Esperanto could be so catchy! And the lyrics are good too! That song is called ‘Nova Kanto’ and it’s by a Brazilian rapper named Tone. We have an interview with Tone (in both English and Esperanto) as well as lots of links to his stuff on the film’s website: esperantodocumentary.com.
Susan Gerhard is the editor of Keyframe.


|No.3 May 2007|
|Crop Prospects and Food Situation|
Low-Income Food-Deficit Countries1/ food situation overview
Prospects for the 2007 cereal crops deteriorate in North and Southern Africa
FAO’s early forecast for the 2007 cereal production of the LIFDCs as a group points to a crop of about 883 million tonnes, marginally above the good level of 2006. However, when excluding China and India, accounting for some two-thirds of the LIFDCs’ aggregate cereal output, production of the remaining countries is seen to decline slightly, following two consecutive years of substantial increases, but would remain above average.
Table 6. Cereal Production1 of LIFDCs ( million tonnes)
1 Includes rice in milled terms.
Note: Totals computed from unrounded data.
In Southern Africa, where the harvest of the 2007 main season coarse grains crops is well advanced, prolonged dry spells in parts, coupled with floods in others, have lowered outputs in all countries, except in Angola and Malawi, where a bumper crop is being gathered and an ample exportable maize surplus is anticipated. Sharp output reductions are expected in Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland, affected by severe dry weather, while in other countries the cereal output will still remain at normal or above-normal levels. In North Africa, rains in April arrived too late to benefit the winter wheat crop in Morocco, adversely affected by below-normal precipitation since the beginning of the season; the output is anticipate to decline by 50 percent from last year’s good level. In Egypt, the irrigated wheat crop is forecast to decrease but to remain at an average level. In Asia, prospects for winter crops, to be harvested from July, are overall favourable in CIS countries and in the Near East, where an increase in production is anticipated following good weather since the beginning of the season. In particular, in Afghanistan, despite localized losses due to flash floods, cereal output is anticipated to recover from last year’s drought-affected level. In the Far East, prospects for the 2007 wheat crops, about to be harvested, remain overall favourable. The subregion’s aggregate output of LIFDCs is forecast slightly above last year’s good level with larger crops in India, Pakistan and Nepal, more than offsetting lower outputs in China and Bangladesh.
Elsewhere in the group of LIFDCs, planting of the 2007/08 main season cereal crops is underway or about to start in Eastern, Western and Central Africa, as well as in Central America. For countries of Africa, FAO’s early and tentative production forecast assumes a return to average growing conditions and a drop of cereal yields from last year’s record levels.
Improvement in 2006/07 food aid allocations
The aggregate cereal import requirements of the 82 LIFDC’s in marketing years 2006/07 or 2007 (calendar basis) are estimated by FAO at 89 million tonnes, some 1.5 million tonnes above the previous year’s actual imports. This reflects an increase of about 6 million tonnes of wheat imports in India, which more than offset lower volumes in most of the other LIFDCs, notably in North, Eastern, Southern and Western Africa, where record or bumper crops were gathered in 2006. As a result of this good performance, the LIFDCs’ total food aid requirements in marketing years 2006/07 declined by one-third from the previous season’s level, to some 4.5 million tonnes or about 5 percent of their total cereal import requirements. Based on information received in GIEWS by mid-April, 68 percent of the food aid requirements have been covered by donors’ deliveries of pledges. In Southern Africa, where countries have just entered their new marketing year, about 80 percent of the food aid needs were covered, while total imports reached 93 percent of FAO’s initial forecast level. In countries of North Africa and in the four countries of Latin America, food aid deliveries/pledges have more than covered the requirements in 2006/07. Good progress has also been made in countries of CIS Asia, where the new marketing year will start next July, as well in Western and Eastern Africa where the seasons only started in November last year and in January 2007, respectively.
Table 7. Cereal import position of LIFDCs ( thousand tonnes)
1 The import requirement is the difference between utilization (food, feed, other uses, exports plus closing stocks) and domestic availability (production plus opening stocks). Utilization is based on historical values, adjusted upon assessment of the country’s current economic situation.
2 Estimates based on information available as of mid-April 2007.
Note: Totals computed from unrounded data.
1. The Low-Income Food-Deficit (LIFDC) group of countries includes food deficit countries with per caput annual income below the level used by the World Bank to determine eligibility for IDA assistance (i.e. US$1 465 in 2003), which is in accordance with the guidelines and criteria agreed to by the CFA should be given priority in the allocation of food aid.
|GIEWS||global information and early warning system on food and agriculture|


