The Manchester occulting mask imager (MOMI) - first results on the environment of P Cygni

The design and first use of the Manchester occulting mask imager (MOMI) is described. This device, when combined with the Cassegrain or Ritchey-Chretien foci of large telescopes, is dedicated to the imagery of faint line emission regions around bright central sources. Initial observations, with MOMI on the Nordic Optical telescope (NOT), of the V=4.8 mag P~Cygni environment, have revealed a $\geq$~5~arcmin long [NII] 6584A emitting filament projecting from the outer nebular shell of this luminous blue variable (LBV) star. The presence of a mono-polar lobe older than both the inner (22 arcsec diameter) and outer (1.6 arcmin diameter) shells is suggested.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted MNRAS 1998 June 1

Two-Loop Crossover Scaling Functions of the O(N) Model

Using Environmentally Friendly Renormalization, we present an analytic calculation of the series for the renormalization constants that describe the equation of state for the $O(N)$ model in the whole critical region. The solution of the beta-function equation, for the running coupling to order two loops, exhibits crossover between the strong coupling fixed point, associated with the Goldstone modes, and the Wilson-Fisher fixed point. The Wilson functions $\gamma_\lambda$, $\gamma_\phi$ and $\gamma_{\phi^2}$, and thus the effective critical exponents associated with renormalization of the transverse vertex functions, also exhibit non-trivial crossover between these fixed points.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, version to appears in IJMPL

ELISA detection of phenazepam, etizolam, pyrazolam, flubromazepam, diclazepam and delorazepam in blood using Immunalysis® benzodiazepine kit

Phenazepam and etizolam were the first uncontrolled benzodiazepines available for sale in the UK. Pyrazolam, flubromazepam and diclazepam are not used medicinally anywhere in the world; they are produced exclusively for the uncontrolled, recreational market. It is important to know whether potentially abused drugs like these can be detected in routine toxicological screening tests. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the Immunalysis® Benzodiazepines ELISA kit could detect phenazepam, etizolam, pyrazolam, flubromazepam, diclazepam and its metabolite delorazepam. Their cross-reactivity was assessed by comparing the absorbance of the drug with that of oxazepam, the reference standard. This study found that these uncontrolled benzodiazepines cross-react sufficiently to produce a positive result with the Immunalysis® Benzodiazepine ELISA kit. Cross-reactivity ranged from 79 to 107% for phenazepam, etizolam, pyrazolam, flubromazepam, diclazepam and delorazepam fortified into blood. The results show that it is possible to detect these newer benzodiazepines with traditional forensic toxicology laboratory tools and it is important to include these benzodiazepines in the confirmation tests

Comment on ``Can Disorder Induce a Finite Thermal Conductivity in 1D Lattices?''

In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 63 (2001)], Li et al have reported that the nonequilibrium heat conducting steady state of a disordered harmonic chain is not unique. In this comment we point out that for a large class of stochastic heat baths the uniqueness of the steady state can be proved, and therefore the findings of Li et al could be either due to their use of deterministic heat baths or insufficient equilibration times in the simulations. We give a simple example where the uniquness of the steady state can be explicitly demonstrated.Comment: 1 page, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let

Estimating drizzle drop size and precipitation rate using two-colour lidar measurements

A method to estimate the size and liquid water content of drizzle drops using lidar measurements at two wavelengths is described. The method exploits the differential absorption of infrared light by liquid water at 905 nm and 1.5 μm, which leads to a different backscatter cross section for water drops larger than ≈50 μm. The ratio of backscatter measured from drizzle samples below cloud base at these two wavelengths (the colour ratio) provides a measure of the median volume drop diameter D0. This is a strong effect: for D0=200 μm, a colour ratio of ≈6 dB is predicted. Once D0 is known, the measured backscatter at 905 nm can be used to calculate the liquid water content (LWC) and other moments of the drizzle drop distribution. The method is applied to observations of drizzle falling from stratocumulus and stratus clouds. High resolution (32 s, 36 m) profiles of D0, LWC and precipitation rate R are derived. The main sources of error in the technique are the need to assume a value for the dispersion parameter μ in the drop size spectrum (leading to at most a 35% error in R) and the influence of aerosol returns on the retrieval (≈10% error in R for the cases considered here). Radar reflectivities are also computed from the lidar data, and compared to independent measurements from a colocated cloud radar, offering independent validation of the derived drop size distributions

ACL function in the normal knee

A biomechanical description of the anteroexternal cruciate ligament of the knee in normal conditions is made

The Specific Heat of a Ferromagnetic Film.

We analyze the specific heat for the $O(N)$ vector model on a $d$-dimensional film geometry of thickness $L$ using ``environmentally friendly'' renormalization. We consider periodic, Dirichlet and antiperiodic boundary conditions, deriving expressions for the specific heat and an effective specific heat exponent, \alpha\ef. In the case of $d=3$, for $N=1$, by matching to the exact exponent of the two dimensional Ising model we capture the crossover for \xi_L\ra\infty between power law behaviour in the limit {L\over\xi_L}\ra\infty and logarithmic behaviour in the limit {L\over\xi_L}\ra0 for fixed $L$, where $\xi_L$ is the correlation length in the transverse dimensions.Comment: 21 pages of Plain TeX. Postscript figures available upon request from [email protected]

Transfer Learning for Multi-language Twitter Election Classification

Both politicians and citizens are increasingly embracing social media as a means to disseminate information and comment on various topics, particularly during significant political events, such as elections. Such commentary during elections is also of interest to social scientists and pollsters. To facilitate the study of social media during elections, there is a need to automatically identify posts that are topically related to those elections. However, current studies have focused on elections within English-speaking regions, and hence the resultant election content classifiers are only applicable for elections in countries where the predominant language is English. On the other hand, as social media is becoming more prevalent worldwide, there is an increasing need for election classifiers that can be generalised across different languages, without building a training dataset for each election. In this paper, based upon transfer learning, we study the development of effective and reusable election classifiers for use on social media across multiple languages. We combine transfer learning with different classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVM) and state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which make use of word embedding representations for each social media post. We generalise the learned classifier models for cross-language classification by using a linear translation approach to map the word embedding vectors from one language into another. Experiments conducted over two election datasets in different languages show that without using any training data from the target language, linear translations outperform a classical transfer learning approach, namely Transfer Component Analysis (TCA), by 80% in recall and 25% in F1 measure