Smaller Saami Herding Groups Cooperate More in a Public Goods Experiment

Group living often entails a balance between individual self-interest and benefits to the group as a whole. Situations in which an individual’s vested interests conflict with collective interests are known as social dilemmas (Kollock 1998). More formally, a theoretical game becomes a social dilemma when an equilibrium of dominant strategies leads to worse outcomes for all players compared to a more cooperative but non-equilibrium strategy (Zelmer 2003; Cardenas and Carpenter 2008). For example, arms races, climate change, the Cold War, credit markets, eBay, exploitation of fisheries, irrigation scheduling, overpopulation, pollution, price wars, voting, water supply and welfare states all give rise to social dilemmas (Kollock 1998; Wydick 2008). Researchers have identified various mutually inclusive routes to solving social dilemmas, including interacting with kin and/or cooperative individuals, communication, coordination, exclusion, institutions, leadership, legislation, mobility, monitoring, parcelling out cooperation or access to resources, partner choice, partner control, policing, punishment, repeated reciprocal interactions, rewards, sanctions, and social norms (Trivers 2005; West et al.2007; Levin 2014; Raihani and Bshary 2015). Social dilemmas pervade the pastoralist way of life. Individual herders must balance their interests (e.g., generating income and managing the inherent risks of pastoralism) with the interests of their herding group and the wider community facing similar challenges (Næss et al.2012; Næss and Bårdsen 2015). Pastoralists such as Saami reindeer herders in Norway face social dilemmas across a range of scales and have a variety of individual and collective strategies for solving them

A search for solar neutrons on a long duration balloon flight

The EOSCOR 3 detector, designed to measure the flux of solar neutrons, was flown on a long duration RACOON balloon flight from Australia during Jan. through Feb, 1983. The Circum-global flight lasted 22 days. No major solar activity occurred during the flight and thus only an upper limit to the solar flare neutrons flux is given. The atmospheric neutron response is compared with that obtained on earlier flights from Palestine, Texas

Improving the reliability of establishing legumes into grass pastures in the sub-tropics

Poor establishment is the most common reason for failure of pasture legumes sown into existing grass pastures on commercial farms in the sub-tropics. Although good establishment is recognised as critical to the long term productivity and persistence of legumes, most producers use low-cost and low-reliability establishment techniques such as broadcasting after either no or minimal pasture disturbance; one-pass cultivation with seed spread at the same time; or severe soil disturbance and a rough seed bed behind a blade plough. This paper reports the results of a study designed to test the impact of different fallow periods (medium – 4 months; short – 2 months; disturb at sowing and no disturbance); seedbed preparation cultivation or zero tillage); drilling or broadcasting seed and post emergence herbicides when establishing legumes into existing grass pastures. The most common, commercially used establishment techniques of sowing legume seed into grass pastures with no disturbance or single pass cultivation treatments at sowing all resulted in establishment failure. Spraying at sowing resulted in adequate numbers of legumes. Short or medium fallows resulted in similar densities of legumes between all treatments, however treatments with greater control of the grass and post emergence weed control grew better which resulted in more seedling recruitment in the subsequent year. At 25 months after sowing only fallowed treatments with Spinnaker® post-emergence weed control achieved legume numbers above benchmark figures for establishment success. The study demonstrates that agronomic practices commonly used for grain cropping (such as fallowing to store soil moisture) can improve the reliability of establishing legumes into existing grass pastures

Detection of Coulomb Charging around an Antidot in the Quantum Hall Regime

We have detected oscillations of the charge around a potential hill (antidot) in a two-dimensional electron gas as a function of a large magnetic field B. The field confines electrons around the antidot in closed orbits, the areas of which are quantised through the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Increasing B reduces each state's area, pushing electrons closer to the centre, until enough charge builds up for an electron to tunnel out. This is a new form of the Coulomb blockade seen in electrostatically confined dots. Addition and excitation spectra in DC bias confirm the Coulomb blockade of tunnelling.Comment: 4 pages, 4 Postscript figure

Observing cirrus halos to constrain in-situ measurements of ice crystal size

International audienceIn this study, characteristic optical sizes of ice crystals in synoptic cirrus are determined using airborne measurements of ice crystal size distributions, optical extinction and water content. The measurements are compared with coincident visual observations of ice cloud optical phenomena, in particular the 22° and 46° halos. In general, the scattering profiles derived from the in-situ cloud probe measurements are consistent with the observed halo characteristics. It is argued that this implies that the measured ice crystals were small, probably with characteristic optical radii between 10 and 20 ?m. There is a current contention that in-situ measurements of high concentrations of small ice crystals reflect artifacts from the shattering of large ice crystals on instrument inlets. Significant shattering cannot be entirely excluded using this approximate technique, but it is not indicated. On the basis of the in-situ measurements, a parameterization is provided that relates the optical effective radius of ice crystals to the temperature in mid-latitude synoptic cirrus

