11,737 research outputs found
Pollination of the European food-deceptive Traunsteinera globosa (Orchidaceae): the importance of nectar-producing neighbouring plants
ISSN:0378-2697ISSN:1615-611
Increased susceptibility to proactive interference in adults with dyslexia?
Recent findings show that people with dyslexia have an impairment in serial-order memory. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to test the hypothesis that people with dyslexia have difficulties dealing with proactive interference (PI) in recognition memory. A group of 25 adults with dyslexia and a group of matched controls were subjected to a 2-back recognition task, which required participants to indicate whether an item (mis)matched the item that had been presented 2 trials before. PI was elicited using lure trials in which the item matched the item in the 3-back position instead of the targeted 2-back position. Our results demonstrate that the introduction of lure trials affected 2-back recognition performance more severely in the dyslexic group than in the control group, suggesting greater difficulty in resisting PI in dyslexia.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Hybrid Meson Decay Phenomenology
The phenomenology of a newly developed model of hybrid meson decay is
developed. The decay mechanism is based on the heavy quark expansion of QCD and
the strong coupling flux tube picture of nonperturbative glue. A comprehensive
list of partial decay widths of a wide variety of light, , ,
and hybrid mesons is presented. Results which appear approximately
universal are highlighted along with those which distinguish different hybrid
decay models. Finally, we examine several interesting hybrid candidates in
detail.Comment: 37 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables, Revte
Susskind's Challenge to the Hartle-Hawking No-Boundary Proposal and Possible Resolutions
Given the observed cosmic acceleration, Leonard Susskind has presented the
following argument against the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal for the
quantum state of the universe: It should most likely lead to a nearly empty
large de Sitter universe, rather than to early rapid inflation. Even if one
adds the condition of observers, they are most likely to form by quantum
fluctuations in de Sitter and therefore not see the structure that we observe.
Here I present my own amplified version of this argument and consider possible
resolutions, one of which seems to imply that inflation expands the universe to
be larger than 10^{10^{10^{122}}} Mpc.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, 8 references added and a distinction between Linde's
and Vilenkin's tunneling proposal
The use and calibration of read-out streaks to increase the dynamic range of the Swift Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope
The dynamic range of photon counting micro-channel-plate (MCP) intensified
charged-coupled device (CCD) instruments such as the Swift Ultraviolet/Optical
Telescope (UVOT) and the XMM-Newton Optical Monitor (XMM-OM) is limited at the
bright end by coincidence loss, the superposition of multiple photons in the
individual frames recorded by the CCD. Photons which arrive during the brief
period in which the image frame is transferred for read out of the CCD are
displaced in the transfer direction in the recorded images. For sufficiently
bright sources, these displaced counts form read-out streaks. Using UVOT
observations of Tycho-2 stars, we investigate the use of these read-out streaks
to obtain photometry for sources which are too bright (and hence have too much
coincidence loss) for normal aperture photometry to be reliable. For
read-out-streak photometry, the bright-source limiting factor is coincidence
loss within the MCPs rather than the CCD. We find that photometric measurements
can be obtained for stars up to 2.4 magnitudes brighter than the usual
full-frame coincidence-loss limit by using the read-out streaks. The resulting
bright-limit Vega magnitudes in the UVOT passbands are UVW2=8.80, UVM2=8.27,
UVW1=8.86, u=9.76, b=10.53, v=9.31 and White=11.71; these limits are
independent of the windowing mode of the camera. We find that a photometric
precision of 0.1 mag can be achieved through read-out streak measurements. A
suitable method for the measurement of read-out streaks is described and all
necessary calibration factors are given.Comment: 11 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Code available from the
calibration link at http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/www_astro/uvo
Ranking Spaces for Predicting Human Movement in an Urban Environment
A city can be topologically represented as a connectivity graph, consisting
of nodes representing individual spaces and links if the corresponding spaces
are intersected. It turns out in the space syntax literature that some defined
topological metrics can capture human movement rates in individual spaces. In
other words, the topological metrics are significantly correlated to human
movement rates, and individual spaces can be ranked by the metrics for
predicting human movement. However, this correlation has never been well
justified. In this paper, we study the same issue by applying the weighted
PageRank algorithm to the connectivity graph or space-space topology for
ranking the individual spaces, and find surprisingly that (1) the PageRank
scores are better correlated to human movement rates than the space syntax
metrics, and (2) the underlying space-space topology demonstrates small world
and scale free properties. The findings provide a novel justification as to why
space syntax, or topological analysis in general, can be used to predict human
movement. We further conjecture that this kind of analysis is no more than
predicting a drunkard's walking on a small world and scale free network.
Keywords: Space syntax, topological analysis of networks, small world, scale
free, human movement, and PageRankComment: 11 pages, 5 figures, and 2 tables, English corrections from version 1
to version 2, major changes in the section of introduction from version 2 to
Space for Both No-Boundary and Tunneling Quantum States of the Universe
At the minisuperspace level of homogeneous models, the bare probability for a
classical universe has a huge peak at small universes for the Hartle-Hawking
`no-boundary' wavefunction, in contrast to the suppression at small universes
for the `tunneling' wavefunction. If the probability distribution is cut off at
the Planck density (say), this suggests that the former quantum state is
inconsistent with our observations. For inhomogeneous models in which
stochastic inflation can occur, it is known that the idea of including a volume
factor in the observational probability distribution can lead to arbitrarily
large universes' being likely. Here this idea is shown to be sufficient to save
the Hartle-Hawking proposal even at the minisuperspace level (for suitable
inflaton potentials), by giving it enough space to be consistent with
observations.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, no figures, blank lines removed, page break inserte
The first Swift X-ray Flash: The faint afterglow of XRF 050215B
We present the discovery of XRF 050215B and its afterglow. The burst was
detected by the Swift BAT during the check-out phase and observations with the
X-ray telescope began approximately 30 minutes after the burst. These
observations found a faint, slowly fading X-ray afterglow near the centre of
the error box as reported by the BAT. Infrared data, obtained at UKIRT after 10
hours also revealed a very faint K-band afterglow. The afterglow appear unusual
since it is very faint, especially in the infrared with K>20 only 9 hours post
burst. The X-ray and infrared lightcurves exhibit a slow, monotonic decay with
alpha=0.8 and no evidence for steepening associated with the jet break to 10
days post burst. We discuss possible explanations for the faintness and slow
decay in the context of present models for the production of X-ray Flashes.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Influence of positional correlations on the propagation of waves in a complex medium with polydisperse resonant scatterers
We present experimental results on a model system for studying wave
propagation in a complex medium exhibiting low frequency resonances. These
experiments enable us to investigate a fundamental question that is relevant
for many materials, such as metamaterials, where low-frequency scattering
resonances strongly influence the effective medium properties. This question
concerns the effect of correlations in the positions of the scatterers on the
coupling between their resonances, and hence on wave transport through the
medium. To examine this question experimentally, we measure the effective
medium wave number of acoustic waves in a sample made of bubbles embedded in an
elastic matrix over a frequency range that includes the resonance frequency of
the bubbles. The effective medium is highly dispersive, showing peaks in the
attenuation and the phase velocity as functions of the frequency, which cannot
be accurately described using the Independent Scattering Approximation (ISA).
This discrepancy may be explained by the effects of the positional correlations
of the scatterers, which we show to be dependent on the size of the scatterers.
We propose a self-consistent approach for taking this "polydisperse
correlation" into account and show that our model better describes the
experimental results than the ISA
- …