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April 2006
International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF): Experimental plot growing trees with crops, Kenya. Photo by CGIAR.
As living entities on this planet, we are at the mercy of the Earth's living conditions just as any other species. Simply put, we are just another passenger on the ship called Earth. The difference, however, is that we are affecting life in a way that no other species has and altering our planet at a much faster rate. In particular, human activity and specifically habitat destruction have dramatically increased rates of biodiversity loss.
Biodiversity is:
- the total variety of living entities on this planet including all living organisms, as well as their surrounding habitats, or ecosystems, and the genetic material of which they are made1
- extremely important to maintain the proper functioning of ecosystems and society; it is the diversity of life that makes this planet extraordinary
- a provider many services and uses, as well as being a source of aesthetic joy: oil, coal, cement, and limestone are all part of the past biodiversity on which our economies depend and the majority of our medicines and agricultural crops come from the environment
- also important for providing ecosystem services such as pollination and pest control.
Even though humankind only uses a few species of crop plants, ensuring that agriculture is carried out in a manner compatible with biodiversity is crucial.
Agricultural systems and biodiversity
Traditional approaches to biodiversity conservation focus on protecting natural habitats in parks and reserves while ignoring the possibilities found within certain agricultural habitats.2 Preservation is necessary to maintain native habitats and those species reliant on pristine habitats, but very little land area is currently protected.
- The total amount of land in protected areas worldwide in 2004 was estimated at only 6.1 percent of the total land area.3
- In contrast, approximately 75 percent of arable lands are now cultivated in some sort of agriculture4 and in large part are contributing to the destruction of biodiversity.
Increasingly, however, conservation biologists are incorporating some agricultural systems into their management plans as important refuges for biodiversity. The general concept underlying incorporation of agricultural areas is that if a certain percentage of land is dedicated to environmentally friendly and sound agriculture, and another percentage of pristine habitat is protected, then preserving the two land uses in combination can contribute to the capacity of the planet to keep us afloat. In order to protect biodiversity, the thinking goes, we need to incorporate agricultural lands managed to protect the environment and therefore our own survival. In contrast, continuing with inappropriate land use will deplete our resources and destroy the remaining biodiversity at ever increased rates.
That we need to incorporate agriculture to save biodiversity may come as a surprise to those who envision agriculture as a wasteland. Yet some agricultural areas with trees may protect as much biodiversity as neighboring forests and provide other benefits necessary for proper ecosystem functioning.5,6 Agricultural systems that differ in number of crop plants and vegetation structure can be located along a gradient of intensification from areas where crops are grown under natural forest canopies (agroforests) to intensively managed areas with only one crop plant (monocultures).7
Monoculture was heavily promoted in the 1970s under the guise of the green revolution. Techniques included planting large expanses with a single crop to increase efficiency and yield and adding high inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. The green revolution promised to increase crop yields and feed a growing population. Many still argue that using such intensive techniques in smaller land areas will allow protection of more habitats for wildlife conservation.8
- Although such techniques may allow short-term yield increases, the costs of intensive and extensive agriculture continues to place a great toll on biodiversity and native habitats, and these negative effects are not limited to the particular agricultural habitats in which they are practiced.4,9
- Pest resistance to pesticides also became a problem causing widespread overuse of chemicals and subsequent pollution.
- Furthermore, intensive production systems have resulted in overproduction of many crops and as a consequence a price decline, making it harder for farmers to continue making a living from agriculture.10
Intensive agriculture also intensifies the problem of forest fragmentation. Even in large forest fragments, there are high levels of species extinction, especially when the fragments are isolated.11 Thus a strategy focusing on intensive agriculture with pesticide applications and intensive monocultures will further isolate those fragments and will prevent movement of individuals between fragments.5 In contrast, when forest fragments are embedded within high quality matrix that promotes interfragment movement, there is a high probability that forest populations can be maintained as metapopulations.12,13
Agroforestry systems, in contrast to intensive monocultures, may provide such high quality habitats important for biodiversity conservation. Agroforestry systems are broadly defined as agricultural systems where trees are grown together with annual crops and/or animals, resulting in enhanced complementary relations between components and increased multiple use.14 Agroforests often fall at the least intensive end of the agricultural spectrum; agroforestry systems such as coffee, cacao, or jungle rubber, where crops are grown under a diverse and dense canopy of trees, protect biodiversity and are a far cry from the images of agriculture as the enemy. Particularly among tropical agroforestry types, shaded coffee and cacao have received the most attention and study. Coffee and cacao were traditionally cultivated under a diverse, dense shade canopy, but recent production is characterized by increased management intensity: reducing shade tree density and diversity, shade tree pruning, and use of agrochemicals.15
Agroforests and maintenance of biodiversity
In general, scientists refer to two types of biodiversity:
- Planned biodiversity encompasses the variety of plants and animals chosen and placed in the system by the farmer. Examples generally include crop plants and livestock.
- Associated biodiversity comprises all other species attracted to or found within the system apart from the farmer's plans. Examples include wildlife such as birds and mammals, soil organisms, and weeds.7
Agricultural intensification, moving along the gradient from agroforests grown with a diverse and dense shade canopy to those agroforests with only a few types of trees to monocultures with only one crop species or cattle pastures, by definition includes a reduction in the planned biodiversity. Agricultural intensification also results in a loss of associated biodiversity. The following key studies in a range of agroforest types and other agricultural systems document losses in associated biodiversity (relative to nearby forest fragments) with increasing agricultural intensification:
- In several agricultural and forest habitat types sampled in Chiapas, Mexico, bird diversity was highest in forest, but it was closely followed by woodlots and shaded coffee agroforests, each supporting approximately 105 species of birds. Other habitats sampled, such as cattle pastures, multigrain fields, arboreal pastures, and pine savannas, had many fewer species.16
In Panama, of 11 habitat types sampled for bird species, wooded habitats (including forests, shaded coffee agroforests, and residential areas) supported many more bird species than introduced pine plantations or sugar cane and at least twice as many species as active cattle pastures.17
Insects were sampled from trees in three coffee agroforest types in Costa Rica: traditional (with the highest diversity and density of trees), moderate, and unshaded. Ant diversity across the three types decreased from 22 species per tree in the traditional agroforest to 5 species in the moderate type to 0 species found in the unshaded plantation. Similarly, beetle diversity decreased from 118 in the traditional plantation to 48 in the moderate type to 0 in the unshaded type.18
In coffee agroforests in Chiapas, Mexico, samples of fruit-feeding butterflies revealed that diversity was similar in forest and coffee agroforests with high density and diversity of trees, but only a half to a third as many species were found in coffee agroforests with few trees.19
Although only a few studies are presented here, many more show similar patterns for other groups of animals and plants, including small mammals, bats, bees, and epiphytes, in a range of geographic locations.20 The pattern is clear: diverse agroforestry systems provide important habitat for biodiversity, especially when they are compared with other agricultural systems. Although less is known about the long-term maintenance of biodiversity within these systems, or the ability of species to reproduce in agroforests, much work has been carried out recently and is underway to determine what factors promote and maintain biodiversity in agroforests. Factors that are known to be important for the maintenance of biodiversity generally include high plant diversity, including any species necessary for reproduction or food, and a variety of microclimates and microhabitats to support diverse life forms and species.21,22
Overall benefits of agroforestry systems
Agroforests benefit biodiversity, which in turn can benefit the agroforest functioning and humans.
provide habitat for biodiversity to live and breed:
-predator species that protect crop plants from pest outbreaks.23
-pollinator species important for ensuring harvests of important crops.24-26
act as buffers to protected areas, in other words, protecting them from the direct effects of more intensive agriculture and human settlements.
create a high quality matrix that increases the movement of animals from one protected area to another and increasing the overall connectivity of natural habitats.12,13
reduce soil erosion, increase carbon sequestration, increase water uptake and storage.27
provide economic benefits to farmers through the large diversity of crops produced.28
Agroforestry and sustainability
The problem of conserving biodiversity goes hand in hand with larger issues of social and economic development: Land use must be both ecologically and economically sustainable. If practiced in a sustainable manner, agroforests can contribute toward these goals. Sustainable use is defined generally as use of components of biological diversity in a way and at a rate that does not lead to the long-term decline of biological diversity, thereby maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of present and future generations.1 Ecologically, agricultural systems need to be oriented in such a manner that they can last longer than just a few years. Agroforests provide one significant way in which this can be done, but it is important they be managed organically. Organic agriculture—eliminating chemical use and promoting soil enriching practices—works hand in hand with agroforests in promoting sustainable agricultural systems.
Economically speaking, agroforests can provide incomes from many alternative sources as well as provide materials and foods used by the farmers. In contrast to sun crops, frequently grown solely for export and with often volatile markets, diverse agroforests produce many crops, buffering the ups and downs of international markets. Diverse systems with high levels of biodiversity also have better ecosystem services, increasing local functions of pest control23 and pollination,24-26 often with high economic returns. In sum, agroforestry systems are not only ecologically sustainable ways to grow crops but also provide income and resources to farmers and protect biodiversity.
The future of agroforestry
To protect biodiversity and other benefits that biodiversity provides, agroforestry systems should continue and expand, especially in buffer zones near protected areas. There are two basic ways to encourage agroforestry systems:
- Provide incentives to the farmers that already have agroforestry systems.
- Restore vegetation in monoculture systems with perennials and tree crops.
Although growing crops under existing forest canopies would easily create very diverse agroforests, it is problematic if farmers turn to existing forests and especially forest reserves to do so.29 However, it is important to provide farmers who already have agroforestry systems with economic incentives to prevent them from turning agroforests into intensive monocultural systems.30 Creating agroforestry systems by restoring degraded agricultural habitats is one way in which to avoid the problem of forest conversion while still maintaining and promoting recovery of biodiversity. In such a restoration process, sun coffee, for example, slowly transformed to shade coffee. Furthermore, areas with sun grown crops like vegetables can be planted with sun tolerant trees, such as cinnamon, allspice, and fruit trees, which eventually grow into shade tolerant hardwoods. This process leads to recovery of forested areas with diverse canopies from which people still can retrieve economic benefits.
Agroforests provide important habitats for biodiversity, ecologically sustainable buffer zones for protected areas, a high quality matrix that promotes movement between forest fragments, and ecosystem services such as pest control, pollination, and erosion control. Furthermore, agroforests produce important sources of income for local people. It is possible to see agriculture as a diverse system and treat it as an extension of natural habitats that can be guided to grow our needs.
© 2006, American Institute of Biological Sciences. Educators have permission to reprint articles for classroom use; other users, please contact email@example.com for reprint permission. See reprint policy.


