The movement advantage in famous and unfamiliar faces: a comparison of point-light displays and shape-normalised avatar stimuli.

Facial movement may provide cues to identity, by supporting the extraction of face shape information via structure-from-motion, or via characteristic patterns of movement. Currently, it is unclear whether familiar and unfamiliar faces derive the same benefit from these mechanisms. This study examined the movement advantage by asking participants to match moving and static images of famous and unfamiliar faces to facial point-light displays (PLDs) or shape-normalised avatars in a same/different task (experiment 1). In experiment 2 we also used a same/different task, but participants matched from PLD to PLD or from avatar to avatar. In both experiments, unfamiliar face matching was more accurate for PLDs than for avatars, but there was no effect of stimulus type on famous faces. In experiment 1, there was no movement advantage, but in experiment 2, there was a significant movement advantage for famous and unfamiliar faces. There was no evidence that familiarity increased the movement advantage. For unfamiliar faces, results suggest that participants were relying on characteristic movement patterns to match the faces, and did not derive any extra benefit from the structure-from-motion cues in the PLDs. The results indicate that participants may use static and movement-based cues in a flexible manner when matching famous and unfamiliar faces

On the Possibility of Optical Unification in Heterotic Strings

Recently J. Giedt discussed a mechanism, entitled optical unification, whereby string scale unification is facilitated via exotic matter with intermediate scale mass. This mechanism guarantees that a virtual MSSM unification below the string scale is extrapolated from the running of gauge couplings upward from M_Z^o when an intermediate scale desert is assumed. In this letter we explore the possibility of optical unification within the context of weakly coupled heterotic strings. In particular, we investigate this for models of free fermionic construction containing the NAHE set of basis vectors. This class is of particular interest for optical unification, because it provides a standard hypercharge embedding within SO(10), giving the standard k_Y = 5/3 hypercharge level, which was shown necessary for optical unification. We present a NAHE model for which the set of exotic SU(3)_C triplet/anti-triplet pairs, SU(2)_L doublets, and non-Abelian singlets with hypercharge offers the possibility of optical unification. Whether this model can realize optical unification is conditional upon these exotics not receiving Fayet-Iliopoulos (FI) scale masses when a flat direction of scalar vacuum expectation values is non-perturbatively chosen to cancel the FI D-term, xi, generated by the anomalous U(1)-breaking Green-Schwarz-Dine-Seiberg-Wittten mechanism. A study of perturbative flat directions and their phenomenological implications for this model is underway. This paper is a product of the NFS Research Experiences for Undergraduates and the NSF High School Summer Science Research programs at Baylor University.Comment: 16 pages. Standard Late

The effect of temperature on adhesion forces between surfaces and model foods containing whey protein and sugar

The formation of fouling deposit from foods and food components is a severe problem in food processing and leads to frequent cleaning. The design of surfaces that resist fouling may decrease the need for cleaning and thus increase efficiency. Atomic force microscopy has been used to measure adhesion forces between stainless steel (SS) and fluoro-coated glass (FCG) microparticles and the model food deposits (i) whey protein (WPC), (ii) sweetened condensed milk, and (iii) caramel. Measurements were performed over a range of processing temperatures between 30 and 90 oC and at contact times up to 60 s. There is a significant increase in adhesion force of both types of microparticle to WPC at 90 oC for all contact times. For confectionary deposits adhesion to SS was similar. Adhesion of confectionary deposits to FCG at 30 oC revealed a decrease in adhesion compared to SS; at higher temperatures the adhesion forces were similar

Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set

We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2, -1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012

Species abundance distributions: moving beyond single prediction theories to integration within an ecological framework

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75247/1/j.1461-0248.2007.01094.x.pd