13,518 research outputs found
Spectrum Analysis of Bright Kepler late B- to early F- Stars
The Kepler satellite mission delivers single band-pass light curves of a huge
number of stars observed in the Cygnus-Lyra region opening a new window for
asteroseismology. In order to accomplish one of the preconditions for the
asteroseismic modelling of the stars, we aim to derive fundamental parameters
and individual abundances for a sample of 18 Gamma Dor (GD)/Delta Sct (DSct)
and 8 SPB/beta Cep candidate stars in the Kepler satellite field of view. We
use the spectral synthesis method to model newly obtained, high-resolution
spectra of 26 stars in order to derive their fundamental parameters and
individual abundances. The stars are then placed into the log(Teff)-log(g)
diagram and the obtained spectroscopic classification is compared to the
existing photometric one. For hot stars, the KIC temperatures appear to be
systematically underestimated, in agreement with previous findings. We also
find that the temperatures derived from our spectra agree reasonably well with
those derived from the SED fitting. According to their position in the
log(Teff)-log(g) diagram, two stars are expected GD stars, four stars are
expected DSct stars, and four stars are possibly DSct stars at the blue edge of
the instability strip. Two stars are confirmed SPB variables, and one star
falls into the SPB instability region but its parameters might be biased by
binarity. Two of the four stars that fall into the DSct instability region show
GD-type oscillation in their light curves implying that GD-like oscillations
are much more common among the DSct stars than is theoretically expected.
Moreover, one of the stars located at the hot border of the DSct instability
strip is classified as DSct-GD hybrid pulsator from its light curve analysis.
Given that these findings are fully consistent with recent investigations, we
conclude that a revision of the GD and DSct instability strips is essential.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables; accepted for publication in MNRA
Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children : What do potential users think?
Luke Wood, Hagen Lehmann, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Ben Robins, Austen Rayner, and Dag Syrdal, ‘Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children: What do potential users think?’, paper presented at the 50th Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 1 April 2014 – 4 April 2014, London, UK.When police officers are conducting interviews with children, some of the disclosures can be quite shocking. This can make it difficult for an officer to maintain their composure without subtly indicating their shock to the child, which can in turn impede the information acquisition process. Using a robotic interviewer could eliminate this problem as the behaviours and expressions of the robot can be consciously controlled. To date research investigating the potential of Robot-Mediated Interviews has focused on establishing whether children will respond to robots in an interview scenario and if so how well. The results of these studies indicate that children will talk to a robot in an interview scenario in a similar way to which they talk to a human interviewer. However, in order to test if this approach would work in a real world setting, it is important to establish what the experts (e.g. specialist child interviewers) would require from the system. To determine the needs of the users we conducted a user panel with a group of potential real world users to gather their views of our current system and find out what they would require for the system to be useful to them. The user group we worked with consisted of specialist child protection police officers based in the UK. The findings from this panel suggest that a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system would need to be more flexible than our current system in order to respond to unpredictable situations and paths of investigation. This paper gives an insight into what real world users would need from a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system
A superfluid hydrodynamic model for the enhanced moments of inertia of molecules in liquid 4He
We present a superfluid hydrodynamic model for the increase in moment of
inertia, , of molecules rotating in liquid He. The static
inhomogeneous He density around each molecule (calculated using the Orsay-Paris
liquid He density functional) is assumed to adiabatically follow the
rotation of the molecule. We find that the values created by the
viscousless and irrotational flow are in good agreement with the observed
increases for several molecules [ OCS, (HCN), HCCCN, and HCCCH ]. For
HCN and HCCH, our model substantially overestimates . This is likely
to result from a (partial) breakdown of the adiabatic following approximation.Comment: 4 pages, 1 eps figure, corrected version of published paper. Erratum
has been submitted for change
Self-Trapped Exciton Defects in a Charge Density Wave: Electronic Excitations of BaBiO3
In the previous paper, it was shown that holes doped into BaBiO3 self-trap as
small polarons and bipolarons. These point defects are energetically favorable
