15,260 research outputs found

    Investigation of the stall-induced shock wave (hammershock) at the inlet to the engine

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    The peak static pressures measured at the inlet to the engine during stall are presented for a turbojet and two turbofan engines. It is shown for one turbofan and the turbojet that the static pressure ratio across the hammershock does not exceed significantly the normal shock pressure ratio necessary to stop the flow. The second turbofan engine did not follow this rule. Possible reasons for the departure are discussed. For the two turbofan engines the influence of the stall method on the hammershock intensity was investigated. Data related to the spatial distribution of pressure in the hammershock are also presented

    Exploring a Non-Minimal Sterile Neutrino Model Involving Decay at IceCube and Beyond

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    We study the phenomenology of neutrino decay together with neutrino oscillations in the context of eV-scale sterile neutrinos. We review the formalism of visible neutrino decay in which one of the decay products is a neutrino that potentially can be observed. We apply the formalism developed for decay to the recent sterile neutrino search performed by IceCube with TeV neutrinos. We show that for ν4\nu_4 lifetime τ4/m41016eV1s\tau_4/m_4 \lesssim 10^{-16} {\rm eV^{-1}s}, the interpretation of the high-energy IceCube analysis can be significantly changed.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. Find code at: https://github.com/arguelles/nuSQUIDSDeca

    Comparison of Allen Carr's Easyway programme with a specialist behavioural and pharmacological smoking cessation support service: a randomized controlled trial.

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    BACKGROUND AND AIMS: A combination of behavioural and pharmacological support is judged to be the optimal approach for assisting smoking cessation. Allen Carr's Easyway (ACE) is a single-session pharmacotherapy-free programme that has been in operation internationally for 38 years. We compared the effectiveness of ACE with specialist behavioural and pharmacological support delivered to the national standard in England. DESIGN: A two-arm, parallel-group, single-blind, randomized controlled trial. SETTING: London, UK, between February 2017 and May 2018. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 620 participants (310 in ACE and 310 in the combined behavioural and pharmacological support condition) were included in the analysis. Adult (≥ 18 years) smokers wanting to quit were randomized in a 1 : 1 ratio. Mean age for the total sample was 40.8 years, with 53.4% being male. Participant baseline characteristics (ethnicity, educational level, number of previous quit attempts, nicotine dependence) were evenly balanced between treatment groups. INTERVENTION AND COMPARATOR: The intervention was the ACE method of stopping smoking. This centres on a 4.5-6-hour session of group-based support, alongside subsequent text messages and top-up sessions if needed. It aims to make it easy to stop smoking by convincing smokers that smoking provides no benefits for them. The comparator was a specialist stop smoking service (SSS) providing behavioural and pharmacological support in accordance with national standards. MEASUREMENTS: The primary outcome was self-reported continuous abstinence for 26 weeks from the quit/quit re-set date verified by exhaled breath carbon monoxide measurement < 10 parts per million (p.p.m.). Primary analysis was by intention to treat. Secondary outcomes were: use of pharmacotherapy, adverse events and continuous abstinence up to 4 and 12 weeks. FINDINGS: A total of 468 participants attended treatment (255 ACE versus 213 SSS, P < 0.05). Of those who did attend treatment, 100 completed 6-month measures (23.7% ACE versus 20.7% SSS). Continuous abstinence to 26 weeks was 19.4% (60 of 310) in the ACE intervention and 14.8% (46 of 310) in the SSS intervention [risk difference for ACE versus SSS 4.5% (95% confidence interval (CI) = -1.4 to 10.4%, odds ratio (OR) = 1.38)]. The Bayes factor for superiority of the ACE condition was 1.24. CONCLUSION: There was no clear evidence of a difference in the efficacies of the Allen Carr's Easyway (ACE) and specialist smoking cessation support involving behavioural support and pharmacotherapy

    How the New Economics Can Improve Employment Discrimination Law, and How Economics Can Survive the Demise of the Rational Actor

