Continuity and change: land and water use reforms in rural Uzbekistan. Socio-economic and legal analyses for the region Khorezm

Decades of Soviet rule have left a heritage of environmental and social problems in Central Asia. The demise of an entire ecosystem at unprecedented pace, the 'Aral Sea Syndrome', is the most prominent of the undesired outcomes of the focus on agricultural production that has dominated land and resource use and continues till today. The international outcry over this ecological crisis has delegated other - and maybe more urgent - problems to a second pane. Rural livelihoods are rapidly deteriorating, unemployment is high, and rural poverty widespread. Ecological aspects, although strongly affecting everyday life in rural areas - such as water and soil salinity and environmental pollution - are not the fore most concern to the local population, as the economic survival is the more pressing need. Nevertheless, it is exactly in this situation where the larger part of the population exploits the natural resources further rather than preserving the ecological basis as a natural means of the local land’s productivity. Table of contents: Preface and acknowledgements; Peter Wehrheim, Anja Schoeller-Schletter, Christopher Martius. Chapter 1: Farmers, cotton, water, and models - Introduction and overview; Peter Wehrheim, Christopher Martius. Chapter 2: Organizing agricultural production - Law and legal forms in transition; Anja Schoeller-Schletter. Chapter 3: A model-based analysis of land and water use reforms in Khorezm: Effects on different types of agricultural producers; Nodir Djanibekov. Chapter 4: Optimal crop allocation and consequent ecological benefits in large scale (shirkat) farms in Uzbekistan's transition process; Ihtiyor Bobojonov, Inna Rudenko, John P. A. Lamers. Chapter 5: Where has all the water gone? Marc Müller. Chapter 6: Analysis of water use and allocation for the Khorezm region in Uzbekistan using an integrated economic-hydrologic model; Tina Schieder, Ximing Cai. Chapter 7: Problems and perspectives of water user associations in Uzbekistan; Darya Hirsch (Zavgorodnyaya). Chapter 8: Barriers to technological change and agrarian reform in Khorezm, Uzbekistan; Caleb Wall. Chapter 9: Analysis of agricultural markets in Khorezm, Uzbekistan; Ihtiyor Bobojonov, John P. A. Lamers. Chapter 10: Cotton, agriculture, and the Uzbek government; Marc Müller --

Der Kaiserswerther Nachen: ein archäologischer Beitrag zur Rheinschifffahrt der Frühen Neuzeit

In the summer of 2009, during maintenance work on the Rhine dike north of the old city centre of Kaiserswerth, a wooden ship was discovered by the ruins of a weir - a so-called batardeau - which was once part of the old Kaiserswerth fortress. The vessel measures nearly 18 metres in length. Since it was located at a depth of 9 metres (at the deepest point) and the work had to be carried out under extreme time pressure, it was not possible to document and recover it in the conventional manner. Instead, methods of documentation and recovery that would meet the requirements of the situation had to be developed while the excavation was in progress. The remains of the batardeau, measuring 40 metres in length and 4 metres in height, were found lying on their side. The weir was presumably constructed around the mid seventeenth century. The topsy-turvy position of the masonry finds will have been brought about by the blasting of the Kaiserswerth fortress by allied troops of Holland, Brandenburg and England in the summer of 1702 during the War of Spanish Succession. Upstream from the vessel, more recent wooden bank reinforcements were exposed, indicating - partly with the aid of old maps - that a harbour of refuge existed here in the period from the mid seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. The vessel can be identified as a "Nachen" on the basis of its construction. Seen from above, the hull is lance-shaped; at the bow and stern it terminates with an upward curving ship's bottom. The "folded" bipartite ship’s sides give the "Nachen" its typical hull cross-section. The narrowly tapered bow and steeply upward curving stern are further elements of the highly characteristic hull form. In view of the many signs of use and repairs, it can be assumed that this "Nachen" was built as early as the seventeenth century. On account of its completeness and the abundance of documented details indicating the shipbuilding technique, the find is of great value for the study of the history of shipping on the Rhine in the early modern period. In view of its good condition and the typical hull form, it can be classified with quite some certainty. The hull form appears on various townscapes of Strasbourg executed by W. Hollar in the early seventeenth century. It is highly probable that the "Nachen of Kaiserswerth" is a vessel of the type known as an Upper Rhenish "Schnieke". Its classification as an Upper Rhenish type and its stratigraphic location lead to the speculation that the ship was among those serving the French defence as transport and supply vessels during the fighting in 1702

Tuning the properties of magnetic thin films by interaction with periodic nanostructures

