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Created in April 1918 to overcome the complex challenges occasioned by wartime pressures, bureaucratic competition, and public outcry, the Royal Air Force became the world’s first independent air arm., 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War

The general trend in aircraft development during World War I was towards better-engined, stronger, higher flying, more heavily armed, and more capable airplanes. Strictly speaking, pure maneuverability became less important than greater overall utility and survivability., 1914-1918-Online International Encyclopedia of the First World War

Community evolution is the hypothesis that characterizes the changes that occur in the community structure, genetic make up, and the inherent dynamics of those aforementioned characteristics from community inception to climax. The neighborhood effect is the hypothesis that explains the impact that individuals have upon each other in a community setting. These two hypotheses combined are indicative of the field of theoretical community dynamics. Though the field is still in its infancy, much evidence has been provided suggesting that there are vast effects upon community stability, species associations, and plant soil correlations with time as the major treatment variable. Additionally, a few authors have investigated the effects of neighbor change on individual performance and found significant impacts of neighbor identity. These ideas, however, have never been coupled with the field of invasion biology. Four years ago, I designed an experiment to investigate the relationships among species performance, behavior, ecological origin, evolutionary history, and distance. I essentially, defined distance and time as analogous when looking at the effects of competition past, focused on plant performance and behavior, with a spin to include non-native plants in to the design. The results suggest that plant pairs taken from the same community have the ability to avoid root overlap; this trend broke down in a linear fashion from the closest to the most distant treatments. Moreover, individuals of the differing evolutionary origin did not show any avoidance ability or other trend in their root behaviors. Performance of individuals was also significantly affected by origin. Individual sampled together and, consequently, grown together exhibited more even growth than those that were sampled from greater distances apart. Finally, in a real world setting individual replanted within their own community exhibited suppressed growth compared to those transplanted into new communities. We suggest that these results are evidence for community change and the neighborhood effect where the community acts as a growth control and all species are capable of acting an "invasive" manner; and, that the community building process leads to communities consisting of the most ecologically suited composition of individuals. To obtain a broad perspective of the aforementioned results, an observational study of the community dominance trends of Artemisia vulgaris conducted with time as the major treatment variable. From 2006 to 2009 transects, perpendicular to the border zones of our target species and other community constituents, were evaluated for percent cover. Those data were analyzed using metrics that were develop specifically for this study and the results suggest that mugwort is a highly dominant non-native exhibiting characteristics of range expansion within the Liberty State Park interior. Additionally, in all pairs where the border was mugwort and a U.S. native the trend was that of dominance. However, when the pair was mugwort and its home-range conspecific the border was low in A. vulgaris or that of a declining trend. The other purpose of this study was to assess the necessity for control of A. vulgaris in the Liberty State Park interior. The results suggest that, if the overall project goal is to reclaim the land as a natural wildland, A. vulgaris needs to be controlled.

CHDS State/Local Accidental or intentional release of radiation may result in catastrophic consequences to urban and suburban populations. Any emergency response is compromised by insufficiently detailed protocols, and qualitative or quantitative wants in equipment and training. These challenges are no less acute for Sacramento County which is an archetype of at-risk suburban and urban settings. Recognized standards in critical patient care illustrate the need for specific considerations for radiological contaminated patients in a response protocol. Current practices in Sacramento require patient decontamination prior to treatment or transport. This may adversely affect survival profiles, despite national and international standards which specifically provide for consideration of alternate procedures. Radiation responses require a systems approach, whereby all work collaboratively toward a common goal. Incident commanders must appreciate their role in a radiation response, and how to incorporate the response into a unified multi-jurisdictional, unified command. Additionally, an essential component of any radiation response protocol is to decrease the associated "fear" of radiation in the general public as well as emergency responders. Best practices research, and recommendations at local, state, national and international levels are compiled into a usable radiation response protocol which can be utilized in formulating protocols in radiation emergency response. http://archive.org/details/sacramentoregion109452524 Captain, Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District