29,468 research outputs found
French and Indian Cruelty? The Fate of the Oswego Prisoners of War, 1756-1758
This article examines what happened to approximately 1,200 prisoners of war taken by the French and their Indian allies at the British post Fort Oswego in August 1756. Their experiences illuminated the contrast between traditional methods of warfare in colonial America and the new rules of war being introduced by European armies fighting in the French and Indian War. Although European armies claimed to treat POWs more humanely than Native Americans, their supposedly civilized rules of warfare actually increased the suffering of the Oswego prisoners
The Ohio Company and the Meaning of Opportunity in the American West 1786-1795
Founded in 1786 by former officers of the Continental Army to promote an orderly expansion of American society westward, the Ohio Company soon succumbed to the desire of many of its investors to make money. The aims of settlement warred with the desire to make a profit through land speculation; eventually the company dissolved, a casualty of its inability to reconcile the varied interests of shareholders and to manage westward development
What About That Pursuit of Happiness?
On the Fourth of July, many Americans will take the opportunity to read the Declaration of Independence. It is a long document, but the passage that is most likely to stir feelings of patriotism comes early, at the start of the second paragraph:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. [excerpt
Development of data unfolding techniques for contoured semiconductor neutron spectrometer Final report
Data unfolding techniques for contoured semiconductor neutron spectromete
LISA Source Confusion
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect thousands of
gravitational wave sources. Many of these sources will be overlapping in the
sense that their signals will have a non-zero cross-correlation. Such overlaps
lead to source confusion, which adversely affects how well we can extract
information about the individual sources. Here we study how source confusion
impacts parameter estimation for galactic compact binaries, with emphasis on
the effects of the number of overlaping sources, the time of observation, the
gravitational wave frequencies of the sources, and the degree of the signal
correlations. Our main findings are that the parameter resolution decays
exponentially with the number of overlapping sources, and super-exponentially
with the degree of cross-correlation. We also find that an extended mission
lifetime is key to disentangling the source confusion as the parameter
resolution for overlapping sources improves much faster than the usual square
root of the observation time.Comment: 8 pages, 14 figure
The Minimum Description Length Principle and Model Selection in Spectropolarimetry
It is shown that the two-part Minimum Description Length Principle can be
used to discriminate among different models that can explain a given observed
dataset. The description length is chosen to be the sum of the lengths of the
message needed to encode the model plus the message needed to encode the data
when the model is applied to the dataset. It is verified that the proposed
principle can efficiently distinguish the model that correctly fits the
observations while avoiding over-fitting. The capabilities of this criterion
are shown in two simple problems for the analysis of observed
spectropolarimetric signals. The first is the de-noising of observations with
the aid of the PCA technique. The second is the selection of the optimal number
of parameters in LTE inversions. We propose this criterion as a quantitative
approach for distinguising the most plausible model among a set of proposed
models. This quantity is very easy to implement as an additional output on the
existing inversion codes.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa
Time's Barbed Arrow: Irreversibility, Crypticity, and Stored Information
We show why the amount of information communicated between the past and
future--the excess entropy--is not in general the amount of information stored
in the present--the statistical complexity. This is a puzzle, and a
long-standing one, since the latter is what is required for optimal prediction,
but the former describes observed behavior. We layout a classification scheme
for dynamical systems and stochastic processes that determines when these two
quantities are the same or different. We do this by developing closed-form
expressions for the excess entropy in terms of optimal causal predictors and
retrodictors--the epsilon-machines of computational mechanics. A process's
causal irreversibility and crypticity are key determining properties.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
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