462 research outputs found
The idea of moral panic – ten dimensions of dispute
This paper explores the open and contested concept of moral panic over its 40-year history, exploring the contributions made by the concept’s key originators, as well as contemporary researchers. While most moral panic researchers are critical, humanist, interpretivist, interventionist and qualitative, this paper highlights ten areas of productive dispute within and around the meaning of moral panic theory’s ‘common sense’. Such diversity of interpretation creates multiple possibilities for convergent and divergent theorization and research within a supposedly singular conceptual framework. This lack of closure and consequent diversity of political standpoints, intellectual perspectives and fields of empirical focus, rather than representing the weakness of the concept of moral panic, reflects and contributes to its successful diffusion, escalation and innovation
Male influence on infant feeding in rural Guatemala and implications for child nutrition interventions
PANIC: the new panoramic NIR camera for Calar Alto
PANIC is a wide-field NIR camera, which is currently under development for
the Calar Alto observatory (CAHA) in Spain. It uses a mosaic of four Hawaii-2RG
detectors and covers the spectral range from 0.8-2.5 micron(z to K-band). The
field-of-view is 30x30 arcmin. This instrument can be used at the 2.2m
telescope (0.45arcsec/pixel, 0.5x0.5 degree FOV) and at the 3.5m telescope
(0.23arcsec/pixel, 0.25x0.25 degree FOV). The operating temperature is about
77K, achieved by liquid Nitrogen cooling. The cryogenic optics has three flat
folding mirrors with diameters up to 282 mm and nine lenses with diameters
between 130 mm and 255 mm. A compact filter unit can carry up to 19 filters
distributed over four filter wheels. Narrow band (1%) filters can be used. The
instrument has a diameter of 1.1 m and it is about 1 m long. The weight limit
of 400 kg at the 2.2m telescope requires a light-weight cryostat design. The
aluminium vacuum vessel and radiation shield have wall thicknesses of only 6 mm
and 3 mm respectively.Comment: This paper has been presented in the SPIE of Astronomical Telescopes
and Instrumentation 2008 in Marseille (France
Heparanase is a prognostic indicator for postoperative survival in pancreatic carcinoma
British Journal of Cancer (2002) 87, 689–689. doi:10.1038/sj.bjc.6600504 www.bjcancer.co
A diffusion-induced transition in the phase separation of binary fluid mixtures subjected to a temperature ramp
Demixing of binary fluids subjected to slow temperature ramps shows repeated
waves of nucleation which arise as a consequence of the competition between
generation of supersaturation by the temperature ramp and relaxation of
supersaturation by diffusive transport and flow. Here, we use an
advection-reaction-diffusion model to study the oscillations in the weak- and
strong-diffusion regime. There is a sharp transition between the two regimes,
which can only be understood based on the probability distribution function of
the composition rather than in terms of the average composition. We argue that
this transition might be responsible for some yet unclear features of
experiments, like the appearance of secondary oscillations and bimodal droplet
size distributions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 color figure
Characterizing Exoplanets in the Visible and Infrared: A Spectrometer Concept for the EChO Space Mission
Transit-spectroscopy of exoplanets is one of the key observational techniques
to characterize the extrasolar planet and its atmosphere. The observational
challenges of these measurements require dedicated instrumentation and only the
space environment allows an undisturbed access to earth-like atmospheric
features such as water or carbon-dioxide. Therefore, several exoplanet-specific
space missions are currently being studied. One of them is EChO, the Exoplanet
Characterization Observatory, which is part of ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025
program, and which is one of four candidates for the M3 launch slot in 2024. In
this paper we present the results of our assessment study of the EChO
spectrometer, the only science instrument onboard this spacecraft. The
instrument is a multi-channel all-reflective dispersive spectrometer, covering
the wavelength range from 400 nm to 16 microns simultaneously with a moderately
low spectral resolution. We illustrate how the key technical challenge of the
EChO mission - the high photometric stability - influences the choice of
spectrometer concept and drives fundamentally the instrument design. First
performance evaluations underline the fitness of the elaborated design solution
for the needs of the EChO mission.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in the Journal of
Astronomical Instrumentatio
GRAVITY: getting to the event horizon of Sgr A*
We present the second-generation VLTI instrument GRAVITY, which currently is
in the preliminary design phase. GRAVITY is specifically designed to observe
highly relativistic motions of matter close to the event horizon of Sgr A*, the
massive black hole at center of the Milky Way. We have identified the key
design features needed to achieve this goal and present the resulting
instrument concept. It includes an integrated optics, 4-telescope, dual feed
beam combiner operated in a cryogenic vessel; near infrared wavefront sensing
adaptive optics; fringe tracking on secondary sources within the field of view
of the VLTI and a novel metrology concept. Simulations show that the planned
design matches the scientific needs; in particular that 10 microarcsecond
astrometry is feasible for a source with a magnitude of K=15 like Sgr A*, given
the availability of suitable phase reference sources.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in the conference proceedings of SPIE
Astronomical Instrumentation, 23-28 June 2008, Marseille, Franc
Modification of a conventional photolytic converter for improving aircraft measurements of NO via chemiluminescence
Nitrogen oxides (NO≡NO+NO) are centrally involved in the photochemical processes taking place in the Earth\u27s atmosphere. Measurements of NO, particularly in remote areas where concentrations are of the order of parts per trillion by volume (pptv), are still a challenge and subject to extensive research. In this study, we present NO measurements via photolysis–chemiluminescence during the research aircraft campaign CAFE Africa (Chemistry of the Atmosphere – Field Experiment in Africa) 2018 around Cabo Verde and the results of laboratory experiments to characterize the photolytic converter used. We find the NO reservoir species MPN (methyl peroxy nitrate) to produce the only relevant thermal interference in the converter under the operating conditions during CAFE Africa. We identify a memory effect within the conventional photolytic converter (type 1) associated with high NO concentrations and rapidly changing water vapor concentrations, accompanying changes in altitude during aircraft measurements, which is due to the porous structure of the converter material. As a result, NO artifacts, which are amplified by low conversion efficiencies, and a varying instrumental background adversely affect the NO measurements. We test and characterize an alternative photolytic converter (type 2) made from quartz glass, which improves the reliability of NO measurements in laboratory and field studies
RAMPARTS: A Programmer-Friendly System for Building Homomorphic Encryption Applications
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is an emerging technology that enables computing on
data while the data is encrypted.
A major challenge with homomorphic encryption is that it takes extensive expert knowledge to design meaningful and useful programs that are constructed from atomic HE operations.
We present RAMPARTS to address this challenge. RAMPARTS provides an environment for developing HE applications in Julia, a high-level language, the same way as ``cleartext\u27\u27 applications are typically written in Julia. RAMPARTS makes the following three contributions. First, we use symbolic execution to automate the construction of an optimized computation circuit where both the circuit size and multiplicative depth are chosen by the compiler. Second, RAMPARTS automatically selects the HE parameters for the generated circuit, which is typically done manually by an HE expert. Third, RAMPARTS automatically selects the plaintext encoding for input values, and performs input and output data transformations. These three operations are not easily performed by programmers who are not HE experts. Thus, RAMPARTS makes HE more widely available and usable by the the population of programmers.
We compare our approach with Cingulata, the only previously known system that automatically generates circuits for HE computations.
The HE circuits generated by RAMPARTS are significantly more efficient than the circuits compiled by Cingulata. For instance, our runtimes for key generation/circuit compilation and all online operations are more than one order of magnitude lower for a sample image processing application used for performance evaluation in our study
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