12,897 research outputs found
The application of amino acid racemization in the acid soluble fraction of enamel to the estimation of the age of human teeth
Estimation of age-at-death for skeletonised forensic remains is one of the most significant problems in forensic anthropology. The majority of existing morphological and histological techniques are highly inaccurate, and show a bias towards underestimating the age of older individuals. One technique which has been successful in forensic age estimation is amino acid racemization in dentine. However, this method cannot be used on remains where the post-mortem interval is greater than 20 years. An alternative approach is to measure amino acid racemization in dental enamel, which is believed to be more resistant to change post-mortem. The extent of amino acid racemization in the acid soluble fraction of the enamel proteins was determined for modem known age teeth. A strong correlation was observed between the age of the tooth and the extent of racemization. No systematic bias in the direction of age estimation errors was detected. For the majority of teeth analyzed, the presence of dental caries did not affect the results obtained. In a minority of cases, carious teeth showed a higher level of racemization than would be expected given the age of the individual. These results indicate that amino acid racemization in enamel has the potential to be used in age estimation of skeletal remains. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved
Collective Excitations of a Two-Component Bose Condensate at Finite Temperature
We compare the collective modes for Bose-condensed systems with two
degenerate components with and without spontaneous intercomponent coherence at
finite temperature using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approximation. We show
that the interaction between the condensate and non-condensate in these two
cases results in qualitatively different collective excitation spectra. We show
that at zero temperature the single-particle excitations of the incoherent Bose
condensate can be probed by intercomponent excitations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to PR
Number-of-Particle Fluctuations and Stability of Bose-Condensed Systems
In this paper we show that a normal total number-of-particle fluctuation can
be obtained consistently from the static thermodynamic relation and dynamic
compressibility sum rule. In models using the broken U(1) gauge symmetry, in
order to keep the consistency between statics and dynamics, it is important to
identify the equilibrium state of the system with which the density response
function is calculated, so that the condensate particle number , the
number of thermal depletion particles , and the number of
non-condensate particles can be unambiguously defined. We also show
that the chemical potential determined from the Hugenholtz-Pines theorem should
be consistent with that determined from the equilibrium equation of state. The
anomalous fluctuation of the number of non-condensate particles is an
intrinsic feature of the broken U(1) gauge symmetry. However, this anomalous
fluctuation does not imply the instability of the system. Using the random
phase approximation, which preserves the U(1) gauge symmetry, such an anomalous
fluctuation of the number of non-condensate particles is completely absentComment: 9 pages, submitted to PR
Strange meson-nucleon states in the quark potential model
The quark potential model and resonating group method are used to investigate
the bound states and/or resonances. The model potential consists of
the t-channel and s-channel one-gluon exchange potentials and the confining
potential with incorporating the QCD renormalization correction and the
spin-orbital suppression effect in it. It was shown in our previous work that
by considering the color octet contribution, use of this model to investigate
the low energy elastic scattering leads to the results which are in pretty
good agreement with the experimental data. In this paper, the same model and
method are employed to calculate the masses of the bound systems.
For this purpose, the resonating group equation is transformed into a standard
Schr\"odinger equation in which a nonlocal effective interaction
potential is included. Solving the Schr\"odinger equation by the variational
method, we are able to reproduce the masses of some currently concerned
states and get a view that these states possibly exist as
molecular states. For the system, the same calculation gives no support to
the existence of the resonance which was announced
recently.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure
Human subjective response to steering wheel vibration caused by diesel engine idle
This study investigated the human subjective response to steering wheel vibration of the type caused by a four-cylinder diesel engine idle in passenger cars. Vibrotactile perception was assessed using sinusoidal amplitude-modulated vibratory stimuli of constant energy level (r.m.s. acceleration, 0.41 m/s(2)) having a carrier frequency of 26 Hz (i.e. engine firing frequency) and modulation frequency of 6.5 Hz (half-order engine harmonic). Evaluations of seven levels of modulation depth parameter m (0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, and 1.0) were performed in order to define the growth function of human perceived disturbance as a function of amplitude modulation depth. Two semantic descriptors were used (unpleasantness and roughness) and two test methods (the Thurstone paired-comparison method and the Borg CR-10 direct evaluation scale) for a total of four tests. Each test was performed using an independent group of 25 individuals. The results suggest that there is a critical value of modulation depth m = 0.2 below which human subjects do not perceive differences in amplitude modulation and above which the stimulus-response relationship increases monotonically with a power function. The Stevens power exponents suggest that the perceived unpleasantness is non-linearly dependent on modulation depth m with an exponent greater than 1 and that the perceived roughness is dependent with an exponent close to unity
Location Dependent Dirichlet Processes
Dirichlet processes (DP) are widely applied in Bayesian nonparametric
modeling. However, in their basic form they do not directly integrate
dependency information among data arising from space and time. In this paper,
we propose location dependent Dirichlet processes (LDDP) which incorporate
nonparametric Gaussian processes in the DP modeling framework to model such
dependencies. We develop the LDDP in the context of mixture modeling, and
develop a mean field variational inference algorithm for this mixture model.
The effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework is shown on an image
segmentation task
Meeting the Expectations of Your Heritage Culture: Links between Attachment Style, Intragroup Marginalisation, and Psychological Adjustment
This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Do insecurely-attached individuals perceive greater rejection from their heritage culture? Few studies have examined the antecedents and outcomes of this perceived rejection – termed intragroup marginalisation – in spite of its implications for the adjustment of cultural migrants to the mainstream culture. The present study investigated whether anxious and avoidant attachment orientations among cultural migrants were associated with greater intragroup marginalisation and, in turn, with lower subjective well-being and flourishing, and higher acculturative stress. Anxious attachment was associated with heightened intragroup marginalisation from friends and, in turn, with increased acculturative stress; anxious attachment was also associated with increased intragroup marginalisation from family. Avoidant attachment was linked with increased intragroup marginalisation from family and, in turn, with decreased subjective well-being
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