partly because they undo locally the strain in the charge-density-wave (Peierls
insulator) ground state. In this paper the neutral excitations of the same
model are discussed. The lowest electronic excitation is predicted to be a
self-trapped exciton, consisting of an electron and a hole located on adjacent
Bi atoms. This excitation has been seen experimentally (but not identified as
such) via the Urbach tail in optical absorption, and the multi-phonon spectrum
of the ``breathing mode'' seen in Raman scattering. These two phenomena occur
because of the Franck-Condon effect associated with oxygen displacement in the
excited state.Comment: 5 pages with 7 embedded figures. See also cond-mat/0108089 on
polarons and bipolarons in BaBiO3 contains background informatio
Pricing Multi-Unit Markets
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets,
where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and
lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be
guaranteed with posted prices, under a range of assumptions about the
designer's information and agents' valuations. Our results provide insights
about the relative power of uniform and non-uniform prices, the relative
difficulty of different valuation classes, and the implications of different
informational assumptions. Among other results, we prove constant-factor
guarantees for agents with (symmetric) subadditive valuations, even in an
incomplete-information setting and with uniform prices
Improved Visualization of the Necrotic Zone after Microwave Ablation Using Computed Tomography Volume Perfusion in an In Vivo Porcine Model
After hepatic microwave ablation, the differentiation between fully necrotic and persistent vital tissue through contrast enhanced CT remains a clinical challenge. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate new imaging modalities, such as CT perfusion (CTP) to improve the visualization of coagulation necrosis. MWA and CTP were prospectively performed in five healthy pigs. After the procedure, the pigs were euthanized, and the livers explanted. Orthogonal histological slices of the ablations were stained with a vital stain, digitalized and the necrotic core was segmented. CTP maps were calculated using a dual-input deconvolution algorithm. The segmented necrotic zones were overlaid on the DICOM images to calculate the accuracy of depiction by CECT/CTP compared to the histological reference standard. A receiver operating characteristic analysis was performed to determine the agreement/true positive rate and disagreement/false discovery rate between CECT/CTP and histology. Standard CECT showed a true positive rate of 81% and a false discovery rate of 52% for display of the coagulation necrosis. Using CTP, delineation of the coagulation necrosis could be improved significantly through the display of hepatic blood volume and hepatic arterial blood flow (p < 0.001). The ratios of true positive rate/false discovery rate were 89%/25% and 90%/50% respectively. Other parameter maps showed an inferior performance compared to CECT
Effizienter Erwerb chirurgischer Basistechniken durch "blended learning"
Zusammenfasssung: Hintergrund: Große Studierendenzahlen und heterogene Dozierende erschweren einheitliche Kursgestaltungen und die objektive Standardisierung von Prüfungen im chirurgischen Fertigkeitstraining. Diese Arbeit zeigt die Vorteile des Einsatzes neuer Medien im "Blended-learning-Konzept" für das Fertigkeitstraining im Studiengang Humanmedizin der Universität Basel. Material und Methoden: Der studentische chirurgische "Nahtkurs" wurde nach einem Blended-learning-Konzept mit multimedialer CD, Präsenzveranstaltung und SkillsLab restrukturiert. Die Lernziele des Kurses wurden am Ende der Studienjahre anhand von Posten mit Checklisten im OSCE ("objective structured clinical examination") überprüft. Die studentische Kursbeurteilung sowie die Prüfungsergebnisse vor und nach Einführung des "blended learning" wurden miteinander verglichen. Ergebnisse: Sowohl die Beurteilungen der eingesetzten Lehrmittel, des subjektiven Übungserfolges und des prospektiven Nutzens für das Wahlstudienjahr (Praktisches Jahr) als auch die Gesamtkursbeurteilung waren nach Einführung des Blended-learning-Konzeptes signifikant höher als im alten Kursformat. Auch der Anteil an bestandenen Prüfungen war mit einem Zuwachs von 10% signifikant im Vergleich zum alten Kurs erhöht. Schlussfolgerung: "Blended learning” kann sowohl Wahrnehmung und Leistung als auch die Effizienz des Fertigkeitstrainings und der Betreuungszeit verbessern. Dadurch werden indirekt Ressourcen gespart. Chirurgische Verfahren können klar und übersichtlich vermittelt werde
The barrel DIRC of PANDA
Cooled antiproton beams of unprecedented intensities in the momentum range of 1.5-15 GeV/c will be used for the PANDA experiment at FAIR to perform high precision experiments in the charmed quark sector. The PANDA detector will investigate antiproton annihilations with beams in the momentum range of 1.5 GeV/c to 15 GeV/c on a fixed target. An almost 4π acceptance double spectrometer is divided in a forward spectrometer and a target spectrometer. The charged particle identification in the latter is performed by ring imaging Cherenkov counters employing the DIRC principle
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