New aircraft instrument indicates turbulence intensity

System consists of accelerometer, indicator, and necessary electronic circuits for summing and averaging accelerations. Averaging-time feature enables pilot to see large values of accelerations over a short time or smaller accelerations over longer period of time

Nuclear Responses to Electro-Weak Probes and In-Medium Chiral Perturbation Theory

We discuss two topics concerning the application of chiral perturbation theory to nuclear physics: (1) the latest developments in the study of possible kaon condensation in dense baryonic systems; (2) nuclear responses to electro-weak probes.Comment: 9 pages, invited talk at WEIN'95, Osaka, Japa

Who wants to be an agent? A framework to analyse water politics and governance

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a framework to analyse water politics and governance. The framework has been constructed from a social constructivist perspective. This theory places attention on the role of normative aspects like ideology, values, interests and culture in politics. This means that a theory of international relations such as neorealism, neoliberalism or structuralism would be appropriate but limiting for the analysis of water politics, in terms of the range of actors, processes and issues focused on. The framework’s niche lies in that it focuses attention on non-state actors. This carries the potential to widen the understanding of the role and involvement of such actors in water politics and governance. The framework has five components: description of the geographic area or issue; the actors involved in water politics and governance; the (hydropolitical) history of the issue; the actors’ power to enable change; and the type of interaction between the actors. In order to illustrate the components, examples from South and Southern Africa, and specifically the Kunene, Limpopo, Okavango and Orange River basins are used.Keywords: Water, politics, governance, agential power, river basin, authority, ideology, econom

Embolization in an adrenocortical carcinoma as palliative therapy

Background: With an annual incidence of 0.2% of new cases per 100,000 inhabitants, adrenocortical carcinoma is rare. In advanced tumor only palliative treatment modalities are practicable. Because of scarcity of the tumor, standard treatment has not been defined. The decision on therapy frequently depends on the individual situation. Tumor embolization and chemotherapy are amongst the possible options. Patient and Methods: We report on a case of a 32-year-old female patient with a large-volume hormonally active adrenocortical carcinoma and hematogenous liver metastases. This carcinoma was confirmed histologically by means of liver biopsy. Owing to the large tumor extent and metastatic spreading and also in view of the poor general condition of the patient, curative surgical therapy was not possible. For this reason, a local approach was chosen primarily with transarterial tumor embolization at the capillary level. Systemic chemotherapy was given afterwards. Results: Improvement of the patient's general condition, especially the pronounced pain symptoms, could be achieved for a short time by the embolization: both, the patient's clinical condition and the laboratory test parameters improved. However, a rapid tumor progression occured under chemotherapy, which was started after embolization. Conclusion: In advanced adrenocortical carcinoma, tumor embolization can lead to a stabilization of the disease and improvement of the symptoms as appraised by palliative criteria in some patients

Teaching young musicians expressive performance: an experimental study

Twenty-nine pupils (aged 8–15) took part in an improvisation test and an experimental vs. control group teaching session. The aim of the improvisation test was to explore whether participants had knowledge about the use of expressive cues to convey basic emotions in improvisations. Assessments of the improvisations by four adjudicators indicated that most pupils in this sample could convey happiness, sadness and anger effectively in improvisations, providing a useful starting point for expressive music performance, which was examined in the experimental study. The experimental study investigated whether discussion of musical character is effective for improving pupils’ expressiveness, by comparing outcomes with a control teaching session that focused on accuracy and technical fluency. Participants’ performances of a ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ musical excerpt pre- and post-teaching were assessed by four adjudicators. Results indicated that the experimental teaching had been significantly more effective for improving expressiveness in the ‘sad’ extract than control teaching

Neutrinos, Axions and Conformal Symmetry

We demonstrate that radiative breaking of conformal symmetry (and simultaneously electroweak symmetry) in the Standard Model with right-chiral neutrinos and a minimally enlarged scalar sector induces spontaneous breaking of lepton number symmetry, which naturally gives rise to an axion-like particle with some unusual features. The couplings of this `axion' to Standard Model particles, in particular photons and gluons, are entirely determined (and computable) via the conformal anomaly, and their smallness turns out to be directly related to the smallness of the masses of light neutrinos.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, expanded version, to be published in EPJ

Dense packing crystal structures of physical tetrahedra

We present a method for discovering dense packings of general convex hard particles and apply it to study the dense packing behavior of a one-parameter family of particles with tetrahedral symmetry representing a deformation of the ideal mathematical tetrahedron into a less ideal, physical, tetrahedron and all the way to the sphere. Thus, we also connect the two well studied problems of sphere packing and tetrahedron packing on a single axis. Our numerical results uncover a rich optimal-packing behavior, compared to that of other continuous families of particles previously studied. We present four structures as candidates for the optimal packing at different values of the parameter, providing an atlas of crystal structures which might be observed in systems of nano-particles with tetrahedral symmetry