557 research outputs found
Surface Ships: The Kriegsmarineās Downfall During the Second World War
This manuscript details the German naval plan against the UK, and explores the statistics as well as leadership in the Kriegsmarine that prove why the German naval strategy during the Second World War was majorly flawed. Germany was a surprisingly powerful nation in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As a nation under National Socialism, Germany had defeated and occupied large swaths of mainland Europe. Germany had taken control of France, Poland, Austria, and a majority of Scandinavia, as well as advancing allied interests in the area through Spain and Italy. The only problem that Germany had was the United Kingdom. As it is an island, the Germans could not employ their usual Blitzkrieg tactics, but instead made an attempt to reverse the British World War 1 strategy of starving the nation out of the war by eliminating any incoming trade. This was an even larger challenge for the Germans than it was for the British in the previous war, as the Germans had to eliminate the UK before the United States joined the war
Within-guild dietary discrimination from 3-D textural analysis of tooth microwear in insectivorous mammals
Resource exploitation and competition for food are important selective pressures in animal evolution. A number of recent investigations have focused on linkages between diversification, trophic morphology and diet in bats, partly because their roosting habits mean that for many bat species diet can be quantified relatively easily through faecal analysis. Dietary analysis in mammals is otherwise invasive, complicated, time consuming and expensive. Here we present evidence from insectivorous bats that analysis of three-dimensional (3-D) textures of tooth microwear using International Organization for Standardization (ISO) roughness parameters derived from sub-micron surface data provides an additional, powerful tool for investigation of trophic resource exploitation in mammals. Our approach, like scale-sensitive fractal analysis, offers considerable advantages over twodimensional (2-D) methods of microwear analysis, including improvements in robustness, repeatability and comparability of studies. Our results constitute the first analysis of microwear textures in carnivorous mammals based on ISO roughness parameters. They demonstrate that the method is capable of dietary discrimination, even between cryptic species with subtly different diets within trophic guilds, and even when sample sizes are small. We find significant differences in microwear textures between insectivore species whose diet contains different proportions of āhardā prey (such as beetles) and āsoftā prey (such as moths), and multivariate analyses are able to distinguish between species with different diets based solely on their tooth microwear textures. Our results show that, compared with previous 2-D analyses of microwear in bats, ISO roughness parameters provide a much more sophisticated characterization of the nature of microwear surfaces and can yield more robust and subtle dietary discrimination. ISO-based textural analysis of tooth microwear thus has a useful role to play, complementing existing approaches, in trophic analysis of mammals, both extant and extinct
Competitive exclusion and Hebbian couplings in random generalised Lotka-Volterra systems
We study communities emerging from generalised random Lotka--Volterra
dynamics with a large number of species with interactions determined by the
degree of niche overlap. Each species is endowed with a number of traits, and
competition between pairs of species increases with their similarity in trait
space. This leads to a model with random Hopfield-like interactions. We use
tools from the theory of disordered systems, notably dynamic mean field theory,
to characterise the statistics of the resulting communities at stable fixed
points and determine analytically when stability breaks down. Two distinct
types of transition are identified in this way, both marked by diverging
abundances, but differing in the behaviour of the integrated response function.
