Keyed plugs and sockets prevent improper connections

Plugs and sockets individually keyed so that no plug can be mated with other than its proper socket facilitates multiple connection in electrical systems

Development of an airborne laser bathymeter

An airborne laser depth sounding system was built and taken through a complete series of field tests. Two green laser sources were tried: a pulsed neon laser at 540 nm and a frequency-doubled Nd:YAG transmitter at 532 nm. To obtain a depth resolution of better than 20 cm, the pulses had a duration of 5 to 7 nanoseconds and could be fired up to at rates of 50 pulses per second. In the receiver, the signal was detected by a photomultiplier tube connected to a 28 cm diameter Cassegrainian telescope that was aimed vertically downward. Oscilloscopic traces of the signal reflected from the sea surface and the ocean floor could either be recorded by a movie camera on 35 mm film or digitized into 500 discrete channels of information and stored on magnetic tape, from which depth information could be extracted. An aerial color movie camera recorded the geographic footprint while a boat crew of oceanographers measured depth and other relevant water parameters. About two hundred hours of flight time on the NASA C-54 airplane in the area of Chincoteague, Virginia, the Chesapeake Bay, and in Key West, Florida, have yielded information on the actual operating conditions of such a system and helped to optimize the design. One can predict the maximum depth attainable in a mission by measuring the effective attenuation coefficient in flight. This quantity is four times smaller than the usual narrow beam attenuation coefficient. Several square miles of a varied underwater landscape were also mapped

Agricultural water management in a water stressed catchment: Lessons from the RIPARWIN Project

irrigation management / water stress / river basins / water rights / water fees / water allocation / irrigation efficiency / economic aspects / decision support tools / wetlands / water use / water users associations

Disparity of attitudes and practices on a concept of productivity of water in agriculture in the Great Ruaha River Sub-Basin

River basinsWater useProductivityAssessmentIrrigation programs

Formal water rights in rural Tanzania: Deepening the dichotomy?

Water rights / Water law / Water scarcity / Water use / Water users’ associations / Irrigation water / Cost recovery

Disparity of attitudes and practices on a concept of productivity of water in agriculture in the Great Ruaha River sub-basin

StakeholdersWater use efficiencyProductivityIrrigation programs

Use of a hydrological model for environmental management of the Usangu Wetlands, Tanzania

Wetlands / Rivers / Ecology / Environmental effects / Remote sensing / Hydrology / Simulation models / Water budget / Irrigated sites / Land cover / Time series analysis / Tanzania / Usangu Wetlands / Great Ruaha River

Studies of superconducting materials with muon spin rotation

The muon spin rotation/relaxation technique was found to be an exceptionally effective means of measuring the magnetic properties of superconductors, including the new high temperature superconductor materials, at the microscopic level. The technique directly measures the magnetic penetration depth (type II superconductors (SC's)) and detects the presence of magnetic ordering (antiferromagnetism or spin-glass ordering were observed in some high temperature superconductor (HTSC's) and in many closely related compounds). Extensive studies of HTSC materials were conducted by the Virginia State University - College of William and Mary - Columbia University collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory and TRIUMF (Vancouver). A survey of LaSrCuO and YBaCaCuO systems shows an essentially linear relationship between the transition temperature T(sub c) and the relaxation rate. This appears to be a manifestation of the proportionality between T(sub c) and the Fermi energy, which suggests a high energy scale for the SC coupling, and which is not consistent with the weak coupling of phonon-mediated SC. Studies of LaCuO and YBaCuO parent compounds show clear evidence of antiferromagnetism. YBa2Cu(3-x)CO(x)O7 shows the simultaneous presence of spin-glass magnetic ordering and superconductivity. Three-dimensional SC, (Ba, K) BiO3, unlike the layered CuO-based compounds, shows no suggestion of magnetic ordering. Experimental techniques and theoretical implications are discussed

Structuring Life After Death: Plant Leachates Promote CO2 Uptake by Regulating Microbial Biofilm Interactions in a Northern Peatland Ecosystem

Shifts in plant functional groups associated with climate change have the potential to influence peatland carbon storage by altering the amount and composition of organic matter available to aquatic microbial biofilms. The goal of this study was to evaluate the potential for plant subsidies to regulate ecosystem carbon flux (CO2) by governing the relative proportion of primary producers (microalgae) and heterotrophic decomposers (heterotrophic bacteria) during aquatic biofilm development in an Alaskan fen. We evaluated biofilm composition and CO2 flux inside mesocosms with and without nutrients (both nitrogen and phosphorus), organic carbon (glucose), and leachates from common peatland plants (moss, sedge, shrub, horsetail). Experimental mesocosms were exposed to either natural sunlight or placed under a dark canopy to evaluate the response of decomposers to nutrients and carbon subsidies with and without algae, respectively. Algae were limited by inorganic nutrients and heterotrophic bacteria were limited by organic carbon. The quality of organic matter varied widely among plants and leachate nutrient content, more so than carbon quality, influenced biofilm composition. By alleviating nutrient limitation of algae, plant leachates shifted the biofilm community toward autotrophy in the light-transparent treatments, resulting in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions compared to the control. Without the counterbalance from algal photosynthesis, a heterotrophic biofilm significantly enhanced CO2 emissions in the presence of plant leachates in the dark. These results show that plants not only promote carbon uptake directly through photosynthesis, but also indirectly through a surrogate, the phototrophic microbes

Loops under Strategies ... Continued

While there are many approaches for automatically proving termination of term rewrite systems, up to now there exist only few techniques to disprove their termination automatically. Almost all of these techniques try to find loops, where the existence of a loop implies non-termination of the rewrite system. However, most programming languages use specific evaluation strategies, whereas loop detection techniques usually do not take strategies into account. So even if a rewrite system has a loop, it may still be terminating under certain strategies. Therefore, our goal is to develop decision procedures which can determine whether a given loop is also a loop under the respective evaluation strategy. In earlier work, such procedures were presented for the strategies of innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive evaluation. In the current paper, we build upon this work and develop such decision procedures for important strategies like leftmost-innermost, leftmost-outermost, (max-)parallel-innermost, (max-)parallel-outermost, and forbidden patterns (which generalize innermost, outermost, and context-sensitive strategies). In this way, we obtain the first approach to disprove termination under these strategies automatically.Comment: In Proceedings IWS 2010, arXiv:1012.533