107,023 research outputs found
Revised Results for Non-thermal Recombination Flare Hard X-Ray Emission
Brown and Mallik (BM) recently showed that, for hot sources, recombination of
non-thermal electrons (NTR) onto highly ionised heavy ions is not negligible
compared to non-thermal bremsstrahlung (NTB) as a source of flare hard X-rays
(HXRs) and so should be included in modelling non-thermal HXR flare emission.
In view of major discrepancies between BM results for the THERMAL continua and
those of the Chianti code and of RHESSI solar data, we critically re-examine
and correct the BM analysis and modify the conclusions concerning the
importance of NTR. Although the analytic Kramers expression used by BM is
correct for the purely hydrogenic recombination cross section, the heuristic
expressions used by BM to extend the Kramers expression beyond the `bare
nucleus' case to which it applies had serious errors. BM results have therefore
been recalculated using corrected expressions, which have been validated
against the results of detailed calculations. At T ~ 10-30 MK the dominant ions
are Fe 22+, 23+, 24+ for which BM erroneously overestimated NTR emission by
around an order of magnitude. Contrary to the BM claim, NTR in hot flare
plasmas does NOT dominate over NTB, although in some cases it can be comparable
and so still very important in inversions of photon spectra to derive electron
spectra, especially as NTR includes sharp edge features. The BM claim of
dominance of NTR over NTB in deka-keV emission is incorrect due to a serious
error in their analysis. However, the NTR contribution can still be large
enough to demand inclusion in spectral fitting, the spectral edges having
potentially serious effects on inversion of HXR spectra to infer fast electron
spectra.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
Simulation of an automatically-controlled STOL aircraft in a microwave landing system multipath environment
The simulated response is described of a STOL aircraft to Microwave Landing System (MLS) multipath errors during final approach and touchdown. The MLS azimuth, elevation, and DME multipath errors were computed for a relatively severe multipath environment at Crissy Field California, utilizing an MLS multipath simulation at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. A NASA/Ames six-degree-of-freedom simulation of an automatically-controlled deHavilland C-8A STOL aircraft was used to determine the response to these errors. The results show that the aircraft response to all of the Crissy Field MLS multipath errors was small. The small MLS azimuth and elevation multipath errors did not result in any discernible aircraft motion, and the aircraft response to the relatively large (200-ft (61-m) peak) DME multipath was noticeable but small
Note on exponential families of distributions
We show that an arbitrary probability distribution can be represented in
exponential form. In physical contexts, this implies that the equilibrium
distribution of any classical or quantum dynamical system is expressible in
grand canonical form.Comment: 5 page
Designs on the Web: A case study of online learning for design students
The De Montfort University Electronic Campus initiative started in September 1999. Web‐based learning resources and support have been provided for over 3,000 students via a portfolio of thirty projects ranging across all levels of the university and within every faculty. This paper focuses on one aspect of this initiative: the development of online teaching and learning materials to support first‐year IT modules for students of art and design. An undergraduate module has been converted from traditional, face‐to‐face, delivery to a hybrid combination of Web‐based and studio‐based work in accordance with Laurillard's conversational framework. In the first year of use all the new material has been made available on a pilot basis to a group of 440 students in parallel with conventional lectures and seminars. All the students have had access to the online resources; some students have used them, but some have not. Data on student expectations collected prior to starting on the module are compared with student feedback gathered at the end of the module and student performance data across the two mode's of presentation are compared to establish the relative effectiveness of each approach. In addition the paper reviews the resource implications of developing, delivering and supporting online learning and discusses some of the barriers to implementation that were encountered and overcome
Question-answering, relevance feedback and summarisation : TREC-9 interactive track report
In this paper we report on the effectiveness of query-biased summaries for a question-answering task. Our summarisation system presents searchers with short summaries of documents, composed of a series of highly matching sentences extracted from the documents. These summaries are also used as evidence for a query expansion algorithm to test the use of summaries as evidence for interactive and automatic query expansion
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