Video conferencing made easy

Network video conferencing is advancing rapidly throughout the nation, and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), a Department of Energy (DOE) facility, is at the forefront of the development. Engineers at INEL/EG&G designed and installed a very unique DOE videoconferencing system, offering many outstanding features, that include true multipoint conferencing, user-friendly design and operation with no full-time operators required, and the potential for cost effective expansion of the system. One area where INEL/EG&G engineers made a significant contribution to video conferencing was in the development of effective, user-friendly, end station driven scheduling software. A PC at each user site is used to schedule conferences via a windows package. This software interface provides information to the users concerning conference availability, scheduling, initiation, and termination. The menus are 'mouse' controlled. Once a conference is scheduled, a workstation at the hubs monitors the network to initiate all scheduled conferences. No active operator participation is required once a user schedules a conference through the local PC; the workstation automatically initiates and terminates the conference as scheduled. As each conference is scheduled, hard copy notification is also printed at each participating site. Video conferencing is the wave of the future. The use of these user-friendly systems will save millions in lost productivity and travel cost throughout the nation. The ease of operation and conference scheduling will play a key role on the extent industry uses this new technology. The INEL/EG&G has developed a prototype scheduling system for both commercial and federal government use

Entropy of Thermally Excited Black Rings

A string theory description of near extremal black rings is proposed. The entropy is computed and the thermodynamic properties are derived for a large family of black rings that have not yet been constructed in supergravity. It is also argued that the most general black ring in N=8 supergravity has 21 parameters up to duality.Comment: 17 pages; v2: minor edits and refs adde

Sinuosity and the affect grid: A method for adjusting repeated mood scores

Copyright @ 2012 Ammons Scientific. The article can be accessed from the links below.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Sinuosity is a measure of how much a travelled pathway deviates from a straight line. In this paper, sinuosity is applied to the measurement of mood. The Affect Grid is a mood scale that requires participants to place a mark on a 9 x 9 grid to indicate their current mood. The grid has two dimensions: pleasure-displeasure (horizontal) and arousal-sleepiness (vertical). In studies where repeated measurements are required, some participants may exaggerate their mood shifts due to faulty interpretation of the scale or a feeling of social obligation to the experimenter. A new equation is proposed, based on the sinuosity measure in hydrology, a measure of the meandering of rivers. The equation takes into account an individual's presumed tendency to exaggerate and meander to correct the score and reduce outliers. The usefulness of the equation is demonstrated by applying it to Affect Grid data from another study.This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

‘Driving’ innovation in construction organizations: a comparative case study of the design and construction of motor racing venues

The culture of high-performance racing, whether Formula One, Nascar, or sports cars represents the continuous push for better performance. The research focuses upon understanding how stakeholders designing and building motor racing venues experience the innovation process through both new and refurbishment projects. This paper will provide a review of the literature relative to the nature of innovations within the construction setting, considering a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The context of innovative designs and high-performance facilities serves as a novel exploration given that the nature of the facilities seems to attract these innovative solutions. Given this seeming repeatability of pursuit and success in innovation on this project type suggests that the context allows construction firms to successfully mobilize their innovative ideas and construction expertise. Using the captured data from two case study projects; Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi and the Daytona International Speedway in the USA, we explore the phenomenon around the mobilization of innovation in these contexts. Data is collected through extensive, unstructured interviews with key leadership in both projects to explore the emergent nature of innovation and the evolving facility design, construction, and operations. Innovation is born, resides and lives within a loosely and tightly knit network of stakeholders. We will connect the discursive nature of innovation in such settings and projects back to the innovation literature

Controlling for Lexical Closeness in Survey Research: A Demonstration on the Technology Acceptance Model

Word co-occurrences in text carry lexical information that can be harvested by data-mining tools such as latent semantic analysis (LSA). In this research perspective paper, we demonstrate the potency of using such embedded information by demonstrating that the technology acceptance model (TAM) can be reconstructed significantly by analyzing unrelated newspaper articles. We suggest that part of the reason for the phenomenal statistical validity of TAM across contexts may be related to the lexical closeness among the keywords in its measurement items. We do so not to critique TAM but to praise the quality of its methodology. Next, putting that LSA reconstruction of TAM into perspective, we show that empirical data can provide a significantly better fitting model than LSA data can. Combined, the results raise the possibility that a significant portion of variance in survey based research results from word cooccurrences in the language itself regardless of the theory or context of the study. Addressing this possibility, we suggest a method to statistically control for lexical closeness

A new measurement of the baryonic fraction using the sparse NGC 3258 group of galaxies

