Broaching the brook : daylighting, community and the ‘stickiness’ of water

Over the last century, under the modern hydraulic model, waterways across the world have been heavily canalized and culverted, driven into underground pipes, drains and sewers. This hydraulic approach has hardwired an isolated water network into the urban fabric, fragmenting erstwhile patterns and dynamics of life, both human and nonhuman. Ecologically, it has been hugely damaging, reducing water quality and biotic diversity, but also socially, disconnecting citizens from the waterways that service and characterize the city. Consequently, since the 1990s, waterway restoration has become widespread as a design solution to degraded rivers and streams, reinstating compromised hydrological, geomorphological and ecological processes. Deculverting or ‘daylighting’, the focus of this paper, is a radical form of restoration, opening up subterranean, culverted waterways often forgotten by communities above ground. Yet, as this paper emphasizes, waterway restoration has tended to privilege ecological over social objectives, while public engagement in project conceptualization has been limited, conducted ‘downstream’ subsequent to planning and design stages. Restoration schemes have therefore tended to reflect the concerns of professionals rather than communities, overlooking their potential for social renewal and change. Drawing on workshop data collected through participatory mapping exercises, this paper explores the case for daylighting a culverted brook in Urmston, Greater Manchester, focusing in particular on the preferences, concerns and knowledge of local residents. The paper compares professional and community perspectives on the preferred scheme design and potential benefits of daylighting, drawing out differences and tensions between them, temporarily ‘unblackboxing’ the brook. It is ventured that daylighting can unleash the social ‘stickiness’ of water, its proclivity to draw and bind together, to revitalize the park, enhancing connection to wildness, attachment to place and sense of community. This is particularly crucial in the face of decreased local authority funding and related crises in park management

Exchange interaction effects in inter-Landau level Auger scattering in a two-dimensional electron gas

We consider the influence of spin effects on the inter-Landau level electron-electron scattering rate in a two-dimensional electron gas. Due to the exchange spin splitting, the Landau levels are not equidistant. This leads to the suppresion of Auger processes and a nonlinear dependence of the lifetime on the concentration of the excited electrons even at very low excitation levels.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

B and I-band optical micro-variability observations of the BL Lac objects S5 2007+777 and 3C371

We have observed S5 2007+777 and 3C371 in the B and I bands for 13 and 8 nights, respectively, during various observing runs in 2001, 2002 and 2004. The observations resulted in almost evenly sampled light curves, 6-9 hours long. We do not detect any flares within the observed light curves, but we do observe small amplitude, significant variations, in both bands, on time scales of hours and days. The average variability amplitude on time scales of minutes/hours is 2.5% and 1-1.5% in the case of S5 2007+777 and 3C371, respectively. The average amplitudes increase to 5-12% and 4-6%, respectively, on time scales of days. We find that the B and I band variations are highly correlated, on both short and long time scales. During the 2004 observations, which resulted in the longest light curves, we observe two well defined flux-decay and rising trends in the light curves of both objects. When the flux decays, we observe significant delays, with the B band flux decaying faster than the flux in the I band. As a result, we also observe significant, flux related spectral variations as well. The flux-spectral relation is rather complicated, with loop-like structures forming during the flux evolution. The presence of spectral variations imply that the observed variability is not caused by geometric effects. On the other hand, our results are fully consistent with the hypothesis that the observed variations are caused by perturbations which affect different regions in the jet of the sources.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Evidence of Skyrmion excitations about ν=1\nu =1 in n-Modulation Doped Single Quantum Wells by Inter-band Optical Transmission

We observe a dramatic reduction in the degree of spin-polarization of a two-dimensional electron gas in a magnetic field when the Fermi energy moves off the mid-point of the spin-gap of the lowest Landau level, $\nu=1$. This rapid decay of spin alignment to an unpolarized state occurs over small changes to both higher and lower magnetic field. The degree of electron spin polarization as a function of $\nu$ is measured through the magneto-absorption spectra which distinguish the occupancy of the two electron spin states. The data provide experimental evidence for the presence of Skyrmion excitations where exchange energy dominates Zeeman energy in the integer quantum Hall regime at $\nu=1$

Implicit and Explicit Values as a Predictor of Ethical Decision-Making and Ethical Behavior

The present study uses measures of implicit and explicit values to predict moral behaviors. Implicit value measures based on a word-fragment completion tasks were developed in this study to assess implicit values. Because values and moral processes are believed to operate at both explicit and implicit levels, it was hypothesized that both implicit and explicit values would predict moral behaviors. Results from a laboratory study show that both implicit and explicit values predicted actual moral behavior, consistent with dual process theories of morality. Chronic collective identity moderated the relation of both implicit and explicit values to ethical behavior. Theoretical and practical implications for the use of both explicit and implicit value measures in research and applied settings are discussed

Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Balloon Flight Data Handling Overview

The GLAST Balloon Flight Engineering Model (BFEM) represents one of 16 towers that constitute the Large Area Telescope (LAT), a high-energy (>20 MeV) gamma-ray pair-production telescope being built by an international partnership of astrophysicists and particle physicists for a satellite launch in 2006. The prototype tower consists of a Pb/Si pair-conversion tracker (TKR), a CsI hodoscopic calorimeter (CAL), an anti-coincidence detector (ACD) and an autonomous data acquisition system (DAQ). The self-triggering capabilities and performance of the detector elements have been previously characterized using positron, photon and hadron beams. External target scintillators were placed above the instrument to act as sources of hadronic showers. This paper provides a comprehensive description of the BFEM data-reduction process, from receipt of the flight data from telemetry through event reconstruction and background rejection cuts. The goals of the ground analysis presented here are to verify the functioning of the instrument and to validate the reconstruction software and the background-rejection scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be published in IEEE Transacations on Nuclear Science, August 200