text:
Studies conducted during the past 40 yr have clearly established that yields are less when corn is grown continuously relative to a cropping rotation. The reduction in grain yields observed in CC systems is not clearly understood. This study was conducted to elucidate the source(s) of the yield loss commonly observed when corn is grown continuously relative to SC, a yield difference we designate as the CCYP. A greater understanding of the agents and mechanisms underlying the CCYP is needed as a result of domestic and international issues that are increasing the demand for U.S. corn grain.
In a summary of 28 U.S. studies comparing CC with SC, Erickson (2008) determined that all but two studies resulted in a yield decrease for CC, with reductions ranging from 2 to 19%. Porter et al. (1997) combined data from 29 site-years in the northern Great Plains and determined that corn yields from SC rotations yielded 13% greater than CC systems. In a 4-yr study conducted by Peterson and Varvel (1989) in eastern Nebraska under rainfed conditions, corn yields were 29% greater for SC than for CC. Additionally, in a 16-yr study conducted in southeastern Nebraska under rainfed conditions, Wilhelm and Wortmann (2004) measured 22% greater yield for SC than CC.
Nitrogen availability is often thought to play the dominant role in explaining the CCYP (Shrader et al., 1966; Baldock and Musgrave, 1980; Stanger and Lauer, 2008). Corn residue management, which affects plant-available N among other things, can also control the CCYP. The larger C/N ratio of corn residues and the greater quantity of biomass remaining after corn harvest compared with soybean production explains observations of reduced net soil N mineralization in CC systems (Kaboneka et al., 1997; Gentry et al., 2001). Additionally, increased residue-induced N immobilization (Varvel and Peterson 1990; Kaboneka et al., 1997) and differences in the timing of immobilization (Green and Blackmer, 1995) may also explain differences in N fertilizer requirements between CC and SC systems. Because of the unpredictable nature of organic N mineralization, growers often apply an additional 45 kg N ha−1 or more to assure sufficient crop N availability in CC systems (Blackmer et al., 1997; Ding et al., 1998).
Although N availability is a critical factor for managing CC systems, the following issues have also been demonstrated to exacerbate the CCYP: reduced seed germination or seedling emergence and other establishment issues (Wilhelm and Wortmann, 2004), impoverished rhizosphere microorganism community (Vanotti and Bundy, 1995), increased sensitivity to weather stressors (Varvel, 1994; Wilhelm and Wortmann, 2004), and autotoxicity (Yakle and Cruse, 1983; Anderson and Cruse, 1995). Before the release of genetically engineered insect resistance and glyphosate [N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine] tolerance traits, some studies concluded that reduced stress from pests was a factor in improved yield from crop rotations (Peterson and Varvel, 1989; Varvel and Peterson, 1990). Excellent weed control and biotechnological trait resistance to the most challenging insect pests in modern corn production systems makes it unlikely that pests are a primary cause of reduced yields in CC systems.
Crop breeding innovations (e.g., herbicide and insect resistance traits) and agricultural technology advancements (e.g., reduced tillage, equipment guidance technology, less biotoxic chemicals) have made it possible to produce corn in monoculture with fewer negative environmental consequences than just a decade ago (Haney et al., 2000; Busse et al., 2001; Hart et al., 2009); however, there are still concerns associated with corn monoculture. Water quality degradation is a concern because CC requires yearly N fertilizer application rates 45 to 60 kg N ha−1 greater than corn in SC rotations (Blackmer et al., 1997; Ding et al., 1998). Insecticide use also increases when corn is planted continuously, particularly in countries where corn hybrids with genetically modified insect-resistance traits are not grown. Many plant diseases (e.g., gray leaf spot, northern corn leaf blight, anthracnose leaf blight, seedling rots) pose greater problems in CC systems, especially when residue remains in place through the winter (Thomison et al., 2011). Weeds are a greater challenge to manage in monoculture than in diverse crop rotations, resulting in greater use of herbicides. Although direct evidence is lacking, corn monocultures are generally thought to reduce soil biological diversity, potentially causing a reduction in or loss of biocontrol services and creating greater need for pesticides (Landis et al., 2008).
Despite these concerns regarding corn monocultures, and particularly considered within the context of the strain placed on global food security systems by a burgeoning human population (Cassman, 1999; Keyzer et al., 2005; Lobell et al., 2009), there are a number of reasons to reconsider the value of CC in combination with appropriate management practices. As a C4 plant, corn is well adapted for growth in high-light, high-heat environments, allowing greater grain production from corn than the other major U.S. commodity crops under the climatic conditions of the country's most agriculturally productive region, the Midwest. For example, typical yields for soybean, the second most commonly grown crop in the United States, are only 28 to 34% of corn yields (Egli, 2008; National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2012). Corn is versatile in terms of its use potential; both grain and stover are used for animal feed and show promise as bioenergy feedstocks. Corn is also receptive to breeding efforts, both traditional and transgenic, making it possible to create hybrids adapted to a range of environmental conditions and resistant to a variety of pests and diseases (Duvick, 2005). Hybrid improvements, increased plant populations, greater N fertilizer rates, and other management practices have resulted in a nearly sevenfold increase in corn yields since 1924 (Duvick, 2005) and an annual yield growth rate of about 1.5% since 1970 (Egli, 2008).
Without a better understanding of the CCYP, it is possible that previous and future advancements in corn yield potential will be underutilized, being partially canceled out by the reduction in yield resulting from CC production. The objectives of this study were (i) to quantify the CCYP relative to SC during 7 yr in the highly productive soils of Illinois, (ii) to evaluate the effect of N fertilizer on the CCYP and identify the conditions under which additional N can alleviate the penalty, (iii) to track the CCYP with time in CC culture, and (iv) to construct a model identifying significant factors controlling the CCYP.
Due to the rotation treatment in this study, two comparable field sites of approximately 2 ha each were established at the University of Illinois Crop Sciences Research and Education Center in Champaign, IL. Sites were located within 4.5 km of each other and predominantly (>75%) consisted of a Flanagan silt loam (a fine, smectitic, mesic Aquic Argiudoll) with 0 to 2% slope. The sites were tile drained and unirrigated. The study alternated between the two field sites each year. The setup site (the site not used for the current year) established the whole blocks of corn and soybean that served as the previous crop for the following year's rotation treatment. The corn and soybean blocks in the setup site were maintained through maturity, harvested, and tilled in preparation for the upcoming year's study. Reported treatments were arranged in a split plot in a randomized complete block design with four replications; rotation was the main plot and N fertilizer rate was the subplot. An experimental unit was the center two rows of a four-row plot (rows 4.58 m long, spaced 76 cm apart).
Both sites had acceptable soil pH levels and adequate P and K levels throughout the study according to Vitosh et al. (1995). To normalize residual soil N levels from one study year to the next, corn planted during the setup year received a modest N rate of 112 kg N ha−1 before planting; no N fertilizer was applied to soybean crops. The study was chisel plowed uniformly across all treatments each fall and lightly cultivated in spring to provide an adequate seedbed. For the years 2006 to 2009, S-metolachlor [2-chloro-N-(2-ethyl-6-methylphenyl)-N-[(1S)-2-methoxy-1-methylethyl]acetamide] was applied before planting for early-season and residual weed control, and a post-emergence application of mesotrione (2-[4-(methylsulfonyl)-2-nitrobenzoyl]-1,3-cyclohexanedione) was made in mid-June. In 2010, Lumax (S-metolachlor, atrazine [6-chloro-N-ethyl-N´-(1-methylethyl)-1,3,5-triazine-2,4-diamine], and mesotrione) was applied preplant and incorporated followed by an in-season (V8 growth stage, Abendroth et al., 2011) application of glyphosate. Aztec soil insecticide (tebupirimfos [O-[2-(1,1-dimethylethyl)-5-pyrimidinyl] O-ethyl O-(1-methylethyl) phosphorothioate] and cyfluthrin [cyano(4-fluoro-3-phenoxyphenyl)methyl 3-(2,2-dichloroethenyl)-2,2-dimethylcyclopropanecarboxylate]) was applied at planting (at 3.4 kg ha−1) for corn rootworm and other early insect control. Notable rootworm damage was not encountered during the course of the study.
