6,883 research outputs found
Discrimination of unique biological communities in the Mississippi lignite belt
Small scale hardcopy LANDSAT prints were manually interpreted and color infrared aerial photography was obtained in an effort to identify and map large contiguous areas of old growth hardwood stands within Mississippi's lignite belt which do not exhibit signs of recent disturbance by agriculture, grazing, timber harvesting, fire, or any natural catastrophe, and which may, therefore, contain unique or historical ecological habitat types. An information system using land cover classes derived from digital LANDSAT data and containing information on geology, hydrology, soils, and cultural activities was developed. Using computer-assisted land cover classifications, all hardwood remnants in the study area which are subject to possible disturbance from surface mining were determined. Twelve rare plants were also identified by botanists
Coping with speaker-related variation via abstract phonemic categories
Listeners can cope with considerable variation in the way that different speakers talk. We argue here that they can do so because of a process of phonological abstraction in the speech-recognition system. We review evidence that listeners adjust the bounds of phonemic categories after only very limited exposure to a deviant realisation of a given phoneme. This learning can be talker-specific and is stable over time; further, the learning generalizes to previously unheard words containing the deviant phoneme. Together these results suggest that the learning involves adjustment of prelexical phonemic representations which mediate between the speech signal and the mental lexicon during word recognition. We argue that such an abstraction process is inconsistent with claims made by some recent models of language processing that the mental lexicon consists solely of multiple detailed traces of acoustic episodes. Simulations with a purely episodic model without functional prelexical abstraction confirm that such a model cannot account for the evidence on lexical generalization of perceptual learning. We conclude that abstract phonemic categories form a necessary part of lexical access, and that the ability to store talker-specific knowledge about those categories provides listeners with the means to deal with cross-talker variation
Resonant Tidal Excitations of Inertial Modes in Coalescing Neutron Star Binaries
We study the effect of resonant tidal excitation of inertial modes in neutron
stars during binary inspiral. For spin frequencies less than 100 Hz, the phase
shift in the gravitational waveform associated with the resonance is small and
does not affect the matched filtering scheme for gravitational wave detection.
For higher spin frequencies, the phase shift can become significant. Most of
the resonances take place at orbital frequencies comparable to the spin
frequency, and thus significant phase shift may occur only in the
high-frequency band (hundreds of Hertz) of gravitational wave. The exception is
a single odd-paity mode, which can be resonantly excited for misaligned
spin-orbit inclinations, and may occur in the low-frequency band (tens of
Hertz) of gravitational wave and induce significant (>> 1 radian) phase shift.Comment: Minor changes. 6 pages. Phys. Rev. D. in press (volume 74, issue 2
Language-universal constraints on the segmentation of English
Two word-spotting experiments are reported that examine whether the Possible-Word Constraint (PWC) [1] is a language-specific or language-universal strategy for the segmentation of continuous speech. The PWC disfavours parses which leave an impossible residue between the end of a candidate word and a known boundary. The experiments examined cases where the residue was either a CV syllable with a lax vowel, or a CVC syllable with a schwa. Although neither syllable context is a possible word in English, word-spotting in both contexts was easier than with a context consisting of a single consonant. The PWC appears to be language-universal rather than language-specific
A Simulation of the LISA Data Stream from Galactic White Dwarf Binaries
Gravitational radiation from the galactic population of white dwarf binaries
is expected to produce a background signal in the LISA frequency band. At
frequencies below 1 mHz, this signal is expected to be confusion-limited and
has been approximated as gaussian noise. At frequencies above about 5 mHz, the
signal will consist of separable individual sources. We have produced a
simulation of the LISA data stream from a population of 90k galactic binaries
in the frequency range between 1 - 5 mHz. This signal is compared with the
simulated signal from globular cluster populations of binaries. Notable
features of the simulation as well as potential data analysis schemes for
extracting information are presented.Comment: Submitted to QC
Estimating tropical forest biomass with a combination of SAR image texture and Landsat TM data:an assessment of predictions between regions
