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Goodbye to Projects? ¿ A livelihoods-grounded audit of the Training for Environmental and Agricultural Management (TEAM) project in Lesotho.
Approaches to projects and development have undergone considerable change in the last decade with significant policy shifts on governance, gender, poverty eradication, and environmental issues. Most recently this has led to the adoption and promotion of the sustainable livelihood (SL) approach. The adoption of the SL approach presents challenges to development interventions including: the future of projects and programmes, and sector wide approaches (SWAPs) and direct budgetary support.This paper `A livelihoods-grounded audit of the `Training for Environmental and Agricultural Management (TEAM) project in Lesotho¿ is the eleventh in the series of project working papers.Department for International Developmen
Ripples and Shear Bands in Plowed Granular Media
Monodisperse packings of dry, air-fluidized granular media typically exist
between volume fractions from = 0.585 to 0.64. We demonstrate that the
dynamics of granular drag are sensitive to volume fraction and their
exists a transition in the drag force and material deformation from smooth to
oscillatory at a critical volume fraction . By dragging a
submerged steel plate (3.81 cm width, 6.98 cm depth) through glass
beads prepared at volume fractions between 0.585 to 0.635 we find that below
the media deformation is smooth and non-localized while above
media fails along distinct shear bands. At high the
generation of these shear bands is periodic resulting in the ripples on the
surface. Work funded by The Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Army Research Lab
MAST CT
A Terradynamics of Legged Locomotion on Granular Media
The theories of aero- and hydrodynamics predict animal movement and device
design in air and water through the computation of lift, drag, and thrust
forces. Although models of terrestrial legged locomotion have focused on
interactions with solid ground, many animals move on substrates that flow in
response to intrusion. However, locomotor-ground interaction models on such
flowable ground are often unavailable. We developed a force model for
arbitrarily-shaped legs and bodies moving freely in granular media, and used
this "terradynamics" to predict a small legged robot's locomotion on granular
media using various leg shapes and stride frequencies. Our study reveals a
complex but generic dependence of stresses in granular media on intruder depth,
orientation, and movement direction and gives insight into the effects of leg
morphology and kinematics on movement
Radiative polarization of electrons in a strong laser wave
We reanalyze the problem of radiative polarization of electrons brought into
collision with a circularly polarized strong plane wave. We present an
independent analytical verification of formulae for the cross section given by
D.\,Yu. Ivanov et al [Eur.\ Phys.\ J. C \textbf{36}, 127 (2004)]. By choosing
the exact electron's helicity as the spin quantum number we show that the
self-polarization effect exists only for the moderately relativistic electrons
with energy and only for a non-head-on collision
geometry. In these conditions polarization degree may achieve the values up to
65%, but the effective polarization time is found to be larger than 1\,s even
for a high power optical or infrared laser with intensity parameter (). This
makes such a polarization practically unrealizable. We also compare these
results with the ones of some papers where the high degree of polarization was
predicted for ultrarelativistic case. We argue that this apparent contradiction
arises due to the different choice of the spin quantum numbers. In particular,
the quantum numbers which provide the high polarization degree represent
neither helicity nor transverse polarization, that makes the use of them
inconvenient in practice.Comment: minor changes compared to v3; to appear in PR
SN1987A - a Testing Ground for the KARMEN Anomaly
We show, that SN1987A can serve as an astrophysical laboratory for testing
the viability of the assertion that a new massive neutral fermion is implied by
the KARMEN data. We show that a wide range of the parameters characterizing the
proposed particle is ruled out by the above constraints making this
interpretation very unlikely.Comment: 12 pages, 1 eps figure embedded, to appear in Phys. Lett.
Kodaira-Spencer formality of products of complex manifolds
We shall say that a complex manifold is emph{Kodaira-Spencer formal} if its Kodaira-Spencer differential graded Lie algebra
is formal; if this happen, then the deformation theory of
is completely determined by the graded Lie algebra and the base space of the semiuniversal deformation is a quadratic singularity..
Determine when a complex manifold is Kodaira-Spencer formal is generally difficult and
we actually know only a limited class of cases where this happen. Among such examples we have
Riemann surfaces, projective spaces, holomorphic Poisson manifolds with surjective anchor map
and every compact K"{a}hler manifold with trivial or torsion canonical
bundle.
In this short note we investigate the behavior of this property under finite products. Let be compact complex manifolds; we prove that whenever and are
K"{a}hler, then is Kodaira-Spencer formal if and only if the same
holds for and . A revisit of a classical example by Douady shows that the above result fails if the K"{a}hler assumption is droppe
Surprising simplicity in the modeling of dynamic granular intrusion
Granular intrusions, such as dynamic impact or wheel locomotion, are complex
multiphase phenomena where the grains exhibit solid-like and fluid-like
characteristics together with an ejected gas-like phase. Despite decades of
modeling efforts, a unified description of the physics in such intrusions is as
yet unknown. Here we show that a continuum model based on the simple notions of
frictional flow and tension-free separation describes complex granular
intrusions near free surfaces. This model captures dynamics in a variety of
experiments including wheel locomotion, plate intrusions, and running legged
robots. The model reveals that three effects (a static contribution and two
dynamic ones) primarily give rise to intrusion forces in such scenarios.
Identification of these effects enables the development of a further
reduced-order technique (Dynamic Resistive Force Theory) for rapid modeling of
granular locomotion of arbitrarily shaped intruders. The continuum-motivated
strategy we propose for identifying physical mechanisms and corresponding
reduced-order relations has potential use for a variety of other materials.Comment: 41 pages including supplementary document, 10 figures, and 8 vide
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