Specific information about the experimental treatments can be found in Table 1. For 2005 through 2008, the treatments consisted of rotation, N fertilizer rate, and hybrid. Nitrogen was applied as granular (NH4)2SO4 at the V3 growth stage (Abendroth et al., 2011) in a diffuse band in the center of the row and incorporated. The types and number of hybrids tested varied from year to year; for each year, 2005 to 2008, 22, 12, 4, and 15 commercial hybrids, respectively, were tested. The hybrid effect was nonsignificant in all years (P > 0.3) and no hybrid interactions were significant so all data were averaged across this variable. In 2009, treatments consisted of rotation, N fertilizer application rate, N source, and N fertilizer application timing (spring and fall application). The N source treatment compared (NH4)2SO4, urea, and two controlled-release N fertilizers, ESN (a polymer-coated urea) and SuperU (a urea-based fertilizer containing urease and a nitrification inhibitor). There were no significant effects for N source (P = 0.83), N timing (P = 0.84), or related interactions, so the data were averaged across these treatments. In 2010, treatments consisted of rotation, N fertilizer application rate, and N source. Nitrogen source treatments for this year consisted of urea, ESN, and SuperU. There were no treatment effects for N source (P = 0.37) or related interactions, so all data were averaged across N source.
|Crop rotation
|N fertilization rate
|N source(s)‡
|kg N ha−1
|3rd yr CC and SC
|0, 34, 67, 134, 202, 269
|3rd yr CC and SC
|0, 56, 112, 168, 224, 280
|5th yr CC and SC
|0, 56, 112, 168, 224, 280
|5th yr CC and SC
|0, 56, 112, 168, 224, 280
|7th yr CC and SC
|0, 45, 90, 134, 179, 224
|(NH4)2SO4, ESN, SuperU, urea
|fall, spring
|7th yr CC and SC
|0, 45, 90, 134, 179, 224
|ESN, SuperU, urea
Planting dates were 18 Apr. 2005, 26 Apr. 2006, 20 Apr. 2007, 20 May 2008, 12 May 2009, and 1 June 2010. Plant population density was 79,040 plants ha−1. Seeds were overplanted in 2005 and 2006 and plots were thinned to achieve the correct population density. In all other years, plots were planted with a precision Almaco plot planter and plant populations were confirmed with stand counts recorded at the R1 and R6 plant growth stages (Abendroth et al., 2011). For grain yield determination at physiological maturity, plots were harvested by hand in 2006 and with a two-row combine all other years (the middle two rows were harvested). Ears were shelled, measured for moisture, and weighed to determine plot yields; grain yields (reported in Mg ha−1) were adjusted to 0% moisture.
An analysis of variance was conducted on the grain yield data (Table 2). For this analysis, year and replicate were declared random effects and the previous crop (corn or soybean) and N rate were declared fixed effects. A significance level of 0.10 was used throughout our statistical analysis, except where indicated for model development.
|Source of variation
|Previous crop
|N fertilizer rate
|Year × previous crop
|Year × N fertilizer rate
|Previous crop × N fertilizer rate
|Year × previous crop × N fertilizer rate
An N rate by yield response function was fitted to the data using the PROC REG and PROC NLIN procedures in SAS (SAS Institute, 2008). We evaluated response models for best fit in the following order: linear, quadratic, and linear-plateau. Best fit was determined by testing the significance of the increase in the coefficients of determination between models. Agreement between the fitted function and data was generally good, as measured by the coefficient of determination (average R2 = 0.63, median R2 = 0.70, range = 0.36–0.82). The agronomically optimum N rate (AONR) was determined by identifying the "hinge point" in linear-plateau models (2005) and by taking the first derivative of the quadratic equation in the quadratic functions (2006, 2007, and 2008). In the linear models (2009 and 2010), we set the maximum N rate as the AONR to evaluate the CCYP. The CCYP was calculated by subtracting the yield at the AONR for CC from that for SC treatments (Eq. [1]):Because the CCYP was calculated from values obtained from regression equations (AONR is a value determined by regressing N rates on corn grain yield), there is no issue with differing N rates among years of the study.
We constructed a model that identified significant predictors of the CCYP from among the following 11 factors (Table 3): CCYRS, CC AONR, SC AONR, yield of CC at the AONR, yield of SC at the AONR, 0NCCYD, SC yield without N fertilizer (0NSCYD), CC delta yield (maximum yield minus 0N yield), SC delta yield, the difference between CC delta yield and SC delta yield (DELTADIFF), and modified growing degree days (MGDD) accumulated from the planting date through 15 September for each year as calculated by Gilmore and Rogers (1958).
|Yield at AONR
|Yield without N
|Δ Yield
|kg ha−1
|Mg ha−1
Forward and fully stepwise regressions were performed on the potential predictors with SAS (version 9.2) using the regression procedure. In the forward regression, the method calculates the F statistic of each potential independent variable (predictor) reflective of the variable's contribution to the model, if included (SAS Institute, 2008). To enter the model, P values for the F statistics are compared with the statistical criterion for entry (we set the value at 0.15); if no F statistic has a P value less than the criterion, the forward selection stops. Otherwise, the selection adds the variable with the smallest P value (equivalently, the largest F statistic) to the model (Fomby, 2005). The method then calculates the F statistics again for those variables not included in the model, and the evaluation process is repeated until no remaining potential predictors produce an eligible F statistic according to the statistical criterion.
In the fully stepwise regression, the process begins as in the forward regression, but with each addition of a predictor to the model, those variables already in the model are evaluated for removal. We again set the statistical criterion for entry to be P < 0.15 for the F value associated with addition of the variable into the model; we set the criterion for remaining in the model at P < 0.15 as well. Thus, if a variable is added to the model but, after addition of more variables, is found to be less predictive of the CCYP (P < 0.15), probably due to redundancy with the newly added variable, that variable is removed from the model. It can, however, be added back into the model at a later time if it is found to again produce a significant F statistic. The stepwise process ends when there are no remaining variables outside of the model with an F statistic that meets the statistical criterion for entry into the model (SAS Institute, 2008).
Yearly seasonal weather patterns influenced corn yields (Table 4), response to the previous crop, and response to the N fertilizer application rate (Table 2). Corn yields were reduced in 2005 by drought conditions and mean temperatures in June and August that were almost 2°C greater than average, resulting in symptoms of water stress. The 2006 growing season was favorable despite below-average precipitation for May, June, August, and September; above-average rainfall amounts in July were timely and provided needed moisture during critical grain-fill periods. The 2007 growing season was also one of below-average precipitation with the exception of June; August and September were particularly hot and dry and resulted in stressful conditions for grain fill. In 2008, temperatures were near average and rainfall was above average for June, July, and September; August received below-average precipitation. The 2009 growing season had above-average rainfall and below-average temperatures, resulting in a poor growth environment and favorable conditions for NO3 leaching and denitrification. In 2010, growing-season conditions were generally hot and dry with the exception of June, when precipitation levels were about 50% above average.
|12.6 (2.0)†
|16.3 (–0.6)
|23.9 (1.9)
|24.5 (0.7)
|24.3 (1.7)
|21.6 (2.7)
|13.6 (3.0)
|16.7 (–0.2)
|21.9 (–0.1)
|24.8 (1.1)
|23.3 (0.7)
|17.7 (–1.2)
|10.2 (–0.4)
|20.1 (3.2)
|23.1 (1.1)
|22.7 (–1.1)
|25.7 (3.0)
|21.6 (2.7)
|10.7 (0.1)
|14.7 (–2.2)
|22.9 (0.9)
|23.2 (–0.6)
|22.3 (–0.4)
|19.7 (0.8)
|10.7 (0.1)
|17.4 (0.5)
|23.7 (1.7)
|21.1 (–2.7)
|21.4 (–1.3)
|19.3 (0.4)
|14.5 (3.9)
|18.1 (1.2)
|23.8 (1.8)
|25.0 (1.2)
|25.1 (2.4)
|19.7 (0.8)
|101 (8)
|25 (–97)
|61 (–45)
|109 (–9)
|57 (–54)
|144 (62)
|112 (19)
|78 (–44)
|42 (–65)
|199 (81)
|76 (–35)
|34 (–48)
|62 (–31)
|41 (–81)
|144 (37)
|87 (–31)
|38 (–73)
|52 (–29)
|76 (–16)
|154 (32)
|163 (56)
|200 (82)
|20 (–91)
|207 (125)
|176 (84)
|145 (23)
|112 (5)
|160 (41)
|143 (32)
|20 (–61)
|53 (–40)
|87 (–35)
|212 (105)
|95 (–23)
|42 (–69)
|81 (–1)
The analysis of variance (Table 2) demonstrated that all treatments and treatment interactions were highly significant. Response to the N fertilizer application rate varied from year to year as a result of seasonal weather patterns and consequent crop growth potential (Table 2). Crop growth was limited in 2005 due to heat and drought stress, resulting in a linear-plateau response to N fertilizer (Fig. 1). A strong quadratic response to fertilizer in 2006 resulted from favorable weather conditions that supported high yields. The 2006 growing season was the only year in which the CC treatment effectively overcame the CCYP at greater N fertilizer application rates. The 2007 and 2008 response curves were similar in their quadratic responses to N fertilizer application. Wessel et al. (2007) conducted a study in the same location as the present experiment, demonstrating that N fertilizer application to corn was susceptible to losses when spring rainfall was above average. We speculate that NO3 loss via leaching or denitrification was the result of above-average spring precipitation in 2009; the N-limiting conditions resulting from fertilizer N loss produced the strong yield responses to N fertilizer application (Fig. 1), evidenced by linear yield responses with steep slopes, demonstrated similarly by both CC and SC. The linear model was again the best fit for the N fertilizer response data in 2010 as a result of poor growth conditions due to drought stress.
Continuous corn produced less grain at the AONR than SC for every year of the study, resulting in a yield penalty for CC every year (Table 3). Averaged across all 6 yr, yield at the AONR for CC was 8.84 Mg ha−1 and for SC was 10.20 Mg ha−1, resulting in a CCYP of 1.36 Mg ha−1 (25.6 bu acre−1); CCYP values ranged yearly from 0.47 to 2.23 Mg ha−1 (8.9–42.0 bu acre−1). In all years except 2007, the AONR was greater for CC than SC despite the lower yield of CC at the AONR (Table 3). It is widely recognized that corn grown in rotation with legume crops requires less fertilizer N than CC systems to reach maximum yields (Shrader et al., 1966; Peterson and Varvel, 1989; Meese et al., 1991; Varvel and Wilhelm, 2003). There is some disagreement among researchers regarding whether the CCYP is a simple function of N availability (Shrader et al., 1966; Baldock and Musgrave, 1980; Stanger and Lauer, 2008) or the product of a number of interacting factors (Baldock et al., 1981; Hesterman et al., 1987; Bergerou et al., 2004). Our data support the latter argument, demonstrating that although N availability is a critical factor for determining the magnitude of the CCYP in a given year, factors related to weather and crop residue accumulation (independent of the effect of residue on N availability) also contribute to the yield difference between CC and SC systems.
