12,919 research outputs found
The impact of the air-fluorescence yield on the reconstructed shower parameters of ultra-high energy cosmic rays
An accurate knowledge of the fluorescence yield and its dependence on
atmospheric properties such as pressure, temperature or humidity is essential
to obtain a reliable measurement of the primary energy of cosmic rays in
experiments using the fluorescence technique. In this work, several sets of
fluorescence yield data (i.e. absolute value and quenching parameters) are
described and compared. A simple procedure to study the effect of the assumed
fluorescence yield on the reconstructed shower parameters (energy and shower
maximum depth) as a function of the primary features has been developed. As an
application, the effect of water vapor and temperature dependence of the
collisional cross section on the fluorescence yield and its impact on the
reconstruction of primary energy and shower maximum depth has been studied.Comment: Accepted in Astroparticle Physic
Los Invisibles
Examining the social, medical and cultural history of male homosexuality in Spain, this book looks at it from the time homosexuality came to be an issue of medical, legal and cultural concern. Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, "Los Invisibles" focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain
The effect of the Fluorescence Yield selection on the energy scales of Auger, HiRes and TA
The fluorescence yield data used for shower reconstruction in the Auger,
HiRes and TA experiments are different, not only in the overall absolute value
but also in the wavelength spectrum and the various atmospheric dependencies.
The effect on the energy reconstruction of using different fluorescence yield
parameterizations is discussed. In addition, the impact of a change in the
fluorescence spectrum depends on the optical efficiency of the telescopes. A
simple analytical procedure allows us to evaluate the combined effect of
fluorescence yield and optical efficiency showing a non-negligible deviation
between the energy scales of TA and Auger. However no relevant effect is found
in the comparison between HiRes and Auger. Finally we show that a similar
procedure could also be applied with real data.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, presented in the UHECR 2012 conferenc
I know your face but can’t remember your name:Age-related differences in the FNAME-12NL
OBJECTIVE: The Face-Name Associative Memory test (FNAME) has recently received attention as a test for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. So far, however, there has been no systematic investigation of the effects of aging. Here, we aimed to assess the extent to which the FNAME performance is modulated by normal ageing. METHOD: In a first step, we adapted the FNAME material to the Dutch population. In a second step, younger (n = 29) and older adults (n = 29) were compared on recall and recognition performance. RESULTS: Significant age effects on name recall were observed after the first exposure of new face-name pairs: younger adults remembered eight, whereas older adults remembered a mean of four out of twelve names. Although both age groups increased the number of recalled names with repeated face-name exposure, older adults did not catch up with the performance of the younger adults, and the age-effects remained stable. Despite of that, both age groups maintained their performance after a 30-min delay. Considering recognition, no age differences were demonstrated, and both age groups succeeded in the recognition of previously shown faces and names when presented along with distractors. CONCLUSIONS: This study presents for the first time the results of different age groups regarding cross-modal associative memory performance on the FNAME. The recall age effects support the hypothesis of age-related differences in associative memory. To use the FNAME as an early cognitive biomarker, further subscales are suggested to increase sensitivity and specificity in the clinical context
Why non-technical skills matter in surgery. New paradigms for surgical leaders
The surgical literature is paying more and more attention to the topic of soft or non-technical skills (NTS), defined as
those cognitive and social skills that characterize high-performing individuals and teams. NTS are essential in supporting
surgeons in dealing with unexpected situations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NTS have been considered crucial in
defining situation awareness, enhancing decision making, communicating among groups and teams, and fostering
leadership. With a “looking back and planning forward” approach, the current perspective aims at deepening the
contribution of NTS for surgeons to deal with the unexpected challenges posed by the COVID crisis, surgical emergencies,
the introduction of new technologies in clinical practice, to understand how such skills may help shape the surgical leaders
of the future
Steel heat treating: Mathematical modelling and numerical simulation of a problem arising in the automotive industry
