A century of effective fire suppression has radically transformed many forested landscapes on the east side of the Cascades. Managers of dry forests critically need information to help plan for and implement forest restoration. Management priorities include the stabilization of fire regimes and the maintenance of habitat for the northern spotted owl and other old-forest associates.

Timber harvest following wildfire leads to different outcomes depending on the biophysical setting of the forest, pattern of burn severity, operational aspects of tree removal, and other management activities. Fire effects range from relatively minor, in which fire burns through the understory and may kill a few trees, to severe, in which fire kills most trees and removes much of the organic soil layer. Postfire logging adds to these effects by removing standing dead trees (snags) and disturbing the soil. The influence of postfire logging depends on the intensity of the fire, intensity of the logging operation, and management activities such as fuel treatments. In severely burned forest, timing of logging following fire (same season as fire vs. subsequent years) can influence the magnitude of effects on naturally regenerating trees, soils, and commercial wood value. Removal of snags reduces long-term fuel loads but generally results in increased amounts of fine fuels for the first few years after logging unless surface fuels are effectively treated. By reducing evapotranspiration, disturbing the soil organic horizon, and creating hydrophobic soils in some cases, fire can cause large increases in surface-water runoff, streamflow, and erosion. Through soil disturbance, especially the construction of roads, logging with ground-based equipment and cable yarding can exacerbate this effect, increasing erosion and altering hydrological function at the local scale. Effects on aquatic systems of removing trees are mostly negative, and logging and transportation systems that disturb the soil surface or accelerate road-related erosion can be particularly harmful unless disturbances are mitigated. Cavity-nesting birds, small mammals, and amphibians may be affected by harvest of standing dead and live trees, with negative effects on most species but positive or neutral effects on other species, depending on the intensity and extent of logging. Data gaps on postfire logging include the effects of various intensities of logging, patch size of harvest relative to fire size, and long-term (10+ years) biophysical changes. Uncertainty about the effects of postfire logging can be reduced by implementing management experiments to document long-term changes in natural resources at different spatial scales.

Mule deer populations in central Oregon are in decline, largely because of habitat loss. Several factors are likely contributors. Encroaching juniper and invasive cheatgrass are replacing deer forage with high nutritional value, such as bitterbrush and sagebrush. Fire suppression and reduced timber harvests mean fewer acres of early successional forest, which also offer forage opportunities. Human development, including homes and roads, is another factor. It is this one that scientists with the Pacific Northwest Research Station and their collaborators investigated in a recent study.

Nationally, there is growing public interest in and policy pressure for developing alternative and renewable sources of energy. Wind energy facilities in the Pacific Northwest expanded rapidly over the past decade, as a result of state policies that encourage wind energy development. While much of the development thus far has occurred on private lands, there is interest in expanding onto federal land. However, there are concerns about the impacts of wind energy on wildlife. Wind energy facilities have the potential to harm wildlife both directly through collisions with turbines and transmission lines, and indirectly by modifying habitat. This report synthesizes the available scientific literature on potential wind energy facility impacts to wildlife, with a focus on the Pacific Northwest (Oregon and Washington), and summarizes the current best management practices recommended in federal and state guidelines for wind energy development. Research gaps in our understanding of wind energy impacts on wildlife remain. Future research needs include long-term, multisite, experimental studies of wind energy impacts on wildlife, improved ability to estimate population-level and cumulative impacts of wind energy facilities on wildlife, and better knowledge of key wildlife species' migration and demography.

Being brought up in Newcastle holds many different memories for all of us and being a Geordie is something to be proud of.

He was granted leave to seek a judicial review into claims the DoH unlawfully directed a watchdog body to suspend some checks on facilities during the Covid-19 emergency

On MAY 3rd, THE BLUES FOUNDATION – celebrating 40 years - held a virtual BLUE MUSIC AWARS (BMAs) ceremony. The 41st annual event was hosted by SHEMEKIA COPELAND, and the presenters … more

The INTERNATIONAL SONGWRITING COMPETITION (ISC) has revealed its 2019 winners. The top honor for 2019 goes to AUSTRALIAN artist and songwriter TONES AND I for the song "Dance … more

The CLEVELAND INDIANS' 22-game winning streak in 2017 will get a replay on 22 straight nights starting MONDAY (5/4) on iHEARTMEDIA Active Rock WMMS/CLEVELAND and some of the INDIANS' … more

Statement Highlights: In a new scientific statement, the American Heart Association supports the creation of specialized multidisciplinary clinical programs that combine cardiovascular medicine and genetics expertise. These specialized programs would use genetic information to better treat patients with inherited heart conditions, as well as assess family members without current heart problems and take steps to reduce their risk.

There are many apps are available on Microsoft store for free which can be installed very easily but who knows? That is why we are sharing 8 Wallpaper Photos Apps On Microsoft Store You (Might) Never Knew For Windows. So, without any further ado let’s take a...

The post 8 Free Wallpaper Photos Apps On Microsoft Store You (Might) Never Knew For Windows appeared first on SmashingApps.com.

