Shock-induced CO2 loss from CaCO3: Implications for early planetary atmospheres

Recovered samples from shock recovery experiments on single crystal calcite were subjected to thermogravimetric analysis to determine the amount of post-shock CO2, the decarbonization interval and the activation energy, for the removal of remaining CO2 in shock-loaded calcite. Comparison of post-shock CO2 with that initially present determines shock-induced CO2 loss as a function of shock pressure. Incipient to complete CO2 loss occurs over a pressure range of approximately 10 to approximately 70 GPa. Optical and scanning electron microscopy reveal structural changes, which are related to the shock-loading. The occurrence of dark, diffuse areas, which can be resolved as highly vesicular areas as observed with a scanning electron microscope are interpreted as representing quenched partial melts, into which shock-released CO2 was injected. The experimental results are used to constrain models of shock-produced, primary CO2 atmospheres on the accreting terrestrial planets

Setting high expectations is not enough: linkages between expectation climate strength, trust, and employee performance

Drawing on Climate Theory and Social Exchange Theory, we examine whether and how the strength of the expectation climate, defined as the degree of agreement amongst job incumbents on what is expected from them, affects their job performance. To explain this relationship, we utilize mediating trust-in-the-organization effects as an explanatory avenue. In a time-lagged data sample of 568 public service employees, whose job performance is rated by their 242 line managers, we apply multilevel modelling. We employed stratified random sampling techniques across 75 job functions in a large, public sector organization in Belgium. Our analysis provides support for the argument that expectation climate strength via mediating trust-in-the-organization effects impacts positively on the relationship between employee expectations and performance. Specifically, the significant association of the expectation climate strength with trust suggests that the perceived consensus about the expectations among different job incumbents demonstrates an organization’s trustworthiness and reliability to pursue intentions that are deemed favorable for employees. We conjecture that expectation climate strength breeds trust which strengthens employees’ job performance. HRM professionals in general, and line managers in particular, should heed our advice and carefully manage their tools and practices in an effort to signal compatible expectancies to different job incumbents in the same or similar roles. Our results shed new light on the mechanisms through which the strength of collective expectations impacts employee outcomes

Magnetooptical sum rules close to the Mott transition

We derive new sum rules for the real and imaginary parts of the frequency-dependent Hall constant and Hall conductivity. As an example, we discuss their relevance to the doped Mott insulator that we describe within the dynamical mean-field theory of strongly correlated electron systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 ps figures; accepted for publication in PR

Cognitive performance in multiple system atrophy

The cognitive performance of a group of patients with multiple system atrophy (MSA) of striato-nigral predominance was compared with that of age and IQ matched control subjects, using three tests sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction and a battery sensitive to memory and learning deficits in Parkinson's disease and dementia of the Alzheimer type. The MSA group showed significant deficits in all three of the tests previously shown to be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction. Thus, a significant proportion of patients from the MSA group failed an attentional set-shifting test, specifically at the stage when an extra-dimensional shift was required. They were also impaired in a subject-ordered test of spatial working memory. The MSA group showed deficits mostly confined to measures of speed of thinking, rather than accuracy, on the Tower of London task. These deficits were seen in the absence of consistent impairments in language or visual perception. Moreover, the MSA group showed no significant deficits in tests of spatial and pattern recognition previously shown to be sensitive to patients early in the course of probable Alzheimer's disease and only a few patients exhibited impairment on the Warrington Recognition Memory Test. There were impairments on other tests of visual memory and learning relative to matched controls, but these could not easily be related to fundamental deficits of memory or learning. Thus, on a matching-to-sample task the patients were impaired at simultaneous but not delayed matching to sample, whereas difficulties in a pattern-location learning task were more evident at its initial, easier stages. The MSA group showed no consistent evidence of intellectual deterioration as assessed from their performance on subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the National Adult Reading Test (NART). Consideration of individual cases showed that there was some heterogeneity in the pattern of deficits in the MSA group, with one patient showing no impairment, even in the face of considerable physical disability. The results show a distinctive pattern of cognitive deficits, unlike those previously seen using the same tests in patients with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, and suggesting a prominent frontal-lobe-like component. The implications for concepts of 'subcortical' dementia and 'fronto-striatal' cognitive dysfunction are considered