Potential predictors of the CCYP selected to test in this study are shown in Table 3 along with single-factor coefficients of determination (R2). The best single predictors of CCYP were 0NCCYD (R2 = 0.84) and CCYRS (R2 = 0.83). The two next-best predictors of CCYP were DELTADIFF (R2 = 0.37) and CC yield at the AONR (R2 = 0.23).
To investigate the agents of the CCYP, we performed forward and stepwise regressions of the potential predictors of the CCYP. Both analyses produced the same model, selecting three variables to predict CCYP: 0NCCYD, CCYRS, and DELTADIFF (Table 5). With these three variables, the model R2 was 0.9966 and the model was (Eq. [2]):
|Summary of stepwise selection
|Summary of model parameters
|Partial R2
|Model R2
|Parameter estimate
|Type II sum of squares
Nonsignificant predictors of the CCYP are not discussed. Continuous corn yield without N fertilizer application (0NCCYD) was the strongest predictor of CCYP in this model (partial R2 = 0.84) and the inverse relationship demonstrates that in years when unfertilized CC yields are relatively low, the CCYP is expected to be greater and vice versa. Unfertilized corn yield is primarily determined by weather and N supplied by the soil. In turn, N supplied by the soil is controlled by the quality and quantity of previous crop residues, soil organic matter content, residual N from previous N applications, atmospheric N2 fixed by legumes and free-living N2–fixing bacteria, and atmospheric deposition (Legg and Meisinger, 1982). In this study, we maintained low residual fertilizer N levels (by applying relatively low maintenance levels of N in setup years before the study year) and accounted for leguminous N inputs with the crop rotation treatment; N inputs from sources other than those related to the rotation treatment should be the same across the study. In our model, 0NCCYD is an indicator of net soil N mineralization in CC systems, a conclusion supported by the findings of Gentry et al. (2001). Net soil N mineralization is significantly reduced in CC relative to SC systems (Gentry et al., 2001; Álvarez et al., 2008) and in years when 0NCCYD is especially low, as seen when weather was unfavorable or after more years in CC, the CCYP can be expected to increase. Enhanced net soil N mineralization in SC relative to CC systems may be the result of a soil microbial community that enhances soil N mineralization (Vanotti and Bundy, 1995). Similarly, Wilhelm and Wortmann (2004) suggested that the CCYP may be associated with lower soil temperatures in CC vs. SC, resulting in reduced activity of N-mineralizing bacteria. In a notable study, Trinsoutrot et al. (2000) tested 47 different crop residues during a 168-d incubation study and found that corn residue had the lowest net N mineralization (–28 kg N kg−1 C), demonstrating the slow decomposition rate and potential for N immobilization presented by incorporation of corn residue. No research that we are aware of has indicated that differing N mineralization kinetics from corn residue resulted in greater N loss to the environment than N released from other crop residues and, as such, corn residues may be viewed as N reservoirs, releasing N at a reduced rate relative to other cropping systems.
The second variable added to the forward and stepwise regression models was CCYRS (partial R2 = 0.1204, Table 5). Years in CC exhibited a positive relationship with CCYP, demonstrating that the yield penalty increased with time through the seventh year of CC culture. This finding is counter to common thought about CC yields in the U.S. Corn Belt, where farmers often claim that yields in CC systems improve with time, eventually reaching the same yield level as SC after the fourth or fifth year. Other researchers have reported that corn yields decreased with additional years of CC (Meese et al., 1991; Dam et al., 2005) or that there was little evidence that CC benefited from more years of corn growing in the same field (Nafziger, 2007). Some studies, however, did not determine significant yield losses from 2, 3, 4, or 5 yr of CC relative to the first year of corn following corn (Crookston et al., 1991; Porter et al., 1997; note: these reports were based on different years of the same study). In the present study, a clear escalation of the CCYP was observed from 3 to 7 yr of CC (Fig. 2). On average, the CCYP increased by 186% (0.64 Mg ha−1, 12.0 bu acre−1) from the third year of CC to the fifth year of CC and 268% (1.24 Mg ha−1, 23.4 bu acre−1) from the third year of CC to the seventh year of CC. We speculate that the primary agent of CCYP represented by CCYRS is accumulated corn biomass. Accumulation of large quantities of high C/N ratio residue under CC with time can exert negative effects on nutrient cycling (Stanford and Epstein, 1974; Westermann and Crothers, 1980; Green and Blackmer, 1995; Nicolardot et al., 2001), soil temperature and moisture (Burrows and Larson, 1962; Grundmann et al., 1995), disease pressure (de Nazareno et al., 1993; Jirak-Peterson and Esker, 2011), and other crop growth factors (Dam et al., 2005). By comparison, the relatively low C/N ratio residue deposited in much smaller quantities under SC decomposes quickly and, consequently, cycles bound nutrients into plant-available forms more rapidly (Green and Blackmer 1995; Gentry et al., 2001) and eliminates issues associated with maintaining large quantities of residue on the soil surface (Álvarez et al., 2008).
The final predictor of CCYP in the model was the difference between CC and SC delta yields (DELTADIFF), contributing a partial factor R2 of 0.0311. The relationship between DELTADIFF and CCYP was positive, i.e., in years when the CC delta yield was close to the SC delta yield (i.e., DELTADIFF was small), the CCYP was correspondingly small and vice versa. In some instances, as in 2005, CCYP and DELTADIFF were both small because of weather conditions that severely limited grain production for CC and SC systems alike. In other cases, as in 2006, both CCYP and DELTADIFF were small due to favorable weather conditions that allowed the CC system to take full advantage of the greater N rates, producing yields comparable to those of the SC system. In years when DELTADIFF was large, as in 2007 and 2010, it appears that weather patterns (specifically, suboptimal moisture and above-average temperatures) more negatively affected grain production for CC systems than SC systems, resulting in relatively large CCYP values. Other studies have reported that water stress (Varvel, 1994; Wilhelm and Wortmann, 2004) and temperature stress (Wilhelm and Wortmann, 2004) are more detrimental in CC than SC systems.
In 2007, strong net soil N mineralization was indicated by the relatively high unfertilized SC yield value, probably due to favorable rainfall in June (as per Kay et al., 2006); however, the muted yield response across the N fertilizer range in the SC system in 2007 was probably the result of hot, dry conditions in July and August, which prevented the crop from achieving potential yields by increasing ovule abortion or reducing grain weight (data not shown). The CC N fertilizer response was strong in 2007, indicating that (i) there was less N available for uptake in the unfertilized CC system relative to the unfertilized SC system, creating a low unfertilized CC yield, and (ii) N fertilizer was taken up early by the crop and probably used to develop ear shoots with large row number and ovule potential counts. The hot, dry conditions in July and August 2007 appeared to be more detrimental to CC than SC treatments, resulting in a substantial reduction of yield in CC relative to SC treatments.
In 2010, as in 2007, the CC system was more responsive to N fertilizer application than the SC system; however, the 0 N yield for CC was much less than in other years, probably due to a large accumulation of corn residue (reflected by CCYRS), which limited net N mineralization. Unfortunately, the response to N at the high end of the fertilizer rate range in 2010 is not completely understood because the maximum N fertilizer rate was reduced to 224 from 280 kg N ha−1 in previous years, preventing determination of the point at which the crop response to N began to decline. The hot, dry conditions of the 2010 growing season, however, make it likely that the yields at higher N rates would have been similar to or less than those observed in 2007.
The difference between delta yields for CC and SC treatments in this study appears to be a function of weather conditions, particularly during critical growth periods, such as ovule determination in June and grain fill in July and August, which can disproportionately reduce yields of the CC system relative to the SC system. We conclude that DELTADIFF is primarily a weather-driven value reflecting the degree to which weather limits or promotes N availability to the CC crop relative to the SC crop. The inclusion of an indicator of weather in the model highlights the importance of weather for a number of growth and development factors (e.g., germination, ovule determination, pollination, grain fill, and kernel abortion) and demonstrates that CC systems are often more strongly affected by negative weather conditions than SC systems. If data are unavailable to calculate DELTADIFF, however, this factor can be removed from Eq. [2] and the model still maintains a strong explanatory ability (R2 = 0.97).
Pairwise correlation coefficients for the three variables in the model ranged from 0.09 to 0.57 and tests for linear relationships among variables were nonsignificant (P > 0.24), indicating that there was no multicollinearity; thus the variables in the model act independently. There are obvious hidden factors, however, that we either cannot adequately quantify (e.g., weather) or did not measure (e.g., residue accumulation). Weather heavily influenced 0NCCYD and DELTADIFF; similarly, 0NCCYD and CCYRS were influenced by residue accumulation. The model presented here is not intended to be used to predict the CCYP because not all of the parameters in the model can be determined before the present crop year. Rather, the value of the model is to facilitate our understanding of the physical, chemical, biological, and, especially, management factors contributing to the CCYP.
