16,588 research outputs found
The Transition Town Network: a review of current evolutions and renaissance
The Transition Network started as a movement with Transition Totnes (Devon, UK) in late 2005, with Rob Hopkins as its founder. To date it has grown to encompass 313 official Transition Network initiatives spread across the world from the UK (with roughly 50% of all initiatives) to the USA, Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil and so on (Transition Network, 2010a). For any social movement, this could most certainly be described as something of a success and warrants a closer examination. Indeed, the aim of this profile is to explore the movement's aims and modus operandi, the problematics it has faced and how it is now evolving. The profile draws on my auto-ethnographic encounters with the movement in Transition Nottingham and at the recent Transition Network Conference 2010, whilst also being grounded in the material made publically available on the Transition Network and Transition Culture websites (see Transition Network, 2010b and Transition Culture, 2010a)
Microjansky sources at 1.4 GHz
We present a deep 1.4 GHz survey made with the Australia Telescope Compact
Array (ATCA), having a background RMS of 9 microJy near the image phase centre,
up to 25 microJy at the edge of a 50' field of view. Over 770 radio sources
brighter than 45 microJy have been catalogued in the field. The differential
source counts in the deep field provide tentative support for the growing
evidence that the microjansky radio population exhibits significantly higher
clustering than found at higher flux density cutoffs. The optical
identification rate on CCD images is approximately 50% to R=22.5, and the
optical counterparts of the faintest radio sources appear to be mainly single
galaxies close to this optical magnitude limit.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted by ApJ Letters 4 May 199
Advanced dendritic web growth development and development of single-crystal silicon dendritic ribbon and high-efficiency solar cell program
Efforts to demonstrate that the dendritic web technology is ready for commercial use by the end of 1986 continues. A commercial readiness goal involves improvements to crystal growth furnace throughput to demonstrate an area growth rate of greater than 15 sq cm/min while simultaneously growing 10 meters or more of ribbon under conditions of continuous melt replenishment. Continuous means that the silicon melt is being replenished at the same rate that it is being consumed by ribbon growth so that the melt level remains constant. Efforts continue on computer thermal modeling required to define high speed, low stress, continuous growth configurations; the study of convective effects in the molten silicon and growth furnace cover gas; on furnace component modifications; on web quality assessments; and on experimental growth activities
A new source detection algorithm using FDR
The False Discovery Rate (FDR) method has recently been described by Miller
et al (2001), along with several examples of astrophysical applications. FDR is
a new statistical procedure due to Benjamini and Hochberg (1995) for
controlling the fraction of false positives when performing multiple hypothesis
testing. The importance of this method to source detection algorithms is
immediately clear. To explore the possibilities offered we have developed a new
task for performing source detection in radio-telescope images, Sfind 2.0,
which implements FDR. We compare Sfind 2.0 with two other source detection and
measurement tasks, Imsad and SExtractor, and comment on several issues arising
from the nature of the correlation between nearby pixels and the necessary
assumption of the null hypothesis. The strong suggestion is made that
implementing FDR as a threshold defining method in other existing
source-detection tasks is easy and worthwhile. We show that the constraint on
the fraction of false detections as specified by FDR holds true even for highly
correlated and realistic images. For the detection of true sources, which are
complex combinations of source-pixels, this constraint appears to be somewhat
less strict. It is still reliable enough, however, for a priori estimates of
the fraction of false source detections to be robust and realistic.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication by A
Furnace and support equipment for space processing
A core facility capable of performing a majority of materials processing experiments is discussed. Experiment classes are described, the needs peculiar to each experiment type are outlined, and projected facility requirements to perform the experiments are treated. Control equipment (automatic control) and variations of the Czochralski method for use in space are discussed
A position sensitive phoswich hard X-ray detector system
A prototype position sensitive phoswich hard X-ray detector, designed for eventual astronomical usage, was tested in the laboratory. The scintillation crystal geometry was designed on the basis of a Monte Carlo simulation of the internal optics and includes a 3mm thick NaI(T1) primary X-ray detector which is actively shielded by a 20 mm thick CsI(T1) scintillation crystal. This phoswich arrangement is viewed by a number two inch photomultipliers. Measured values of the positional and spectral resolution of incident X-ray photons are compared with calculation
Large-area sheet task advanced dendritic web growth development
The computer code for calculating web temperature distribution was expanded to provide a graphics output in addition to numerical and punch card output. The new code was used to examine various modifications of the J419 configuration and, on the basis of the results, a new growth geometry was designed. Additionally, several mathematically defined temperature profiles were evaluated for the effects of the free boundary (growth front) on the thermal stress generation. Experimental growth runs were made with modified J419 configurations to complement the modeling work. A modified J435 configuration was evaluated
The quantum Casimir operators of \Uq and their eigenvalues
We show that the quantum Casimir operators of the quantum linear group
constructed in early work of Bracken, Gould and Zhang together with one extra
central element generate the entire center of \Uq. As a by product of the
proof, we obtain intriguing new formulae for eigenvalues of these quantum
Casimir operators, which are expressed in terms of the characters of a class of
finite dimensional irreducible representations of the classical general linear
algebra.Comment: 10 page
Adaptive Optics Imaging of QSOs with Double-Peaked Narrow Lines: Are they Dual AGNs?
Active galaxies hosting two accreting and merging super-massive black holes
(SMBHs) -- dual Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) -- are predicted by many current
and popular models of black hole-galaxy co-evolution. We present here the
results of a program that has identified a set of probable dual AGN candidates
based on near Infra-red (NIR) Laser Guide-Star Adaptive Optics (LGS AO) imaging
with the Keck II telescope. These candidates are selected from a complete
sample of radio-quiet Quasi-stellar Objects (QSOs) drawn from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey (SDSS), which show double-peaked narrow AGN emission lines. Of the
twelve AGNs imaged, we find six with double galaxy structure, of which four are
in galaxy mergers. We measure the ionization of the two velocity components in
the narrow AGN lines to test the hypothesis that both velocity components come
from an active nucleus. The combination of a well-defined parent sample and
high-quality imaging allows us to place constraints on the fraction of SDSS
QSOs that host dual accreting black holes separated on kiloparsec (kpc) scales:
~0.3%-0.65%. We derive from this fraction the time spent in a QSO phase during
a typical merger and find a value that is much lower than estimates that arise
from QSO space densities and galaxy merger statistics. We discuss possible
reasons for this difference. Finally, we compare the SMBH mass distributions of
single and dual AGN and find little difference between the two within the
limited statistics of our program, hinting that most SMBH growth happens in the
later stages of a merger process.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; accepted to the Astrophysical Journa
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