At fixed points only a fraction of the initial pool of species survives. We
numerically study the eigenvalue spectra of the interaction matrix between
extant species. We find evidence that the two types of dynamical transition
are, respectively, associated with the bulk spectrum or an outlier eigenvalue
crossing into the right half of the complex plane.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures + Supplemen
Mean left-right eigenvector self-overlap in the real Ginibre ensemble
We study analytically the Chalker-Mehlig mean diagonal overlap
between left and right eigenvectors associated with a complex
eigenvalue of matrices in the real Ginibre ensemble (GinOE). We
first derive a general finite expression for the mean overlap and then
investigate several scaling regimes in the limit . While
in the generic spectral bulk and edge of the GinOE the limiting expressions for
are found to coincide with the known results for the complex
Ginibre ensemble (GinUE), in the region of eigenvalue depletion close to the
real axis the asymptotic for the GinOE is considerably different. We also study
numerically the distribution of diagonal overlaps and conjecture that it is the
same in the bulk and at the edge of both the GinOE and GinUE, but essentially
different in the depletion region of the GinOE.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure
Aircraft computations using multigrid and an unstructured parallel library
This paper examines the application of unstructured multigrid, using a sequence of independent tetrahedral grids. The test cases examined are for inviscid flow over an aircraft and an M6 wing. The sensitivity of the method to grid sequence and cycling strategy are investigated. \ud
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All of the calculations were performed on a parallel computer. This was achieved by using the OPlus library which, by the straightforward insertion of subroutine calls, facilitates parallelisation of the resulting code. A single source OPlus application code can be compiled to executed on either a parallel or sequential machine. This greatly increases the usability of the parallel machine, and the maintainability of the code
Potential Benefits of Wetland Filters for Tile Drainage Systems: Impact on Nitrate Loads to Mississippi River Subbasins
The primary objective of this project was to estimate the nitrate reduction that could be achieved using restored wetlands as nitrogen sinks in tile-drained regions of the upper Mississippi River (UMR) and Ohio River basins. This report provides an assessment of nitrate concentrations and loads across the UMR and Ohio River basins and the mass reduction of nitrate loading that could be achieved using wetlands to intercept nonpoint source nitrate loads. Nitrate concentration and stream discharge data were used to calculate stream nitrate loading and annual flow-weighted average (FWA) nitrate concentrations and to develop a model of FWA nitrate concentration based on land use. Land use accounts for 90% of the variation among stations in long term FWA nitrate concentrations and was used to estimate FWA nitrate concentrations for a 100 ha grid across the UMR and Ohio River basins. Annual water yield for grid cells was estimated by interpolating over selected USGS monitoring station water yields across the UMR and Ohio River basins. For 1990 to 1999, mass nitrate export from each grid area was estimated as the product of the FWA nitrate concentration, water yield and grid area. To estimate potential nitrate removal by wetlands across the same grid area, mass balance simulations were used to estimate percent nitrate reduction for hypothetical wetland sites distributed across the UMR and Ohio River basins. Nitrate reduction was estimated using a temperature dependent, area-based, firstorder model. Model inputs included local temperature from the National Climatic Data Center and water yield estimated from USGS stream flow data. Results were used to develop a nonlinear model for percent nitrate removal as a function of hydraulic loading rate (HLR) and temperature. Mass nitrate removal for potential wetland restorations distributed across the UMR and Ohio River basin was estimated based on the expected mass load and the predicted percent removal. Similar functions explained most of the variability in per cent and mass removal reported for field scale experimental wetlands in the UMR and Ohio River basins. Results suggest that a 30% reduction in nitrate load from the UMR and Ohio River basins could be achieved using 210,000-450,000 ha of wetlands targeted on the highest nitrate contributing areas
The toxicity of chlorpyrifos towards differentiating mouse N2a neuroblastoma cells
The aim of this work was to study the effects of chlorpyrifos (CPF) on the outgrowth of axons by differentiating mouse N2a neuroblastoma cells. This was achieved by morphological, Western blotting and enzymatic analyses of cells induced to differentiate in the presence and absence of CPF added either at the same time (co-differentiation) or 16 h after (post-differentiation) the induction of cell differentiation. The outgrowth of axon-like processes was impaired following 4 or 8 h exposure to CPF in both co- and post-differentiation experiments. Western blotting analysis revealed reduced levels of neurofilament heavy chain (NF-H) following 8 h of exposure but no significant effect at 4 h under both co- and post-differentiation conditions. By contrast, levels of the heat shock protein HSP-70 were raised at both time points, but only in co-differentiation experiments. Neuropathy target esterase (NTE) activity was lower than controls following 4 or 8 h of exposure under co-differentiation conditions, but not under any post-differentiation conditions. The results suggest that the inhibition of axon production and maintenance by CPF in differentiating N2a cells may involve multiple targets, which are different under co- and post-differentiation conditions
Real Learning Connections: Questioning the Learner in the LIS Internship
The focus of literature on the role of internship has been on whether and how such activity benefits the student. A model is proposed that examines what happens for both the practitioner supervisor and the LIS educator during an internship experience. Is it possible that all participants learn from the experience and how can that learning be characterized? The results from a three year-long case study are shared
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