16,962 research outputs found
CIVIC LIFE: Evidence Base for the Triennial Review
This document forms part of the Equality and Human Rights Commission triennial review and covers equalities in civic life. It examines equality in political participation, freedom of language and freedom of worship. The primary aim is to map the various dimensions of equality and inequality in participation in civic and political life. We explore and review equalities, good relations and human rights in relation to civic life, and where possible we examine some of the driving forces behind the differences that we observe
Retrieval of phase memory in two independent atomic ensembles by Raman process
In spontaneous Raman process in atomic cell at high gain, both the Stokes
field and the accompanying collective atomic excitation (atomic spin wave) are
coherent. We find that, due to the spontaneous nature of the process, the
phases of the Stokes field and the atomic spin wave change randomly from one
realization to another but are anti-correlated. The phases of the atomic
ensembles are read out via another Raman process at a later time, thus
realizing phase memory in atoms. The observation of phase correlation between
the Stokes field and the collective atomic excitations is an important step
towards macroscopic EPR-type entanglement of continuous variables between light
and atoms
A fabrication history based strain-fatigue model for prediction of crack initiation in a radial loading wheel
A strain-based fatigue model concerning fabrication history is applied to predict the fatigue life of a commercial car wheel under radial loads. As the prior conditions, the strain fatigue testing is performed on standard specimen of DP590 and FB540 steels at various fabrication states, including raw materials, pre-strain and pre-strain + bake. Furthermore, the strain distribution of car wheel during its rotation under radial loads is simulated via ANSYS. The fatigue properties mainly determined by crack initiation of car wheels at various fabrication states are predicted via local stress–strain method, in which the scale and surface factors are also taken into account. The radial fatigue testing is carried out, and the results are used to validate the present model. The fracture mechanism is analysed using FEI Nova 400 field emission gun scanning electron microscope
A momentum-conserving, consistent, Volume-of-Fluid method for incompressible flow on staggered grids
The computation of flows with large density contrasts is notoriously
difficult. To alleviate the difficulty we consider a consistent mass and
momentum-conserving discretization of the Navier-Stokes equation.
Incompressible flow with capillary forces is modelled and the discretization is
performed on a staggered grid of Marker and Cell type. The Volume-of-Fluid
method is used to track the interface and a Height-Function method is used to
compute surface tension. The advection of the volume fraction is performed
using either the Lagrangian-Explicit / CIAM (Calcul d'Interface Affine par
Morceaux) method or the Weymouth and Yue (WY) Eulerian-Implicit method. The WY
method conserves fluid mass to machine accuracy provided incompressiblity is
satisfied which leads to a method that is both momentum and mass-conserving. To
improve the stability of these methods momentum fluxes are advected in a manner
"consistent" with the volume-fraction fluxes, that is a discontinuity of the
momentum is advected at the same speed as a discontinuity of the density. To
find the density on the staggered cells on which the velocity is centered, an
auxiliary reconstruction of the density is performed. The method is tested for
a droplet without surface tension in uniform flow, for a droplet suddenly
accelerated in a carrying gas at rest at very large density ratio without
viscosity or surface tension, for the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, for a
falling raindrop and for an atomizing flow in air-water conditions
Matter-wave bistability in coupled atom-molecule quantum gases
We study the matter-wave bistability in coupled atom-molecule quantum gases,
in which heteronuclear molecules are created via an interspecies Feshbach
resonance involving either two-species Bose or two-species Fermi atoms at zero
temperature. We show that the resonant two-channel Bose model is equivalent to
the nondegenerate parametric down-conversion in quantum optics, while the
corresponding Fermi model can be mapped to a quantum optics model that
describes a single-mode laser field interacting with an ensemble of
inhomogeneously broadened two-level atoms. Using these analogy and the fact
that both models are subject to the Kerr nonlinearity due to the two-body
s-wave collisions, we show that under proper conditions, the population in the
molecular state in both models can be made to change with the Feshbach detuning
in a bistable fashion.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
TimeMachine: Timeline Generation for Knowledge-Base Entities
We present a method called TIMEMACHINE to generate a timeline of events and
relations for entities in a knowledge base. For example for an actor, such a
timeline should show the most important professional and personal milestones
and relationships such as works, awards, collaborations, and family
relationships. We develop three orthogonal timeline quality criteria that an
ideal timeline should satisfy: (1) it shows events that are relevant to the
entity; (2) it shows events that are temporally diverse, so they distribute
along the time axis, avoiding visual crowding and allowing for easy user
interaction, such as zooming in and out; and (3) it shows events that are
content diverse, so they contain many different types of events (e.g., for an
actor, it should show movies and marriages and awards, not just movies). We
present an algorithm to generate such timelines for a given time period and
screen size, based on submodular optimization and web-co-occurrence statistics
with provable performance guarantees. A series of user studies using Mechanical
Turk shows that all three quality criteria are crucial to produce quality
timelines and that our algorithm significantly outperforms various baseline and
state-of-the-art methods.Comment: To appear at ACM SIGKDD KDD'15. 12pp, 7 fig. With appendix. Demo and
other info available at http://cs.stanford.edu/~althoff/timemachine
Neuroprotective roles of asiaticoside on hydrogen peroxide-induced toxicity in SH-SY5Y cells
This study aims to determine whether the neuroprotective role of asiaticoside at maximum non-toxic dose (MNTD) or half MNTD (½MNTD) on H2O2-induced neurotoxicity in SH-SY5Y cells was mediated by regulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and nitric oxide (NO) through inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and heme-oxygenase 1 (HO-1). The levels of ROS, NO, iNOS and HO-1 in SH-SY5Y cells pre-treated with asiaticoside ½MNTD were significantly reduced by 15.3, 55.6, 24.8 and 6.7 %, respectively as compared to the H2O2 treatment group. Cells pre-treated MNTD only reduced the iNOS level significantly. Asiaticoside, particularly at ½MNTD reduced the ROS, NO and iNOS levels. Contrarily, the HO-1 expression was down-regulated when treated with asiaticoside, which further suggest that asiaticoisde exerted its neuroprotective effects via HO-1 regulation.Keywords: Asiaticoside; Heme-oxygenase 1; Inducible nitric oxide synthase; Nitric oxide; Reactive oxygen species
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