How to Boil the Water

Choose a pot that's large enough to hold the amount of water you want to boil, and has a lid that fits. You might be tempted to use water that's already warm or hot from the tap, but this water has been sitting in your pipes for some time, getting stale. Use cold water if you're going to drink it or cook with it.

Don’t fill the pot all the way up. Keep in mind that anything you add to the boiling water will increase the volume, and plus, you’ll need to allow room for those bubbles to do their thing. Without enough room in the pot, for example, rice or pasta will boil over.Place the pot on the stove and turn the heat to high. If you want to speed up the process, put a cover on it

Check for steam escaping from under the lid, then lift the lid carefully to see how the water is doing.Look at the water. If large bubbles are rising from the bottom of the pot to the surface, the water is boiling. NOTE: Small bubbles that stay at the bottom or sides of the pot are air bubbles present in the water; they don't necessarily indicate that boiling is imminent. Wait for bubbles that rise to the top of the pot.

Small bubbles that stay at the bottom or sides of the pot are air bubbles present in the water; they don't necessarily indicate that boiling is imminent. Wait for bubbles that rise to the top of the pot.

Business and Eco-System

All businesses – all economic activities – depend on ecosystem services. Thus it is in the interests of business in general and companies in particular to help maintain and enhance those services.

Market-based instruments can achieve some environmental objectives for less economic cost than conventional approaches.Not surprisingly, business wants to find market-based ways to do this, given that business understands market mechanisms and knows them to be an extremely powerful lever.

Until recently, environmental NGOs have tended to be suspicious of this approach, partly because they tended to be suspicious of both business and markets, but also for the very good reason that it is often the poorest, most marginalized people who depend most directly on ecosystems, their services and their biodiversity for food, drinking water, clothing and shelter. Such people are rarely well equipped to participate in new markets.

Yet as NGOs have developed a more sophisticated understanding of markets and business, and as companies have become more knowledgeable about ecosystem services and their users, the two have begun to cooperate on solutions. It helps that business is beginning to understand and agree with the environmentalists' argument that conserving ecosystems and sustaining the services they provide is a pre-requisite for prosperity. Now we need to bring governments to this realization.

Fire Regime

As devastating as it may appear, fire is a natural process, and Joshua Tree National Park has endured centuries of lightning-caused fires. Although fire in deserts has been less common than in forests because shrubs and trees are widely spaced in deserts and grasses not as abundant as in wetter areas.

The park maintains records of fires dating back to 1945. Most of these fires occurred between May 18 and September 20 when desert vegetation was very dry. Seventy-four percent of the fires were ignited by lightning. The remaining 26 percent were human caused.

The number and intensity of lightning fires has increased over the past 50 years. Before 1965 most lightning fires burned less than one-quarter acre. After 1965 more large fires and more frequent fires have been recorded. In 1979 the Quail Mountain fire burned 6,000 acres; in 1995 the Covington fire burned 5,158 acres. And in 1999, the largest fire in Joshua Tree’s history, the Juniper Complex fire burned 13,894 acres of slow-growing California junipers, pinyon pines, and Joshua trees.

Exotic grasses, such as red brome and cheatgrass, now represent up to 60 percent of the biomass from annuals. Resource managers believe the increased fuel loads provided by these exotic grasses are responsible for carrying lightning-ignited fires from plant to plant.

Desert plants do not need fire to reproduce and most are highly susceptible to fire. Shallow roots are easily burned and seeds lying on the ground waiting to germinate are destroyed. The desert does grow back but recovery after a fire is slow. Joshua trees can live for hundreds of years, and if one burns, it will take a hundred years for another to take its place. Even small shrubs like blackbrush may require 50 years to return to a burned area. Non-native grasses are also able to quickly recover after a fire and are usurping the habitat of native grasses.

The key to managing fire in Joshua Tree is in understanding how wildfires affect vegetation and wildlife in a desert environment where non-native grasses may have substantially altered the local ecology. Biologists are monitoring the long-term consequences of these newly arrived plants.

To help preserve and protect wildlife, scenery, and natural processes, each park develops its own Fire Management Plan. At Joshua Tree, we are revising our plan to provide for full suppression of all fires, including those naturally caused, until we have a better understanding of fire behavior and effects in the park. Although fire plays a beneficial, even a critical role, in some ecosystems, that may not be the case at Joshua Tree under these new conditions.

Snooping Protocals

Snooping, in a security situation, is illegal access to another person's or company's data. Snooping can consist of informal observance of an e-mail that appears on another's computer screen or watching what someone else is typing. More complicated snooping uses software programs to distantly monitor bustle on a computer or network device. Snooping techniques, to monitor keystrokes, detain passwords and login information, and to catch e-mail and other private communications and data transmissions. Corporations sometimes snoop on workers legally to monitor their use of business computers and track Internet usage; governments may watch on persons to collect information and avert crime and terrorism. In a snooping system, all caches on the bus monitor the bus to determine if they have a copy of the block of data that is requested on the bus. Every cache has a copy of the sharing status of every block of physical memory it has. Multiple copies of a document in a multiprocessing environment typically can be read without any coherence problems; however, a processor must have exclusive access to the bus in order to write.
There are two types of snooping protocol
1.Write invalidate
Read-broadcast is not suitable for sequential sharing
It may prove beneficial in the single-producer, multiple-consumer situation
2.Write Update
Competitive Snooping is advantageous if there is sequential sharing

Reheating in the Microwave Oven

* Cover foods with a lid or a microwave-safe plastic wrap to hold in moisture and provide safe, even heating.

* Heat ready-to-eat foods such as hot dogs, luncheon meats, fully cooked ham, and leftovers until steaming hot.

* After reheating foods in the microwave oven, allow standing time. Then, use a clean food thermometer to check that food has reached 165 °F.