Design concepts and detectors for parity violation experiments

Throughout the last fifteen years, a number of experiments on parity violation in elastic electron nucleon scattering have been carried out, especially at Jefferson Lab and at the Mainzer Mikrotron facility MAMI. While the main challenge —the precise measurement of tiny cross-section asymmetries of order 10−6— was the same for all those experiments, quite different approaches were employed by the experimentalists. The diversity in the used techniques will be pointed out to give an overview of the achieved experience with such high-precision measurements

Interactions between sentence comprehension and concurrent action: The role of movement effects and timing

Embodied approaches to language comprehension suggest that we understand sentences by using our perception and action systems for simulating their contents. In line with this assumption, the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) shows that sensibility judgments for sentences are faster when the direction of the described action matches the direction of the response movement. The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether this compatibility is effective between sentence direction and movement direction or between sentence direction and the direction of the movement effect. To this end, movements were dissociated from their effects in several experiments. Participants indicated whether sentences describing transfer actions toward or away from the body are sensible or not by producing a movement effect on a screen at a location near the body or far from the body. These movement effects were achieved by moving the hand from a middle button to a near or far button, i.e., toward the body or away from the body. In one condition, a movement effect resulted from pressing the button whose location corresponded with the location of the effect. Crucially for the above research question, there was another condition in which an action effect resulted from pressing the button at the opposite location. Since in the first series of experiments, the ACE turned out to be unreliable and in part seemed to be reversed, it was difficult to address the initial question. Therefore, a second series of experiments additionally investigated the role of timing between response preparation and sentence comprehension as a potential cause of the negative ACE. Results showed a positive ACE when the same directional feature was concurrently activated within the two processes, leading to priming between them. A negative ACE appeared when the directional feature was already bound into the sentence representation and thus was less accessible when needed for response preparation. In both cases, the ACE was related to the movement effect. These results suggest that the ACE occurs on the higher level of cognitive representations referring to distal information

Oblique Photogrammetric Analysis of Dome Growth at Mount St. Helens Volcano, 2004 – 2007

This project is an oblique photogrammetric survey of the 2004-2007 dome-building eruption of Mount St. Helens volcano with two primary objectives: (1) to evaluate the potential of a new rapid and low-cost technique to create digital elevation models (DEMs) and subsequently calculate dome volumes and extrusion rates at Mount St. Helens; and (2) to attempt to understand mechanics associated with lava dome extrusion and collapse by analyzing volumetric and extrusion rate measurements in the context of dome height measurements, seismicity data, and migration of the locus of dome growth. The new method uses sets of oblique aerial photographs, acquired from a helicopter with a standard digital camera, and commercially available photogrammetry software to create DEMs. Twelve sets of overlapping digital images from November 2004 to April 2007 of the growing dome inside the crater of Mount St. Helens were used to produce DEMs. Analyses of the digital images were carried out using PhotoModeler software, which produces three dimensional coordinates of points identified in multiple photos. The DEMs were used for qualitative and quantitative descriptions of the 2004-2007 eruption. The DEMs were used to calculate height, volume, and extrusion rate, and to track changes in these quantities through time. These quantities show a decreasing extrusion rate through time that has remained lower than 1 m3/s since October 2005. Total dome volume had reached 94x106 m3 as of April 2007, a larger volume than that of the 1980-1986 Dome. Quantitative evaluation of the DEMs also shows a relationship between dome height and extrusion rate, which varies with the character of eruptive activity. Results were validated by comparing volume measurements derived from traditional aerophotogrammetric surveys run by the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory. The new oblique photogrammetric technique yields estimates of eruptive volume consistently within 5% of the volumes estimated with traditional surveys. The end result of this project is a new technique that provides inexpensive, rapid assessment of volcanic activity that can be an important supplement to volcano monitoring worldwide

The Role of Trait and State Anxiety in Semantic Network Organization of Information Related to Current Concerns.

In the first study of this report empirically-derived cognitive networks were established for high trait test anxious participants ( n = 28) and low trait test anxious participants (n = 25) during periods of both high and low exam stress. Cognitive networks were created using the Pathfinder algorithm, which transforms pair-wise word similarity ratings into an associative network. Information included in the networks pertained to the following word categories: testing situations, positive performance evaluation, and negative performance evaluation. Contrary to predictions, there was no effect of either trait or state test anxiety on semantic network organization. These findings fail to support the associative network theory of anxiety and suggest the need for development of alternative explanations for biased cognitive processing associated with anxiety. Study number two investigated the validity of the Pathfinder algorithm by examining the relationship between Pathfinder-generated network organization and free-recall order, which represents a measure of organization of information in memory. Correlations were conducted for both high trait test anxious participants (n = 21) and low trait test anxious participants (n = 23). Findings only partially supported the validity of Pathfinder. Implications of these findings for use of Pathfinder in future research and clinical assessment are discussed

Determination of interactions between tegument proteins of herpes simplex virus type 1

要約のみTohoku University有本　博一課