Wedge immersed thermistor bolometers

An immersed thermistor bolometer for the detection of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared radiation is described. Two types of immersed bolometers are discussed. The immersion of thermistor flakes in a lens, or half immersed by optical contact on a lens, is examined. Lens materials are evaluated for optimum immersion including fused aluminum oxide, beryllium oxide, and germanium. The application of the bolometer to instruments in which the entrance pupil of the immersion optics has a high aspect ratio is considered

Wedge immersed thermistor bolometer measures infrared radiation

Wedge immersed-thermistor bolometer measures infrared radiation in the atmosphere. The thermistor flakes are immersed by optical contact on a wedge-shaped germanium lens whose narrow dimension is clamped between two complementary wedge-shaped germanium blocks bonded with a suitable adhesive

Observation of a nanophase segregation in LiCl aqueous solutions from Transient Grating Experiments

Transient Grating experiments performed on supercooled LiCl, RH2O solutions with R>6 reveal the existence of a strong, short time, extra signal which superposes to the normal signal observed for the R=6 solution and other glass forming systems. This extra signal shows up below 190 K, its shape and the associated timescale depend only on temperature, while its intensity increases with R. We show that the origin of this signal is a phase separation between clusters with a low solute concentration and the remaining, more concentrated, solution. Our analysis demonstrates that these clusters have a nanometer size and a composition which are rather temperature independent, while increasing R simply increases the number of these clusters.Comment: 19 pages+ 8 figures+ 2 table

Ground-Level Intelligence: Action-Oriented Representation and the Dynamics of the Background

First paragraph: Studies of embodied intelligence have often tended to focus on the essentially responsive aspects of bodily expertise (for example, catching a ball once it has been hit into the air). But skilled sportsmen and sportswomen, actors and actresses, dancers, orators, and other performers often execute ritual-like gestures or other fixed action routines as performance-optimizing elements in their pre-performance preparations, especially when daunting or unfamiliar conditions are anticipated. For example, a recent movie (The King's Speech) and a book of memories (Logue and Conradi, 2010) have revealed that, just before broadcasting his historic announcement that the United Kingdom was entering the Second World War, King George VI furiously repeated certain tongue twisters in a resolute effort to overcome his relentless stutter. Such ritualized actions don't merely change the causal relations between performers and their physical environments (although this may well be part of their function); they provide performers with the practical scaffolds that summon more favourable contexts for their accomplishments, by uncovering viable landscapes for effective action rather than unassailable barricades of frightening obstacles. In other words, while the kinds of embodied skills that have occupied many recent theorists serve to attune behaviour to an actual context of activity, whether that context is favourable or not, preparatory embodied routines actively refer to certain potential (and thus non-actual) contexts of a favourable nature that those routines themselves help to bring about, indicating the possibilities of actions disclosed by the desired context. As we shall see, this sort of transformative event, which is exemplified by, but not confined to, the ritualized gestures and routines of skilled performers, is a regular occurrence in everyday skilled activity, not the crowning achievement of a few talented individuals; so the capacity in question belongs centrally to our ordinary suite of bodily skills. The theoretical ramifications of that embodied capacity are the topic of this paper

Unexpected Effect of Internal Degrees of Freedom on Transverse Phonons in Supercooled Liquids

We show experimentally that in a supercooled liquid composed of molecules with internal degrees of freedom the internal modes contribute to the frequency dependent shear viscosity and damping of transverse phonons, which results in an additional broadening of the transverse Brillouin lines. Earlier, only the effect of internal modes on the frequency dependent bulk viscosity and damping of longitudinal phonons was observed and explained theoretically in the limit of weak coupling of internal degrees of freedom to translational motion. A new theory is needed to describe this new effect. We also demonstrate, that the contributions of structural relaxation and internal processes to the width of the Brillouin lines can be separated by measurements under high pressure

Considering the role of cognitive control in expert performance

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ (1986) influential phenomenological analysis of skill acquisition proposes that expert performance is guided by non-cognitive responses which are fast, effortless and apparently intuitive in nature. Although this model has been criticised (e.g., by Breivik Journal of Philosophy of Sport, 34, 116–134 2007, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 40, 85–106 2013; Eriksen 2010; Montero Inquiry:An interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 53, 105–122 2010; Montero and Evans 2011) for over-emphasising the role that intuition plays in facilitating skilled performance, it does recognise that on occasions (e.g., when performance goes awry for some reason) a form of ‘detached deliberative rationality’ may be used by experts to improve their performance. However, Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) see no role for calculative problem solving or deliberation (i.e., drawing on rules or mental representations) when performance is going well. In the current paper, we draw on empirical evidence, insights from athletes, and phenomenological description to argue that ‘continuous improvement’ (i.e., the phenomenon whereby certain skilled performers appear to be capable of increasing their proficiency even though they are already experts; Toner and Moran 2014) among experts is mediated by cognitive (or executive) control in three distinct sporting situations (i.e., in training, during pre-performance routines, and while engaged in on-line skill execution). We conclude by arguing that Sutton et al. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42, 78–103 (2011) ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ (AIR) approach may help to elucidate the process by which expert performers achieve continuous improvement through analytical/mindful behaviour during training and competition

Distance Oracles for Time-Dependent Networks

We present the first approximate distance oracle for sparse directed networks with time-dependent arc-travel-times determined by continuous, piecewise linear, positive functions possessing the FIFO property. Our approach precomputes $(1+\epsilon)-$approximate distance summaries from selected landmark vertices to all other vertices in the network. Our oracle uses subquadratic space and time preprocessing, and provides two sublinear-time query algorithms that deliver constant and $(1+\sigma)-$approximate shortest-travel-times, respectively, for arbitrary origin-destination pairs in the network, for any constant $\sigma > \epsilon$. Our oracle is based only on the sparsity of the network, along with two quite natural assumptions about travel-time functions which allow the smooth transition towards asymmetric and time-dependent distance metrics.Comment: A preliminary version appeared as Technical Report ECOMPASS-TR-025 of EU funded research project eCOMPASS (http://www.ecompass-project.eu/). An extended abstract also appeared in the 41st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2014, track-A