ELISION: sonic gastronomy

Concert review of Australian contemporary art music ensemble Elision. Their Spirit Weapons concert at the 2001 Queensland Biennial Festival of Music included Michael Smetanin, Vault; Michael Jarrell, Essaims-Cribles ; Liza Lim, Spirit Weapons; René Wohlhauser, Quantenströmung; Michael Vaughan, Infinite Skies

Freely-Decaying, Homogeneous Turbulence Generated by Multi-scale Grids

We investigate wind tunnel turbulence generated by both conventional and multi-scale grids. Measurements were made in a tunnel which has a large test-section, so that possible side wall effects are very small and the length assures that the turbulence has time to settle down to a homogeneous shear-free state. The conventional and multi-scale grids were all designed to produce turbulence with the same integral scale, so that a direct comparison could be made between the different flows. Our primary finding is that the behavior of the turbulence behind our multi-scale grids is virtually identical to that behind the equivalent conventional grid. In particular, all flows exhibit a power-law decay of energy, $u^2 \sim t^{-n}$, where $n$ is very close to the classical Saffman exponent of $n = 6/5$. Moreover, all spectra exhibit classical Kolmogorov scaling, with the spectra collapsing on the integral scales at small $k$, and on the Kolmogorov micro-scales at large $k$. Our results are at odds with some other experiments performed on similar multi-scale grids, where significantly higher energy decay exponents and turbulence levels have been reported.Comment: 19 pages, 18 figure

Segment-level evaluation of the simulated aggregation test: US corn and soybean exploratory experiment

An evaluation of the corn and soybean proportion-estimation accuracy and dot labeling accuracy of the Simulated Aggregation Test, U.S. Corn and Soybean Exploratory Experiment, is presented. These results are in turn compared with the corn and soybean proportion-estimation accuracy and dot labeling accuracy of the Classification Procedures Verification Test

Spectral properties of non-local uniformly-elliptic operators

In this paper we consider the spectral properties of a class of non-local uniformly elliptic operators, which arise from the study of non-local uniformly elliptic partial differential equations. Such equations arise naturally in the study of a variety of physical and biological systems with examples ranging from Ohmic heating to population dynamics. The operators studied here are bounded perturbations of linear (local) differential operators, and the non-local perturbation is in the form of an integral term. We study the eigenvalues, the multiplicities of these eigenvalues, and the existence of corresponding positive eigenfunctions. It is shown here that the spectral properties of these non-local operators can differ considerably from those of their local counterpart. However, we show that under suitable hypotheses, there still exists a principal eigenvalue of these operators

Spacecraft attitude sensor

A system for sensing the attitude of a spacecraft includes a pair of optical scanners having a relatively narrow field of view rotating about the spacecraft x-y plane. The spacecraft rotates about its z axis at a relatively high angular velocity while one scanner rotates at low velocity, whereby a panoramic sweep of the entire celestial sphere is derived from the scanner. In the alternative, the scanner rotates at a relatively high angular velocity about the x-y plane while the spacecraft rotates at an extremely low rate or at zero angular velocity relative to its z axis to provide a rotating horizon scan. The positions of the scanners about the x-y plane are read out to assist in a determination of attitude. While the satellite is spinning at a relatively high angular velocity, the angular positions of the bodies detected by the scanners are determined relative to the sun by providing a sun detector having a field of view different from the scanners

Analytical Solutions for the Nonlinear Longitudinal Drift Compression (Expansion) of Intense Charged Particle Beams

To achieve high focal spot intensities in heavy ion fusion, the ion beam must be compressed longitudinally by factors of ten to one hundred before it is focused onto the target. The longitudinal compression is achieved by imposing an initial velocity profile tilt on the drifting beam. In this paper, the problem of longitudinal drift compression of intense charged particle beams is solved analytically for the two important cases corresponding to a cold beam, and a pressure-dominated beam, using a one-dimensional warm-fluid model describing the longitudinal beam dynamics

Safer recruitment practice: audit of exisiting recruitment practices in residential child care

In the wake of a number of high profile cases of the abuse of children and young people in residential child care, there have been repeated calls for the improvement of recruitment and selection of residential child care staff. Following the Children’s Safeguards Review the Scottish Executive funded the Scottish Recruitment and Selection Consortium to contribute to the safefguards for children by developing a toolkit for safer selection of staff. The toolkit was published in 2001. In 2004 the Scottish executive commisioned research form Residential Child Care (SIRCC) to identify current recruitment practices in residentialchild care for staff who have unsupervised contact with children and young people and to gauge opinion on how safer recruitment should be taken forward . A postal survey of operational and human resource managers responsible for the recruitment of residential childcare staff in local authority and voluntary organisationswas undertaken between January and April 2005. A sample of those respondents was invited to participate in semi-structured exploratory interviews, focusing in more detail on current practice and participants’ views on the implementation of the recommendations of the Toolkit