Abstract: In recent decades, as crop production has increased in many areas where irrigation projects have been implemented, the global agricultural development community has promoted irrigation investments. However, due to the disappointing performance of irrigation farming in developing countries, irrigation intervention in Africa South of the Sahara including Ethiopia is an issue of debate. Moreover, several gaps exist in the Ethiopian irrigation farming literature. For instance, evidence about the direct and indirect effects of irrigation water on agriculture is not well documented. The irrigation farming literature has not disentangled the indirect effects of having access to irrigation water from the direct effect and the indirect effects have been underrepresented. Furthermore, most previous studies have applied either a quantitative or qualitative approach and have relied only on revealed data as main type of methodology, making studies that combine qualitative and quantitative research and that use both stated and revealed data underrepresented. In this study, different approaches have been applied to investigate how irrigation water impacts Ethiopia agriculture with special attention being given to disentangling the direct and indirect effects of irrigation water on Ethiopian agriculture. Using a structural equation model, a stochastic production frontier approach, and a discrete choice experiment, I drew evidence regarding the direct and indirect effects of irrigation water on crop revenue of smallholder farmers, the technical efficiency of irrigation user farmers, and the farmers’ willingness to pay to improve poor irrigation schemes from field observations, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with farmers, and key informant interviews with the local agricultural agents from the Koga and Fogera Districts of Amhara Region Ethiopia. The results indicate that irrigation water in general has both direct and indirect positive effects on agriculture, and the indirect effect is mediated by both improved farm inputs and the type of crops produced. The results also show that – due to poor extension services and backward agronomic practices, the mean technical efficiency of farmers in Ethiopia is very low, and that large-scale irrigation users are less technically efficient than small-scale irrigation users. Moreover, the results show that improving irrigation schemes shifts the frontier up, and smallholder farmers are strongly willing to contribute financially to the maintenance costs of irrigation schemes. The results offer relevant lessons for policymakers that providing irrigation water supply must be embedded in a comprehensive support package including access to extension services, improved input supply, and access to stable markets.

Abstract: Not much about the effect of thiocyanate addition on the sulphur ripening is known, although it is used for many applications in photographic practice. Via a combination of tracer analysis and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy the effect of thiocyanate addition on the sulphur and sulphur-plus-gold ripening could be unveiled. When thiocyanate is added prior to the sulphur addition, it appears to rearrange the silver halide surface in such way that the sulphur deposition rate is enhanced, but the supply of interstitials is limited. Addition of thiocyanate after the sulphur reaction results in the formation of thiocyanate complexes with silver, from which a silver ion is more easily deposited in a surface cell of the silver sulphide clusters thus enhancing the sensitization rate. For sulphur-plus-gold sensitized emulsions it was observed that part of the gold ions could be removed out of the Ag2-xAuxS clusters by addition of thiocyanate ions and subsequent washing. Hence, it was concluded that two different types of gold ions are present in the silver sulphide clusters; 1. gold ions which are substitutional for silver (bound between sulphur and bromide ions) 2. gold ions which bridge two or three sulphur atoms. Incorporation of gold ions into silver sulphide clusters suppresses their optical absorption in diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. Since the optical absorption at 505 nm can completely be restored by addition of thiocyanate, it is assumed that the entity absorbing at this wavelength is a monomer of silver sulphide.

Abstract: This dataset comprises a large collection of atom probe tomography datasets collected from DIN 1.4970 alloy that was irradiated with Fe ions at different conditions. The DIN 1.4970 alloy is an austenitic stainless steel with 15 wt% Cr, 15 wt% Ni, a small addition of Ti. The full composition and characterization of our material can be found published elsewhere [1,2]. Some of our material was subjected to ageing heat treatments at different temperatures for different times. Small samples of our original material and aged material was irradiated at the Michigan Ion Beam Laboratory in 2017 with 4.5 MeV Fe ions up to 40 dpa at an average dose rate of 2×10−4 dpa/s. This was done at three different temperatures: 300, 450, and 600 ºC. Atom probe samples were made of the irradiated layers (approximately 1.5 micron deep) with focused ion beam and mounted on Microtip coupons. APT measurements took place on three CAMECA LEAP-HR systems located at CAES in Idaho Falls, USA (files beginning with R33), at Montanuniversität Leoben in Leoben, Austria (R21) and at Friedrich–Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany (R56).

Abstract: The gravitational energy associated with variations in the radius of the Sun is huge: with a relative change of 1/2000 (the estimated difference between maximum and minimum solar activity) and taking only the convection zone to expand, corresponds to about 2 10(34)J, which is 1/10 of the total rotational energy of the Sun. Non-radial oscillations with a tiny nonlinearity can still yield energies comparable to or larger than the total magnetic energy of a full sunspot cycle or three or four orders more than the luminosity of the Sun, but that is not sufficient to account for the changes of the temperature on Earth. The expansion of the upper layers of the convection zone, however, may directly or indirectly affect the climate and the biological aspects on the Earth. Moreover this suits a qualitative explanation why the Sun expands during a minimum of the magnetic activity.

Abstract: In 2008, Museum M in Louvain (Flanders, Belgium) acquired a panel depicting The Anointing at Bethany that is believed once to have adorned the citys former Charterhouse. The panel required conservation treatment, which was preceded by a thorough art-historical and technical examination. It emerged that comparable panels are kept at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Riverside Church in New York. Chemical analyses show most of the glass in the panel to have a typical 16th century high-limelow-alkali composition. The conservation treatment was based on the evaluation of these findings and focused very strongly on enhancing the aesthetic balance for an improved reading of the panel.