Late Quaternary Mediterranean Outflow Water: implications from radiogenic Nd, Sr, Pb isotopes and clay minerals

Mediterranean Outflow Water (MOW) is characterised by higher temperatures and salinities than other ambient water masses. MOW spreads at water depths between 500 and 1500 m into the eastern North Atlantic and has been a source of salinity for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. We used high-resolution Nd and Pb isotope records of past ambient seawater obtained from authigenic ferromanganese coatings of sediments in three gravity cores at 577, 1745 and 1974 m water depths in the Gulf of Cadiz and along the Portuguese margin complemented by a selection of surface sediments to reconstruct the extent and pathways of MOW over the past 23 000 years. In addition, radiogenic Nd, Pb and Sr isotope ratios obtained from total digestion of the residual clay fraction of the leached samples were used to evaluate any changes in the endmember compositions. The surface and downcore seawater Nd isotope data from all water depths exhibit only a very small variability close to the present day composition of MOW but do not reflect the present day Nd isotopic stratification of the water column as determined from a nearby open ocean hydrographic station, which is most likely the consequence of downslope sediment transport in the nepheloid boundary layer as well as the small variations in the Nd endmember compositions. In contrast, the seawater Pb isotope records show significant and systematic variations, which provide evidence for a significantly different pattern of the MOW pathways between 20 000 and 12 000 years ago compared with the subsequent period of time. A deeper situated MOW during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) raised during the early deglaciation with its shallowest position around Heinrich event H1, followed by a moderate deepening and the establishment of present-day MOW hydrography. The radiogenic isotope signatures of the residual clay fractions document a pulse of sediment input from the north during Heinrich event H1 around 14.8 ka, but other than that exhibit little varibility over time suggesting surprisingly constant sedimentary endmember compositions and mixing ratios since the LGM

Nitrogen abundances in giant stars of the globular cluster NGC 6752

We present N abundances for 21 bright giants in the globular cluster NGC 6752 based on high-resolution UVES spectra of the 3360A NH lines. We confirm that the Stromgren c1 index traces the N abundance and find that the star-to-star N abundance variation is 1.95 dex, at the sample's luminosity. We find statistically significant correlations, but small amplitude variations, between the abundances of N and alpha-, Fe-peak, and s-process elements. Analyses using model atmospheres with appropriate N, O, Na, and Al abundances would strengthen, rather than mute, these correlations. If the small variations of heavy elements are real, then the synthesis of the N anomalies must take place in stars which also synthesize alpha-, Fe-peak, and s-process elements. These correlations offer support for contributions from both AGB and massive stars to the globular cluster abundance anomalies.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap

\u3ci\u3eUnder the absolute Amir \u3c/i\u3e

Contents: On the road.--Kabul.--Manners and customs.--Amir Abdur Rahman.--Prisons and prisoners.--Tortures and methods of execution.--Life of Europeans in Kabul.--Soldiers and arms.--Trades and commerce.--Geological conditions of the country.--Religion.--Political situation.--Road from Kabul to Peshawar. Illustrated by the author\u27s drawings and photographs, and by other photograph

Tutoring systems based on user-interface dialogue specification

This thesis shows how the appropriate specification of a user interface to an application software package can be used as the basis for constructing a tutorial for teaching the use of that interface. An economy can hence be made by sharing the specification between the application development and tutorial development stages. The major part of the user-interface specification which is utilised, the task classification structure, must be transformed from an operational to a pedagogic ordering. Heuristics are proposed to achieve this, although human expertise is required to apply them. The report approach is best suited to domains with hierarchically-ordered command sets. A portable rule-based shell has been developed in Common Lisp which supports the delivery of tutorials for a range of software application package interfaces. The use of both the shell and tutorials for two such interfaces is reported. A computer-based authoring environment provides support for tutorial development. The shell allows the learner of a software interface to interact directly with the application software being learnt while remaining under tutorial control. The learner can always interrupt in order to request a tutorial on any topic, although advice may be offered against this in the light of the tutor's current knowledge of the learner. This advice can always be over-ridden. The key-stroke sequences of the tutorial designer and the learner interacting with the package are parsed against an application model based on the task classification structure. Diagnosis is effected by a differential modelling technique applied to the structures generated by the parsing processes. The approach reported here is suitable for an unsupported software interface learner and is named LIY (`Learn It Yourself'). It provides a promising method for augmenting a software engineering tool-kit with a new technique for producing tutorials for application software

Plio-Pleistocene changes in water mass exchange and erosional inputs in the Fram Strait

