A shared history forgotten: Aboriginal miners and prospectors of tropical Queensland, from pre-contact times - c.1970

The story of Aboriginal miners and prospectors in north Queensland history has been underestimated, ignored, forgotten and written out of history. Complex traditional mining which predates similar European mining technology by thousands of years has been under-researched and under-estimated as 'quarrying' by archaeologists, and signs that pre-contact mining continued into modern times, either for its original purposes or adapted to the White economy, have rarely received attention. Aboriginal prospectors made important discoveries, of both new mining fields and new ore bodies, and Aboriginal mining was far more extensive than indicated in the literature, whether this literature is popular history or academic history. So far only a few of these important figures in the north's history have been noticed by academic historians and even for these, little research has been done. This thesis reinstates the essential roles of Aborigines in prospecting, mining and ancillary work on north Queensland mining fields. It reveals the importance of using an Aboriginal research paradigm, one which involves knowing Aboriginal family story to find post-contact Aborigines in the historical records. This thesis has found that Aboriginal involvement in the mining industry was most extensive, and long-lasting, on those fields which Whites found difficult to access or were remote, and which had alluvial or eluvial resources suited to miners with limited capital, sometimes using Aboriginal mining methods. It found that on those fields, mining could give Aboriginal people a way of escaping White control, particularly under the Protection Acts. It also found that the miners and prospectors were often valued by their White communities, who tried to prevent their removal under the Act. It found that official records of removals were inaccurate, which has implications for Native Title cases

A perturbative analysis of tachyon condensation

Tachyon condensation in the open bosonic string is analyzed using a perturbative expansion of the tachyon potential around the unstable D25-brane vacuum. Using the leading terms in the tachyon potential, Pad\'e approximants can apparently give the energy of the stable vacuum to arbitrarily good accuracy. Level-truncation approximations up to level 10 for the coefficients in the tachyon potential are extrapolated to higher levels and used to find approximants for the full potential. At level 14 and above, the resulting approximants give an energy less than -1 in units of the D25-brane tension, in agreement with recent level-truncation results by Gaiotto and Rastelli. The extrapolated energy continues to decrease below -1 until reaching a minimum near level 26, after which the energy turns around and begins to approach -1 from below. Within the accuracy of this method, these results are completely consistent with an energy which approaches -1 as the level of truncation is taken to be arbitrarily large.Comment: 8 pages, 3 eps figures, Latex; v2: typo correcte

Female teat size is a reliable indicator of annual breeding success in European badgers: Genetic validation

Assessing which females have bred successfully is a central requirement in many ecological field studies, providing an estimate of the effective female population size. Researchers have applied teat measurements previously to assess whether females, in a variety of mammalian species, have bred; however, this technique has not been validated genetically. Furthermore, several analytical techniques are available to classify individuals, but their misclassification rates have not been compared. We used 22 microsatellite loci to assign maternity, with 95% confidence, within a high-density population of European badgers Meles meles, as plural and subterranean breeding means that maternity cannot be inferred from behavioural observations. The teat lengths and diameters of 136 females, measured May–July 1994–2005, from social groups in which all offspring were assigned a mother, were reliable indicators of recent breeding success. A Generalised Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) classified both breeding and non-breeding females with lower error rates than discriminant analyses and crude teat-size criteria. The GLMM model logit probability = −20 + 1.8 month + 1.6 mean teat length + 1.0 mean teat diameter can be applied quickly in the field to assess the probability with which a female badger should be assigned maternity. This is a low-cost measure which, after validation, could be used in other badger or mammalian populations to assess the breeding success of females. This may be a particularly useful welfare tool for veterinary practitioners, especially during badger culls

Proof of vanishing cohomology at the tachyon vacuum

We prove Sen's third conjecture that there are no on-shell perturbative excitations of the tachyon vacuum in open bosonic string field theory. The proof relies on the existence of a special state A, which, when acted on by the BRST operator at the tachyon vacuum, gives the identity. While this state was found numerically in Feynman-Siegel gauge, here we give a simple analytic expression.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures; v2: references adde

Level Truncated Tachyon Potential in Various Gauges

New gauge fixing condition with single gauge parameter proposed by the authors is applied to the level truncated analysis of tachyon condensation in cubic open string field theory. It is found that the only one real non-trivial extremum persists to appear in the well-defined region of the gauge parameter, while the other solutions are turned out to be gauge-artifacts. Contrary to the previously known pathology in the Feynman-Siegel gauge, tachyon potential is remarkably smooth enough around Landau-type gauge.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. For associated movie files, see http://hep1.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kato/sft

The Tachyon Potential in the Sliver Frame

We evaluate the tachyon potential in the Schnabl gauge through off-shell computations in the sliver frame. As an application of the results of our computations, we provide a strong evidence that Schnabl's analytic solution for tachyon condensation in open string field theory represents a saddle point configuration of the full tachyon potential. Additionally we verify that Schnabl's analytic solution lies on the minimum of the effective tachyon potential.Comment: v1: 19 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; v2: 20 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 1 reference added, comments added; v3: 21 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 4 references added, comments adde

Superstring field theory equivalence: Ramond sector

We prove that the finite gauge transformation of the Ramond sector of the modified cubic superstring field theory is ill-defined due to collisions of picture changing operators. Despite this problem we study to what extent could a bijective classical correspondence between this theory and the (presumably consistent) non-polynomial theory exist. We find that the classical equivalence between these two theories can almost be extended to the Ramond sector: We construct mappings between the string fields (NS and Ramond, including Chan-Paton factors and the various GSO sectors) of the two theories that send solutions to solutions in a way that respects the linearized gauge symmetries in both sides and keeps the action of the solutions invariant. The perturbative spectrum around equivalent solutions is also isomorphic. The problem with the cubic theory implies that the correspondence of the linearized gauge symmetries cannot be extended to a correspondence of the finite gauge symmetries. Hence, our equivalence is only formal, since it relates a consistent theory to an inconsistent one. Nonetheless, we believe that the fact that the equivalence formally works suggests that a consistent modification of the cubic theory exists. We construct a theory that can be considered as a first step towards a consistent RNS cubic theory.Comment: v1: 24 pages. v2: 27 pages, significant modifications of the presentation, new section, typos corrected, references adde

Descent Relations in Cubic Superstring Field Theory

The descent relations between string field theory (SFT) vertices are characteristic relations of the operator formulation of SFT and they provide self-consistency of this theory. The descent relations and in the NS fermionic string field theory in the kappa and discrete bases are established. Different regularizations and schemes of calculations are considered and relations between them are discussed.Comment: Replaced to JHEP styl