The office of Jeff Hammerbacher at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine sits in the middle of one of the most stark economic divides in the nation. To Hammerbacher’s south are New York City’s posh Upper East Side townhouses. To the north, the barrios of East Harlem.
What's below in the basement may be what's most interesting: Minerva, a humming supercomputer installed last year that's named after the Roman goddess of wisdom and medicine.
It’s rare to find a supercomputer in a hospital, even a major research center and medical school like Mount Sinai. But it’s also rare to find people like Hammerbacher, a sort of human supercomputer who is best known for launching Facebook’s data science team and, later, co-founding Cloudera, a top Silicon Valley “big data” software company where he is chief scientist today. After moving to New York this year to dive into a new role as a researcher at Sinai’s medical school, he is setting up a second powerful computing cluster based on Cloudera’s software (it’s called Demeter) and building tools to better store, process, mine, and build data models. “They generate a pretty good amount of data,” he says of the hospital’s existing electronic medical record system and its data warehouse that stored 300 million new “events” last year. “But I would say they are only scratching the surface.”
Combined, the circumstances make for one of the most interesting experiments happening in hospitals right now--one that gives a peek into the future of health care in a world where the amount of data about our own health, from our genomes to our Jawbone tracking devices, is exploding.
“What we’re trying to build is a learning health care system,” says Joel Dudley, director of biomedical informatics for the medical school. “We first need to collect the data on a large population of people and connect that to outcomes.”
To imagine what the hospital of the future could look like at Mount Sinai, picture how companies like Netflix and Amazon and even Facebook work today. These companies gather data about their users, and then run that data through predictive models and recommendation systems they’ve developed--usually taking into account a person’s past history, maybe his or her history in other places on the web, and the history of “similar” users--to make a best guess about the future--to suggest what a person wants to buy or see, or what advertisement might entice them.
Through real-time data mining on a large scale--on massive computers like Minerva--hospitals could eventually operate in similar ways, both to improve health outcomes for individual patients who enter Mount Sinai’s doors as well as to make new discoveries about how to diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases at a broader, public health scale. “It’s almost like the Hadron Collider approach,” Dudley says. “Let’s throw in everything we think we know about biology and let’s just look at the raw measurements of how these things are moving within a large population. Eventually the data will tell us how biology is wired up.”
Dudley glances at his screen to show the very early inklings of this vision of what “big data” brought to the world of health care and medical research could mean.
On it (see the figure above) is a visualization of the health data of 30,000 Sinai patients who have volunteered to share their information with researchers. He points out, in color, three separate clusters of the people who have Type 2 diabetes. What we're looking at could be an entirely new notion of a highly scrutinized disease. “Why this is interesting is we could really be looking at Type 2, Type 3, and Type 4 diabetes,” says Dudley. “Right now, we have very coarse definitions of disease which are not very data-driven.” (Patients on the map are grouped by how closely related their health data is, based on clinical readings like blood sugar and cholesterol.)
From this map and others like it, Dudley might be able to pinpoint genes that are unique to diabetes patients in the different clusters, giving new ways to understand how our genes and environments are linked to disease, symptoms, and treatments. In another configuration of the map, Dudley shows how racial and ethnic genetic differences may define different patterns of a disease like diabetes--and ultimately, require different treatments.
These are just a handful of small examples of what could be done with more data on patients in one location, combined with the power to process it. In the same way Facebook shows the social network, this data set is the clinical network. (The eventual goal is to enroll 100,000 patients in what’s called the BioMe platform to explore the possibilities in having access to massive amounts of data.) “There’s nothing like that right now--where we have a sort of predictive modeling engine that’s built into a health care system,” Dudley says. “Those methods exist. The technology exists, and why we’re not using that for health care right now is kind of crazy.”
While Sinai’s goal is to use these methods to bring about more personalized diagnoses and treatments for a wide variety of diseases, such as cancer or diabetes, and improve patient care in the hospital, there are basic challenges that need to be overcome in order to making this vision achievable.
Almost every web company was born swimming in easily harvested and mined data about users, but in health care, the struggle has for a long time been more simple: get health records digitized and keep them private, but make them available to individual doctors, insurers, billing departments, and patients when they need them. There’s not even a hospital’s version of a search engine for all its data yet, says Hammerbacher, and in the state the slow-moving world of health care is in today, making predictions that would prevent disease could be just the icing on the cake. “Simply centralizing the data and making it easily available to a broad base of researchers and clinicians will be a powerful tool for developing new models that help us understand and treat disease,” he says.
Sinai is starting to put some of these ideas into clinical practice at the hospital. For example, in a hint of more personalized medicine that could come one day, the FDA is beginning to issue labels for some medicines that dictate different doses for patients who have a specific genetic variant (or perhaps explain that they should avoid the medicine altogether). The “Clipmerge” software that the hospital is beginning to now use makes it easier for doctors to quickly search and be notified of these kinds of potential interactions on an electronic medical record form.
On the prediction side, the hospital has already implemented a predictive model called PACT into its electronic medical record system. It is used to predict the likelihood that a discharged patient will come back to the hospital within 90 days (the new health care law creates financial incentives for hospitals to reduce their 90-day readmission rate). Based on the prediction, a high-risk patient at the medical center now might actually receive different care, such as being assigned post-care coordinator.
Eventually, there will be new kinds of data that can be put in mineable formats and linked to electronic patient records, from patient satisfaction surveys and doctors’ clinical notes to imaging data from MRI scans, Dudley says.
Right now, for example, the growing volumes of data generated from people’s fitness and health trackers is interesting on the surface, but it’s hard to glean anything meaningful for individuals. But when the data from thousands of people are mined for signals and links to health outcomes, Dudley says, it’s likely to prove valuable in understanding new ways to prevent disease or detect it at the earliest signs.
A major limitation to this vision is the hospital’s access to all of these new kinds of data. There are strict federal laws that govern patient privacy, which can make doctors loathe to experiment with ways to gather it or unleash it. And there are many hoops today to transferring patient data from one hospital or doctor to another, let alone from all the fitness trackers floating around. If patients start demanding more control over their own health data and voluntarily provide it to doctors, as Dudley believes patients will start to do, privacy could become a concern in ways people don’t expect or foresee today--just as it has on the Internet.
One thing is clear: As the health care system comes under pressure to cut costs and implement more preventative care, these ideas will become more relevant. Says Dudley: “A lot of people do research on computers, but I think what we’re hoping for is that we’re going to build a health care system where complex models ... are firing on an almost day-to-day basis. As patients are getting information about them put in the electronic medical record system there will be this engine in the background."
[Image via Shutterstock]


Private aviation often plays victim to bad weather and hefty storage and maintenance fees. If light aircraft could double as road vehicles, pilots would have a more practical, safer way to fly.
The Transition has wings that extend and retract electronically, allowing it to take to the air and then drive home from the airstrip on city streets (where it can hit 65 mph and gets 35 mpg). Says Terrafugia CEO and CTO Carl Dietrich: "People like to call it a flying car, but it's really a street-legal airplane."
FAA standards require the Transition to weigh under 1,000 pounds when unoccupied. Carbon fiber and titanium, used for the fuselage and frame, have a higher strength-to-weight ratio than steel or aluminum.
Despite its shortcomings, the Transition does solve one of the biggest barriers to personal aviation: high storage costs. It fits neatly into a standard home garage, saving owners up to $1,500 a month on the cost of a hanger. It also puts to good use the U.S.'s 5,200 public-access airports, most of which see too little traffic to justify car-rental kiosks or cab lines.
1. Pass future flight and drive tests.
"We have to do things during testing that no pilot in their right mind would do," Dietrich says. The Transition is designed for casual cruising, but upcoming tests include aggressive acrobatics.
2. Ensure its street and sky legality.
Federal motor-vehicle standards never imagined something that could drive and fly. "It either complies with multipurpose vehicle standards," Dietrich says, "or we've gotten exemptions." Terrafugia is working with insurance providers to design plans for the Transition.
An initial run of 10 Transitions will roll out to customers once compliance testing is completed. After that, Terrafugia can ramp up production into the hundreds.


Contractor Sentenced in Espionage Case
A Dangerous Betrayal
The Case of the Cash Hungry Contractor
|East Tennessee Technology Park|
Two hundred thousand dollars—not a huge sum of money in return for betraying one’s country. But that’s exactly how much money Roy Lynn Oakley asked for when he attempted to sell stolen parts of uranium enrichment equipment to someone he thought was an agent of a foreign government.
Oakley’s contact was an “agent” all right, but not from a foreign country—it was an undercover agent from the FBI.
How it all began. In January 2007, our Knoxville office learned that Oakley—an employee of the East Tennessee Technology Park in Oak Ridge—was trying to sell restricted U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) materials.
The East Tennessee Technology Park was formerly known as the K-25 building, a DOE facility that opened during the 1940s and produced highly enriched uranium used in the manufacture of atomic weapons. DOE later shut down the facility and contracted with a company—Bechtel Jacobs—to dismantle and demolish the plant. Oakley was an employee of Bechtel Jacobs.
Working with DOE’s Office of Counterintelligence, we used sophisticated investigative techniques, interviews, and analysis of records to further pinpoint Oakley as a suspect.
The next phase. To catch Oakley in the act, we began an undercover operation. Our agent contacted Oakley and told him he was representing a foreign government and had heard that Oakley was offering to sell some classified materials. During recorded phone calls, Oakley said he had stolen parts of the uranium enrichment fuel rods and other related hardware items from his place of employment that he was willing to sell for $200,000.
Our undercover agent eventually agreed to the deal, and a face-to-face meeting was set up for January 26, 2007. Both parties showed up at the meeting place, money and classified components were exchanged, and Oakley was ultimately arrested and charged with violating the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
Oakley’s confession. So why did he do it? Not because of any anti-U.S. ideology. Not because he was angry at his employer. No, he did it purely for the money. Oakley wanted to retire from Bechtel during 2007 but was deep in debt and needed cash.
He told us he took the materials home with him and kept them in a metal box…until he could find a buyer.
In January 2009, Oakley pled guilty to trying to sell these materials. He admitted that he knew the items were “restricted” and that they play a crucial role in the production of highly enriched uranium which is used for atomic weapons (through what’s called the gaseous diffusion process). In June, he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Knoxville to six years in prison.
Upon Oakley’s sentencing, Knoxville Special Agent in Charge Rick Lambert said, “Bringing to justice the trusted insider who would betray America for private gain remains the FBI’s highest priority.”
- FBI Counterintelligence


