President Barack Obama walks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012, as he returned from speaking about the fiscal cliff at Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama walks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012, as he returned from speaking about the fiscal cliff at Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
House Speaker John Boehner, of Ohio, and the House GOP leadership leave after a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012, following a closed-door GOP strategy session. At left is Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The administration is taking a tough line on the "fiscal cliff" at the same time President Barack Obama resumes contact with House Speaker John Boehner over ways to avert across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases at the turn of the year.
The administration will "absolutely" let the double whammy take effect as scheduled unless Republicans give in to Obama's demand to raise tax rates at upper income levels, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Wednesday. "The size of the problem is so large it can't be solved without rates going up," he told CNBC.
Geithner drew a fierce response from Republicans. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah called his statement "stunning and irresponsible." He added, "Going over the fiscal cliff will put our economy, jobs, people's paychecks and retirement at risk, but that is what the White House wants, according to Secretary Geithner, if they don't get their way."
Economists inside and outside the government warn that failing to reach agreement on taxes and spending could land the economy back in recession.
It wasn't the only demand from the administration on a day Obama telephoned Boehner, the first known discussion of the fiscal cliff between the two in several days.
The president, appearing before corporate CEOs, warned Republicans not to inject the threat of a government default into negotiations over the fiscal cliff as a way of extracting concessions on spending cuts. "It's not a game I will play," he said, recalling the brinkmanship of last year in which a budget standoff pushed the Treasury to the edge of a first-ever default.
Obama will visit a northern Virginia family on Thursday to highlight his call for extending current tax rates to all but the top 2 percent of earners. The White House said a member of the family wanted to "share her story about how paying $2,200 more in taxes next year would impact them if Congress doesn't act."
Both sides say they want a compromise, although the administration's hand in bargaining is strengthened by polls showing public support for Obama's position on taxes, as well as by his re-election last month. The president is also working to rally the public to his side and has a trip scheduled to Detroit next week.
In a concession, Republican leaders have agreed to back increased tax revenue. Yet despite defections from within the rank and file, they have so far balked at Obama's demand that rates go up on income over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. They have also called for spending cuts and measures to slow the growth of government benefit programs. Earlier this week, they called for curbing the growth in Social Security cost-of-living increases, as well as delaying Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67, beginning in a decade.
Obama has said he will back spending cuts, including savings in Medicare, as part of a deal that includes the tax proposal that was a key part of re-election bid.
Once Republicans yield on taxes, he told the Business Roundtable, "We can probably solve this in about a week; it's not that tough."
Republicans argue that they can raise about $800 billion in additional government revenue over a decade by closing loopholes and narrowing tax deductions on the wealthy, rather than raising income tax rates. They argue the rate increase would impose a particularly harmful impact on the economy and job creation at a time when the country is still struggling to recover fully from the deepest recession in decades.
I am a copywriter. But it didn?t come across my mind to draw that line between copywriting and technical writing until recently, when some of my friends began to speak ?technical? with me.
Although, most clients don?t usually mind if you were a copywriter, copyrighter, or copiedwriter? as long as you get the job done. Nonetheless, if you are looking to get the most bang of your bucks, you should decide whether your needs would be best served by a copywriter or a technical writer.
A copywriter helps you to sell.
That?s what I do, for a living. Most marketing professionals can easily tell the differences between the two, but if you aren?t in marketing, this name game could be quite challenging. A copywriter develops content for not just marketing and publicity, but also corporate/business communication materials. Copywriters understand the structures of effective copy and possess the ninja skills to appeal to specific audience using copy.
A copywriter should have an eye for creativity. A lot of us can provide basic layout services, including newsletters, poster, billboard, direct mails, and web designing, on top of the good ol? press releases, TV and radio scripts, blogs, and even Tweets. It comes back to using copy to persuade your potential customers to purchase or employ your services.
So if you are looking to present your product and/or service in an attractive way, we are who you need.
A technical writer helps you to describe stuff.
