Hydraulic Bureaucracies and the Hydraulic Mission: Flows of Water, Flows of Power

Anchored in 19th century scientism and an ideology of the domination of nature, inspired by colonial hydraulic feats, and fuelled by technological improvements in high dam constructions and power generation and transmission, large-scale water resources development has been a defining feature of the 20th century. Whether out of a need to increase food production, raise rural incomes, or strengthen state building and the legitimacy of the state, governments – North and South, East and West – embraced the 'hydraulic mission' and entrusted it to powerful state water bureaucracies (hydrocracies). Engaged in the pursuit of iconic and symbolic projects, the massive damming of river systems, and the expansion of large-scale public irrigation these hydrocracies have long remained out of reach. While they have enormously contributed to actual welfare, including energy and food generation, flood protection and water supply to urban areas, infrastructural development has often become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, fuelling rent-seeking and symbolising state power. In many places projects have been challenged on the basis of their economic, social or environmental impacts. Water bureaucracies have been challenged internally (within the state bureaucracies or through political changes) and externally (by critiques from civil society and academia, or by reduced funding). They have endeavoured to respond to these challenges by reinventing themselves or deflecting reforms. This paper analyses these transformations, from the emergence of the hydraulic mission and associated water bureaucracies to their adjustment and responses to changing conditions

Focal plane transport assembly for the HEAO-B X-ray telescope

The High Energy Astronomy Observatory - Mission B (HEAO-B), an earth orbiting X-ray telescope facility capable of locating and imaging celestial X-ray sources within one second of arc in the celestial sphere, is considered. The Focal Plane Transport Assembly (FPTA) is one of the basic structural elements of the three thousand pound HEAO-B experiment payload. The FPTA is a multifunctional assembly which supports seven imaging X-ray detectors circumferentially about a central shaft and accurately positions any particular one into the focus of a high resolution mirror assembly. A drive system, position sensor, rotary coupler, and detent alignment system, all an integral part of the rotatable portion which in turn is supported by main bearings to the stationary focal plane housing are described

Modelling the role of electron attachment rates on column density ratios for CnH-/CnH (n=4; 6; 8) in dense molecular clouds

(abridged) The fairly recent detection of a variety of anions in the Interstellar Molecular Clouds have underlined the importance of realistically modeling the processes governing their abundance. To this aim, our earlier calculations for the radiative electron attachment (REA) rates for C4H-, C6H-, and C8H- are employed to generate the corresponding column density ratios of anion/neutral (A/N) relative abundances. The latter are then compared with those obtained from observational measurements. The calculations involved the time-dependent solutions of a large network of chemical processes over an extended time interval and included a series of runs in which the values of REA rates were repeatedly scaled. Macroscopic parameters for the clouds' modeling were also varied to cover a broad range of physical environments. It was found that, within the range and quality of the processes included in the present network,and selected from state-of-the-art astrophysical databases, the REA values required to match the observed A/N ratios needed to be reduced by orders of magnitude for C4H- case, while the same rates for C6H- and C8H- only needed to be scaled by much smaller factors. The results suggest that the generally proposed formation of interstellar anions by REA mechanism is overestimated by current models for the C4H- case, for which is likely to be an inefficient path to formation. This path is thus providing a rather marginal contribution to the observed abundances of C4H-, the latter being more likely to originate from other chemical processes in the network, as we discuss in some detail in the present work.Possible physical reasons for the much smaller differences against observations found instead for the values of the (A/N) ratios in two other, longer members of the series are put forward and analyzed within the evolutionary modeling discussed in the present work.Comment: Journal of Physics B, accepte

Wat veteranen vertellen, verschillende perspectieven op biografische interviews over ervaringen tijdens militaire operaties

__Abstract__ Het boek Wat veteranen vertellen is ook digitaal als verrijkte publicatie verschenen. Hierdoor is het mogelijk de interviewfragmenten die gebruikt zijn door de onderzoekers en als citaten in de betreffende hoofdstukken gepresenteerd worden, ook te beluisteren. Het horen van de stem, de intonatie en het accent van de geïnterviewde, biedt een meerwaarde boven de tekstuele transcripties die opgenomen zijn in het artikel uit deze bundel. Biografische interviews van Nederlandse veteranen vormen een vruchtbare bron voor multidisciplinair onderzoek. Maar het wetenschappelijke artikel vormt slechts het topje van de ijsberg aan informatie waarmee de onderzoeker redeneert. De gebruikte interviews en de contextinformatie die daarbij relevant is, zijn belangrijke onderliggende bronnen die door middel van informatietechnologie beschikbaar komen om het artikel te verrijken, nader onderzoek mogelijk te maken of de uitkomsten van het onderzoek te verifiëren

The Tails of the Crossing Probability

The scaling of the tails of the probability of a system to percolate only in the horizontal direction $\pi_{hs}$ was investigated numerically for correlated site-bond percolation model for $q=1,2,3,4$.We have to demonstrate that the tails of the crossing probability far from the critical point have shape $\pi_{hs}(p) \simeq D \exp(c L[p-p_{c}]^{\nu})$ where $\nu$ is the correlation length index, $p=1-\exp(-\beta)$ is the probability of a bond to be closed. At criticality we observe crossover to another scaling $\pi_{hs}(p) \simeq A \exp (-b {L [p-p_{c}]^{\nu}}^{z})$. Here $z$ is a scaling index describing the central part of the crossing probability.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, v3:one fitting procedure is changed, grammatical change