When asking ‘what’ and ‘how’ helps you win: mimicry of interrogative terms facilitates successful online negotiations

Strategic word mimicry during negotiations facilitates better outcomes. We explore mimicry of specific word categories and perceptions of rapport, trust, and liking as underlying mechanisms. Dyads took part in an online negotiation exercise in which word mimicry was manipulated: participants were instructed to mimic each other’s words (both-mimic), one participant mimicked the other (half-mimic) or neither participant mimicked (neither-mimic). When given a simple instruction to mimic their partner, participants mimicked both the style (personal pronouns, adverbs, linguistic style, interrogative terms) and the content (affiliation terms, power terms, and assents) of their partner’s messages. Mimicry was associated with greater joint and individual points gain and perceptions of rapport from the mimicked partner. Further, mimicry of interrogative terms (e.g., how, why) mediated positive effects of mimicry upon negotiation outcomes, suggesting the coordination of question asking between negotiators is an important strategy to create beneficial interactions and add value in negotiations

On relativistic elements of reality

Several arguments have been proposed some years ago, attempting to prove the impossibility of defining Lorentz-invariant elements of reality. I find that a sufficient condition for the existence of elements of reality, introduced in these proofs, seems to be used also as a necessary condition. I argue that Lorentz-invariant elements of reality can be defined but, as Vaidman pointed out, they won't satisfy the so-called product rule. In so doing I obtain algebraic constraints on elements of reality associated with a maximal set of commuting Hermitian operators.Comment: Clarifications, reference added; published versio

Bounds on the Complexity of Halfspace Intersections when the Bounded Faces have Small Dimension

We study the combinatorial complexity of D-dimensional polyhedra defined as the intersection of n halfspaces, with the property that the highest dimension of any bounded face is much smaller than D. We show that, if d is the maximum dimension of a bounded face, then the number of vertices of the polyhedron is O(n^d) and the total number of bounded faces of the polyhedron is O(n^d^2). For inputs in general position the number of bounded faces is O(n^d). For any fixed d, we show how to compute the set of all vertices, how to determine the maximum dimension of a bounded face of the polyhedron, and how to compute the set of bounded faces in polynomial time, by solving a polynomial number of linear programs

An Automated Method for the Detection and Extraction of HI Self-Absorption in High-Resolution 21cm Line Surveys

We describe algorithms that detect 21cm line HI self-absorption (HISA) in large data sets and extract it for analysis. Our search method identifies HISA as spatially and spectrally confined dark HI features that appear as negative residuals after removing larger-scale emission components with a modified CLEAN algorithm. Adjacent HISA volume-pixels (voxels) are grouped into features in (l,b,v) space, and the HI brightness of voxels outside the 3-D feature boundaries is smoothly interpolated to estimate the absorption amplitude and the unabsorbed HI emission brightness. The reliability and completeness of our HISA detection scheme have been tested extensively with model data. We detect most features over a wide range of sizes, linewidths, amplitudes, and background levels, with poor detection only where the absorption brightness temperature amplitude is weak, the absorption scale approaches that of the correlated noise, or the background level is too faint for HISA to be distinguished reliably from emission gaps. False detection rates are very low in all parts of the parameter space except at sizes and amplitudes approaching those of noise fluctuations. Absorption measurement biases introduced by the method are generally small and appear to arise from cases of incomplete HISA detection. This paper is the third in a series examining HISA at high angular resolution. A companion paper (Paper II) uses our HISA search and extraction method to investigate the cold atomic gas distribution in the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey.Comment: 39 pages, including 14 figure pages; to appear in June 10 ApJ, volume 626; figure quality significantly reduced for astro-ph; for full resolution, please see http://www.ras.ucalgary.ca/~gibson/hisa/cgps1_survey

High-precision optical-frequency dissemination on branching optical-fiber networks

We present a technique for the simultaneous dissemination of high-precision optical-frequency signals to multiple independent remote sites on a branching optical-fiber network. The technique corrects optical-fiber length fluctuations at the output of the link, rather than at the input as is conventional. As the transmitted optical signal remains unaltered until it reaches the remote site, it can be transmitted simultaneously to multiple remote sites on an arbitrarily complex branching network. This technique maintains the same servo-loop bandwidth limit as in conventional techniques and is compatible with active telecommunication links.Sascha W. Schediwy, David Gozzard, Kenneth G. H. Baldwin, Brian J. Orr, R. Bruce Warrington, Guido Aben and Andre N. Luite

Radio polarimetric imaging of the interstellar medium: magnetic field and diffuse ionized gas structure near the W3/W4/W5/HB3 complex

