This article provides a review and synthesis of scholarly knowledge of Depression-era droughts on the North American Great Plains, a time and place known colloquially as the Dust Bowl era or the Dirty Thirties. Recent events, including the 2008 financial crisis, severe droughts in the US corn belt, and the release of a popular documentary film, have spawned a resurgence in public interest in th...

We study the Casimir force in piston-like geometries semiclassically. The force on the piston is finite and physical, but to leading semiclassical approximation depends strongly on the shape of the surrounding cavity. Whereas this force is attractive for pistons in a parallelepiped with flat cylinder head, for which the semiclassical approximation by periodic orbits is exact, this approximation...

In this paper we study the Casimir force for a piston configuration in R 3 with one dimension being slightly curved and the other two infinite. We work for two different cases with this setup. In the first, the piston is " free to move " along a transverse dimension to the curved one and in the other case the piston " moves " along the curved one. We find that the Casimir force has opposite sig...

The Hypertension Singing Bowl is an Acoustic Sonification shaped by a year of blood pressure data that has been 3D printed in stainless steel so that it rings. The design of the bowl was a response to a medical diagnosis of hypertension that required regular self-tracking of blood pressure. The culture of selftracking, known as the Quantified Self movement, has the motto “self knowledge through...

The present study compared the memory of young and older adults for details pertaining to two public events of close temporal proximity but varying emotional import-the Columbia shuttle explosion and the 2003 Super Bowl. Participants responded to surveys sent within 2 weeks of these events and then again 7 months later, providing information about event-related details (i.e., of the events them...

This paper presents a new JDtthematieal model of indicated horsepower of rolling piston compressor. It is not an intergul formula but a genertl mathematical formula made out by authors calculating ia detail on the baee of former integral formula of indicated hor1epower aad parameters such as the ratio of Ieath aad diameter, the ratio of eccentric from implicit function. Ia accordance with this ...

− A new controlled-clearance pressure balance has been developed to improve the hydraulic pressure standard for pressures up to 1 GPa. For several controlledclearance piston-cylinders, characterization experiments based on the Heydemann-Welch model were performed to estimate the effective area of them. The results for the piston-cylinders of different pressure ranges are exemplified in this pap...

We consider a massive inelastic piston, whose opposite faces have different coefficients of restitution, moving under the action of an infinitely dilute gas of hard disks maintained at a fixed temperature. The dynamics of the piston is Markovian and obeys a continuous Master Equation: however, the asymmetry of restitution coefficients induces a violation of detailed balance and a net drift of t...

Rectangular cavities are solvable models that nevertheless touch on many of the controversial or mysterious aspects of the vacuum energy of quantum fields. This paper is a thorough study of the two-dimensional scalar field in a rectangle by the method of images, or closed classical (or optical) paths, which is exact in this case. For each point r and each specularly reflecting path beginning an...