Vegetational response to tephra deposition and land-use change in Iceland: a modern analogue and multiple working hypothesis approach to tephropalynology

Evidence is provided from the joint application of tephrochronology and palynology in two Icelandic locations — the island of Papey off the east coast and Seljaland in the south. The Papey study relates to vegetation change around the time of volcanic ash deposition from the eruption of Katla in 1755. This produced various hypotheses concerning volcanic impacts and land-use activities, including changes in nutrient inputs, grazing activity, and climate. Similar data have been obtained from Seljaland, where a group of farms was affected by fall-out from the 1947 eruption of Hekla. The patterns of pollen-based vegetational change were similar at both locations, enabling a fuller explorationof floristic and anthropogenic responses to ash deposition. The Seljaland data are influenced by the known removal of livestock in order to guard against the effects of fluorosis. The resultant cessation of grazing was probably responsible for much of the vegetational change apparent in the pollen record, and this represents a credible recent analogue for processes that may have taken place in Papey in 1755

Mechanism for the failure of the Edwards hypothesis in the SK spin glass

The dynamics of the SK model at T=0 starting from random spin configurations is considered. The metastable states reached by such dynamics are atypical of such states as a whole, in that the probability density of site energies, $p(\lambda)$, is small at $\lambda=0$. Since virtually all metastable states have a much larger $p(0)$, this behavior demonstrates a qualitative failure of the Edwards hypothesis. We look for its origins by modelling the changes in the site energies during the dynamics as a Markov process. We show how the small $p(0)$ arises from features of the Markov process that have a clear physical basis in the spin-glass, and hence explain the failure of the Edwards hypothesis.Comment: 5 pages, new title, modified text, additional reference

Development of a remote digital augmentation system and application to a remotely piloted research vehicle

A cost-effective approach to flight testing advanced control concepts with remotely piloted vehicles is described. The approach utilizes a ground based digital computer coupled to the remotely piloted vehicle's motion sensors and control surface actuators through telemetry links to provide high bandwidth feedback control. The system was applied to the control of an unmanned 3/8-scale model of the F-15 airplane. The model was remotely augmented; that is, the F-15 mechanical and control augmentation flight control systems were simulated by the ground-based computer, rather than being in the vehicle itself. The results of flight tests of the model at high angles of attack are discussed

Expert systems for real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis

Methods for building real-time onboard expert systems were investigated, and the use of expert systems technology was demonstrated in improving the performance of current real-time onboard monitoring and fault diagnosis applications. The potential applications of the proposed research include an expert system environment allowing the integration of expert systems into conventional time-critical application solutions, a grammar for describing the discrete event behavior of monitoring and fault diagnosis systems, and their applications to new real-time hardware fault diagnosis and monitoring systems for aircraft

Cenozoic evolution of the eastern Black Sea: a test of depth-dependent stretching models

Subsidence analysis of the eastern Black Sea basin suggests that the stratigraphy of this deep, extensional basin can be explained by a predominantly pure-shear stretching history. A strain-rate inversion method that assumes pure-shear extension obtains good fits between observed and predicted stratigraphy. A relatively pure-shear strain distribution is also obtained when a strain-rate inversion algorithm is applied that allows extension to vary with depth without assuming its existence or form. The timing of opening of the eastern Black Sea, which occupied a back-arc position during the closure of the Tethys Ocean, has also been a subject of intense debate; competing theories called for basin opening during the Jurassic, Cretaceous or Paleocene/Eocene. Our work suggests that extension likely continued into the early Cenozoic, in agreement with stratigraphic relationships onshore and with estimates for the timing of arc magmatism. Further basin deepening also appears to have occurred in the last 20 myr. This anomalous subsidence event is focused in the northern part of the basin and reaches its peak at 15–10 Ma. We suggest that this comparatively localized shortening is associated with the northward movement of the Arabian plate. We also explore the effects of paleowater depth and elastic thickness on the results. These parameters are controversial, particularly for deep-water basins and margins, but their estimation is a necessary step in any analysis of the tectonic subsidence record stored in stratigraphy. <br/

Establishing a support service for educational technology within a university

This paper covers some of the issues associated with the support of learning technology within an institution. It describes the activities of a working support service, and highlights approaches to some of the academic, technological, political and management issues that have helped it perform effectively over a four‐year period

Open Science Happens Somewhere: Exploring the use of Science OER in Schools

This paper concerns a pilot exploring the use of openly licensed content in secondary schools. Specifically it looks at the use of the Open University’s (OU) OpenScienceLab (OSL) in two remote rural schools in the West Highlands of Scotland. OSL is a series of online experiments openly licensed for anyone to use, they are about learning through experimentation, and are part of a wider OU interest in how to support and develop inquiry based learning at a distance (Scanlon 2012). This area is of particular relevance to Scottish schools, as the underlying pedagogy of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) promotes interdisciplinary thinking and learning through inquiry (Macintyre 2014). The idea of the pilot was to work on how “open content” might be used in schools to understand what openness might mean in and for educational practice. While our initial intention was simply to run these in schools after the first workshops it became apparent while the technical and licences were open and it was relatively clear how to do the experiments, people were uncertain how to use them in their educational practice. Emphasising the need to attend to Educational Practice as well as Openness in OEP. The pilot took a participatory design approach (Sanders and Westerlund 2011; Mor et.al 2012), to developing and support practices around the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in classroom. Through a series of workshops and schools visits we looked to solve these problems from the classroom out, using the teachers experience to develop learning journeys that worked for teachers and pupils. With teachers we created a learning journey using the OU’s free platform OpenLearnWorks to wrap the experiments in a mixture of existing and newly developed OER. Two journeys were created, these will be run in two locations with with two sets of teachers in December 2014. The paper will report on the outcomes for pupils and teachers of this final stage. In doing so it will reflect on the participatory design process, highlighting the practices developed to support the use of open content, drawing out broader conclusions might support the use open materials in the classroom

Continuing Progress on a Lattice QCD Software Infrastructure

We report on the progress of the software effort in the QCD Application Area of SciDAC. In particular, we discuss how the software developed under SciDAC enabled the aggressive exploitation of leadership computers, and we report on progress in the area of QCD software for multi-core architectures.Comment: 5 Pages, to appear in the Proceedings of SciDAC 2008 conference, (Seattle, July 13-17, 2008), Conference Poster Presentation Proceeding