A mechanical coordinate converter

Mechanical converter for spherical coordinates used in polariscope balloon program

Measuring the Effect and Efficiency of City Marketing

AbstractCity marketing, defined as the interaction that exists in the management of the city policy areas, such as education, employment, or housing towards three target groups, viz. tourists, citizens and enterprises (Hospers, 2011), is increasingly becoming more important in the management of cities (Rennen, 2007) with raised budgets as a result. This research aims at gauging the effect and measuring the efficiency of city marketing, therefore designing a tool that is a combination of integrated performance rating (Jorissen, 1999) and return on investment (ROI) (Jacobson, 1987), based on widely available secondary data, spanning the time period 2008–2011

Reference prior for Bayesian estimation of seismic fragility curves

One of the crucial quantities of probabilistic seismic risk assessment studies is the fragility curve, which represents the probability of failure of a mechanical structure conditional to a scalar measure derived from the seismic ground motion. Estimating such curves is a difficult task because for most structures of interest, few data are available, whether they come from complex numerical simulations or experimental campaigns. For this reason, a wide range of the methods of the literature rely on a parametric log-normal model. Bayesian approaches allow for efficient learning of the model parameters. However, for small data set sizes, the choice of the prior distribution has a non-negligible influence on the posterior distribution, and therefore on any resulting estimate. We propose a thorough study of this parametric Bayesian estimation problem when the data are binary (i.e. data indicate the state of the structure, failure or non-failure). Using the reference prior theory as a support, we suggest an objective approach for the prior choice to simulate a posteriori fragility curves. This approach leads to the Jeffreys prior and we prove that this prior depends only of the ground motion characteristics, making its calculation suitable for any equipment in an industrial installation subjected to the same seismic hazard. Our proposal is theoretically and numerically compared to those classically proposed in the literature by considering three different case studies. The results show the robustness and advantages of the Jeffreys prior in terms of regularization (no degenerate estimations) and stability (no outliers of the parameters) for fragility curves estimation

PHASES Differential Astrometry and Iodine Cell Radial Velocities of the kappa Pegasi Triple Star System

kappa Pegasi is a well-known, nearby triple star system. It consists of a ``wide'' pair with semi-major axis 235 milli-arcseconds, one component of which is a single-line spectroscopic binary (semi-major axis 2.5 milli-arcseconds). Using high-precision differential astrometry and radial velocity observations, the masses for all three components are determined and the relative inclinations between the wide and narrow pairs' orbits is found to be 43.8 +/- 3.0 degrees, just over the threshold for the three body Kozai resonance. The system distance is determined to 34.60 +/- 0.21 parsec, and is consistent with trigonometric parallax measurements.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, complete versions of tables 2 and 4 can be found at http://stuff.mit.edu/~matthew1/kapPegTables

Young stars and brown dwarfs surrounding Alnilam (eps Ori) and Mintaka (del Ori)

Aims: We look for new regions for the search of substellar objects. Methods: Two circular areas, 45 arcmin-radius each, centred on the young massive star systems Alnilam and Mintaka in the Orion Belt, have been explored. The regions are very young (less than 10 Ma), have low extinction, and are neighbours to sigma Orionis (~3 Ma), a young open cluster very rich in brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects. We have used Virtual Observatory tools, the astro-photometric Tycho-2, DENIS and 2MASS catalogues, 10 control fields at similar galactic latitudes, and X-ray, mid-infrared and spectroscopic data from the literature. Results: We have compiled exhaustive lists of known young stars and new candidate members in the Ori OB1b association, and of fore- and background sources. A total of 136 stars display features of extreme youth, like early spectral types, lithium in absorption, or mid-infrared flux excess. Other two young brown dwarf and 289 star candidates have been identified from an optical/near-infrared colour-magnitude diagram. We list additional 74 known objects that might belong to the association. This catalogue can serve as an input for characterisation of the stellar and high-mass substellar populations in the Orion Belt. Finally, we have investigated the surface densities and radial distributions of young objects surrounding Alnilam and Mintaka, and compared them with those in the sigma Orionis cluster. We report a new open cluster centred on Mintaka. Conclusions: Both regions can be analogs to the sigma Orionis cluster, but more massive, more extended, slightly older, and less radially concentrated.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A. It will be published on line in Sect. 14 (Catalogs and data). Tables in Appendix A will soon be available at the CD