Fronto-striatal cognitive deficits at different stages of Parkinson's disease

Groups of patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease, either medicated or unmedicated, were compared with matched groups of normal controls on a computerized battery previously shown to be sensitive to frontal lobe dysfunction, including tests of planning, spatial working memory and attentional set-shifting. In a series of problems based on the 'Tower of London' test, medicated patients with Parkinson's disease were shown to be impaired in the amount of time spent thinking about (planning) the solution to each problem. Additionally, an impairment in terms of the accuracy of the solution produced on this test was only evident in those patients with more severe clinical symptoms and was accompanied by deficits in an associated test of spatial short-term memory. Medicated patients with both mild and severe clinical symptoms were also impaired on a related test of spatial working memory. In contrast, a group of patients who were unmedicated and 'early in the course' of the disease were unimpaired in all three of these tests. However, all three Parkinson's disease groups were impaired in the test of attentional set-shifting ability, although unimpaired in a test of pattern recognition which is insensitive to frontal lobe damage. These data are compared with those previously published from a group of young neurosurgical patients with localized excisions of the frontal lobes and are discussed in terms of the specific nature of the cognitive deficit at different stages of Parkinson's disease

Elligator : elliptic-curve points indistinguishable from uniform random strings

Censorship-circumvention tools are in an arms race against censors. The censors study all traffic passing into and out of their controlled sphere, and try to disable censorship-circumvention tools without completely shutting down the Internet. Tools aim to shape their traffic patterns to match unblocked programs, so that simple traffic profiling cannot identify the tools within a reasonable number of traces; the censors respond by deploying rewalls with increasingly sophisticated deep-packet inspection. Cryptography hides patterns in user data but does not evade censorship if the censor can recognize patterns in the cryptography itself. In particular, elliptic-curve cryptography often transmits points on known elliptic curves, and those points are easily distinguishable from uniform random strings of bits. This paper introduces high-security high-speed elliptic-curve systems in which elliptic-curve points are encoded so as to be indistinguishable from uniform random strings. At a lower level, this paper introduces a new bijection between strings and about half of all curve points; this bijection is applicable to every odd-characteristic elliptic curve with a point of order 2, except for curves of j-invariant 1728. This paper also presents guidelines to construct, and two examples of, secure curves suitable for these encodings

Hall effect in quasi one-dimensional organic conductors

We study the Hall effect in a system of weakly coupled Luttinger Liquid chains, using a Memory function approach to compute the Hall constant in the presence of umklapp scattering along the chains. In this approximation, the Hall constant decomposes into two terms: a high-frequency term and a Memory function term. For the case of zero umklapp scattering, where the Memory function vanishes, the Hall constant is simply the band value, in agreement with former results in a similar model with no dissipation along the chains. With umklapp scattering along the chains, we find a power-law temperature dependance of the Hall constant. We discuss the applications to quasi 1D organic conductors at high temperatures.Comment: Proceedings of the ISCOM conference "Sixth International Symposium on Crystalline Organic Metals, Superconductors, and Ferromagnets", Key West, Florida, USA (Sept. 2005), to be plublished in the Journal of Low Temperature Physic

Prediction of solar particle events with SRAM-based soft error rate monitor and supervised machine learning

This work introduces an embedded approach for the prediction of Solar Particle Events (SPEs) in space applications by combining the real-time Soft Error Rate (SER) measurement with SRAM-based detector and the offline trained machine learning model. The proposed approach is intended for the self-adaptive fault-tolerant multiprocessing systems employed in space applications. With respect to the state-of-the-art, our solution allows for predicting the SER 1 h in advance and fine-grained hourly tracking of SER variations during SPEs as well as under normal conditions. Therefore, the target system can activate the appropriate mechanisms for radiation hardening before the onset of high radiation levels. Based on the comparison of five different machine learning algorithms trained with the public space flux database, the preliminary results indicate that the best prediction accuracy is achieved with the recurrent neural network (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM). © 2020 The Author

Leader-employee congruence of expected contributions in the employee-organization relationship

Employees' expected contributions can be incongruent with those of their leader. We examine the congruence effect of leaders' and employees' expected contributions on job satisfaction. Results of cross-level polynomial regressions on 947 employees and 224 leaders support the congruence effect. When expected contributions are congruent, employees are more satisfied with their job. Our findings suggest that employees enjoy high challenges, as long as these challenges are in harmony with the expected contributions of their leaders. Employees are less satisfied with their jobs both when their expected contributions were higher than their leaders' and when their expected contributions were lower than those of their leaders. Beyond the relevance of having high expected contributions, the findings highlight the crucial role played by the congruence of expected contributions of leaders and employees