From 1950 the percentage of O&M costs paid by users declined from 95 per cent to 37 per cent in 1990. As a result of the shortage of funds the irrigation districts deferred maintenance, leading to a serious reduction in output and decline in the infrastructure. To solve this problem, in 1990 the government instituted a program of transferring management from the National Water Commission (CNA) to the water users. The transfer program in Mexico took off very quickly such that by the middle of 1996, more than 86 per cent of the 3.3 million ha of publicly irrigated land in the country had been transferred to joint management. Water user associations have proven capable of operating and maintaining the modules and water tar jffs collected by the users -in excess of US$170 million in 1994 and1995 -have not only supported the module O&M activities but have also supported the majority of the O&M activities by CNA staff In order to sustain the transferred districts, the users need to establish an investment fund to cover emergencies and future development. In addition, it is necessary to clarify the water laws to protect agricultural rights.

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Recent theoretical accounts maintain that core components of attentional functioning are preferentially tuned to self-relevant information. Evidence in support of this viewpoint is equivocal, however, with research overly reliant on personally significant (i.e., familiar) stimulus inputs (e.g., faces, forenames) and a diverse range of methodologies. Addressing these limitations, here we utilized arbitrary items (i.e., geometric shapes) and administered the Attention Network Test (ANT) to establish the extent to which self-relevance (vs. friend-relevance) moderates the three subsystems of attentional functioning — alerting, orienting, and executive control. The results revealed that only executive control was sensitive to the meaning of the stimuli, such that conflict resolution was enhanced following the presentation of self-associated compared to friend-associated shapes (i.e., cues). Probing the origin of this effect, a further computational analysis (i.e., Shrinking Spotlight Diffusion Model analysis) indicated that self-relevance facilitated the narrowing of visual attention. These findings highlight when and how the personal significance of otherwise trivial material modulates attentional processing.

We have developed a “Space Weather Buoy” for measuring upper atmospheric radiation from cosmic rays and solar storms. The Buoy, which is carried to the stratosphere by helium balloons, is relatively inexpensive and uses off‐the‐shelf technology accessible to small colleges and high schools. Using this device, we have measured two Forbush Decreases and a small surge in atmospheric radiation during the St. Patrick's Day geomagnetic storm of March 2015.

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