24,149 research outputs found
Gambling in Great Britain:a response to Rogers
A recent issue of Practice: Social Work in Action featured a paper by Rogers that examined whether the issue of problem gambling was a suitable case for social work. Rogers’ overview was (in various places) out of date, highly selective, contradictory, presented unsupported claims and somewhat misleading. Rogers’ paper is to be commended for putting the issue of problem gambling on the social work agenda. However, social workers need up-to-date information and contextually situated information if they are to make informed decisions in helping problem gamblers
Strong interference effects in the resonant Auger decay of atoms induced by intense X-Ray fields
The theory of resonant Auger decay of atoms in a high intensity coherent
X-ray pulse is presented. The theory includes the coupling between the ground
state and the resonance due to an intense X-ray pulse, taking into account the
decay of the resonance and the direct photoionization of the ground state, both
populating the final ionic states coherently. The theory also considers the
impact of the direct photoionization of the resonance state itself which
typically populates highly-excited ionic states. The combined action of the
resonant decay and of the direct ionization of the ground state in the field
induces a non-hermitian time-dependent coupling between the ground and the
'dressed' resonance stats. The impact of these competing processes on the total
electron yield and on the 2s2p3p P spectator and
2s2p S participator Auger decay spectra of the Ne 1s3p
resonance is investigated. The role of the direct photoionization of the ground
state and of the resonance increases dramatically with the field intensity.
This results in strong interference effects with distinct patterns in the
electron spectra, different for the participator and spectator final states.Comment: 31 pages, 6 figure
Relating Urban Morphologies To Movement Potentials Over Time: A diachronic study with Space Syntax of Liverpool, UK
In this paper we describe our observations of Liverpool’s (UK) syntactical patterning relating
to its urban network growth from 1850s to the present day. Liverpool’s rapid growth and
transformation provides a compelling case study of network configurations as they relate to
movement potentials over time. We argue that syntactical analysis of movement potentials
provides a tool for evidencing urban historical socio-spatial patterning. Urban patterning might
be shaped variously by historical factors such as socio-economic inequalities, labour divisions,
ethnicities or religious denominations. We have attempted to demonstrate how movement
potentials have persisted normatively along structural path-dependencies that underpin these
patterns.
We based our study on samples of three prominent centralities of Princes Avenue, Scotland
Road and Canning Place, across four periods: 1850s, 1890s, 1950s and contemporary. We
prepared Depthmap data samples using an arrayed visualization format, which allowed us to
make comparative observations of movement potentials as they converge and intersect across
various urban scales. This has allowed us to generate ‘internal’ perspectives on configurations
over time, to suggest some possible effects of city-scale morphologies on local spatial dynamics
Choice of Consistent Family, and Quantum Incompatibility
In consistent history quantum theory, a description of the time development
of a quantum system requires choosing a framework or consistent family, and
then calculating probabilities for the different histories which it contains.
It is argued that the framework is chosen by the physicist constructing a
description of a quantum system on the basis of questions he wishes to address,
in a manner analogous to choosing a coarse graining of the phase space in
classical statistical mechanics. The choice of framework is not determined by
some law of nature, though it is limited by quantum incompatibility, a concept
which is discussed using a two-dimensional Hilbert space (spin half particle).
Thus certain questions of physical interest can only be addressed using
frameworks in which they make (quantum mechanical) sense. The physicist's
choice does not influence reality, nor does the presence of choices render the
theory subjective. On the contrary, predictions of the theory can, in
principle, be verified by experimental measurements. These considerations are
used to address various criticisms and possible misunderstandings of the
consistent history approach, including its predictive power, whether it
requires a new logic, whether it can be interpreted realistically, the nature
of ``quasiclassicality'', and the possibility of ``contrary'' inferences.Comment: Minor revisions to bring into conformity with published version.