The association of dispositional optimism with health-related factors has been well established in several clinical populations, but little is known about the role of optimism in recovery after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Given the high prevalence of cognitive complaints after TBI, the present study examined the association between optimism and cognitive functioning after TBI.

What do you do if you’re partway through an important project for a client and you get, well… stuck? You simply can’t wring any more good ideas from that brain...

The post Getting Those Creative Juices Flowing Again appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

I was just sitting in the back listening to Shayne Sanderson from Insctinct, who talked about their e-commerce plugin and a new plugin that released today.. Once he finished, Jason dug his hand in the ticket bucket and my ticket was called. I won a Pro Revolution Theme Pack from Brian Gardner. Totally sweet!

The post Winner: Free Revolution Theme appeared first on WPCult.

I love paddling on the Horsetooth Reservoir in cold season. Boat ramps are closed, no power boat traffic, usually quiet and calm. Snow and ice can enhance scenery. A great time to paddle, train, relax or photograph. The Horsetooth stays […]

A review of the renewed book Wayshowing > Wayfinding from Per Mollerup.

For years the only bit of feedback web developers could get was via alert("{str}") calls. These days we have the web console but, in rare cases, we don’t have a console and alert calls are our only window into a value at a given time. One problem: if an alert sneaks into production code, your […]

The post Override window.alert appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

Video games are always a fun time, something we desperately need during our COVID lockdown. A few years back I shared how to play retro games on Mac, as well as how to patch games to play popular ROM hacks like Grand Poo World and Invictus. One disadvantage that Macs have, however, is performance — […]

The post How to Play Retro Game ROMs on Windows appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

In a blog, Opera Software Developer Relations team member Tiffany B. Brown looks at code injection, error throwing and handling and mobile debugging. She notes Opera Dragonfly and its remote debug features provide a way to debug mobile sites from their desktop. Brown mentions WebKit’s recently added remote debugging capabilities, folded into Google Chrome developer Read the rest...

HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end.  Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript Read the rest...

WinJS is a JavaScript framework for Windows 8, and David Rousset uses it here to create a quick RSS reader. He shows how in a tutorial series. This first article shows the way to build a welcome screen that employs WinJS ListView control. Blend and CSS3 are employed. The second tutorial shows work on the Read the rest...

We're familiar with awarding prizes for excellence, from the Oscars to The International Design Awards. But what if we started giving prizes to shame bad examples of design? Enter the Procrustes Awards.

Illustrations for Demetre's Winter Sweet Menu

Family trip to London and Windsor.

Next week I will be at WordCamp San Francisco and a week later at the WooConf! Maybe one or antoher […]

In small, daily actions you’re creating outcomes for yourself and by extension, creating your life. My man Tim Ferriss is a master at deconstructing the work of others and de-stilling it into a working practice. In fact, he wrote his book Tools of Titans as a reference of some of the tactics, routines, and habits of billionaires. In this quick episode, he shares the 3 key themes he’s seen in over 200 hundred people he’s interviewed. Enjoy! FOLLOW TIM: instagram | twitter | website Listen to the Podcast Subscribe   Watch the Episode  This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world’s largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker, money/life and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top experts — Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.

The post Win the Morning. Win the Day with Tim Ferriss appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Cheri has been a student and teacher of Zen for over 35 years. She is the author of over 20 books on Zen, and founded the Mountain View Zen Center and the Zen Monastery Peace Center. Cheri also founded a non-profit dedicated to transforming lives and ending suffering, Living Compassion, whose primary work is the Africa Vulnerable Children Project in Zambia. Ashwini co-facilitates and creates workshops with Cheri. She runs the operations of the two nonprofits that Cheri founded. Her eclectic background includes degrees in physics, business, and computer science to working in advertising, an investment bank, a social enterprise, and several technology startups in the Silicon Valley. Cheri and Ashwini have co-written multiple books, including their latest Don’t Suffer, Communicate. Today’s episode isn’t just about awareness practice, it’s about a framework for navigating life. A few highlights: Zen isn’t just the practice of keeping things nicely organized, it’s also a spiritual practice largely focused on awareness and where you direct attention. Self-improvement is an endless diss. The very nature of saying we need improvement implies we’re not enough. Cheri and Ashwini share some useful tools to redirect the attention, such as using a recorder to access the wisdom, love, and compassion that is […]

The post You Are Not Your Ego with Cheri Huber and Ashwini Narayanan appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

Winterlichter Palmengarten Jan 2016

With the coronavirus pandemic, many folks switched to working online. Things like teaching, business meetings and other face-to-face activities have been replaced with video calls. Home has become both home and workplace, and admit it: your wardrobe totally reflects this. Creative duo The Workmans shows this “fashion crossover” in their latest photo series #COVIDwear. The […]

The post #COVIDwear: a hilarious photo series showing quarantine fashion of remote workers appeared first on DIY Photography.

Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic dataset, that these models are sensitive to linguistic perturbations of the Winograd examples that minimally affect human understanding. Our results highlight interesting differences between humans and language models: language models are more sensitive to number or gender alternations and synonym replacements than humans, and humans are more stable and consistent in their predictions, maintain a much higher absolute performance, and perform better on non-associative instances than associative ones. Overall, humans are correct more often than out-of-the-box models, and the models are sometimes right for the wrong reasons. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on a large, task-specific dataset can offer a solution to these issues.

