Space, the new frontier

Space program - high thrust boosters with greater payload capabilities, superior guidance and control, and astronaut trainin

Space... the New Frontier

Space exploration - united states space progra

An Unsettling Outcome: Why the Florida Supreme Court Was Wrong to Ban All Settlement Evidence in \u3ci\u3eSaleeby v Rocky Elson Construction, Inc.\u3c/i\u3e, 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009)

It is rare that a court as sophisticated as the Florida Supreme Court casually makes a fundamental mistake in an important area of the law. Unfortunately, Saleeby v. Rocky Elson Construction, Inc., 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009) represents one of these unusual instances. The Court was faced with a simple question: may evidence pertaining to a prior settlement be offered at trial when it is relevant to something other than liability or the invalidity or amount of the pending claim. The universal answer under both federal law and the law of other states is yes, as long as the probative value of the evidence outweighs its prejudicial impact. In Saleeby, the Florida Supreme Court held that the answer is a resounding “no.” The result could be a miscarriage of justice – for instance, in a case in which a witness’s testimony is effectively “purchased” through an overly generous settlement, but the fact-finder will be prevented by the Saleeby holding from finding this out

An Unsettling Outcome: Why the Florida Supreme Court Was Wrong to Ban All Settlement Evidence in \u3ci\u3eSaleeby v Rocky Elson Construction, Inc.\u3c/i\u3e, 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009)

It is rare that a court as sophisticated as the Florida Supreme Court casually makes a fundamental mistake in an important area of the law. Unfortunately, Saleeby v. Rocky Elson Construction, Inc., 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009) represents one of these unusual instances. The Court was faced with a simple question: may evidence pertaining to a prior settlement be offered at trial when it is relevant to something other than liability or the invalidity or amount of the pending claim. The universal answer under both federal law and the law of other states is yes, as long as the probative value of the evidence outweighs its prejudicial impact. In Saleeby, the Florida Supreme Court held that the answer is a resounding “no.” The result could be a miscarriage of justice – for instance, in a case in which a witness’s testimony is effectively “purchased” through an overly generous settlement, but the fact-finder will be prevented by the Saleeby holding from finding this out

DREDed Anomaly Mediation

We offer a guide to dimensional reduction (DRED) in theories with anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking. Evanescent operators proportional to epsilon arise in the bare Lagrangian when it is reduced from d=4 to d= (4-2 epsilon) dimensions. In the course of a detailed diagrammatic calculation, we show that inclusion of these operators is crucial. The evanescent operators conspire to drive the supersymmetry-breaking parameters along anomaly-mediation trajectories across heavy particle thresholds, guaranteeing the ultraviolet insensitivity.Comment: 24 pages. 10 figures. Uses Axodraw. Reference adde

Radiocarbon Evidence for the Importance of Surface Vegetation on Fermentation and Methanogenesis in Contrasting Types of Boreal Peatlands

We found a consistent distribution pattern for radiocarbon in dissolved organic carbon (DOC), dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and methane replicated across spatial and temporal scales in northern peatlands from Minnesota to Alaska. The 14C content of DOC is relatively modern throughout the peat column, to depths of 3 m. In sedge-dominated peatlands, the 14C contents of the products of respiration, CH4 and DIC, are essentially the same and are similar to that of DOC. In Sphagnum- and woody plant-dominated peatlands with few sedges, however, the respiration products are similar but intermediate between the 14C contents of the solid phase peat and the DOC. Preliminary data indicates qualitative differences in the pore water DOC, depending on the extent of sedge cover, consistent with the hypothesis that the DOC in sedge-dominated peatlands is more reactive than DOC in peatlands where Sphagnum or other vascular plants dominate. These data are supported by molecular level analysis of DOC by ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry that suggests more dramatic changes with depth in the composition of DOC in the sedge-dominated peatland pore waters relative to changes observed in DOC where Sphagnum dominates. The higher reactivity of DOC from sedge-dominated peatlands may be a function of either different source materials or environmental factors that are related to the abundance of sedges in peatlands

Self dual models and mass generation in planar field theory

We analyse in three space-time dimensions, the connection between abelian self dual vector doublets and their counterparts containing both an explicit mass and a topological mass. Their correspondence is established in the lagrangian formalism using an operator approach as well as a path integral approach. A canonical hamiltonian analysis is presented, which also shows the equivalence with the lagrangian formalism. The implications of our results for bosonisation in three dimensions are discussed.Comment: 15 pages,Revtex, No figures; several changes; revised version to appear in Physical Review

Automatic transcription of multi-genre media archives

This paper describes some recent results of our collaborative work on developing a speech recognition system for the automatic transcription or media archives from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The material includes a wide diversity of shows with their associated metadata. The latter are highly diverse in terms of completeness, reliability and accuracy. First, we investigate how to improve lightly supervised acoustic training, when timestamp information is inaccurate and when speech deviates significantly from the transcription, and how to perform evaluations when no reference transcripts are available. An automatic timestamp correction method as well as a word and segment level combination approaches between the lightly supervised transcripts and the original programme scripts are presented which yield improved metadata. Experimental results show that systems trained using the improved metadata consistently outperform those trained with only the original lightly supervised decoding hypotheses. Secondly, we show that the recognition task may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we describe Multi-level Adaptive Networks, a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of domain posterior features using deep neural network. We show that it provides a substantial reduction in WER over other systems including a PLP-based baseline, in-domain tandem features, and the best out-of-domain tandem features.This research was supported by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/I031022/1 (Natural Speech Technology).This paper was presented at the First Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia, August 22-23, 2013; Marseille. It was published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1012/