US Southern Research Articles

Along US Southern Border, Pollution, Poverty, Ignorance, and Greed Threaten Nation's Health

TWO ROOSTERS scurry from the path of Cynthia Lopez' car as she pulls into the dusty front yard of a home on the west side of El Paso, Tex, where Maria Ramos and her family live. Lopez, an epidemiologist, has stopped by to explain the results of laboratory tests on a sample of the Ramos' well water she collected during an earlier visit. Ramos and her family live in a substandard dwelling in the colonia called Campestre. As in most of the hundreds of other colonias that have sprung up along both sides of the US-Mexico border, Campestre's houses have no connection to water or sewer lines. Most have shallow pumps that draw water from the Rio Grande flood plain, which is badly contaminated with human, animal, and industrial wastes. Many also have illegal or nonconforming outhouses, cesspools, or latrines that add to the contamination. Speaking in Spanish, Lopez tells

Along US southern border, pollution, poverty, ignorance, and greed threaten nation's health

Along US southern border, pollution, poverty, ignorance, and greed threaten nation's health

Live-electronic music on the third coast

The term “third coast” originated in Houston, Texas, in the seventies to describe growing significant activity in the arts in US southern states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. New and live-electronic music thrives as well in the inland cities of San Antonio, Austin, the Dallas/Ft. Worth “metroplex”, and at the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia in Denton. Alternating with explanatory text is a transcription of an informal conversation between Texas composers Austin and Jerry Hunt, discussing the technology and aesthetics at issue in live-electronic music. They describe their own works, including Hunt's Sur (Doctor) John Dee (1967) and Flund (1987) and Austin's Accidents (1967) and Beachcombers (1983), elucidating the musico-dramatic, technical, and poetic dimensions of each piece.

A wheat grazing systems model for the US Southern Plains: Part I—Model description and performance

A model was developed to simulate production of wheat and stocker cattle. A mechanistic plant model (CERES-Wheat, Ritchie & Otter, 1985) was combined with empirical equations for animal intake and growth to produce a Wheat Grazing Systems model, called WGS. Grazing reduces the plant's leaf area index which affects the ability of plants to fix energy, the rate of evapotranspiration, the rate of soil water evaporation, and the rate of leaf senescence. Grazing also reduces the accumulation of aboveground biomass in the average wheat plant; thus, affects the rate of ear growth, grain filling, and, ultimately, grain yield. Simulations using daily weather data showed that forage biomass and grain yield decreased as grazing intensity increased. Observed and pridicted forage biomass and grain yield were correlated with an r 2 of 0·63 and 0·74, respectively. Simulations using daily weather data showed that the WGS model predicted observed intraseasonal live animal weight gains with an r 2 of 79%.

A wheat grazing systems model for the US Southern Plains: Part II—Economic analysis of grazing management decisions under weather uncertainty

The Wheat Grazing Systems model was used to investigate the risk associated with stocking density, and beginning and termination date of the grazing season when weather was a source of variation in the system. A total of 91 combinations of beginning/ending dates of the grazing season and stocking densities (managerial strategies) were considered. Each was simulated under typical management conditions of western Oklahoma for fifty grazing seasons using a stochastic daily climatic simulator. Stochastic dominance analysis was used to select efficient strategies assuming the producers were utility maximizers and utility was a function of net returns. Optimal stocking densities were shown to be sensitive to producer risk preferences, ranging from 0·6 steer ha −1 for risk averters to 2·7 steer ha −1 for risk neutral decision makers. A grazing season spanning from 1 November to 15 March was efficient under all risk preferences.

Large are variability in climate-based soil moisture estimates and implications for remote sensing

Although the basic physical relationships between various remotely sensed signatures and soil are sound, the representativeness of pixel-averaged wetness used to interpret the remotely sensed data is often suspect and at times even doubtful. To study the affect of local variation in soil moisture on the large-area average, mean areal precipitation, temperature and modelled soil moisture in 1/4° grid cells were analyzed for a 700 km by 400 km region in the US Southern Great Plains. Variability in five years of mean daily grid cell data was investigated for 150 km2 study sites, approximately corresponding in size to a satellite microwave pixel. The number of wetted grid cells and the magnitude of precipitation in grid cells within a site were highly variable. The variability of each of these factors is critical, and will not only influence mean site wetness, but also how the area will be seen from space. Analysis indicated that similar mean site precipitation values may result from numerous widely differing combinations of precipitation magnitude and watted gric cell population. Consequently, mean site moisture is also highly variable in the distribution and magnitude of the individual cell moisture values. Extreme values in several grid cells may severely bias the quadrant mean, while influencing a remote measurement much less. Although large-scale surface wetness may eventually be reliably inferred from satellite measurements, a degree of uncertainty will always exist, especially in semi-arid areas. One may be required to associate mean soil moisture with an expected distribution of wetness within a pixel.

Nutrient content prediction equations for wetland trees in the US Southern Coastal plain

Nutrient content prediction equations are presented for blackgum, green ash, red maple, sweetgum, water tupelo, hickory, laurel oak, water oak, and baldcypress growing on wetland sites in the southern United States from Virginia to Mississippi. In all, 495 trees from 19 locations on the Coastal Plain were sampled for N, P, K, Ca, and Mg concentrations and biomass of foliage, branches, bole wood, and bole bark. The ranking of nutrient concentrations in tree components was N>Ca>K>Mg>P for foliage and Ca>N>K>Mg>P for branches, bole wood, and bole bark. Individual species equations developed to predict nutrient contents for the total-bole and total-tree had coefficients of determination (R 2 values) ranging from 0·87 to 0·99. These equations make it possible to compare the nutrient losses associated with total-tree and conventional bole wood harvesting on wetland sites.

Somatization disorder in a US southern community: use of a new procedure for analysis of medical classification.

The authors examine somatization disorder in a community population, using grade of membership analysis, a new multivariate analytical technique for the analysis of medical classification. The technique is used to examine whether somatic symptoms will cluster into a clinical syndrome resembling somatization disorder, as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), if no a priori assumptions are made about the interrelationship of somatic symptoms or their clustering into clinical syndromes. Grade of membership analysis is applied to all respondents in the US National Institute of Mental Health Epidemiological Catchment Area Project of the Piedmont region of North Carolina reporting three or more somatic symptoms from the somatization disorder section of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. The analysis indicates that seven 'pure' types, roughly analogous to clusters in cluster analysis, best describe the interrelationship of the symptoms included in the analysis. One 'pure' type in the analysis is nearly identical to DSM-III somatization disorder and is associated with demographic characteristics consistently found among patients with DSM-III somatization disorder. The present results demonstrate that symptoms associated with this disorder do cluster in a highly predictable fashion and represent a strong validation of the natural occurrence of an entity resembling somatization disorder.