Watershed Info
Daniel Salzler No. 1037 EnviroInsight.org Seven Items February 28, 2020
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1. EnviroInsight To Hold Recycling Education Event This Saturday. On February 29th, EnviroInsight will host a recycling education event in front of Lowes Home Improvement located at 5809 West Northern Avenue, Glendale from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
EnviroInsight, a Non-Profit Organization, will be educating the public on that “what” and “how” to recycle goods that are generated around the house, such as old paint, aluminum cans, Fats, Oil, and Grease (F.O.G.), newspapers and magazines, and much, much more.
For more information,or if you would like EnviroInsigh to conduct a recycling event in your community, contact Dan Salzler at Sconflict@aol.com or 623-623-7178
2. Upper Agua Fria Meeting, March 3rd. Kelly Bull, Director of Sustainability at Orme School, is hosting the March Upper Agua Fria Watershed Partnership meeting in her classroom on Tuesday, March 3, 2020. After our 9 – 11 meeting, we will have a chance to meet her students, have a tour of Orme School and stay for lunch (if you let me know you are coming, and pay $10.0.). Agenda and Map to follow.
Ash Creek, a major tributary of the Agua Fria flows through Orme; parts of Orme are included in a proposed Conservation Easement. Orme collaborates with the School of Sustainability at ASU. For more info go to earthhouse@aol.com
3. Water Resources Reserch Center Final Webinar in Our “Get Ready” Series. March 3, 2020
A series of presentations in collaboration with the Central Arizona Project on a range of topics linked to the management of the Colorado River system
- Patrick Dent, Director of Water Policy, CAP
- Austin Carey, Planning Analyst, Resource Planning and Analysis, CAP
- Angie Lohse, Senior Policy Analyst, CAP
- Chris Brooks, Senior Water Resources Analyst, CAGRD
- Orestes Morfin, Planning Analyst, Colorado River Programs Department, CAP
- Mohammed Mahmoud, Senior Policy Analyst, Colorado River Programs Department, CAP
4. 2020 Membrane Technology Conference
Ever heard of “Struvite”? Struvite is a crystalline mineral composed of magnesium, ammonium and phosphate and is a natural byproduct of wastewater treatment and is as hard as concrete.
Join AMTA and AWWA to explore how the latest developments in membrane technology can enhance water reliability and quality. Each year the conference reveals new directions in water and wastewater treatment technologies, desalting and membrane bioreactor applications.
Who Attends MCT?
- Consultants and contractors
- Designers
- Professors and students
- Federal, state and municipal management and executives
- Local, state and federal regulatons
- International audience
- Manufacturers, suppliers and distributors
- Operators
- Scientists and researchers
- Water and wastewater engineers
- Water utility plant management and executives
5. Remembering The Man Who Created The Digital Copy, Cut, Paste Feature On Your Computer.
Larry Tesler, inventor of copy-and-paste computer functions, dies at 74 on February 16.
Larry Tesler held various high-level positions at Apple, including chief scientist. (Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images) February 16, 2020 By Matt Schudel
Larry Tesler, who invented and named the “cut, copy and paste” commands on computers, an indispensable part of the everyday operation of digital devices, died Feb. 16 at his home in Portola Valley, Calif. He was 74.
The death was confirmed by a brother, Alan Tesler, who declined to specify the cause.
Mr. Tesler, who worked for several leading tech companies, including Xerox, Apple, Amazon and Yahoo, devoted much of his career to the idea of making computers practical, inexpensive and easy to use.
During the 1970s, he worked at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in California, which produced many breakthroughs in computer technology. Among other advances, Mr. Tesler was credited with helping develop the terms “user-friendly” and “WYSIWYG,” for “what you see is what you get,” to describe the goal of having computer printouts be the exact duplicate of what is seen on a screen.
He also devised what is known as Tesler’s Law, a tenet holding that, in any computing system, there is a level of technical complexity that cannot be reduced.