Peterson and Varvel (1989) cited several studies observing the CCYP to be greatest in "dry" or "stress" years; they also noted greater whole-plant moisture content at maturity in CC systems, suggesting that crop development lags behind that of rotational systems. Similarly, Porter et al. (1997) concluded that the CCYP is reduced in "high yielding environments," characterized by high but not excessive rainfall, temperatures, and solar radiation during the growing season. Alternatively, Nafziger (2007) did not determine that the CCYP was correlated with soil productivity or environment. We believe that the concepts of 0NCCYD, CCYRS, and DELTADIFF are more reliable and quantifiable parameters of the CCYP than describing how "favorable" a year was or how "high yielding" an environment was. As seen in 2005, a very poor weather year does not necessarily result in a high CCYP (Tables 2 and 4). Similarly, a relatively good weather year, like 2008, can result in a fairly large CCYP. Residue decomposition rates and corresponding degrees of N mineralization and N immobilization are directly controlled by the interaction of seasonal weather, N fertilization, and residue amount, quality, and management. These three factors—N availability, residue, and weather—and their interactions appear to be the primary determinants of the CCYP.
In general, CC treatments required more N fertilizer and produced lower yields than SC treatments, as demonstrated by a greater AONR in all years except one and lower corn yields at the AONR for CC in every year of the study. Averaged across all years of the study, the CCYP was 1.36 Mg ha−1 (25.6 bu acre−1); values ranged yearly from 0.47 to 2.23 Mg ha−1 (8.9–42.0 bu acre−1). During favorable growing seasons early in the CC cycle, the CCYP was overcome by increasing the N fertilizer rate; however, greater N rates did not eliminate the CCYP when season-long weather was average or poor. This study suggests that the CCYP persists for at least 7 yr. Unfertilized CC yield (0NCCYD), CCYRS, and DELTADIFF were significant predictors of the CCYP. These three predictors used together in a regression model explained >99% of variability in the CCYP data set. The strongest predictor, 0NCCYD, indicates net soil N mineralization and reflects reduced mineralization or increased immobilization of plant-available soil N in CC relative to SC systems. Furthermore, CCYRS was strongly and positively correlated with CCYP, indicating that the CCYP became greater with more time in CC culture, a conclusion that is counter to the generally accepted position of many farmers in the U.S. Corn Belt. We believe that CCYRS is a measure of the negative effects of accumulated corn residue in CC systems. Finally, DELTADIFF reflects the season-long growth environment of the cropping system and, especially, indicates yearly weather patterns that are disproportionately adverse for CC relative to SC systems. Examining the relationship of each predictor with the CCYP suggests that the primary causative agents of the CCYP are N availability, corn residue, weather, and their interactions. Given that weather cannot be controlled and the annual optimum N fertilizer rate can only be determined ex post facto, managing corn residue has the greatest potential for reducing the CCYP.


text: I made this for my aunt - she just had a stroke and is convalescing in the hospital now - I wanted to send her a little cheer. This is a design by Jenny Doan from Quilting Quickly magazine. I love how easy it was and quick - All her designs are wonderful. Hope you like it. The fabric was a charm pack from Bonnie and Camille - I think it is called Cotton Blossoms. I practiced some fmq from the class I took at Craftsy. So what do you think?

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Signifying the Processes of Production
"Language is not a code," Lacan asserted, because he wished to deny any one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified.(11) In word processing, however, language is a code. The relation between assembly and compiler languages is specified by a coding arrangement, as is the relation of the compiler language to the programming commands that the user manipulates. Through these multiple transformations some quantity is conserved, but it is not the mechanical energy implicit in a system of levers or the molecular energy of a thermodynamical system. Rather it is the informational structure that emerges from the interplay between pattern and randomness. The immateriality of the text, deriving from a translation of mechanical leverage into informational patterns, allows transformations to take place that would be unthinkable if matter or energy were the primary basis for the systemic exchanges. This textual fluidity, which the user learns in her body as she interacts with the system, implies that signifiers flicker rather than float.
To explain what I mean by flickering signifiers, I will find it useful briefly to review Lacan's notion of floating signifiers. Lacan, operating within a view of language that was primarily print-based rather than electronically mediated, not surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic of interest.(12) When he formulated the concept of floating signifiers, he drew on Saussure's idea that signifiers are defined by networks of relational differences between themselves rather than by their relation to signifieds. He complicated this picture by maintaining that signifieds do not exist in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers. He imagined them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers that itself is constituted through continual slippages and displacements. Thus for him a doubly reinforced absence is at the core of signification--absence of signifieds as things-in-themselves as well as absence of stable correspondences between signifiers. The catastrophe in psycholinguistic development corresponding to this absence in signification is castration, the moment when the (male) subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence.
How does this scenario change when floating signifiers give way to flickering signifiers? Foregrounding pattern and randomness, information technologies operate within a realm in which the signifier is opened to a rich internal play of difference. In informatics the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes. As I write these words on my computer, I see the lights on the video screen, but for the computer the relevant signifiers are magnetic tracks on disks. Intervening between what I see and what the computer reads are the machine code that correlates alphanumeric symbols with binary digits, the compiler language that correlates these symbols with higher level instructions determining how the symbols are to be manipulated, the processing program that mediates between these instructions and the commands I give the computer, and so forth. A signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next higher level. Precisely because the relation between signifier and signifier at each of these levels is arbitrary, it can be changed with a single global command. If I am producing ink marks by manipulating moveable type, changing the font requires changing each line of type. By contrast, if I am producing flickering signifiers on a video screen, changing the font is as easy as giving the system a single command. The longer the chain of codes, the more radical the transformations that can be effected. Acting as linguistic levers, the coding chains impart astonishing power to even very small changes. Such leverage is possible because the constant reproduced through multiple coding layers is a pattern rather than a presence. Pattern can be recognized through redundancy or repetition of elements. If there is only repetition, however, no new information is imparted; the intermixture of randomness rescues pattern from sterility. If there is only randomness, the result is gibberish rather than communication. Information is produced by a complex dance between predictability and unpredictabililty, repetition and variation. We have seen that the possibilities for mutation are enhanced and heightened by long coding chains. We can now understand mutation in more fundamental terms. Mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction.(13) Mutation implies both the replication of pattern--the morphological standard against which it can be measured and understood as a mutation--and the interjection of randomness--the variations that mark it as a deviation so decisive it can no longer be assimilated into the same.
Mutation is the catastrophe in the pattern/randomness dialectic analogous to castration in presence/absence. It marks the opening of pattern to randomness so extreme that the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained. But as with castration, this only appears to be a disruption located at a specific moment. The randomness to which mutation testifies is always already interwoven into pattern. One way to understand this "always already" is through the probability function that mathematically defines information in Claude Shannon's classic equations in information theory.(14) Were randomness not always already immanent, we would be in the Newtonian world of strict causality rather than the information-theoretic realm of probability. More generally, randomness is involved because it is only against the background or possibility of non-pattern that pattern can emerge. Wherever pattern exists, randomness is implicit as the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such. The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging and pervasive in its import within the pattern/randomness dialectic as castration is within the tradition of presence/absence, for it is the visible mark that testifies to the continuing interplay of the dialectical terms.
Shifting the emphasis from presence/absence to pattern/randomness suggests different choices for tutor texts. Rather than Freud's discussion of "fort/da" (a short passage whose replication in hundreds of commentaries would no doubt astonish its creator), theorists interested in pattern and randomness might point to something like David Cronenberg's film The Fly. At a certain point the protagonist's penis does fall off (he quaintly puts it in his medicine chest as a momento to times past), but the loss scarcely registers in the larger metamorphosis he is undergoing. The operative transition is not from male to female-as-castrated-male, but from human to something radically other than human (see Figure 3). Flickering signification brings together language with a psychodynamics based on the symbolic moment when the human confronts the posthuman.
I understand "human" and "posthuman" to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is the picture constructed by nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists of "man" as a tool-user.(15) Using tools may shape the body (some anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at will. When the claim could not be sustained that man's unique nature was defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools), the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker. Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley's 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.(16) Oakley, in charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum's Natural History division, wrote in his introduction, "Employment of tools appears to be [man's] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb" [p. 1]. The kind of tool he envisioned was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand, not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once "detachable" and an "extension," separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman. Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions taking place during the same period (1946-53), as participants wavered between a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment,(17) and a more threatening, reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics had shifted dramatically toward reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain kinds of complex systems.(18) Through these discussions, the "posthuman" future of "humanity" began increasingly to be evoked. Examples range from Hans Moravec's invocation of a "postbiological" future in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls "intelligence augmentation."(19) Although these visions differ in the degree and kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued, is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.
Information Narratives and Bodies of Information
The shift from presence and absence to pattern and randomness is encoded into every aspect of contemporary literature, from the physical object that constitutes the text to such staples of literary interpretation as character, plot, author, and reader. The development is by no means even; some texts testify dramatically and explicitly to the shift, whereas others manifest it only indirectly. I will call the texts where the displacement is most apparent information narratives. Information narratives show in exaggerated form changes that are more subtly present in other texts as well. Whether in information narratives or contemporary fiction generally, the dynamic of displacement is crucial. One could focus on pattern in any era, but the peculiarity of pattern in these texts is its interpenetration with randomness and its implicit challenge to physicality. Pattern tends to overwhelm presence, marking a new kind of immateriality which does not depend on spirituality or even consciousness, only on information.
