Understanding the truth about subjectivity

Results of two experiments show children’s understanding of diversity in personal preference is incomplete. Despite acknowledging diversity, in Experiment 1(N=108), 6- and 8-year-old children were less likely than adults to see preference as a legitimate basis for personal tastes and more likely to say a single truth could be found about a matter of taste. In Experiment 2 (N=96), 7- and 9-year-olds were less likely than 11- and 13-yearolds to say a dispute about a matter of preference might not be resolved. These data suggest that acceptance of the possibility of diversity does not indicate an adult-like understanding of subjectivity. An understanding of the relative emphasis placed on objective and subjective factors in different contexts continues to develop into adolescence

Spin Structure of the Nucleon - Status and Recent Results

After the initial discovery of the so-called "spin crisis in the parton model" in the 1980's, a large set of polarization data in deep inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering was collected at labs like SLAC, DESY and CERN. More recently, new high precision data at large x and in the resonance region have come from experiments at Jefferson Lab. These data, in combination with the earlier ones, allow us to study in detail the polarized parton densities, the Q^2 dependence of various moments of spin structure functions, the duality between deep inelastic and resonance data, and the nucleon structure in the valence quark region. Together with complementary data from HERMES, RHIC and COMPASS, we can put new limits on the flavor decomposition and the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin. In this report, we provide an overview of our present knowledge of the nucleon spin structure and give an outlook on future experiments. We focus in particular on the spin structure functions g_1 and g_2 of the nucleon and their moments.Comment: 69 pages, 46 figures. Report to be published in "Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics". v2 with added references and minor edit

Unifying metastasis--Integrating intravasation, circulation and end organ colonization

Recent technological advances that have enabled the measurement of circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in patients have spurred interest in the circulatory phase of metastasis. Techniques that do not solely rely on a blood sample allow substantial biological interrogation beyond simply counting CTCs

Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of oscillatory shape evolution for electromigration-driven islands

The shape evolution of two-dimensional islands under electromigration-driven periphery diffusion is studied by kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations and continuum theory. The energetics of the KMC model is adapted to the Cu(100) surface, and the continuum model is matched to the KMC model by a suitably parametrized choice of the orientation-dependent step stiffness and step atom mobility. At 700 K shape oscillations predicted by continuum theory are quantitatively verified by the KMC simulations, while at 500 K qualitative differences between the two modeling approaches are found.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Diffusion and Interdiffusion in Binary Metallic Melts

We discuss the dependence of self- and interdiffusion coefficients on temperature and composition for two prototypical binary metallic melts, Al-Ni and Zr-Ni, in molecular-dynamics (MD) computer simulations and the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition (MCT). Dynamical processes that are mainly entropic in origin slow down mass transport (as expressed through self diffusion) in the mixture as compared to the ideal-mixing contribution. Interdiffusion of chemical species is a competition of slow kinetic modes with a strong thermodynamic driving force that is caused by non-entropic interactions. The combination of both dynamic and thermodynamic effects causes qualitative differences in the concentration dependence of self-diffusion and interdiffusion coefficients. At high temperatures, the thermodynamic enhancement of interdiffusion prevails, while at low temperatures, kinetic effects dominate the concentration dependence, rationalized within MCT as the approach to its ideal-glass transition temperature $T_c$. The Darken equation relating self- and interdiffusion qualitatively reproduces the concentration-dependence in both Zr-Ni and Al-Ni, but quantitatively, the kinetic contributions to interdiffusion can be slower than the lower bound suggested by the Darken equation. As temperature is decreased, the agreement with Darken's equation improves, due to a strong coupling of all kinetic modes that is a generic feature predicted by MCT.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

Determination of the Telluric Water Vapor Absorption Correction for Astronomical Data Obtained from the Kuiper Airborne Observatory

The amount of telluric water vapor along the line of sight of the Kuiper Airborne Observatory telescope as obtained concommitantly on 23 flights is compared with the NASA-Ames Michelson interferometer and with the NOAA-Boulder radiometer. A strong correlation between the two determinations exists, and a method for computing the atmospheric transmission for a given radiometer reading is established