8,517 research outputs found
Interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejections observed by MESSENGER and Venus Express
Interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) observed by the MESSENGER (MES)
and Venus Express (VEX) spacecraft have been catalogued and analysed. The ICMEs
were identified by a relatively smooth rotation of the magnetic field direction
consistent with a flux rope structure, coinciding with a relatively enhanced
magnetic field strength. A total of 35 ICMEs were found in the surveyed MES
data (primarily from March 2007 to April 2012), and 84 ICMEs in the surveyed
VEX data (from May 2006 to December 2013). The ICME flux rope configurations
have been determined. Ropes with northward leading edges were about four times
more common than ropes with southward leading edges, in agreement with a
previously established solar cycle dependence. Ropes with low inclinations to
the solar equatorial plane were about four times more common than ropes with
high inclinations, possibly an observational effect. Left and right-handed
ropes were observed in almost equal numbers. In addition, data from MES, VEX,
STEREO-A, STEREO-B and ACE were examined for multipoint signatures of the
catalogued ICMEs. For spacecraft separations below 15{\deg} in heliocentric
longitude, the second spacecraft observed the ICME flux rope in 82% of cases;
this percentage dropped to 49% for separations between 15 and 30{\deg}, to 18%
for separations between 30 and 45{\deg}, and to 12% for separations between 45
and 60{\deg}. As spacecraft separation increased, it became increasingly likely
that only the sheath and not the flux rope of the ICME was observed, in
agreement with the notion that ICME flux ropes are smaller in longitudinal
extent than the shocks or discontinuities that they often drive. Furthermore,
this study has identified 23 ICMEs observed by pairs of spacecraft close to
radial alignment. A detailed analysis of these events could lead to a better
understanding of how ICMEs evolve during propagation.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
Magnetomechanical effects in textured polycrystalline Tb76Dy24
Uniaxial stress-strain measurements were performed on polycrystalline Tb76Dy24 alloys which exhibit "giant magnetostriction" at cryogenic temperatures. The Young's moduli were reduced by up to a factor of five at 77 K, in comparison to their values at 300 K. We attribute this reduction to a mechanical compliance from domain rotation. Large mechanical hysteresis is also found in nominally elastic stress-strain curves measured below the Curie temperature. Hysteretic curves from 0 to 25 MPa demonstrate up to 19% dissipation of the applied mechanical energy. The anisotropy of thermal expansion was also measured and used as a parameter for the degree of crystallographic texture. This anisotropy was correlated to bulk magnetostriction and to mechanical hysteresis
Geometric creation of quantum vorticity
We consider superfluidity and quantum vorticity in rotating spacetimes. The
system is described by a complex scalar satisfying a nonlinear Klein-Gordon
equation. Rotation terms are identified and found to lead to the transfer of
angular momentum of the spacetime to the scalar field. The scalar field
responds by rotating, physically behaving as a superfluid, through the creation
of quantized vortices. We demonstrate the vortex nucleation through numerical
simulation.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, updated to closely resemble published versio
Magnetostriction of single crystal and polycrystalline Tb0.60Dy0.40 at cryogenic temperatures
At cryogenic temperatures, single crystals of TbDy alloys exhibit giant magnetostrictions of nearly 9000 ppm, making these materials promising for engineering service in cryogenic actuators, valves, and positioners. The preparation of single crystals is difficult and costly. Preliminary results on the magnetostriction of textured polycrystalline materials are presented here. For instance, polycrystalline Tb0.60Dy0.40, plane-rolled (one direction of applied stress) to induce crystallographic texture, has shown magnetostrictions at 77 K of 3000 ppm for an applied field of 4.5 kOe and an applied load of 23 MPa, or 48% that of a single crystal under similar conditions. Comparisons are presented between the magnetostrictive response of plane- and form-rolled (two orthogonal directions of applied stress) polycrystalline Tb0.60Dy0.40 at 10 and 77 K. It is reported that at 10 K plane-rolled Tb0.60Dy0.40 exhibits 1600 ppm magnetostriction at an applied field of 4.4 kOe with a minimal applied load of 0.28 MPa. An observed restoration of the initial unstrained state may be a useful feature of polycrystalline materials for engineering service. Finally it is reported that thermal expansion measurements provide a measure of crystallographic texture for comparison with the magnetostriction
Playing the odds in clinical decision making: lessons from berry aneurysms undetected by magnetic resonance angiography
No description supplie
Degree of explanation
Partial explanations are everywhere. That is, explanations citing causes that explain some but not all of an effect are ubiquitous across science, and these in turn rely on the notion of degree of explanation. I argue that current accounts are seriously deficient. In particular, they do not incorporate adequately the way in which a cause’s explanatory importance varies with choice of explanandum. Using influential recent contrastive theories, I develop quantitative definitions that remedy this lacuna, and relate it to existing measures of degree of causation. Among other things, this reveals the precise role here of chance, as well as bearing on the relation between causal explanation and causation itself
Adaptive Regret Minimization in Bounded-Memory Games
Online learning algorithms that minimize regret provide strong guarantees in
situations that involve repeatedly making decisions in an uncertain
environment, e.g. a driver deciding what route to drive to work every day.
