13,492 research outputs found
Websites as Facilities Under ADA Title III
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires public accommodationsâprivate entities that offer goods or services to the publicâto be accessible to individuals with disabilities. There is an ongoing debate about whether Title III applies to websites that offer services to the public, but this debate may be resolved in the coming years by litigation or Department of Justice regulations. Assuming for the sake of argument that Title III will eventually be applied to websites, the next inquiry is what that application should look like. The regulatory definition of âfacilitiesâ should be amended to include nonphysical places of public accommodations. This change would open the door to a multilayered approach to accessible websites, wherein existing websites are subject to relatively lax requirements but new and altered websites are subject to stricter requirements
Fusion of conformal interfaces
We study the fusion of conformal interfaces in the c=1 conformal field
theory. We uncover an elegant structure reminiscent of that of black holes in
supersymmetric theories. The role of the BPS black holes is played by
topological interfaces, which (a) minimize the entropy function, (b) fix
through an attractor mechanism one or both of the bulk radii, and (c) are
(marginally) stable under splitting. One significant difference is that the
conserved charges are logarithms of natural numbers, rather than vectors in a
charge lattice, as for BPS states. Besides potential applications to
condensed-matter physics and number theory, these results point to the
existence of large solution-generating algebras in string theory.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures. Minor clarifications in v2. Sign Mistakes
corrected and reference added in v
Superconformal defects in the tricritical Ising model
We study superconformal defect lines in the tricritical Ising model in 2
dimensions. By the folding trick, a superconformal defect is mapped to a
superconformal boundary of the N=1 superconformal unitary minimal model of
c=7/5 with D_6-E_6 modular invariant. It turns out that the complete set of the
boundary states of c=7/5 D_6-E_6 model cannot be interpreted as the consistent
set of superconformal defects in the tricritical Ising model since it does not
contain the "no defect" boundary state. Instead, we find a set of 18 consistent
superconformal defects including "no defect" and satisfying the Cardy
condition. This set also includes some defects which are not purely
transmissive or purely reflective.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures. v2: typos corrected. v3: clarification about
spin structure aligned theory added, references adde
The SDSS Galaxy Angular Two-Point Correlation Function
We present the galaxy two-point angular correlation function for galaxies
selected from the seventh data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The
galaxy sample was selected with -band apparent magnitudes between 17 and 21;
and we measure the correlation function for the full sample as well as for the
four magnitude ranges: 17-18, 18-19, 19-20, and 20-21. We update the flag
criteria to select a clean galaxy catalog and detail specific tests that we
perform to characterize systematic effects, including the effects of seeing,
Galactic extinction, and the overall survey uniformity. Notably, we find that
optimally we can use observed regions with seeing < 1\farcs5, and -band
extinction < 0.13 magnitudes, smaller than previously published results.
Furthermore, we confirm that the uniformity of the SDSS photometry is minimally
affected by the stripe geometry. We find that, overall, the two-point angular
correlation function can be described by a power law, with , over the range
0\fdg005--10\degr. We also find similar relationships for the four
magnitude subsamples, but the amplitude within the same angular interval for
the four subsamples is found to decrease with fainter magnitudes, in agreement
with previous results. We find that the systematic signals are well below the
galaxy angular correlation function for angles less than approximately
5\degr, which limits the modeling of galaxy angular correlations on larger
scales. Finally, we present our custom, highly parallelized two-point
correlation code that we used in this analysis.Comment: 22 pages, 17 figures, accepted by MNRA
Marker based Thermal-Inertial Localization for Aerial Robots in Obscurant Filled Environments
For robotic inspection tasks in known environments fiducial markers provide a
reliable and low-cost solution for robot localization. However, detection of
such markers relies on the quality of RGB camera data, which degrades
significantly in the presence of visual obscurants such as fog and smoke. The
ability to navigate known environments in the presence of obscurants can be
critical for inspection tasks especially, in the aftermath of a disaster.
Addressing such a scenario, this work proposes a method for the design of
fiducial markers to be used with thermal cameras for the pose estimation of
aerial robots. Our low cost markers are designed to work in the long wave
infrared spectrum, which is not affected by the presence of obscurants, and can
be affixed to any object that has measurable temperature difference with
respect to its surroundings. Furthermore, the estimated pose from the fiducial
markers is fused with inertial measurements in an extended Kalman filter to
remove high frequency noise and error present in the fiducial pose estimates.
The proposed markers and the pose estimation method are experimentally
evaluated in an obscurant filled environment using an aerial robot carrying a
thermal camera.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Published in International Symposium on Visual
Computing 201
By Power Defined: Women in the Superintendency
Women who are successful in powerful positions define power as power to get things done with others, something more easily done for women than for men because women do not view themselves as powerful
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