14,864 research outputs found
My Brother\u27s Recital
The big night had arrived. My eight; year-old brother was to perform on the eighty-eight in his first recital. Tonight was the climax of a month of madness. Four long weeks had seen the rise and fall of the neighbors\u27 patience. Day and night, night and day, all they heard was piano, piano, piano! They, as well as we, almost went mad. It would not have been too bad if Al could have played the piano without making it an instrument of torture .. But his brand of music involved no more than two fingers, one on each hand
A Fixed Effects Analysis of the Adoption of New Technologies in the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1899-1929
This paper focuses on the relationship between technical and
institutional changes in Cuba a leader in the use of continuousprocess
technologies being applied to cane sugar manufacture in
the first three decades of the twentieth century. Using a fixed
effects model of the sugar manufacturer's decision to invest in
new technologies, we show that a change in institutional factors
had an impact on the adoption of the new technologies. The
results show that differences in cane contracting arrangements
affected the ease with which mills adopted new technologies.
These differences were based on historical factors in the
evolution of the cane farming institution in Cuba that affected
whether the cane lands were the property of the farmer or the
mill. This distinction created differences in the cane farmers'
bargaining positions in the renegotiation of contracts with the
mill, and it resulted in variation in the long-run costs of
procuring cane at different mills
Evolution of the star formation histories of BLAST galaxies
We have measured star formation histories (SFHs) and stellar masses of
galaxies detected by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope
(BLAST) over approximately 9 square degrees centred on the Chandra Deep Field
South. We have applied the recently developed SFH reconstruction method of Dye
et al. to optical, near-infrared and mid-infrared photometry of 92 BLAST
galaxies. We find significant differences between the SFHs of low mass (<10^11
M_sol) and high mass (>10^11 M_sol) galaxies. On average, low mass galaxies
exhibit a dominant late burst of star formation which creates a large fraction
of their stellar mass. Conversely, high mass systems tend to have a significant
amount of stellar mass that formed much earlier. We also find that the high
mass SFHs evolve more strongly than the low mass SFHs. These findings are
consistent with the phenomenon of downsizing observed in optically selected
samples of galaxies.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS Letters. 5 pages. 4 figure
Analog table look-up device identifies unknown terrain
Table provides a probability map defining unknown terrain in terms of known terrain inputs. Device consists of analog transformation network and flying spot scanner. Information is useful to manufacturers and users of remote sensing equipment and applies to automated quality control
An investigation of phase-lock loop swept- frequency synchronization
Rapid synchronization of phase-locked oscillators is best achieved by the swept-frequency acquisition technique, wherein the voltage-controlled oscillator /VCO/ is linearly swept through the uncertainty band. The theoretically predicted sweep rates of this technique and the observed experimental results differ by less than seven percent
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