Excavations At Stobi, 1971

Anthropolog

Advanced Wildfire Hose Clamp

We, Team AHC, have designed, manufactured, and tested an advanced firehose clamp for wildland firefighters to use during extended hose lays. The clamp is designed to stop high-pressure water flow in a firehose so that a new length of hose can be added. The current industry standard, the Timberline hose clamp, is expensive and wears down over time effecting the speed and success of hose lays. Our goal was to improve firefighter\u27s tools and therefore improve fire fighting effectiveness

Ma'afala Breadfruit Maturity Indicators and the Influence of Harvest Maturity and 1-Methylcyclopropene on Its Postharvest Quality

M.S

Chemical flocculation for removing bentonite spills in water

A potential environmental impact associated with horizontal directional drilling is the inadvertent return of bentonite-based drilling fluid to the surface via naturally occurring fractures or fissures. This study investigated a range of flocculants consisting of water-soluble linear polyacrylamides (PAMs) differing in charge (anionic, neutral, and cationic), biopolymer (chitosan) and gypsum for treating the bentonite suspension that might release with runoff or into stream water. Laboratory jar test were conducted with a 0.4 % (w/v) bentonite suspension having an average initial turbidity of 1,217 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU). None of the PAMs by themselves were effective in flocculating bentonite suspension (\u3e 690 NTU), but adding gypsum in a combination with anionic PAM enhanced the flocculation reaction (\u3c 120 NTU). The biopolymer performed better than the PAMs alone by lowering turbidity to 437 NTU. A simple, passive dosing system was tested in which bentonite-laden turbid water was pumped into a length of pipe with a jute lining treated with the chemical and passed through a geotextile dewatering bag. Both the biopolymer and the combination of gypsum and anionic PAM were effective, reducing turbidity by 86-95 % relative to influent bentonite suspension (1,188 NTU). These results suggest that simple, inexpensive flocculation systems can be deployed to reduce turbidity caused by bentonite spills

Canonical form of master equations and characterization of non-Markovianity

Master equations govern the time evolution of a quantum system interacting with an environment, and may be written in a variety of forms. Time-independent or memoryless master equations, in particular, can be cast in the well-known Lindblad form. Any time-local master equation, Markovian or non-Markovian, may in fact also be written in a Lindblad-like form. A diagonalisation procedure results in a unique, and in this sense canonical, representation of the equation, which may be used to fully characterize the non-Markovianity of the time evolution. Recently, several different measures of non-Markovianity have been presented which reflect, to varying degrees, the appearance of negative decoherence rates in the Lindblad-like form of the master equation. We therefore propose using the negative decoherence rates themselves, as they appear in the canonical form of the master equation, to completely characterize non-Markovianity. The advantages of this are especially apparent when more than one decoherence channel is present. We show that a measure proposed by Rivas et al. is a surprisingly simple function of the canonical decoherence rates, and give an example of a master equation that is non-Markovian for all times t>0, but to which nearly all proposed measures are blind. We also give necessary and sufficient conditions for trace distance and volume measures to witness non-Markovianity, in terms of the Bloch damping matrix.Comment: v2: Significant update, with many new results and one new author. 12 pages; v3: Minor clarifications, to appear in PRA; v4: matches published versio