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Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Richard Klein proposes that governments pay less attention to warnings about smoking, calories, cholesterol and pay more attention to promoting an intelligent lifestyle that includes fine wine, excellent dining and, following in the footsteps of Socrates, even dancing in the mornings.
Written not-at-all in the stiff, formal academic style, an article well worth reading. And perhaps showing to those who are constantly warning us of how doomsday awaits at our next bite of foie gras or our next sip of Chateau d'Yquem.
See the article at http://chronicle.com/article/Against-Health/125415/


text:
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'One of today's bestselling study Bibles, the NIV Life Application Study Bible has over 10,000 application notes to help you understand the message of Scripture and apply it to your life in practical ways. Character sketches allow you to learn from the lives of key Bible personalities while charts, time lines and a concordance enhance your study experience. This unique Bible is full of study directives to help you discover how God's Word applies to your life today. Features: * The most popular modern English Bible---the New International Version (NIV) * Over 10,000 in-text application notes * Over 100 character profiles * Charts, time lines, concordance, and other study helps'
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NIV - New International VersionReader Level: Grade 7-8
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Sample Verses: John 3:16-17 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."
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text:
Model Francesca Eastwood has secretly wed Jonah Hill's brother in a low-key ceremony in Las Vegas, according to multiple reports.
The 20-year-old blonde obtained a marriage license from officials in Clark County, Nev., on November 17 and exchanged vows with Jordan Feldstein, who serves as Adam Levine and Robin Thicke's manager, on Sunday.
The happy news will come as a surprise to many – the bride, whose mother is actress Frances Fisher and dad is Clint Eastwood, had been dating celebrity photographer Tyler Shields for some time and even documented their relationship on reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company," in which both appeared with Francesca's stepmother, Dina Eastwood.
The newlyweds posted their marriage certificate in Clark County on Tuesday, according to TMZ.com.


text:
Corbett met with investigator over Sandusky case
HARRISBURG — Gov. Tom Corbett recently met with a special prosecutor investigating his handling of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse case while he was attorney general and looking into why it took so long to bring charges against the former Penn State assistant football coach.
The Republican governor's communications director, Lynn Lawson, told The Associated Press on Friday that the meeting was earlier this week, but she declined to disclose other details.
The investigation into how the Sandusky case was handled has its roots in Kathleen Kane's successful 2012 campaign to become the first Democrat and the first woman to be elected Pennsylvania's attorney general. During the campaign, she repeatedly questioned why it took nearly three years for charges to be filed against Sandusky.
In February 2013, Kane appointed Widener Law School professor and former federal prosecutor Geoff Moulton to lead an investigation. Moulton did not return a phone message, and Kane's spokesman declined to address Corbett's interview.
Corbett is running for a second term this year, and Moulton's report, no matter its findings, is certain to become fodder for both sides on the campaign trail in the coming months.
The Sandusky criminal investigation began while Corbett was serving as attorney general and continued through 2010, the year Corbett made his run for governor. Sandusky was arrested in November 2011, a year after Corbett's election.
The governor has cited the successful prosecution of Sandusky as proof that the state investigation was effective and strongly denied suggestions that he didn't want the investigation to become public while he was campaigning for governor.
He said early on he would likely meet with Moulton, but he suggested Kane's probe was politically motivated.
"Anybody can come in and sit down and Monday morning quarterback decisions, OK? But for a true investigation, there has to be some criminal act. I know I didn't commit any criminal act. None, zero," he said in late 2012.
Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse of 10 boys and is serving a 30- to 60-year state prison sentence.
During testimony at Sandusky's criminal trial in June 2012, an investigator with the attorney general's office, Anthony Sassano, said the case began in late 2008 when a state trooper interviewed a young man from Lock Haven who was one of Sandusky's victims.
Sassano said the case was turned over to state prosecutors in early 2009, after the local prosecutor raised a conflict of interest, and a grand jury began to take testimony that summer. An anonymous tip to the district attorney in the State College area alerted investigators that former assistant coach Mike McQueary may have information in the matter and Sandusky was put under surveillance, Sassano said.
"It was a daunting task to try to get others to come forward," Sassano said on the stand, noting the nature of the abuse the victims suffered.
Investigators obtained lists of boys who participated in events through a charity for children that Sandusky founded, identified boys in photos from Sandusky's autobiography "Touched" and searched his home and a storage facility at Penn State, Sassano said.
The Patriot-News reported on the existence of the grand jury investigation at the end of March 2011. About seven months later, the attorney general's office filed criminal molestation charges against Sandusky and charged athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz with perjury and other offenses for an alleged criminal cover-up. Similar charges were filed later against former Penn State president Graham Spanier.
Charges against the three former Penn State administrators are pending. All three deny the allegations.
Kane announced in February that Moulton's investigation had taken longer than expected because of a time-consuming process to retrieve emails that had been thought to have been permanently deleted when the man who briefly succeeded Corbett as attorney general, Bill Ryan, approved a new record retention policy.


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Tonight, I went to the MassDOT Developers "Where's the Bus? 2.0: The Wait is Over" event, where the MBTA announced the next phase of its real-time data project.
Starting today, the MBTA released real-time data for bus routes 1, 4, 15, 22, 23, 28, 32, 57, 66, 71, 73 and 77. With these routes, on top of the previously released data for routes 39, 111, 114, 116, and 117, data for routes handling one-third of the MBTA's bus passenger load has been made public. By the end of the summer, the MBTA plans to release real-time data for every bus route in the system and launch a marketing campaign around the availability of real-time bus data.
"We need to be more open and frank," said recently hired MBTA General Manager Rich Davey, who today began tweeting as @MBTAGM. He stated his focus on "investing and working in the guts of the system."
All of the MassDOT and MBTA personnel on hand emphasized the need for innovation and creativity to propel the transit agency.
"We're going to revolutionize riding the bus in Boston," said project mastermind Joshua Robin, whose hope is that buses become cool enough for people to make t-shirts pimping out their favorite routes.
Larry Rosenshein of NextBus, the company that the MBTA works with to crunch its real-time data and make it feed-ready, referenced this NPR commentary declaring that "practical tech is the sexiest tech," because of the way it improves our essential quality of life.
Rick Borovoy from the Center for Future Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab talked about community media and art projects that can benefit from this data, including Lost in Boston, which blends public and private spaces to build community, and John Ewing's Virtual Street Corners, which bridges the gap between spots in the city that are geographically close but worlds apart.
As a huge fan of public transit and a longtime nerd, I am beyond excited about this initiative. I wish I were a programmer just so I could hack together an app this weekend.
Next up after the bus system? The commuter rail.
Photo by Dan4th/Flickr Creative Commons


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SUSER_ID (Transact-SQL)
Returns the login identification number of the user.
SUSER_ID always returned NULL when it is used in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. In SQL Server 2005, SUSER_ID returns the value listed as principal_id in the sys.server_principals catalog view.
Transact-SQL Syntax Conventions
SUSER_ID ( [ 'login' ] )
- 'login'
Is the login name of the user. login is nchar. If login is specified as char, login is implicitly converted to nchar. login can be any SQL Server login or Microsoft Windows user or group that has permission to connect to an instance of SQL Server. If login is not specified, the login identification number for the current user is returned.
Return Types
SUSER_ID returns an identification number only for logins that have been explicitly provisioned inside SQL Server. This ID is used within SQL Server to track ownership and permissions. This ID is not equivalent to the SID of the login that is returned by SUSER_SID. If login is a SQL Server login, the SID maps to a GUID. If login is a Windows login or Windows group, the SID maps to a Windows security identifier.
SUSER_SID returns a SUID only for a login that has an entry in the syslogins system table.
System functions can be used in the select list, in the WHERE clause, and anywhere an expression is allowed, and must always be followed by parentheses, even if no parameter is specified.
In SQL Server version 7.0, the security identification number (SID) replaced the server user identification number (SUID).
The following example returns the login identification number for the
sa login.
SELECT SUSER_ID('sa')
See Also
sys.server_principals (Transact-SQL)
SUSER_SID (Transact-SQL)
System Functions (Transact-SQL)


text: We drove from Philly to see you perform last night in York and hung around to try to meet you at the end! Thank you for being so generous with your time! Your performances and your charisma are amazing! The night was a life changing experience for my little brother who is a junior in high school, looking to go to NYU for recording and music business. He has played the trumpet since 5th grade and piano since he was 7 years old. He taught himself how to play the guitar and drums and to mic, record, and mix it all. When he heard about your background, it motivated him even more to stick with the troubled music industry which he still has faith in and loves so much! You have inspired him and we are lucky to have you as a great role model for aspiring artists. Thank you again for your time, kindness and sincerity last night. It meant a lot to my brother and our family. We are huge fans and hope to follow you for the rest of the long & successful career that you deserve.


