VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

The Most Direct Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy

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Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company

FRIDAY REPORT OF 8/19/05

The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy

“NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF DOWNED WOODY MATERIALS”

Our title and quotes below are from THE FORESTRY SOURCE of 08/05 published by the SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS:

“Scientists have long believed that downed woody materials (DWM) – the dead matter within forests that is in various stages of decay, such as fallen trees, branches, and leaf litter – to be a useful indicator of forest health given its role in the quality of wildlife habitat and the cycling of soil nutrients and water. Yet, there has never been a national assessment of DWM to help forest scientists, managers, and policymakers in their efforts to improve forest health…

“According to Chris Woodall, a research forester at the Forest Service’s North Central Research Station and Forest Inventory Analysis program’s National Indicator Advisor for Downed Woody Materials, access to information about DWM will be useful to those tasked with making policy and management decisions.

“‘Our forests are threatened by climate change, urban sprawl, disease epidemics, invasive species, and pests. To assess ecosystem health, we need more than just a standing tree inventory. That’s where indicators of forest health, such as DWM, play an important role…’”

“Woodall expects the FIA’s DWM inventory data to be more widely available to the public by the end of the year.

“For more information contact Chris Woodall, research forester, Forest Inventory and Analysis, North Central Research Station, USDA Forest Service, 1992 Folwell Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55106, 651+649-5141; cwoodall@fs.fed.us.”

“WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ON SMOKING AND LUNG CANCER”
by TIME’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Our title and quotes below are from a 08/10/05 posting on TIME’s web site:

“If you quit smoking can you reduce or eliminate your risk of tobacco-related lung cancer, or is the damage permanent?

“You can always reduce your risk if you quit smoking. If you’re 50 years old and you’ve been a lifelong smoker and you quit smoking today, you reduce your risk by half. If you’re 30 years old and a lifelong smoker, you can almost completely eliminate your risk of lung cancer by quitting.

“There’s some increased risk compared to the general population, if you have smoked. But, if you quit at the age of 30, it’s almost a negligible increased risk.

“If you’ve never been a smoker and you develop lung cancer, how did you get it? Is it genetics, environment, radon, luck of the draw?

“There are two likely reasons. One…you were born genetically disposed to getting cancer…

“Radon is the second leading risk factor for lung cancer in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that comes from the Earth’s soil. In fact, one in 15 homes have levels of radon that are considered too high. So home inspectors recommend that you get radon levels checked before buying new property…

“But smoking is far and away the number one risk factor. About 80% of people who have lung cancer were smokers…

“Are certain types of lung cancer more treatable than others? What’s the general survival rate?…

“Survival rates for all lung cancer: in the first year, six out of 10 people will be dead. By the second year, eight out of 10 people will be dead. By five years, only 15% of people will survive…”

To read this entire interesting article, click on http://www.time.com/time/health/printout/0,8816,1092120,00.html

“YAHOO!’S PERSONALITY CRISIS”

Our quotes above and below are from an ECONOMIST article on 08/11/05:

“Students from Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management were recently invited to play a ‘war game’ between the big four internet portals – Yahoo!, Google, Time Warner’s AOL, and Microsoft’s MSN…Yahoo!, its team thought, is in essence a smorgasbord. ‘I don’t have to be the best at everything; I just have to be good enough for you,’ said the team’s presenter. Google’s team, by contrast, was confident that it alone was the true technological innovator. The MSN team, predictably, talked about ‘leveraging Windows’, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system, which excited nobody. And the AOL team began its presentation by saying that ‘we are fortunate just to be invited to the party.’ In the end, Google won and Yahoo! came last…

“ ‘The only place anyone needs to go to find anything, communicate with anyone, or buy anything,’ is how the firm [Yahoo!] describes itself, adding that it has a web audience of over 345m users in 25 countries. This appears to be paying off handsomely. Last month, Yahoo! reported quarterly revenues up by 51%, and profits up by 70% compared with the same period last year…