Comments on the Mattes Study
- Mattes claimed to be using a "high dose" of coloring. However, the cookie provided by the Nutrition Foundation (and remember, this is an organization composed of additive and snack food producers and distributors) contained 13 mg of food dyes each. And they were identical to the placebo cookie. This means that there was TOO LITTLE color to change the color of the cookie!! If THAT is a high dose, how much coloring is actually in those colorful cookies and candies you buy in the store? Is it surprising that if you call the company and ask, they won't tell you?
- Letter written to the Feingold Association from a mom whose child was in the Mattes study
My daughter, Christine, was one of the children in the study.
Points I remember:
- Took a long time to do the study, because each time Chrissy got a "toxic" cookie she not only got hyper, but also got severe ear infections and sick. Her school work regressed, as much as it can in kindergarten. After school she was in a dance class the school sponsored, and after her "after school snack cookie" got so bad they called me to pick her up early.
- I also remember getting a phone call after it was completed, telling me that 5 out of 6 of the children reacted to the "toxic" cookies and that Chrissy was definitely one of those children.
The next day he published in Newsday that there was no significant proof. Even her teachers laughed.
- In the report he states some of the children did not eat all six cookies. That is correct! After 2 cookies, Chrissy was nuts; after 4 my family was ready to drive me off a ships plank for agreeing to this mess; also Chrissy was ready to kill me.
- As far as getting a cookie 1.5 hr before seeing him, only once did that ocur. I couldn't control her and drive the Long Island Expressway for 1.5 hours with her in a reaction.


Substantial evidence supports the BIA’s decision. While Zhang contends that she was persecuted when the village chief attempted to coerce her into marrying his son, and that she suffered this persecution on account of her membership in a particular social group, the alleged wrongs here do not rise to the level of persecution. Li Rong Zhang v. Attorney General of U.S., 2012 WL 3715337 (3rd Cir. 2012).
As someone who is not anything close to an expert in asylum law, I can’t say that I agree with the Third Circuit’s conclusion.
In Zhang, Li Rong Zhang petitioned for review of an order of the Board of Immigration Appeals affirming an Immigration Judge’s order removing her to the People’s Republic of China. Zhang claimed that the head of her village had threatened to put her in jail if she did not marry his son. The Immigration Judge, however, found that
[B]ased on the testimony of the respondent[,] [e]ven if one were to find her testimony credible, the Court would find that she has not suffered past persecution. She was not forced into a marriage. She was not detained. [A] [m]arriage proposal, even by someone you detest, does not rise to the level of persecution. Respondent’s family was not involved in this threat….This was strictly, if you were to believe the respondent, the village head making proposals to her on behalf of his son. And even though he was a powerful individual, according to the respondent, the Court finds the proposals do not rise to the level of persecution. Respondent’s testimony regarding being taken away from her home and being threatened with detention is unsupported by any credible evidence and again, the respondent was able to escape and live with a relative undetected.
With respect to future persecution, the respondent has been away from China for more than two years. It is inconceivable that the village head is still looking for her to marry his son. The respondent certainly could not have been the only single woman in the village. There is no evidence that the village head remains interested in having the respondent as a daughter-in-law. Th[e] statement that she would be forced to marry the son of the village head, were she to return to China, is purely speculative.
The Board of Immigration Appeals thereafter dismissed Zhang’s appeal, finding that “[f]or all the reasons noted by the [IJ], we agree that [Zhang] failed to carry her burden of establishing that she has suffered past persecution or has a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
As noted in the block quote that led this post, the Third Circuit subsequently denied Zhang’s petition for review. So, why did the Third Circuit find that what Zhang faced and would face was not persecution? According to the court,
Persecution is defined as “threats to life, confinement, torture, and economic restrictions so severe that they constitute a threat to life or freedom.” Fatin v. INS, 12 F.3d 1233, 1240 (3d Cir.1993). Persecution “does not encompass all treatment our society regards as unfair, unjust or even unlawful or unconstitutional.” Id.
Here, Zhang was not forced into marriage. She received two allegedly coercive marriage proposals and was threatened with detention. But she was not forced to marry Li’s son against her will, she was not detained, and she was able to escape the perceived threat and reside with her aunt in another part of China without being detected. As for Zhang’s claimed fear of future persecution, we agree with the IJ that, without substantial further evidence, “[i]t is inconceivable that the village head is still looking for her to marry his son” several years later. Without evidence showing a reasonable likelihood that Zhang experienced past persecution or has a well-founded fear of future persecution,…we agree with the IJ and BIA that she has failed to demonstrate that she qualifies for asylum.
Meanwhile, Judge Aldisert dissented, finding that a remand was appropriate so that
a number of legal questions of first impression, including: (1) whether the experience of forced marriage is “immutable”; (2) whether the ability to choose one’s spouse is so fundamental to human conscience and dignity that one should not be deprived of that experience by a forced marriage; and (3) whether Zhang may even maintain a past persecution claim on this ground as someone who has never actually been “forced into marriage” at—all indeed, she fled before she wed.
Again, I’m no expert in asylum law, so I have no answers to these questions, but I sure wish that the case would have been remanded to the BIA so that they could provide some answers.
I will say, though, that I’m quite confused by the majority’s contention that Zhang could not have feared future persecution because “‘[i]t is inconceivable that the village head is still looking for her to marry his son’ several years later.” I have no idea whether this conclusion is factually accurate, but what I do know is that, if Zhang is to be believed, the head of her village threatened to jail her if she did not marry his son. Yes, Zhang escaped from this coerced marriage by fleeing her village, but what type of reception should she expect when she returns home? I would think that the man that threatened her with incarceration if he didn’t marry his son might make good on that promise. I’m reminded of the statement of Secretary State Madeleine Albright in the wake of embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania: “Our memory is long, our reach is far.”


