21,872 research outputs found
Space, conversations and place: lessons and questions from organisational development
Physical workspace is distinguished from workplace. The latter embodies culture and should become the
greater concern of FM. In the field of individual and group development spaces can add an extra gear to
stimulate cognitive processes. We provide various examples and suggest modern workplaces, with their
emphasis on interaction need to also focus on environments and spaces for individual and collective
reflection
Condition matters: pupil voices on the design and condition of secondary schools
This research was produced by Sheffield Hallam University. The project aimed to inform the creation of a national schools Facilities Management network and an ongoing programme to research and benchmark the impact of school condition and design on pupils
Piezoelectric copolymer hydrophones for ultrasonic field characterization
Hydrophones to be used in the characterization of medical ultrasonic transducers have
been fabricated using a new polyvinylidene fluoride/trifluoroethylene (VF2/VF3)
copolymer. The copolymer has an advantage over VF2 in that it does not require
prestretching before poling. Thin copolymer films can be cast from solution and then
poled using the corona discharge method. As there is a need for smallâdiameter
hydrophones to provide good spatial resolution in measuring highly focused ultrasonic
beams, hydrophones with diameter as small as 0.1 mm have been made. Both
needleâtype and line hydrophones have been tested and their performance reported. In
the case of line hydrophones, the output signal is proportional to the line integral of the
acoustic pressure and a computer tomographic technique has been used to reconstruct the
beam profiles
ARIA 2016 : Care pathways implementing emerging technologies for predictive medicine in rhinitis and asthma across the life cycle
European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Ageing Reference Site MACVIA-France, EU Structural and Development Fund Languedoc-Roussillon, ARIA.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Recommended from our members
A perceptual-statistics shading model
The process of surface perception is complex and based on several influencing factors, e.g., shading, silhouettes, occluding contours, and top down cognition. The accuracy of surface perception can be measured and the influencing factors can be modified in order to decrease the error in perception. This paper presents a novel concept of how a perceptual evaluation of a visualization technique can contribute to its redesign with the aim of improving the match between the distal and the proximal stimulus. During analysis of data from previous perceptual studies, we observed that the slant of 3D surfaces visualized on 2D screens is systematically underestimated. The visible trends in the error allowed us to create a statistical model of the perceived surface slant. Based on this statistical model we obtained from user experiments, we derived a new shading model that uses adjusted surface normals and aims to reduce the error in slant perception. The result is a shape-enhancement of visualization which is driven by an experimentally-founded statistical model. To assess the efficiency of the statistical shading model, we repeated the evaluation experiment and confirmed that the error in perception was decreased. Results of both user experiments are publicly-available datasets
The effect of magnetic fields on star cluster formation
We examine the effect of magnetic fields on star cluster formation by
performing simulations following the self-gravitating collapse of a turbulent
molecular cloud to form stars in ideal MHD. The collapse of the cloud is
computed for global mass-to-flux ratios of infinity, 20, 10, 5 and 3, that is
using both weak and strong magnetic fields. Whilst even at very low strengths
the magnetic field is able to significantly influence the star formation
process, for magnetic fields with plasma beta < 1 the results are substantially
different to the hydrodynamic case. In these cases we find large-scale
magnetically-supported voids imprinted in the cloud structure; anisotropic
turbulent motions and column density structure aligned with the magnetic field
lines, both of which have recently been observed in the Taurus molecular cloud.
We also find strongly suppressed accretion in the magnetised runs, leading to
up to a 75% reduction in the amount of mass converted into stars over the
course of the calculations and a more quiescent mode of star formation. There
is also some indication that the relative formation efficiency of brown dwarfs
is lower in the strongly magnetised runs due to the reduction in the importance
of protostellar ejections.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 8 very pretty movies, MNRAS, accepted. Version
with high-res figures + movies available from
http://www.astro.ex.ac.uk/people/dprice/pubs/mcluster/index.htm
A Population of Short-Period Variable Quasars from PTF as Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidates
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) at sub-parsec separations should be
common in galactic nuclei, as a result of frequent galaxy mergers.
Hydrodynamical simulations of circumbinary discs predict strong periodic
modulation of the mass accretion rate on time-scales comparable to the orbital
period of the binary. As a result, SMBHBs may be recognized by the periodic
modulation of their brightness. We conducted a statistical search for periodic
variability in a sample of 35,383 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the
photometric database of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). We analysed
Lomb-Scargle periodograms and assessed the significance of our findings by
modeling each individual quasar's variability as a damped random walk (DRW). We
identified 50 quasars with significant periodicity beyond the DRW model,
typically with short periods of a few hundred days. We find 33 of these to
remain significant after a re-analysis of their periodograms including
additional optical data from the intermediate-PTF and the Catalina Real-Time
Transient Survey (CRTS). Assuming that the observed periods correspond to the
redshifted orbital periods of SMBHBs, we conclude that our findings are
consistent with a population of unequal-mass SMBHBs, with a typical mass ratio
as low as q = M2/M1 ~ 0.01.Comment: MNRAS (accepted), new section 4.
Classical moduli hair
We extend existing treatments of black hole solutions in String Gravity to
include moduli fields. We compute the external moduli and dilaton hair, as well
as of their associated axions,to in the framework of the loop
corrected superstring effective action for a Kerr-Newman black hole background.Comment: 11 pages,LaTex file,no figure
The Power of Brane-Induced Gravity
We study the role of the brane-induced graviton kinetic term in theories with
large extra dimensions. In five dimensions we construct a model with a
TeV-scale fundamental Planck mass and a {\it flat} extra dimension the size of
which can be astronomically large. 4D gravity on the brane is mediated by a
massless zero-mode, whereas the couplings of the heavy Kaluza-Klein modes to
ordinary matter are suppressed. The model can manifest itself through the
predicted deviations from Einstein theory in long distance precision
measurements of the planetary orbits. The bulk states can be a rather exotic
form of dark matter, which at sub-solar distances interact via strong 5D
gravitational force. We show that the induced term changes dramatically the
phenomenology of sub-millimeter extra dimensions. For instance, high-energy
constraints from star cooling or cosmology can be substantially relaxed.Comment: 24 pages, 4 eps figures; v2 typos corrected; v3 1 ref. added; PRD
versio
- âŠ