Stabilizing multi-steered articulated vehicles in backward motion is a complex task for any human driver. Unless the vehicle is accurately steered, its structurally unstable joint-angle kinematics during reverse maneuvers can cause the vehicle segments to fold and enter a jack-knife state. In this work, a model predictive path-following controller is proposed enabling automatic low-speed steering control of multi-steered articulated vehicles, comprising a car-like tractor and an arbitrary number of trailers with passive or active steering. The proposed path-following controller is tailored to follow nominal paths that contains full state and control-input information, and is designed to satisfy various physical constraints on the vehicle states as well as saturations and rate limitations on the tractor's curvature and the trailer steering angles. The performance of the proposed model predictive path-following controller is evaluated in a set of simulations for a multi-steered 2-trailer with a car-like tractor where the last trailer has steerable wheels.

Digital Twin technology is an emerging concept that has become the centre of attention for industry and, in more recent years, academia. The advancements in industry 4.0 concepts have facilitated its growth, particularly in the manufacturing industry. The Digital Twin is defined extensively but is best described as the effortless integration of data between a physical and virtual machine in either direction. The challenges, applications, and enabling technologies for Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Twins are presented. A review of publications relating to Digital Twins is performed, producing a categorical review of recent papers. The review has categorised them by research areas: manufacturing, healthcare and smart cities, discussing a range of papers that reflect these areas and the current state of research. The paper provides an assessment of the enabling technologies, challenges and open research for Digital Twins.

By Energy.Gov Annual reports analyzing the wind energy industry released today by the Energy Department show continued rapid growth in wind power installations in 2015, demonstrating market resilience and underscoring the vitality of the U.S. wind energy market on a … Continue reading →

Drink Local Life under the COVID-19 pandemic is rough for everyone, individuals and businesses alike.…

If you've ever taken a stroll around downtown Spokane's west side, you may have come across Barrister Winery, tucked into a historic brick and timber building alongside the railroad tracks at 1213 Railroad Ave.…

[IMAGE-1] If you think about it, the art of brewing beer is as visually interesting as it is delicious — the way the hops and the yeast and the grain all swirl together to create that sweet amber-colored goodness. Spokane's Genus Brewing has taken full advantage of that, and they've taken their passion for beer to the internet with great results.…

A modeling framework for evaluating the impact of weather conditions on farming and harvest operations applies real-time, field-level weather data and forecasts of meteorological and climatological conditions together with user-provided and/or observed feedback of a present state of a harvest-related condition to agronomic models and to generate a plurality of harvest advisory outputs for precision agriculture. A harvest advisory model simulates and predicts the impacts of this weather information and user-provided and/or observed feedback in one or more physical, empirical, or artificial intelligence models of precision agriculture to analyze crops, plants, soils, and resulting agricultural commodities, and provides harvest advisory outputs to a diagnostic support tool for users to enhance farming and harvest decision-making, whether by providing pre-, post-, or in situ-harvest operations and crop analyzes.

A wind direction indicating and time display unit is provided for use at the tee areas of a golf course. The unit wind direction indicating device is mounted on an upper surface of a support structure and extends upwardly therefrom. The wind direction indicating device includes a support pole, a sleeve mounted for rotation on the pole at the top thereof, a wind direction indicating element, such as a flag, secured to the sleeve and movable in response to changes in wind direction, and a pole support fitting. Secured to the upper surface of the support structure. A time display device, such as a clock, is secured in a laterally facing wall surface of the support structure.

A sequence of storage devices of a data store may include one or more stripesets for storing data stripes of different lengths and of different types. Each data stripe may be stored in a prefix or other portion of a stripeset. Each data stripe may be identified by an array of addresses that identify each page of the data stripe on each included storage device. When a first storage device of a stripeset becomes full, the stripeset may be shifted by removing the full storage device from the stripeset, and adding a next storage device of the data store to the stripeset. A class variable may be associated with storage devices of a stripeset to identify the type of data that the stripeset can store. The class variable may be increased (or otherwise modified) when a computer stores data of a different class in the stripeset.

A source device to provide power through a network cable and a user device is to draw power from the network cable. A database is to store a parameter associated with the user device. The source device is to access the stored parameter based on receipt of information related to the user device and is to compare at least one of a current power drawn and an additional power requested by the user device to a power limit of the user device based on the accessed parameters. The source device is to send a power message to the user device based on the comparison, the power message to relate to an amount of the power the user device is to draw.

A region growing algorithm for controlling leakage is presented including a processor configured to select a starting point for segmentation of data, initiate a propagation process by designating adjacent voxels around the starting point, determine whether any new voxels are segmented, count and analyze the segmented new voxels to determine leakage levels, and identify and record segmented new voxels from a previous iteration when the leakage levels exceed a predetermined threshold. The processor is further configured to perform labeling of the segmented new voxels of the previous iteration, select the segmented new voxels from the previous iteration when the leakage levels fall below the predetermined threshold, and create a voxel list based on acceptable segmented voxels found in the previous iteration.