We describe a mathematical model for the industrial heating and cooling processes of a steel workpiece representing the steering rack of an automobile. The goal of steel heat treating is to provide a hardened surface on critical parts of the workpiece while keeping the rest soft and ductile in order to reduce fatigue. The high hardness is due to the phase transformation of steel accompanying the rapid cooling. This work takes into account both heating-cooling stage and viscoplastic model. Once the general mathematical formulation is derived, we can perform some numerical simulations
Resistin Regulates Pituitary Lipid Metabolism and Inflammation In Vivo
The adipokine resistin is an insulin-antagonizing factor that also plays a regulatory role in inflammation, immunity, food intake, and gonadal function and also regulates growth hormone (GH) secretion in rat adenopituitary cells cultures with the adipokine. Although adipose tissue is the primary source of resistin, it is also expressed in other tissues, including the pituitary. The aim of this study is to investigate the possible action of resistin on the lipid metabolism in the pituitary gland in vivo (rats in two different nutritional status, fed and fast, treated with resistin on acute and a chronic way) and in vitro (adenopituitary cell cultures treated with the adipokine). Here, by a combination of in vivo and in vitro experimental models, we demonstrated that central acute and chronic administration of resistin enhance mRNA levels of the lipid metabolic enzymes which participated on lipolysis and moreover inhibiting mRNA levels of the lipid metabolic enzymes involved in lipogenesis. Taken together, our results demonstrate for the first time that resistin has a regulatory role on lipid metabolism in the pituitary gland providing a novel insight in relation to the mechanism by which this adipokine can participate in the integrated control of lipid metabolism
PANIC: the new panoramic NIR camera for Calar Alto
PANIC is a wide-field NIR camera, which is currently under development for
the Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain. It uses a mosaic of four Hawaii-2RG
detectors and covers the spectral range from 0.8-2.5 micron(z to K-band). The
field-of-view is 30x30 arcmin. This instrument can be used at the 2.2m
telescope (0.45arcsec/pixel, 0.5x0.5 degree FOV) and at the 3.5m telescope
(0.23arcsec/pixel, 0.25x0.25 degree FOV). The operating temperature is about
77K, achieved by liquid Nitrogen cooling. The cryogenic optics has three flat
folding mirrors with diameters up to 282 mm and nine lenses with diameters
between 130 mm and 255 mm. A compact filter unit can carry up to 19 filters
distributed over four filter wheels. Narrow band (1%) filters can be used. The
instrument has a diameter of 1.1 m and it is about 1 m long. The weight limit
of 400 kg at the 2.2m telescope requires a light-weight cryostat design. The
aluminium vacuum vessel and radiation shield have wall thicknesses of only 6 mm
and 3 mm respectively.Comment: This paper has been presented in the SPIE of Astronomical Telescopes
and Instrumentation 2008 in Marseille (France
Modulational and Parametric Instabilities of the Discrete Nonlinear Schr\"odinger Equation
We examine the modulational and parametric instabilities arising in a
non-autonomous, discrete nonlinear Schr{\"o}dinger equation setting. The
principal motivation for our study stems from the dynamics of Bose-Einstein
condensates trapped in a deep optical lattice. We find that under periodic
variations of the heights of the interwell barriers (or equivalently of the
scattering length), additionally to the modulational instability, a window of
parametric instability becomes available to the system. We explore this
instability through multiple-scale analysis and identify it numerically. Its
principal dynamical characteristic is that, typically, it develops over much
larger times than the modulational instability, a feature that is qualitatively
justified by comparison of the corresponding instability growth rates
Method for hue plane preserving color correction
Hue plane preserving color correction (HPPCC), introduced by Andersen and Hardeberg [Proceedings of the 13th Color and Imaging Conference (CIC) (2005), pp. 141–146], maps device-dependent color values (RGB) to colorimetric color values (XYZ) using a set of linear transforms, realized by white point preserving 3×33×3 matrices, where each transform is learned and applied in a subregion of color space, defined by two adjacent hue planes. The hue plane delimited subregions of camera RGB values are mapped to corresponding hue plane delimited subregions of estimated colorimetric XYZ values. Hue planes are geometrical half-planes, where each is defined by the neutral axis and a chromatic color in a linear color space. The key advantage of the HPPCC method is that, while offering an estimation accuracy of higher order methods, it maintains the linear colorimetric relations of colors in hue planes. As a significant result, it therefore also renders the colorimetric estimates invariant to exposure and shading of object reflection. In this paper, we present a new flexible and robust version of HPPCC using constrained least squares in the optimization, where the subregions can be chosen freely in number and position in order to optimize the results while constraining transform continuity at the subregion boundaries. The method is compared to a selection of other state-of-the-art characterization methods, and the results show that it outperforms the original HPPCC method
- …