Look around you. See that little user manual that comes in your new laptop? That?s the work of a technical writer. They are boring. They are important people who make your life much easier. Unless you?re a computer engineer or a mechanic, it is unlikely that you?ll understand how the latest tabloid works without a demonstrative manual.
Though most of the demos can be found on YouTube these days, user manual remains the first thing that people look for when their computer shut down unexpectedly. Instructional manuals, assembly or industry documents, legal forms, leases ? these are the main responsibilities of a technical writer. They munch on incredibly difficult stuff and make it digestible for laypeople like you and me.
However, more and more copywriters today are getting quite ?technical? as they also produce copy for products descriptions, corporate identity profiles, art magazines, annual reports, company newsletters, etc. The line is blurred when the work of a copywriter involves descriptive writing. What makes copywriters different is that they have a clear sense of the marketing objectives when they write. Yet at this point, I don?t really mind being called a technical copywriter (you can tell I?m overused).
So, I?ll throw the ball back at you. When you?re looking for someone to develop copy for your project, decide if you need an emcee or a deejay. That should help you to make up your mind.
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Image courtesy: Desicreative.com
About Jason Tham
Googler, Creative media specialist. Graduated from St. Cloud State University, Minnesota. See more about me at www.jasontham.blog.com.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 6, 2012) ? If nanoscience were television, we'd be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light -- the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color -- is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.
But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience.
"We've found a way to combine the advantages of scan/probe microscopy with the advantages of optical spectroscopy," says Alex Weber-Bargioni, a scientist at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience center at Berkeley Lab. "Now we have a means to actually look at chemical and optical processes on the nanoscale where they are happening."
Weber-Bargioni is corresponding author of a paper reporting this research, published in Science. The paper is titled, "Mapping local charge recombination heterogeneity by multidimensional nanospectroscopic imaging." Co-authoring the paper are Wei Bao, Mauro Meli, Frank Ogletree, Shaul Aloni, Jeffrey Bokor, Stephano Cabrini, Miquel Salmeron, Eli Yablonovitch, and James Schuck of Berkeley Lab; Marco Staffaroni of the University of California, Berkeley; Hyuck Choo of Caltech; and their colleagues in Italy, Niccolo Caselli, Francesco Riboli, Diederik Wiersma, and Francesca Intoni.
"If you want to characterize materials, particularly nanomaterials, the way it's traditionally been done is with electron microscopies and scan/probe microscopies because those give you really high, sub-atomic spatial resolution," says co-author James Schuck, a nano-optics researcher at the Molecular Foundry. "Unfortunately, what they don't give you is chemical, molecular-level information."
For chemical information, researchers typically turn to optical or vibrational spectroscopy. The way a material interacts with light is dictated to large part by its chemical composition, but for nanoscience the problem with doing optical spectroscopy at relevant scales is the diffraction limit, which says you can't focus light down to a spot smaller than approximately half its wavelength, due to the wave-nature of light.
To get around the diffraction limit, scientists employ "near-field" light. Unlike the light we can see, near-field light decays exponentially away from an object, making it hard to measure, but it contains very high resolution -- much higher than normal, far-field light.
Says Schuck, "The real challenge to near-field optics, and one of the big achievements in this paper, is to create a device that acts as a transducer of far-field light to near-field light. We can squeeze it down and get very enhanced local fields that can interact with matter. We can then collect any photons that are scattered or emitted due to this interaction, collect in the near field with all this spatial frequency information and turn it back into propagating, far-field light."
The trick for that conversion is to use surface plasmons: collective oscillations of electrons that can interact with photons. Plasmons on two surfaces separated by a small gap can collect and amplify the optical field in the gap, making a stronger signal for scientists to measure.
Researchers have exploited these effects to make near-field probes with a variety of geometries, but the experiments typically require painstaking optical alignment, suffer from background noise, only work for narrow frequency ranges of light and are limited to very thin samples.