|Accelerating Infrastructure Innovations|
|Federal Highway Administration > Publications > Focus > July 2007 > ProVAL Produces a Smoother Ride in Ohio|
|July 2007||Publication Number: FHWA-HRT-07-015|
ProVAL Produces a Smoother Ride in Ohio
The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) optimized its diamond grinding strategy and achieved a smoother ride on a highway construction project recently by using the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Pavement Profile Viewing and Analysis (ProVAL) software. ProVAL allows users to view and analyze pavement profiles collected by inertial pavement profile measurement equipment. It is currently the only software application that can read data from numerous inertial pavement profilers and standardize the data using a common format (see November 2006 Focus). ProVAL's data format was recently adopted as an ASTM International standard, "E 2560-07: Standard Specification for Data Format for Pavement Profile." The new standard will be included in the 2008 Annual Book of ASTM Standards.
ODOT had resurfaced the asphalt pavement on U.S. 23 in southern Ohio and put a new deck on a bridge but the ride was found by its area engineer to exceed the State's acceptable levels. "We decided to diamond grind to correct the problem. We used the diamond grinding simulator in ProVAL to optimize our grinding strategy and help us determine where to grind. It made us smarter about what we were doing," says Brian Schleppi of ODOT. ProVAL's simulation was right on target with the independent calculations performed by ODOT's contractor, Safety Grooving and Grinding, and the actual grinding that was ultimately done for the project.
"I had been introduced to the program but we had never used it before," says Duff Parker of Safety Grooving and Grinding. "It could definitely help you pinpoint areas that needed corrective action. We will be using it in the future."
Diamond grinding for ODOT's U.S. 23 project was performed on June 13, 2007. "Everyone was very pleased with the result," says Schleppi. "We were able to remedy the rideability issues." For the section of the bridge that had the worst ride problem, the International Roughness Index (IRI) calculation was 152. A lower IRI means a smoother ride. The ProVAL simulation predicted an IRI of 108 after grinding, with the actual result being 70. Similarly, the bridge's left wheel path had an IRI of 324, with a predicted result of 208 after grinding. The final result was 128.
ODOT is requiring all of its contractors this year to use ProVAL to calculate pavement smoothness indices.
ProVAL, which traces its origins to FHWA's Long-Term Pavement Performance Program, was first introduced in 2001 as a tool for processing and analyzing pavement profile data. Road profilers use lasers and other technology to measure pavement smoothness, as calculated using indexes such as IRI. ProVAL's new 2.72 version, developed by the Transtec Group, Inc., in Austin, Texas, reflects user requests for new features. Features first introduced in version 2.7 include the ability to customize the software to reflect user preferences. Users can change the main screen, for example, so that it displays the features they use and removes those not needed. Users can also customize the data input and automate the setup selections, as well as define and save specific settings that comply with agency specifications. Another new feature is the Profile Editor. Using this tool, users can edit and filter data sets instantly and export the results to other software programs such as spreadsheets. Version 2.72 has further improved the reporting and table exporting features and enhanced the ability to customize ride statistics.
"ProVAL has gone a long way in optimizing diamond grinding," says John Roberts of the International Grooving and Grinding Association. "Whether it be a bridge deck or pavement, it removes the guesswork and produces a far better product at a far more inexpensive cost. It is a very innovative piece of software."
To download a free copy of ProVAL or to learn more about the software, visit www.roadprofile.com. The Web site also features a list of frequently asked questions on using ProVAL, resource documents, links to more information on pavement profiling and pavement smoothness, and a user forum.
To learn more about ODOT's use of ProVAL, contact Brian Schleppi at ODOT, 614-752-5745 (email: email@example.com). For more information on ProVAL, contact George Chang at Transtec, 512-451-6233, ext. 227 (email: firstname.lastname@example.org); Mark Swanlund at FHWA, 202-366-1323 (email: email@example.com); or Bob Orthmeyer at FHWA, 708-283-3533 (email: firstname.lastname@example.org).
United States Department of Transportation - Federal Highway Administration


The short stories in Feathers in the Wind are like feathers blown about helter-skelter in, at times, a gentle breeze and sometimes in a powerful gale. The Nightingale Revisited tells of love found, then lost, and found again. In American Tolstoy, a struggling writer learns that life itself is the most intriguing story of all. In the light-hearted story For Mozart Lover's Only, we meet Mr. Klein, who loves Mozart's music more than anything else in the world, and it is through this love that he meets the beautiful Natalie Brown. Will they find their bliss humming Mozart tunes together? We read about a knight, who delights in threatening the lives of others, only to learn through a young boy that it is his own life that could have been ended by one stroke of a sharp razor In Vaya Con Dios, two elderly widows meet on a cruise ship and learn that this beautiful song played a deeply emotional role in both of their lives. These, and the other stories, take you from Chicago to the Mexican Riviera, from Vienna to Russia, and to many places in between. And in each story, Helmut Stefan makes it seem as if he is talking directly to you, just to you, inviting you to share the joys and sorrows of his characters who all, in some way, have touched his life, too.


Calories In Vs Calories Out: The Basic Formula Explained
Written By: Suzanne Hiscock
In a world run rampant with fad diets, quick fixes and bogus claims, the most basic formula for weight loss has become lost in all the noise. Cries of “Why am I gaining weight?” are being answered with complicated eating habits:
- Eat this.
- Don’t eat that.
- Eat this with that.
- Don’t eat this with that.
It gets so confusing, don’t you think?
But when you understand the basic formula for weight loss, you’ll never be at the mercy of the diet companies again.
Let me take you back to the basics:
What is a Calorie, Anyway?
When it comes to weight loss, a calorie is simply a measurement of energy.
You usually hear the word calories used in two ways:
1) You hear it used in relation to food, as in, “That apple has 100 calories.”
2) You also hear the word calories in relation to calories burned, as in, “Walking burns 100 calories.”
When it comes to the food you eat, I want you to think of those calories as calories IN. You’re taking IN those calories; you’re taking in that “energy.”
When you eat a large apple, you’re taking IN 100 calories. When you eat 3 ounces of chicken you’re taking IN about 140 calories.
So, I want you to think of the food you eat as CALORIES IN.
When it comes to your body and the energy it uses, I want you think of that as calories OUT. You’re burning and using up that energy just like a car burns gasoline or like wood burning in a fireplace.
Your body is constantly burning calories for energy – even when you’re sleeping. Everything that your body does to stay alive burns energy. So, that’s your calories OUT.
Calories In Vs. Calories Out
Which brings us to a very basic weight loss concept: When healthy, non-pregnant adults eat more calories than their body can use, their body will store those extra calories as fat.
Here’s the basic equation:
Calories In MINUS Calories Out = Energy Balance
When it comes to fat loss, you want to create a negative energy balance — also known as a calorie deficit. When you create a negative calorie balance/calorie deficit, your body will burn your stored fat for energy.
For example, if you eat 2300 calories (calories in) but burn only 2000 calories (calories out), you create a positive energy balance of 300 calories. Do that every day and you’ll gain around 1lb every 12 days.
2300 – 2000 = +300 (positive energy balance/weight gain)
But, if you eat 1700 calories a day and burn 2000 calories a day, you create a negative calorie balance (-300). Do that every day and you’ll lose 1lb in about 12 days.
1700 – 2000 = -300 (negative energy balance/weight loss)
Your body is complex, no doubt about it. And there’s a lot going on as you move, sleep, digest and exercise throughout the day. Your body is busy repairing cells, building muscle and, well, just keeping you alive.
Your body will do different things with the different types of calories you eat, too. But I don’t want you to lose sight of this very basic fact: if you eat more calories than your body can use, it will store the extra calories as fat. You can eat the healthiest foods, but if you take in more calories than your body needs, you will gain weight.
Create a Calorie Deficit (Negative Energy Balance)
What you want to do to lose weight is to choose a daily calorie goal that will create a safe and healthy calorie deficit for you.
This is done using a formula that calculates the amount of calories your body burns in a day and then subtracting a certain amount of calories. But don’t worry! I have a calorie deficit calculator you can use, so you won’t be doing any math.
This daily calorie goal is different for everybody and it’s a goal that will change over time. But you need start somewhere and then adjust as time goes on.
Never Go Too Low
Before we get to the calorie deficit calculator there’s an important point I want to make. When it comes to creating a calorie deficit and setting a daily calorie goal, don’t go too low. This is critical. Your body needs a certain amount of calories to function properly. Women should eat at least 1200 calories or more a day; men should eat at least 1800 calories or more a day.
Use the FitWatch Calorie Deficit Calculator
You can use the the FitWatch Calorie Deficit Calculator to create your own daily calorie goal. If you have a FitWatch Calorie Tracker account, you can set your daily calorie goal in the tracker.
What you’ll do is select your gender and then type in your weight, height, age and your activity level. When you click the “Calculate” button, the calculator will give you a few different calorie deficit goals.
For the average person, I recommend a calorie deficit of 15% to 20%. That’s a moderate calorie deficit. You can round the number up or down, if you’d like. So, if you see something like 1785, you can round it up to 1800 or down to 1750.
Here’s a quick example. For a woman who is 200lbs, five feet five inches tall, 35 years old and lightly active, the estimated amount of calories her body burns in a day is almost 2300 calories. In order for her to create a moderate calorie deficit to lose weight, she could eat anywhere from 1800 to 1900 calories a day.
Now you know the basics of calories in vs. calories out. Create a daily calorie deficit goal that’s right for you to lose weight at a steady — and safe — pace and never be at the mercy of a fad diet again.
Just a quick side note: With this article, I wanted to explain the basic concept of creating a calorie deficit. There’s more to calories than just in/out. Quality of food and other factors come into play. But knowing the basic concept can go a long way to helping you understand weight loss.
|« Previous Post||Next Post »|