“Yet by other measures, Yahoo! is not the hottest thing on the internet. Microsoft appears to consider Google its only real threat, and vice versa. If the standard is product excellence, Google seems to be the clear winner in the biggest category, search – its share of searches has been rising, to 52% in America in June, whereas Yahoo!’s has fallen, to 25%. Ditto for music, blogging, pictures and many other categories – in each, there is another firm that most users currently consider better. If Wall Street is the judge, Yahoo! also loses – with roughly equal revenues, it is worth only 60% of Google’s market capitalization of $84 billion…

“Google, in short, is at heart a technology firm. It is about algorithms. Yahoo! sees itself as a media firm. ‘Google says trust the machine; Yahoo! says trust the editor or the community,’ says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. ‘Its DNA is editors and making recommendations to other people.’ Consider, say, the difference between the firms’ news sites: Google’s story list is picked by computers with no human intervention; Yahoo!’s is edited by journalists. Yahoo!’s Hollywood types do deal with film studios and news organizations – from September, for instance, Yahoo! will offer video feeds from ABC News and CNN. Google’s geeks ‘merely’ try to write great computer code…

“‘There is a huge problem with this vision, however. Yahoo’s ‘business model is necessarily in conflict’, says John Battelle, the author of a forthcoming book on the search industry. With so much content owned by Yahoo! or generated within its site by users, the quandary for the firm will be: ‘Do you point people to your own stuff or to the most relevant stuff?’ If the former, Yahoo!’s reputation as a trusted internet search and navigation brand may evaporate; if the latter, its content may not earn the returns to justify Yahoo!’s investments in it. By contrast, says Mr. Battelle, Google, which has chosen not to make content, does not face this conflict.”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4277417

“THE BIG POTENTIAL OF SMALL FARMS
by Paul Polak”

Our title and the quotes below are from the September 2005 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:

“Peter Mwete, an angular Zimbabwean man in his 20s, was weeding his tiny vegetable plot in the settlement of Marimari when I met him in 2002…To feed his family and earn a living with fewer hands to do the work, Peter had installed a low-cost, gravity-fed, drip-irrigation kit…

Peter’s plot consisted of eight raised beds neatly planted with rape leaves, cabbage and corn. In the middle of each bed, a movable drip line delivered water from a 40-liter plastic tank placed atop a wooden stand. Because the drip system brought water directly to the roots, it was far more efficient than watering plants by bucket. As a result, the small plot produced enough corn and vegetables to meet most of the family’s needs, and Peter expected to earn at least $90 – a substantial income for a farmer in Zimbabwe – from selling the surplus…Because he could not afford chemical fertilizers, he intended to dunk a burlap bag filled with cow manure into a water drum and apply this ‘manure tea’ to the roots of his vegetables through the drip system…

“Their struggle is part of a global challenge: by 2050 the world’s farmers must feed nine billion people – three billion more than the current population – without much expansion in the amount of land and water devoted to agriculture. Water, in particular, has emerged as the key to boosting farm production and easing poverty, because nearly 1,000 liters of water are needed to grow one kilogram of grain…

“Of all human activities, agriculture leaves the biggest footprint on Earth. About 70 percent of the water diverted for human use now goes to farming; another 19 percent goes to industry, 9 percent to homes and the rest to evaporation from reservoirs…

“The average size of a family farm is less than four acres in India, 1.8 acres in Bangladesh and about half an acre in China…

“People use only about 10 percent of the freshwater that falls on our planet; the other 90 percent falls in underpopulated places such as the Amazon or comes all at once during rainy seasons and rushes past farmers’ fields to the sea…”

This magazine is available at newsstands. This eight-page article with its six photographs and maps and short biography of the author will fascinate as well as educate you. Get it.

CHANGES IN BOOK SALES

This week we sold several batches of books and deleted them from the offering at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php. We deleted all empty spaces and added new books beginning at #406.

NEW SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER

For the details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.

For each tract posted after 05/12/05 and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.25 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.25 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease. The new fee schedule does not apply to tracts marked with asterisks::

SELL LAND OR TIMBER

For 107-A. tract in GA, send e-mail to slaseter@comcast.net

BUY LAND

BUY TIMBER

*For tracts in AR, send e-mail to dyork@digitalpassage.com
*For tracts in IL, send e-mail to psftimber@hotmail.com