Positive and negative inïŹuences of the lexicon on phonemic decision-making
Lexical knowledge influences how human listeners make decisions about speech sounds. Positive lexical effects (faster responses to target sounds in words than in nonwords) are robust across several laboratory tasks, while negative effects (slower responses to targets in more word-like nonwords than in less word-like nonwords) have been found in phonetic decision tasks but not phoneme monitoring tasks. The present experiments tested whether negative lexical effects are therefore a task-specific consequence of the forced choice required in phonetic decision. We compared phoneme monitoring and phonetic decision performance using the same Dutch materials in each task. In both experiments there were positive lexical effects, but no negative lexical effects. We observe that in all studies showing negative lexical effects, the materials were made by cross-splicing, which meant that they contained perceptual evidence supporting the lexically-consistent phonemes. Lexical knowledge seems to influence phonemic decision-making only when there is evidence for the lexically-consistent phoneme in the speech signal
LISA Response Function and Parameter Estimation
We investigate the response function of LISA and consider the adequacy of its
commonly used approximation in the high-frequency range of the observational
band. We concentrate on monochromatic binary systems, such as white dwarf
binaries. We find that above a few mHz the approxmation starts becoming
increasingly inaccurate. The transfer function introduces additional amplitude
and phase modulations in the measured signal that influence parameter estmation
and, if not properly accounted for, lead to losses of signal-to-noise ratio.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, amaldi 5 conference proceeding
A Bayesian approach to the follow-up of candidate gravitational wave signals
Ground-based gravitational wave laser interferometers (LIGO, GEO-600, Virgo
and Tama-300) have now reached high sensitivity and duty cycle. We present a
Bayesian evidence-based approach to the search for gravitational waves, in
particular aimed at the followup of candidate events generated by the analysis
pipeline. We introduce and demonstrate an efficient method to compute the
evidence and odds ratio between different models, and illustrate this approach
using the specific case of the gravitational wave signal generated during the
inspiral phase of binary systems, modelled at the leading quadrupole Newtonian
order, in synthetic noise. We show that the method is effective in detecting
signals at the detection threshold and it is robust against (some types of)
instrumental artefacts. The computational efficiency of this method makes it
scalable to the analysis of all the triggers generated by the analysis
pipelines to search for coalescing binaries in surveys with ground-based
interferometers, and to a whole variety of signal waveforms, characterised by a
larger number of parameters.Comment: 9 page
PlagioclaseâSaturated Melt Hygrothermobarometry and PlagioclaseâMelt Equilibria Using Machine Learning
Compositions of plagioclaseâmelt pairs are commonly used to constrain temperatures (T), dissolved water contents (H2O) and pressures (P) of preâeruptive magma storage and transport. However, previous plagioclaseâbased thermometers, hygrometers, and barometers can have significant errors, leading to imprecise reconstructions of conditions during plagioclase growth. Here, we explore whether we can refine existing plagioclaseâbased hygrothermobarometers with either plagioclaseâmelt or meltâonly chemistry (±T/H2O), calibrated using random forest machine learning on experimental petrology data (n = 1,152). We find that both the plagioclaseâmelt and meltâonly models return similar crossâvalidation rootâmeanâsquare errors (RMSEs), as the melt holds most of the PâTâH2O information rather than the plagioclase. T/H2Oâdependent melt models have test set RMSEs of 25°C, 0.70 wt.% and 76 MPa for temperature, H2O content and pressure, respectively, while T/H2Oâindependent models have RMSEs of 38°C, 0.97 wt.% and 91 MPa. The melt thermometer and hygrometer are applicable to a wide range of plagioclaseâbearing melts at temperatures between 664 and 1355°C, and with H2O concentrations up to 11.2 wt.%, while the melt barometer is suitable for pressures of â€500 MPa. An updated plagioclaseâmelt equilibrium model has also been calibrated, allowing the equilibrium anorthite content to be predicted with an error of 5.8 mol%. The new PâTâH2OâAn models were applied to matrix glasses and melt inclusions from the 1980 Mount St Helens (USA) and 2014â2015 Holuhraun (Iceland) eruptions, corroborating previous independent estimates and observations. Models are available at https://github.com/kyraâcutler/PlagâsaturatedâmeltâPâTâH2OâAn, enabling assessment of plagioclaseâmelt equilibrium and characterization of lastâequilibrated PâTâH2O conditions of plagioclaseâsaturated magmas
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