21,156 research outputs found
On the Speed of Gravity and the Corrections to the Shapiro Time Delay
Using a relatively simple method, I compute the v/c correction to the
gravitational time delay for light passing by a massive object moving with
speed v. It turns out that the v/c effects are too small to have been measured
in the recent experiment involving Jupiter and quasar J0842+1845 that was used
to measure the speed of gravity.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX (or Latex, etc), one figure, which is also available
at http://www-theory.lbl.gov/~samuel/sog_figure.pdf; Revised version is the
one to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett
Issues in the development of advance directives in mental health care
<i>Background</i>: Interest in advance directives in mental health care is growing internationally. There is no clear universal agreement as to what such an advance directive is or how it should function. <i>Aim</i>: To describe the range of issues embodied in the development of advance directives in mental health care. <i>Method</i>: The literature on advance directives is examined to highlight the pros and cons of different versions of advance directive. <i>Results</i>: Themes emerged around issues of terminology, competency and consent, the legal status of advance directives independent or collaborative directives and their content. Opinions vary between a unilateral legally enforceable instrument to a care plan agreed between patient and clinician. <i>Conclusion</i>: There is immediate appeal in a liberal democracy that values individual freedom and autonomy in giving weight to advance directives in mental health care. They do not, however, solve all the problems of enforced treatment and early access to treatment. They also raise new issues and highlight persistent problems. <i>Declaration</i> <i>of</i> <i>interest</i>: The research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation grant number
MNH/00015G
Straight to Shapes: Real-time Detection of Encoded Shapes
Current object detection approaches predict bounding boxes, but these provide
little instance-specific information beyond location, scale and aspect ratio.
In this work, we propose to directly regress to objects' shapes in addition to
their bounding boxes and categories. It is crucial to find an appropriate shape
representation that is compact and decodable, and in which objects can be
compared for higher-order concepts such as view similarity, pose variation and
occlusion. To achieve this, we use a denoising convolutional auto-encoder to
establish an embedding space, and place the decoder after a fast end-to-end
network trained to regress directly to the encoded shape vectors. This yields
what to the best of our knowledge is the first real-time shape prediction
network, running at ~35 FPS on a high-end desktop. With higher-order shape
reasoning well-integrated into the network pipeline, the network shows the
useful practical quality of generalising to unseen categories similar to the
ones in the training set, something that most existing approaches fail to
handle.Comment: 16 pages including appendix; Published at CVPR 201
SPECS - an embedded platform, speech-driven environmental control system evaluated in a virtuous circle framework
RSGM: Real-time Raster-Respecting Semi-Global Matching for Power-Constrained Systems
Stereo depth estimation is used for many computer vision applications. Though
many popular methods strive solely for depth quality, for real-time mobile
applications (e.g. prosthetic glasses or micro-UAVs), speed and power
efficiency are equally, if not more, important. Many real-world systems rely on
Semi-Global Matching (SGM) to achieve a good accuracy vs. speed balance, but
power efficiency is hard to achieve with conventional hardware, making the use
of embedded devices such as FPGAs attractive for low-power applications.
However, the full SGM algorithm is ill-suited to deployment on FPGAs, and so
most FPGA variants of it are partial, at the expense of accuracy. In a non-FPGA
context, the accuracy of SGM has been improved by More Global Matching (MGM),
which also helps tackle the streaking artifacts that afflict SGM. In this
paper, we propose a novel, resource-efficient method that is inspired by MGM's
techniques for improving depth quality, but which can be implemented to run in
real time on a low-power FPGA. Through evaluation on multiple datasets (KITTI
and Middlebury), we show that in comparison to other real-time capable stereo
approaches, we can achieve a state-of-the-art balance between accuracy, power
efficiency and speed, making our approach highly desirable for use in real-time
systems with limited power.Comment: Accepted in FPT 2018 as Oral presentation, 8 pages, 6 figures, 4
table
The Impact of Accretion Disk Winds on the Optical Spectra of Cataclysmic Variables
Many high-state non-magnetic cataclysmic variables (CVs) exhibit blue-shifted
absorption or P-Cygni profiles associated with ultraviolet (UV) resonance
lines. These features imply the existence of powerful accretion disk winds in
CVs. Here, we use our Monte Carlo ionization and radiative transfer code to
investigate whether disk wind models that produce realistic UV line profiles
are also likely to generate observationally significant recombination line and
continuum emission in the optical waveband. We also test whether outflows may
be responsible for the single-peaked emission line profiles often seen in
high-state CVs and for the weakness of the Balmer absorption edge (relative to
simple models of optically thick accretion disks). We find that a standard disk
wind model that is successful in reproducing the UV spectra of CVs also leaves
a noticeable imprint on the optical spectrum, particularly for systems viewed
at high inclination. The strongest optical wind-formed recombination lines are
H and He II . We demonstrate that a higher-density outflow
model produces all the expected H and He lines and produces a recombination
continuum that can fill in the Balmer jump at high inclinations. This model
displays reasonable verisimilitude with the optical spectrum of RW Trianguli.
