2,320 research outputs found
Exploring the interplay between Buddhism and career development : a study of highly skilled women workers in Sri Lanka
This article adopts a socio cultural lens to examine the role of Buddhism in highly skilled women workersâ careers in Sri Lanka. While Buddhism enabled womenâs career development by giving them strength to cope with difficult situations in work, it also seemed to restrict their agency and constrain their career advancement. Based on our findings, we argue that being perceived as a good Buddhist woman worked as a powerful form of career capital for the respondents in our sample, who used their faith to combat gender disadvantage in their work settings
Systematic Approach to Using Isentropic Stress Reverberation Techniques in Approximating Equation of State
Isentropic stress reverberations are used to obtain multiple Hugoniot states from a single plate impact experiment using a layered plate geometry, where a low impedance inner layer is embedded within a high impedance bulk structure. The mathematical framework used in this technique uses the classical Rankine-Hugoniot equations in the method of impedance matching, where the bulk material is required to have a known Hugoniot. Factors including the wave velocities in the materials, input pulse duration, inner layer thickness, and diameter of the test samples affect the number of states that can be generated from a single experiment. Experiments using 6061 aluminum and polycarbonate, respectively, as the bulk material and inner layer, accurately generated six Hugoniot states for the polycarbonate. Experiments using A572 grade 50 structural steel as the bulk material accurately generated ten Hugoniot states for the polycarbonate. For each experiment, the method can be used to generate a Hugoniot equation defining the material response of the inner layer within the domain encompassed by the specific test. The method is also confined to the low to moderate stress regions, within which Hugoniot and isentropic representations of the material are almost identical
Neural Circuitry of Novelty Salience Processing in Psychosis Risk: Association With Clinical Outcome
Psychosis has been proposed to develop from dysfunction in a hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit, leading to aberrant salience processing. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during novelty salience processing to investigate this model in people at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis according to their subsequent clinical outcomes. Seventy-six CHR participants as defined using the Comprehensive Assessment of At-Risk Mental States (CAARMS) and 31 healthy controls (HC) were studied while performing a novelty salience fMRI task that engaged an a priori hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit of interest. The CHR sample was then followed clinically for a mean of 59.7 months (~5 y), when clinical outcomes were assessed in terms of transition (CHR-T) or non-transition (CHR-NT) to psychosis (CAARMS criteria): during this period, 13 individuals (17%) developed a psychotic disorder (CHR-T) and 63 did not. Functional activation and effective connectivity within a hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit were compared between groups. In CHR individuals compared to HC, hippocampal response to novel stimuli was significantly attenuated (P = .041 family-wise error corrected). Dynamic Causal Modelling revealed that stimulus novelty modulated effective connectivity from the hippocampus to the striatum, and from the midbrain to the hippocampus, significantly more in CHR participants than in HC. Conversely, stimulus novelty modulated connectivity from the midbrain to the striatum significantly less in CHR participants than in HC, and less in CHR participants who subsequently developed psychosis than in CHR individuals who did not become psychotic. Our findings are consistent with preclinical evidence implicating hippocampal-striatal-midbrain circuit dysfunction in altered salience processing and the onset of psychosis
Vortex lattice stability and phase coherence in three-dimensional rapidly rotating Bose condensates
We establish the general equations of motion for the modes of a vortex
lattice in a rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensate in three dimensions,
taking into account the elastic energy of the lattice and the vortex line
bending energy. As in two dimensions, the vortex lattice supports Tkachenko and
gapped sound modes. In contrast, in three dimensions the Tkachenko mode
frequency at long wavelengths becomes linear in the wavevector for any
propagation direction out of the transverse plane. We compute the correlation
functions of the vortex displacements and the superfluid order parameter for a
homogeneous Bose gas of bounded extent in the axial direction. At zero
temperature the vortex displacement correlations are convergent at large
separation, but at finite temperatures, they grow with separation. The growth
of the vortex displacements should lead to observable melting of vortex
lattices at higher temperatures and somewhat lower particle number and faster
rotation than in current experiments. At zero temperature a system of large
extent in the axial direction maintains long range order-parameter correlations
for large separation, but at finite temperatures the correlations decay with
separation.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, Changes include the addition of the particle
density - vortex density coupling and the correct value of the shear modulu
Estimation of the rigid-body motion from three-dimensional images using a generalized center-of-mass points approach
We present an analytical method for the estimation of rigid-body motion in sets of three-dimensional (3-D) SPECT and PET slices. This method utilizes mathematically defined generalized center-of-mass points in images, requiring no segmentation. It can be applied to compensation of the rigid-body motion in both SPECT and PET, once a series of 3-D tomographic images are available. We generalized the formula for the center-of-mass to obtain a family of points comoving with the object\u27s rigid-body motion. From the family of possible points we chose the best three points which resulted in the minimum root-mean-square difference between images as the generalized center-of-mass points for use in estimating motion. The estimated motion was used to sum the sets of tomographic images, or incorporated in the iterative reconstruction to correct for motion during reconstruction of the combined projection data. For comparison, the principle-axes method was also applied to estimate the rigid-body motion from the same tomographic images. To evaluate our method for different noise levels, we performed simulations with the MCAT phantom. We observed that though noise degraded the motion-detection accuracy, our method helped in reducing the motion artifact both visually and quantitatively. We also acquired four sets of the emission and transmission data of the Data Spectrum Anthropomorphic Phantom positioned at four different locations and/or orientations. From these we generated a composite acquisition simulating periodic phantom movements during acquisition. The simulated motion was calculated from the generalized center-of-mass points calculated from the tomographic images reconstructed from individual acquisitions. We determined that motion-compensation greatly reduced the motion artifact. Finally, in a simulation with the gated MCAT phantom, an exaggerated rigid-body motion was applied to the end-systolic frame. The motion was estimated from the end-diastolic and end-systolic images, and used to sum them into a summed image without obvious artifact. Compared to the principle-axes method, in two of the three comparisons with anthropomorphic phantom data our method estimated the motion in closer agreement to the Polaris system than the principal-axes method, while the principle-axes method gave a more accurate estimation of motion in most cases for the MCAT simulations. As an image-driven approach, our method assumes angularly com plete data sets for each state of motion. We expert this method to be applied in correction of respiratory motion in respiratory gated SPECT, and respiratory or other rigid-body motion in PET. © 2006 IEEE
A Multi-Wavelength Mass Analysis of RCS2 J232727.6-020437, a ~3x10M Galaxy Cluster at z=0.7
We present an initial study of the mass and evolutionary state of a massive
and distant cluster, RCS2 J232727.6-020437. This cluster, at z=0.6986, is the
richest cluster discovered in the RCS2 project. The mass measurements presented
in this paper are derived from all possible mass proxies: X-ray measurements,
weak-lensing shear, strong lensing, Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect decrement, the
velocity distribution of cluster member galaxies, and galaxy richness. While
each of these observables probe the mass of the cluster at a different radius,
they all indicate that RCS2 J232727.6-020437 is among the most massive clusters
at this redshift, with an estimated mass of M_200 ~3 x10^15 h^-1 Msun. In this
paper, we demonstrate that the various observables are all reasonably
consistent with each other to within their uncertainties. RCS2 J232727.6-020437
appears to be well relaxed -- with circular and concentric X-ray isophotes,
with a cool core, and no indication of significant substructure in extensive
galaxy velocity data.Comment: 19 pages, 15 figures, submitted to ApJ on March 5, 2015; in press.
Manuscript revised following the referee revie
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