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With the mountain pine beetle infestation beginning to wind down, attempting to quantify the amount of Non-Sufficiently-Restocked (NSR) land is one that has caused arguments with different estimates ranging from as high as 9.1 million hectares to as low as 240 thousand hectares. An analysis of this problem has concluded that there is not enough evidence, due to a lack of government surveys, to come up with a definitive number. This lack of evidence has lead to an unclear, and poorly carried out reforestation program, resulting in the lowest rates of planted seedlings in 20 years. This decline will severely hamper the long term growing volume in the provinces forest and is one which needs to be dealt with quickly. A province-wide inventory of all mountain pine beetle and other NSR must be carried out with funding from all levels of government and perhaps with the help of carbon credit revenue. Once this analysis has been completed a pointed silviculture strategy must drawn up, using criteria such as feasible access, site-index, cost, understory success, fertilization potential and hydrology concerns to create a realistic, provincial, management plan. Once this plan is created, further sources of revenue can be pursued with the ability to demonstrate that the problem is understood and that the money will be put to a targeted use with a reachable outcome. With the forest sector beginning to turn around and create revenue for the province once again, it is reasonable to expect that province would attempt to put some of this money back into managing this valuable resource. ; Forestry, Faculty of ; Forest Resources Management, Department of ; Unreviewed ; Undergraduate

Related to IDRC supported Research ICT Africa (RIA) projects 101584, 103114 and 105266. ; This article reviews the progress towards universal access to telephony and other information projects in South Africa between 1996, when the last Telecommunications Act was passed, and 2000. It draws on the results of the Telecentre 2000(1) study and the Community ICT (2)research project. The Telecentre programme of the Universal Service Agency (USA) is examined in detail, with statistics on the progress of their 65 telecentres being provided. This programme is critiqued, focusing both on the problems of the telecentres and a misunderstanding of their role in creating a model for universal access. Initiatives, such as Vodacom Phone shops and the Multi-Purpose Community Centres of the Government Communications & Information Service, are also covered to show other models for community ICT projects were possible. The statistics on universal access since 1996, showing a major increase in access to telephony, are given though this has little to do with the work of the USA. The idea of a "Dig-it-all divide" is introduced. The challenges facing the country in this sector are very different from what they were in 1996, and the focus of the work in this area must shift from chasing numbers to finding real ways in which these technologies can support people-centred development.

A hierarchical model of a helicopter pilot is developed and mechanized by means of computer simulation. The basic element of the pilot model is a decision hierarchy which determines the multiloop closure and tracking characteristics of the man-vehicle system. Pilot model input is quantized and used by the hierarchy to determine the specific loop to be closed and the particular transfer function to apply to that loop. The pilot model and vehicle dynamics are implemented on a digital computer. Model validation is provided by comparison of tracking records obtained from this simulation of the vehicle with a human operator. Although developed for a vehicle with only the two lateral degrees of freedom, the pilot model is sufficiently general in form to allow its extension to six degrees of freedom. As a fourth-order system, it is applicable to the control of not only the helicopter, but all VTOL vehicles. The reduction of higher-order inputs to zero permits applicability to vehicles with lower-order dynamics. Its form is independent of the input function.

When shared between remote locations, entanglement opens up fundamentally new capabilities for science and technology.Envisioned quantum networks use light to distribute entanglement between their remote matter-based quantum nodes. Here wereport on the observation of entanglement between matter (a trapped ion) and light (a photon) over 50 km of opticalfibre: twoorders of magnitude further than the state of the art and a practical distance to start building large-scale quantum networks. Ourmethods include an efficient source of ion–photon entanglement via cavity-QED techniques (0.5 probability on-demandfibre-coupled photon from the ion) and a single photon entanglement-preserving quantum frequency converter to the 1550 nm telecomC band (0.25 device efficiency). Modestly optimising and duplicating our system would already allow for 100 km-spaced ion–ionheralded entanglement at rates of over 1 Hz. We show therefore a direct path to entangling 100 km-spaced registers of quantum-logic capable trapped-ion qubits, and the optical atomic clock transitions that they contain. ; This work was supported by the START prize of the Austrian FWF project Y 849-N20, the Army Research Laboratory Center for Distributed Quantum Information via the project SciNet under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-15-2-0060, the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy Of Sciences (OEAW) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 820445 and project name 'Quantum Internet Alliance'. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information this paper contains.