day 339 is December 5, non leap year. this is the day the visitation from God started in 1997. one of the major core concepts to come out of the years that followed was the role Jared the patriarch (Enoch's father) plays in the last days study. His name means Descend.
the first appearance of the Strong's 339h word Isles is found in:
"By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations."
years ago I read a book by John Walvoord where he speculates that these "Isles" are the United States.
I think when the Descending of the Lord begins (1 Thess 4:16), there's a division coming. this division may be of many things, one of which is countries. I know that Jared numbers are associated with dividing things into two parts. like maybe countries. like maybe the USA.
before I read the Genesis 10:5 verse, and looked at it's word by word break down as found here:
... I thought to myself, "If there is a real division of countries coming when the Lord Descends then one of these three numbers should appear in this verse, Genesis 10:5"
214, the hebrew gematria of Jared
527, the age Jared is when Enoch his on is 'taken'.
416, the greek gematria of Jared, which matches 1 Thessalonians 4:16, the Lord Himself shall 'descend' ....
this proved correct.
word six has an in-text gematria of 416


The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) has embarked on a process to potentially declare some conservation lands as surplus, and subsequently sell or trade them, or dedicate lands to uses other than the conservation purposes for which they were purchased.
Unlike the Land Assessments recently conducted by the St. Johns River Water Management District and Southwest Florida Water Management District, the staff at SFWMD is not releasing a information that reveals which parcels may be proposed to be declared surplus. Instead, SFWMD is starting by asking for public comments on ALL of its conservation land holdings. This presents a certain danger, in that it is possible the district could interpret “no response” from the public in regard to a particular parcel as “disinterest”, or an indication that the public, environmental and conservation organizations, do not care enough about that parcel to comment. Such parcels where “people don’t seem to care” could be at a greater risk for surplus disposal.
SFWMD is dividing the district up into several “Land Assessment Regions”, and is starting the evaluation in the northern reaches of the district, in the “Northern Lakes” district which consists of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes area in Orange, Osceola, and Polk Counties. We at Audubon Florida believe all of the listed properties should be retained in public ownership as conservation land; they constitute the true “Headwaters of the Everglades”. Properties being studied for possible surplus declaration include the Lake Tibet-Butler Preserve, the Shingle Creek floodplain properties in Orange County and Osceola County, the Lake Marion Creek and Reedy Creek floodplain tracts in Osceola and Polk Counties, and the SUMICA conservation area in Polk County.
Comments on these properties are being solicited until the end of business on February 11th, 2013. It is essential that the SFWMD receive substantial comments from numerous organizations and individuals evaluating these properties and recommending their retention as Conservation Lands. Comments should expressly recommend that properties not be declared surplus, and should state in particular why retention of these properties serves the “core missions” of the SFWMD: Flood Control, Water Quality protection/improvements, Water Supply, Natural Resource protection and restoration.
Comments MUST be submitted through the electronic forms on the District’s Web Page. You can access the web page, review detailed descriptions and many photographs of each of the properties, and submit comments at:


See Also: Ancient Maya & Turkey; Let’s Talk Turkey; 2 Hour Turkey Recipe; Turkey Tips; Turkey Recipes; Stuffing Recipes; Turducken; Turkey Trivia; Turkey Quotes; Thanksgiving Trivia; Thanksgiving Quotes; Stuffing Article; etc.
The flightless, huge, ugly-looking, domesticated turkey is more popular in North America than anywhere else in the world.
Indigenous to the Americas, wild turkey is a majestic, fast running bird more of interest to hunters than butchers. It was domesticated around 10 B C – 10 A D by Aztecs who ate its meat, and used its feathers for ornamentals purposes. According to accounts, they staged a turkey festival every 200 days and traded approximately 900 – 1000 birds daily in their markets. Mayan royal feasts included turkey wrapped in corn tortillas. By the time conquistadors arrive in the Americas, turkey had become the staple meat of Mayans, Aztecs, Incas and other indigenous peoples. Both H. Cortes and C. Columbus tasted turkey and found the meat tasty enough to take a few specimens to Spain. Soon turkey was popular amongst the European aristocracy due to its less stringy texture. Up to that time, nobility ate peacock and pheasant both of which have stringy flesh. From Spain, turkey spread to France and Italy, but today Europeans eat much less turkey than North Americans do.
Further east in the Middle East, turkey never really gained popularity although there are flocks that are paraded in residential streets. When a customer buys a bird, it is slaughtered right on the sidewalk and plucked. Not a pretty sight!
By the 16th century, British referred to the bird as turkeycock, but the origin of the word unclear. In India, turkey is called tuka by the Tamils (a south Indian people who were brought to Sri Lanka for tea picking). Today there are Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils), some claim the name comes from the guttural sound turkeys make, others call it hindi for Indian believing the bird came from there. The French call it dinde (also meaning from India = d’Inde which was eventually abbreviated) and a small specimen dindon, whereas South Americans refer to it as peru.
When the Pilgrims sailed to North America in 1620, they actually took a few domesticated turkeys with them in the Mayflower. There is however, a huge difference between the wild and domesticated turkey. In the wild the bird is fast (up to 40 kilometres), its eyesight and hearing are sharp. Although unattractive looking, the male has an iridescent plumage. During the day wild turkeys forage for seeds, berries, buds and grubs (even a little snake, frog or lizard may be a meal on occasion), and at night they fly into trees to roost.
Benjamin Franklin so admired turkeys that he proposed it as the national bird and when the eagle was chosen he was reportedly extremely disappointed.
Thousands of hunters pursued the wild turkey so persistently that by 1930 there were fewer than 30,000 specimens in the U S A. The wild bird was hunted to extinction in 1902 in Ontario. Conservationists introduced turkey in the wild successfully and today every province has a sizeable flock. In the USA all states boast large inventories except Alaska. Pelee Island, the most southerly landmass in Canada, has sizeable wild turkey population attracting hundreds of turkey hunters.
Commercially available turkey is completely different. It is specifically bred for its huge breast and tender meat. (Broad Breasted White was bred in the 1950’s for commercial use and today constitutes the majority available). It cannot fly at all, it cannot even run as it is too heavy and cannot mate due to the size of its breasts. Turkeys must be artificially inseminated in huge farms that resemble manufacturing plants. Although the natural colour of the turkey is black, commercial species are white-feathered. Most birds reach 10 Kg live weight in 15 weeks due to the constant availability of formulated feed and ample water. The food is designed to retain water in the body. Consequently roasting loss is significant.
Turkey meat is naturally dry; because the bird does not have a chance to create a fate layer that actually provides taste. For this reason carcasses are injected with vegetable oil solutions, water and salt to render it “self basting” an insult to the wild turkey.
Many people are now trying to revive breeds like Narragansetts, Bombon reds and Bronzes that resemble the original turkey.
In restaurant kitchens whole turkeys are used for Thanksgiving-, Christmas- and special dinners. Many chefs buy turkey rolls, which are available in various shades, white, dark or blended. Then you can buy sausages, breast or legs. Needless to say the natural taste and texture has been completely altered in an attempt to increase production and reduce market-ready weight growth time to I crease profits. Fortunately, a small fraction of food enthusiasts can differentiate between taste and texture and facsimiles thereof. They have started fighting to reverse the trend.
Article contributed by Hrayr Berberoglu, a Professor Emeritus of Hospitality and Tourism Management specializing in Food and Beverage. Books by H. Berberoglu
Please feel free to link to any pages of FoodReference.com from your website.
For permission to use any of this content please E-mail: email@example.com
All contents are copyright © 1990 - 2014 James T. Ehler and www.FoodReference.com unless otherwise noted.
All rights reserved.
You may copy and use portions of this website for non-commercial, personal use only.
Any other use of these materials without prior written authorization is not very nice and violates the copyright.
Please take the time to request permission.


