11,882 research outputs found
Fluid thrust control system
A pure fluid thrust control system is described for a pump-fed, regeneratively cooled liquid propellant rocket engine. A proportional fluid amplifier and a bistable fluid amplifier control overshoot in the starting of the engine and take it to a predetermined thrust. An ejector type pump is provided in the line between the liquid hydrogen rocket nozzle heat exchanger and the turbine driving the fuel pump to aid in bringing the fluid at this point back into the regular system when it is not bypassed. The thrust control system is intended to function in environments too severe for mechanical controls
Gibrat's law for cities: uniformly most powerful unbiased test of the Pareto against the lognormal
We address the general problem of testing a power law distribution versus a
log-normal distribution in statistical data. This general problem is
illustrated on the distribution of the 2000 US census of city sizes. We provide
definitive results to close the debate between Eeckhout (2004, 2009) and Levy
(2009) on the validity of Zipf's law, which is the special Pareto law with tail
exponent 1, to describe the tail of the distribution of U.S. city sizes.
Because the origin of the disagreement between Eeckhout and Levy stems from the
limited power of their tests, we perform the {\em uniformly most powerful
unbiased test} for the null hypothesis of the Pareto distribution against the
lognormal. The -value and Hill's estimator as a function of city size lower
threshold confirm indubitably that the size distribution of the 1000 largest
cities or so, which include more than half of the total U.S. population, is
Pareto, but we rule out that the tail exponent, estimated to be ,
is equal to 1. For larger ranks, the -value becomes very small and Hill's
estimator decays systematically with decreasing ranks, qualifying the lognormal
distribution as the better model for the set of smaller cities. These two
results reconcile the opposite views of Eeckhout (2004, 2009) and Levy (2009).
We explain how Gibrat's law of proportional growth underpins both the Pareto
and lognormal distributions and stress the key ingredient at the origin of
their difference in standard stochastic growth models of cities
\cite{Gabaix99,Eeckhout2004}.Comment: 7 pages + 2 figure
XMM-Newton observation of the ULIRG NGC 6240: The physical nature of the complex Fe K line emission
We report on an XMM-Newton observation of the ultraluminous infrared galaxy
NGC 6240. The 0.3-10 keV spectrum can be successfully modelled with: (i) three
collisionally ionized plasma components with temperatures of about 0.7, 1.4,
and 5.5 keV; (ii) a highly absorbed direct power-law component; and (iii) a
neutral Fe K_alpha and K_beta line. We detect a significant neutral column
density gradient which is correlated with the temperature of the three plasma
components. Combining the XMM-Newton spectral model with the high spatial
resolution Chandra image we find that the temperatures and the column densities
increase towards the center.
With high significance, the Fe K line complex is resolved into three distinct
narrow lines: (i) the neutral Fe K_alpha line at 6.4 keV; (ii) an ionized line
at about 6.7 keV; and (iii) a higher ionized line at 7.0 keV (a blend of the Fe
XXVI and the Fe K_beta line). While the neutral Fe K line is most probably due
to reflection from optically thick material, the Fe XXV and Fe XXVI emission
arises from the highest temperature ionized plasma component.
We have compared the plasma parameters of the ultraluminous infrared galaxy
NGC 6240 with those found in the local starburst galaxy NGC 253. We find a
striking similarity in the plasma temperatures and column density gradients,
suggesting a similar underlying physical process at work in both galaxies.Comment: 8 pages including 9 figures. Accepted for publication in A&
Heavy Ion Collisions and the Density Dependence of the Local Mean Field
We study the effect of the density dependence of the scalar and the vector
part of the nucleonic self-energy in Relativistic Quantum Molecular Dynamics
(RQMD) on observables like the transversal flow and the rapidity distribution.
The stability of nuclei in RQMD is greatly improved if the density dependence
is included in the self-energies compared to a calculation assuming always
saturation density of nuclear matter. Different approaches are studied: The
main results are calculated with self-energies extracted from a
Dirac-Br\"uckner-Hartree-Fock G-matrix of a one boson exchange model, i.e. the
Bonn potential. These results are compared with those obtained by a
generalization of static Skyrme force, with calculations in the simple linear
Walecka model and results of the Br\"uckner-Hartree-Fock G-matrix of the Reid
soft core potential. The transversal flow is very sensitive to these different
approaches. A comparison with the data is given.Comment: LaTex-file, 13 pages, 5 figures (available upon request), submitted
to Nuclear Physics
Re-imagining community participation at the district level: Lessons from the DIALHS collaboration.
In South Africa, the value of community participation as one of the central
components of a primary health care approach is highlighted in legislation, policy
documents and strategic plans. There is widespread acceptance that community
participation strengthens community empowerment, disease prevention and access
to services.
Since 2010, the District Innovation and Action Learning for Health System Development
collaboration has co-produced knowledge about how to strengthen district
health systems. Nested within this collaboration is a series of engagements seeking
to understand and strengthen community participation including a multi-stakeholder
health risks and assets mapping activity; âLocal Action Groupâ initiatives; reflective
meetings with service colleagues about community participation experiences; and a
capacity-development initiative (community participation-related short courses and
mentoring).
These engagements hold a number of lessons for those interested in enhancing the
population orientation of primary health care and the district health system, the first
of which is the clear benefit to those interested in community roles and engagement of
convening spaces for dialogue. However, it is not easy to generate and sustain these
spaces. Through the application of a framework of collective capacity, this chapter
aims to shed light on why this is the case, and in so doing, to highlight a second
lesson, which is the perhaps unrecognised capacities of certain cadres, particularly
environmental health practitioners, in the implementation of community participation.
Ultimately, the chapter seeks to stimulate thinking and engagement about the ways in
which dialogue and participation can enrich the South African health system
A quantitative analysis of measures of quality in science
Condensing the work of any academic scientist into a one-dimensional measure
of scientific quality is a difficult problem. Here, we employ Bayesian
statistics to analyze several different measures of quality. Specifically, we
determine each measure's ability to discriminate between scientific authors.
Using scaling arguments, we demonstrate that the best of these measures require
approximately 50 papers to draw conclusions regarding long term scientific
performance with usefully small statistical uncertainties. Further, the
approach described here permits the value-free (i.e., statistical) comparison
of scientists working in distinct areas of science.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 4 table
Effect of periodic parametric excitation on an ensemble of force-coupled self-oscillators
We report the synchronization behavior in a one-dimensional chain of
identical limit cycle oscillators coupled to a mass-spring load via a force
relation. We consider the effect of periodic parametric modulation on the final
synchronization states of the system. Two types of external parametric
excitations are investigated numerically: periodic modulation of the stiffness
of the inertial oscillator and periodic excitation of the frequency of the
self-oscillatory element. We show that the synchronization scenarios are ruled
not only by the choice of parameters of the excitation force but depend on the
initial collective state in the ensemble. We give detailed analysis of
entrainment behavior for initially homogeneous and inhomogeneous states. Among
other results, we describe a regime of partial synchronization. This regime is
characterized by the frequency of collective oscillation being entrained to the
stimulation frequency but different from the average individual oscillators
frequency.Comment: Comments and suggestions are welcom
Distribution of reflection eigenvalues in many-channel chaotic cavities with absorption
The reflection matrix R=S^{\dagger}S, with S being the scattering matrix,
differs from the unit one, when absorption is finite. Using the random matrix
approach, we calculate analytically the distribution function of its
eigenvalues in the limit of a large number of propagating modes in the leads
attached to a chaotic cavity. The obtained result is independent on the
presence of time-reversal symmetry in the system, being valid at finite
absorption and arbitrary openness of the system. The particular cases of
perfectly and weakly open cavities are considered in detail. An application of
our results to the problem of thermal emission from random media is briefly
discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures; (Ref.[5b] added, appropriate modification in
text
Longitudinal Reproducibility of Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI) Derived Metrics in the White Matter
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) is undergoing constant evolution with the ambitious goal of developing in-vivo histology of the brain. A recent methodological advancement is Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI), a histologically validated multi-compartment model to yield microstructural features of brain tissue such as geometric complexity and neurite packing density, which are especially useful in imaging the white matter. Since NODDI is increasingly popular in clinical research and fields such as developmental neuroscience and neuroplasticity, it is of vast importance to characterize its reproducibility (or reliability). We acquired multi-shell DWI data in 29 healthy young subjects twice over a rescan interval of 4âŻweeks to assess the within-subject coefficient of variation (CVWS), between-subject coefficient of variation (CVBS) and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), respectively. Using these metrics, we compared regional and voxel-by-voxel reproducibility of the most common image analysis approaches (tract-based spatial statistics [TBSS], voxel-based analysis with different extents of smoothing [âVBM-styleâ], ROI-based analysis). We observed high testâretest reproducibility for the orientation dispersion index (ODI) and slightly worse results for the neurite density index (NDI). Our findings also suggest that the choice of analysis approach might have significant consequences for the results of a study. Collectively, the voxel-based approach with Gaussian smoothing kernels of â„4âŻmm FWHM and ROI-averaging yielded the highest reproducibility across NDI and ODI maps (CVWS mostly â€3%, ICC mostly â„0.8), respectively, whilst smaller kernels and TBSS performed consistently worse. Furthermore, we demonstrate that image quality (signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]) is an important determinant of NODDI metric reproducibility. We discuss the implications of these results for longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs commonly employed in the neuroimaging field
Finding Exogenous Variables in Data with Many More Variables than Observations
Many statistical methods have been proposed to estimate causal models in
classical situations with fewer variables than observations (p<n, p: the number
of variables and n: the number of observations). However, modern datasets
including gene expression data need high-dimensional causal modeling in
challenging situations with orders of magnitude more variables than
observations (p>>n). In this paper, we propose a method to find exogenous
variables in a linear non-Gaussian causal model, which requires much smaller
sample sizes than conventional methods and works even when p>>n. The key idea
is to identify which variables are exogenous based on non-Gaussianity instead
of estimating the entire structure of the model. Exogenous variables work as
triggers that activate a causal chain in the model, and their identification
leads to more efficient experimental designs and better understanding of the
causal mechanism. We present experiments with artificial data and real-world
gene expression data to evaluate the method.Comment: A revised version of this was published in Proc. ICANN201
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