In this latest work, however, the Berkeley Lab researchers transcended these limitations with a cleverly designed near-field probe. Fabricated on the end of an optical fiber, the probe has a tapered, four-sided tip. The researchers named their new tool after the campanile church tower it resembles, inspired by the landmark clock tower on the UC Berkeley campus. Two of the campanile's sides are coated with gold and the two gold layers are separated by just a few nanometers at the tip. The three-dimensional taper enables the device to channel light of all wavelengths down into an enhanced field at the tip. The size of the gap determines the resolution.
In a regular atomic force microscope (AFM), a sharp metal tip is essentially dragged across a sample to generate a topological map with sub-nanoscale resolution. The results can be exquisite but only contain spatial information and nothing about the composition or chemistry of the sample.
Replacing the usual AFM tip with a campanile tip is like going from black-and-white to full color. You can still get the spatial map but now there's a wealth of optical data for every pixel on that map. From optical spectra, scientists can identify atom and molecule species, and extract details about electronic structure.
"That's the beauty of these tips," says Schuck. "You can just put them on the end of an optical fiber and then it's just like using a regular AFM. You don't have to be a super near-field jock anymore to get this type of data."
The team developed their new tool to study indium-phosphide nanowires. These nanowires, with the nearly ideal band gap of 1.4 electron-volts, are well-suited to converting solar energy to electricity. The researchers found that the nanowires were not the homogeneous objects previously thought, but instead had varying optoelectronic properties along their length, which could radically alter how sunlight is converted to electricity. They also found that photoluminescence, an indication of the relationship between light and electricity, was seven-times stronger in some parts of a nanowire than others. This is the first time anyone has measured these events on such a small scale.
Weber-Bargioni says: "Details like this about indium-phosphide nanowires are important because if you want to use these suckers for photocatalysis or a photovoltaic material then the length scale at which we're measuring is where everything happens. This information is really important to understand how, for example, the fabrication and surface treatment of nanowires influences these charge recombination velocities. These determine how efficiently a solar device can convert photons into usable electrons."
Adds Schuck: "We realized that this is really the optimal way to do any kind of optical experiment one might want to do at the nano scale. So we use it for imaging and spectroscopy but we anticipate many other uses also."
This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The original article was written by Alison Hatt.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Wei Bao, M. Melli, N. Caselli, F. Riboli, D. S. Wiersma, M. Staffaroni, H. Choo, D. F. Ogletree, S. Aloni, J. Bokor, S. Cabrini, F. Intonti, M. B. Salmeron, E. Yablonovitch, P. J. Schuck, A. Weber-Bargioni. Mapping local charge recombination heterogeneity by multidimensional nanospectroscopic imaging. Science, December 7, 2012 DOI: 10.1126/science.1227977
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Despite the fact that Apple's shares are up today, people are still puzzling over what knocked them down yesterday.
At Forbes, Chuck Jones suggests comments from AT&T could have played a part in the stock's drop.
AT&T mobile CEO Ralph De La Vega said he expects the company to sell 26 million smartphones this year, which is a million more than originally anticipated. He also said that through the first two months of this quarter AT&T sold 6.4 million smartphones.
Through the first three quarters of the year, AT&T reported that it has sold 16.7 million smartphones.
Jones does the math and concludes that AT&T will sell 9.3 million smartphones in the fourth quarter. Last year, AT&T said it sold 9.4 million smartphones in the fourth quarter.
If AT&T's smartphone sales are down, then it suggests bad news for Apple, which last quarter accounted for ~77% of smartphone sales at AT&T.
It suggests that Apple, despite launching a brand new iPhone will have flat sales at AT&T.
Before people get too worried about Apple, there are a few things to consider here.
One, De La Vega could be sandbagging here. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek thinks AT&T surprises everyone with 10 million smartphones sold in the fourth quarter. This makes sense, because if it sold 6.4 million smartphones in the first two months of the quarter, sales would fall in December, which makes no sense since people are buying lots of presents.
