538 research outputs found
Space, the new frontier
Space program - high thrust boosters with greater payload capabilities, superior guidance and control, and astronaut trainin
An Unsettling Outcome: Why the Florida Supreme Court Was Wrong to Ban All Settlement Evidence in \u3ci\u3eSaleeby v Rocky Elson Construction, Inc.\u3c/i\u3e, 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009)
It is rare that a court as sophisticated as the Florida Supreme Court casually makes a fundamental mistake in an important area of the law. Unfortunately, Saleeby v. Rocky Elson Construction, Inc., 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009) represents one of these unusual instances. The Court was faced with a simple question: may evidence pertaining to a prior settlement be offered at trial when it is relevant to something other than liability or the invalidity or amount of the pending claim. The universal answer under both federal law and the law of other states is yes, as long as the probative value of the evidence outweighs its prejudicial impact. In Saleeby, the Florida Supreme Court held that the answer is a resounding “no.” The result could be a miscarriage of justice – for instance, in a case in which a witness’s testimony is effectively “purchased” through an overly generous settlement, but the fact-finder will be prevented by the Saleeby holding from finding this out
DREDed Anomaly Mediation
We offer a guide to dimensional reduction (DRED) in theories with anomaly
mediated supersymmetry breaking. Evanescent operators proportional to epsilon
arise in the bare Lagrangian when it is reduced from d=4 to d= (4-2 epsilon)
dimensions. In the course of a detailed diagrammatic calculation, we show that
inclusion of these operators is crucial. The evanescent operators conspire to
drive the supersymmetry-breaking parameters along anomaly-mediation
trajectories across heavy particle thresholds, guaranteeing the ultraviolet
insensitivity.Comment: 24 pages. 10 figures. Uses Axodraw. Reference adde
Radiocarbon Evidence for the Importance of Surface Vegetation on Fermentation and Methanogenesis in Contrasting Types of Boreal Peatlands
We found a consistent distribution pattern for radiocarbon in dissolved organic carbon (DOC), dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC), and methane replicated across spatial and temporal scales in northern peatlands from Minnesota to Alaska. The 14C content of DOC is relatively modern throughout the peat column, to depths of 3 m. In sedge-dominated peatlands, the 14C contents of the products of respiration, CH4 and DIC, are essentially the same and are similar to that of DOC. In Sphagnum- and woody plant-dominated peatlands with few sedges, however, the respiration products are similar but intermediate between the 14C contents of the solid phase peat and the DOC. Preliminary data indicates qualitative differences in the pore water DOC, depending on the extent of sedge cover, consistent with the hypothesis that the DOC in sedge-dominated peatlands is more reactive than DOC in peatlands where Sphagnum or other vascular plants dominate. These data are supported by molecular level analysis of DOC by ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry that suggests more dramatic changes with depth in the composition of DOC in the sedge-dominated peatland pore waters relative to changes observed in DOC where Sphagnum dominates. The higher reactivity of DOC from sedge-dominated peatlands may be a function of either different source materials or environmental factors that are related to the abundance of sedges in peatlands
Automatic transcription of multi-genre media archives
This paper describes some recent results of our collaborative work on
developing a speech recognition system for the automatic transcription
or media archives from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The
material includes a wide diversity of shows with their associated
metadata. The latter are highly diverse in terms of completeness,
reliability and accuracy. First, we investigate how to improve lightly
supervised acoustic training, when timestamp information is inaccurate
and when speech deviates significantly from the transcription, and how
to perform evaluations when no reference transcripts are available.
An automatic timestamp correction method as well as a word and segment
level combination approaches between the lightly supervised transcripts
and the original programme scripts are presented which yield improved
metadata. Experimental results show that systems trained using the
improved metadata consistently outperform those trained with only the
original lightly supervised decoding hypotheses. Secondly, we show that
the recognition task may benefit from systems trained on a combination
of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we
describe Multi-level Adaptive Networks, a novel technique for
incorporating information from out-of domain posterior features using
deep neural network. We show that it provides a substantial reduction in
WER over other systems including a PLP-based baseline, in-domain tandem
features, and the best out-of-domain tandem features.This research was supported by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/I031022/1 (Natural Speech Technology).This paper was presented at the First Workshop on Speech, Language and Audio in Multimedia, August 22-23, 2013; Marseille. It was published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1012/
Zeta function regularization for a scalar field in a compact domain
We express the zeta function associated to the Laplacian operator on
in terms of the zeta function associated to the Laplacian on
, where is a compact connected Riemannian manifold. This gives formulas
for the partition function of the associated physical model at low and high
temperature for any compact domain . Furthermore, we provide an exact
formula for the zeta function at any value of when is a -dimensional
box or a -dimensional torus; this allows a rigorous calculation of the zeta
invariants and the analysis of the main thermodynamic functions associated to
the physical models at finite temperature.Comment: 19 pages, no figures, to appear in J. Phys.
Personal identity (de)formation among lifestyle travellers: A double-edged sword?
This article explores the personal identity work of lifestyle travellers – individuals for whom extended leisure travel is a preferred lifestyle that they return to repeatedly. Qualitative findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with lifestyle travellers in northern India and southern Thailand are interpreted in light of theories on identity formation in late modernity that position identity as problematic. It is suggested that extended leisure travel can provide exposure to varied cultural praxes that may contribute to a sense of social saturation. Whilst a minority of the respondents embraced a saturation of personal identity in the subjective formation of a cosmopolitan cultural identity, several of the respondents were paradoxically left with more identity questions than answers as the result of their travels
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