Revtex 29 pages including 1 page with figure
Optimal Eavesdropping in Quantum Cryptography. II. Quantum Circuit
It is shown that the optimum strategy of the eavesdropper, as described in
the preceding paper, can be expressed in terms of a quantum circuit in a way
which makes it obvious why certain parameters take on particular values, and
why obtaining information in one basis gives rise to noise in the conjugate
basis.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, Latex, the second part of quant-ph/970103
EPR, Bell, and Quantum Locality
Maudlin has claimed that no local theory can reproduce the predictions of
standard quantum mechanics that violate Bell's inequality for Bohm's version
(two spin-half particles in a singlet state) of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
problem. It is argued that, on the contrary, standard quantum mechanics itself
is a counterexample to Maudlin's claim, because it is local in the appropriate
sense (measurements at one place do not influence what occurs elsewhere there)
when formulated using consistent principles in place of the inconsistent
appeals to "measurement" found in current textbooks. This argument sheds light
on the claim of Blaylock that counterfactual definiteness is an essential
ingredient in derivations of Bell's inequality.Comment: Minor revisions to previous versio
The Prevalence of Workaholism: A Survey Study in a Nationally Representative Sample of Norwegian Employees
Workaholism has become an increasingly popular area for empirical study. However, most studies examining the prevalence of workaholism have used non-representative samples and measures with poorly defined cut-off scores. To overcome these methodological limitations, a nationally representative survey among employees in Norway (N = 1,124) was conducted. Questions relating to gender, age, marital status, caretaker responsibility for children, percentage of full-time equivalent, and educational level were asked. Workaholism was assessed by the use of a psychometrically validated instrument (i.e., Bergen Work Addiction Scale). Personality was assessed using the Mini-International Personality Item Pool. Results showed that the prevalence of workaholism was 8.3% (95% CI = 6.7–9.9%). An adjusted logistic regression analysis showed that workaholism was negatively related to age and positively related to the personality dimensions agreeableness, neuroticism, and intellect/imagination. Implications for these findings are discussed
Compressing Word Embeddings
Recent methods for learning vector space representations of words have
succeeded in capturing fine-grained semantic and syntactic regularities using
vector arithmetic. However, these vector space representations (created through
large-scale text analysis) are typically stored verbatim, since their internal
structure is opaque. Using word-analogy tests to monitor the level of detail
stored in compressed re-representations of the same vector space, the
trade-offs between the reduction in memory usage and expressiveness are
investigated. A simple scheme is outlined that can reduce the memory footprint
of a state-of-the-art embedding by a factor of 10, with only minimal impact on
performance. Then, using the same `bit budget', a binary (approximate)
factorisation of the same space is also explored, with the aim of creating an
equivalent representation with better interpretability.Comment: 10 pages, 0 figures, submitted to ICONIP-2016. Previous experimental
results were submitted to ICLR-2016, but the paper has been significantly
updated, since a new experimental set-up worked much bette
Complex X-ray spectral variability in Mkn 421 observed with XMM-Newton
The bright blazar Mkn 421 has been observed four times for uninterrupted
durations of ~ 9 - 13 hr during the performance verification and calibration
phases of the XMM-Newton mission. The source was strongly variable in all
epochs, with variability amplitudes that generally increased to higher energy
bands. Although the detailed relationship between soft (0.1 - 0.75 keV) and
hard (2 - 10 keV) band differed from one epoch to the next, in no case was
there any evidence for a measurable interband lag, with robust upper limits of
hr in the best-correlated light curves. This is in conflict
with previous claims of both hard and soft lags of ~1 hr in this and other
blazars. However, previous observations suffered a repeated 1.6 hr feature
induced by the low-Earth orbital period, a feature that is not present in the
uninterrupted XMM-Newton data. The new upper limit on leads to a lower
limit on the magnetic field strength and Doppler factor of B \delta^{1/3} \gs
4.7 G, mildly out of line with the predictions from a variety of homogeneous
synchrotron self-Compton emission models in the literature of G. Time-dependent spectral fitting was performed on all epochs,
and no detectable spectral hysteresis was seen. We note however that the source
exhibited significantly different spectral evolutionary behavior from one epoch
to the next, with the strongest correlations in the first and last and an
actual divergance between soft and hard X-ray bands in the third. This
indicates that the range of spectral variability behavior in Mkn 421 is not
fully described in these short snippets; significantly longer uninterrupted
light curves are required, and can be obtained with XMM-Newton.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, accepted for ApJ, scheduled for August 1, 200
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