Two, Verizon could have stolen a lot of iPhone users this quarter. My wife and I, for instance, finally ditched AT&T for Verizon. It's possible others did the same. If the AT&T sales are down, they could just be transferred to Verizon.
Three, the iPhone 5 launch was international. If AT&T sales are down or flat, it doesn't necessarily mean Apple's worldwide sales are flat.?
All that said, Apple was expected to sell 46-53 million iPhones this quarter. If it's coming up lame at AT&T, it makes it that much harder to beat expectations.
We reached out to AT&T for a comment. It declined.
KUWAIT: ?A dream come true? is how Dr Fahad Al-Ghimlas, the chairman of the first Kuwait evidence-based clinical practice workshop described the event as he inaugurated it. Dr Al-Ghimlas, who is also a consultant in respiratory medicine and director of fitness and rehab center at Dasman Diabetes Institute, declared open? the workshop conducted in collaboration with McMaster University (Canada) as well as Kuwait Institute for Medical Specialization (KIMS). The workshop is part of the activities of Dasman Institute to improve the level of patients? care. He told the Kuwait Times that this will help the doctors acquire new critical appraisal skills, and treat patients in a better fashion.
He also informed that another event next week will focus on teaching the clinicians to improve their way of delivering information to their juniors and their patients, and will be held in cooperation with Harvard University. Dr Al-Ghimlas said Dasman Institute focuses on teaching healthcare workers because ?we believe the network of professionals should work hand in hand to improve the health care system and deliver better medical care to our valued patients.?
He added that it was important to focus on other health care workers including allied health professionals, pharmacists, nurses and others ?just as we focus on educating our fellow physicians.? Meanwhile Dr Gordon Guyatt from McMaster University said ?what we are here to do is to train the residents, who are doctors in training, in what we call evidence-based medicine.? What EBM does is train the doctor to be able to read the medical literature, to be able to read the original research studies, so they are up to date with the best evidence and can apply it in their patient care.?
He said, ?We have a number of tutors at the workshop who take the rounds with the residents and deal with issues of therapy including? how to give the best therapy, reach best diagnosis and how to predict what is going to happen in the future? and to use the medical literature to do that.? He said the idea is if they understand how to use the medical literature, they can stay up to date and deliver the best care to their patients. When asked if this program will only be for doctors, or will also focus on other healthcare professionals, he said, ?We hope that it ultimately applies across all professions.?
He said, ?In my university, it was a very important part of the nursing program, and the physiotherapy programs.? On his part, KIMS Secretary General Dr Ibrahim Abbas Hadi said this is the first local workshop for the Kuwait Board Residency Program. He said, ?We currently have 25 residency training programs and there are a total of 935 residents enrolled in our program.? He said there is no course that teaches our residents evidence based practice, and this is currently a very important issue in medicine. He said, ?Our residents are learning how to become good physicians, but since they should also learn how to become good clinical investigators, we decided to run workshops for our doctors.
For this purpose, we studied various capacities and communicated with our program directors through KIMS, and they gave us a list of doctors, and we hope that over a period of one year, all our resident doctors will be able to benefit from our endeavours.? Dr Hadi thanked Health Minister Dr Ali Al-Obaid, and Undersecretary Dr Khalid Al-Sahlawi for their continued support for these workshops, and said he was confident that KIMS will evolve into an excellent future with regard to medical education. The workshop will continue until Thursday.
Plant stress paints early picture of droughtPublic release date: 5-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kathryn Hansen kathryn.h.hansen@nasa.gov 301-286-1046 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
In July 2012, farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Plains regions watched crops wilt and die after a stretch of unusually low precipitation and high temperatures. Before a lack of rain and record-breaking heat signaled a problem, however, scientists observed another indication of drought in data from NASA and NOAA satellites: plant stress.
Healthy vegetation requires a certain amount of water from the soil every day to stay alive, and when soil moisture falls below adequate levels, plants become stressed. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) have developed a way to use satellite data to map that plant stress. The maps could soon aid in drought forecasts, and prove useful for applications such as crop yield estimates or decisions about crop loss compensation.
