8,580 research outputs found
Legitimating inaction : differing identity constructions of the Scots language.
The Scots language plays a key role in the political and cultural landscape of contemporary Scotland. From a discourse-historical perspective, this article explores how language ideologies about the Scots language are realized linguistically in a so-called ‘languages strategy’ drafted by the Scottish Executive, and in focus groups consisting of Scottish people. This article shows that although the decline of Scots is said to be a ‘tragedy’, focus group participants seem to reject the notion of Scots as a viable, contemporary language that can be used across a wide range of registers. The policy document also seems to construct Scots in very positive terms, but is shown to be unhelpful or potentially even damaging in the process of changing public attitudes to Scots
Force indeterminacy in the jammed state of hard disks
Granular packings of hard discs are investigated by means of contact dynamics
which is an appropriate technique to explore the allowed force-realizations in
the space of contact forces. Configurations are generated for given values of
the friction coefficient, and then an ensemble of equilibrium forces is found
for fixed contacts. We study the force fluctuations within this ensemble. In
the limit of zero friction the fluctuations vanish in accordance with the
isostaticity of the packing. The magnitude of the fluctuations has a
non-monotonous friction dependence. The increase for small friction can be
attributed to the opening of the angle of the Coulomb cone, while the decrease
as friction increases is due to the reduction of connectivity of the
contact-network, leading to local, independent clusters of indeterminacy. We
discuss the relevance of indeterminacy to packings of deformable particles and
to the mechanical response properties.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Minor changes, journal reference adde
Ethical Pluralism: The Decision-Making System of a Complex World
Today\u27s leaders are faced with many different ethical decisions that are further highlighted by social media and a rapid news cycle. It has been established that there is no universal ethical code, nor is there one unified global culture. Leaders must continually educate themselves and their employees in proper leadership techniques, education, decision-making, and cultural understanding. Pluralism is engrained in ethics, where there are different interpretations of the same information, different ways to analyze the situation and different ethical frameworks. Pluralism can lead to different outputs and decisions across the same situation, but pluralism is not a blight on ethics but a way to understand the reason for different outcomes and feedback
Hair Transplantation: Current Concepts and Techniques
Because of changes in technique, hair transplanting can now be offered as a reasonable option to more male and female patients who are not responsive to, or likely to benefit from, medical treatment. These changes have also resulted in exceptionally natural-looking results, even after a single session in an alopecic area, or in many individuals with prior and cosmetically unacceptable transplanting results. Current concepts and techniques are described in the article. Possible disadvantages of some of them are also discussed. In particular, the apparent advantages of “megasessions” of 3000 or more grafts per session, “dense packing” of more than 40 follicular units per cm2 and a new method of harvesting single follicular units directly from the donor area (Follicular Unit Extraction), may not be advantageous as they first seem
Jet triggered Type Ia supernovae in radio-galaxies?
We report the serendipitous discovery of a supernova (SN) in the nearby
radio-galaxy 3C 78. Observations obtained with the STIS spectrograph on board
the Hubble Space Telescope show, at a distance of 0.54 arcsec (300 pc) from the
galaxy nucleus, a second bright source, not present in previous images. As this
source was fortuitously covered by the spectrograph slit its spectrum was
obtained and it is characteristic of a Type Ia SN. This SN is closely aligned
with the radio-jet of 3C 78. Analysis of historical records shows that such a
close association between jet and supernova occurred in 6 of the 14 reported
SNe in radio-galaxies. The probability that this results from a random
distribution of SN in the host galaxy is less than 0.05%. We then argue that
jets might trigger supernova explosions.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, to appear in ApJL, 20 Jul 200
Reduction of electromagnetic exposure using hybrid (DVB-H/UMTS) networks
The hybrid mobile communication network described in this paper consists of a point-to-point network (UMTS) and a point-to-multipoint network (DVB-H). Using an additional DVB-H network increases the downlink capacity of the communications system. Another benefit of combining these two networks is an optimised transfer of data by collecting several user requests for a single response via the broadcast network DVB-H. It is analysed how the hybrid network structure influences the electromagnetic exposure. Therefore, realistic scenarios have been developed consisting of different user behaviour and different network structures. These scenarios provide building data for investigations of indoor coverage and realistic propagation of signals. In order to evaluate the grade of exposure, criteria have been defined. These criteria have been used for comparing a hybrid network with a single UMTS network in terms of electromagnetic exposure. The simulation results of the scenarios are shown for different network structures and network configurations
On the magnetic equation of state in (2+1)-flavor QCD
A first study of critical behavior in the vicinity of the chiral phase
transition of (2+1)-flavor QCD is presented. We analyze the quark mass and
volume dependence of the chiral condensate and chiral susceptibilities in QCD
with two degenerate light quark masses and a strange quark. The strange quark
mass (m_s) is chosen close to its physical value; the two degenerate light
quark masses (m_l) are varied in a wide range 1/80 \le m_l/m_s \le 2/5, where
the smallest light quark mass value corresponds to a pseudo-scalar Goldstone
mass of about 75 MeV. All calculations are performed with staggered fermions on
lattices with temporal extent Nt=4. We show that numerical results are
consistent with O(N) scaling in the chiral limit. We find that in the region of
physical light quark mass values, m_l/m_s \simeq 1/20, the temperature and
quark mass dependence of the chiral condensate is already dominated by
universal properties of QCD that are encoded in the scaling function for the
chiral order parameter, the magnetic equation of state. We also provide
evidence for the influence of thermal fluctuations of Goldstone modes on the
chiral condensate at finite temperature. At temperatures below, but close to
the chiral phase transition at vanishing quark mass, this leads to a
characteristic dependence of the light quark chiral condensate on the square
root of the light quark mass.Comment: 18 pages, 18 EPS-file
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