Alaska schools highlight local menu items
Local program funded by state grant.
Dec. 17—Salmon and halibut on a school lunch menu has been happening in Juneau, Ala., as the school district looks for healthier and more local foods for kids. Juneau schools in August received a state grant to help fund Alaska Grown lunches. The school district plans to expand the program, but for now students, staff and suppliers are still getting used to the new meals.
Students flood the hallways as lunch starts at Thunder Mountain High School. They congregate at the lunch line, speeding through so they can sit and socialize. Most choose pizza, or a cheeseburger, but 18-year-old Alora Pilgrim picks up halibut with broccoli and red potatoes.


Back on the 'menu'?
Company starts polystyrene recycling program at Penn State.
For those of you who, like me, believed that polystyrene recycling was virtually dead in non-commercial foodservice, apparently it still has a pulse. I received a press release late Wednesday afternoon from Dart Container Corp. announcing that the campus dining program at Penn State University is working with Dart to recycle polystyrene.
The effort, the newest part of Penn State’s sustainability initiative, will take place in the university’s dining commons as well as several retail outlets. Bins into which students and other customers can dump their polystyrene will be installed in foodservice facilities, The polystyrene will be collected and sent to the university’s Office of Physical Plant, which has a recycling center. OPP employees will condense the polystyrene, which will then be picked up at Dart and taken to its headquarters, in nearby Lancaster, Pa., to be melted down and made into other useful articles.
I’ve not yet had a chance to talk with Penn State officials about this, so I’ll have more in the days to come. Back in the late 1980s, polystyrene recycling was hailed as the next “big thing” in the environmental movement. The petroleum-based material was going to collected in great quantities and remade into thousands of useful articles such as park benches.
The reality, as it turned out, was that it apparently cost more to collect and process the polystyrene than was profitable. So the initiative slowly seemed to die away. I know in New York City, where dozens of items are listed as “must recycles,” polystyrene is no longer in favor. Does this move by Penn State signal a swinging of the pendulum back in a positive direction? We’ll see.


latest boardroom guests
v St Mirren
Dundee Survival Group are the latest visitors to Dens Park under the Community Initiative. For over 30 years, DSG provide a service to homeless people living in and around Dundee, not just providing a place to stay, but also vital support services. Dundee FC Supporters’ Society spoke with Morag Maich about the work of DSG, and the services they provide.‘From its’ inception in 1982 our aim at Dundee Survival Group has been to aid the rehabilitation and resettlement of the single homeless in Dundee and its environs. We are committed to helping all single homeless people regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, race, religion or of any other opinion.’ ‘Although our clientele has changed since 1982 it is still often the most vulnerable in society who we house at DSG. Oftentimes the provision of accommodation is not enough to make sure people can conquer homelessness. Homelessness is often a symptom of complex needs including addictions, mental health, and relationship breakdown. Many of our service users present with significant issues and often particularly challenging behaviours. Many have problems with subsance misuse, mental health, social problems and physical disabilities although not all do. Many homeless people carry with them the distressing experiences they have suffered which led to their homelessness in the first place. Often homelessness is combined with high levels of poverty and poor health.’‘At DSG we help by providing temporary supported accommodationThe accommodation is self-contained, fully furnished flats and furnished single bedrooms. Service users who reside in our bedroom accommodation are provided with 3 meals a day, a residents’ TV lounge, tea and coffee and laundry facilities. Some of these service users require a high level of assistance from our support workers but not all. Service users housed in flats are usually more independent and as such are expected to budget, shop and cook for themselves and maintain the flat in a tenable condition. These service users can and do come from all walks of life. We provide support to all residents by trained and qualified support workers. All service users are allocated a key worker when they arrive and they will receive practical and emotional aid and assistance from that person throughout their stay.’ ‘DSG works alongside many other services, both statutory and voluntary including social work, local drug and alcohol projects, training projects, voluntary projects and local council projects. Service users who are not in employment or studying have the opportunity to and are encouraged to attend various training and voluntary schemes. We have a private medical room which is used by the “Health and Homeless Outreach Team” which visits us every month. We regularly run AA and NA meetings and invite a variety of agencies along to offer help and support to our service users.’ ‘There are many negative consequences as a result of homelessness. Poor physical and emotional health is often at the top of the list. Homeless people often encounter a lot of health issues in their lives. Their health gets worse from time to time because they lack attention from doctors, friends and family members. People who are living “rough” encounter further problems such as cold injury, abuse, assault and nutritional deficiencies.
The general public usually have misconceptions about homeless people. These misconceptions are oftentimes based on inaccurate information presented by the media or anecdotal evidence. However the homeless population in Dundee is as varied as the reasons why people become homeless. According to recent Scottish Government statistics the main reason for homelessness is the result of a relationship breakdown. This may mean the paternal relationship, a marriage or life partner or a friendship. The largest group of people who are homeless are single adults without resident children, aged between 25 -35. Some may have been living rough for a while; others may have been recently released from prison or hospital; they may have recently left the armed forces; some become homeless because they are escaping violence in their homes and others due to relocation for employment reasons. Not all homeless people have issues with substance misuse and they are not all in receipt of benefits. They do not live with us for free and are expected to pay rent and a service charge.’
‘People who use our service usually have very little or no belongings beyond clothing and some personal items. We can provide all they need whilst they are residing with us (in both bedroom and flat accommodation) such as beds, bedding, sofa, cooker, fridge, carpets and kitchen utensils. We receive no government funding for this. All these items are either purchased through funds raised or are donated by companies or members of the public. We keep costs down through buying reconditioned items or by trawling recycling sites which offer items free. Despite this the cost o
f replacing items is increasing. We are always in need of good quality furnishings and working white goods as well as toiletries and warm clothing.’
If you feel you could donate any of the above goods please feel free to contact me at firstname.lastname@example.org.
If you are an internet shopper you can donate to us just by doing your regular shopping online. It won’t cost you any money and you’ll be helping us raise much needed funds. To find out more go to:www.easyfundraising.org.uk/causes/dundeesurvival
Dundee FC Supporters’ Society would like to welcome Dundee Survival Group to Dens Park, and would once again urgeour supporters to take some time to catch up with another local charity doing fantastic work to help the homeless in the Dundee area.
Source: Dundee Mad
Related Dundee News


The university was founded in 1908 when a local YMCA in Youngstown, OH, started offering college courses on law, business and engineering. The university adopted its current name in 1955. It offers more than 115 undergraduate majors as well as more than 30 graduate programs. Youngstown State has six fraternities and seven sororities. The 145-acre campus is home to five university residence halls and a $12 million fitness center. The Ward Beecher Planetarium at Youngstown State is free and open to the public and features a new state-of-the-art dome video system called the Spitz SciDome. The number of female faculty in the YSU College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics has increased more than 40% in the last seven years, part of a concerted effort to boost the presence of women in the college's student and faculty ranks. The university competes in NCAA Division I athletics.


