Late-season escapes of Palmer amaranth and waterhemp (both are Amaranthus species) pose a significant challenge in cotton production due to their high fecundity, herbicide resistance, and ability to replenish the weed seedbank at harvest. While harvest weed seed control (HWSC) has been adopted in grain systems, its feasibility in cotton remains unknown due to differences in cotton harvesting equipment design. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the fate of Amaranthus spp. seeds during harvest with cotton pickers and stripper harvesters, and evaluated the efficacy of an impact mill to destroy a range of weed seeds present in different types of cotton debris. Along with the seed cotton, cotton strippers removed 52% of the Amaranthus seeds, compared with just 7% with pickers, which are then cleaned at the cotton gin. About 85% of the seeds were retained on the plant after harvest by the pickers, and about 15% by the strippers. Seeds shattered to the ground accounted for 8% with pickers and 18% with strippers. Additionally, the cotton stripper’s field cleaner mechanism removed 15% of the weed seeds. Together, seeds collected in seed cotton, retained on the plant, or separated by field cleaners (in strippers) represent points for HWSC implementation. Different types of cotton debris were then run through a stationary weed-seed impact mill with a known number of seeds for seven weed species to determine seed destruction efficacy. The stem debris had a 29% moisture content, which is too high for the impact mill and caused mill clogging; however, seed kill levels of 98% were achieved in bur debris and gin debris types, values similar to those reported in grain systems. Together, these findings provide a framework for incorporating HWSC practices into cotton, offering growers and processors a way to reduce weed seedbank inputs.

One of my fellow graduate students at MIT had access to the Pentagon Papers at a time when they were still classified, and he was writing a dissertation on aspects of the American involvement in Vietnam. One morning over breakfast he discovered that he had been preempted by the New York Times. Every scholar recently working on the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe must understand that student’s sensation that morning. By now, they must face newspapers with a mixture of hope and foreboding. Events outrun the most radical predictions. Not only has the Wall crumbled, with pieces of it being sold as souvenirs, but Albania has established telephone connections to the world not long after westerners came to believe Albania had been the only nation in modem times to succeed in disappearing.

In a critique of international deontology, Hardin discusses the forms that moral reasoning might take—from rationalist actor theory to Kantian proceduralism to ad hoc Kantianism—and the relation of Kant's dictum to the institutional nature of much of international affairs. He then relates this discussion to three quite different general policy issues: nuclear deterrence, intervention, and international redistribution.

There are three centrally important ways in which norms have been elaborated and explained: in terms of religious or natural law strictures on behavior, in terms of constraints imposed by rationality, and, recently, in terms of agents' behavior in well-defined games. The principal difficulty of a gaming account of norms is to show how the account explains motivations of individuals to follow the norms. This issue is examined in the context of small-number norms and large-number norms.

There can be no relevant cardinal assessment of the welfares of individuals that would allow traditional comparisons of average and total welfare of whole societies to be made. Given that cardinally additive welfare measures are unavailable, I work out some of the implications of an ordinal utilitarian analysis of international distributional issues. I first address the general problem of utilitarian comparisons between aggregates, then the nature of ordinal transfers between groups or nations, and then the complications that population growth in impoverished nations entails for such comparisons. I conclude with remarks on the difficulties and the benefits of thinking ordinally in general.

Potentially corrosive brines can form during post-closure by deliquescence of salt minerals in dust deposited on the surface of waste packages at Yucca Mountain during operations and the pre-closure ventilation period. Although thermodynamic modeling and experimental studies of brine deliquescence indicates that brines are likely to form, they will be nitrate-rich and noncorrosive. Processes that modify the brines following deliquescence are beneficial with respect to inhibition of corrosion. For example, acid degassing (HCl, HNO3) could dry out brines, but kinetic limitations are likely to limit the effect to increasing their passivity by raising the pH and increasing the NO3/Cl ratio.

Predicted dust quantities and maximum brine volumes on the waste package surface are small, and physical isolation of salt minerals in the dust may inhibit formation of eutectic brines and decrease brine volumes. If brines do contact the WP surface, small droplet volumes and layer thicknesses do not support development of diffusive gradients necessary for formation on separate anodic-cathodic zones required for localized corrosion. Finally, should localized corrosion initiate, corrosion product buildup will stifle corrosion, by limiting oxygen access to the metal surface, by capillary retention of brine in corrosion product porosity, or by consumption of brine components (Cl−).

If we wish to assess the morality of elected officials, we must understand their function as our representatives and then infer how they can fulfill this function. I propose to treat the class of elected officials as a profession, so that their morality is a role morality and it is functionally determined. If we conceive the role morality of legislators to be analogous to the ethics of other professions, then this morality must be functionally defined by the purpose that legislators are to fulfill once in office. Hence, the role morality of legislators will largely be determined by our theory of representation. We will need not a normative account of their role, but an empirical explanatory account. In David Hume's terms, the morality of role holders is one of “artificial” duties, that is to say, duties defined by their functional fit with the institutional purposes of a profession. Our most difficult problem, therefore, is to understand the role of our elected representatives.

The current debate in political science over methods and fundamentaltheoretical stances recalls similar debates in other fields. Part ofthe debate focuses on the merits of the use of statistical methodsor the use of mathematics and quasi-mathematical reasoning, as ingame theory and much of rational choice. Among the critics of thosewho use these approaches are many who focus more on interpretiveapproaches to understanding social institutions and behavior. Insome ways, the debate seems dated in that the largest and mostcompelling body of quasi-economic work is broad studies of therelationships between political and economic development. Such work,often with relatively sharply defined statistical models, spans morethan two generations of scholars in political science. Such work hasgiven compelling answers to many questions about the workings andworkability of democracy. It typically abstracts from culture and itfits congenially with rational choice theory in its focus onmicrofoundations for various claims.

The beginning of political and economic liberalism is distrust. This claim is clearer for economic liberalism than for political liberalism because it is overtly foundational in economic liberalism, which was directed against the intrusions of the state in economic affairs. Those intrusions typically had the obvious purpose of securing economic advantages for some by restricting opportunities for others, although some of them may have been merely capricious or ignorantly intended. The hostility to such economic intrusions led to the form of the American constitution, with its principal purpose to restrict government and its actions in the economy or, in the lexicon of the time, in commerce. James Madison saw the creation of an open economy or untrammelled commerce as the main achievement of the new constitution.