I begin my exploration with William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the novel that sparked the cyberpunk movement and motivated Autodesk, a software company, to launch a major initiative in developing virtual reality technology. Hard on the heels of Neuromancer came two more volumes, Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). The Neuromancer trilogy gave a local habitation and a name to the disparate spaces of computer simulations, networks, and hypertext windows that prior to Gibson's intervention had been discussed as separate phenomena. Gibson's novels acted like seed crystals thrown into a supersaturated solution; the time was ripe for the technology known as cyberspace to precipitate into public consciousness. The narrator defines cyberspace as a "consensual illusion" accessed when a user "jacks into" a computer (p. 51). Here the writer's imagination outstrips existing technologies, for Gibson imagines a direct neural link between the brain and computer through electrodes. Another version of this link is a socket implanted behind the ear which accepts computer chips, allowing direct neural access to computer memory. Network users collaborate in creating the richly textured landscape of cyberspace, a "graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding . . ." (p. 51). Existing in the non-material space of computer simulation, cyberspace defines a perimeter within which pattern is the essence of the reality, presence an optical illusion.
Like the landscapes they negotiate, the subjectivities who operate within cyberspace also become patterns rather than physical entities. Case, the computer cowboy who is the novel's protagonist, still has a physical presence, although he regards his body as so much "meat" that exists primarily to sustain his consciousness until the next time he can enter cyberspace. Others have completed the transition that Case's values imply. Dixie Flatline, a cowboy who encountered something in cyberspace that flattened his EEG, ceased to exist as a physical body and lives now as a personality construct within the computer, defined by the magnetic patterns that store his identity.
The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality. Such views are authorized by cultural conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit. In a world despoiled by overdeverlopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption. It is no accident that the vaguely apocalyptic landscapes of films like The Terminator, Bladerunner and Hardware occur in narratives focusing on cybernetic lifeforms. The sense that the world is rapidly becoming uninhabitable by human beings is part of the impetus toward the displacement of presence by pattern.
These connections lie close to the surface in Neuromancer. "Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialities. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market. . ." (p. 16). The metaphoric slippages between urban sprawl, computer matrix and biological protein culminate in the final elliptical phrase, "data made flesh." Information is the putative origin, physicality the derivative manifestation. Body parts sold in black market clinics, body neurochemistry manipulated by synthetic drugs, body of the world overlaid by urban sprawl testify to the precariousness of physical existence. If flesh is data incarnate, why not go back to the source and leave the perils of physicality behind?
The reasoning presupposes that subjectivity and computer programs have a common arena in which to interact. Historically, that arena was first defined in cybernetics by the creation of a conceptual framework that constituted humans, animals, and machines as information-processing devices receiving and transmitting signals to effect goal-directed behavior.(20) Gibson matches this technical achievement with two literary innovations that allow subjectivity, with its connotations of consciousness and self-awareness, to be articulated together with abstract data. The first is a subtle modification in point of view, abbreviated in the text as pov. More than an acroynym, pov is a substantive noun that constitutes the character's subjectivity by serving as a positional marker substituting for his absent body.
In its usual Jamesian sense, point of view presumes the fiction of a person who observes the action from a particular angle and tells what he sees. In the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James imagines a "house of fiction" with a "million windows" formed by "the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will."(21) At each "stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other" (p. 46). For James the observer is an embodied creature, and the specificity of his location determines what he can see as he looks out on a scene that itself is physically specific. When an omniscient viewpoint is used, the limitations of the narrator's corporeality begin to fall away, but the suggestion of embodiment lingers in the idea of focus, the "scene" created by the eye's movement.
Even for James, vision is not unmediated technologically. Significantly, he hovers between eye and field glass as the receptor constituting vision. Cyberspace represents a quantum leap forward into the technological construction of vision. Instead of an embodied consciousness looking through the window at a scene, consciousness moves through the screen to become the pov, leaving behind the body as a unoccupied shell. In cyberspace point of view does not emanate from the character; rather, the pov literally is the character. If a pov is annihilated the character disappears with it, ceasing to exist as a consciousness in and out of cyberspace. The realistic fiction of a narrator who observes but does not create is thus unmasked in cyberspace. The effect is not primarily metafictional, however, but in a literal sense metaphysical, above and beyond physicality. The crucial difference between the Jamesian point of view and cyberspace pov is that the former implies physical presence, whereas the latter does not.
Gibson's technique recalls Robbe-Grillet's novels, which were among the first information narratives to exploit the formal consequences of combining subjectivity with data. In Robbe-Grillet, however, the effect of interfacing narrative voice with objective description was paradoxically to heighten the narrator's subjectivity, for certain objects, like the jalousied windows or the centipede in Jealousy, are inventoried with obsessive interest, indicating a mindset that is anything but objective. In Gibson, the space in which subjectivity moves lacks this personalized stamp. Cyberspace is the domain of postmodern collectivity, constituted as the resultant of millions of vectors representing the diverse and often conflicting interests of human and artificial intelligences linked together through computer networks.
To make this space work as a level playing field on which humans and computers can meet on equal terms, Gibson introduces his second innovation. Cyberspace is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen. In mathematics matrix is a technical term denoting data that have been arranged into an n-dimensional array. Expressed in this form, data seem as far removed from the fascinations of story as random number tables are from the National Inquirer. Because the array is already conceptualized in spatial terms, however, it is a small step to imagining it as a three-dimensional landscape. Narrative becomes possible when this spatiality is given a temporal dimension by the pov's movement through it. The pov is located in space, but it exists in time. Through the track it weaves, the desires, repressions, and obsessions of subjectivity can be expressed. The genius of Neuromancer lies in its explicit recognition that the categories Kant considered fundamental to human experience, space and time, can be used as a conjunction to join awareness with data. Reduced to a point, the pov is abstracted into a purely temporal entity with no spatial extension; metaphorized into an interactive space, the datascape is narrativized by the pov's movement through it. Data are thus humanized, and subjectivity computerized, allowing them to join in a symbiotic union whose result is narrative.
Such innovations carry the implications of informatics beyond the textual surface into the signifying processes that constitute theme and character. I suspect that Gibson's novels have been so influential not only because they present a vision of the posthuman future that is already upon us--in this they are no more prescient than many other science fiction novels--but also because they embody within their techniques the assumptions expressed explicitly in the novels' themes. This kind of move is possible or inevitable when the cultural conditions authorizing the assumptions are pervasive enough so that the posthuman is experienced as an everyday lived reality as well as an intellectual proposition.
In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey characterizes the economic aspects of the shift to an informatted society as a transition from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation.(22) As Harvey along with many others have pointed out, in late capitalism durable goods yield pride of place to information.(23) A significant difference between information and durable goods is replicability. Information is not a conserved quantity. If I give you information, you have it and I do too. With information, the constraining factor separating the haves from the have-nots is not so much possession as access. The shift of emphasis from ownership to access is another manifestation of the underlying transition from presence/absence to pattern/randomness. Presence precedes and makes possible the idea of possession, for one can possess something only if it already exists. By contrast, access implies pattern recognition, whether the access is to a piece of land (recognized as such through the boundary pattern defining that land as different from adjoining parcels), confidential information (constituted as confidential through the comparison of its informational patterns with less secure documents), or a bank vault (associated with knowing the correct pattern of tumbler combinations). In general, access differs from possession because it tracks patterns rather than presences. When someone breaks into a computer system, it is not her physical presence that is detected but the informational traces her entry has created.(24)
When the emphasis falls on access rather than ownership, the private/public distinction that was so important in the formation of the novel is radically reconfigured. Whereas possession implies the existence of private life based on physical exclusion or inclusion, access implies the existence of credentialling practices that use patterns rather than presences to distinguish between those who do and do not have the right to enter. Morover, entering is itself constituted as access to data rather than a change in physical location. In DeLillo's White Noise (1985), for example, the Gladney's home, traditionally the private space of family life, is penetrated by noise and radiation of all wavelengths--microwave, radio, television. The penetration signals that private spaces, and the private thoughts they engender and figure, are less a concern than the interplay between codes and the articulation of individual subjectivity with data. Jack Gladney's death is prefigured for him as a pattern of pulsing stars around a computerized data display, and it is surely no accident that Babette, his wife, objects to the idea that a man sexually "enters" a woman. The phrases she prefers emphasize by contrast the idea of access.
Although the Gladney family still operates as a social unit (albeit with the geographical dispersion endemic to postmodern life), their conversations are punctuated by random bits of information emanating from the radio and TV. The punctuation points toward a mutation in subjectivity that comes from joining the focused attention of traditional novelistic consciousness with the digitized randomness of miscellaneous bits. The mutation reaches incarnation in Willie Mink, whose brain has become so addled by a designer drug that his consciousness is finally indistinguishable from the white noise that surrounds him. Through a different route than that used by Gibson, DeLillo arrives at a similar destination: a vision of subjectivity constituted through the interplay of pattern and randomness rather than presence and absence.
The bodies of texts are also implicated in these changes. The displacement of presence by pattern thins the tissue of textuality, making it a semipermeable membrane that allows awareness of the text as an informational pattern to infuse into the space of representation. When the fiction of presence gives way to the recognition of pattern, passages are opened between the text-as-object and representations within the text that are characteristically postmodern. Consider the play between text as physical object and information flow in Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler (1981). The text's awareness of its own physicality is painfully apparent in the anxiety it manifests toward keeping the literary corpus intact. Within the space of representation, texts are subjected to birth defects, maimed and torn apart, lost and stolen, and last but hardly least, pulverized when the wrong computer key is pushed and the stored words are randomized into miscellaneous bits.