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Tilly; I did the calculations in the past to determine the stoichiometric amount of biodiesel produced and the volume of methanol required to make biodiesel from new corn oil. But when I titrated new corn oil the sodium hydroxide titration number was 0.6 grams/litre. That's a little fly in the ointment. A 100% stoichiometric amount of biodiesel produced from 1 litre of new corn oil with no free fatty acids in it is 1056.5 milliliters. That requires 127.2 milliliters of 100% of anhydrous alcohol. That's figuring corn oil with a density of 0.915 grams per litre (I measured it) and biodiesel with a density of 0.87 grams per millilitre. The average molecular weight of the methyl fatty acid ester from corn oil is about 292 grams per mole.
Hi WessleyB,
There are a few flies in this ointment.
It is true that we do not know what type of oil was being reacted, but it is common practice to consider 12.5% methanol (125ml methanol/ litre WVO) to be the stoicheometric amount of methanol required for the reaction.
Dgs claims to have used 12% methanol (120 ml methanol/ litre WVO) to perform the reaction which is pretty close to stoicheometric.
HOWEVER The first fly in the ointment is that this is NOT A stoicheometric reaction, it is an Equilibrium reaction
As I am sure you know, that means that it requires More than the stoicheometric amount of methanol to achieve a complete reaction.
The second fly in the ointment is that my conversion chart shows that in a single stage reaction, if you perform the reaction using the stoicheometric amount of methanol you would achieve about an 81% conversion.
Do you see the flies?
It's amazing what you find when you Google your name. I haven't visited this forum for some time, and there have been several pages of discussion since I last visited.
I'll plough through them when I get a chance, and answer as many questions as are appropriate. In saying that I face the problem that most of you don't understand much chemistry (exception is WesleyB). This is complicated by the fact that a couple of self-styled experts have popped up who think that they do, and have done nothing but confuse people with their uninformed comments.
The bottom line is this - the explanations I have given will make perfect sense to a chemist. If they don't, then I'm afraid I don't have the time or inclination to conduct online chemistry tutorials. The method was written for the layman. All you have to do is follow the method and it will work. I'll happily answer any questions directly arising from the method, like this one.
Also, I have now simplified the method even further, but I'll get to that later.
To answer this specific question, if you got soap in the batch, it's because the oil wasn't dry. This method is anhydrous, and will work best with dry oil.
I once got lazy with this, but never again. I had a batch that I knew had some water in the oil, but went ahead anyway. The result was that the method didn't proceed at room temperature - a bit of a problem when you make 1000L at a time.
So I whacked a water heater in it overnight, and by the time the temperature got to about 30C it commenced.
Afterwards when it settled there was a yellow layer of soap sitting on top of the glycerol, which I guess is what dgs is referring to. The problem that this caused was it greatly increased the settling time when I tapped off the raw product into one of my settling tanks. Never again.
Shortly I'll repost my method modification. Also, for those of you living in Perth WA I'll be doing a public demonstration of this method soon.
Hello Minder/ Dr Mark/ Mark Imisidies,
You are acquiring more and more online names all the time
I understand your problem and that you are way to busy to try to explain what you are talking about.
We will just struggle on the best we can.
I am afraid that some of us on this forum have been well and truley spoiled.
At one time we had an Industrial Research Chemist (PhD) on the forum who went by the name of Neutral who was really really knowledgeable about the chemistry involved in making biodiesel and was outstanding at explaining complicated things so that us chemically ignorant people actually understood what he was talking about.
He should have been a teacher!
As I recall, he had been involved in alternate fuel research in the 70's and had actually made biodiesel way back then.
Of course it was not called biodiesel in the 70's.
That is a worry.
When I use just the standard method of making biodiesel it processes at room temperature. It just takes longer.
In fact, Dgs has reported that he normally processes everything at Ambient temperature and the reaction is finished in 45 Minutes!!!
I am eager to see your modified method!
Isn't it a coincidence, the chemist Neutral also lives in Perth!!!
OH!!! It just twigged,
you need to go on to the Australia biofuel forum and tell everyone there you are doing a demonstration in Perth.
From freshman university chemistry, professor Bramer said, for some organic chemistry reactions a ten degree celcius increase in temperature doubles the reaction rate. But at a inadequate temperate the reaction will not proceed. I am sceptical of this room temperature reaction proceeding to form our desired product.
I promise when you post your revised anhydrous processing method I will certainly try it over here in the UK. I tried the first method you posted, but like dgs, found that it produced calcium soap which could only be removed using wood chips. Made lovely bio though, which is in my car now! No explanation of the chemistry involved is fine for me. I'm only grateful that you are prepared to share your findings here.
One thing I would like to ask - you say that you process your own oil in 1000 litre batches. Which method do you use to dry that quantity of oil?
Best wishes
I don't dry the oil. I use dry oil to begin with. I don't have a Karl Fischer unit handy to measure it, but my test is simply whether the oil is transparent - ie free of any murkiness. I have found in the past that drying oil that contains water is simply not practical in the volumes I am using. The reason is that normally if there is water in the drum I am collecting oil from, it is because they have put washings into the drum, and this involves surfactants of some sort. Hence it will sit there as an emulsion and never actually settle out.
If the oil is dry the reaction will begin in a couple of minutes, and no soap will be formed.
BTW the modification I have made is to substitute General Purpose Grey Cement as the drying agent, as quicklime is unavailable over the counter here in WA. Note, it is the grey cement powder only, not the Concrete that also contains gravel and sand. It's a mixture of dry silicates, along with some quicklime and other salts that does a nice job of dehydrating the meth solution.
I'm going to get a website set up at some stage complete with vids that'll simplify any questions rthat people may have
Hi Minder,
That is interesting,
I looked up the MSDS for Boral General Purpose Cement and it lists the content of Calcium Oxide/ Quick lime as "<3%"
Considering there is such a minimal amount of quick lime available in General Purpose grey cement, how much do you recommend people use?
I'm not so sure about that Tilly. I've had a look to find out and it seems that Ordinary Portland Cement (what we mostly use here in the UK) consists of 63% CaO
Now I may have got a bit mixed up, and maybe that is the CaO level before the cement is finished. It might start at this level but be much lower in the finished product.
The exact components of the cement don't matter. The only requirements of the drying agent are
1. That it be insoluble in MeOH
2. That the aqueous adsorption equilibrium lie to the right. This is the beauty of the CaO, as it forms hydrated lime, and pulls it further to the right than you'd normally get with a purely adsorptive mechanism.
The fact that the cement is so fine also helps, as it provides a large surface area for adsorption.
One factor that I didn't mention in the initial method is that the methoxide solution needs to be sealed from the atmosphere as far as is possible while it's settling. As a highly alkaline, dry methanolic solution it will rapidly absorb both water and CO2 from the atmosphere very quickly, both of which will degrade it. In my case I put a tarp over the drum with some ocky straps
Correct. And for some it will triple it. And for some it will quadruple it. And for some it will make no (measurable) difference. The nature of catalysis is that it lowers the Ea by providing an alternative mechanistic pathway to the products. That mechanism may be heterogenous, such as the catalytic converter in your car where the function of the catalyst is simply to immobilise the reactants in the solid phase, or homogenous, as in this case.
In the case of a homogenous catalyst the relationship between temp and reaction rate is far more nebulous, as it is dependent on a whole lot of factors that are often not known, most notably (and obviously) the order of the reaction. Evidently you don't understand as much chemistry as I thought you did.
Hello Minder,
I'm pleased you are back posting after all this time to help us with your method.
When I added the calcium oxide to my mixed potassium methoxide, I probably added too much in an attempt to make sure it was as dry as possible. Someone on the UK forum suggested that this could have formed some calcium methoxide and this was the reason that the calcium soaps were present in the resultant bio.
'sooty', who has posted on this thread has been doing this method for some time and in one of his last posts says that passing his biodiesel 3 times through woodchips is normal to remove the calcium soaps.
Don't get me wrong here, I think the method is really good, but any comments you have about keeping those calcium soaps to a minimum would be appreciated.
Many thanks, Dave.
Hi David,
After more research, it appears that the list of chemicals you linked to are the chemicals that go into the cement kiln which is then heated to a fusion temperature, which is about 1,450 °C (2,640 °F) for modern cements, to sinter the materials into clinker
Typical constituents of Portland clinker plus gypsum
Tricalcium silicate...............45–75%
Dicalcium silicate................7- 32%
Tricalcium aluminate............0–13%
Tetracalcium aluminoferrite...0- 18%
Gypsum.............................2- 10%
So it appears that once the CaO goes into the Kiln it is fused with other chemicals to produce Portland Cement Clinker which is something all together different.
The Cement Australia SDS for Portland cement gives-
Portland Cement Clinker....<97%
Calcium Oxide..................0-3%
Hexavalent Chromium.......<20 ppm
Crystalline Silica (Quartz)..<1%
So it appears that cement is not a good source of Calcium Oxide/ CaO
Dgs et. al.
Let me clarify I have not been using this method and never dried my NaOH methoxy using CaO. The three chip passages I needed was using pretreat/no titration and whole batch demeth to get rid of "regular" soaps.
What I did test was a method first used in Mexico where CaOH was used as the catalyst instead of NaOH or KOH, with the goal of both converting oil and acting as a drying agent. The CaOH I used was a high CaO containing Garden Lime and it does produce biodiesel BUT
1.the fine CaOH catalyst remained visibly suspended in the finished biodiesel (prior to any filtering) and
2.the final cost of the CaOH when used as a catalyst was the same as NaOH
Didn't mean to mislead.
However, the brand of garden lime I used in those tests was "Hi-Yield" garden lime which has 72.5% CaO in it.
Might be a candidate for drying the methoxide and any fines might come out with the glycerin phase.
Hi WesleyB,
Now you have done it. You have well and truly blotted your copy book.
I think you have been relegated to the chemically challenged along with the rest of us.
Thanks for the clarification Sooty.
Hi Tilly
Whereas the CaO content of Ordinary Portland Cement may be low, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the manufactured product contains other dessicants that would dry the methoxide.
We have a product in the Uk called quick drying cement that I would imagine has a higher CaO content.
Hi David,
You certainly could be correct.
I am giving the MSDS of the product General Purpose Grey Cement which Minder recommends and Portland cement which is what you linked to in your earlier post.
There may be other products out there that contain more CaO, but I imagine that if they are called cement they will all be mostly Portland cement Clinker with relative tiny amounts of other contents.
Tilly - have you ever conducted any experiments involving attempts to dry the methoxide prior to processing and if so, did you have any success? What sort of yield do you achieve with your current process?
Hi David,
No I have not.
As I do not make biodiesel commercially, I have never bothered to go to the time and expense required to install the equipment necessary to accurately measure the finished amount of biodiesel I produce after washing and drying.
My eyeball measuring tells me that my yield is usually over 90% and less than 100%
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text: 24 Nov 2014 05:30 Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, and Alitalia, Italy's leading carrier, will offer enhanced connections between Abu Dhabi and three of Italy's biggest cities next year, with combined double-daily flights to Milan and Rome, and a new daily service to Venice. Airlines will offer a combined 35 flights per week between Italy and Abu Dhabi.Alitalia to triple service frequency between Italy and Abu Dhabi in March 2015 with new daily services from Milan and Venice, with Etihad Airways codesharing on both routes.Next stage of codeshare expansion will include 15 of Alitalia's domestic routes from Rome Fiumicino Airport, offering travellers even more choice and convenience from next year.The two airlines signed a major codeshare expansion this week, which subject to government approval, will result in Etihad Airways placing its 'EY' code on Alitalia's new daily service between Venice and Abu Dhabi. The flights launch on 29 March 2015 using an Airbus A330-200 aircraft with 20 Business Class seats, 17 Economy Plus Class seats, and 213 Economy Class seats.In addition, the 'EY' code will be placed on Alitalia's upcoming daily service between Abu Dhabi and the global fashion capital Milan, which also launches on 29 March 2015, and will be operated using a Boeing 777 aircraft with 30 seats in Business Class, 24 seats in Economy Plus Class, and 239 seats in Economy Class. The flights will combine with Etihad Airways' popular daily service between the two cities to provide travellers with a convenient double-daily frequency.Both airlines already codeshare on each other's daily services between Abu Dhabi and Rome, and subject to government approval, Etihad Airways will codeshare on 15 of Alitalia's domestic routes from Rome Fiumicino Airport next year, offering extensive access to and from the country.The codeshare agreement was expanded a week after Etihad Airways and Alitalia received merger clearance from the European Commission for a proposed strategic partnership, under which Etihad Airways will acquire a 49 per cent stake in the Italian national carrier.James Hogan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Etihad Airways, said: "Our codeshare agreement with Alitalia was initiated over four years ago, and the partnership has developed into a resounding commercial success. Importantly, we are also providing business and leisure travellers with enhanced, and soon to be unmatched, depth and breadth into and out of Italy."We are delighted to build on this success with the inclusion of Alitalia's daily flights from Milan to Abu Dhabi, which complements Etihad Airways' own daily service between the two cities. In addition, by codesharing on Alitalia's new Venice service, we will offer access to one of Italy's most popular tourist destinations for the first time, with strong demand expected not only from the GCC region, including the UAE, but also Asian markets such as China, Japan and Korea."The codeshare flights can be booked from 28 November 2014 on etihad.com, through Etihad Airways' contact centres, or via travel agents, for travel on 29 March 2015 onwards. Get in touch with us. Contact us Let us know what you think Send feedback Join our community Etihad Facebook Watch our latest videos Etihad YouTube Follow us Etihad Airways