We determined the isotopic composition of neodymium (Nd) and lead (Pb) of past seawater to reconstruct water mass exchange and erosional input between the Arctic Ocean and the Norwegian-Greenland Seas over the past 5 Ma. For this purpose, sediments of ODP site 911 (leg 151) located at 900 m water depth on the Yermak Plateau in the Fram Strait were used. The paleo-seawater variability of Nd and Pb isotopes was extracted from the sea water-derived metal oxide coatings on the sediment particles following the leaching method of Gutjahr et al. (2007). All radiogenic isotope data were acquired by Multi-Collector (MC) ICP-MS. The site 911 stratigraphy of Knies et al. (2009) was applied. Surface sediment Sr and Nd isotope data, as well as downcore Sr isotope data obtained on the same leaches are close to seawater and confirm the seawater origin of the Nd and Pb isotope signatures. The deep water Nd isotope time series extracted from site 911 was in general more radiogenic ("Nd = -7.5 to -10) than present day deep water ("Nd = -9.8 to -11.8) in the area of the Fram Strait (Andersson et al., 2008) and does not show a systematic trend with time. In contrast, the radiogenic isotope composition of Pb evolved from 206Pb/204Pb ratios around 18.7 to more radiogenic values around 19.2 between 2 Ma and today. The data indicate that mixing of water masses from the Arctic Ocean and the Norwegian-Greenland Seas has controlled the Nd isotope signatures of deep waters on the Yermak Plateau over the past 5 Ma. Prior to 1.7 Ma the Nd isotope signatures on the Yermak Plateau were less radiogenic than waters from the same depth in the central Arctic Ocean (Haley et al., 2008) pointing to a greater influence from the Norwegian-Greenland Seas. After 1.7 Ma the central Arctic and Yermak Plateau data have varied around similar values indicating water mass mixing overall similar to today. In contrast, the Pb isotope composition of deep waters in the Fram Strait appears to have been dominated by weathering inputs from glacially weathering old continental landmasses, such as Greenland or parts of Svalbard since 2 Ma. A similar control over the Pb isotope evolution of seawater since the onset of Northern Hemisphere Glaciation was recorded by ferromanganese crusts that grew from North Atlantic DeepWater in the western North Atlantic. References: Gutjahr, M., Frank, M., Stirling, C.H., Klemm, V., van de Flierdt, T. and Halliday, A.N. (2007): Reliable extraction of a deepwater trace metal isotope signal from Fe-Mn oxyhydroxide coatings of marine sediments.- Chemical Geology 242, 351-370 Haley B. A., M. Frank, R.F. Spielhagen and A. Eisenhauer (2008): Influence of brine formation on Arctic Ocean circulation over the past 15 million years. Nature Geoscience 1, 68–72 Andersson, P.S., Porcelli, D., Frank, M., Björk, G., Dahlqvist, R. and Gustafsson, Ö. (2008): Neodymium isotopes in seawater from the Barents Sea and Fram Strait Arctic- Atlantic gateways.- Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 72, 2854-2867 Knies, J., J. Matthiessen, C. Vogt, J.S. Laberg, B.O. Hjelstuen, M.Smelror, E. Larsen, K. Andreassen, T. Eidvin and T.O. Vorren (2009): The Plio-Pleistocene glaciation of the Barents Sea–Svalbard region: a new model based on revised chronostratigraphy - Quaternary Science Reviews 28, 9-10, 812-82

SWAS observations of comet 9P/Tempel 1 and Deep Impact

On 4 July 2005 at 1:52 UT the Deep Impact mission successfully completed its goal to hit the nucleus of 9P/Tempel 1 with an impactor, forming a crater on the nucleus and ejecting material into the coma of the comet. The 370 kg impactor collided with the sunlit side of the nucleus with a relative velocity of 10.2 km/s. NASA's Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) observed the 1(10)-1(01) ortho-water ground-state rotational transition in comet 9P/Tempel 1 before, during, and after the impact. No excess emission from the impact was detected by SWAS. However, the water production rate of the comet showed large natural variations of more than a factor of three during the weeks before the impact.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of the IAU Symposium No. 231: "Astrochemistry - Recent Successes and Current Callenges". Typo corrected in author affiliation lis

Fabrication of wide-IF 200–300 GHz superconductor–insulator–superconductor mixers with suspended metal beam leads formed on silicon-on-insulator

We report on a fabrication process that uses SOI substrates and micromachining techniques to form wide-IF SIS mixer devices that have suspended metal beam leads for rf grounding. The mixers are formed on thin 25 µm membranes of Si, and are designed to operate in the 200–300 GHz band. Potential applications are in tropospheric chemistry, where increased sensitivity detectors and wide-IF bandwidth receivers are desired. They will also be useful in astrophysics to monitor absorption lines for CO at 230 GHz to study distant, highly redshifted galaxies by reducing scan times. Aside from a description of the fabrication process, electrical measurements of these Nb/Al–AlNx/Nb trilayer devices will also be presented. Since device quality is sensitive to thermal excursions, the new beam lead process appears to be compatible with conventional SIS device fabrication technology

One-dimensional infinite component vector spin glass with long-range interactions

We investigate zero and finite temperature properties of the one-dimensional spin-glass model for vector spins in the limit of an infinite number m of spin components where the interactions decay with a power, \sigma, of the distance. A diluted version of this model is also studied, but found to deviate significantly from the fully connected model. At zero temperature, defect energies are determined from the difference in ground-state energies between systems with periodic and antiperiodic boundary conditions to determine the dependence of the defect-energy exponent \theta on \sigma. A good fit to this dependence is \theta =3/4-\sigma. This implies that the upper critical value of \sigma is 3/4, corresponding to the lower critical dimension in the d-dimensional short-range version of the model. For finite temperatures the large m saddle-point equations are solved self-consistently which gives access to the correlation function, the order parameter and the spin-glass susceptibility. Special attention is paid to the different forms of finite-size scaling effects below and above the lower critical value, \sigma =5/8, which corresponds to the upper critical dimension 8 of the hypercubic short-range model.Comment: 27 pages, 27 figures, 4 table

A review of Multi-Agent Simulation Models in Agriculture

Multi-Agent Simulation (MAS) models are intended to capture emergent properties of complex systems that are not amenable to equilibrium analysis. They are beginning to see some use for analysing agricultural systems. The paper reports on work in progress to create a MAS for specific sectors in New Zealand agriculture. One part of the paper focuses on options for modelling land and other resources such as water, labour and capital in this model, as well as markets for exchanging resources and commodities. A second part considers options for modelling agent heterogeneity, especially risk preferences of farmers, and the impacts on decision-making. The final section outlines the MAS that the authors will be constructing over the next few years and the types of research questions that the model will help investigate.multi-agent simulation models, modelling, agent-based model, cellular automata, decision-making, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries,