Single pulse and profile variability study of PSR J1022+1001

Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are known as highly stable celestial clocks. Nevertheless, recent studies have revealed the unstable nature of their integrated pulse profiles, which may limit the achievable pulsar timing precision. In this paper, we present a case study on the pulse profile variability of PSR J1022+1001. We have detected approximately 14,000 sub-pulses (components of single pulses) in 35-hr long observations, mostly located at the trailing component of the integrated profile. Their flux densities and fractional polarisation suggest that they represent the bright end of the energy distribution in ordinary emission mode and are not giant pulses. The occurrence of sub-pulses from the leading and trailing components of the integrated profile is shown to be correlated. For sub-pulses from the latter, a preferred pulse width of approximately 0.25 ms has been found. Using simultaneous observations from the Effelsberg 100-m telescope and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, we have found that the integrated profile varies on a timescale of a few tens of minutes. We show that improper polarisation calibration and diffractive scintillation cannot be the sole reason for the observed instability. In addition, we demonstrate that timing residuals generated from averages of the detected sub-pulses are dominated by phase jitter, and place an upper limit of ~700 ns for jitter noise based on continuous 1-min integrations.Comment: 13 pages, 20 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA

Distributed utterances

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.

The beamformer and correlator for the Large European Array for Pulsars

The Large European Array for Pulsars combines Europe's largest radio telescopes to form a tied-array telescope that provides high signal-to-noise observations of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) with the objective to increase the sensitivity of detecting low-frequency gravitational waves. As part of this endeavor we have developed a software correlator and beamformer which enables the formation of a tied-array beam from the raw voltages from each of telescopes. We explain the concepts and techniques involved in the process of adding the raw voltages coherently. We further present the software processing pipeline that is specifically designed to deal with data from widely spaced, inhomogeneous radio telescopes and describe the steps involved in preparing, correlating and creating the tied-array beam. This includes polarization calibration, bandpass correction, frequency dependent phase correction, interference mitigation and pulsar gating. A link is provided where the software can be obtained.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Computin

Multi-telescope timing of PSR J1518+4904

PSR J1518+4904 is one of only 9 known double neutron star systems. These systems are highly valuable for measuring the masses of neutron stars, measuring the effects of gravity, and testing gravitational theories. We determine an improved timing solution for a mildly relativistic double neutron star system, combining data from multiple telescopes. We set better constraints on relativistic parameters and the separate masses of the system, and discuss the evolution of PSR J1518+4904 in the context of other double neutron star systems. PSR J1518+4904 has been regularly observed for more than 10 years by the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) network using the Westerbork, Jodrell Bank, Effelsberg and Nancay radio telescopes. The data were analysed using the updated timing software Tempo2. We have improved the timing solution for this double neutron star system. The periastron advance has been refined and a significant detection of proper motion is presented. It is not likely that more post-Keplerian parameters, with which the individual neutron star masses and the inclination angle of the system can be determined separately, can be measured in the near future. Using a combination of the high-quality data sets present in the EPTA collaboration, extended with the original GBT data, we have constrained the masses in the system to m_p1.55 msun (95.4% confidence), and the inclination angle of the orbit to be less than 47 degrees (99%). From this we derive that the pulsar in this system possibly has one of the lowest neutron star masses measured to date. From evolutionary considerations it seems likely that the companion star, despite its high mass, was formed in an electron-capture supernova.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, accepted by A&

Divergence in Dialogue

Copyright: 2014 Healey et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; http://www.esrc.ac.uk/) through the DynDial project (Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue, RES-062-23-0962) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/) through the RISER project (Robust Incremental Semantic Resources for Dialogue, EP/J010383/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

THE CONSISTENCY OF SELF-, PEER, AND INSTRUCTOR ASSESSMENT IN WRITING COURSE AT UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH MALANG

