Oxygen isotope ratios of pedogenic carbonates were analyzed along a climatic gradient in the Palouse region of eastern Washington State to evaluate changes in their isotopic composition with changing climate. A modern analog approach was used to assess the relationship between the istotope ratios in the pedogenic carbonates with those in soil water (measured in June when we anticipated carbonat...

The effects of grazing winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) by Canada geese (Branta canadensis) was assessed in 3 fields during 2 years of experimentation at the Wye Research and Education Center, Queenstown, Maryland. Randomly placed wire enclosures prevented goose grazing on 11.1 m sq. control plots. Grazed plots were marked in each field soon after the geese migrated in March. Grazed plots had c...

The first climatology of airmass origin in the Arctic is presented in terms of rigorously defined airmass fractions that partition air according to where it last contacted the planetary boundary layer (PBL). Results from a present-day climate integration of the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry–Climate Model (GEOSCCM) reveal that the majority of air in the Arctic below 700mb last contact...

Multiyear satellite observations are used to document a relationship between the large-scale variability in precipitation over the tropical Atlantic and aerosol traced to African sources. During boreal winter and spring there is a significant reduction in precipitation south of the Atlantic marine intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) during months when aerosol concentrations are anomalously hi...

48 AI MAGAZINE ■ For many years, the very idea of artificial intelligence has been provocative and exciting. However, with a continually increasing focus on specialized subareas and somewhat narrow technical problems (both of which are inevitable and in many ways healthy), we may be torpedoing our core research agenda: the creation of a true synthetic intelligence. I reflect briefly on the esse...

The aim of this contribution is to highlight a new, complex, challenging scenario involving the design discipline when working on the design of mobile applications. New challenging usability issues have to be faced, as well as the social and economic impact of the designed products. In this multifaceted context, design has the chance to play a key strategic role: relating to and cooperating wit...

SUMMER 2016 3 In 1998, AAAI Publications committee chair Ken Ford invited me to become the Editor-in-Chief of AI Magazine. After two issues as Editor Elect, I became Editor-in-Chief in spring 1999. Now, 70 issues and 17 years later, I am still deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute to AAAI and to the AI community through the editorship. It has been a privilege to guide the magazine’s...

This study investigated the snowstorm impact on Wisconsin state highway system and assessed the winter maintenance effort in improving highway safety from a macroscopic perspective. Though the inverse relationship between the de-icing material consumption and the crash counts during the snowstorms is not reflected in the analysis, it implies that causes of snowstorm crashes are multifold. The f...

Seasonal characteristics of aerosol optical properties in Sky Radiometer Network (SKYNET) Hefei site are studied using a sky radiometer from March 2007 to May 2013. The aerosol optical depth (AOD), Angstrom exponent (AE), volume size distributions, single-scattering albedo (SSA), refractive index, and asymmetry factor (ASY) of aerosols are simultaneously retrieved using the SKYRAD.pack version ...

WINTER 2015 5 As George Bernard Shaw once observed, being slandered is better than being ignored. So maybe AI researchers should be happy about what’s been happening lately. After decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the g...