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    Much employment discrimination law is premised on a purely money-focused reasonable employee, the sort who can be made whole with damages equal to lost wages, and who does not hesitate to challenge workplace discrimination. This type of rational actor populated older economic models but has been since modified by behavioral economics and research on happiness. Behavioral and traditional economists alike have analyzed broad employment policies, such as the wisdom of discrimination statutes, but the devil is in the details of employment law. On the critical damages-and-liability issues the Supreme Court and litigators face regularly, the law essentially ignores the lessons of behavioral economics and the affective sciences. (1) Damages: With emotional distress and punitive damages limited, the basic discrimination damages are the employee\u27s lost income. Courts draw no distinction between a failure to hire a job applicant and a termination of a long-term employee, yet endowment effect and happiness research indicate that terminated long-term employees typically suffer greater psychological loss, justifying greater damages. (2) Employer Duties: Effective antidiscrimination programs can shield employers from liability, but the cases and scholarship say little about what programs are effective. Research showing that people think and problem solve best in positive emotional states indicates that programs focused on negativity (for example, discrimination gets us sued ) yield fear and backlash but not the productive employee effort, understanding, and empathy that lessen bias. (3) Employee Duties: Harassment victims often cannot sue unless they first complained to their employer. Courts should recognize the reasonableness of not complaining due to learned helplessness and because the endowment effect and loss aversion explain reluctance to upset even a bad status quo (a job with harassment). The risk of loss (retaliation) outweighs the possible gain (ending harassment). This Article also analyzes broad implications of behavioral and happiness research for law and economics: (1) Do behavioral and happiness adjustments to a rational actor model make economics indeterminate? Economics still can yield useful legal analyses, but likely narrower ones (for example, improving individual, micro-level determinations of damages and reasonable behavior) than past economic analyses of macro-level issues, like whether all discrimination law is efficient. (2) Psychologically informed economics often prescribes regulation of markets. It asks, When is such regulation worth the transaction costs and incentive distortions? More complex rules, like those this Article prescribes, are worth the cost in higher-stakes, less-repeated transactions like employment than in lower-stakes, often-repeated transactions like consumer purchases. (3) Should courts rely on these new findings or instead disclaim reliance on any social science because new research often displaces prior findings? In employment cases, courts must assess make-whole damages and employee reasonableness, so they cannot avoid some conception of well-being and cognition--and even imperfect new findings beat disproven, too-narrow rationality assumptions. This Article thus offers a half-full/half-empty assessment of the usefulness of economics, and of behavioral and happiness research, to law. It sounds a cautionary note against using social science to assess grand legal policies, but a hopeful note that such research can improve decision making by judges, firms, and individuals

    Cosmological Constraints on Dissipative Models of Inflation

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    (Abridged) We study dissipative inflation in the regime where the dissipative term takes a specific form, \Gamma=\Gamma(\phi), analyzing two models in the weak and strong dissipative regimes with a SUSY breaking potential. After developing intuition about the predictions from these models through analytic approximations, we compute the predicted cosmological observables through full numerical evolution of the equations of motion, relating the mass scale and scale of dissipation to the characteristic amplitude and shape of the primordial power spectrum. We then use Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to constrain a subset of the models with cosmological data from the cosmic microwave background (WMAP three-year data) and large scale structure (SDSS Luminous Red Galaxy power spectrum). We find that the posterior distributions of the dissipative parameters are highly non-Gaussian and their allowed ranges agree well with the expectations obtained using analytic approximations. In the weak regime, only the mass scale is tightly constrained; conversely, in the strong regime, only the dissipative coefficient is tightly constrained. A lower limit is seen on the inflation scale: a sub-Planckian inflaton is disfavoured by the data. In both weak and strong regimes, we reconstruct the limits on the primordial power spectrum and show that these models prefer a {\it red} spectrum, with no significant running of the index. We calculate the reheat temperature and show that the gravitino problem can be overcome with large dissipation, which in turn leads to large levels of non-Gaussianity: if dissipative inflation is to evade the gravitino problem, the predicted level of non-Gaussianity might be seen by the Planck satellite.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by JCAP without text changes, References adde

    Physics of brain dynamics: Fokker-Planck analysis reveals changes in EEG delta-theta interactions in anaesthesia

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    We use drift and diffusion coefficients to reveal interactions between different oscillatory processes underlying a complex signal and apply the method to EEG delta and theta frequencies in the brain. By analysis of data recorded from rats during anaesthesia, we consider the stability and basins of attraction of fixed points in the phase portrait of the deterministic part of the retrieved stochastic process. We show that different classes of dynamics are associated with deep and light anaesthesia, and we demonstrate that the predominant directionality of the interaction is such that theta drives delt

    Biscuit wheat in W.A

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    Following small scale trials in the production and evaluation of Gluclub wheat in 1970 and 1971, farmers have been asked to produce 20,000 tons of this variety for the 1972/73 season. The background of this attempt to establish a class of soft or biscuit wheat in world markets is described in this article

    On the consistency of warm inflation

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    Conditions are obtained for the existence of a warm inflationary attractor in the system of equations describing an inflaton coupled to radiation. These conditions restrict the temperature dependence of the dissipative terms and the size of thermal corrections to the inflaton potential, as well as the gradient of the inflaton potential. When these conditions are met, the evolution approaches a slow-roll limit and only curvature fluctuations survive on super-horizon scales. Formulae are given for the spectral indices of the density perturbations and the tensor/scalar density perturbation amplitude ratio in warm inflation.Comment: 7 pages, ReVTeX. New refs in v
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