6,983 research outputs found
Erodibility of hill peat
peer-reviewedThe project was funded by the European Union Structural Funds EAGGF distributed under the Department of Agriculture and Food Stimulus Fund.The energy necessary to entrain soil in water depends on the soil strength. Once entrained, the settling velocity of the eroded soil in water is of fundamental importance to the processes of sediment transport and deposition. In this paper, stream power theory and transport concepts coupled with the equation of continuity were used to derive a transport-limited peat concentration. The ratio of the log of the actual sediment concentration in surface run-off to the log of the transport-limited sediment concentration was the index of erosion used. The value of this index is a measure of the sensitivity of peat to erosion by sheet flow. Four peats were subjected to a range of overland flow rates under two slopes in a laboratory flume. The peats represented peat farmed in a sustainable manner (Leenane), overgrazed peat (Maam), peat undergoing erosion (Newport) and peat which had undergone weathering following exposure by a landslip (Croagh Patrick). Both in situ and surface damaged slabs were studied. The results indicate that shearing and remoulding of a wet peat surface (e.g., by animal treading) and weathering of exposed drained peat surfaces predispose peat to erosion. Defoliation by overgrazing is considered to be of secondary importance.Department of Agriculture, Food and the MarineEuropean Union Structural Funds EAGG
Does Corporate Performance Improve After Mergers?
We examine the post-acquisition operating performance of merged firms using a sample of the 50 largest mergers between U.S. public industrial firms completed in the period 1979 to 1983. The results indicate that merged firms have significant improvement in asset productivity relative to their industries after the merger, leading to higher post-merger operating cash flow returns. Sample firms maintain their capital expenditure and R&D rates relative to their industries after the merger, indicating that merged firms do not reduce their long-term investments. There is a strong positive relation between postmerger increases in operating cash flows and abnormal stock returns at merger announcements, indicating that expectations of economic improvements underlie the equity revaluations of the merging firms.
Acoustic characterization of crack damage evolution in sandstone deformed under conventional and true triaxial loading
We thank the Associate Editor, Michelle Cooke, and the reviewers, Ze'ev Reches and Yves Guéguen, for useful comments which helped to improve the manuscript. We thank J.G. Van Munster for providing access to the true triaxial apparatus at KSEPL and for technical support during the experimental program. We thank R. Pricci for assistance with technical drawings of the apparatus. This work was partly funded by NERC award NE/N002938/1 and by a NERC Doctoral Studentship, which we gratefully acknowledge. Supporting data are included in a supporting information file; any additional data may be obtained from J.B. (e-mail: [email protected]).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Coastal oceanography and sedimentology in New Zealand, 1967-91.
This paper reviews research that has taken place on physical oceanography and sedimentology on New Zealand's estuaries and the inner shelf since c. 1967. It includes estuarine sedimentation, tidal inlets, beach morphodynamics, nearshore and inner shelf sedimentation, tides and coastal currents, numerical modelling, short-period waves, tsunamis, and storm surges. An extensive reference list covering both published and unpublished material is included. Formal teaching and research programmes dealing with coastal landforms and the processes that shape them were only introduced to New Zealand universities in 1964; the history of the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research parallels and chronicles the development of physical coastal science in New Zealand, most of which has been accomplished in last 25 years
Multi-porous extension of anisotropic poroelasticity : linkage with micromechanics
We thank the Editor, Prof. Ronaldo Borja, Prof. Mark Kachanov, and anonyomus reviewers for careful reading of themanuscript and their insightful comments. This research was supported financially by the NERC grant: âQuantifying theAnisotropy of Poroelasticity in Stressed Rockâ, NE/N007826/1 and NE/T00780X/1.Peer reviewe
Correlation Functions for an Elastic String in a Random Potential: Instanton Approach
We develop an instanton technique for calculations of correlation functions
characterizing statistical behavior of the elastic string in disordered media
and apply the proposed approach to correlations of string free energies
corresponding to different low-lying metastable positions. We find high-energy
tails of correlation functions for the case of long-range disorder (the
disorder correlation length well exceeds the characteristic distance between
the sequential string positions) and short-range disorder with the correlation
length much smaller then the characteristic string displacements. The former
case refers to energy distributions and correlations on the distances below the
Larkin correlation length, while the latter describes correlations on the large
spatial scales relevant for the creep dynamics.Comment: 5 pages; 1 .eps figure include
Pseudorandomness for Regular Branching Programs via Fourier Analysis
We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once,
permutation branching programs of constant width that can read their input bits
in any order. The seed length is , where is the length of the
branching program. The previous best seed length known for this model was
, which follows as a special case of a generator due to
Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS 2012) (which gives a seed length of
for arbitrary branching programs of size ). Our techniques
also give seed length for general oblivious, read-once branching
programs of width , which is incomparable to the results of
Impagliazzo et al.Our pseudorandom generator is similar to the one used by
Gopalan et al. (FOCS 2012) for read-once CNFs, but the analysis is quite
different; ours is based on Fourier analysis of branching programs. In
particular, we show that an oblivious, read-once, regular branching program of
width has Fourier mass at most at level , independent of the
length of the program.Comment: RANDOM 201
Exact free energy distribution function of a randomly forced directed polymer
We study the elastic (1+1)-dimensional string subject to a random gaussian
potential on scales smaller than the correlation radius of the disorder
potential (Larkin problem). We present an exact calculation of the probability
function for the free energy of a string starting at
and ending at . The function is strongly
asymmetric, with the left tail decaying exponentially () and the right tail vanishing as . Our analysis defines a strategy for future attacks on
this class of problems.Comment: RevTeX, 4 pages, 1 figure inserte
Upper critical dimension, dynamic exponent and scaling functions in the mode-coupling theory for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation
We study the mode-coupling approximation for the KPZ equation in the strong
coupling regime. By constructing an ansatz consistent with the asymptotic forms
of the correlation and response functions we determine the upper critical
dimension d_c=4, and the expansion z=2-(d-4)/4+O((4-d)^2) around d_c. We find
the exact z=3/2 value in d=1, and estimate the values 1.62, 1.78 for z, in
d=2,3. The result d_c=4 and the expansion around d_c are very robust and can be
derived just from a mild assumption on the relative scale on which the response
and correlation functions vary as z approaches 2.Comment: RevTex, 4 page
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