The anxiety is transmitted to readers within the text who keep pursuing parts of textual bodies only to lose them, as well as to readers outside the text who must try to make sense of the radically discontinuous narrative. Only when the titles of the parts are perceived to form a sentence is the literary corpus reconstituted as a unity. Significantly, the recuperation is syntactical rather than physical. It does not arise from or imply an intact physical body. Rather, it emerges from the patterns--metaphorical, grammatical, narrative, thematic and textual--that the parts together make. As the climactic scene in the library suggests, the reconstituted corpus is a body of information, emerging from the discourse community among whom information circulates.
The correspondence between transformations in human and textual bodies can be seen as early as William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), written in the decade that saw the institutionalization of cybernetics and the construction of the first large-scale electronic computer. The narrative metamorphizes nearly as often as bodies within it, suggesting by its cut-up method a textual corpus as artificial, heterogeneous, and cybernetic as they are.(25) Since the fissures that mark the text always fall within the units that comprise the textual body--within chapters, paragraphs, sentences and even words--it becomes increasingly clear that they do not function to delineate the textual corpus.Rather, the body of the text is produced precisely by these fissures, which are not so much ruptures as productive dialectics bringing the narrative as a syntactic and chronological sequence into being.
Bodies within the text follow the same logic. Under the pressure of sex and addiction, bodies explode or mutate, protoplasm is sucked out of cocks or nostrils, plots are hatched to take over the planet or nearest lifeform. Burroughs anticipates Jameson's claim that an information society is the purest form of capitalism.(26) When bodies are constituted as information, they can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to market pressures. Junk instantiates the dynamics of informatics and makes clear its relation to late capitalism. Junk is the "ideal product" because the "junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client" ("Introduction," xxxix). The junkie's body is a harbinger of the postmodern mutant, for it demonstrates how presence yields to patterns of assembly and disassembly created by the flow of junk-as-information through points of amplification and resistance.
The characteristics of information narratives include, then, an emphasis on mutation and transformation as a central thematic for bodies within the text as well as for the bodies of texts. Subjectivity, already joined with information technologies through cybernetic circuits, is further integrated into the circuit by novelistic techniques that combine it with data. Access vies with possession as a structuring element, and data are narrativized to accomodate their integration with subjectivity. In general, materiality and immateriality are joined in a complex tension that is a source of exultation and strong anxiety. To understand the links between information narratives and other contemporary fictions that may not obviously fall into this category, let us turn now to consider the more general effects of informatics on narrative encodings.
Functionalities of Narrative
The very word narrator implies a voice speaking, and a speaking voice implies a sense of presence. Derrida, announcing the advent of grammatology, focused on the gap that separates speaking from writing; such a change transforms the narrator from speaker to scribe, or more precisely an absence toward which the inscriptions point.(27) Informatics pushes this transformation further. As writing yields to flickering signifiers underwritten by binary digits, the narrator becomes not so much a scribe as a cyborg authorized to access the relevant codes.
To see how the function of the narrator changes, consider the seduction scene from "I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense White Dot," one of the stories in Mark Layner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist.(28) The narrator, "high on Sinutab" and driving "isotropically," so that any destination is equally probable, finds himself at a "squalid little dive" (p. 6).
I don't know. . . but there she is. I can't tell if she's a human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don't care. I crack open an ampule of mating pheromone and let it waft across the bar, as I sip my drink, a methyl isocyanate on the rocks--methyl isocyanate is the substance which killed more than 2,000 people when it leaked in Bhopal, India, but thanks to my weight training, aerobic workouts, and a low-fat fiber-rich diet, the stuff has no effect on me. Sure enough she strolls over and occupies the stool next to mine. . . . My lips are now one angstrom unit from her lips . . . I begin to kiss her but she turns her head away. . . . I can't kiss you, we're monozygotic replicants--we share 100% of our genetic material. My head spins. You are the beautiful day, I exclaim, your breath is a zephyr of eucalyptus that does a pas de bourre across the Sea of Galilee. Thanks, she says, but we can't go back to my house and make love because monozygotic incest is forbidden by the elders. What if I said I could change all that. . . What if I said that I had a miniature shotgun that blasts gene fragments into the cells of living organisms, altering their genetic matrices so that a monozygotic replicant would no longer be a monozygotic replicant and she could then make love to a muscleman without transgressing the incest taboo, I say, opening my shirt and exposing the device which I had stuck in the waistband of my black jeans. How'd you get that thing? she gasps, ogling its thick fiber-reinforced plastic barrel and the Uzi-Biotech logo embossed on the magazine which held two cartridges of gelated recombinant DNA. I got it for Christmas. . . . Do you have any last words before I scramble your chromosomes, I say, taking aim. Yes, she says, you first (p. 7).
Much of the passage's wit comes from the juxtaposition of folk wisdom and seduction cliches with high-tech language and ideas that makes them nonsensical. The narrator sips a chemical that killed thousands when it leaked into the environment, but he is immune to damage because he eats a low-fat diet. The narrator leans close to the woman/android to kiss her, but he has not yet made contact when he is an angstrom away, considerably less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The characters cannot make love because they are barred by incest taboos, being replicants from the same monozygote, which would make them identical twins but does not seem to prevent them from being opposite sexes. They are governed by kinship rules enforced by tribal elders, but they have access to genetic technologies that intervene in and disrupt evolutionary modes of descent. They think their problem can be solved by an Uzi-Biotech weapon that will scramble their chromosomes, but the narrator, at least, seems to expect their identities to survive intact.
Even within the confines of a short story no more than five pages long, this encounter is not preceded or followed by events that relate directly to it. Rather the narrative leaps from scene to scene, which are linked by only the most tenuous and arbitrary threads. The incongruities make the narrative a kind of textual android created through patterns of assembly and disassembly. There is no natural body to this text, any more than there are natural bodies within the text. As the title intimates, identity merges with typograpy ("I was a . . . dot") and is further conflated with such high-tech reconstructions as computer simulations of gravitational collapse ("I was an infintelyhot and dense white dot"). Signifiers collapse like stellar bodies into an explosive materiality that approaches the critical point of nova, ready to blast outward into dissipating waves of flickering signification.
The explosive tensions between cultural codes that familiarize the action and neologistic splices that dislocate traditional expectations do more than structure the narrative. They also constitute the narrator, who exists less as a speaking voice endowed with a plausible psychology than as a series of fissures and dislocations that push toward a new kind of subjectivity. To understand the nature of this subjectivity, let us imagine a trajectory that arcs from storyteller to professional to some destination beyond. The shared community of values and presence that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he evoked the traditional storyteller whose words are woven into the rhythms of work echo faintly in allusions to the Song of Songs and tribal elders.(29) Overlaid on this is the professionalization that Lyotard wrote about in The Postmodern Condition, in which the authority to tell the story is constituted by possessing the appropriate credentials that qualify one as a member of a physically dispersed, electronically bound professional community.(30) This phase of the trajectory is signified in a number of ways. The narrator is driving "isotropically," indicating that physical location is no longer necessary or relevant to the production of the story. His authority derives not from his physical participation in a community but his possession of a high-tech language that includes pheramones, methyl isocyanate, and gelated recombinant DNA, not to mention the Uzi-Biotech phallus. This authority too is displaced even as it is created, for the incongruities reveal that the narrative and therefore the narrator are radically unstable, about to mutate into a scarcely conceivable form, signified in the story by the high-tech, identity-transforming orgasmic blast that never quite comes.
What is this form? Its physical manifestations vary, but the ability to manipulate complex codes is a constant. The looming transformation, already enacted through the passage's language, is into a subjectivity who derives his authority from possessing the correct codes. Countless scenarios exist in popular literature and culture where someone fools a computer into thinking he is an "authorized" person because he possesses or stumbles upon the codes that the computer recognizes as constituting authorization. Usually these scenarios imply that the person exists unchanged, taking on a spurious identity that allows him to move unrecognized within an informational system. There is, however, another way to read these narratives. Constituting identity through authorization codes changes the person who uses them into another kind of subjectivity, precisely one who exists and is recognized because he knows the codes. The surface deception is underlaid by a deeper truth. We become the codes we punch. The narrator is not a storyteller and not a professional authority, although these functions linger in the narrative as anachronistic allusions and wrenched referentiality. Rather the narrator is a keyboarder, a hacker, a manipulator of codes.(31) Assuming that the text was at some phase in its existence digitized, in a literal sense he (it?) is these codes.
The construction of the narrator as a manipulator of codes obviously has important implications for the construction of the reader. The reader is similarly constituted through a layered archeology that moves from listener to reader to decoder. Because codes can be sent over fiber optics essentially instantaneously, there is no longer a shared, stable context that helps to anchor meaning and guide interpretation. Like reading, decoding takes place in a location arbitrarily far removed in space and time from the source text. In contrast to fixed type print, however, decoding implies that there is no original text--no first editions, no fair copies, no holographic manuscripts. There are only the flickering signfiers, whose transient patterns evoke and embody what G. W. S. Trow has called the context of no context, the suspicion that all contexts, like all texts, are electronically mediated constructions.(32) What binds the decoder to the system is not the stability of an interpretive community or the intense pleasure of physically possessing the book that all bibliophiles know. Rather it is her construction as a cyborg, her recognition that her physicality is also data made flesh, another flickering signifier in a chain of signification that extends through many levels, from the DNA that in-formats her body to the binary code that is the computer's first language.
