The Anterior Midline Field: Coercion or decision making?

To study the neural bases of semantic composition in language processing without confounds from syntactic composition, recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) studies have investigated the processing of constructions that exhibit some type of syntax-semantics mismatch. The most studied case of such a mismatch is complement coercion; expressions such as the author began the book, where an entity-denoting noun phrase is coerced into an eventive meaning in order to match the semantic properties of the event-selecting verb (e.g., ‘the author began reading/writing the book’). These expressions have been found to elicit increased activity in the Anterior Midline Field (AMF), an MEG component elicited at frontomedial sensors at ∼400 ms after the onset of the coercing noun [Pylkkänen, L., & McElree, B. (2007). An MEG study of silent meaning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 11]. Thus, the AMF constitutes a potential neural correlate of coercion. However, the AMF was generated in ventromedial prefrontal regions, which are heavily associated with decision-making. This raises the possibility that, instead of semantic processing, the AMF effect may have been related to the experimental task, which was a sensicality judgment. We tested this hypothesis by assessing the effect of coercion when subjects were simply reading for comprehension, without a decision-task. Additionally, we investigated coercion in an adjectival rather than a verbal environment to further generalize the findings. Our results show that an AMF effect of coercion is elicited without a decision-task and that the effect also extends to this novel syntactic environment. We conclude that in addition to its role in non-linguistic higher cognition, ventromedial prefrontal regions contribute to the resolution of syntax-semantics mismatches in language processing

The GSC-II-based survey of ancient cool white dwarfs I. The sample of spectroscopically confirmed WDs

The GSC-II white dwarf survey was designed to identify faint and high proper motion objects, which we used to define a new and independent sample of cool white dwarfs. With this survey we aim to derive new constraints on the halo white dwarf space density. Also, these data can provide information on the age of thick disk and halo through the analysis of the luminosity function. On the basis of astrometric and photometric parameters, we selected candidates with mu > 0.28 as/yr and R_F > 16 in an area of 1150 square degrees. Then, we separated white dwarfs from late type dwarfs and subdwarfs by means of the reduced proper motion diagram. Finally, spectroscopic follow-up observations were carried out to confirm the white dwarf nature of the selected candidates. We found 41 white dwarfs of which 24 are new discoveries. Here we present the full sample and for each object provide positions, absolute proper motions, photometry, and spectroscopy.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, submitted to A&

Cosmic ray tables - Asymptotic directions, variational coefficients and cut-off rigidities IQSY instruction manual no. 10

Cosmic ray deflections in geomagnetic field, variational coefficients, and diurnal intensity variations - table

Parallaxes of Five L Dwarfs with a Robotic Telescope

We report the parallax and proper motion of five L dwarfs obtained with observations from the robotic Liverpool Telescope. Our derived proper motions are consistent with published values and have considerably smaller errors. Based on our spectral type versus absolute magnitude diagram, we do not find any evidence for binaries among our sampleor, at least no comparable mass binaries. Their space velocities locate them within the thin disk, and based on the model comparisons, they have solar-like abundances. For all five objects, we derived effective temperature, luminosity, radius, gravity, and mass from an evolutionary model (CBA00) and our measured parallax; moreover, we derived their effective temperature by integrating observed optical and near-infrared spectra and model spectra (BSH06 or BT-Dusty) at longer wavelengths to obtain bolometric flux using the classical Stefan-Boltzmann law. Generally, the three temperatures for one object derived using two different methods with three models are consistent, although at lower temperature (e.g., for L4) the differences among the three temperatures are slightly larger than those at higher temperature (e.g., for L1).Peer reviewe

‘RE/TRS’ is a Girl’s Subject: Talking about Gender and the Discourse of ‘Religion’ in UK Educational Spaces

This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and different. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping

Parallaxes of southern extremely cool objects III : 118 L and T dwarfs

We present new results from the Parallaxes of Southern Extremely Cool dwarfs program to measure parallaxes, proper motions and multiepoch photometry of L and early T dwarfs. The observations were made on 108 nights over the course of 8 yr using the Wide Field Imager on the ESO 2.2m telescope. We present 118 new parallaxes of L and T dwarfs of which 52 have no published values and 24 of the 66 published values are preliminary estimates from this program. The parallax precision varies from 1.0 to 15.5mas with a median of 3.8mas. We find evidence for two objects with long term photometric variation and 24 new moving group candidates. We cross-match our sample to published photometric catalogues and find standard magnitudes in up to 16 pass-bands from which we build spectral energy distributions and H-R diagrams. This allows us to confirm the theoretically anticipated minimum in radius between stars and brown dwarfs across the hydrogen burning minimum mass. We find the minimum occurs between L2 and L6 and verify the predicted steep dependence of radius in the hydrogen burning regime and the gentle rise into the degenerate brown dwarf regime. We find a relatively young age of ~2 Gyr from the kinematics of our sample.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

NPARSEC : NTT Parallaxes of Southern Extremely Cool objects. Goals, targets, procedures and first results

The discovery and subsequent detailed study of T dwarfs have provided many surprises and pushed the physics and modelling of cool atmospheres in unpredicted directions. Distance is a critical parameter for studies of these objects to determine intrinsic luminosities, test binarity and measure their motion in the Galaxy. We describe a new observational programme to determine distances across the full range of T-dwarf subtypes using the New Technology Telescope (NTT)/SOFI telescope/instrument combination. We present preliminary results for ten objects, five of which represent new distances.Peer reviewe

Classical generalized constant coupling model for geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets

A generalized constant coupling approximation for classical geometrically frustrated antiferromagnets is presented. Starting from a frustrated unit we introduce the interactions with the surrounding units in terms of an internal effective field which is fixed by a self consistency condition. Results for the magnetic susceptibility and specific heat are compared with Monte Carlo data for the classical Heisenberg model for the pyrochlore and kagome lattices. The predictions for the susceptibility are found to be essentially exact, and the corresponding predictions for the specific heat are found to be in very good agreement with the Monte Carlo results.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 2 columns. Discussion about the zero T value of the pyrochlore specific heat correcte