Demonstration-Based Education Generates Behavior Change Related to Conservation Practices

Getting agricultural producers to make changes to their operations is difficult, especially related to complex systems such as the water cycle on managed agricultural lands. We surveyed participants who had watched a rainfall simulator demonstration during the summer of 2015. Results indicate that the demonstration was effective in providing educational outreach on the impact of the water cycle and prompting the adoption of conservation practices and monitoring techniques among producers. The study reinforces the importance in conservation education of learning experiences involving simulation, observation, and group discussion. Our findings may be applicable not only to Extension professionals working with agricultural producers but also to those involved in encouraging conservation practices among other audiences

Stationary shapes of deformable particles moving at low Reynolds numbers

Lecture Notes of the Summer School ``Microswimmers -- From Single Particle Motion to Collective Behaviour'', organised by the DFG Priority Programme SPP 1726 (Forschungszentrum J{\"{u}}lich, 2015).Comment: Pages C7.1-16 of G. Gompper et al. (ed.), Microswimmers - From Single Particle Motion to Collective Behaviour, Lecture Notes of the DFG SPP 1726 Summer School 2015, Forschungszentrum J\"ulich GmbH, Schriften des Forschungszentrums J\"ulich, Reihe Key Technologies, Vol 110, ISBN 978-3-95806-083-

The return trip effect: Why the return trip often seems to take less time

Three studies confirm the existence of the return trip effect: The return trip often seems shorter than the initial trip, even though the distance traveled and the actual time spent traveling are identical. A pretest shows that people indeed experience a return trip effect regularly, and the effect was found on a bus trip (Study 1), a bicycle trip (Study 2), and when participants watched a video of someone else traveling (Study 3). The return trip effect also existed when another, equidistant route was taken on the return trip, showing that it is not familiarity with the route that causes this effect. Rather, it seems that a violation of expectations causes this effect

Elaborated Modeling of Synchrotron Motion in Vlasov-Fokker-Planck Solvers

Solving the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation is a well-tested approach to simulate dynamics of electron bunches self-interacting with their own wake-field. Typical implementations model the dynamics of a charge density in a damped harmonic oscillator, with a small perturbation due to collective effects. This description imposes some limits to the applicability: Because after a certain simulation time coherent synchrotron motion will be damped down, effectively only the incoherent motion is described. Furthermore – even though computed - the tune spread is typically masked by the use of a charge density instead of individual particles. As a consequence, some effects are not reproduced. In this contribution, we present methods that allow to consider single-particle motion, coherent synchrotron oscillations, non-linearities of the accelerating voltage, higher orders of the momentum compaction factor, as well as modulations of the accelerating voltage. We also provide exemplary studies – based on the KIT storage ring KARA (KArlsruhe Research Accelerator) - to show the potentiality of the methods

Top Arc Seam Weld Shear Strength and Stiffness for Sheet-to-sheet Connections

The North American Specification for the Design of Cold-Formed Steel Structural Members does not provide specific design guidance for sheet-to-sheet top arc seam welds in shear. A collaborative industry study has developed design guidance for both strength and stiffness of the connection to facilitate analytical evaluation of floor and roof diaphragm assemblies and wall assemblies. The test program was performed per AISI S905 and addressed material ductility, weld length, sheet thickness and the distribution of the force being transferred by the weld connection

Quantitative spectroscopy of single molecule interaction times

Funding Information: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (421152132 (subproject C03)), EXC 2046 (MATH+Incubator project IN-B2).Single molecule fluorescence tracking provides information at nanometer-scale and millisecond-temporal resolution about the dynamics and interaction of individual molecules in a biological environment. While the dynamic behavior of isolated molecules can be characterized well, the quantitative insight is more limited when interactions between two indistinguishable molecules occur. We address this aspect by developing a theoretical foundation for a spectroscopy of interaction times, i.e., the inference of interaction from imaging data. A non-trivial crossover between a power law to an exponential behavior of the distribution of the interaction times is highlighted, together with the dependence of the exponential term upon the microscopic reaction affinity. Our approach is validated with simulated and experimental datasets.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe