Reconciling Assumptions in Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches for Estimating Aerosol Emission Rates From Wildland Fires Using Observations From FIREX-AQ.

Accurate fire emissions inventories are crucial to predict the impacts of wildland fires on air quality and atmospheric composition. Two traditional approaches are widely used to calculate fire emissions: a satellite-based top-down approach and a fuels-based bottom-up approach. However, these methods often considerably disagree on the amount of particulate mass emitted from fires. Previously available observational datasets tended to be sparse, and lacked the statistics needed to resolve these methodological discrepancies. Here, we leverage the extensive and comprehensive airborne in situ and remote sensing measurements of smoke plumes from the recent Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) campaign to statistically assess the skill of the two traditional approaches. We use detailed campaign observations to calculate and compare emission rates at an exceptionally high-resolution using three separate approaches: top-down, bottom-up, and a novel approach based entirely on integrated airborne in situ measurements. We then compute the daily average of these high-resolution estimates and compare with estimates from lower resolution, global top-down and bottom-up inventories. We uncover strong, linear relationships between all of the high-resolution emission rate estimates in aggregate, however no single approach is capable of capturing the emission characteristics of every fire. Global inventory emission rate estimates exhibited weaker correlations with the high-resolution approaches and displayed evidence of systematic bias. The disparity between the low-resolution global inventories and the high-resolution approaches is likely caused by high levels of uncertainty in essential variables used in bottom-up inventories and imperfect assumptions in top-down inventories.

Accounting for a not-for-profit organization's fund-raising costs.

The AICPA's Statement of Position (SOP) 98-2 provides guidance on how a not-for-profit entity should account for costs associated with activities that involve a fund-raising component in combination with one or more mission-related components. Costs may be allocated among the various components of such an activity as long as the activity meets certain criteria specified by SOP 98-2. These criteria are related to the activity's purpose, audience, and content. If the activity does not meet the criteria, then all costs of the activity must be shown as fund-raising costs.

Surface Plasmon Resonance Imaging Measurements of Electrostatic Biopolymer Adsorption onto Chemically Modified Gold Surfaces.

A combination of in situ and ex situ surface plasmon resonance (SPR) imaging experiments is used to characterize the differential electrostatic adsorption of proteins and synthetic polypeptides onto photopatterned monolayers at gold surfaces. The nonspecific electrostatic adsorption of proteins onto negatively charged self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA) is found to depend on the protein pI, solution ionic strength, and solution pH. The pH dependence of the electrostatic adsorption of the protein avidin onto a MUA SAM indicates that a full monolayer adsorbs at a solution pH greater than 5.0, and an "effective pK(a)" of 3.6 is determined for the avidin adsorption. This effective pK(a) is a combination of the pK(a) of the MUA monolayer and the ion pairing adsorption coefficient for the avidin. Additional SPR imaging experiments show that the electrostatic adsorption of the synthetic polypeptide poly-l-lysine (PL) onto a MUA SAM varies with molecular weight, forming a full PL monolayer for polypeptides with more than 67 lysine residues.

Guidelines for handling domestic violence cases in community mental health centers. Kentucky Department for Mental Health and Mental Retardation Services.

Community mental health centers are becoming increasingly involved in the delivery of services to victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. To help centers plan a domestic violence program and address the risk of liability in treating clients who may be dangerous, the authors suggest principles to guide clinical decisions, standards for service delivery, and standards for staff development. Domestic violence is clearly defined as criminal behavior. In treatment, cessation of violence takes priority over family reunification and resolution of issues between victim and perpetrator. Decisions about accepting a perpetrator in treatment should be made by the treatment provider, even if treatment is mandated by the court. Suggestions for reducing the burden of domestic violence cases on individual clinicians include using treatment teams, establishing guidelines for maximum caseloads, and encouraging mixed caseloads. CMHCs have an important role in a comprehensive approach to domestic violence that includes a wide array of services and careful coordination among agencies that provide them.

Case history: asking the right questions.

The importance of asking the right question is highlighted in this case study. The patient was a 76-yr-old man with hearing loss that initially appeared to be a classic case of presbycusis. Without asking the right question this patient might have been managed in a manner inappropriate to his true hearing sensitivity.

Polycarpaly and other abnormalities of the wrist in chondroectodermal dysplasia: the Ellis-van Creveld syndrome.

Radiographs of 45 wrists of 23 patients who had chondroectodermal dysplasia (CED) showed variable wrist malformations, which we grouped into eight categories. In each patient, the wrists tended to be similar but seldom identical; in six patients they were sufficiently dissimilar that we classified the malformations in their two wrists into separate categories. A ninth carpal bone was present in the wrists of all patients who were five years old or older (42 of 45 wrists). It was located in the distal row, medial to the hamate bone and proximal to the fifth and sixth metacarpals. A tenth carpal bone was found in six wrists. Unlike the ninth carpal bone, it varied in location. All of the carpal bones were deformed, and two or three separate ossification centers of the hamate were found in some individuals. Fusions between the capitate, the hamate, and the ninth carpal bone were present by the last available examination in 71% of the 45 hands: these included fusions between the capitate and hamate in 7%, between the hamate and the ninth carpal bone in 47%, and between all three bones in 18%.

Comparison of ventricular enlargement and radiopharmaceutical retention: a cisternographic-pneumoencephalographic comparison.

The cisternograms and pneumoencephalograms of 58 patients with suspected "normal pressure" hydrocephalus were correlated and the relationship of ventricular radiopharmaceutical entry and stasis to ventricular size was analyzed. It was found that radiopharmaceutical entry relates directly to ventricular size, stasis occurring only in markedly enlarged ventricles. Cerebrospinal fluid imaging alone is a highly reliable diagnostic study only if patients exhibit the characteristic cisternographic patterns of normal pressure hydrocephalus. In those who do not, pneumoencephalography and cisternography are valuable complementary studies which can also be used to identify primary cortical atrophy.