Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated. Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists. Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Mapping the complexity of higher education in the developing world

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.On October 27 and 28, 2009, a workshop of experts on higher education in developing countries was convened by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. The meeting was supported by a grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative with additional support from the Pardee Center and the Office of the Boston University Provost. The meeting brought together experts in economics, public policy, education, development, university management, and quantitative modeling who had rich experiences across the developing world. These experts offered a variety of conceptual tools with which to look at the particular complexities associated with higher education in developing countries. The meeting was convened by the authors of this paper. This policy brief builds upon and reflects on the discussion at this meeting, but is not a meeting report, per se

Soft Heisenberg hair on black holes in three dimensions

Three-dimensional Einstein gravity with negative cosmological constant admits stationary black holes that are not necessarily spherically symmetric. We propose boundary conditions for the near horizon region of these black holes that lead to a surprisingly simple near horizon symmetry algebra consisting of two affine u(1) current algebras. The symmetry algebra is essentially equivalent to the Heisenberg algebra. The associated charges give a specific example of "soft hair" on the horizon, as defined by Hawking, Perry and Strominger. We show that soft hair does not contribute to the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black holes and "black flower" generalizations. From the near horizon perspective the conformal generators at asymptotic infinity appear as composite operators, which we interpret in the spirit of black hole complementarity. Another remarkable feature of our boundary conditions is that they are singled out by requiring that the whole spectrum is compatible with regularity at the horizon, regardless the value of the global charges like mass or angular momentum. Finally, we address black hole microstates and generalizations to cosmological horizons.Comment: 6p

Buckling Length of Unbraced Frame Columns

In the design of steel columns in unbraced frames, the current AISC specification commentaries from both LRFD and ASD contain an alignment chart to determine the K factor for a particular column. The K factor is based on the effective length concept where K factors are used to equate the strength of a compression member of length L to an equivalent pinended member oflength KL subjected to axial load only. The unbraced frame alignment chart is a graphical representation of a transcendental equation of a buckling solution of a subassemblage. This solution involves several assumptions limiting the use of the alignment chart to idealized cases not necessarily satisfying a particular practical situation. The aim of this study is to I) compare K factor values from frame instability analysis usmg structural software with values from the alignment chart in situations where the assumptions of the alignment chart are violated and 2) suggest application of appropriate known solutions to particular situations in which violations of the assumptions occur. Situations investigated are: variations in bay width, variations in column moment of inertia, variations in loading, and variations in column height. The nomograph perfom1ance was found to be relatively insensitive to bay width variation. Variations in column moment of inertia and column loading lead to large inaccuracies in the nomograph K factor values but Lui's method handled these cases well. The nomograph performance was found to be most sensitive to column height variation. Configurations with large variation in column height require system stability analysis to obtain accurate K factors

Information-seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Purpose – The study examines two aspects of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers including methods applied for keeping up-to-date and methods used for finding articles. The relationship between academic status and research field of users with their information seeking behaviour was investigated. Methodology/approach – Data were gathered using a questionnaire survey of PhD students and staff of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London; 114 people (47.1 per cent response rate) participated in the survey. Findings – The study reveals differences among subfields of physics and astronomy in terms of information-seeking behaviour, highlights the need for and the value of looking at narrower subject communities within disciplines for a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of scientists. Originality/value – The study is the first study to deeply investigate intradisciplinary dissimilarities of information-seeking behaviour of scientists in a discipline. It is also an up-to-date account of information seeking behaviour of physicists and astronomers

Asymmetrically severe internal auditory canal hypoplasia: A case report.

We present a case of an otherwise healthy 20-month-old with congenital sensorineural hearing loss. CT and MR imaging demonstrated bilateral asymmetrically severe hypoplasia of the internal auditory canals and vestibulocochlear nerves. Additional developmental inner ear anomalies were present in this patient, including unilateral semicircular canal hypoplasia and suspected bilateral cochlear hypoplasia. The patient retained normal facial nerve function bilaterally. We highlight the current research and understanding of congenital IAC abnormalities

How to Influence People with Partial Incentives

We study the power of fractional allocations of resources to maximize influence in a network. This work extends in a natural way the well-studied model by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Tardos (2003), where a designer selects a (small) seed set of nodes in a social network to influence directly, this influence cascades when other nodes reach certain thresholds of neighbor influence, and the goal is to maximize the final number of influenced nodes. Despite extensive study from both practical and theoretical viewpoints, this model limits the designer to a binary choice for each node, with no way to apply intermediate levels of influence. This model captures some settings precisely, e.g. exposure to an idea or pathogen, but it fails to capture very relevant concerns in others, for example, a manufacturer promoting a new product by distributing five "20% off" coupons instead of giving away one free product. While fractional versions of problems tend to be easier to solve than integral versions, for influence maximization, we show that the two versions have essentially the same computational complexity. On the other hand, the two versions can have vastly different solutions: the added flexibility of fractional allocation can lead to significantly improved influence. Our main theoretical contribution is to show how to adapt the major positive results from the integral case to the fractional case. Specifically, Mossel and Roch (2006) used the submodularity of influence to obtain their integral results; we introduce a new notion of continuous submodularity, and use this to obtain matching fractional results. We conclude that we can achieve the same greedy $(1-1/e-\epsilon)$-approximation for the fractional case as the integral case. In practice, we find that the fractional model performs substantially better than the integral model, according to simulations on real-world social network data

Spiritual Well-Being, Social Support, and Financial Distress in Determining Depression: The Mediating Role of Impact of Event During COVID-19 Pandemic in Iran

We would like to thank all of our participants in this study.This study investigates the relationship between spiritual well-being, social support, and financial distress with depressive symptoms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A path analysis was used to analyze data collected from 1,156 Iranian participants via an online survey. The results showed that spiritual well-being and social support were negatively related to depressive symptoms and financial distress. The impact of COVID-19 events showed negative associations with depressive symptoms. In addition, the link between spiritual well-being and financial distress with depressive symptoms was partially mediated by the impact of events