Activation volumes in CoPtCr-SiO2 perpendicular recording media

CoPtCr-SiO2 perpendicular recording media with varying levels of SiO2 were examined by two different methods to determine the activation volume. The first is based on the sweep-rate dependence of the remanence coercivity using Sharrock's equation. The second is based on the measurement of the fluctuation field from time-dependence data, determined using a magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) magnetometer. The values of V-act measured at the coercivity for both methods are almost the same, with the fluctuation field and activation volumes increasing with the SiO2 content. The difference between V-act and the grain volume measured directly from bright-field TEM images decreases as the SiO2 content increases due to the reduction of intergranular exchange coupling. The experimental results indicate that values of V-act obtained from single- and double-layered media are consistent. It was also found that the coercivity and normalized hysteresis loop slope at coercivity varied with SiO2 content, with the coercivity peaking at 8 at % SiO2 (nearly 26 vol% SiO2)

Determination of activation volumes of reversal in perpendicular media

We discuss a method for the determination of activation volumes of reversal in perpendicular media. This method does not require correction for the self-demagnetizing field normally associated with these media. This is achieved by performing time dependence measurements at a constant level of magnetization. From the difference in time taken for the magnetization to decay to a fixed value at two fields-separated by a small increment DeltaH, the activation volume can be determined. We report data for both CoCrPt alloy films and a multilayer film, typical of those materials under consideration for use as perpendicular media. We find activation volumes that are consistent with the hysteresis curves of the materials. The activation volume scales qualitatively with the exchange coupling. The alloy films have significantly lower activation volumes, implying that they would be capable of supporting a higher data density

Monsoonal influences on evapotranspiration of savanna vegetation of northern Australia

Data from savannas of northern Australia are presented for net radiation, latent and sensible heat, ecosystem surface conductance (Gs) and stand water use for sites covering a latitudinal range of 5° or 700 km. Measurements were made at three locations of increasing distance from the northern coastline and represent high- (1,750 mm), medium- (890 mm) and low- (520 mm) rainfall sites. This rainfall gradient arises from the weakened monsoonal influence with distance inland. Data were coupled to seasonal estimates of leaf area index (LAI) for the tree and understorey strata. All parameters were measured at the seasonal extremes of late wet and dry seasons. During the wet season, daily rates of evapotranspiration were 3.1-3.6 mm day-1 and were similar for all sites along the rainfall gradient and did not reflect site differences in annual rainfall. During the dry season, site differences were very apparent with evapotranspiration 2-18 times lower than wet season rates, the seasonal differences increasing with distance from coast and reduced annual rainfall. Due to low overstorey LAI, more than 80% of water vapour flux was attributed to the understorey. Seasonal differences in evapotranspiration were mostly due to reductions in understorey leaf area during the dry season. Water use of individual trees did not differ between the wet and dry seasons at any of the sites and stand water use was a simple function of tree density. Gs declined markedly during the dry season at all sites, and we conclude that the savanna water (and carbon) balance is largely determined by Gs and its response to atmospheric and soil water content and by seasonal adjustments to canopy leaf area

The LOST Algorithm: finding lines and separating speech mixtures

Robust clustering of data into linear subspaces is a frequently encountered problem. Here, we treat clustering of one-dimensional subspaces that cross the origin. This problem arises in blind source separation, where the subspaces correspond directly to columns of a mixing matrix. We propose the LOST algorithm, which identifies such subspaces using a procedure similar in spirit to EM. This line finding procedure combined with a transformation into a sparse domain and an L1-norm minimisation constitutes a blind source separation algorithm for the separation of instantaneous mixtures with an arbitrary number of mixtures and sources. We perform an extensive investigation on the general separation performance of the LOST algorithm using randomly generated mixtures, and empirically estimate the performance of the algorithm in the presence of noise. Furthermore, we implement a simple scheme whereby the number of sources present in the mixtures can be detected automaticall

Time dependence in perpendicular media with a soft underlayer

In this paper we describe measurements of magnetic viscosity or time dependence in magnetic thin films suitable for use as perpendicular recording media. Generally, such effects cannot be measured using conventional magnetometry techniques due to the presence of a thin (0.1 mum) soft underlayer (SUL) in the media necessary to focus the head field. To achieve our results we have developed an ultrastable MOKE magnetometer, the construction of which is described. This has enabled us to measure nominally identical films with and without the presence of the SUL. We find that the presence of the SUL narrows the energy barrier distribution in the perpendicular film increasing the nucleation field (H-n), reducing the coercivity (H-c) and results in an increase in the squareness of the loop. This in turn results in an increase in the magnitude of the viscosity in the region of the H-c but that the range of fields over which the viscosity occurs is reduced

Daily and seasonal patterns of carbon and water fluxes above a north Australian savanna

Daily and seasonal fluxes of carbon dioxide and water vapor above a north Australian savanna were recorded over a complete dry season-wet season annual cycle using the eddy covariance technique. Wet season rates of photosynthesis and transpiration were larger than those measured in the dry season and were dominated by the presence of the grassy understory. As the dry season progressed and the grass understory died, ecosystem rates of assimilation and water vapor flux declined substantially. By the end of the dry season, canopy assimilation and evapotranspiration rates were 20-25% of wet season values. Assimilation was light saturated in the dry season but not in the wet season. Stomatal control of transpiration increased between the wet and dry season. This was revealed by the decline in the slope of E with increasing leaf-to-air vapor pressure difference (D) between wet and dry seasons, and also by the significant decrease in the ratio of boundary to canopy conductance observed between the wet and dry seasons. A simple pan-tropical modeling of leaf area index or wet season canopy CO2 flux was undertaken. It was shown that with readily available data for foliar N content and the ratio of rainfall to potential evaporation, leaf index and wet season canopy CO2 flux can be successfully estimated for a number of tropical ecosystems, including north Australian savannas

Policy Ideology in European Mass Publics, 1981–2016

Using new scaling methods and a comprehensive public opinion dataset, we develop the first survey-based time-series–cross-sectional measures of policy ideology in European mass publics. Our dataset covers 27 countries and 36 years and contains nearly 2.7 million survey responses to 109 unique issue questions. Estimating an ordinal group-level IRT model in each of four issue domains, we obtain biennial estimates of the absolute economic conservatism, relative economic conservatism, social conservatism, and immigration conservatism of men and women in three age categories in each country. Aggregating the group-level estimates yields estimates of the average conservatism in national publics in each biennium between 1981–82 and 2015–16. The four measures exhibit contrasting cross-sectional cleavages and distinct temporal dynamics, illustrating the multidimensionality of mass ideology in Europe. Subjecting our measures to a series of validation tests, we show that the constructs they measure are distinct and substantively important and that they perform as well as or better than one-dimensional proxies for mass conservatism (left–right self-placement and median voter scores). We foresee many uses for these scores by scholars of public opinion, electoral behavior, representation, and policy feedback

Discovering speech phones using convolutive non-negative matrix factorisation with a sparseness constraint

Discovering a representation that allows auditory data to be parsimoniously represented is useful for many machine learning and signal processing tasks. Such a representation can be constructed by Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF), a method for finding parts-based representations of non-negative data. Here, we present an extension to convolutive NMF that includes a sparseness constraint, where the resultant algorithm has multiplicative updates and utilises the beta divergence as its reconstruction objective. In combination with a spectral magnitude transform of speech, this method discovers auditory objects that resemble speech phones along with their associated sparse activation patterns. We use these in a supervised separation scheme for monophonic mixtures, finding improved separation performance in comparison to classic convolutive NMF