There are often questions about how to identify the 1932, 1933, and 1934 Model B, BB, and Model 46 Pickup cabs. The cabs were similar but different each year. The major differences relate primarily to firewalls, back panels, and fuel tanks.
Pictured above is the 1932 Model B and BB truck cab. The most distinguishing feature of this cab is that it uses the same separate firewall as the Model B cars. The separate firewall design is used only on 1932 cabs.
Pictured above is the 1933 and 1934 style Model BB and Model 46 cab with the integral welded firewall. This firewall is not removable, and is unique to truck cabs.
The pic above shows the back panel of a 1932 cab, which was also similar to 1933. Contrast this with the next pic of a 1934 back panel.
The last pic above shows the 1934 cab backpanel. For 1934, Ford added another wide reveal molding shape above the previous moldings in the back panel stamping. This was done to stiffen the back panel and reduce noise and drumming.


- New Issue
- Books & Reviews
- About Us
Poverty From the Ground Level
Why are some countries rich and others poor? Differing accounts put more or less weight on the role of policies, geography, culture, history, and international interventions. Only by answering this question can one decide how best to reduce poverty in low-income countries. Yet few debates about public policy are more contentious. More than half a century of intensive efforts to improve the lot of the poor in the developing world has had mixed success. Although some countries, such as China, have made enormous progress in reducing poverty, many others have languished. Today, most estimates suggest that more than one billion people live on less than $1.25 per day.
Poverty presents both a moral and an intellectual challenge. No one can fail to be moved by seeing the slums that plague so many parts of the developing world. And the fact that one can travel a few hours by plane and find extremes of wealth and deprivation at either end of the journey is an insult to economists' notions of rationality, efficiency, and equity. There is no greater challenge to the discipline.
Yet traditional economics alone is not enough to grasp the problem fully. I learned this at a pivotal moment early in my career when a senior colleague asked me about my research interests. I proudly listed development economics among them -- and was promptly deflated when he told me that he, too, had once been interested in development, until it dawned on him that most of the problems of the developing world were political and so he did not have the necessary expertise to study the issue. Thankfully, the field of economics has changed a lot in the years since, and issues of politics and economics are routinely interwoven when trying to understand persistent poverty.


By D.R. Bartlette
Fayetteville Free Weekly
As holidays go, Valentine’s Day just doesn’t fit in. Sure, we have secular holidays to honor mothers, fathers, veterans and even administrative professionals. And although these holidays generally require the purchase of flowers or a dinner out, they are tame, family-friendly affairs.
Valentine’s Day doesn’t fit in with any religious holidays, either. Most of these can be observed in a church or with your family over a big dinner.
But, Valentine’s Day is the one holiday devoted to love, romance and, yes, sex — not exactly the kinds of things associated with the church. Despite cutesy classroom parties with pink cupcakes and chalky conversation hearts, Valentine’s Day is a decidedly adult holiday.
The background on Valentine’s Day is sketchy at best. Officially, Pope Gelasius declared St. Valentine’s Day as a church holiday in 498 C.E. The problem is, there were at least three St. Valentines that it could have been named for. The most popular choice was a priest who lived in the 3rd century C.E.
The Roman Emperor Claudius, seeing how lovesick his soldiers were when separated from their wives on long campaigns, declared marriage illegal. St. Valentine, defying the emperor, married young couples in secret. St. Valentine was captured and ordered to be executed.
While he was in jail, many of the couples he had married would visit him, leaving gifts and flowers. Legend has it that during his imprisonment, St. Valentine fell in love with his jailer’s daughter. As he was being led to his execution on Feb. 14, he passed a note to the woman he loved and signed it, “Your Valentine.”
Some think the holiday has much older origins — going back to the Roman Lupercalia, usually celebrated around Feb. 13-15. The holiday was a purification and fertility ritual involving a goat sacrifice and some light lashing — a far cry from today’s tender rites. There was rumored to be a sex lottery associated with this holiday as well — all the single women put their names into a large urn for the local bachelors to draw — but scholars say there is no real evidence for this.
It turns out that Valentine’s Day may be the creation of — who else? — a poet. Not just any poet, mind you, but Geoffrey Chaucer. Before Chaucer’s time in the High Middle Ages, there was no connection between St. Valentine’s Day and romantic love. In fact, the first recorded association between the two was in Chaucer’s 1382 “Parlement of Foules”:
“For this was on St. Valentine’s Day/When every bird cometh there to chase his mate.”
In Great Britain, Valentine’s Day didn’t really get popular until the 17th century. Back then, there was a custom of drawing lots; when you drew someone’s name, you had to give them a gift and a title, such as: “Most Courteous and Most Faire.” One superstition held that the first single person of the opposite sex that you met on St. Valentine’s Day morning was destined to become your spouse.
By the mid-18th century, it was common for friends and lovers to exchange tokens of affection, and by the end of that century, printed valentines had replaced handwritten notes. It was around 1847 that Esther Howland of Worcester, Mass., made the first mass-produced valentines of embossed paper and lace. Now, according to the American Greeting Card Association, Valentine’s Day is second only to Christmas in greeting-card sales.
The heart symbol found on most valentines became popular in Victorian times. As a symbol for love, and the human heart, it is enigmatic. It looks nothing like a human heart, so why is it called a “heart” and associated with love?
There are at least two theories on its origins. One theory states that it comes from Africa — the shape strongly resembles the shape of the seed pod of the plant silphium. Silphium was used as a contraceptive and was so popular that it was harvested into extinction. Another theory states that the heart shape isn’t meant to represent a heart, but rather the vulva. Either way, it seems as though this symbol was originally associated with a very different organ than the one it is now.
Like Christmas has Santa Claus, Valentine’s Day has Cupid, the Roman god of erotic love and beauty. Said to be the son of Venus, Roman goddess of love, and Mars, Roman god of war, he is usually portrayed as a baby or child. Sometimes he’s shown blindfolded, as a metaphor for the idea that “love is blind.” He is said to be fickle and playful, and he delights in playing pranks on unsuspecting humans and gods. He carries two sets of arrows: one gold-tipped set, which inspires love, and one lead-tipped set, which inspires hatred.
The Greeks and Romans also associated red roses with their goddesses of love and sex, and since ancient times, the rose has been a symbol of love and beauty — a fitting gift for a romantic occasion.
Chocolate came to us from the Aztecs of central Mexico. It was called xocolatl (pronounced shock-o-LOT-el) and was associated with Xochiquetzal (pronounced sho-chee-KET-zel), the Aztec goddess of fertility. The Spaniards brought chocolate back to Europe in the 16th century, and it quickly became a favorite in the royal palaces and courts.
It has long been thought to be an aphrodisiac — the emperor Montezuma was said to eat copious amounts of cocoa beans to fuel his romantic exploits. According to the New York Times, chocolate contains two chemicals that may contribute to its spicy reputation. One, tryptophan, is a building block of serotonin, a brain chemical involved in sexual arousal. The other, phenylethylamine, a stimulant related to amphetamine, is released in the brain when people fall in love.
Its aphrodisiac effects, however, have not been verified. According to the New York Times, most researchers believe that those chemicals are present in amounts too small to have any measurable effect on arousal. Perhaps, researchers believe, chocolate’s arousing qualities are more psychological than physical. Or, perhaps it’s simply due to the sensual pleasure of eating it.
As for the heart-shaped box they come in, Richard Cadbury, son of the founder of Cadbury’s, is credited with its invention in 1868.
Today, Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the U.K., France and Australia. It is a $14 billion industry, with some 180 million red roses, 36 million heart-shaped boxes of candy and 1 billion cards purchased each year.
What do you plan to do for your sweetie? What do you think about Valentine’s Day in general? Respond at www.freeweekly.com