"Functionality" is a term used by virtual reality technologists to describe the communication modes that are active in a computer-human interface. If the user wears a data glove, for example, hand motions constitute one functionality. If the computer can respond to voice-activated commands, voice is another functionality. If it can sense body position, spatial location is yet another. Functionalities work in both directions; that is, they both describe the computer's capabilities and also indicate how the user's sensory-motor apparatus is being trained to accomodate the computer's responses. Working with a VR simulation, the user learns to move her hand in stylized gestures that the computer can accomodate. In the process, changes take place in the neural configuration of the user's brain, some of which can be long-lasting. The computer molds the human even as the human builds the computer.
When narrative functionalities change, a new kind of reader is produced by the text. The effects of flickering signification ripple outward because readers are trained to read through different functionalities, which can affect how they interpret any text, including texts written before computers were invented. Moreover, changes in narrative functionalities go deeper than structural or thematic characteristics of a specific genre, for they shift the modalities that are activated to produce the narrative. It is on this level that the subtle connections between information narratives and other kinds of contemporary fictions come into play.
Drawing on a context that included information technologies, Roland Barthes in S/Z brilliantly demonstrated the possibility of reading a text as a production of diverse codes.(33) Information narratives make that possibility an inevitability, for they often cannot be understood, even on a literal level, without referring to codes and their relation to information technologies. Flickering signification extends the productive force of codes beyond the text to include the signifying processes by which the technologies produce texts, as well as the interfaces that enmesh humans into integrated circuits. As the circuits connecting technology, text, and human expand and intensify, the point where quantitative increments shade into qualitative transformation draws closer. If my assessment is correct that the dialectic of pattern/randomness is displacing presence/absence, the implications extend beyond narrative into many cultural arenas. In my view, one of the most serious of these implications for the present cultural moment is a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. I find this trend ironic, for changes in material conditions and embodied experience are precisely what give the shift its deep roots in everyday experience. In this essay I have been concerned not only to anatomize the shift and understand its implications for literature but also to suggest that it should be understood in the context of changing experiences of embodiment. If on the one hand embodiment implies that informatics is imprinted into body as well as mind, on the other it also acts as a reservoir of materiality that resists the pressure toward dematerialization.
Implicit in nearly everything I have written here is the assumption that presence and pattern are opposites existing in antagonistic relation. The more emphasis that falls on one, the less the other is noticed and valued. Entirely different readings emerge when one entertains the possibility that pattern and presence are mutually enhancing and supportive. Paul Virilio has observed that one cannot ask whether information technologies should continue to be developed.(34) Given market forces already at work, it is virtually (if I may use the word) certain that increasingly we will live, work, and play in environments that construct us as embodied virtualities.(35) I believe that our best hope to intervene constructively in this development is to put an interpretive spin on it that opens up the possibilities of seeing pattern and presence as complementary rather than antagonistic. Information, like humanity, cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world; and embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific. Embodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated. Once the specific form constituting it is gone, no amount of massaging data will bring it back. This observation is as true of the planet as it is of an individual lifeform. As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us also remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced.


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-Suff Daddy
Taken From: "The Gin Diaries" (read Dart's take on the album HERE)
Damn yo, the lyrical "excerpt" from Suff Daddy's neckbreaker, "I Need A Break": "Step To 'Em/ Gettin' off, Gettin', Gettin", Gettin' off…", has probably been my most said "phrase" of the week. You know how every once in a while you stumble upon a cut that has those certain "unforgettable" qualities? Well, "I Need A Break" is just that; a sure-fire, neck-snapping instrumental cut from a "sophisticated" instrumental LP, "I Need A Break" is laced with an extra crisp bassline, one helluva' catchy sample and brilliant sequencing. While "I Need A Break" stands tall amongst the other noteworthy cuts that can be found on "The Gin Diaries", tracks such as "4 My Holiks" and "Hospital" aren't lagging too far behind in terms of quality and playability. Be sure to peep "The Gin Diaries" as you can count on "I Need A Break" holding down a definite spot on the next Bloggerhouse mixtape.
f. Ta-Ku-Leo Miles
Taken From: "One Night Stand" (Get It HERE)
Leo dropped his free LP, "One Night Stand" in our C-Box late last week, and being from PA myself, it was virtually a no-brainier to allot this local Philly product his well-deserved shine. I might add, not only was "One Night Stand" a very enjoyable listen (although, the sound quality of some of the tracks on the LP could use a little "tightening up"), but it was the addictive force of tracks like the Ta-Ku-assisted "Hearts" that kept me coming back for more. Propelled by a slick beatbox sample, "Hearts" finds Leo reminiscing of a love lost over an undeniable track with a hint of East Coast bounce injected into the mix.
-Guilty Simpson
Taken From: "OJ Simpson"
"Chillin' like Lance in the Tour De France..", has gotta' be one of the more catchy hooks in recent memory. Atop a pulsing Madlib sound scape, Guilty Simpson appropriately takes this bangin' instrumental to "New Heights". Guilty's "tongue in cheek" lyrical delivery meshes perfectly with Madlib's quirky, yet always innovative production to account for what I consider to be the most "rewind-worthy" cut from "OJ Simpson". Also, while we're on the topic of "OJ Simpson", any one else get the feeling if Stones Throw's intent for this album was to feature the lyricism of one Guilty Simpson or to shed even more light on Madlib's production? I don't know, but this sure as hell feels like a Madlib album as opposed to a Guilty Simpson album, waay too many instrumental "breaks" thrown into the mix on "OJ Simpson" for me, which deducts from the overall fluidity of the album.
-Homeboy Sandman
Taken From: "The Good Sun"
I gotta' say, man, Homeboy Sandman's promo for his forthcoming LP, "The Good Sun" was my very first exposure to this lyrically-inclined emcee, but it definitely won't be the last. I popped "The Good Sun" in the Ipod to accompany me for a morning run yesterday and after just one full listen to the LP, I can say that one thing's for certain: Homeboy Sandman CAN RAP HIS ASS OFF! And, on no other track is that more prevalent than "The Carpenter". Over a frantic, 2 Hungry Bros. production Sandboy unleashes a furious lyrical barrage that will have you exhaling a deep breath upon the track's end. It doesn't even appear that Sandman took a breather between rhymes on this uptempo heatrock.
"The Good Sun" should be arriving in stores near the 1st of June. The album, his first on NYC indie powerhouse High Water Music, boasts not only the otherworldly lyrical and thematic dexterity that have quickly made Boy Sand a champion of the national talent-based hip hop community, but also his most personal material to date. "The Good Sun is setting a lot of things straight. If somebody sets someone else straight, it might be referred to as 'sonning' them. I'm 'sonning' people with this album—a lot of people. It's the good son though. It's all done with love" says the Queens, NY emcee.
-Tone Liv
Taken From: "Path To Jersey" EP (Get It HERE)
My first exposure to Tone Liv was via his inclusion on the Uncut Raw CLASSIC "First Toke" a few years back and I've been tracking his solo career ever since. Late last month Tone released his freeEP "Path To Jersey" via Domination, and upon my first listen to the EPMD-flavored "Chill", the track has since remained on my "Top 25 Most Played" on the Ipod ever since. Produced by Tha S ence, "Chill" takes it back to the days of truck jewels, beepers and over-sized cellphones, and Tone's gruff, sandpaper delivery on "Chill" captures the true essence and spirit of the underground as Tha S ence's moving production evokes images of the gritty, sh*tty inna' city (c) Group Home.
Taken From: DJ House Shoes Presents: Chanes "An Experiment In Instrumentation" (Get It HERE)
Shi*ty cover art aside, this BandCamp special, the DJ House Shoes presented, instrumental LP from Chanes boasted some of the hardest production that I've heard thus far, nearly half-way through 2010. If you skipped the download of "An Experiment.." all you "4-20″ heads missed out on a true smoker's anthem, the Notorious B.I.G. ("Smoke a lil' chronic") sampled "Smoke Chronic". With a heavy dose of electronica mingled into the mix, "Smoke Chronic" will give your speakers a workout and will have your amps screaming for new life when all is said and done. I could have picked more than one track from this LP to include on this week's "Most Played", this album is just THAT GOOD. And no, Chanes and House Shoes are not the same person as many have inquired.
-TRUTHLiVE f. Mo Green
Taken From: "Patience"
Soooo….TRUTHLiVE's "Patience" dropped on the 20th of April, you know the ENTIRE LP was produced by Seattle's very own Jake One, right? Yeah, that's what I thought..me neither. Yet, after listening to "Patience" in it's entirety mid-week, I had to skim through the LP just one more time to be like: ahhhh OK. However, "The Stimulus Package" this ain't, rightfully so as Jake One's collaborative LP with Philadelphia's finest Freeway is probably the best piece of work to emerge from 2010. Not to say that Jake laced TRUTHLive with nothing but throwaway beats, but on the same token, TRUTHLiVE is no Freeway either.
Yet, it is tracks such as the Mo Green featured "Ready Set Go" as well as "Poetry In Motion" and "It's Easy" (which features the same backdrop that the Special Teamz ripped apart on their debut LP) that make "Patience" more than deserving of your ear's attention. Coming from the same producer who laced one of my favorite productions of the last decade (Jake One's "Home", from "White Van Music", "Ready Set Go" is what we've grown to expect from one of the West's most underrated, under-appreciated producers.
