74,818 research outputs found
Discovery of Substructure in the Scatter-Broadened Image of Sgr A*
We have detected substructure within the smooth scattering disk of the
celebrated Galactic Center radio source Sagittarius A* (SgrA*). We observed
this structure at 1.3 cm wavelength with the Very Long Baseline Array together
with the Green Bank Telescope, on baselines of up to 3000 km, long enough to
completely resolve the average scattering disk. Such structure is predicted
theoretically, as a consequence of refraction by large-scale plasma
fluctuations in the interstellar medium. Along with the much-studied
scaling of angular broadening
with observing wavelength , our observations
indicate that the spectrum of interstellar turbulence is shallow, with an inner
scale larger than 300 km. The substructure is consistent with an intrinsic size
of about 1 mas at 1.3 cm wavelength, as inferred from deconvolution of the
average scattering. Further observations of the substructure can set stronger
constraints on the properties of scattering material and on the intrinsic size
of SgrA*. These constraints will guide understanding of effects of
scatter-broadening and emission physics of the black hole, in images with the
Event Horizon Telescope at millimeter wavelengths.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letters; minor
corrections to the text and figures are introduce
A probabilistic model checking approach to analysing reliability, availability, and maintainability of a single satellite system
Satellites now form a core component for space
based systems such as GPS and GLONAS which provide
location and timing information for a variety of uses. Such
satellites are designed to operate in-orbit and have lifetimes of
10 years or more. Reliability, availability and maintainability
(RAM) analysis of these systems has been indispensable in
the design phase of satellites in order to achieve minimum
failures or to increase mean time between failures (MTBF)
and thus to plan maintainability strategies, optimise reliability
and maximise availability. In this paper, we present formal
modelling of a single satellite and logical specification of
its reliability, availability and maintainability properties. The
probabilistic model checker PRISM has been used to perform
automated quantitative analyses of these properties
Universality and correlations in individuals wandering through an online extremist space
The 'out of the blue' nature of recent terror attacks and the diversity of
apparent motives, highlight the importance of understanding the online
trajectories that individuals follow prior to developing high levels of
extremist support. Here we show that the physics of stochastic walks, with and
without temporal correlation, provides a unifying description of these online
trajectories. Our unique dataset comprising all users of a global social media
site, reveals universal characteristics in individuals' online lifetimes. Our
accompanying theory generates analytical and numerical solutions that describe
the characteristics shown by individuals that go on to develop high levels of
extremist support, and those that do not. The existence of these temporal and
also many-body correlations suggests that existing physics machinery can be
used to quantify and perhaps mitigate the risk of future events
Irrelevance of memory in the minority game
By means of extensive numerical simulations we show that all the distinctive
features of the minority game introduced by Challet and Zhang (1997), are
completely independent from the memory of the agents. The only crucial
requirement is that all the individuals must posses the same information,
irrespective of the fact that this information is true or false.Comment: 4 RevTeX pages, 4 figure
Contextual-based Image Inpainting: Infer, Match, and Translate
We study the task of image inpainting, which is to fill in the missing region
of an incomplete image with plausible contents. To this end, we propose a
learning-based approach to generate visually coherent completion given a
high-resolution image with missing components. In order to overcome the
difficulty to directly learn the distribution of high-dimensional image data,
we divide the task into inference and translation as two separate steps and
model each step with a deep neural network. We also use simple heuristics to
guide the propagation of local textures from the boundary to the hole. We show
that, by using such techniques, inpainting reduces to the problem of learning
two image-feature translation functions in much smaller space and hence easier
to train. We evaluate our method on several public datasets and show that we
generate results of better visual quality than previous state-of-the-art
methods.Comment: ECCV 2018 camera read
Experimental and analytical investigation of the fracture processes of boron/aluminum laminates containing notches
Experimental results for five laminate orientations of boron/aluminum composites containing either circular holes or crack-like slits are presented. Specimen stress-strain behavior, stress at first fiber failure, and ultimate strength were determined. Radiographs were used to monitor the fracture process. The specimens were analyzed with a three-dimensional elastic-elastic finite-element model. The first fiber failures in notched specimens with laminate orientation occurred at or very near the specimen ultimate strength. For notched unidirectional specimens, the first fiber failure occurred at approximately one-half of the specimen ultimate strength. Acoustic emission events correlated with fiber breaks in unidirectional composites, but did not for other laminates. Circular holes and crack-like slits of the same characteristic length were found to produce approximately the same strength reduction. The predicted stress-strain responses and stress at first fiber failure compared very well with test data for laminates containing 0 deg fibers
Hypnosis for acute procedural pain: a critical review
Clinical evidence for the effectiveness of hypnosis in the treatment of acute procedural pain was critically evaluated based on reports from randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs). Results from the 29 RCTs meeting inclusion criteria suggest that hypnosis decreases pain compared to standard care and attention control groups and that it is at least as effective as comparable adjunct psychological or behavioral therapies. In addition, applying hypnosis in multiple sessions prior to the day of the procedure produced the highest percentage of significant results. Hypnosis was most effective in minor surgical procedures. However, interpretations are limited by considerable risk of bias. Further studies using minimally effective control conditions and systematic control of intervention dose and timing are required to strengthen conclusions
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