It was Mr. Tesler’s work on the Gypsy word processor at PARC during the 1970s that turned out to have the greatest utility and long-term impact. With his interest in simplicity and ease of use, he sought ways to make computers more interactive for consumers, a notion called “user interface” in computer design. In developing his designs and ideas, Mr. Tesler often asked ordinary users — rather than computer experts — what they wanted their machines to do.
At the time, computers operated in separate “modes”: For instance, text could be entered in one digital mode, but for editorial changes to that text, the user would have to switch the computer to a different mode. Mr. Tesler helped refine the concept of “modeless” computing, in which a user could perform a variety of functions at all times without manually changing how the computer would operate.
For his best-known innovation, Mr. Tesler adapted an age-old practice of schoolchildren — cutting out pictures and pasting them in scrapbooks — to computers. At first, he thought the term “cut-and-paste” would apply strictly to design and visual images.
“I would have some analogous thing called delete and insert to use for moving text around, but it would have the same concept,” he said in a 2013 oral history interview with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “After a while, I thought you don’t really need a different name. We can probably teach people what cut and paste means even if they’ve never heard of it before.”
Mr. Tesler and another computer scientist, Tim Mott, “did user testing at every stage of the development. He was the one that came up with the idea of the double click to select a word.”
For his best-known innovation, Mr. Tesler adapted an age-old practice of schoolchildren — cutting out pictures and pasting them in scrapbooks — to computers At first, he thought the term “cut-and-paste” would apply strictly to design and visual images. Mr. Tesler and another computer scientist, Tim Mott, “did user testing at every stage of the development. He was the one that came up with the idea of the double click to select a word.”
Mr. Tesler even developed a way to make the action of the mouse more precise by developing “a software algorithm that controlled for hand shake as you were dragging the mouse,” he said in the oral history. “As long as they’re starting out with a horizontal motion, we . . . assume [there will] be some shaking in the vertical direction and kind of ignore it unless they go all the way into the next line, like “ more than halfway into the next line. And then go, ‘Uhm . . . they really do want to go to this line.’
Lawrence Gordon Tesler was born April 24, 1945, in the Bronx. His father was a physician, his mother a homemaker.
Mr. Tesler became fascinated with the emerging technology of computers in the 1950s, when he saw early computers used to predict presidential elections. He studied mathematics at Stanford University, where he did computer programming for medical researcher and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg. After graduating in 1965, Mr. Tesler became a computer programmer and worked at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
He joined Xerox in 1973 and reportedly demonstrated the company’s Alto computer to Steve Jobs, who then adapted the Alto’s mouse and other elements to improve the design of the personal computer. Mr. Tesler followed Jobs to Apple in 1980 and held various high-level positions at the company, including chief scientist — a job once held by computer visionary Steve Wozniak.
After leaving Apple in 1997, Mr. Tesler founded a software company and later worked at Yahoo and Amazon, where he was vice president of “shopping experience” and worked on Amazon’s program allowing customers to preview books online. Sources: Google.com, Wall Street Journal
6. Climas: Southwest Climate Outlook.
Monthly Precipitation and Temperature.
January precipitation ranged from average to much below
average in most of Arizona, but included areas that ranged
from below average to above average.
January temperatures were above average across nearly all of Arizona. The daily average temperature anomalies for Jan 1 – Feb 17 highlight the fluctuations at select stations around the region. Particularly notable was the cold snap in early February
Drought: The Feb 11 U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) maintains drought characterizations similar to last month in the Four Corners region while adding drought characterizations in central Nevada and
California, as well as southeastern New Mexico. A large pocket of “Moderate Drought” and “Severe Drought” remains ccntered on the Four Corners region, reflecting localized acute and accumulated precipitation deficits.
Arizona Reservoirs
Capacity
- Lake Powell 52%
- Lake Mead 42%
- Lake Mohave 90%
- Lake Havasu 97%
- Lyman Lake 29%
- San Carlos 5%
- Verde River System 59%
- Salt River System 75%
7. NASA, NOAA Say 2019 Was The Second-Warmest Year Ever
The past five years have been the warmest of the last 140 years, with 2016 taking the hottest spot.
“We know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” says the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. Getty Images
Copyright: EnviroInsight.org 2020
