932 research outputs found
The EISCAT meteor code
The EISCAT UHF system has the unique capability to determine meteor vector velocities from the head echo Doppler shifts measured at the three sites. Since even meteors spending a very short time in the common volume produce analysable events, the technique lends itself ideally to mapping the orbits of meteors arriving from arbitrary directions over most of the upper hemisphere. <br><br> A radar mode optimised for this application was developed in 2001/2002. A specially selected low-sidelobe 32-bit pseudo-random binary sequence is used to binary phase shift key (BPSK) the transmitted carrier. The baud-length is 2.4 μs and the receiver bandwidth is 1.6 MHz to accommodate both the resulting modulation bandwidth and the target Doppler shift. Sampling is at 0.6 μs, corresponding to 90-m range resolution. Target range and Doppler velocity are extracted from the raw data in a multi-step matched-filter procedure. For strong (SNR&gt;5) events the Doppler velocity standard deviation is 100–150 m/s. The effective range resolution is about 30 m, allowing very accurate time-of-flight velocity estimates. On average, Doppler and time-of-flight (TOF) velocities agree to within about one part in 10<sup>3</sup>. Two or more targets simultaneously present in the beam can be resolved down to a range separation &lt;300 m as long as their Doppler shifts differ by more than a few km/s
'The world is full of big bad wolves': investigating the experimental therapeutic spaces of R.D. Laing and Aaron Esterson
In conjunction with the recent critical assessments of the life and work of R.D. Laing, this paper seeks to demonstrate what is revealed when Laing’s work on families and created spaces of mental health care are examined through a geographical lens. The paper begins with an exploration of Laing’s time at the Tavistock Clinic in London during the 1960s, and of the co-authored text with Aaron Esterson entitled, Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964). The study then seeks to demonstrate the importance Laing and his colleague placed on the time-space situatedness of patients and their worlds. Finally, an account is provided of Laing’s and Esterson’s spatial thinking in relation to their creation of both real and imagined spaces of therapeutic care
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Gut thinking: the gut microbiome and mental health beyond the head
Background: In recent decades, dominant models of mental illness have become increasingly focused on the head, with mental disorders being figured as brain disorders. However, research into the active role that the microbiome-gut-brain axis plays in affecting mood and behaviour may lead to the conclusion that mental health is more than an internalised problem of individual brains.
Objective: This article explores the implications of shifting understandings about mental health that have come about through research into links between the gut microbiome and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. It aims to analyse the different ways that the lines between mind and body and mental and physical health are re-shaped by this research, which is starting to inform clinical and public understanding.
Design: As mental health has become a pressing issue of political and public concern it has become increasingly constructed in socio-cultural and personal terms beyond clinical spaces, requiring a conceptual response that exceeds biomedical inquiry. This article argues that an interdisciplinary critical medical humanities approach is well positioned to analyse the impact of microbiome-gut-brain research on conceptions of mind.
Results: The entanglement of mind and matter evinced by microbiome-gut-brain axis research potentially provides a different way to conceptualise the physical and social concomitants of mental distress.
Conclusion: Mental health is not narrowly located in the head but is assimilated by the physical body and intermingled with the natural world, requiring different methods of research to unfold the meanings and implications of gut thinking for conceptions of human selfhood
Quantum probabilities as Dempster-Shafer probabilities in the lattice of subspaces.
yesThe orthocomplemented modular lattice of subspaces L[H(d)] , of a quantum system with d-dimensional Hilbert space H(d), is considered. A generalized additivity relation which holds for Kolmogorov probabilities is violated by quantum probabilities in the full lattice L[H(d)] (it is only valid within the Boolean subalgebras of L[H(d)] ). This suggests the use of more general (than Kolmogorov) probability theories, and here the Dempster-Shafer probability theory is adopted. An operator D(H1,H2) , which quantifies deviations from Kolmogorov probability theory is introduced, and it is shown to be intimately related to the commutator of the projectors P(H1),P(H2) , to the subspaces H 1, H 2. As an application, it is shown that the proof of the inequalities of Clauser, Horne, Shimony, and Holt for a system of two spin 1/2 particles is valid for Kolmogorov probabilities, but it is not valid for Dempster-Shafer probabilities. The violation of these inequalities in experiments supports the interpretation of quantum probabilities as Dempster-Shafer probabilities
Two-Center Integrals for r_{ij}^{n} Polynomial Correlated Wave Functions
All integrals needed to evaluate the correlated wave functions with
polynomial terms of inter-electronic distance are included. For this form of
the wave function, the integrals needed can be expressed as a product of
integrals involving at most four electrons
Psychopolitics: Peter Sedgwick’s legacy for mental health movements
This paper re-considers the relevance of Peter Sedgwick's Psychopolitics (1982) for a politics of mental health. Psychopolitics offered an indictment of ‘anti-psychiatry’ the failure of which, Sedgwick argued, lay in its deconstruction of the category of ‘mental illness’, a gesture that resulted in a politics of nihilism. ‘The radical who is only a radical nihilist’, Sedgwick observed, ‘is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives’. Sedgwick argued, rather, that the concept of ‘mental illness’ could be a truly critical concept if it was deployed ‘to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live’. The paper contextualizes Psychopolitics within the ‘crisis tendencies’ of its time, surveying the shifting welfare landscape of the subsequent 25 years alongside Sedgwick's continuing relevance. It considers the dilemma that the discourse of ‘mental illness’ – Sedgwick's critical concept – has fallen out of favour with radical mental health movements yet remains paradigmatic within psychiatry itself. Finally, the paper endorses a contemporary perspective that, while necessarily updating Psychopolitics, remains nonetheless ‘Sedgwickian’
Time-dependent calculation of ionization in Potassium at mid-infrared wavelengths
We study the dynamics of the Potassium atom in the mid-infrared, high
intensity, short laser pulse regime. We ascertain numerical convergence by
comparing the results obtained by the direct expansion of the time-dependent
Schroedinger equation onto B-Splines, to those obtained by the eigenbasis
expansion method. We present ionization curves in the 12-, 13-, and 14-photon
ionization range for Potassium. The ionization curve of a scaled system, namely
Hydrogen starting from the 2s, is compared to the 12-photon results. In the
13-photon regime, a dynamic resonance is found and analyzed in some detail. The
results for all wavelengths and intensities, including Hydrogen, display a
clear plateau in the peak-heights of the low energy part of the Above Threshold
Ionization (ATI) spectrum, which scales with the ponderomotive energy Up, and
extends to 2.8 +- 0.5 Up.Comment: 15 two-column pages with 15 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for
publication in Phys. Rev A. Improved figures, language and punctuation, and
made minor corrections. We also added a comparison to the ADK theor
Open Mushrooms: Stickiness revisited
We investigate mushroom billiards, a class of dynamical systems with sharply
divided phase space. For typical values of the control parameter of the system
, an infinite number of marginally unstable periodic orbits (MUPOs) exist
making the system sticky in the sense that unstable orbits approach regular
regions in phase space and thus exhibit regular behaviour for long periods of
time. The problem of finding these MUPOs is expressed as the well known problem
of finding optimal rational approximations of a real number, subject to some
system-specific constraints. By introducing a generalized mushroom and using
properties of continued fractions, we describe a zero measure set of control
parameter values for which all MUPOs are destroyed and therefore
the system is less sticky. The open mushroom (billiard with a hole) is then
considered in order to quantify the stickiness exhibited and exact leading
order expressions for the algebraic decay of the survival probability function
are calculated for mushrooms with triangular and rectangular stems.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures. Includes discussion of a three-dimensional
mushroo
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