158 research outputs found
More on wormholes supported by small amounts of exotic matter
Recent papers by Fewster and Roman have emphasized that wormholes supported
by arbitrarily small amounts of exotic matter will have to be incredibly
fine-tuned if they are to be traversable. This paper discusses a wormhole model
that strikes a balance between two conflicting requirements, reducing the
amount of exotic matter and fine-tuning the metric coefficients, ultimately
resulting in an engineering challenge: one requirement can only be met at the
expense of the other. The wormhole model is macroscopic and satisfies various
traversability criteria.Comment: 8 pages AMSTeX; 3 figures adde
Nose Heat: Exploring Stress-induced Nasal Thermal Variability through Mobile Thermal Imaging
Automatically monitoring and quantifying stress-induced thermal dynamic
information in real-world settings is an extremely important but challenging
problem. In this paper, we explore whether we can use mobile thermal imaging to
measure the rich physiological cues of mental stress that can be deduced from a
person's nose temperature. To answer this question we build i) a framework for
monitoring nasal thermal variable patterns continuously and ii) a novel set of
thermal variability metrics to capture a richness of the dynamic information.
We evaluated our approach in a series of studies including laboratory-based
psychosocial stress-induction tasks and real-world factory settings. We
demonstrate our approach has the potential for assessing stress responses
beyond controlled laboratory settings
Worker Retention, Response Quality, and Diversity in Microtask Crowdsourcing: An Experimental Investigation of the Potential for Priming Effects to Promote Project Goals
Online microtask crowdsourcing platforms act as efficient resources for delegating small units of work, gathering data, generating ideas, and more. Members of research and business communities have incorporated crowdsourcing into problem-solving processes. When human workers contribute to a crowdsourcing task, they are subject to various stimuli as a result of task design. Inter-task priming effects - through which work is nonconsciously, yet significantly, influenced by exposure to certain stimuli - have been shown to affect microtask crowdsourcing responses in a variety of ways. Instead of simply being wary of the potential for priming effects to skew results, task administrators can utilize proven priming procedures in order to promote project goals. In a series of three experiments conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, we investigated the effects of proposed priming treatments on worker retention, response quality, and response diversity. In our first two experiments, we studied the effect of initial response freedom on sustained worker participation and response quality. We expected that workers who were granted greater levels of freedom in an initial response would be stimulated to complete more work and deliver higher quality work than workers originally constrained in their initial response possibilities. We found no significant relationship between the initial response freedom granted to workers and the amount of optional work they completed. The degree of initial response freedom also did not have a significant impact on subsequent response quality. However, the influence of inter-task effects were evident based on response tendencies for different question types. We found evidence that consistency in task structure may play a stronger role in promoting response quality than proposed priming procedures. In our final experiment, we studied the influence of a group-level priming treatment on response diversity. Instead of varying task structure for different workers, we varied the degree of overlap in question content distributed to different workers in a group. We expected groups of workers that were exposed to more diverse preliminary question sets to offer greater diversity in response to a subsequent question. Although differences in response diversity were revealed, no consistent trend between question content overlap and response diversity prevailed. Nevertheless, combining consistent task structure with crowd-level priming procedures - to encourage diversity in inter-task effects across the crowd - offers an exciting path for future study
Optimizing astrophotonic spatial reformatters using simulated on-sky performance
One of the most useful techniques in astronomical instrumentation is image
slicing. It enables a spectrograph to have a more compact angular slit, whilst
retaining throughput and increasing resolving power. Astrophotonic components
like the photonic lanterns and photonic reformatters can be used to replace
bulk optics used so far. This study investigates the performance of such
devices using end-to-end simulations to approximate realistic on-sky
conditions. It investigates existing components, tries to optimize their
performance and aims to understand better how best to design instruments to
maximize their performance. This work complements the recent work in the field
and provides an estimation for the performance of the new components.Comment: Conference proceedings in SPIE 2018 Austin Texa
Proteolytic degradation of regulator of G protein signaling 2 facilitates temporal regulation of Gq/11 signaling and vascular contraction
Proteolytic degradation of regulator of G protein signaling 2 facilitates temporal regulation of Gq/11 signaling and vascular contraction
Evaluation of the present theoretical basis for determination of planetary surface properties by earth-based radar
Spaceflight programs such as the planned Viking landing on Mars require the determination of planetary surface slopes and surface dielectric constants by earth-based methods. Heavy reliance is often placed on radar backscattering data for estimation of these surface properties. An assessment is presented of the basic theory by which the raw radar data are interpreted, and it is shown that serious difficulties and internal inconsistencies are present in the available theoretical formulas. The discussion brings into question the reliability of the presently available results for these surface properties as obtained by earth-based radar methods
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