Goodbye to Projects? ¿ A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Training for Environmental and Agricultural Management (TEAM) project in Lesotho.

Approaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support.This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of the `Training for Environmental and Agricultural Management (TEAM) project in Lesotho¿ is the eleventh in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen

Open charm tomography of cold nuclear matter

We study the relative contribution of partonic sub-processes to D meson production and D meson-triggered inclusive di-hadrons to lowest order in perturbative QCD. While gluon fusion dominates the creation of large angle DD-bar pairs, charm on light parton scattering determines the yield of single inclusive D mesons. The distinctly different non-perturbative fragmentation of c quarks into D mesons versus the fragmentation of quarks and gluons into light hadrons results in a strong transverse momentum dependence of anticharm content of the away-side charm-triggered jet. In p+A reactions, we calculate and resum the coherent nuclear-enhanced power corrections from the final state partonic scattering in the medium. We find that single and double inclusive open charm production can be suppressed as much as the yield of neutral pions from dynamical high-twist shadowing. Effects of energy loss in p+A collisions are also investigated phenomenologically and may lead to significantly weaker transverse momentum dependence of the nuclear attenuation.Comment: 24 pages, 21 figure

Energetics of Quantum Antidot States in Quantum Hall Regime

We report experiments on the energy structure of antidot-bound states. By measuring resonant tunneling line widths as function of temperature, we determine the coupling to the remote global gate voltage and find that the effects of interelectron interaction dominate. Within a simple model, we also determine the energy spacing of the antidot bound states, self consistent edge electric field, and edge excitation drift velocity.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 5 Postscript figure

Characterizing the Hofstadter butterfly's outline with Chern numbers

In this work, we report original properties inherent to independent particles subjected to a magnetic field by emphasizing the existence of regular structures in the energy spectrum's outline. We show that this fractal curve, the well-known Hofstadter butterfly's outline, is associated to a specific sequence of Chern numbers that correspond to the quantized transverse conductivity. Indeed the topological invariant that characterizes the fundamental energy band depicts successive stairways as the magnetic flux varies. Moreover each stairway is shown to be labeled by another Chern number which measures the charge transported under displacement of the periodic potential. We put forward the universal character of these properties by comparing the results obtained for the square and the honeycomb geometries.Comment: Accepted for publication in J. Phys. B (Jan 2009

Detecting Non-Abelian Statistics in the nu=5/2 Fractional Quantum Hall State

In this letter we propose an interferometric experiment to detect non-Abelian quasiparticle statistics -- one of the hallmark characteristics of the Moore-Read state expected to describe the observed FQHE plateau at nu=5/2. The implications for using this state for constructing a topologically protected qubit as has been recently proposed by Das Sarma et. al. are also addressed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 eps figures v2: A few minor changes and citation corrections. In particular, the connection to cond-mat/9711087 has been clarified. v3: Minor changes: fixed references to Fig. 2, updated citations, changed a few words to conform to the version published in PR

Crucial role of sidewalls in velocity distributions in quasi-2D granular gases

Our experiments and three-dimensional molecular dynamics simulations of particles confined to a vertical monolayer by closely spaced frictional walls (sidewalls) yield velocity distributions with non-Gaussian tails and a peak near zero velocity. Simulations with frictionless sidewalls are not peaked. Thus interactions between particles and their container are an important determinant of the shape of the distribution and should be considered when evaluating experiments on a tightly constrained monolayer of particles.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Added reference, model explanation charified, other minor change

Synthetic gauge fields in synthetic dimensions

We describe a simple technique for generating a cold-atom lattice pierced by a uniform magnetic field. Our method is to extend a one-dimensional optical lattice into the "dimension" provided by the internal atomic degrees of freedom, yielding a synthetic 2D lattice. Suitable laser-coupling between these internal states leads to a uniform magnetic flux within the 2D lattice. We show that this setup reproduces the main features of magnetic lattice systems, such as the fractal Hofstadter butterfly spectrum and the chiral edge states of the associated Chern insulating phases.Comment: 5+4 pages, 5+3 figures, two-column revtex; v2: discussion of role of interactions added, Fig. 1 reshaped, minor changes, references adde

MoodBar: Increasing new user retention in Wikipedia through lightweight socialization

Socialization in online communities allows existing members to welcome and recruit newcomers, introduce them to community norms and practices, and sustain their early participation. However, socializing newcomers does not come for free: in large communities, socialization can result in a significant workload for mentors and is hard to scale. In this study we present results from an experiment that measured the effect of a lightweight socialization tool on the activity and retention of newly registered users attempting to edit for the first time Wikipedia. Wikipedia is struggling with the retention of newcomers and our results indicate that a mechanism to elicit lightweight feedback and to provide early mentoring to newcomers improves their chances of becoming long-term contributors.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for presentation at CSCW'1