3,939 research outputs found
Ecohydrological Modeling in Agroecosystems: Examples and Challenges
Human societies are increasingly altering the water and biogeochemical cycles to both improve ecosystem productivity and reduce risks associated with the unpredictable variability of climatic drivers. These alterations, however, often cause large negative environmental consequences, raising the question as to how societies can ensure a sustainable use of natural resources for the future. Here we discuss how ecohydrological modeling may address these broad questions with special attention to agroecosystems. The challenges related to modeling the two‐way interaction between society and environment are illustrated by means of a dynamical model in which soil and water quality supports the growth of human society but is also degraded by excessive pressure, leading to critical transitions and sustained societal growth‐collapse cycles. We then focus on the coupled dynamics of soil water and solutes (nutrients or contaminants), emphasizing the modeling challenges, presented by the strong nonlinearities in the soil and plant system and the unpredictable hydroclimatic forcing, that need to be overcome to quantitatively analyze problems of soil water sustainability in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. We discuss applications of this framework to problems of irrigation, soil salinization, and fertilization and emphasize how optimal solutions for large‐scale, long‐term planning of soil and water resources in agroecosystems under uncertainty could be provided by methods from stochastic control, informed by physically and mathematically sound descriptions of ecohydrological and biogeochemical interactions
Particle-particle random phase approximation applied to Beryllium isotopes
This work is dedicated to the study of even-even 8-14 Be isotopes using the
particle-particle Random Phase Approximation that accounts for two-body
correlations in the core nucleus. A better description of energies and
two-particle amplitudes is obtained in comparison with models assuming a
neutron closed-shell (or subshell) core. A Wood-Saxon potential corrected by a
phenomenological particle-vibration coupling term has been used for the
neutron-core interaction and the D1S Gogny force for the neutron-neutron
interaction. Calculated ground state properties as well as excited state ones
are discussed and compared to experimental data. In particular, results suggest
the same 2s_1/2-1p_1/2 shell inversion in 13Be as in 11Be.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev.
Double‐Photon Absorption and Delayed Fluorescence of Some Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Solution
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/70959/2/JCPSA6-53-10-4108-1.pd
Transforming High School Counseling: Counselors\u27 Roles, Practices, and Expectations for Students\u27 Success
This study examined the current roles and practices of American high school counselors in relation to the ASCA National Model. Expectations for student success by high school counselors were also examined and compared to those of teachers\u27 and school administrators\u27. A nationally representative sample of 852 lead counselors from 944 high schools was surveyed as part of the High School Longitudinal Study: 2009-2012. Findings are examined in the light of the National Model and advocated practices
Bioautomation – re-engineering human body system controls
Invoking the paradigm of control-type cybernetics with structure of couplings independent of physical realization, and viewing the cellular system as basic material layer similar to computer network architecture models, one can exploit plant-wide control concepts in engineering for top-down modeling of control structures. This path is considered in detail
Designed to fail : a biopolitics of British Citizenship.
Tracing a route through the recent 'ugly history' of British citizenship, this article advances two central claims. Firstly, British citizenship has been designed to fail specific groups and populations. Failure, it argues, is a design principle of British citizenship, in the most active and violent sense of the verb to design: to mark out, to indicate, to designate. Secondly, British citizenship is a biopolitics - a field of techniques and practices (legal, social, moral) through which populations are controlled and fashioned. This article begins with the 1981 Nationality Act and the violent conflicts between the police and black communities in Brixton that accompanied the passage of the Act through the British parliament. Employing Michel Foucault's concept of state racism, it argues that the 1981 Nationality Act marked a pivotal moment in the design of British citizenship and has operated as the template for a glut of subsequent nationality legislation that has shaped who can achieve citizenship. The central argument is that the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design, but is foundational to British citizenship. For many 'national minorities' the lived realities of biopolitical citizenship stand in stark contradistinction to contemporary governmental accounts of citizenship that stress community cohesion, political participation, social responsibility, rights and pride in shared national belonging
Light Rays at Optical Black Holes in Moving Media
Light experiences a non-uniformly moving medium as an effective gravitational
field, endowed with an effective metric tensor , being the refractive index and the
four-velocity of the medium. Leonhardt and Piwnicki [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 60},
4301 (1999)] argued that a flowing dielectric fluid of this kind can be used to
generate an 'optical black hole'. In the Leonhardt-Piwnicki model, only a
vortex flow was considered. It was later pointed out by Visser [Phys. Rev.
Lett. {\bf 85}, 5252 (2000)] that in order to form a proper optical black hole
containing an event horizon, it becomes necessary to add an inward radial
velocity component to the vortex flow. In the present paper we undertake this
task: we consider a full spiral flow, consisting of a vortex component plus a
radially infalling component. Light propagates in such a dielectric medium in a
way similar to that occurring around a rotating black hole. We calculate, and
show graphically, the effective potential versus the radial distance from the
vortex singularity, and show that the spiral flow can always capture light in
both a positive, and a negative, inverse impact parameter interval. The
existence of a genuine event horizon is found to depend on the strength of the
radial flow, relative to the strength of the azimuthal flow. A limitation of
our fluid model is that it is nondispersive.Comment: 30 pages, LaTeX, 4 ps figures. Expanded discussion especially in
section 6; 5 new references. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.
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