Living in the same household - ‘Incest’ in the family of sport

This article focuses on the coach/athlete relationship in the self admitted sporting ‘family’ and, using both the provisions of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the civil law remedies of non-molestation orders argues that where matters of abuse are concerned, the private world of the surrogate family of sport could be just as liable under family law principles as any other modern day informal family

Projecting the voice : audience responses to ICT-mediated contemporary opera

This paper examines how audiences experience live opera performance and the behaviours they exhibit during live-streaming of the performance. It aims to contribute to our understanding of how audiences, who increasingly inhabit an environment saturated with digital media, respond to contemporary opera performance. Based on a comparative study of audience experiences and behaviours during a live opera performance and the streamed opera screening, we investigate whether digital mediation affects audience appreciation, and whether streaming live opera means the same thing to an audience as the unmediated performance. We firstly outline the conception, design and performance of a contemporary opera and its simultaneous streaming to nearby digital screens. Then, we report the evaluation of the project as measured by a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods during the rehearsals, the live performance and the screening. As one of the few social studies of contemporary classical music in Britain, our study of opera audience behaviours sheds light on the challenges and opportunities afforded by digital technologies for opera companies. Understanding how audiences appreciate digital operas offers practical advice on how theatres and opera companies could respond to new forms of digital activities

L0L_0-ARM: Network Sparsification via Stochastic Binary Optimization

We consider network sparsification as an $L_0$-norm regularized binary optimization problem, where each unit of a neural network (e.g., weight, neuron, or channel, etc.) is attached with a stochastic binary gate, whose parameters are jointly optimized with original network parameters. The Augment-Reinforce-Merge (ARM), a recently proposed unbiased gradient estimator, is investigated for this binary optimization problem. Compared to the hard concrete gradient estimator from Louizos et al., ARM demonstrates superior performance of pruning network architectures while retaining almost the same accuracies of baseline methods. Similar to the hard concrete estimator, ARM also enables conditional computation during model training but with improved effectiveness due to the exact binary stochasticity. Thanks to the flexibility of ARM, many smooth or non-smooth parametric functions, such as scaled sigmoid or hard sigmoid, can be used to parameterize this binary optimization problem and the unbiasness of the ARM estimator is retained, while the hard concrete estimator has to rely on the hard sigmoid function to achieve conditional computation and thus accelerated training. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art pruning rates with almost the same accuracies of baseline methods. The resulting algorithm $L_0$-ARM sparsifies the Wide-ResNet models on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 while the hard concrete estimator cannot. The code is public available at https://github.com/leo-yangli/l0-arm.Comment: Published as a conference paper at ECML 201

1++1^{++} Nonet Singlet-Octet Mixing Angle, Strange Quark Mass, and Strange Quark Condensate

Two strategies are taken into account to determine the $f_1(1420)$-$f_1(1285)$ mixing angle $\theta$. (i) First, using the Gell-Mann-Okubo mass formula together with the $K_1(1270)$-$K_1(1400)$ mixing angle $\theta_{K_1}=(-34\pm 13)^\circ$ extracted from the data for ${\cal B}(B\to K_1(1270) \gamma), {\cal B}(B\to K_1(1400) \gamma), {\cal B}(\tau\to K_1(1270) \nu_\tau)$, and ${\cal B}(\tau\to K_1(1420) \nu_\tau)$, gave $\theta = (23^{+17}_{-23})^\circ$. (ii) Second, from the study of the ratio for $f_1(1285) \to \phi\gamma$ and $f_1(1285) \to \rho^0\gamma$ branching fractions, we have two-fold solution $\theta=(19.4^{+4.5}_{-4.6})^\circ$ or $(51.1^{+4.5}_{-4.6})^\circ$. Combining these two analyses, we thus obtain $\theta=(19.4^{+4.5}_{-4.6})^\circ$. We further compute the strange quark mass and strange quark condensate from the analysis of the $f_1(1420)-f_1(1285)$ mass difference QCD sum rule, where the operator-product-expansion series is up to dimension six and to ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^3, m_s^2 \alpha_s^2)$ accuracy. Using the average of the recent lattice results and the $\theta$ value that we have obtained as inputs, we get $/ =0.41 \pm 0.09$.Comment: 10 pages, 1 table, published versio

A reduction in ag/residential signature conflict using principal components analysis of LANDSAT temporal data

Methods to accurately delineate the types of land cover in the urban-rural transition zone of metropolitan areas were considered. The application of principal components analysis to multidate LANDSAT imagery was investigated as a means of reducing the overlap between residential and agricultural spectral signatures. The statistical concepts of principal components analysis were discussed, as well as the results of this analysis when applied to multidate LANDSAT imagery of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area

Loading Bose condensed atoms into the ground state of an optical lattice

We optimize the turning on of a one-dimensional optical potential, V_L(x,t) = S(t) V_0 cos^2(kx) to obtain the optimal turn-on function S(t) so as to load a Bose-Einstein condensate into the ground state of the optical lattice of depth V_0. Specifically, we minimize interband excitations at the end of the turn-on of the optical potential at the final ramp time t_r, where S(t_r) = 1, given that S(0) = 0. Detailed numerical calculations confirm that a simple unit cell model is an excellent approximation when the turn-on time t_r is long compared with the inverse of the band excitation frequency and short in comparison with nonlinear time \hbar/\mu where \mu is the chemical potential of the condensate. We demonstrate using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation with an optimal turn-on function S(t) that the ground state of the optical lattice can be loaded with very little excitation even for times t_r on the order of the inverse band excitation frequency

3D printing of cement composites

The aims of this study were to investigate the feasibility of generating 3D structures directly in rapid-hardening Portland cement (RHPC) using 3D Printing (3DP) technology. 3DP is a Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) process that generates parts directly from CAD in a layer-wise manner. 3D structures were successfully printed using a polyvinylalcohol: RHPC ratio of 3:97 w/w, with print resolutions of better than 1mm. The test components demonstrated the manufacture of features, including off-axis holes, overhangs / undercuts etc that would not be manufacturable using simple mould tools. Samples hardened by 1 day post-build immersion in water at RT offered Modulus of Rupture (MOR) values of up to 0.8±0.1MPa, and, after 26 days immersion in water at RT, offered MOR values of 2.2±0.2MPa, similar to bassanite-based materials more typically used in 3DP (1-3 MPa). Post-curing by water immersion restructured the structure, removing the layering typical of ALM processes, and infilling porosity

Non-equilibrium umbrella sampling applied to force spectroscopy of soft matter

Physical systems often respond on a timescale which is longer than that of the measurement. This is particularly true in soft matter where direct experimental measurement, for example in force spectroscopy, drives the soft system out of equilibrium and provides a non-equilibrium measure. Here we demonstrate experimentally for the first time that equilibrium physical quantities (such as the mean square displacement) can be obtained from non-equilibrium measurements via umbrella sampling. Our model experimental system is a bead fluctuating in a time-varying optical trap. We also show this for simulated force spectroscopy on a complex soft molecule--a piston-rotaxane