text:
The Olympics is creating a "ghost town" effect in central London as visitors who would normally flock to the capital's shops, hotels and theatres stay away, casting doubt on expectations of a short-term economic boost from the games.
The gameshave attracted as many as 100,000 foreign visitors to London — more than in previous Olympics. But, on its own, that number significantly lags behind the estimated 300,000 foreign tourists who could be expected in a typical year.
Theatres are among the businesses suffering most from emptier streets.
"We're bleeding, darling," said Nica Burns, chief executive of Nimax Theatres. "For my six theatres, last week was the worst this year. I think the Olympics are great — but I feel like I've been the bullseye for the archery competition."
Ms Burns forecast that ticket sales at her company's six West End theatres would be down 30 percent over the summer.
London's top museums and tourist attractions are also feeling the pinch. The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, the body representing them, reported a fall of 30-35 percent in attendance over the past two weeks, compared with last year.
Bernard Donoghue, ALVA's chief executive, said its members — who include the British Museum, the Tower of London and the Science Museum — "have been trying to compensate by telling people there are fewer queues and longer opening hours".
Transport for London, the public body that runs the capital's Underground and road network, has been warning for monthsof heavy disruption over the summer in central London and urging travelers to avoid transport hubs and plan alternative routes. The voice of Boris Johnson, London's mayor, has boomed from station platforms warning of the imminent "huge pressure" on the transport system.
TfL said estimates of journeys on the Tube were up 4 percent on Monday from normal traffic.
In response to slow bookings, hotels have now cut prices. Research by Hotels.com said prices in London during the Olympics had fallen around 25 percent in a two-week period in June.
Nick Palan, managing director for Golden Tours, an open-top tour bus company, said: "It's totally destroyed the market for us this summer. The hotels put up prices heavily earlier in the year and some of the larger tour companies literally stopped selling London back in May. We're down by over 20 percent."
David Cameron, prime minister, has said 13 billion pounds of economic investment should flow from the games over four years, some of which is from tourism.
But in the short term, the benefits are more elusive. Mark Field, a London Conservative MP, said: "The message has been going out for months that London would be packed to the rafters — and the transport system would be under pressure — and that has put a lot of people off. The high-end hoteliers are fine because of all the official Olympic guests but many others have not benefited so much."
Mr Donoghue of ALVA said the body had asked TfL to alter its advice to travelers: "As long as you avoid peak times and stations, London is surprisingly accessible and open for business."


text:
Sugar Gliders, Pangolins & Foxes, Oh My! New Novel Entertains for Earth Day
(NewsUSA) - Sponsored News - Just in time for Earth Day, a new book introduces young readers aged 7 to 11 to a whole new world of unique and compelling endangered species, environmental awareness, teamwork and, best of all, a rollicking, outlandish group of characters that entertain the whole family.
The Nocturnals: The Mysterious Abductions, by Tracey Hecht, focuses on a group of animals who form an unlikely team to solve the mystery of why other nocturnal denizens of their forest are disappearing. Dawn the fox, Tobin the pangolin and Bismark the sugar glider embark on a fantastic adventure that takes them to the depths of the earth and places their survival at stake.
R.L. Stine, author of the bestselling Goosebumps children's series, describes the book as "an enchanting story about a group of animals who band together to protect their friends and find adventure. The characters are delightful, and the nighttime landscape is captivating. It was just as I expected -- because the best stories always take place in the dark!"
The book is aimed not only at children, but at their parents, and is written with an ear toward being read aloud to educate all ages about the importance of protecting animals and the environment. The story combines snappy dialogue with plot twists and action, and slips in education about different types of animals and how they live and behave.
Author Tracey Hecht noted in an interview that the benefits of shared reading aren't limited to pre-readers.
"I didn't stop reading aloud to my kids -- I still haven't -- and it's the best part of my day," she said. "I keep books everywhere and I think of reading like a conversation -- just have it. Just pick up a book and have it. You'll be amazed at how well it bridges the gaps," she emphasized.
Children, parents and teachers can visit www.nocturnalsworld.com for more information about the book, including a sample chapter that introduces the main characters. In addition, the website offers bonus animated shorts, activities and educational materials, including a Next Generation Science Guide, templates for animal trading cards and library resources including guidelines for middle grade book clubs.