"Crop drought monitoring is of high practical value, and any advance notice of drought conditions helps the farmer make practical decisions sooner," says Steve Running, an ecologist at University of Montana in Missoula.
A new animation of plant stress (top) shows how drought evolved across the United States from January 2010 through September 2012. In spring 2010, satellites measured cool leaf temperatures, indicating healthy plants and wetter-than-average conditions (green), over many areas across the country. By summer 2011, satellites saw the warming of stressed vegetation, indicating significantly lower-than-usual water availability (red) in many areas, most notably in Texas. Crops were either dead or would soon be dead.
Drought in 2012 was the most severe and extensive in at least 25 years, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service. By August 60 percent of farms were in areas experiencing drought, and by mid-September USDA had designated more than 2,000 counties as disaster areas. "2012 was record-breaking, this was just a huge event," says Martha Anderson with USDA-ARS in Beltsville, Md., who is working with a team to develop the plant stress indicator for drought and presented the research Dec. 5, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The 2012 event is what experts call a flash drought, meaning that it evolved quickly and unexpectedly. Low soil moisture was further depleted by the heat wave that started in May, and drought abruptly followed. By about May 5 the core regions of drought began to appear on the plant stress map earlier than the signs of drought appeared in other indicators, such as rainfall measurements.
"We think there's some early-warning potential with these plant stress maps, alerting us as the crops start to run out of water," Anderson says. Signals of plant stress may often appear first in satellite-derived maps of vegetation temperature before the crops have actually started to wilt and die. "The earlier we can learn things are turning south, presumably the more time we have to prepare for whatever actions might be taken."
For example, farmers may decide they need to buy supplemental feed from outside the drought-affected area to support their livestock, or they may need to adjust contract or insurance decisions.
The U.S. Drought Monitor already uses a combination of indices, such as rainfall, to describe drought conditions each week. The monitor currently does not include plant stress, but the potential is being explored. "Plant stress is one representation of drought impacts, and the drought monitoring community agrees that you can't do this with just one tool you need a lot of different tools," Anderson says.
Plant stress information has the potential to improve the skill of existing forecasts that predict drought out to weeks or months. Also, because the plant stress information is derived from satellites, it can describe drought conditions in areas where rain gauge and radar networks are sparse -- and it can do so at the scale of individual fields.
To produce the maps of plant stress, scientists start with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Images are processed to distinguish between land surfaces covered by soil and surfaces covered with vegetation.
Narrowing their focus to vegetated areas, scientists set out to measure moisture availability. Plants cool themselves by sweating water extracted from the soil by their roots. When access to water is limited, plants lessen their consumption and reduce evapotranspiration from leaf surfaces. As a result, leaves heat up and produce an elevated leaf or canopy temperature, which can be detected by thermal sensors on NOAA's geostationary weather satellites. Hotter plants imply limited water in the soil.
"This is not a drought forecast. It's a map of what's going on right now," Anderson says. "Is there more or less water than usual?"
What is "usual" or normal, however, can depend on the season or even the year. Scientists currently define normal by calculating and mapping plant stress averaged over periods of 1-3 months, from the start of MODIS data collection in 2000 to present. The mean of these historic maps is considered normal. Compare a current map with the longer-term "normal" map, and scientists get a picture of the magnitude by which current conditions deviate from normal.
"What was normal back in 1920 is not what's normal now, so the more years we have under the belt the better we can define normal," Anderson says. "But this year is so far out of line with respect to previous years, it is unusual regardless of the period of record used as the baseline."
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Plant stress paints early picture of droughtPublic release date: 5-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Kathryn Hansen kathryn.h.hansen@nasa.gov 301-286-1046 NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
In July 2012, farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Plains regions watched crops wilt and die after a stretch of unusually low precipitation and high temperatures. Before a lack of rain and record-breaking heat signaled a problem, however, scientists observed another indication of drought in data from NASA and NOAA satellites: plant stress.
