47,404 research outputs found
State lottery revenue: the importance of game characteristics
Previous studies find state lottery sales are significantly influenced by socioeconomic characteristics of the population. We extend this literature by examining how the overall expected value, the top prize, and the total combinations influence sales after controlling for these other socioeconomic factors. We perform our empirical analysis on an unparalleled set of data that includes information for 135 on-line lottery games in the United States. Our results show that sales are significantly influenced the top prize amount and odds of winning it, but that sales are not significantly affected by the expected value of the remaining lower prizes.Gambling industry
The effect of the quasar H1821+643 on the surrounding intracluster medium: revealing the underlying cooling flow
We present a detailed study of the thermodynamic properties of the
intracluster medium of the only low redshift galaxy cluster to contain a highly
luminous quasar, H1821+643. The cluster is a highly massive, strong cool core
cluster. We find that the ICM entropy around the quasar is significantly lower
than that of other similarly massive strong cool core clusters within the
central 80 kpc, and that the entropy lies significantly below the extrapolated
baseline entropy profile from hierarchical structure formation. By comparing
the scaled temperature profile with those of other strong cool core clusters of
similar total mass, we see that the entropy deficiency is due to the central
temperature being significantly lower. This suggests that the presence of the
quasar in the core of H1821+643 has had a dramatic cooling effect on the
intracluster medium around it. We find that, if the quasar was brighter in the
past, Compton cooling by radiation from the quasar may have caused the low
entropy and temperature levels in the ICM around the quasar. Curiously, the
gradients of the steep central temperature and entropy decline are in
reasonable agreement with the profiles expected for a constant pressure cooling
flow. It is possible that the system has been locked into a Compton cooled
feedback cycle which prevents energy release from the black hole heating the
gas sufficiently to switch it off, leading to the formation of a huge (~3x10^10
solar mass) supermassive black hole.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Is HIV-1 RNA dimerization a prerequisite for packaging? Yes, no, probably?
During virus assembly, all retroviruses specifically encapsidate two copies of full-length viral genomic RNA in the form of a non-covalently linked RNA dimer. The absolute conservation of this unique genome structure within the Retroviridae family is strong evidence that a dimerized genome is of critical importance to the viral life cycle. An obvious hypothesis is that retroviruses have evolved to preferentially package two copies of genomic RNA, and that dimerization ensures the proper packaging specificity for such a genome. However, this implies that dimerization must be a prerequisite for genome encapsidation, a notion that has been debated for many years. In this article, we review retroviral RNA dimerization and packaging, highlighting the research that has attempted to dissect the intricate relationship between these two processes in the context of HIV-1, and discuss the therapeutic potential of these putative antiretroviral targets
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Petrography and bulk composition of Miller Range 05035: a new lunar VLT gabbro
Miller Range (MIL) 05035 is a crystalline lunar mare gabbroic meteorite collected in Antarctica in 2005 [1]. It is an important new sample in the lunar meteorite (LM) collection as it is only one of ~8 to be classified as basaltic in nature. MIL 05035 is coarsely grained with large pyroxene grains ( 8mm) subophitically enclosing plagioclase grains ( 6mm), and accessory ilmenite, spinel, silica and sulphide phases
p-Wave stabilization of three-dimensional Bose-Fermi solitons
We explore bright soliton solutions of ultracold Bose-Fermi gases, showing
that the presence of p-wave interactions can remove the usual collapse
instability and support stable soliton solutions that are global energy minima.
A variational model that incorporates the relevant s- and p-wave interactions
in the system is established analytically and solved numerically to probe the
dependencies of the solitons on key experimental parameters. Under attractive
s-wave interactions, bright solitons exist only as meta-stable states
susceptible to collapse. Remarkably, the presence of repulsive p-wave
interactions alleviates this collapse instability. This dramatically widens the
range of experimentally-achievable soliton solutions and indicates greatly
enhanced robustness. While we focus specifically on the boson-fermion pairing
of 87Rb and 40K, the stabilization inferred by repulsive p-wave interactions
should apply to the wider remit of ultracold Bose-Fermi mixtures.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
Determination of high temperature strains using a PC based vision system
With the widespread availability of video digitizers and cheap personal computers, the use of computer vision as an experimental tool is becoming common place. These systems are being used to make a wide variety of measurements that range from simple surface characterization to velocity profiles. The Sub-Pixel Digital Image Correlation technique has been developed to measure full field displacement and gradients of the surface of an object subjected to a driving force. The technique has shown its utility by measuring the deformation and movement of objects that range from simple translation to fluid velocity profiles to crack tip deformation of solid rocket fuel. This technique has recently been improved and used to measure the surface displacement field of an object at high temperature. The development of a PC based Sub-Pixel Digital Image Correlation system has yielded an accurate and easy to use system for measuring surface displacements and gradients. Experiments have been performed to show the system is viable for measuring thermal strain
Bayesian Spatial Binary Regression for Label Fusion in Structural Neuroimaging
Many analyses of neuroimaging data involve studying one or more regions of
interest (ROIs) in a brain image. In order to do so, each ROI must first be
identified. Since every brain is unique, the location, size, and shape of each
ROI varies across subjects. Thus, each ROI in a brain image must either be
manually identified or (semi-) automatically delineated, a task referred to as
segmentation. Automatic segmentation often involves mapping a previously
manually segmented image to a new brain image and propagating the labels to
obtain an estimate of where each ROI is located in the new image. A more recent
approach to this problem is to propagate labels from multiple manually
segmented atlases and combine the results using a process known as label
fusion. To date, most label fusion algorithms either employ voting procedures
or impose prior structure and subsequently find the maximum a posteriori
estimator (i.e., the posterior mode) through optimization. We propose using a
fully Bayesian spatial regression model for label fusion that facilitates
direct incorporation of covariate information while making accessible the
entire posterior distribution. We discuss the implementation of our model via
Markov chain Monte Carlo and illustrate the procedure through both simulation
and application to segmentation of the hippocampus, an anatomical structure
known to be associated with Alzheimer's disease.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure
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