The Orion constellation as an installation - An innovative three dimensional teaching and learning environment

Visualising the three dimensional distribution of stars within a constellation is highly challenging for both students and educators, but when carried out in an interactive collaborative way it can create an ideal environment to explore common misconceptions about size and scale within astronomy. We present how the common table top activities based upon the Orion constellation miss out on this opportunity. Transformed into a walk-through Orion installation that includes the position of our Solar system, it allows the students to fully immerse themselves within the model and experience parallax. It enables participants to explore within the installation many other aspects of astronomy relating to sky culture, stellar evolution, and stellar timescales establishing an innovative learning and teaching environment.Comment: 2 pages, submitted to The Physics Teacher - Colum

Boosting as a Product of Experts

In this paper, we derive a novel probabilistic model of boosting as a Product of Experts. We re-derive the boosting algorithm as a greedy incremental model selection procedure which ensures that addition of new experts to the ensemble does not decrease the likelihood of the data. These learning rules lead to a generic boosting algorithm - POE- Boost which turns out to be similar to the AdaBoost algorithm under certain assumptions on the expert probabilities. The paper then extends the POEBoost algorithm to POEBoost.CS which handles hypothesis that produce probabilistic predictions. This new algorithm is shown to have better generalization performance compared to other state of the art algorithms

Weak Boson Production Amplitude Zeros; Equalities of the Helicity Amplitudes

We investigate the radiation amplitude zeros exhibited by many Standard Model amplitudes for triple weak gauge boson production processes. We show that $WZ\gamma$ production amplitudes have especially rich structure in terms of zeros, these amplitudes have zeros originating from several different sources. It is also shown that TYPE I current null zone is the special case of the equality of the specific helicity amplitudes.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures, 2 table

Exploring Lifetime Effects in Femtoscopy

We investigate the role of lifetime effects from resonances and emission duration tails in femtoscopy at RHIC in two Blast-Wave models. We find the non-Gaussian components compare well with published source imaged data, but the value of R_out obtained from Gaussian fits is not insensitive to the non-Gaussian contributions when realistic acceptance cuts are applied to models.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Synchronization Based Approach for Estimating All Model Parameters of Chaotic Systems

The problem of dynamic estimation of all parameters of a model representing chaotic and hyperchaotic systems using information from a scalar measured output is solved. The variational calculus based method is robust in the presence of noise, enables online estimation of the parameters and is also able to rapidly track changes in operating parameters of the experimental system. The method is demonstrated using the Lorenz, Rossler chaos and hyperchaos models. Its possible application in decoding communications using chaos is discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Studies of interface damping Summary technical report, 25 Aug. 1967 - 25 Mar. 1968

Air flow and vacuum effects on damping between solid-solid sliding interfaces in aluminum space structures in relation to surface oxide layer

Zeroing in on more photons and gluons

We discuss radiation zeros that are found in gauge tree amplitudes for processes involving multi-photon emission. Previous results are clarified by examples and by further elaboration. The conditions under which such amplitude zeros occur are identical in form to those for the single-photon zeros, and all radiated photons must travel parallel to each other. Any other neutral particle likewise must be massless (e.g. gluon) and travel in that common direction. The relevance to questions like gluon jet identification and computational checks is considered. We use examples to show how certain multi-photon amplitudes evade the zeros, and to demonstrate the connection to a more general result, the decoupling of an external electromagnetic plane wave in the ``null zone". Brief comments are made about zeros associated with other gauge-boson emission.Comment: 26 page

Quantum dynamics of the Neel vector in the antiferromagnetic molecular wheel CsFe8

The inelastic neutron scattering (INS) spectrum is studied for the antiferromagnetic molecular wheel CsFe8, in the temperature range 2 - 60 K, and for transfer energies up 3.6 meV. A qualitative analysis shows that the observed peaks correspond to the transitions between the L-band states, from the ground state up to the S = 5 multiplet. For a quantitative analysis, the wheel is described by a microscopic spin Hamiltonian (SH), which includes the nearest-neighbor Heisenberg exchange interactions and uniaxial easy-axis single-ion anisotropy, characterized by the constants J and D, respectively. For a best-fit determination of J and D, the L band is modeled by an effective SH, and the effective SH concept extended such as to facilitate an accurate calculation of INS scattering intensities, overcoming difficulties with the dimension of the Hilbert space. The low-energy magnetism in CsFe8 is excellently described by the generic SH used. The two lowest states are characterized by a tunneling of the Neel vector, as found previously, while the higher-lying states are well described as rotational modes of the Neel vector.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, REVTEX4, to appear in PR

\u3cem\u3eGESAKU\u3c/em\u3e IN EDO FICTION AND AN ANNOTATED TRANSLATION OF \u3cem\u3e NENASHIGUSA YUME MONOGATARI \u3c/em\u3e BY SHIKITEI SANBA

In this thesis Iw ill examine the illustrated fiction gesaku of the Edo period (1600-1868), focusing on Shikitei Sanba (1776-1882) as a gesaku writer and translate one of his gesaku works, Nenashigusa yume monogatari, which was published in 1809. Nenushigusa yume monegaiari has been categorized as gôkan, which is a genre of gesaku literature