A catalogue of the collections of Mexican amber at the Natural History Museum, London and National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, UK

A catalogue is here provided of the pieces of Mexican amber with inclusions in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, and National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, both in the United Kingdom. There are 32 pieces in the Natural History Museum and 101 pieces in National Museums Scotland which contain a combined total of 557 arthropod and 13 plant inclusions. Four orders and 11 families of arthropods are additional to a taxonomic list of Mexican amber arthropods published in 2010

Nonlinear atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic oscillator using a Bose-Einstein condensate

We experimentally investigate the atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic oscillator for the case of nonlinearity due to collisional interactions present in a Bose-Einstein condensate. A Bose condensate of rubidium atoms tightly confined in a static harmonic magnetic trap is exposed to a one-dimensional optical standing-wave potential that is pulsed on periodically. We focus on the quantum anti-resonance case for which the classical periodic behavior is simple and well understood. We show that after a small number of kicks the dynamics is dominated by dephasing of matter wave interference due to the finite width of the condensate's initial momentum distribution. In addition, we demonstrate that the nonlinear mean-field interaction in a typical harmonically confined Bose condensate is not sufficient to give rise to chaotic behavior.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Implementation architectures for natural language generation

Generic software architectures aim to support re-use of components, focusing of research and development effort, and evaluation and comparison of approaches. In the field of natural language processing, generic frameworks for understanding have been successfully deployed to meet all of these aims, but nothing comparable yet exists for generation. The nature of the task itself, and the current methodologies available to research it, seem to make it more difficult to reach the necessary level of consensus to support generic proposals. Recent work has made progress towards establishing a generic framework for generation at the functional level, but left open the issue of actual implementation. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for such an implementation layer for generation systems, drawing on two initial attempts to implement it. We argue that it is possible and useful to distinguish “functional architecture ” from “implementation architecture” for generation systems. 1 The Case for a Generic Software Architecture for NLG Most natural language generation (NLG) systems have some kind of modular structure