This study focused on the implementation of self assessment, peer assessment, and instructor assessment in writing course. This focus was taken in order to investigate the consistency among self assessment, peer assessment, and instructor assessment in university level, particularly in University of Muhammadiyah Malang. The previous study examined those three assessments in pre-service teacher in one of Turkey Universities, while in this current study was applied for students in Indonesian University. The researcher wants to reveal the level of consistency among self assessment, peer assessment, and instructor assessment in writing course. The level of consistency was taken because some researchers only investigate the level of agreement, the similarity and different among those three assessments. The objective of this study was considered in order to know level of consistency when those assessments were conducted for students in university level. Research method had been considered as quantitative method. This method was chosen because the data in the form of number. The instrument used test and rubric assessment. A test was used because the researcher wanted to compare among self-peer, self-instructor, and peer-instructor. After data collected, the researcher analyzed the data by using SPSS 17 with Shapiro-Wilk Test to know the normality of the data. Wilcoxon Ranked Sum Test was applied to answer whether or not there was consistency among self assessment, peer assessment, and instructor assessment. The research subject was the students in second semester from English Department. The subject research experienced in assessment and this study conducted by involving one class. The result based on Wilcoxon Ranked Sum Test revealed, there was inconsistency both among self-instructor assessment or peer-instructor assessment. Score based on p value 0.002 and 0.026 that was lower than 0.05 or (p0.05)

Placing limits on the stochastic gravitational-wave background using European Pulsar Timing Array data

Direct detection of low-frequency gravitational waves ($10^{-9} - 10^{-8}$ Hz) is the main goal of pulsar timing array (PTA) projects. One of the main targets for the PTAs is to measure the stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWB) whose characteristic strain is expected to approximately follow a power-law of the form $h_c(f)=A (f/\hbox{yr}^{-1})^{\alpha}$, where $f$ is the gravitational-wave frequency. In this paper we use the current data from the European PTA to determine an upper limit on the GWB amplitude $A$ as a function of the unknown spectral slope $\alpha$ with a Bayesian algorithm, by modelling the GWB as a random Gaussian process. For the case $\alpha=-2/3$, which is expected if the GWB is produced by supermassive black-hole binaries, we obtain a 95% confidence upper limit on $A$ of $6\times 10^{-15}$, which is 1.8 times lower than the 95% confidence GWB limit obtained by the Parkes PTA in 2006. Our approach to the data analysis incorporates the multi-telescope nature of the European PTA and thus can serve as a useful template for future intercontinental PTA collaborations.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, mnras accepte

Automatic Decision Detection in Meeting Speech

Decision making is an important aspect of meetings in organisational settings, and archives of meeting recordings constitute a valuable source of information about the decisions made. However, standard utilities such as playback and keyword search are not sufficient for locating decision points from meeting archives. In this paper, we present the AMI DecisionDetector, a system that automatically detects and highlights where the decision-related conversations are. In this paper, we apply the models developed in our previous work [1], which detects decision-related dialogue acts (DAs) from parts of the transcripts that have been manually annotated as extract-worthy, to the task of detecting decision-related DAs and topic segments directly from complete transcripts. Results show that we need to combine features extracted from multiple knowledge sources (e.g., lexical, prosodic, DA-related, and topical class) in order to yield the model with the highest precision. We have provided a quantitative account of the feature class effects. As our ultimate goal is to operate AMI DecisionDetector in a fully automatic fashion, we also investigate the impacts of using automatically generated features, for example, the 5-class DA features obtained in [2]

The noise properties of 42 millisecond pulsars from the European Pulsar Timing Array and their impact on gravitational wave searches

The sensitivity of Pulsar Timing Arrays to gravitational waves depends on the noise present in the individual pulsar timing data. Noise may be either intrinsic or extrinsic to the pulsar. Intrinsic sources of noise will include rotational instabilities, for example. Extrinsic sources of noise include contributions from physical processes which are not sufficiently well modelled, for example, dispersion and scattering effects, analysis errors and instrumental instabilities. We present the results from a noise analysis for 42 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) observed with the European Pulsar Timing Array. For characterising the low-frequency, stochastic and achromatic noise component, or "timing noise", we employ two methods, based on Bayesian and frequentist statistics. For 25 MSPs, we achieve statistically significant measurements of their timing noise parameters and find that the two methods give consistent results. For the remaining 17 MSPs, we place upper limits on the timing noise amplitude at the 95% confidence level. We additionally place an upper limit on the contribution to the pulsar noise budget from errors in the reference terrestrial time standards (below 1%), and we find evidence for a noise component which is present only in the data of one of the four used telescopes. Finally, we estimate that the timing noise of individual pulsars reduces the sensitivity of this data set to an isotropic, stochastic GW background by a factor of >9.1 and by a factor of >2.3 for continuous GWs from resolvable, inspiralling supermassive black-hole binaries with circular orbits.Comment: Accepted for publication by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