78,883 research outputs found
AGAINST MECHANISM: METHODOLOGY FOR AN EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMICS
When the first economics departments were proposed at Cambridge and Oxford, the proponents thought acceptance would be improved if economics could be seen as incorporating the methods of physics. The enterprise was premised on the existence of economic laws that describe invariant relationships between events. These event regularities, like gravity, were not affected by human action. Humans could adapt and use them, but not change them. Thus the metaphor of "mechanism" seemed appropriate and became embedded in economists' language. It is common to use the term market mechanism to link prices and commodities. This suggests the economy is like turning a crank attached to a set of gears where there is a fixed relationship between the crank's motion and the last gear's motion. The gears have no ideas of their own, they don't get mad; there is no cognitive element between events and action.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,
Autonomous prealignment of a docking mechanism
Proposed future space exploration, such as lunar and Martian expeditions, will require autonomous docking of space vehicles. One proposed candidate method of autonomous docking utilizes a actively controlled parallel manipulator. Operation of the proposed docking manipulator can be segmented into four successive events: prealignment, capture/latching, attenuation, and structural rigidization. This paper discusses the development and testing of a digitally controlled, six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF), parallel manipulator for the prealignment segment of a docking spacecraft
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Are Mock Jurors Influenced by the Defendants Gender, Socio-Economic Status and Emotional State in Forensic Medicine?
The aim of this study was to investigate whether mock jurors’ decisions were affected by the defendant’s gender, socio-economic status and emotional state in mock cases. The implications are far reaching, especially in trials that involve forensic medicine. An experimental design was used where a total of 24 participants from Bournemouth University took part, and were assigned to one of four groups. In these groups, the three independent variables were manipulated. Participants were presented with two murder/manslaughter cases. The results suggest male defendants received harsher judgements than female defendants. More female defendants were found not guilty than male defendants. Male defendants from a high socio-economic background received harsher judgements than male defendants from a low socio-economic background. Female defendants from a low socio-economic background received harsher judgements than female defendants from a high socio-economic background. Female defendants were found to be more trustworthy than male defendants. These findings are discussed are discussed in the context of the jury’s verdict, sentence length and personal opinion of the defendant
Diagnosing magnetars with transient cooling
Transient X-ray emission, with an approximate t^{-0.7} decay, was observed
from SGR 1900+14 over 40 days following the the giant flare of 27 Aug 1998. We
calculate in detail the diffusion of heat to the surface of a neutron star
through an intense 10^{14}-10^{15} G magnetic field, following the release of
magnetic energy in its outer layers. We show that the power law index, the
fraction of burst energy in the afterglow, and the return to persistent
emission can all be understood if the star is composed of normal baryonic
material.Comment: 9 pages, 1 eps figur
Double wells, scalar fields and quantum phase transitions in ions traps
Since Hund's work on the ammonia molecule, the double well potential has
formed a key paradigm in physics. Its importance is further underlined by the
central role it plays in the Landau theory of phase transitions. Recently, the
study of entanglement properties of many-body systems has added a new angle to
the study of quantum phase transitions of discrete and continuous degrees of
freedom, i.e., spin and harmonic chains. Here we show that control of the
radial degree of freedom of trapped ion chains allows for the simulation of
linear and non-linear Klein-Gordon fields on a lattice, in which the parameters
of the lattice, the non-linearity and mass can be controlled at will. The
system may be driven through a phase transition creating a double well
potential between different configurations of the ion crystal. The dynamics of
the system are controllable, local properties are measurable and tunnelling in
the double well potential would be observable.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Method for locating low-energy solutions within DFT+U
The widely employed DFT+U formalism is known to give rise to many self-consistent yet energetically distinct solutions in correlated systems, which can be highly problematic for reliably predicting the thermodynamic and physical properties of such materials. Here we study this phenomenon in the bulk materials UO_2, CoO, and NiO, and in a CeO_2 surface. We show that the following factors affect which self-consistent solution a DFT+U calculation reaches: (i) the magnitude of U; (ii) initial correlated orbital occupations; (iii) lattice geometry; (iv) whether lattice symmetry is enforced on the charge density; and (v) even electronic mixing parameters. These various solutions may differ in total energy by hundreds of meV per atom, so identifying or approximating the ground state is critical in the DFT+U scheme. We propose an efficient U-ramping method for locating low-energy solutions, which we validate in a range of test cases. We also suggest that this method may be applicable to hybrid functional calculations
Numerical solutions for laminar and turbulent viscous flow over single and multi-element airfoils using body-fitted coordinate systems
The technique of body-fitted coordinate systems is applied in numerical solutions of the complete time-dependent compressible and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for laminar flow and to the time-dependent mean turbulent equations closed by modified Kolmogorov hypotheses for turbulent flow. Coordinate lines are automatically concentrated near to the bodies at higher Reynolds number so that accurate resolution of the large gradients near the solid boundaries is achieved. Two-dimensional bodies of arbitrary shapes are treated, the body contour(s) being simply input to the program. The complication of the body shape is thus removed from the problem
Highly-improved lattice field-strength tensor
We derive an O(a^4)-improved lattice version of the continuum field-strength
tensor. Discretization errors are reduced via the combination of several clover
terms of various sizes, complemented by tadpole improvement. The resulting
improved field-strength tensor is used to construct O(a^4)-improved topological
charge and action operators. We compare the values attained by these operators
as we cool several configurations to self-duality with a previously defined
highly-improved action and assess the relative scale of the remaining
discretization errors.Comment: 22 pages, 7 postscript figure
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