Chemistry and Apparent Quality of Surface Water and Ground Water Associated with Coal Basins

Personnel of the Arkansas Mining and Mineral Resources Research Institute conducted preliminary investigations on the chemistry and quality of surface and ground water associated with 12 coal-bearing sub-basins in the Arkansas Valley coal field. The coal field is approximately 60 miles long and 33 miles wide but only in 12 areas coal is thick enough and has proper quality to be termed commercial. Both surface and underground sample sites were established in each of the sub-basins with some minor variations in four areas where not all types of sites could be located. Water was collected from 19 surface points and 19 underground points in the established areas. Both field and laboratory analyses were made and elemental contents are reported herein. In the main, the chemistry and water quality suggests that all water is suitable for agricultural and industrial uses. To obtain potable water, treatment must be made to reduce calcium, magnesium, sodium sulfate and iron. The mineral content of the water is due to its contact with coal-bearing zones and, as such, reflects the mineral content of the coal. However, it is recommended that additional studies on the petrography and geochemistry of the coal, overburden and underburden is in order. Also, it is recommended that at least one detailed study be made of one of the coal sub-basins where geologic parameters can be completely established with regard to hydrogeology. This report is an important first step in determining the character and quality of Arkansas coal which must be fully understood to fully utilize this important mineral resource

An anti-symmetric exclusion process for two particles on an infinite 1D lattice

A system of two biased, mutually exclusive random walkers on an infinite 1D lattice is studied whereby the intrinsic bias of one particle is equal and opposite to that of the other. The propogator for this system is solved exactly and expressions for the mean displacement and mean square displacement (MSD) are found. Depending on the nature of the intrinsic bias, the system's behaviour displays two regimes, characterised by (i) the particles moving towards each other and (ii) away from each other, both qualitatively different from the case of no bias. The continuous-space limit of the propogator is found and is shown to solve a Fokker-Planck equation for two biased, mutually exclusive Brownian particles with equal and opposite drift velocity.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Animal movements in the Kenya Rift and evidence for the earliest ambush hunting by hominins

Animal movements in the Kenya Rift Valley today are influenced by a combination of topography and trace nutrient distribution. These patterns would have been the same in the past when hominins inhabited the area. We use this approach to create a landscape reconstruction of Olorgesailie, a key site in the East African Rift with abundant evidence of large-mammal butchery between ~1.2 and ~0.5 Ma BP. The site location in relation to limited animal routes through the area show that hominins were aware of animal movements and used the location for ambush hunting during the Lower to Middle Pleistocene. These features explain the importance of Olorgesailie as a preferred location of repeated hominin activity through multiple changes in climate and local environmental conditions, and provide insights into the cognitive and hunting abilities of Homo erectus while indicating that their activities at the site were aimed at hunting, rather than scavenging

New critical frontiers for the Potts and percolation models

We obtain the critical threshold for a host of Potts and percolation models on lattices having a structure which permits a duality consideration. The consideration generalizes the recently obtained thresholds of Scullard and Ziff for bond and site percolation on the martini and related lattices to the Potts model and to other lattices.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Recursive Neural Networks Can Learn Logical Semantics

Tree-structured recursive neural networks (TreeRNNs) for sentence meaning have been successful for many applications, but it remains an open question whether the fixed-length representations that they learn can support tasks as demanding as logical deduction. We pursue this question by evaluating whether two such models---plain TreeRNNs and tree-structured neural tensor networks (TreeRNTNs)---can correctly learn to identify logical relationships such as entailment and contradiction using these representations. In our first set of experiments, we generate artificial data from a logical grammar and use it to evaluate the models' ability to learn to handle basic relational reasoning, recursive structures, and quantification. We then evaluate the models on the more natural SICK challenge data. Both models perform competitively on the SICK data and generalize well in all three experiments on simulated data, suggesting that they can learn suitable representations for logical inference in natural language

Synthesising and utilising complex evidence to inform policy in education and health.

Oslo, Norway, May 19 to 21, 200

Improved head-controlled TV system produces high-quality remote image

Manipulator operator uses an improved resolution tv camera/monitor positioning system to view the remote handling and processing of reactive, flammable, explosive, or contaminated materials. The pan and tilt motions of the camera and monitor are slaved to follow the corresponding motions of the operators head

Evidence of photospheric vortex flows at supergranular junctions observed by FG/SOT (Hinode)

Twisting motions of different nature are observed in several layers of the solar atmosphere. Chromospheric sunspot whorls and rotation of sunspots or even higher up in the lower corona sigmoids are examples of the large scale twisted topology of many solar features. Nevertheless, their occurrence at large scale in the quiet photosphere has not been investigated. The present study reveals the existence of vortex flows located at the supergranular junctions of the quiet Sun. We use a 1-hour and a 5-hour time series of the granulation in Blue continuum and G-band images from FG/SOT to derive the photospheric flows. A feature tracking technique called Balltracking is performed to track the granules and reveal the underlying flow fields. In both time series we identify long-lasting vortex flow located at supergranular junctions. The first vortex flow lasts at least 1 hour and is ~20-arcsec-wide (~15.5 Mm). The second vortex flow lasts more than 2 hours and is ~27-arcsec-wide (~21 Mm).Comment: 4 pages, 10 figure

Using the Scientific Method to Improve Game Bird Management and Research: Time

Aware of the time lag that frequently exists between declines in biodiversity and effective conservation to correct and reverse the declines, I examine some reasons behind this problem. Experience with species as diver se as the shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) and grey partridge (Perdix perdix) shows the main problem to be the long period of time needed to detect problems, to define causation, to install effective change s in policy and, finally, to bring about restoration. The time needed to conduct research and implement policy to solve such problems often exceeds the time span of a career in ecology. Speedier results are therefore essential, but they will depend in part on removing the barriers between practitioners and theorists on the one hand and between practical applied ecologists and bureaucratic policy maker s on the other