Healthy vegetation requires a certain amount of water from the soil every day to stay alive, and when soil moisture falls below adequate levels, plants become stressed. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) have developed a way to use satellite data to map that plant stress. The maps could soon aid in drought forecasts, and prove useful for applications such as crop yield estimates or decisions about crop loss compensation.
"Crop drought monitoring is of high practical value, and any advance notice of drought conditions helps the farmer make practical decisions sooner," says Steve Running, an ecologist at University of Montana in Missoula.
A new animation of plant stress (top) shows how drought evolved across the United States from January 2010 through September 2012. In spring 2010, satellites measured cool leaf temperatures, indicating healthy plants and wetter-than-average conditions (green), over many areas across the country. By summer 2011, satellites saw the warming of stressed vegetation, indicating significantly lower-than-usual water availability (red) in many areas, most notably in Texas. Crops were either dead or would soon be dead.
Drought in 2012 was the most severe and extensive in at least 25 years, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service. By August 60 percent of farms were in areas experiencing drought, and by mid-September USDA had designated more than 2,000 counties as disaster areas. "2012 was record-breaking, this was just a huge event," says Martha Anderson with USDA-ARS in Beltsville, Md., who is working with a team to develop the plant stress indicator for drought and presented the research Dec. 5, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
The 2012 event is what experts call a flash drought, meaning that it evolved quickly and unexpectedly. Low soil moisture was further depleted by the heat wave that started in May, and drought abruptly followed. By about May 5 the core regions of drought began to appear on the plant stress map earlier than the signs of drought appeared in other indicators, such as rainfall measurements.
"We think there's some early-warning potential with these plant stress maps, alerting us as the crops start to run out of water," Anderson says. Signals of plant stress may often appear first in satellite-derived maps of vegetation temperature before the crops have actually started to wilt and die. "The earlier we can learn things are turning south, presumably the more time we have to prepare for whatever actions might be taken."
For example, farmers may decide they need to buy supplemental feed from outside the drought-affected area to support their livestock, or they may need to adjust contract or insurance decisions.
The U.S. Drought Monitor already uses a combination of indices, such as rainfall, to describe drought conditions each week. The monitor currently does not include plant stress, but the potential is being explored. "Plant stress is one representation of drought impacts, and the drought monitoring community agrees that you can't do this with just one tool you need a lot of different tools," Anderson says.
Plant stress information has the potential to improve the skill of existing forecasts that predict drought out to weeks or months. Also, because the plant stress information is derived from satellites, it can describe drought conditions in areas where rain gauge and radar networks are sparse -- and it can do so at the scale of individual fields.
To produce the maps of plant stress, scientists start with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. Images are processed to distinguish between land surfaces covered by soil and surfaces covered with vegetation.
Narrowing their focus to vegetated areas, scientists set out to measure moisture availability. Plants cool themselves by sweating water extracted from the soil by their roots. When access to water is limited, plants lessen their consumption and reduce evapotranspiration from leaf surfaces. As a result, leaves heat up and produce an elevated leaf or canopy temperature, which can be detected by thermal sensors on NOAA's geostationary weather satellites. Hotter plants imply limited water in the soil.
"This is not a drought forecast. It's a map of what's going on right now," Anderson says. "Is there more or less water than usual?"
What is "usual" or normal, however, can depend on the season or even the year. Scientists currently define normal by calculating and mapping plant stress averaged over periods of 1-3 months, from the start of MODIS data collection in 2000 to present. The mean of these historic maps is considered normal. Compare a current map with the longer-term "normal" map, and scientists get a picture of the magnitude by which current conditions deviate from normal.
"What was normal back in 1920 is not what's normal now, so the more years we have under the belt the better we can define normal," Anderson says. "But this year is so far out of line with respect to previous years, it is unusual regardless of the period of record used as the baseline."
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
I am a copywriter. But it didn?t come across my mind to draw that line between copywriting and technical writing until recently, when some of my friends began to speak ?technical? with me.
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Public release date: 5-Dec-2012
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