7,363 research outputs found
The star formation rate of CaII and damped Lyman-alpha absorbers at 0.4<z<1.3
[abridged] Using stacked Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra, we present the
detection of [OII]3727,3730 nebular emission from galaxies hosting CaII and
MgII absorption line systems. Both samples of absorbers, 345 CaII systems and
3461 MgII systems, span the redshift interval 0.4 < z < 1.3; all of the former
and half the latter sample are expected to be bona-fide damped Lyman-alpha
(DLA) absorbers. The measured star formation rate (SFR) per absorber from light
falling within the SDSS fibre apertures (corresponding to physical radii of 6-9
h^-1 kpc) is 0.11-0.14 Msol/yr for the MgII-selected DLAs and 0.11-0.48 Msol/yr
for the CaII absorbers. These results represent the first estimates of the
average SFR in an absorption-selected galaxy population from the direct
detection of nebular emission. Adopting the currently favoured model in which
DLAs are large, with radii >9h^-1 kpc, and assuming no attenuation by dust,
leads to the conclusion that the SFR per unit area of MgII-selected DLAs falls
an order of magnitude below the predictions of the Schmidt law, which relates
the SFR to the HI column density at z~0. The contribution of both DLA and CaII
absorbers to the total observed star formation rate density in the redshift
range 0.4 < z < 1.3, is small, <10% and <3% respectively. The result contrasts
with the conclusions of Hopkins et al. that DLA absorbers can account for the
majority of the total observed SFR density in the same redshift range. Our
results effectively rule out a picture in which DLA absorbers are the sites in
which a large fraction of the total SFR density at redshifts z < 1 occurs.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS, 13 pages, 6 figure
This Time It's Personal: from PIM to the Perfect Digital Assistant
Interacting with digital PIM tools like calendars, to-do lists, address books, bookmarks and so on, is a highly manual, often repetitive and frequently tedious process. Despite increases in memory and processor power over the past two decades of personal computing, not much has changed in the way we engage with such applications. We must still manually decompose frequently performed tasks into multiple smaller, data specific processes if we want to be able to recall or reuse the information in some meaningful way. "Meeting with Yves at 5 in Stata about blah" breaks down into rigid, fixed semantics in separate applications: data to be recorded in calendar fields, address book fields and, as for the blah, something that does not necessarily exist as a PIM application data structure. We argue that a reason Personal Information Management tools may be so manual, and so effectively fragmented, is that they are not personal enough. If our information systems were more personal, that is, if they knew in a manner similar to the way a personal assistant would know us and support us, then our tools would be more helpful: an assistive PIM tool would gather together the necessary material in support of our meeting with Yves. We, therefore, have been investigating the possible paths towards PIM tools as tools that work for us, rather than tools that seemingly make us work for them. To that end, in the following sections we consider how we may develop a framework for PIM tools as "perfect digital assistants" (PDA). Our impetus has been to explore how, by considering the affordances of a Real World personal assistant, we can conceptualize a design framework, and from there a development program for a digital simulacrum of such an assistant that is not for some far off future, but for the much nearer term
Reconstructing Compact Metrizable Spaces
The deck, , of a topological space is the set
, where denotes the
homeomorphism class of . A space is (topologically) reconstructible if
whenever then is homeomorphic to . It is
known that every (metrizable) continuum is reconstructible, whereas the Cantor
set is non-reconstructible.
The main result of this paper characterises the non-reconstructible compact
metrizable spaces as precisely those where for each point there is a
sequence of pairwise disjoint
clopen subsets converging to such that and are homeomorphic
for each , and all and .
In a non-reconstructible compact metrizable space the set of -point
components forms a dense . For -homogeneous spaces, this condition
is sufficient for non-reconstruction. A wide variety of spaces with a dense
set of -point components are presented, some reconstructible and
others not reconstructible.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure
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