New X-ray observations of the sparse NGC 3258 group of galaxies made by the ASCA satellite with good spectral and spatial resolution has revealed that this group has a gravitational potential deep enough to prohibit significant mass removal from the system. The baryonic fraction within 240 kpc is found to be 0.065 +0.051/-0.020 for h_{50}=1, where h_{50}=H_0/50 km/s/Mpc, in good agreement with the universal value of 0.05 +/-0.01 predicted by standard Big Bang nucleosynthesis for a Universe with Omega_0=1 and h_{50}=1. Since the deep potential of the NGC 3258 group ensures that all pristine intragroup gas has been retained, the baryonic fraction of the NGC 3258 group is indicative of the universal value. Consequently it seems premature to rule out a critical Universe.Comment: 19 pages Latex, using aasms4.sty, paper also available at http://www.dsri.dk/~kristian To appear in Astrophysical Journal Letter

HST observations of star clusters in NGC 1023: Evidence for three cluster populations?

Using HST images we have carried out a study of cluster populations in the nearby S0 galaxy NGC 1023. In two WFPC2 pointings we have identified 221 cluster candidates. The small distance (~9 Mpc) combined with deep F555W and F814W images allows us to reach about two magnitudes below the expected turn-over of the globular cluster luminosity function. NGC 1023 appears to contain at least three identifiable cluster populations: the brighter clusters show a clearly bimodal color distribution with peaks at V-I = 0.92 and at V-I = 1.15 and in addition there are a number of fainter, more extended objects with predominantly red colors. Among the brighter clusters, we find that the blue clusters have somewhat larger sizes than the red ones with mean effective radii of R(eff) ~ 2 and R(eff) ~ 1.7 pc, respectively. These clusters have luminosity functions (LFs) and sizes consistent with what is observed for globular clusters in other galaxies. Fitting Gaussians to the LFs of the blue and red compact clusters we find turn-over magnitudes of M(TO,blue)=-7.58 and M(TO,red)=-7.37 in V and dispersions of sigma(V,blue)=1.12 and sigma(V,red)=0.97. The fainter, more extended clusters have effective radii up to R(eff) ~ 10-15 pc and their LF appears to rise at least down to M(V) ~ -6, few of them being brighter than M(V) = -7. We suggest that these fainter objects may have a formation history distinct from that of the brighter GCs.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa

Black Hole Hair Removal: Non-linear Analysis

BMPV black holes in flat transverse space and in Taub-NUT space have identical near horizon geometries but different microscopic degeneracies. It has been proposed that this difference can be accounted for by different contribution to the degeneracies of these black holes from hair modes, -- degrees of freedom living outside the horizon. In this paper we explicitly construct the hair modes of these two black holes as finite bosonic and fermionic deformations of the black hole solution satisfying the full non-linear equations of motion of supergravity and preserving the supersymmetry of the original solutions. Special care is taken to ensure that these solutions do not have any curvature singularity at the future horizon when viewed as the full ten dimensional geometry. We show that after removing the contribution due to the hair degrees of freedom from the microscopic partition function, the partition functions of the two black holes agree.Comment: 40 pages, LaTe

A study on the multicolour evolution of Red Sequence galaxy populations: insights from hydrodynamical simulations and semi-analytical models

By means of our own cosmological-hydrodynamical simulation and semi-analytical model we studied galaxy population properties in clusters and groups, spanning over 10 different bands from UV to NIR, and their evolution since redshift z=2. We compare our results in terms of galaxy red/blue fractions and luminous-to-faint ratio (LFR) on the Red Sequence (RS) with recent observational data reaching beyond z=1.5. Different selection criteria were tested in order to retrieve galaxies belonging to the RS: either by their quiescence degree measured from their specific SFR ("Dead Sequence"), or by their position in a colour-colour plane which is also a function of sSFR. In both cases, the colour cut and the limiting magnitude threshold were let evolving with redshift, in order to follow the natural shift of the characteristic luminosity in the LF. We find that the Butcher-Oemler effect is wavelength-dependent, with the fraction of blue galaxies increasing steeper in optical colours than in NIR. Besides, only when applying a lower limit in terms of fixed absolute magnitude, a steep BO effect can be reproduced, while the blue fraction results less evolving when selecting samples by stellar mass or an evolving magnitude limit. We then find that also the RS-LFR behaviour, highly debated in the literature, is strongly dependent on the galaxy selection function: in particular its very mild evolution recovered when measured in terms of stellar mass, is in agreement with values reported for some of the highest redshift confirmed (proto)clusters. As to differences through environments, we find that normal groups and (to a lesser extent) cluster outskirts present the highest values of both star forming fraction and LFR at low z, while fossil groups and cluster cores the lowest: this separation among groups begins after z~0.5, while earlier all group star forming properties are undistinguishable.Comment: revised version, A&A accepted (11 pages, 6 figures