While regret minimization has been extensively studied in repeated games, we
study regret minimization for a richer class of games called bounded memory
games. In each round of a two-player bounded memory-m game, both players
simultaneously play an action, observe an outcome and receive a reward. The
reward may depend on the last m outcomes as well as the actions of the players
in the current round. The standard notion of regret for repeated games is no
longer suitable because actions and rewards can depend on the history of play.
To account for this generality, we introduce the notion of k-adaptive regret,
which compares the reward obtained by playing actions prescribed by the
algorithm against a hypothetical k-adaptive adversary with the reward obtained
by the best expert in hindsight against the same adversary. Roughly, a
hypothetical k-adaptive adversary adapts her strategy to the defender's actions
exactly as the real adversary would within each window of k rounds. Our
definition is parametrized by a set of experts, which can include both fixed
and adaptive defender strategies.
We investigate the inherent complexity of and design algorithms for adaptive
regret minimization in bounded memory games of perfect and imperfect
information. We prove a hardness result showing that, with imperfect
information, any k-adaptive regret minimizing algorithm (with fixed strategies
as experts) must be inefficient unless NP=RP even when playing against an
oblivious adversary. In contrast, for bounded memory games of perfect and
imperfect information we present approximate 0-adaptive regret minimization
algorithms against an oblivious adversary running in time n^{O(1)}.Comment: Full Version. GameSec 2013 (Invited Paper
Interpretation, translation and intercultural communication in refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France
This article explores the interplay between language and intercultural communication within refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, using material taken from ethnographic research that involved a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis in both countries over a two-year period (2007–2009). It is concerned, in particular, to examine the role played by interpreters in facilitating intercultural communication between asylum applicants and the different administrative and legal actors responsible for assessing or defending their claims. The first section provides an overview of refugee status determination procedures in the UK and France, introducing the main administrative and legal contexts of the asylum process within which interpreters operate in the two countries. The second section compares the organisation of interpreting services, codes of conduct for interpreters and institutional expectations about the nature of interpreters’ activity on the part of the relevant UK and French authorities. The third section then explores some of the practical dilemmas for interpreters and barriers to communication that exist in refugee status determination procedures in the two countries. The article concludes by emphasising the complex and active nature of the interpreter's role in UK and French refugee status determination procedures
Isospin asymmetry and type-I superconductivity in neutron star matter
It has been argued by Buckley et. al.(Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 151102, 2004) that
nuclear matter is a type-I rather than a type-II superconductor. The suggested
mechanism is a strong interaction between neutron and proton Cooper pairs,
which arises from an assumed U(2) symmetry of the effective potential, which is
supposed to originate in isospin symmetry of the underlying nuclear
interactions. To test this claim, we perform an explicit mean-field calculation
of the effective potential of the Cooper pairs in a model with a simple
four-point pairing interaction. In the neutron star context, matter is very
neutron rich with less than 10% protons, so there is no neutron-proton pairing.
We find that under these conditions our model shows no interaction between
proton Cooper pairs and neutron Cooper pairs at the mean-field level. We
estimate the leading contribution beyond mean field and find that it is is
small and attractive at weak coupling.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure
A Theoretical Analysis of Two-Stage Recommendation for Cold-Start Collaborative Filtering
In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for tackling the cold-start
collaborative filtering problem, where unknown targets (items or users) keep
coming to the system, and there is a limited number of resources (users or
items) that can be allocated and related to them. The solution requires a
trade-off between exploitation and exploration as with the limited
recommendation opportunities, we need to, on one hand, allocate the most
relevant resources right away, but, on the other hand, it is also necessary to
allocate resources that are useful for learning the target's properties in
order to recommend more relevant ones in the future. In this paper, we study a
simple two-stage recommendation combining a sequential and a batch solution
together. We first model the problem with the partially observable Markov
decision process (POMDP) and provide an exact solution. Then, through an
in-depth analysis over the POMDP value iteration solution, we identify that an
exact solution can be abstracted as selecting resources that are not only
highly relevant to the target according to the initial-stage information, but
also highly correlated, either positively or negatively, with other potential
resources for the next stage. With this finding, we propose an approximate
solution to ease the intractability of the exact solution. Our initial results
on synthetic data and the Movie Lens 100K dataset confirm the performance gains
of our theoretical development and analysis
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