text:
The 26-year-old celebutante was greeted by an enormous gathering of cameras and reporters upon leaving the all-women's facility in Lynwood.
LYNWOOD, Calif. - A smiling Paris Hilton walked out of a Los Angeles County jail early Tuesday, officially ending a bizarre, three-week stay that ignited furious debate over celebrity treatment in the jail system.
The 26-year-old celebutante was greeted by an enormous gathering of cameras and reporters upon leaving the all-women's facility in Lynwood about 15 minutes past midnight. She had checked into the Century Regional Detention Facility late June 3, largely avoiding the spotlight, after a surprise appearance at the MTV Movie Awards.
Hilton smiled and waved as she filed past deputies and the media, her blond hair pulled back in a braided ponytail. Her parents, Kathy and Rick, waited in a black SUV. Hilton hurried to the vehicle, where she hugged her mom through the window.
Hilton, who was wearing a sage jacket with white trim over a white shirt and skinny jeans, did not respond to reporters' questions.
"She fulfilled her debt. She was obviously in good spirits. She thanked people as she left," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore.
Photographers sprinted after Hilton's vehicle as she left. When the SUV hit a red light during the ride, photographers jumped out of their cars and swarmed it.
Hilton appeared to have gone to a family home in a ritzy Los Angeles canyon north of Sunset Blvd.
The hotel heiress will complete her probation in March 2009 as long as she keeps her driver's license current and doesn't break any laws. She can reduce that time by 12 months if she does community service that could include a public-service announcement, the city attorney's office has said.
During her stay at the Lynwood facility, Hilton was mostly confined to a solitary cell in the special needs unit away from the other 2,200 inmates.
After spending only three days there, she was released to home confinement by Sheriff Lee Baca for an unspecified medical condition that he later said was psychological.
The following day, Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer, who sentenced the hotel heiress, called her back into court and ordered her returned to jail, saying he had not condoned her release.
Hilton left the courtroom in tears calling for her mother and shouting, "It's not right!"
She was then taken to the downtown Twin Towers jail, which houses men and the county jail's medical treatment center, where she underwent medical and psychiatric exams to determine where she should be confined.
Hilton's stay there cost taxpayers $1,109.78 a day, more than 10 times the cost of housing inmates in the general population.
The move by Baca caused a firestorm of criticism over whether the celebrity was getting special treatment. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has launched an investigation into whether the multimillionaire received special treatment because of her wealth and fame.
At least one person has filed a claim against the county alleging she "had serious medical issues" but was not treated as well as Hilton.
A few days into her stint at the Twin Towers medical ward, the heiress said in a phone call to Barbara Walters that she had a new outlook.
"I used to act dumb. It was an act. I am 26 years old, and that act is no longer cute," Hilton said during the call, according to an account posted June 11 by Walters on ABC's Web site.
"It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me," Hilton was quoted as saying.
Hilton's path to jail began Sept. 7, when she failed a sobriety test after police saw her weaving down a street in her car on what she said was a late-night run to a hamburger stand.
She pleaded no contest to reckless driving and was sentenced to 36 months' probation, alcohol education and $1,500 in fines.
In the months that followed, she was stopped twice by officers who discovered her driving with a suspended license. The second stop landed her in Sauer's courtroom, where he sentenced her to 45-days in jail. She was released after three weeks for reasons including good behavior.


