Seven half-day regional listening sessions were held between December 2016 and April 2017 with groups of diverse stakeholders on the issues and potential solutions for herbicide-resistance management. The objective of the listening sessions was to connect with stakeholders and hear their challenges and recommendations for addressing herbicide resistance. The coordinating team hired Strategic Conservation Solutions, LLC, to facilitate all the sessions. They and the coordinating team used in-person meetings, teleconferences, and email to communicate and coordinate the activities leading up to each regional listening session. The agenda was the same across all sessions and included small-group discussions followed by reporting to the full group for discussion. The planning process was the same across all the sessions, although the selection of venue, time of day, and stakeholder participants differed to accommodate the differences among regions. The listening-session format required a great deal of work and flexibility on the part of the coordinating team and regional coordinators. Overall, the participant evaluations from the sessions were positive, with participants expressing appreciation that they were asked for their thoughts on the subject of herbicide resistance. This paper details the methods and processes used to conduct these regional listening sessions and provides an assessment of the strengths and limitations of those processes.

Herbicide resistance is ‘wicked’ in nature; therefore, results of the many educational efforts to encourage diversification of weed control practices in the United States have been mixed. It is clear that we do not sufficiently understand the totality of the grassroots obstacles, concerns, challenges, and specific solutions needed for varied crop production systems. Weed management issues and solutions vary with such variables as management styles, regions, cropping systems, and available or affordable technologies. Therefore, to help the weed science community better understand the needs and ideas of those directly dealing with herbicide resistance, seven half-day regional listening sessions were held across the United States between December 2016 and April 2017 with groups of diverse stakeholders on the issues and potential solutions for herbicide resistance management. The major goals of the sessions were to gain an understanding of stakeholders and their goals and concerns related to herbicide resistance management, to become familiar with regional differences, and to identify decision maker needs to address herbicide resistance. The messages shared by listening-session participants could be summarized by six themes: we need new herbicides; there is no need for more regulation; there is a need for more education, especially for others who were not present; diversity is hard; the agricultural economy makes it difficult to make changes; and we are aware of herbicide resistance but are managing it. The authors concluded that more work is needed to bring a community-wide, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the complexity of managing weeds within the context of the whole farm operation and for communicating the need to address herbicide resistance.

Let $W$ be a compact simply connected triangulated manifold with boundary and let $K\,\subset \,W$ be a subpolyhedron. We construct an algebraic model of the rational homotopy type of $W\text{ }\!\!\backslash\!\!\text{ K}$ out of a model of the map of pairs $\left( K,\,K\cap \partial W \right)\,\to \,\left( W,\,\partial W \right)$ under some high codimension hypothesis.

We deduce the rational homotopy invariance of the configuration space of two points in a compactmanifold with boundary under 2-connectedness hypotheses. Also, we exhibit nice explicit models of these configuration spaces for a large class of compact manifolds.

Cotton and synthetic fiber competition in textile mills between 1961-1990 was examined using a time-varying parameter regression model. Results indicate that the structure of demand for cotton is not stable and cotton's share responses to changes in the prices of cotton and synthetic fiber vary over time. Cotton and synthetic fiber competition in textile mill use is essentially between cotton and noncellulosic fiber. Cellulosic fiber is not a cotton competitor.

This study provides an analysis of the price-quality relationships of U.S. cotton using primary data collected from textile manufacturers, the end users of fiber. Hedonic prices of fiber attributes are estimated for three production regions—West, South Central, and South—over the 1992–95 study period. Results indicate that cotton price is determined by quality attributes and nonquality factors in the end-use market. There are similarities and differences in valuation of fiber attributes based on region of origin of the cotton.

Let X be a finite CW-complex. We show that the image of the homotopy groups of X under suspension have an exponent at every prime. As a corollary we recover Long's result that finite H-spaces have exponents at all primes. We show that the stable homotopy groups of X have an exponent at p if and only if X is rationally equivalent to a point. This allows us to construct many examples of spaces with infinite dimensional rational homotopy groups and without an exponent at any prime. These examples further support Moore's conjecture.

The sub-nanosecond electrical transients induced by 5-MeV He+ and 10-MeV Si3+ ions have been measured in single-crystal, natural type Ila diamonds. The detectors were fabricated into conductivity modulated devices and were incorporated into 50-Ω high bandwidth transmission line structures. The electrical signals were recorded with a system based on a 70 GHz random sampling oscilloscope with the total recording rise time of 18.6 ±:0.6 ps.

Signal rise times are less than 70 ps and fall times are less than 200 ps for electric fields in the range 3.8x104 - 1×105 V/cm. The plasma time appears to play a key role in defining the initial stages of the charge transport because signal rise times are much greater than the recording system rise time, especially with the Si-ion excitation. Furthermore, incomplete charge collection is quite severe even at the highest applied electric fields due to the dominance of carrier trapping/recombination at the defect sites.