-Panacea f. Alona Of The Ebony Bed
Taken From: Panacea' s forthcoming LP "12 Step Program"
For those readers whom remained loyal to When They Reminisce over the last 3 years, you already know just how "big" I am on Panacea. Truly one of a kind, the production styling of K-Murdock and lyrical musings of one Raw Poetic don't really "grab you" per se upon first listen to the duo. Yet, they are both so damn unique and original that it's almost impossible not to revert back to albums like "The Scenic Route" and "A Mind On A Ship Through Time" for a refresher on just how talented this oft-overlooked duo truly are.
With the proper-U.S. (the album is already available for purchase overseas, I believe) release just right around the bend, May 5th to be exact, from what I've gathered with just a few complete listens to "12 Step Program", Panacea has compiled their finest piece of work to date. While K-Murdock's production on the LP features his signature melodic style, it's tracks such as this, the nearly 120-BPM "Sync In City" that venture off the usual path of what you can expect from Panacea. And while Raw Poetic has remained as consistent and potent on the mic as ever, Panacea's forward-thinking on this LP elevates this album to an instant classic in the minds of Panacea's die-hard following.
-Waterloo & Rhettoric
Taken From: "Cherry Blossoms And Gunpowder"
Louis (Waterloo) Hampton and Joshua (Rhettoric) Rhett are both Charlottesville natives, while attending VCU in Richmond, Rhettoric started honing his skills as a beat maker/producer, competing in local producer/MC showcases and crushing the competition. Meanwhile, back in Charlottesville, Waterloo is creating with Beetnix. Building fame locally and on the East Coast by opening up for Ghostface, GZA and Muggs, State Radio, and Murs and 9th Wonder. Through a mutual friend Rhettoric, and Waterloo were introduced. Both hit it off and had respect for each others style. After a few visits from Charlottesville to Richmond, a collaborative album was agreed upon. In the spirit of Murs and 9th Wonder's. 316 the 9th edition, Waterloo and Rhettoric were formed. Creating "Cherryblossoms and Gunpowder."
St. Mic sent this to me last week, and allow me to be the first one to say: "this LP is SERIOUS". Waterloo has lyrics for days, and while he may remind some of Skyzoo (not a bad comparison, by any stretch), this cat reels you in with his vivid lyricism and wordplay as Rhettoric laces him with some sick production. For a nice little primer of what I'm referring to peep the aforementioned "Good Morning", a playful cut that will have you reaching for the "repeat/rewind" button in an instant. Warning: neck-brace not included!
-5th Element
Taken From: "Elements Of Life" (Get It HERE)
When you listen to a particular album and in the end you don't quite know as to how you would "classify" or "categorize" and album that in itself can be the gift and the curse. Is 5th Element's instrumental Hip Hop? Electronica? Just what is it? Doesn't matter, "Elements Of Life" is HANDS-DOWN (although, I'm quite sure I'm missing one or two?) the most cohesive, enjoyable beat tape that I've enjoyed this year. Be sure to hit up THE FIND MAG, for the link and the complete rund0wn on each track as 5th Element takes you from start to finish on this instrumental expedition. I just can't believe I never heard of this cat before, extremely talented dude!


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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Dry weather will speed early harvesting of corn and soybean crops for the next week to 10 days in the southern section of the U.S. Midwest, agricultural meteorologists said Monday.
Don Keeney, meteorologist for MDA EarthSat Weather, said cooler and mostly dry weather was expected this week in the Midwest crop belt.
The exception would be light rain late in the week in the northwestern Midwest and showers in the southwest Plains on Monday and Tuesday.
"Rather benign weather this week, and next week looks similar," Keeney forecast said.
A turn to wetter weather now would do little to revive drought-stricken corn or soy, Keeney said, and instead slow the early harvest pace.
Each crop was maturing earlier than normal due to excessive stress from heat and drought over the summer, and from the historic early seeding pace of last spring.
Keeney said light showers were likely Thursday and Friday in the northwestern Midwest, but dry weather was expected throughout the week in the southern and eastern Midwest.
Temperatures have moderated from the extreme heat wave over the summer, with highs now seen in the 70s to 80s degrees Fahrenheit, Keeney said.
Commodity Weather Group (CWG) said the forecast trended drier for the next 10 days, particularly in the southern Midwest as well as the Delta.
Weekend rains spread across much of the southern Delta and Southeast, slowing early corn harvest, according to CWG.
Reporting By Sam Nelson


text:
A Target store in far northwest suburban West Dundee is among eight stores nationwide that will close this spring.
In a press statement, company officials said the store, at 999 W Main St, will close May 3, along with stores in Duluth, GA.; Memphis, Tenn., Orange Park, Fla.; Middletown, Ohio; and two in the Las Vegas, Nev., area.
Some of the employees at those stores -- "eligible" employees, according to the company -- will be offered an opportunity to transfer to another store.
The company said the closures come "after careful consideration of each location's financial performance."
They also come as the big box retailer deals with the expanding fallout of a massive data breach at its stores during the 2013 holiday season. Officials said as many as 110 million shoppers may have had their personal data compromised.


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Duncan, Dewey, 74, of Clarkesville; 2 p.m. at Whitfield Funeral Home, North Chapel.
Huff, Harold, 82, of Winder; 2 p.m. at Smith Funeral Home.
Packer, Robert, of Athens; 2 p.m. at First Baptist Church, Athens; Bernstein Funeral Home.
Parker, J.R., 65, of Baldwin; 1 p.m. at B.C. Grant Baptist Church; Whitfield Funeral Home, South Chapel.
This article published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, October 17, 2001.
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UCLA's Student Financial Services has recovered almost all of the about $27 million in duplicate financial aid distributed to more than 7,000 students last week.
Nearly all of the students who received duplicate payments have sent the funds back, but $85,000 still needs to be recovered.
Student Financial Services is currently working individually with fewer than 50 students to reverse the error, said Allison Baird-James, associate vice chancellor for corporate financial services and the campus controller.
This is the first time in recent memory an error like this has occurred, Baird-James said.
At the beginning of each quarter, the university deposits excess funds for many financial aid and scholarship recipients directly into their bank accounts. This payment is the amount of money from financial aid and scholarships remaining after tuition and fees have been paid.
On March 26, Student Financial Services processed the excess funds smoothly, Baird-James said. The next day, however, a systemic error led to a duplicate deposit into many students' bank accounts.
The overpayments occurred through the automatic refunding system portion in the CASHNet system. The automatic refunding element of CASHNet was installed in January.
The error occurred when CASHNet failed to communicate properly with a separate student billing and account system, Baird-James said.
"It was a problem with the timing and the way the two systems communicated with each other," Baird-James said.
Belem Lamas, a third-year political science student, said she panicked when she checked her bank account to see she had been overpaid in financial aid.
When she found the error on March 28, she called the Financial Aid Office, fearing that her classes would be dropped since the duplicate refund had also resulted in a due balance on her BAR account. But she was told this would not be the case.
In an email sent to affected students on March 29, Student Financial Services stated that students' fees had been paid and classes would not be dropped as a result of the error.
Students received one of two versions of the email. The first thanked students who had already returned the duplicate payment. The second urged students to monitor their bank accounts to ensure the fund reversal was carried out properly.
Steve Ritea, a UCLA spokesman, said neither he nor Baird-James could give specifics on the logistics of the error for security reasons, because the system is important in handling student funds and transactions.
The university is looking internally to ensure the error does not happen again, Baird-James said. This involves implementing checks and balances to make sure the timing between CASHNet and the separate student billing and account system is synchronized.
Belem said the process of paying the funds back went smoothly, and she didn't have problems. The incident was mainly an inconvenience for students, Baird-James said.
"It added a wrinkle to spring break that wasn't intended." Baird-James said.


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Jay Bouwmeester is a shining example right now of why it's never a bad idea on draft day to take a late-round chance on an under-achieving defenceman with a high first-round pedigree.
Drafted third overall by Florida in 2002, J-Bo has, for the most part, been a fantasy disappointment, but is enjoying a career year in his first full season with the powerful Blues and making his owners look either shrewd or lucky.
Bouwmeester did have some solid seasons with the Panthers -- though never quite reaching that elite level most expected of him -- before sliding off the fantasy radar screen entirely with the Flames. But this season, the 30-year-old has finally climbed up to that top-drawer level with 2-19-21 totals in 27 games and should easily be looking at career bests in assists, points and PIMs. All that is missing is the goals, netting just his second of the year on Thursday. Take heart, though.


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NAIPR Message
AOP Notification
- From: Michael Dillon (michael at MEMRA.COM)
- Date: Sun Feb 2 17:52:33 EST 1997
- Next message (by thread): AOP Notification
- Previous message (by thread): AOP Notification
On Sun, 2 Feb 1997, Kim Hubbard wrote: > It's going to take upfront money to make ARIN operational. I don't > think it's a good idea to go around asking for donations from everyone > before we can open the doors. It depends on what the up-front costs are. Do you refer to a portion of your salary, the website, the mailing list, some postage costs, some legal fees, some phone calls? All of these are certainly essential to creating ARIN but they don't amount to a lot of money and could be handled as a loan to be repaid by ARIN. Or is there something else? Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-250-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael at memra.com


text: The Castle Collection is the epitome of rustic, with a touch of old world charm, infused with the elegance of modern home furnishings. Made from the finest oak, each piece is carefully crafted to achieve the perfect finish. The distressing process gives this collection an authentic period appeal - an age worn dignity that is normally achieved through the passage of time.