Measurement of the top quark mass in topologies enhanced with single top quarks produced in the tt-channel at s=8 TeV\sqrt{s}=8\,\mathrm{TeV} using the ATLAS experiment

A measurement of the top quark mass in topologies enhanced with single top quarks produced in the $t$-channel produced via weak interactions is presented. The dataset was collected at a centre-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s}=8\,\mathrm{TeV}$ with the ATLAS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $20.3\,\mathrm{fb^{-1}}$. To determine the top quark mass a template method is used based on the distribution of the invariant mass of the lepton and the $b$-tagged jet as estimator. The result of the measurement is $m_{\mathrm{top}} = 172.2 \pm 0.7 {\mathrm{(stat.)}} \pm 2.0 {\mathrm{(syst.)}}\,\mathrm{GeV}$.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in proceedings of Top 2014, Cannes, France, 28th Sept - 3rd Oct 201

Spiritual impacts of the space program on the world

The lessons learned from the space program in showing how fragile the environment is on earth are discussed. Examples are cited of the reactions of the astronauts to the unique features of earth. The reactions of the populace in seeking better living conditions and their concern with improving the environment are given as two outgrowths of the program

Breaking new ground in mapping human settlements from space -The Global Urban Footprint-

Today 7.2 billion people inhabit the Earth and by 2050 this number will have risen to around nine billion, of which about 70 percent will be living in cities. Hence, it is essential to understand drivers, dynamics, and impacts of the human settlements development. A key component in this context is the availability of an up-to-date and spatially consistent map of the location and distribution of human settlements. It is here that the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) raster map can make a valuable contribution. The new global GUF binary settlement mask shows a so far unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.4 arcsec ($\sim12 m$) that provides - for the first time - a complete picture of the entirety of urban and rural settlements. The GUF has been derived by means of a fully automated processing framework - the Urban Footprint Processor (UFP) - that was used to analyze a global coverage of more than 180,000 TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X radar images with 3m ground resolution collected in 2011-2012. Various quality assessment studies to determine the absolute GUF accuracy based on ground truth data on the one hand and the relative accuracies compared to established settlements maps on the other hand, clearly indicate the added value of the new global GUF layer, in particular with respect to the representation of rural settlement patterns. Generally, the GUF layer achieves an overall absolute accuracy of about 85\%, with observed minima around 65\% and maxima around 98 \%. The GUF will be provided open and free for any scientific use in the full resolution and for any non-profit (but also non-scientific) use in a generalized version of 2.8 arcsec ($\sim84m$). Therewith, the new GUF layer can be expected to break new ground with respect to the analysis of global urbanization and peri-urbanization patterns, population estimation or vulnerability assessment

A note on the endogeneity of the pay-performance relationship in professional soccer

Torgler and Schmidt (2007) have recently found a positive impact of pay on player performance in German soccer, measured by the number of goals and assists scored within a season. This note shows that their result is spurious as both a player's wage and goal/assist scoring are driven by individual playing abilities. Holding the (unobserved) time-invariant and the varying talent of a player constant, the positive pay-performance link is no longer statistically significant. In professional soccer, wages seem to buy talent rather than motivation.

A superelement-based method for computing unsteady three-dimensional potential flows in hydraulic turbomachines

A numerical method is presented for the computation of unsteady, three-dimensional potential flows in hydraulic pumps and turbines. The superelement method has been extended in order to eliminate slave degrees of freedom not only from the governing Laplace equation, but also from the Kutta conditions. The resulting superelement formulation is invariant under rotation. Therefore the geometrical symmetry of the flow channels in the rotor can be exploited. This makes the method especially suitable to performing fully coupled computations of the unsteady flow phenomena in both rotor and stator, the so-called rotor-stator interaction. \ud The developed numerical method is used to simulate the unsteady flow in an industrial mixed-flow pump. Two types of simulation are considered: one in which unsteady wakes behind the trailing edges of the rotor blades are taken into account and one in which these are neglected. Results are given that show the importance of unsteady flow phenomena. However, the computed head-capacity curve is hardly influenced by whether or not unsteady wakes are taken into account