Discovery of two L & T binaries with wide separations and peculiar photometric properties

We present spatially resolved photometric and spectroscopic observations of two wide brown dwarf binaries uncovered by the SIMP near-infrared proper motion survey. The first pair (SIMP J1619275+031350AB) has a separation of 0.691" (15.2 AU) and components T2.5+T4.0, at the cooler end of the ill-understood J-band brightening. The system is unusual in that the earlier-type primary is bluer in J-Ks than the later-type secondary, whereas the reverse is expected for binaries in the late-L to T dwarf range. This remarkable color reversal can possibly be explained by very different cloud properties between the two components. The second pair (SIMP J1501530-013506AB) consists of an L4.5+L5.5 (separation 0.96", 30-47 AU) with a surprisingly large flux ratio (Delta J =1.79 mag) considering the similar spectral types of its components. The large flux ratio could be explained if the primary is itself an equal-luminosity binary, which would make it one of the first known triple brown dwarf systems. Adaptive optics observations could not confirm this hypothesis, but it remains a likely one, which may be verified by high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy. These two systems add to the handful of known brown dwarf binaries amenable to resolved spectroscopy without the aid of adaptive optics and constitute prime targets to test brown dwarf atmosphere models.Comment: accepted for publication in Ap

Consensus on the reporting and experimental design of clinical and cognitive-behavioural neurofeedback studies (CRED-nf checklist)

Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards in the field.</p

An evolving pattern library for collaborative project documentation

In distributed research projects, the involved personnel acquires lots of technical and domain-specific knowledge. Generalizable outcomes of single project partners that are relevant to all stakeholders need to be distributed within the project. Since the involved parties may possess very different professional backgrounds, specific jargon and different ways to document results may lead to inefficient exchange. Therefore, within this kind of projects, it is a hard task to communicate and keep general project knowledge current. It is likewise difficult to provide achieved results for future projects. This thesis proposes to collaboratively describe project outcomes and gathered domain knowledge as evolving design patterns. A design pattern must, by definition, be easy to read and understand by non-experts. This enables all stakeholders to understand the described contents without requiring specific background knowledge. The thesis develops a collaborative pattern formulation and validation process that takes into account the special conditions of joint research projects. Therewith, the research and development personnel can easily draft project knowledge in parallel to their efforts as initial design patterns that are refined over time. From initial ideas or open problems the formulations evolve to validated and reusable patterns that are organized within a dynamically growing pattern library structure. A lightweight role model supports composing new and reviewing existing submissions as well as administrating the library structure. The derived maturation process ensures the formulation quality of the pattern by reflecting the proposals and opinions of all participants. In addition, all contributors collect evidence to support or refute the solutions suggested by a pattern. The research methodology included, besides research in literature, user-centered, iterative design methods that involve representatives of the research and development personnel. The approach was concretely implemented within a customizable technical platform and substantially validated in an existing distributed research project. A second study was conducted in an academic context in which patterns are used to incrementally document findings. These validations indicate that the evolving pattern library concept is understandable and achieves high acceptance. Furthermore, it can be a useful tool for improving knowledge exchange and accumulation within and across projects

A pattern language for architecture assessments of service-oriented enterprise systems

The SOA Innovation Lab an innovation and research network of industry leaders in Germany and Europe - investigates the practical use of service-oriented enterprise systems. Current state of practice approaches for assessing maturity of service-oriented enterprise software architectures were intuitively developed, having sparse metamodel or pattern foundation and being rarely validated. This is a real problem for practical architecture assessments in repeatable cyclic evaluations of base architectures of service-oriented systems, which are based on recurring patterns for analysis of continuously growing services over the time. In our research we have developed an original pattern language for supporting architecture assessments and optimization of enterprise systems, leveraging and extend ing base frameworks like the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and considering additionally similar related work models of architecture maturity. We have deduced our original architecture quality assessment and optimization pattern language from our special designed architecture maturity framework. We have applied our architecture assessment pattern language in consecutive cyclic assessment workshops with global vendors of service-oriented platforms