Associative aids:II. Their relation to practice and the transfer of training.

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The last glacial-interglacial cycle in Lake Ohrid (Macedonia/Albania): testing diatom response to climate

Lake Ohrid is a site of global importance for palaeoclimate research. This study presents results of diatom analysis of a ca. 136 ka sequence, Co1202, from the northeast of the lake basin. It offers the opportunity to test diatom response across two glacial-interglacial transitions and within the Last Glacial, while setting up taxonomic protocols for future research. The results are outstanding in demonstrating the sensitivity of diatoms to climate change, providing proxy evidence for temperature change marked by glacial-interglacial shifts between the dominant planktonic taxa, Cyclotella fottii and C. ocellata, and exact correlation with geochemical proxies to mark the start of the Last Interglacial at ca. 130 ka. Importantly, diatoms show much stronger evidence in this site for warming during MIS3 than recorded in other productivity-related proxies, peaking at ca. 39 ka, prior to the extreme conditions of the Last Glacial maximum. In the light of the observed patterns, and from the results of analysis of early Holocene sediments from a second core, Lz1120, the lack of a response to Late Glacial and early Holocene warming from ca. 15-7.4 ka suggests the Co1202 sequence may be compromised during this phase. After ca. 7.4 ka, there is evidence for enhanced nutrient enrichment compared to the Last Interglacial, following by a post-Medieval cooling trend. Taxonomically, morphological variability in C. fottii shows no clear trends linked to climate, but an intriguing change in central area morphology occurs after ca. 48.7 ka, coincident with a tephra layer. In contrast, C. ocellata shows morphological variation in the number of ocelli between interglacials, suggesting climatically-forced variation or evolutionary selection pressure. The application of a simple dissolution index does not track preservation quality very effectively, underlining the importance of diatom concentration data in future studies

Long-Time Dynamics of Variable Coefficient mKdV Solitary Waves

We study the Korteweg-de Vries-type equation dt u=-dx(dx^2 u+f(u)-B(t,x)u), where B is a small and bounded, slowly varying function and f is a nonlinearity. Many variable coefficient KdV-type equations can be rescaled into this equation. We study the long time behaviour of solutions with initial conditions close to a stable, B=0 solitary wave. We prove that for long time intervals, such solutions have the form of the solitary wave, whose centre and scale evolve according to a certain dynamical law involving the function B(t,x), plus an H^1-small fluctuation.Comment: 19 page

Prejudice in the pub: How alcohol and ideology loosen the tongue.

This study (N = 124) tested the main and interactive effects of alcohol consumption, egalitarianism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in relation to prejudice suppression in the natural environment of a British Public House (pub). Employing a quasi-experimental between-subjects design, participants who had consumed alcohol were worse at suppressing their prejudice than participants with no alcohol consumption. Further, the more participants endorsed egalitarian values, the more they were able to suppress their prejudice. This tendency was resistant to the effects of alcohol. By contrast, the stronger participants held RWA beliefs, the less they were able to suppress their prejudice. In addition, this tendency was accentuated by alcohol consumption. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications

Restricted three-body problem in effective-field-theory models of gravity

One of the outstanding problems of classical celestial mechanics was the restricted 3-body prob- lem, in which a planetoid of small mass is subject to the Newtonian attraction of two celestial bodies of large mass, as it occurs, for example, in the sun-earth-moon system. On the other hand, over the last decades, a systematic investigation of quantum corrections to the Newtonian potential has been carried out in the literature on quantum gravity. The present paper studies the effect of these tiny quantum corrections on the evaluation of equilibrium points. It is shown that, despite the extreme smallness of the corrections, there exists no choice of sign of these corrections for which all qualitative features of the restricted 3-body problem in Newtonian theory remain unaffected. Moreover, first-order stability of equilibrium points is characterized by solving a pair of algebraic equations of fifth degree, where some coefficients depend on the Planck length. The coordinates of stable equilibrium points are slightly changed with respect to Newtonian theory, because the planetoid is no longer at equal distance from the two bodies of large mass. The effect is conceptually interesting but too small to be observed, at least for the restricted 3-body problems available in the solar system.Comment: 20 pages, latex, 8 figure

Quantum Monte Carlo scheme for frustrated Heisenberg antiferromagnets

When one tries to simulate quantum spin systems by the Monte Carlo method, often the 'minus-sign problem' is encountered. In such a case, an application of probabilistic methods is not possible. In this paper the method has been proposed how to avoid the minus sign problem for certain class of frustrated Heisenberg models. The systems where this method is applicable are, for instance, the pyrochlore lattice and the $J_1-J_2$ Heisenberg model. The method works in singlet sector. It relies on expression of wave functions in dimer (pseudo)basis and writing down the Hamiltonian as a sum over plaquettes. In such a formulation, matrix elements of the exponent of Hamiltonian are positive.Comment: 19 LaTeX pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Sulphur River Formation and the Pleistocene Mammals of the Ben Franklin Local Fauna

An extensive alluvial deposit in northeastern Texas is here described and named the Sulphur River Formation. Twenty-one mammals from these deposits are identified and grouped under the name Ben Franklin local fauna. Fossils and radiocarbon dates indicate that the age of the fauna is Late Wisconsin

Temporal Ordering in Quantum Mechanics

We examine the measurability of the temporal ordering of two events, as well as event coincidences. In classical mechanics, a measurement of the order-of-arrival of two particles is shown to be equivalent to a measurement involving only one particle (in higher dimensions). In quantum mechanics, we find that diffraction effects introduce a minimum inaccuracy to which the temporal order-of-arrival can be determined unambiguously. The minimum inaccuracy of the measurement is given by dt=1/E where E is the total kinetic energy of the two particles. Similar restrictions apply to the case of coincidence measurements. We show that these limitations are much weaker than limitations on measuring the time-of-arrival of a particle to a fixed location.Comment: New section added, arguing that order-of-arrival can be measured more accurately than time-of-arrival. To appear in Journal of Physics

Probability distributions of smeared quantum stress tensors

We obtain in closed form the probability distribution for individual measurements of the stress-energy tensor of two-dimensional conformal field theory in the vacuum state, smeared in time against a Gaussian test function. The result is a shifted Gamma distribution with the shift given by the previously known optimal quantum inequality bound. For small values of the central charge it is overwhelmingly likely that individual measurements of the sampled energy density in the vacuum give negative results. For the case of a single massless scalar field, the probability of finding a negative value is 84%. We also report on computations for four-dimensional massless scalar fields showing that the probability distribution of the smeared square field is also a shifted Gamma distribution, but that the distribution of the energy density is not.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure. Minor edits implemente