No single-peaked emission is seen, although we observe a narrowing of the
double-peaked emission lines from the base of the wind. Finally, we show that
even denser models can produce a single-peaked H line. On the basis of
our results, we suggest that winds can modify, and perhaps even dominate, the
line and continuum emission from CVs.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures. Accepted to MNRA
Efficient transduction of primary vascular cells by the rare adenovirus serotype 49 vector
Neointima formation and vascular remodelling through vascular smooth muscle cell migration and proliferation can limit the long term success of coronary interventions, for example in coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Ex vivo gene therapy has the potential to reduce unnecessary cell proliferation and limit neointima formation in vascular pathologies. To date the species C adenovirus serotype 5 (Ad5) has been commonly used for pre-clinical gene therapy, however its suitability is potentially limited by relatively poor tropism for vascular cells and high levels of pre-existing immunity in the population. To avoid these limitations, novel species of adenovirus are being tested; here we investigate the potential of adenovirus 49 (Ad49) for use in gene therapy. Transduction of primary human vascular cells by a range of adenovirus serotypes was assessed; Ad49 demonstrated highest transduction of both vascular smooth muscle and endothelial cells. Gene transfer with Ad49 in vascular smooth muscle and endothelial cells was possible following short exposure times (*lt;1hr) and with low MOI which is clinically relevant. Ex vivo delivery to surplus CABG tissue showed efficient gene transfer with Ad49, consistent with the in vitro findings. Luminal infusion of Ad49GFP into intact CABG samples ex vivo resulted in efficient vessel transduction. In addition, no seroprevelance rates to Ad49 were observed in a Scottish cohort of patients from cardiovascular clinics, thus circumventing issues with pre-existing immunity. Our results show Ad49 has tropism for vascular cells in vitro and ex vivo and demonstrate Ad49 may be an improved vector for local vascular gene therapy compared to current alternatives
Differential Rotation in Neutron Stars: Magnetic Braking and Viscous Damping
Diffferentially rotating stars can support significantly more mass in
equilibrium than nonrotating or uniformly rotating stars, according to general
relativity. The remnant of a binary neutron star merger may give rise to such a
``hypermassive'' object. While such a star may be dynamically stable against
gravitational collapse and bar formation, the radial stabilization due to
differential rotation is likely to be temporary. Magnetic braking and viscosity
combine to drive the star to uniform rotation, even if the seed magnetic field
and the viscosity are small. This process inevitably leads to delayed collapse,
which will be accompanied by a delayed gravitational wave burst and, possibly,
a gamma-ray burst. We provide a simple, Newtonian, MHD calculation of the
braking of differential rotation by magnetic fields and viscosity. The star is
idealized as a differentially rotating, infinite cylinder consisting of a
homogeneous, incompressible conducting gas. We solve analytically the simplest
case in which the gas has no viscosity and the star resides in an exterior
vacuum. We treat numerically cases in which the gas has internal viscosity and
the star is embedded in an exterior, low-density, conducting medium. Our
evolution calculations are presented to stimulate more realistic MHD
simulations in full 3+1 general relativity. They serve to identify some of the
key physical and numerical parameters, scaling behavior and competing
timescales that characterize this important process.Comment: 11 pages. To appear in ApJ (November 20, 2000
Adiabatic limit and the slow motion of vortices in a Chern-Simons-Schr\"odinger system
We study a nonlinear system of partial differential equations in which a
complex field (the Higgs field) evolves according to a nonlinear Schroedinger
equation, coupled to an electromagnetic field whose time evolution is
determined by a Chern-Simons term in the action. In two space dimensions, the
Chern-Simons dynamics is a Galileo invariant evolution for A, which is an
interesting alternative to the Lorentz invariant Maxwell evolution, and is
finding increasing numbers of applications in two dimensional condensed matter
field theory. The system we study, introduced by Manton, is a special case (for
constant external magnetic field, and a point interaction) of the effective
field theory of Zhang, Hansson and Kivelson arising in studies of the
fractional quantum Hall effect. From the mathematical perspective the system is
a natural gauge invariant generalization of the nonlinear Schroedinger
equation, which is also Galileo invariant and admits a self-dual structure with
a resulting large space of topological solitons (the moduli space of self-dual
Ginzburg-Landau vortices). We prove a theorem describing the adiabatic
approximation of this system by a Hamiltonian system on the moduli space. The
approximation holds for values of the Higgs self-coupling constant close to the
self-dual (Bogomolny) value of 1. The viability of the approximation scheme
depends upon the fact that self-dual vortices form a symplectic submanifold of
the phase space (modulo gauge invariance). The theorem provides a rigorous
description of slow vortex dynamics in the near self-dual limit.Comment: Minor typos corrected, one reference added and DOI give
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