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Journal of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering
versión On-line ISSN 2309-8775
versión impresa ISSN 1021-2019
J. S. Afr. Inst. Civ. Eng. vol.55 no.3 Midrand ene. 2013
Incorporating rainfall uncertainty into catchment modelling
J G Ndiritu
A framework for incorporating areal rainfall uncertainties into catchment modelling is presented and demonstrated through the daily streamflow simulation of the Mooi River catchment using the Australian Water Balance Model (AWBM). The framework is an extension of the typical hybrid manual-automatic model calibration-validation in which uncertainties are imposed as perturbations (disturbances) on the rainfall time series. The differences in areal rainfall obtained from different rain-gauge densities are used to generate the perturbations, and their variability is found to reduce as areal rainfall magnitude increases. The applied probability distributions of perturbations are therefore obtained for specified ranges of rainfall magnitude. The effect of incorporating uncertainties is assessed by finding out the impact of imposing perturbations on the validation performance of the rainfall-runoff modelling. This is done by carrying out 100 rainfall-runoff calibration-validation runs with perturbed and with unperturbed rainfall and comparing the 100 generated validation period runoff time series with the observed (historical) runoff series. With perturbations applied, the 5-95 percentile bounds from the resulting 100 streamflow ensembles contain 52% of the observed time series for the validation period. Without perturbations, only 25% of the observed flows fall within the bounds. The framework has the potential for practical use, but this would require a more rigorous identification of appropriate distributions of the perturbations.
Keywords: rainfall uncertainties, catchment modelling, multipliers, calibration
Areal rainfall is recognised as a major contributor to uncertainty in catchment modelling (Kavetski et al 2006a,b; Sawunyama 2008; Hughes et al 2011), although it is not formally incorporated into hydrological analysis in southern Africa (Sawunyama 2008) and many other regions of the world. While improving rainfall measurement is considered vital for well-informed decision-making in water resources management (Hughes et al 2011), many regions of the world may not have the resources to install and maintain the required data networks (Sawunyama 2008). Even if this were possible, areal rainfall estimation for the practically installable rain-gauge density is still likely to be substantially uncertain. Remote-sensing approaches require validation using rain-gauge measurements (Sawunyama 2008) and are therefore unlikely to reduce these uncertainties to insignificant levels. The need to formally incorporate rainfall uncertainty into catchment modelling is therefore essential. Bayesian approaches have recently been applied for the incorporation of uncertainties of rainfall and other variables and have generally been assessed as effective (Kavektsi et al 2006a,b; Ajami et al 2007; Vrugt et al 2009; Kuczera et al 2006, 2010; Balin et al 2010). Their complexity and high computational requirements, however, pose serious challenges to their application in practice. Sawunyama (2008) investigated the effect of rainfall uncertainties by obtaining areal rainfalls from different rain-gauge densities (by systematically omitting some valid stations from areal rainfall estimation) and comparing the modelled streamflow sequences using these different rainfall station configurations. Rainfall uncertainty was found to be more significant for mountainous areas and the main recommendation was to improve rainfall measurement density in order to reduce uncertainty.
This paper presents an approach for incorporating rainfall uncertainties into catchment modelling within the typical hybrid manual-automatic calibration framework. The rainfall multiplier approach of quantifying uncertainty (Kavektsi et al 2006 a, b), which has been found suitable in a recent field study (McMillan et al 2011), is applied. The framework obtains the multipliers randomly from probability distributions derived from the rainfall data. The current approach also incorporates parameter uncertainty, with the prior parameter distributions taken as uniform distributions within the specified lower and upper bounds, and the posterior as the distribution of the parameter values obtained from the randomly initialised calibration runs. This is in contrast with the more complex Bayesian approaches(Kavetski et al 2006a, b) that update parameter distributions within a single computation run. The framework is assessed by the split-sample method and a control experiment in which no disturbances (multipliers) are applied. The effect of rainfall uncertainties on the optimisation effort required in calibration is assessed by comparing the validation performance obtained from two levels in rigour of optimisation.
Figure 1 presents the framework for incorporating rainfall uncertainty for the common streamflow simulation problem and could be easily adapted to other catchment modelling problems (water quality, groundwater, sediment generation, etc). The areal rainfall obtained by any appropriate method (e.g. Thiessen polygons) is perturbed by multipliers obtained randomly from a probability distribution derived from the rainfall data. An areal rainfall rt for period t thus becomes rt x mt, where mt is the multiplier for period t. The number of perturbed rainfall sequences that need to be generated (ensemble size) is selected and a population of perturbed rainfall sequences is thus obtained. Each of these is used, together with other required inputs, for multiple calibrations of the model. An understanding of the model structure, the catchment characteristics, previous experience and other information is used to establish the starting parameter ranges and the parameter range limits for the calibration. Where the uncertainties regarding the realistic parameter values are large, the starting ranges will be set more widely. The ranges therefore effectively act as quantifiers of parameter uncertainty and define the prior distribution of the parameters. Depending on the purpose of the modelling, an appropriate objective function is also selected for the calibration.
Each calibration run (for each perturbed rainfall sequence) provides an "optimal" parameter set and a population of optimal parameters is finally obtained. An assessment of this population and the calibrated streamflow time series makes it clear how realistic the modelling is and helps to identify any unexpected behaviour. This may then require adjustment of the parameter range limits and could also provide leads to aspects of significant catchment processes that were ignored or not recognised (Ndiritu 2009b). After the practically imple-mentable changes have been made (and the calibration runs repeated if need be), each of the "optimal" parameter sets is used with a perturbed rainfall series (and other required inputs) for a period that was not applied to calibrate the model. The result is a population of validation streamflow time series. A comparison between the observed validation time series and the generated population of validation streamflows shows how suitable the framework is for the specific problem.
The uncertainty framework was applied to daily streamflow modelling of the Mooi River catchment in South Africa using the Australian Water Balance Model (AWBM) and multiplicative perturbations (multipliers) of rainfall derived from ratios of areal rainfall obtained from various rain-gauge densities. The widely applied SCE-UA optimiser (Duan et al 1992) was selected for calibration and maximising the coefficient of efficiency as the objective function. The ensemble (population) size was subjectively selected as 100.
The catchment
The Mooi River headwaters up to river-gauging station V2H002 were included in the analysis and were delineated into three sub-catchments: up to gauging stations V2H005 and V2H007, and the incremental area from these two to V2H002. Figure 2 shows the location of the catchment in South Africa, the three sub-catchments and the four rain-gauging stations used to obtain areal rainfall. Daily evaporation measurements were obtained from station V7E003A located outside the catchment. Flow and evaporation data were obtained from the Department of Water Affairs' (DWA) website (http://www.dwa.gov.za/hydrology), while rainfall was obtained from a rainfall database and extraction facility (Lynch 2003; Kunz 2009). The period 3 November 1973 to 19 August 1976 was used for calibration and that from 20 August 1976 to 7 June 1979 for validation. The selection was based on the need to have a continuous dataset with minimal human impacts.
The catchment model
The AWBM model (Boughton 2004) is widely used for daily rainfall-runoff modelling in Australia and for flood hydrograph prediction when applied in hourly time steps. An approach for estimating runoff for ungauged catchments in Australia using the AWBM model has also been developed (Boughton & Chiew 2007). Makungo et al (2010) applied the AWBM to the Nzhelele catchment of Limpopo Province, South Africa. The AWBM was selected on the basis of its robust structure and successful application. The ACRU model (Schulze 1989) is widely applied for daily catchment modelling in South Africa, but is data-intensive and has not been set up for hybrid manual-automatic calibration. ACRU was therefore not an optimal choice for this study, although it is possible to adapt the rainfall uncertainty framework for application with ACRU. The AWBM model (Figure 3) assumes that the catchment consists of three stores of different depths C1, C2 and C3 which respectively occupy different proportions of the catchment, indicated as partial areas A1, A2 and A3 in Figure 3. At each time period, runoff is generated as the sum of the excess (overflow) from each store. The runoff is then divided into surface runoff and baseflow in proportions determined by the baseflow index (BFI). The surface runoff and the baseflow at the catchment outlet are each subjected to linear attenuation and are then summed to give the flow at the catchment outlet. Boughton (2004) provides more details of the AWBM model.
The model applied in this study also included lags for both surface runoff and baseflow, and a coefficient for scaling open-water evaporation to effective catchment evapotranspiration, giving a total of 12 parameters for each sub-catchment. The partial areas A1, A2 and A3 are expressed as proportions of the total area and therefore sum to unity. Only two of the three therefore need to be calibrated and 11 parameters were calibrated for each sub-catchment. These are shown in the first two columns of Table 1. Although the recession constants can be obtained directly from the data, it was decided to calibrate them, as an effective calibrator would have no difficulty obtaining these parameters for a well-structured model. Table 1 shows the starting parameter ranges and the range limits that were used in this study based on the understanding of the model structure, literature sources(Boughton 2004, Boughton & Chiew 2007) and past experience of modelling the Mooi River catchment.
Probability distribution of multiplicative perturbations
Some studies have assumed that the multiplicative perturbations (multipliers) can be obtained from a log-normal distribution(Kavetski et al 2006b; Thyer et al 2009) and this has been largely supported by an experimental study (McMillan et al 2011), although the log-normal distribution did not capture the upper-end tail of the data adequately. McMillan et al (2011) therefore proposed trials with other distributions as well. No other field data-based studies on multiplier distributions were found in the literature, and assuming that distributions fitting well in one region will do the same in another may also not be justifiable. For the current study, plausible values of multipliers were determined by computing ratios of daily areal rainfall values obtained from different rain-gauge densities for the study catchment. Thiessen polygons were used to obtain the areal rainfalls and this was confined to the days with non-zero rainfalls at all stations. It is expected that the multiplier values should depend on the magnitude of the areal rainfall as larger rainfall storms cover bigger areas and less variable rainfall would therefore be recorded at the different rain gauges. The observed variation of the multipliers with the areal rainfall (obtained at the highest rain-gauge density) is presented as Figure 4 and it reveals the expected reduction in multiplier variability as areal rainfall increases. Figure 4 also reveals that very large variations of areal rainfall could be obtained by simply omitting one or two rain gauges. It was decided to incorporate the observed reduction in multiplier variability in generating the perturbations by obtaining probability distributions for different ranges of areal rainfall magnitude. After some trial runs, the rainfall ranges selected were: < 3, 3-10, 10-20, 20-40 and > 40 mm. The multipliers within each range were ranked and plotted in order of magnitude, with the rank transformed into a percentage (non-exceedance probability), akin to the plotting of flow-duration curves. This resulted in the cumulative density plots presented in Figure 5. The multiplier to apply for a given areal rainfall was then randomly obtained from the respective probability distribution, based on the rainfall magnitude.
Experimental set-up
In order to evaluate the impact of incorporating rainfall perturbations, a control experiment consisting of 100 randomly initialised calibrations of the catchment with the unperturbed rainfall data was included. It was also decided to assess the effect of incorporating uncertainties on the required level of optimisation for calibration because it was considered likely that perturbing data could reduce the effectiveness and therefore the need for high levels of optimisation. The optimiser selected for this study, the SCE-UA (Duan et al 1992), is widely used and has been found to be effective and efficient (Ndiritu 2009a). The SCE-UA generates a population of solutions (parameter values) and divides these into a number of complexes. Each complex evolves independently, using the downhill simplex method for a set number of evolutions. The complexes are then shuffled to exchange valuable information among them and a new set of independent evolutions (epoch) commences. This process repeats until the set convergence criteria are achieved. The default SCE-UA optimisation parameters as specified by Duan et al (1994) were applied here and the level of optimisation was varied by setting the two parameters that Duan et al (1994) did not specify, namely the number of complexes to use and the convergence criterion to apply. The higher optimisation level applied 10 complexes and the convergence criterion was specified as an improvement of less than 10% in the best solution (objective function value) of the current epoch in comparison with the best solution from the epoch two steps before (the one before the previous epoch). For the lower optimisation level, five complexes were applied and convergence was specified as an improvement of less than 10% in the best solution from the current epoch in comparison with the best one from the previous epoch.
A set of 100 calibration runs with and without perturbations was therefore carried out at the higher and the lower levels of optimisation. The analysis reported in the next section thus compares results from the following four experiments: (i) higher optimisation effort with perturbations; (ii) higher optimisation effort with no perturbations; (iii) lower optimisation effort with perturbations; and (iv) lower optimisation effort with no perturbations. The lower level took 110 minutes (on a standard desktop PC), while the higher level of optimisation took 11 hours (six times longer).
