42,971 research outputs found
Can consumer research panels form an effective part of the cancer research community?
The North Trent Cancer Research Network’s Consumer Research Panel (NTCRN CRP) was established in December 2001 by the Academic Unit of Supportive Care at the University of Sheffield. In three years, the CRP has succeeded in nurturing a climate of sustainable consumer involvement within the NTCRN and this has become embedded in the culture of the network. Furthermore, the panel have championed a sustainable development of consumer involvement in health and social care research by testing new ground and forging a new way of working between health professionals and patients and carers. The CRP model has been held up as an example to other cancer networks, with new panels being set up around the country to emulate its success. This paper describes the Sheffield model of patient and public involvement and using the eight key principles of successful consumer involvement in research, identified in a recent paper by Telford et al (2003), provides a useful framework for analysing the work of the Panel. This demonstrates how consumers and professionals can inform each other to work constructively and synergistically to achieve impressive research results. The need for measurable outcomes to assess the impact and effect of consumer involvement is finally explored
Post-Impact Thermal Evolution of Porous Planetesimals
Impacts between planetesimals have largely been ruled out as a heat source in
the early Solar System, by calculations that show them to be an inefficient
heat source and unlikely to cause global heating. However, the long-term,
localized thermal effects of impacts on planetesimals have never been fully
quantified. Here, we simulate a range of impact scenarios between planetesimals
to determine the post-impact thermal histories of the parent bodies, and hence
the importance of impact heating in the thermal evolution of planetesimals. We
find on a local scale that heating material to petrologic type 6 is achievable
for a range of impact velocities and initial porosities, and impact melting is
possible in porous material at a velocity of > 4 km/s. Burial of heated
impactor material beneath the impact crater is common, insulating that material
and allowing the parent body to retain the heat for extended periods (~
millions of years). Cooling rates at 773 K are typically 1 - 1000 K/Ma,
matching a wide range of measurements of metallographic cooling rates from
chondritic materials. While the heating presented here is localized to the
impact site, multiple impacts over the lifetime of a parent body are likely to
have occurred. Moreover, as most meteorite samples are on the centimeter to
meter scale, the localized effects of impact heating cannot be ignored.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figures, Revised for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta
(Sorry, they do not accept LaTeX
Detection of hidden mineral deposits by airborne spectral analysis of forest canopies
Data from field surveys and biogeochemical tests conducted in Maine, Montana, and Washington strongly correlate with results obtained using high resolution airborne spectroradiometer which detects an anomalous spectral waveform that appears definitely associated with sulfide mineralization. The spectral region most affected by mineral stress is between 550 nm and 750 nm. Spectral variations observed in the field occur on the wings of the red chlorophyll band centered at about 690 nm. The metal-stress-induced variations on the absorption band wing are most successfully resolved in the high spectral resolution field data using a waveform analysis technique. The development of chlorophyll pigments was retarded in greenhouse plants doped with copper and zinc in the laboratory. The lowered chlorophyll production resulted in changes on the wings of the chlorophyll bands of reflectance spectra of the plants. The airborne spectroradiometer system and waveform analysis remains the most sensitive technique for biogeochemical surveys
Extending local features with contextual information in graph kernels
Graph kernels are usually defined in terms of simpler kernels over local
substructures of the original graphs. Different kernels consider different
types of substructures. However, in some cases they have similar predictive
performances, probably because the substructures can be interpreted as
approximations of the subgraphs they induce. In this paper, we propose to
associate to each feature a piece of information about the context in which the
feature appears in the graph. A substructure appearing in two different graphs
will match only if it appears with the same context in both graphs. We propose
a kernel based on this idea that considers trees as substructures, and where
the contexts are features too. The kernel is inspired from the framework in
[6], even if it is not part of it. We give an efficient algorithm for computing
the kernel and show promising results on real-world graph classification
datasets.Comment: To appear in ICONIP 201
Drell-Yan production at small q_T, transverse parton distributions and the collinear anomaly
Using methods from effective field theory, an exact all-order expression for
the Drell-Yan cross section at small transverse momentum is derived directly in
q_T space, in which all large logarithms are resummed. The anomalous dimensions
and matching coefficients necessary for resummation at NNLL order are given
explicitly. The precise relation between our result and the
Collins-Soper-Sterman formula is discussed, and as a by-product the previously
unknown three-loop coefficient A^(3) is obtained. The naive factorization of
the cross section at small transverse momentum is broken by a collinear
anomaly, which prevents a process-independent definition of x_T-dependent
parton distribution functions. A factorization theorem is derived for the
product of two such functions, in which the dependence on the hard momentum
transfer is separated out. The remainder factors into a product of two
functions of longitudinal momentum variables and x_T^2, whose
renormalization-group evolution is derived and solved in closed form. The
matching of these functions at small x_T onto standard parton distributions is
calculated at O(alpha_s), while their anomalous dimensions are known to three
loops.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures; version to appear in Eur. Phys. J.
Multiplexed Memory-Insensitive Quantum Repeaters
Long-distance quantum communication via distant pairs of entangled quantum
bits (qubits) is the first step towards more secure message transmission and
distributed quantum computing. To date, the most promising proposals require
quantum repeaters to mitigate the exponential decrease in communication rate
due to optical fiber losses. However, these are exquisitely sensitive to the
lifetimes of their memory elements. We propose a multiplexing of quantum nodes
that should enable the construction of quantum networks that are largely
insensitive to the coherence times of the quantum memory elements.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in PR
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