The most important limitation for a significant increase of the areal storage density in magnetic recording is the superparamagnetic effect. Below a critical grain size of the used CoCrPt exchange-decoupled granular films the information cannot be stored for a reasonable time (typically ten years) due to thermal fluctuations arbitrary flipping of the magnetization direction. An alternative approach that may provide higher storage densities is the use of so-called percolated media, in which defect structures are imprinted in an exchange-coupled magnetic film. Such percolated magnetic films are investigated in the present work. We employ preparation routes that are based on (i) self-assembly of Au nanoparticles and (ii) homogeneous size-reduction of self-assembled polystyrene particles. On such non-close-packed nanostructures thin Fe films or Co/Pt multilayers are grown with in-plane and out-of-plane easy axis of magnetization. The impact of the particles on the magnetic switching behavior is measured by both integral magnetometry and magnetic microscopy techniques. We observe enhanced coercive fields while the switching field distribution is broadened compared to thin-film reference samples. It appears possible to tailor the magnetic domain sizes down to the width of an unperturbed domain wall in a continuous film, and moreover, we observe pinning and nucleation at or close to the imprinted defect structures

Controlling Fragmentation of the Acetylene Cation in the Vacuum Ultraviolet via Transient Molecular Alignment.

An open-loop control scheme of molecular fragmentation based on transient molecular alignment combined with single-photon ionization induced by a short-wavelength free electron laser (FEL) is demonstrated for the acetylene cation. Photoelectron spectra are recorded, complementing the ion yield measurements, to demonstrate that such control is the consequence of changes in the electronic response with molecular orientation relative to the ionizing field. We show that stable C2H2+ cations are mainly produced when the molecules are parallel or nearly parallel to the FEL polarization, while the hydrogen fragmentation channel (C2H2+ → C2H+ + H) predominates when the molecule is perpendicular to that direction, thus allowing one to distinguish between the two photochemical processes. The experimental findings are supported by state-of-the art theoretical calculations

Clocking Auger Electrons

Intense X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) can rapidly excite matter, leaving it in inherently unstable states that decay on femtosecond timescales. As the relaxation occurs primarily via Auger emission, excited state observations are constrained by Auger decay. In situ measurement of this process is therefore crucial, yet it has thus far remained elusive at XFELs due to inherent timing and phase jitter, which can be orders of magnitude larger than the timescale of Auger decay. Here, we develop a new approach termed self-referenced attosecond streaking, based upon simultaneous measurements of streaked photo- and Auger electrons. Our technique enables sub-femtosecond resolution in spite of jitter. We exploit this method to make the first XFEL time-domain measurement of the Auger decay lifetime in atomic neon, and, by using a fully quantum-mechanical description, retrieve a lifetime of $2.2^{ + 0.2}_{ - 0.3}$ fs for the KLL decay channel. Importantly, our technique can be generalised to permit the extension of attosecond time-resolved experiments to all current and future FEL facilities.Comment: Main text: 20 pages, 3 figures. Supplementary information: 17 pages, 6 figure

Clocking Auger electrons

Intense X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) can rapidly excite matter, leaving it in inherently unstable states that decay on femtosecond timescales. The relaxation occurs primarily via Auger emission, so excited-state observations are constrained by Auger decay. In situ measurement of this process is therefore crucial, yet it has thus far remained elusive in XFELs owing to inherent timing and phase jitter, which can be orders of magnitude larger than the timescale of Auger decay. Here we develop an approach termed ‘self-referenced attosecond streaking’ that provides subfemtosecond resolution in spite of jitter, enabling time-domain measurement of the delay between photoemission and Auger emission in atomic neon excited by intense, femtosecond pulses from an XFEL. Using a fully quantum-mechanical description that treats the ionization, core-hole formation and Auger emission as a single process, the observed delay yields an Auger decay lifetime of 2.2_−0.3^+0.2 fs for the KLL decay channel

Are men universally more dismissing than women? Gender differences in romantic attachment across 62 cultural regions

The authors thank Susan Sprecher (USA), Del Paulhus (Canada), Glenn D. Wilson (England), Qazi Rahman (England), Alois Angleitner (Germany), Angelika Hofhansl (Austria), Tamio Imagawa (Japan), Minoru Wada (Japan), Junichi Taniguchi (Japan), and Yuji Kanemasa (Japan) for helping with data collection and contributing significantly to the samples used in this study.Gender differences in the dismissing form of adult romantic attachment were investigated as part of the International Sexuality Description Project—a survey study of 17,804 people from 62 cultural regions. Contrary to research findings previously reported in Western cultures, we found that men were not significantly more dismissing than women across all cultural regions. Gender differences in dismissing romantic attachment were evident in most cultures, but were typically only small to moderate in magnitude. Looking across cultures, the degree of gender differentiation in dismissing romantic attachment was predictably associated with sociocultural indicators. Generally, these associations supported evolutionary theories of romantic attachment, with smaller gender differences evident in cultures with high–stress and high–fertility reproductive environments. Social role theories of human sexuality received less support in that more progressive sex–role ideologies and national gender equity indexes were not cross–culturally linked as expected to smaller gender differences in dismissing romantic attachment.peer-reviewe