Table 2 provides the mean and standard deviations of the 100 values obtained for the three sub-catchments. All the parameter values were found to be realistic. The mean parameter values from the four experiments are very close and mostly within 95-105% of the grand average (average parameter from all four experiments), as seen in Figure 6. Figure 6 also presents plots of the coefficients of variation (mean/standard deviation) of the parameters. It is observed that the coefficients of variation of only the evaporation coefficient (Ke) consistently increase with the inclusion of rainfall uncertainties. This happens for sub-catchment V2H005 and V2H007 but not for V2H002. The mean and coefficient of variation for the surface lag (LagS) is also notably higher for V2H002 than for the other sub-catchments and a probable explanation for these differences is offered later in this section. The effect of rainfall uncertainty on parameter Ke could be attributed to the direct impact of perturbations on rainfall on the computed net rainfall (rainfall - Ke x evaporation). The observed dependence of only one parameter on rainfall uncertainty is consistent with the finding by Kuczera et al (2006) who found that only two out of the seven parameters of the LogSPM model were dependent on rainfall uncertainty.
Figure 7 shows the probability density plots and normal distribution fits for parameters Ke and A2 for sub-catchment V2H005. Although the differences in variability were not substantial for parameter A2, the plot in Figure 7 helps to illustrate the ability of the calibration to search for and obtain optimal parameters beyond the starting range specified in Table 1. This table specifies the starting range as 0.4-0.5 for A2, whereas a substantial proportion of the optimal parameters for A2 in Figure 7 locate beyond 0.5. From Figure 7 it is observed that applying perturbations leads to a notably larger spread in variability for parameter Ke at both optimisation levels, whereas the effect on the variability of A2 was only slight. Incorporating uncertainties shifted the location of the distribution of Ke, but the average Ke values for all four experiments were still reasonably close.
Figure 8 shows the 5-95 percentile range obtained from the 100 ensembles of validation time series for the four experiments for sub-catchment V2H005 and also includes plots of the observed streamflows for the same period (portrayed as circles). It is found that perturbing the rainfall obtains much wider ranges than if this is not done. A more detailed analysis of the effect of rainfall uncertainties is done by obtaining the percentages of the observed flows locating within the 5-95% bounds for different magnitudes of observed flows. The percentages obtained using 10 classes of flow magnitude defined by the 10th percentiles of the respective flow-duration curves are presented in Table 3 and Figure 9. For all three sub-catchments, including rainfall uncertainty obtains a much larger percentage of the flows within the 5-95% bounds for all flow levels, with an overall increase from 25 to 52%. The proportion of observed flows within the percentiles is found to reduce as flow reduces, probably because the applied objective function (maximising the coefficient of variation) favours the replication of higher rather than lower flows. It could also be an indication of an inadequacy of the AWBM model structure in simulating low flows. In addition, Table 3 and Figure 9 reveal that the lower optimisation effort obtains slightly higher percentages of observed flows within the 5-95% bounds than the higher level for the entire range of flows. Careful selection of the optimisation effort to apply is therefore needed, as an exceedingly high optimisation may over-fit on the calibration dataset, while simultaneously losing the overall fitness of the parameter set.
A probable explanation of the distinct differences in the results obtained for sub-catchment V2H002 in comparison with those for V2H005 and V2H007 is now offered. For V2H002, the variability of parameter Ke is found to be independent of rainfall uncertainty (Figure 6), while the average value and the coefficient of variation of the lag for surface runoff (LagS) is found to be considerably higher than for V2H005 and V2H007 (Table 2). The observed average LagS value ranged from 1.11 to 1.22 days for V2H002, meaning that some calibration runs optimised this to 1 day and some to 2 days since LagS was specified to vary at a daily time step. For V2H005 and V2H007, Table 2 shows that the LagS value optimised to 1 day for all 100 runs. Sub-catchment V2H002 is the most downstream of the three sub-catchments and is expected to generally steep more gently than the other two; consequently it would have slower surface runoff processes. Since V2H002 is also the longest of the three sub-catchments, it is probable that a considerable portion of the surface runoff takes longer than 1 day to reach river gauge V2H002, but would reach it within 2 days, while most surface runoff may be reaching gauges V2H005 and V2H007 within 1 day. Since the calibration constrained LagS to optimise to a daily value, the variability in LagS became artificially larger as it has to take a value of either 1 or 2 days, whereas the more realistic lag time lies in-between. Confining LagS to a daily time could also have caused inaccuracy in the streamflow simulation that perhaps (i) confounded the impact of rainfall uncertainties on Ke, (ii) led to the observed higher variability of the other parameters for V2H002 than for V2H005 and V2H007 (coefficient of variation of 0.089 compared with 0.074), and (iii) led to the lower validation performance for V2H002 as seen in Table 3 and Figure 9. Catchment modelling is mostly carried out at single time steps but the reasoning here, while not proven, gives credence to variable time interval catchment modelling (Hughes & Sami 1994) which seems to have gone dormant in research and practice.
In comparison with the manual rainfallrunoff model calibration approach (the predominant approach in southern Africa) which obtains single parameter values fairly subjectively, the framework applied here obtains a population of realistic parameter sets, while incorporating areal rainfall uncertainty. As revealed in the previous paragraph, this approach also enables inferences about the observed behaviour of parameters and modelling performance which can be directly related to catchment processes and how these have been modelled. Using a similar approach, Ndiritu (2009b) was able to infer the impact of dambos (complex shallow wetlands) in the Kafue Basin on Pitman model parameters - an endeavour that manual calibration had failed to achieve. This framework is therefore likely to be more suitable than manual calibration for designs that need to incorporate uncertainty and reliability of performance comprehensively. The framework also has the potential to complement the more physically based parameter uncertainty quantification developed recently in South Africa for the Pitman model (Hughes et al 2011).
A framework for incorporating rainfall uncertainties in catchment modelling has been presented and applied to a daily streamflow simulation problem of the Mooi River catchment in South Africa using the AWBM model. In the absence of any field data-based guideline for quantifying rainfall uncertainties, the ratios of areal daily rainfalls obtained from various rain-gauge densities were used to obtain probable values of multiplicative perturbations. A reasonable probability distribution of perturbations was then conceived from these and it was found that very large variations of areal rainfall can be obtained by omitting one or two rain gauges. This underlines the need to formally incorporate rainfall uncertainty into water resources assessment.
The impact of rainfall uncertainties was assessed by making 100 randomly initialised calibration-validation runs, with and without including rainfall uncertainties, and comparing the resulting distribution of parameter values and the proportion of observed flows falling in the 5-95 percentile bounds of the flows simulated in validation. Applying rainfall uncertainties is found not to impact on the average parameter values and to increase significantly the variability of only the evaporation coefficient Ke of the AWBM model - the only parameter directly associated with rainfall. All the other parameters are for modelling surface and subsurface processes, and the independence of the probability distributions of their calibrated values from rainfall uncertainty is considered to be an indication that the modelling represented the main catchment components and processes realistically. This also indicates that including rainfall uncertainty in calibration did not prevent a realistic quantification of parameter uncertainty, although the framework did not include an explicit procedure to enable this as is done in the more complex and computation-intensive Bayesian approaches (Kavetski et al 2006a, b). The framework applied here could therefore be a credible and practical alternative to these approaches, provided the modelling captures the main catchment processes adequately.
Applying rainfall uncertainties was found to double the proportion of observed flows within the 5-95 percentile bounds from an average of 25 to 52% in validation, indicating that rainfall input uncertainty is indeed highly significant. Two levels of optimisation effort were applied and the lower optimisation level obtained slightly better percentages of the observed flows within the 5-95 percentile bounds, highlighting the need for careful selection of the optimisation effort to apply in model calibration.
Further work needs to consider the following:
■ Are multiplicative perturbations the most appropriate for quantifying areal rainfall uncertainties, and does the approach applied here make the best use of the data and other information available? Ongoing analysis indicates that linear perturbations hold much promise.
■ How can computational efficiency be maximised/optimised for uncertainty analysis? The SCEM-UA (Vrugt et al 2003), a later development of the SCE-UA calibrator applied here, could be considered.
■ How does the choice of the ensemble size and objective function for calibration impact on the uncertainty analysis?
■ How would this framework fit into the current water resources planning and management decision-support structures?
■ How can the framework be adapted for prediction in ungauged basins and to climate change/variability analysis?
Ajami, N K, Duan, Q & Sorooshian, S. 2007 An integrated hydrologic Bayesian multimodel combination framework: Confronting input, parameter and model structural uncertainty in hydrologic prediction. Water Resources Research, 43, W01403, 2, doi:10.1029/2005WR004745. [ Links ]
Balin, D, Lee, H & Rode, M 2010. Is point uncertain rainfall likely to have a great impact on distributed complex hydrological modeling? Water Resources Research, 46, W11520, doi:10.1029/2009WR007848. [ Links ]
Boughton, W 2004. The Australian water balance model. Environmental Modelling & Software, 19: 943-956. [ Links ]
Boughton, W & Chiew, F 2007. Estimating runoff in ungauged catchments from rainfall, PET and the AWBM model. Environmental Modelling & Software, 22: 476-487. [ Links ]
Duan, Q Y, Sorooshian, S & Gupta, V 1992. Effective and efficient global optimization for conceptual rainfall-runoff models. Water Resources Research, 28(4): 1015-1031. [ Links ]
Duan, Q Y, Sorooshian, S & Gupta, V 1994. Optimal use of the SCE-UA global optimization method for calibrating watershed models. Journal of Hydrology, 158: 265-284. [ Links ]
Hughes, D A & Sami, K 1994. A semi-distributed, variable time interval model of catchment hydrology - Structure and parameter estimation procedures. Journal of Hydrology, 155: 265-291. [ Links ]
Hughes, D A, Kapangaziwiri, E, Mallory, S J, Wagener, T & Smithers, J 2011. Incorporating uncertainty in water resources simulation and assessment tools in South Africa. Water Research Commission Report No 1838/1/11. [ Links ]
Kavetski, D G, Kuczera G & Franks, S W 2006a. Bayesian analysis of input uncertainty in hydrologi-cal modeling: 1. Theory. Water Resources Research, 42, W03407, doi:10.1029/2005WR004368. [ Links ]
Kavetski, D, Kuczera G & Franks, S W 2006b. Bayesian analysis of input uncertainty in hydrological modeling: 2. Application. Water Resources Research, 42, W03408, doi:10.1029/2005WR004376. [ Links ]
Kuczera, G, Kavetski D, Franks, S & Thyer, M 2006. Towards a Bayesian total error analysis of conceptual rainfall-runoff models: Characterising model error using storm-dependent parameters. Journal of Hydrology, 331: 161-177. [ Links ]
Kunz, R 2009. Rainfall data extraction, Version Number 1.2, ICFR, PMB, South Africa. [ Links ]
Lynch, S D 2003. The development of a raster database of annual, monthly and daily rainfall for southern Africa. Water Research Commission Report No 1156/0/1. [ Links ]
Makungo, R, Odiyo, J O, Ndiritu, J G & Mwaka, B 2010. Rainfall-runoff modelling approach for ungauged catchments: A case study of Nzhelele River sub-quaternary catchment, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, 35: 596-607. [ Links ]
McMillan, H, Jackson, B, Clark, M, Kavetski, D, & Woods, R 2011. Rainfall uncertainty in hydrologi-cal modelling: An evaluation of multiplicative error models, Journal of Hydrology, 400: 83-94. [ Links ]
Ndiritu, J G 2009a. Automatic calibration of the Pitman model using the shuffled complex evolution method. Water Research Commission Report No K8/566/1. [ Links ]
Ndiritu, J 2009b. A comparison of automatic and manual calibration using the Pitman model. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, 34: 729-740. [ Links ]
Sawunyama, T 2008. Evaluating uncertainty in water resources estimation in southern Africa: A case study of South Africa. Unpublished PhD thesis, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. [ Links ]
Schulze, R E 1989. ACRU: Background, concepts and theory. Water Research Commission Report No 154/1/89, ACRU Report No 35. [ Links ]
Thyer, M, Renard, B, Kavetski, D, Kuczera, G, Franks, S W & Srikanthan, S 2009. Critical evaluation of parameter consistency and predictive uncertainty in hydrological modeling: A case study using Bayesian total error analysis. Water Resources Research, 45, W00B14. doi:10.1029/2008WR006825. [ Links ]
Vrugt, J A, Gupta, H V, Bouten, W & Sorooshian, S 2003. A Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis algorithm for optimization and uncertainty assessment of hydrologic model parameters, Water Resources Research, 39(8): 1201, doi:10.1029/2002WR001642. [ Links ]
Vrugt, J A, Braak, C J F, Gupta, V H, & Robinson, B A 2009. Equifinality of formal (DREAM) and informal (GLUE) Bayesian approaches in hydrologic modeling? Stochastic Environmental Research Risk Assessment, 23: 1011-1026, doi 10.1007/ s00477-008-0274-y. [ Links ]
Contact details:
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of the Witwatersrand Private
Bag 3
WITS, 2050, South Africa
E: john.nd email@example.com
PROF JOHN NDIRITU is an associate professor ir the School of Civil and Environmenta Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) and an MSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Nairobi in 1987 and 1993, and a PhD from the University of Adelaide, Australia, in 1998. His current research Interests are optimisation and uncertainty quantification in water resource systems design, operation and management. He is a Fellow of the Water Institute of Southern Africa and is rated as a C3 researcher by the National Research Foundation of South Africa.


