Exploring relationships between touch perception and surface physical properties

This paper reports a study of materials for confectionery packaging. The aim was to explore the touch perceptions of textures and identify their relationships with the surfaces' physical properties. Thirty-seven tactile textures were tested including 22 cardboards, nine flexible materials and six laminate boards. Semantic differential questionnaires were administered to assess responses to touching the textures against six word pairs: warm-cold, slippery-sticky, smooth,-rough, hard-soft, bumpy-flat, and wet-dry. Four physical measurements were conducted to characterize the surfaces' roughness, compliance, friction, and the rate of cooling of an artificial finger when touching the surface. Correlation and regression analyses were carried out to identify the relationships between the people's responses and the physical measurements. Results show that touch perception is often associated with more than one physical property, and the strength and form of the combined contribution can be represented by a regression model. © 2009 Chen, Shao, Barnes, Childs, & Henson

Concordance Among Extension Workers, Researchers, and Professional Arborists in Rating Landscape Trees

Formulas developed to determine the monetary value of landscape trees require a species rating value. Polling Extension professionals, researchers, and arborists is a common procedure to derive species rating value. Due to differences in professional training and background, and the variability of landscapes in any given area, professional agreement on the rating of a species is difficult to reach but is necessary to be useful. The Delphi method and W criterion were used to determine the strength of concordance among extension professionals. We hope that other Extension professionals can use this method in developing species rating in their respective areas

Quantum Dynamics without the Wave Function

When suitably generalized and interpreted, the path-integral offers an alternative to the more familiar quantal formalism based on state-vectors, selfadjoint operators, and external observers. Mathematically one generalizes the path-integral-as-propagator to a {\it quantal measure} $\mu$ on the space $\Omega$ of all ``conceivable worlds'', and this generalized measure expresses the dynamics or law of motion of the theory, much as Wiener measure expresses the dynamics of Brownian motion. Within such ``histories-based'' schemes new, and more ``realistic'' possibilities open up for resolving the philosophical problems of the state-vector formalism. In particular, one can dispense with the need for external agents by locating the predictive content of $\mu$ in its sets of measure zero: such sets are to be ``precluded''. But unrestricted application of this rule engenders contradictions. One possible response would remove the contradictions by circumscribing the application of the preclusion concept. Another response, more in the tradition of ``quantum logic'', would accommodate the contradictions by dualizing $\Omega$ to a space of ``co-events'' and effectively identifying reality with an element of this dual space.Comment: plainTeX, 24 pages, no figures. To appear in a special volume of {\it Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General} entitled ``The Quantum Universe'' and dedicated to Giancarlo Ghirardi on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Most current version is available at http://www.physics.syr.edu/~sorkin/some.papers/ (or wherever my home-page may be

Aligning physical elements with persons' attitude: an approach using Rasch measurement theory

Affective engineering uses mathematical models to convert the information obtained from persons' attitude to physical elements into an ergonomic design. However, applications in the domain have not in many cases met measurement assumptions. This paper proposes a novel approach based on Rasch measurement theory to overcome the problem. The research demonstrates that if data fit the model, further variables can be added to a scale. An empirical study was designed to determine the range of compliance where consumers could obtain an impression of a moisturizer cream when touching some product containers. Persons, variables and stimulus objects were parameterised independently on a linear continuum. The results showed that a calibrated scale preserves comparability although incorporating further variables

Kinetics of the γ–δ phase transition in energetic nitramine-octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine

The solid, secondary explosive nitramine-octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7 or HMX has four different stable polymorphs which have different molecular conformations, crystalline structures, and densities, making structural phase transitions between these nontrivial. Previous studies of the kinetics of the β–δ HMX structural transition found this to happen by a nucleation and growth mechanism, where growth was governed by the heat of fusion, or melting, even though the phase transition temperature is more than 100 K below the melting point. A theory known as virtual melting could easily justify this since the large volume difference in the two phases creates a strain at their interface that can lower the melting point to the phase transition temperature through a relaxation of the elastic energy. To learn more about structural phase transitions in organic crystalline solids and virtual melting, here we use time-resolved X-ray diffraction to study another structural phase transition in HMX, γ–δ. Again, second order kinetics are observed which fit to the same nucleation and growth model associated with growth by melting even though the volume change in this transition is too small to lower the melting point by interfacial strain. To account for this, we present a more general model illustrating that melting over a very thin layer at the interface between the two phases reduces the total interfacial energy and is therefore thermodynamically favorable and can drive the structural phase transition in the absence of large volume changes. Our work supports the idea that virtual melting may be a more generally applicable mechanism for structural phase transitions in organic crystalline solids

A Bell Inequality Analog in Quantum Measure Theory

One obtains Bell's inequalities if one posits a hypothetical joint probability distribution, or {\it measure}, whose marginals yield the probabilities produced by the spin measurements in question. The existence of a joint measure is in turn equivalent to a certain causality condition known as ``screening off''. We show that if one assumes, more generally, a joint {\it quantal measure}, or ``decoherence functional'', one obtains instead an analogous inequality weaker by a factor of $\sqrt{2}$. The proof of this ``Tsirel'son inequality'' is geometrical and rests on the possibility of associating a Hilbert space to any strongly positive quantal measure. These results lead both to a {\it question}: ``Does a joint measure follow from some quantal analog of `screening off'?'', and to the {\it observation} that non-contextual hidden variables are viable in histories-based quantum mechanics, even if they are excluded classically.Comment: 38 pages, TeX. Several changes and added comments to bring out the meaning more clearly. Minor rewording and extra acknowledgements, now closer to published versio

The structure of causal sets

More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case of a physical theory predestined to be interpreted in structuralist terms. It is shown how employing structuralism lends itself to a natural interpretation of the physical meaning of causal sets theory. Conversely, the conceptually exceptionally clear case of causal sets is used as a foil to illustrate how a mathematically informed rigorous conceptualization of structure serves to identify structures in physical theories. Furthermore, a number of technical issues infesting structuralist interpretations of physical theories such as difficulties with grounding the identity of the places of highly symmetrical physical structures in their relational profile and what may resolve these difficulties can be vividly illustrated with causal sets.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Survival of the quantum depletion of a Bose-Einstein condensate after release from a magnetic trap

We present observations of quantum depletion in expanding condensates released from a harmonic trap. We confirm experimental observations of slowly-decaying tails in the far-field beyond the thermal component, consistent with the survival of the quantum depletion. Our measurements support the hypothesis that the depletion survives the expansion, and even appears stronger in the far-field than expected before release based on the Bogoliubov theory. This result is in conflict with the hydrodynamic theory which predicts that the in-situ depletion does not survive when atoms are released from a trap. Simulations of our experiment show that the depletion should indeed survive into the far field and become stronger. However, while in qualitative agreement, the final depletion observed in the experiment is much larger than in the simulation. In light of the predicted power-law decay of the momentum density, we discuss general issues inherent in characterizing power laws.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

A Study of the Soft X-Ray Emission Lines in NGC 4151. I. Kinematic Properties of the Plasma Wind

We present our analysis of the narrow emission lines produced in the plasma regions within the bright active galactic nucleus of NGC 4151, from an ORBYTS research-with-schools public engagement project. Our goal was to test whether the properties of these plasma regions changed between XMM-Newton observations spanning 15 yr from 2000 to 2015, by measuring the outflow velocities and distances. From this study, we found that NGC 4151 has at least two to three plasma regions. There is no evidence of the outflowing wind properties changing as the velocities and distances are consistent throughout the observations