Picture Book Manuscript? Check.
Targeted Agent List? Check.
Query Letter? Heck no!
We all know that writing for very young children is different than penning novels for older kids and adults. Make no mistake, writing a query letter for picture books is an equally unique process. It is also highly nuanced, making it necessary for writers to really research potential agents and their guidelines.
In my experience, more agents are open to receiving a full manuscript for picture books than for any other age group. In part, this is due to short word counts. After all, it is easier to enjoy a book by reading the book rather than by reading a summary of it. With picture books topping out at 500 words, manuscripts can be shorter than the query letters representing them.
Thus, e-querying agents for picture books falls into two distinct categories.
- Agents who accept manuscripts along with a query letter.
- Agents who do not accept manuscripts with a query letter.
You can figure out your targeted agents' preferences by visiting AgentQuery, Query Tracker, agent websites/blogs and market resources such as those found at and by Writer's Digest. Verla Kay's Blue Boards is another great resource, as is the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
For the sake of space, I will address only the first instance (with manuscript), as a cold query letter without a manuscript or sample pages is the same for picture books as it is for older novels. Additionally, the example provided below is not a MUST DO, but rather a guideline that I used when searching for my agent. My method is a conglomeration of info gathered on websites, via magazine articles, at writing conferences and my own personality.
Subject Line: Query: TITLE, picture book, 475 words (Capitalize your title.)
Method to My Madness: all my pertinent information is available at a glance. Agents immediately know I'm sending a query letter for a picture book within the acceptable word count. They should also get a feel for my manuscript based on my title. In this way, I'm not wasting anybody's time.
It also serves a secondary purpose. If an agent were to provide feedback and request a revision, a simple change to my subject line would keep Said Agent up to date on what is coming in, while remaining consistent and keeping my title in the agent's mind. My new subject line would look like this: Requested revision for TITLE.
Dear Mr. Agent Awesome: (Don't forget to double check spellings for names and end with a colon.)
(Very brief bio and/or a relevant blurb on why you chose this agent.)
As a library board member, a child advocate in the court system and a past preschool teacher, I recognized a need for stories about XYZ. I am a member of the SCBWI and a moderator on AgentQuery Connect. I have also presented at Young Writer's Conference across Southwestern Minnesota.
I follow your blog/met you at a conference/etc ... and feel TITLE may address your interest in XYZ (a tie into your bio would be nice). Per your guidelines, I have included the full manuscript for my picture book.
Method to My Madness: The agent will get to read my manuscript. It's pasted into the body of the text, and therefore does not require a blurb. In this instance, I feel it is a good idea to let the agent know who we are and what we're doing. This is our time to connect with the agent and let our personalities shine through.
But be brief. Agents have little time to wade through our backgrounds from infancy to old age. We should provide only those details that lend credence to our ability to write this particular story. Case in point, I said nothing about my pubbed works in the adult arena or that I have four children. Avoid telling the agent about the story. Again, Agent Awesome will have the opportunity to read our text as long as we don't bore him with our life histories first.
I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you.
Method to My Madness: I'm a people person. A warm thanks is my style. Some people may argue it lacks professionalism or that it sounds needy. I tend to believe it's a whole lot better than a sterile and abrupt end such as "Thank you" or a rude "Call me". The choice is yours, but know that agents don't reject a manuscript based on this line. And if they do, they're likely not the kind of agent you want.
Words From The Woods
Method to My Madness: with luck an agent will need to contact us. If we fail to provide this information, we may inadvertently slow down the process or fail to make a viable contact with an interested agent altogether. I do add my blog address to my writing correspondence, as an interested agent may google me. If you don't have one, don't fret. Blogs are not necessary to secure an agent.
Next, paste your manuscript into the remainder of the email—never, ever send agents to your website or blog to read it or send it as an attachment unless expressly requested by the agent—and check for the following things:
- formatting: spaces, line breaks, etc. You want a clean copy for easy reading.
- white space: you may need to adjust how your manuscript looks to make it easier on the agent's eyes.
- italics should be capped or underlined, as some email servers don't support fancy schmancy text.
- likewise, centered titles can be brought to the left margin for a clean look.
Writing a query letter is not as difficult as it sounds, particularly when we can submit our manuscripts at the same time. When sending writing samples is not an option, my picture book query letters have two extra paragraphs: one for my hook and the second for my mini-synopsis. I also combine my bio and agent search info to make one small paragraph.
How about you? What tips do you have for writing picture book queries? What do you put in your subject lines and how do you close? Do you include a hook and mini-synopsis when sending your manuscript? If so, why? Do you tailor your manuscripts based on the agents you send to? If so, how? Lastly, where's your go-to resource for agent information?
Curious minds want to know!


Rocky Mountain Research Station Publications
RMRS Online Publication
RMRS-RP-49: Sound recordings of road maintenance equipment on the Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico
Delaney, D. K.; Grubb, T. G. 2004. Sound recordings of road maintenance equipment on the Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico. Res. Pap. RMRS-RP-49. Fort Collins, CO: USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. 56 p.
The purpose of this pilot study was to record, characterize, and quantify road maintenance activity in Mexican spotted owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) habitat to gauge potential sound level exposure for owls during road maintenance activities. We measured sound levels from three different types of road maintenance equipment (rock crusherlloader, dozerlroller, and grader), from seven distances (30,60, 120, 180,240,320, and 400 m), in two different habitat types (forested and meadow sites) on the Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico, on 22-23 October 2002 to determine how sound varied over distance, habitat type, topography, and stimulus type. Sound levels increased as the distance between road maintenance activity and microphone locations decreased, regardless of stimulus type or habitat type. Concomitantly, the amount of sound energy within the middle frequency range decreased substantially with increasing stimulus distance from microphone locations. The frequency range over which owls can potentially hear road maintenance events decreased with increasing stimulus distance. Sound recordings of road maintenance equipment were louder at tree microphones than at base microphones, regardless of stimulus distance, stimulus type, and site location. The difference in sound levels between tree and base microphones at each distance was consistently louder at meadow sites (tree microphones were located in trees along the edge of the meadow during testing at the meadow site) compared with forested sites, regardless of stimulus type or stimulus distance. Tree microphones registered a greater proportion of sound energy from road maintenance activities in the middle frequency range than at base microphones, regardless of stimulus type, stimulus distance or site location. Sound level and frequency spectra varied by stimulus type. Rock crushing equipment registered the highest sound levels of any of the road maintenance equipment tested, regardless of stimulus distance or habitat type. Rock crushing equipment had the greatest amount of sound energy in the middle frequency range of all the road maintenance equipment tested, followed by the dozerlroller and the grader, regardless of stimulus distance or habitat type. Road maintenance equipment was consistently louder than background ambient forest and meadow sound levels over a range of distances from 30 to 400 m. The extended duration of both rock crusher sound and the multiple passes required of the grader and dozerlroller are additional, potentially negative considerations. Based on our previous sound research with this species, it appears that spotted owls are capable of hearing all the sound sources tested during this pilot study out to distances of at least 400 m.
Keywords: sound recordings, tree microphones, road maintenance, Lincoln National Forest, Mexican spotted owl, Strix occidentalis lucida
About PDFs: For best results, do not open the PDF in your Web browser. Right-click on the PDF link to download the PDF file directly to your computer. Click here for more PDF help or order a printed copy of this publication.
The PDF below have been scanned and converted to text. Some errors may occur.
PDF File Size: 4.1 MB
Sound recordings of road maintenance equipment on the Lincoln
National Forest, New Mexico
Electronic Publish Date: April 14, 2006
Last Update: Juanuary 15, 2010
RMRS Publications | Order a publication | Contact Us