Since the invention of the movable head disk, people have improved I/O performance by intelligent scheduling of disk accesses. Processor speed and memory capacity are increasing several times faster than disk speed. This disparity suggests that disk I/O performance w ill become an important bottleneck .Methods are needed for using disks more eff iciently. Past analysis of disk scheduling algori...

• Tillage intensity increased soil organic C losses and risks of wind water erosion. Occluded POM was more management-sensitive in smaller than larger sized aggregates. Maximizing plant inputs via cropping system type partially mitigated negative tillage effects. Soil disturbance from N management limited mitigating effects system. increases the susceptibility agricultural soils to erosion carb...

Fault tolerance requirements for near term disk array storage systems are analyzed. The excellent reliability provided by RAID Level 5 data organization is seen to be insuucient for these systems. We consider various alternatives { improved MTBF and MTTR times as well as smaller reliability groups and increased numbers of check disks per group { to obtain the necessary improved reliability. The...

Organic agricultural systems are often assumed to be more sustainable than conventional farming, yet there has been little work comparing surface water quality from organic and conventional production, especially under the same cropping sequence. Our objective was to compare nutrient and sediment losses, as well as sweet corn ( L. var. ) yield, from organic and conventional production with conv...

Tillage of arable fields, using for instance a smoothing harrow, may increase the magnitude albedo such soil surfaces depending on location, sun’s illumination and atmospheric components. As these absorb less shortwave radiation compared to plowed soils, result is an cooling positive effect Earth’s climate. This paper follow-on previous study aimed at quantifying seasonal dynamics net reflected...

We present an improved upper bound on the competitiveness of the online coloring algorithm First-Fit in disk graphs, which are graphs representing overlaps of disks on the plane. We also show that this bound is best possible for deterministic online coloring algorithms that do not use the disk representation of the input graph. We also present a related new lower bound for unit disk graphs.

Soil quality indicators and nematode abundance were characterized in a loessial soil under long-term conservation tillage to evaluate the effects of no-till, double-disk, chisel, and moldboard plow treatments. Indicators included soil electrical conductivity (EC), soil texture, soil organic matter (SOM), and total particulate organic matter (tPOM). Nematode abundance was positively correlated w...

We present an improved upper bound on the competitiveness of the online colouring algorithm First-Fit in disk graphs, which are graphs representing overlaps of disks on the plane. We also show that this bound is best possible for deterministic online colouring algorithms that do not use the disk representation of the input graph. We also present a related new lower bound for unit disk graphs. c...