We have used polarimetric imaging to study the magneto-ionic medium of the Galaxy, obtaining 1420 MHz images with an angular resolution of 1' over more than 40 square-degrees of sky around the W3/W4/W5/HB3 HII region/SNR complex in the Perseus Arm. Features detected in polarization angle are imposed on the linearly polarized Galactic synchrotron background emission by Faraday rotation arising in foreground ionized gas having an emission measure as low as 1 cm^{-6} pc. Several new remarkable phenomena have been identified, including: mottled polarization arising from random fluctuations in a magneto-ionic screen that we identify with a medium in the Perseus Arm, probably in the vicinity of the HII regions themselves; depolarization arising from very high rotation measures (several times 10^3 rad m^{-2}) and rotation measure gradients due to the dense, turbulent environs of the HII regions; highly ordered features spanning up to several degrees; and an extended influence of the HII regions beyond the boundaries defined by earlier observations. In particular, the effects of an extended, low-density ionized halo around the HII region W4 are evident, probably an example of the extended HII envelopes postulated as the origin of weak recombination-line emission detected from the Galactic ridge. Our polarization observations can be understood if the uniform magnetic field component in this envelope scales with the square-root of electron density and is 20 microG at the edge of the depolarized region around W4, although this is probably an over-estimate since the random field component will have a significant effect.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures (7 jpeg and 1 postscript), accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

An experimental test of non-local realism

Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of 'realism' - a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. But quantum physics has shattered some of our cornerstone beliefs. According to Bell's theorem, any theory that is based on the joint assumption of realism and locality (meaning that local events cannot be affected by actions in space-like separated regions) is at variance with certain quantum predictions. Experiments with entangled pairs of particles have amply confirmed these quantum predictions, thus rendering local realistic theories untenable. Maintaining realism as a fundamental concept would therefore necessitate the introduction of 'spooky' actions that defy locality. Here we show by both theory and experiment that a broad and rather reasonable class of such non-local realistic theories is incompatible with experimentally observable quantum correlations. In the experiment, we measure previously untested correlations between two entangled photons, and show that these correlations violate an inequality proposed by Leggett for non-local realistic theories. Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.Comment: Minor corrections to the manuscript, the final inequality and all its conclusions do not change; description of corrections (Corrigendum) added as new Appendix III; Appendix II replaced by a shorter derivatio

The "Unromantic Pictures" of Quantum Theory

I am concerned with two views of quantum mechanics that John S. Bell called ``unromantic'': spontaneous wave function collapse and Bohmian mechanics. I discuss some of their merits and report about recent progress concerning extensions to quantum field theory and relativity. In the last section, I speculate about an extension of Bohmian mechanics to quantum gravity.Comment: 37 pages LaTeX, no figures; written for special volume of J. Phys. A in honor of G.C. Ghirard

The Synthesis Telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory

We describe an aperture synthesis radio telescope optimized for studies of the Galactic interstellar medium (ISM), providing the ability to image extended structures with high angular resolution over wide fields. The telescope produces images of atomic hydrogen emission using the 21-cm HI spectral line, and, simultaneously, continuum emission in two bands centred at 1420 MHz and 408 MHz, including linearly polarized emission at 1420 MHz, with synthesized beams of 1 degree and 3.4 degrees at the respective frequencies.Comment: Accepted for publication by Astronomy and Astrophysics, Supplement Serie

HARP/ACSIS: A submillimetre spectral imaging system on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

This paper describes a new Heterodyne Array Receiver Programme (HARP) and Auto-Correlation Spectral Imaging System (ACSIS) that have recently been installed and commissioned on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The 16-element focal-plane array receiver, operating in the submillimetre from 325 to 375 GHz, offers high (three-dimensional) mapping speeds, along with significant improvements over single-detector counterparts in calibration and image quality. Receiver temperatures are $\sim$120 K across the whole band and system temperatures of $\sim$300K are reached routinely under good weather conditions. The system includes a single-sideband filter so these are SSB figures. Used in conjunction with ACSIS, the system can produce large-scale maps rapidly, in one or more frequency settings, at high spatial and spectral resolution. Fully-sampled maps of size 1 square degree can be observed in under 1 hour. The scientific need for array receivers arises from the requirement for programmes to study samples of objects of statistically significant size, in large-scale unbiased surveys of galactic and extra-galactic regions. Along with morphological information, the new spectral imaging system can be used to study the physical and chemical properties of regions of interest. Its three-dimensional imaging capabilities are critical for research into turbulence and dynamics. In addition, HARP/ACSIS will provide highly complementary science programmes to wide-field continuum studies, and produce the essential preparatory work for submillimetre interferometers such as the SMA and ALMA.Comment: MNRAS Accepted 2009 July 2. 18 pages, 25 figures and 6 table