Subtracting and Fitting Histograms using Profile Likelihood

It is known that many interesting signals expected at LHC are of unknown shape and strongly contaminated by background events. These signals will be dif cult to detect during the rst years of LHC operation due to the initial low luminosity. In this work, one presents a method of subtracting histograms based on the pro le likelihood function when the background is previously estimated by Monte Carlo events and one has low statistics. Estimators for the signal in each bin of the histogram difference are calculated so as limits for the signals with 68.3% of Con dence Level in a low statistics case when one has a exponential background and a Gaussian signal. The method can also be used to t histograms when the signal shape is known. Our results show a good performance and avoid the problem of negative values when subtracting histograms

Much or More? Experiments of Rationality and Spite with School Children

Copyright © 2014 North American Journal of Pyschology.In a competitive environment the maximization of self-interest and the minimization of the other's interest can be seen as the two faces of the same coin. However, these motivations can lead to very different behaviors. In order to understand how these are expressed, we designed an experiment to measure the ability of children and teenagers to react to stimuli that induce behavior to act as a rational player (maximization of self interest) or as a spiteful player (minimization of other's interest). Each player faced the following dilemma: maximizing pay-off and incurring the risk of having a lower pay-off; or alternatively guaranteeing one’s own pay-off was not smaller than the opponent’s pay-off. A prize was attributed proportionally to the pay-off (Treatment 1) or to the player with highest pay-off (Treatment 2), which meant that the optimal behavior was different for each treatment. We performed experiments with 398 Portuguese children and teenagers and found evidence that younger children tended to be maximizers (in both variants) and that teenagers tended towards rational behavior when it was best for them and towards spiteful behavior when the latter was more advantageous

Lidar temperature series in the middle atmosphere as a reference data set – Part 1: Improved retrievals and a 20-year cross-validation of two co-located French lidars

The objective of this paper and its companion (Wing et al., 2018) is to show that ground-based lidar temperatures are a stable, accurate, and precise data set for use in validating satellite temperatures at high vertical resolution. Long-term lidar observations of the middle atmosphere have been conducted at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP), located in southern France (43.93°&thinsp;N, 5.71°&thinsp;E), since 1978. Making use of 20 years of high-quality co-located lidar measurements, we have shown that lidar temperatures calculated using the Rayleigh technique at 532&thinsp;nm are statistically identical to lidar temperatures calculated from the non-absorbing 355&thinsp;nm channel of a differential absorption lidar (DIAL) system. This result is of interest to members of the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) ozone lidar community seeking to produce validated temperature products. Additionally, we have addressed previously published concerns of lidar–satellite relative warm bias in comparisons of upper-mesospheric and lower-thermospheric (UMLT) temperature profiles. We detail a data treatment algorithm which minimizes known errors due to data selection procedures, a priori choices, and initialization parameters inherent in the lidar retrieval. Our algorithm results in a median cooling of the lidar-calculated absolute temperature profile by 20&thinsp;K at 90&thinsp;km altitude with respect to the standard OHP NDACC lidar temperature algorithm. The confidence engendered by the long-term cross-validation of two independent lidars and the improved lidar temperature data set is exploited in Wing et al. (2018) for use in multi-year satellite validations.</p

Assessement of tensile strength of graphites by the iosipescu coupon test

Polycrystalline graphites are widely used in the metallurgical, nuclear and aerospace industries. Graphites are particulated composites manufactured with a mixture of coke with pitch, and changes in relative proportions of these materials cause modifications in their mechanical properties. Uniaxial tension tests must be avoided for mechanical characterization in this kind of brittle material, due to difficulties in making the relatively long specimens and premature damages caused during testing set-up. On other types of tests, e.g. bending tests, the specimens are submitted to combined stress states (normal and transverse shear stresses). The Iosipescu shear test, is performed in a beam with two 90° opposite notches machined at the mid-length of the specimens, by applying two forces couples, so that a pure and uniform shear stress state is generated at the cross section between the two notches. When a material is isotropic and brittle, a failure at 45° in relation to the beam long axis can take place, i.e., the tensile normal stress acts parallel to the lateral surface of the notches, controls the failure and the result of the shear test is numerically equivalent to the tensile strength. This work has evaluated a graphite of the type used in rocket nozzles by the Iosipescu test and the resulted stress, ~11 MPa, was found to be equal to the tensile strength. Thus, the tensile strength can be evaluated just by a single and simple experiment, thus avoiding complicated machining of specimen and testing set-up