Critical comments on the constancy of the speed of light

Criticisms on the theory of the constancy of the speed of light are answered. It is shown that the new theory is not logically inconsistent for the reasons expressed

An Atypical Presentation of a Rare Disease

A 76-year-old white woman presented for evaluation of asymptomatic skin lesions on her right shin, right buttock, and left arm. All lesions initially underwent slow growth and plateaued and then remained stable in size. A complete review of systems revealed normal results. She had 3 well-demarcated erythematous round plaques ranging from 1.5 to 3 cm, all with a central depression, yellow hue, and prominent telangiectasias (Figs 1 and 2). An excisional biopsy was performed. Histologically, there were palisading granulomas within the papillary and reticular dermis, predominantly composed of a histiocytic cell population with multiple large giant cells (S100-; Fig 3)

Photo annotation and retrieval through speech

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 36).In this thesis I describe the development of a speech-based annotation and retrieval system for digital photographs. The system uses a client/server architecture which allows photographs to be captured and annotated on various clients, such as mobile camera phones or the web, and then processed, indexed and stored on networked servers. For speech-based retrieval we have developed a mixed grammar recognition approach which allows the speech recognition system to construct a single finite-state network combining context-free grammars for recognizing and parsing query carrier phrases and metadata phrases, with an unconstrained statistical n-gram model for recognizing free-form search terms. Experiments demonstrating successful retrieval of photographs using purely speech-based annotation and retrieval are presented.by Brennan P. Sherry.M.Eng

Speed of light as measured by two terrestrial stable clocks

Despite the recent criticism within the special theory of relativity, there exists an arrangement of stable clocks rotating with the earth which predicts diurnal variations of the one-way speed of light, as suggested previously

Observations of Binary Stars with the Differential Speckle Survey Instrument. III. Measures below the Diffraction Limit of the WIYN Telescope

In this paper, we study the ability of CCD- and electron-multiplying-CCD-based speckle imaging to obtain reliable astrometry and photometry of binary stars below the diffraction limit of the WIYN 3.5 m Telescope. We present a total of 120 measures of binary stars, 75 of which are below the diffraction limit. The measures are divided into two groups that have different measurement accuracy and precision. The first group is composed of standard speckle observations, that is, a sequence of speckle images taken in a single filter, while the second group consists of paired observations where the two observations are taken on the same observing run and in different filters. The more recent paired observations were taken simultaneously with the Differential Speckle Survey Instrument, which is a two-channel speckle imaging system. In comparing our results to the ephemeris positions of binaries with known orbits, we find that paired observations provide the opportunity to identify cases of systematic error in separation below the diffraction limit and after removing these from consideration, we obtain a linear measurement uncertainty of 3-4 mas. However, if observations are unpaired or if two observations taken in the same filter are paired, it becomes harder to identify cases of systematic error, presumably because the largest source of this error is residual atmospheric dispersion, which is color dependent. When observations are unpaired, we find that it is unwise to report separations below approximately 20 mas, as these are most susceptible to this effect. Using the final results obtained, we are able to update two older orbits in the literature and present preliminary orbits for three systems that were discovered by Hipparcos

An Investigation of Tree Biomass in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

We determined the biomass (carbon storage) of four forest types in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park: pine/oak, cove hardwood, northern hardwood, and spruce/fir. Based on the GLOBE Programs land cover protocols (www.globe.gov), and the University of New Hampshire\u27s GLOBE Carbon Cycle Program (http://globecarboncycle.unh.edu/), we knew that species and tree circumference would be the two most critical factors in determining biomass, but we also hypothesized that number of trees in a study site and the elevation of the site would impact biomass. We hypothesized that old growth forest would contain greater biomass than a young forest. We recorded tree species and circumference for every tree that had a circumference greater than 15 centimeters in each plot of 900 square. The circumference of a total of 219 trees represented by 22 different species, as well as forest type, elevation, and GPS coordinates for each plot, were recorded

A Closer Look at the Performance of Neural Language Models on Reflexive Anaphor Licensing

An emerging line of work uses psycholinguistic methods to evaluate the syntactic generalizations acquired by neural language models (NLMs). While this approach has shown NLMs to be capable of learning a wide range of linguistic knowledge, confounds in the design of previous experiments may have obscured the potential of NLMs to learn certain grammatical phenomena. Here we re-evaluate the performance of a range of NLMs on reflexive anaphor licensing. Under our paradigm, the models consistently show stronger evidence of learning than reported in previous work. Our approach demonstrates the value of well-controlled psycholinguistic methods in gaining a fine-grained understanding of NLM learning potential