Coulomb blockade of tunnelling through compressible rings formed around an antidot: an explanation for h/2eh/2e Aharonov-Bohm oscillations

We consider single-electron tunnelling through antidot states using a Coulomb-blockade model, and give an explanation for h/2e Aharonov-Bohm oscillations, which are observed experimentally when the two spins of the lowest Landau level form bound states. We show that the edge channels may contain compressible regions, and using simple electrostatics, that the resonance through the outer spin states should occur twice per h/e period. An antidot may be a powerful tool for investigating quantum Hall edge states in general, and the interplay of spin and charging effects that occurs in quantum dots.Comment: 5 pages, 4 Postscript figure

Medics in southern Queensland: Effects of sowing method, weed control and phosphorus application on plant population and biomass

Declining sown pasture productivity as a result of a tie-up in plant available soil nitrogen is an ongoing constraint to grazing production across the brigalow bioregion of central and southern Queensland. Research suggests that legume establishment offers the most cost effective long-term remediation strategy for improving pasture quality and yield. Within southern Queensland, medics (Medicago spp.) can provide valuable winter contributions to dietary protein and soil nitrogen, however establishment and yields are frequently poor and soil phosphorus often limiting. An experiment was established across two soil types (brigalow clay and poplar box red loam) 70 km north of Goondiwindi, Queensland to investigate the effects of sowing method, weed control and phosphorus fertiliser application on the establishment and yield of a mix of three medic cultivars (Medicago truncatula cv. Jester & cv .Caliph and Medicago orbicularis cv. Bindaroo Gold). On both soil types, plant population and biomass were significantly improved via direct drilling of seed as compared to broadcasting. On the loam, drilling increased average populations by between 519 and 1,900% above those recorded in broadcast treatments and improved biomass by between 144 and 315%. On the clay soil, drilling increased populations by between 339 and 983% above those measured in broadcast treatments. Clay soil drilling showed biomass improvements of between 124 and 1,368%. No significant biomass or legume population treatment effects were observed on the clay soil. No significant treatment effects were observed for yield on the loam soil. This study implies that medic establishment, plant populations and biomass can be greatly improved through the application of seed drilling

EPIC 220204960: A Quadruple Star System Containing Two Strongly Interacting Eclipsing Binaries

We present a strongly interacting quadruple system associated with the K2 target EPIC 220204960. The K2 target itself is a Kp = 12.7 magnitude star at Teff ~ 6100 K which we designate as "B-N" (blue northerly image). The host of the quadruple system, however, is a Kp = 17 magnitude star with a composite M-star spectrum, which we designate as "R-S" (red southerly image). With a 3.2" separation and similar radial velocities and photometric distances, 'B-N' is likely physically associated with 'R-S', making this a quintuple system, but that is incidental to our main claim of a strongly interacting quadruple system in 'R-S'. The two binaries in 'R-S' have orbital periods of 13.27 d and 14.41 d, respectively, and each has an inclination angle of >89 degrees. From our analysis of radial velocity measurements, and of the photometric lightcurve, we conclude that all four stars are very similar with masses close to 0.4 Msun. Both of the binaries exhibit significant ETVs where those of the primary and secondary eclipses 'diverge' by 0.05 days over the course of the 80-day observations. Via a systematic set of numerical simulations of quadruple systems consisting of two interacting binaries, we conclude that the outer orbital period is very likely to be between 300 and 500 days. If sufficient time is devoted to RV studies of this faint target, the outer orbit should be measurable within a year.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figures, 7 tables; accepted for publication in MNRA

Ballistic Composite Fermions in Semiconductor Nanostructures

We report the results of two fundamental transport measurements at a Landau level filling factor $\nu$ of 1/2. The well known ballistic electron transport phenomena of quenching of the Hall effect in a mesoscopic cross-junction and negative magnetoresistance of a constriction are observed close to B~=~0 and $\nu~=~ 1/2$. The experimental results demonstrate semi-classical charge transport by composite fermions, which consist of electrons bound to an even number of flux quanta.Comment: 9 pages TeX 3.1415 C version 6.1, 3 PostScript figure