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The country added 319MW of new installed capacity in 2013, all of it onshore, to bring its total wind portfolio to 2.01GW. An annual addition of around 275MW should be sufficient to reach the target.
Wind is accounting for 18% of generating electricity and, according to energy minister Pat Rabitte, saving EUR1 billion a year on fossil-fuel imports. But Ireland's most ambitious wind development — up to 8GW installed in the republic's Midlands region and exported through a subsea link to the UK — has hit the rocks, temporarily at least, despite the Irish and UK governments signing a memorandum of understanding last year.
The Irish government has accused its UK counterpart of being disorganised over its energy policy, causing delays that would have prevented the project from being completed by 2020 to meet EU targets. But there was also considerable local opposition to such a huge development.
Kenneth Matthews, CEO of the Irish Wind Energy Association, describes the situation as "an opportunity delayed rather than an opportunity lost", but there seems little chance of a wind-power export deal on this scale getting under way anytime soon.


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Labrador flack sacked after tweet
Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, has fired his spokesman, Phil Hardy, for accidentally tweeting his appreciation for a steamy Super Bowl ad from his boss's account.
Hardy accidentally tweeted "Me likey Broke Girls," from the @Raul_Labrador account on Sunday night. The tweet was deleted 14 seconds later, but is archived on Politwoops, a website that collects politician's deleted tweet, the Idaho Statesman reported earlier this week.
Story Continued Below
Labrador's office apologized for the tweet Monday, which referenced the ad which the stars of CBS' "2 Broke Girls" dance in revealing, sparkly waitress outfits.
Hardy has been the Republican's spokesperson since 2010, when Labrador won the Republican primary and general election in major upsets. According to the Statesman, it was the lawmaker's decision to fire Hardy.


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LOS ANGELES - It's one of the most vexing problems in medical science: How can you mend a broken heart?
LOS ANGELES � It�s one of the most vexing problems in medical science: How can you mend a broken heart?
A decade ago, researchers and cardiologists thought they had found an answer in stem cells. These powerful cells are found throughout the body, repairing and maintaining tissues as needed. In the laboratory, scientists can transform them into heart cells. When implanted in animals, they grow into new heart tissue, too.
So it was with high hopes that researchers transfused stem cells into patients suffering from heart failure � people whose hearts, weakened by heart attacks or other conditions, no longer pumped enough blood through their bodies.
But in clinical trials, the effects have been modest. Stem cells appeared to help, but not as much as doctors had hoped � and not in the ways they had expected.
Now, those early results are pointing researchers toward other types of stem cells that might be better suited to help repair cardiac muscle.
Because 5 million Americans suffer from heart failure � and their ranks are sure to grow as 76 million baby boomers march into old age � cardiologists are counting on breakthroughs in stem-cell therapy.
�We�re trying to tear pages out of nature�s playbook,� said Dr. Douglas W. Losordo, director of the program in Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
As the era of regenerative medicine dawned, stem cells seemed a perfect candidate to rebuild damaged hearts.
The stem cells in bone marrow were particularly tantalizing. They had long been used to rebuild the immune systems of cancer patients, but scientists discovered that they also have the capacity to grow into heart muscle, blood vessels and other tissues � at least under certain laboratory conditions.
Bone marrow is easy to extract from patients, and the therapeutic cells derived from it are a perfect genetic match for patients, greatly reducing the risk of tissue rejection.
Researchers and clinicians imagined using stem cells to undo the damage caused by a heart attack. In just a few minutes, a blockage in an artery can cut off oxygen to the heart, killing as many as a billion cells. The cells, for the most part, don�t grow back. Instead, what remains is scar tissue and a weakened circulatory system.
Heart attacks aren�t nearly as deadly as they used to be � more than 4 out of 5 heart-attack victims are alive after one year, according to a study last month in the American Journal of Medicine.
But the damage caused by a heart attack can result in heart failure � and patients diagnosed with heart failure have an average life expectancy of less than five years, said Dr. Charles Murry, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. �It�s deadlier than breast cancer,� Murry said.
That helps explain the enthusiasm for clinical trials involving stem cells from bone marrow. From 2002 to 2006, at least 18 randomized controlled studies were conducted, involving nearly 1,000 patients.
�Everyone started putting bone marrow in the heart,� said Christine Mummery, a researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
She has studied how to turn stem cells into heart-muscle cells called cardiomyocytes. The results, she said, were mixed. The treatment appeared to be safe, but patients had only transient improvement.
�People went from being very sick to a little less sick,� Mummery said.
There is a silver lining: Even stem cells that don�t grow into new heart cells seem to help patients in other ways. As the bone-marrow transplant trials continue, researchers are trying to sort it all out.
�It�s a little bit mysterious,� said Dr. Eduardo Marban, director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
Marban, like many others, said he believes the improvements came about because transplanted cells secreted chemicals that boosted heart function � not because new heart tissue grew. The �stem cells are working mostly by raising an alarm to resident cardiac stem cells. They seem to work indirectly.�


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Nov. 30, 2005
Five female and five male Yale student-athletes in fall sports have been named Academic All-Ivy. They are: Josh Block, Todd Feiereisen, Matt Handlon, Ed McCarthy, Jake Miller, Eleni Benson, Lindsay Donaldson, Renee Lopes, Katherine McKinstry and Heather Orrico.
Block, a junior, was a key member of Yale's Ivy League champion men's soccer team. A History of Science/History of Medicine major, he was also CoSIDA second-team Academic All-District.
Feiereisen, a senior economics major, was second-team All-Ivy in football. He finished with 55 catches for 762 yards and seven TDs after spending his first three years as a quarterback.
Handlon, a senior economics major, earned honorable mention All-Ivy honors. He posted 74 tackles and two interceptions. He was a semi-finalist for the Draddy Trophy, recognizing academic success, football performance and exemplary community leadership.
McCarthy, a junior history major, was named first team All-Ivy on the offensive line. He was the Ivy League Rookie of the Year as a freshman.
Miller, a junior economics major, was first-team All-Ivy in men's soccer. He headed a Yale defense that allowed only 16 goals in 18 games.
Benson, a senior molecular biophysics and biochemistry major, captained the Yale women's soccer team to an Ivy League title and a Sweet 16 appearance in the NCAA College Cup. She was also CoSIDA first-team Academic All-American.
Donaldson, a sophomore cross country star, finished second at Heps. She was also 41st at the NCAA Championships.
Lopes, a senior economics major, was first-team All-Ivy for the Yale volleyball team. She posted .389 hitting percentage, second in the league.
McKinstry, a junior history major, won the ECAC 5k title at Van Cortlandt Park.
Orrico, a junior political science major, was first-team All-Ivy & All-Region for the Yale field hockey team.


text: Right now there are men and women sitting in Humvees in Iraq or flying missions over the mountains of Afghanistan. In matters of religion and conscience they represent great diversity, but they are bound together in their professional duty by a commitment to Constitution and country. As American servicemen and women they are willing to fight


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