1,838 research outputs found
The Ellipticity of the Disks of Spiral Galaxies
The disks of spiral galaxies are generally elliptical rather than circular.
The distribution of ellipticities can be fit with a log-normal distribution.
For a sample of 12,764 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release
1 (SDSS DR1), the distribution of apparent axis ratios in the i band is best
fit by a log-normal distribution of intrinsic ellipticities with ln epsilon =
-1.85 +/- 0.89. For a sample of nearly face-on spiral galaxies, analyzed by
Andersen and Bershady using both photometric and spectroscopic data, the best
fitting distribution of ellipticities has ln epsilon = -2.29 +/- 1.04. Given
the small size of the Andersen-Bershady sample, the two distribution are not
necessarily inconsistent. If the ellipticity of the potential were equal to
that of the light distribution of the SDSS DR1 galaxies, it would produce 1.0
magnitudes of scatter in the Tully-Fisher relation, greater than is observed.
The Andersen-Bershady results, however, are consistent with a scatter as small
as 0.25 magnitudes in the Tully-Fisher relation.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures; ApJ, accepte
Development and testing of a multidimensional parent reported outcome measure for common presenting complaints of infancy: the UK infant questionnaire.
Objectives: Patient reported outcome measures are recognized as important and valuable tools to monitor patient progress in healthcare. It is fundamental to clinical practice to understand whether the treated patient has improved or not. Despite the highest use of outpatient healthcare among all pediatric age groups, no age-appropriate outcome measures are available for the infant. Therefore, the objective of this study was to develop and test a new infant outcomes instrument for the most common presenting complaints of infancy. Methods: This was a multi-phase study designed to develop a questionnaire using maternal interviews and to test it for reliability and validity for use in well child clinical practice. After collecting the motherâs views, grounded theory and content analysis were used to derive
themes and domains for the questionnaire. After achieving face validity, the instrument was evaluated for test-retest
reliability, homogeneity and concurrent criterion validity. Subjects comprised a convenience sample of mothers who
presented their infants to a university-affiliated chiropractic teaching clinic on the south coast of England. Results:
Maternal interviews revealed mothersâ concerns about feeding, sleeping, crying and other aspects of infant activities
of daily living resulting in construction of a 12 question instrument. The questionnaire showed excellent test-retest
reliability (ICC = 0.96) and good internal consistency (Cronbachâs α = 0.8). In validity testing, ten questions showed positive correlation to a statistically significant degree against their established gold standard references. In all, 294 mother/infant dyads were involved in the research project. Conclusion: The UK Infant Questionnaire is the first
parent reported outcome measure for use with the most common complaints of the infant patient based on maternal
views. As such, this instrument meets the standard set by the UK National Health Service to involve the parentâs
voice in their childâs care, and is therefore innovative in its field. Although further testing is indicated, and we make
no claims that this instrument is comprehensive in all aspects of infant well-child care, it may be used by individual clinicians in routine daily practice to gain understanding of clinical progress of individual patients
The problem of shot selection in basketball
In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player
with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I
explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up
the shot by considering a simple theoretical model of the shot selection
process, in which the quality of shot opportunities generated by the offense is
assumed to fall randomly within a uniform distribution. I derive an answer to
the question "how likely must the shot be to go in before the player should
take it?", and show that this "lower cutoff" for shot quality depends
crucially on the number of shot opportunities remaining (say, before the
shot clock expires), with larger demanding that only higher-quality shots
should be taken. The function is also derived in the presence of a
finite turnover rate and used to predict the shooting rate of an
optimal-shooting team as a function of time. This prediction is compared to
observed shooting rates from the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the
comparison suggests that NBA players tend to wait too long before shooting and
undervalue the probability of committing a turnover.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures; comparison to NBA data adde
Anomalous Spin Dynamics observed by High Frequency ESR in Honeycomb Lattice Antiferromagnet InCu2/3V1/3O3
High-frequency ESR results on the S=1/2 Heisenberg hexagonal antiferromagnet
InCu2/3V1/3O3 are reported. This compound appears to be a rare model substance
for the honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet with very weak interlayer couplings.
The high-temperature magnetic susceptibility can be interpreted by the S=1/2
honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet, and it shows a magnetic-order-like anomaly
at TN=38 K. Although, the resonance field of our high-frequency ESR shows the
typical behavior of the antiferromagnetic resonance, the linewidth of our
high-frequency ESR continues to increase below TN, while it tends to decrease
as the temperature in a conventional three-dimensional antiferromagnet
decreases. In general, a honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet is expected to show
a simple antiferromagnetic order similar to that of a square lattice
antiferromagnet theoretically because both antiferromagnets are bipartite
lattices. However, we suggest that the observed anomalous spin dynamics below
TN is the peculiar feature of the honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet that is not
observed in the square lattice antiferromagnet.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure
Sexual harassment and abuse in sport: The research context
This special issue of the Journal of Sexual Aggression draws on the contributions to a Symposium on âSexual Harassment in Sport â Challenges for Sport Psychology in the New Millenniumâ, held at the Xth Congress of the International Society for Sport Psychology, Skiathos, Greece from May 28th to June 2nd 2001. The symposium, which was organised by the authors of this editorial, was intended to move forward the international research agenda on sexual harassment and abuse in sport and to examine professional practice issues for sport psychologists. It was clear from the attendance of over 60 delegates at that symposium that international interest in this subject is growing. Further evidence of this came from the attendance of 26 members states â from Azerbaijan to Sweden - at a Council of Europe seminar on The Protection of Children, Young People and Women in Sport, held in Helsinki in September 2001
Phase diagram of a Heisenberg spin-Peierls model with quantum phonons
Using a new version of the density-matrix renormalization group we determine
the phase diagram of a model of an antiferromagnetic Heisenberg spin chain
where the spins interact with quantum phonons. A quantum phase transition from
a gapless spin-fluid state to a gapped dimerized phase occurs at a non-zero
value of the spin-phonon coupling. The transition is in the same universality
class as that of a frustrated spin chain, which the model maps to in the
anti-adiabatic limit. We argue that realistic modeling of known spin-Peierls
materials should include the effects of quantum phonons.Comment: RevTeX, 5 pages, 3 eps figures included using epsf. Improved theories
in adiabatic and non-adiabatic regimes give better agreement with DMRG. This
version accepted in Physical Review Letter
The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: HI Mass Function and Omega_HI
We present a new accurate measurement of the HI mass function of galaxies
from the HIPASS Bright Galaxy Catalog, a sample of 1000 galaxies with the
highest HI peak flux densities in the southern hemisphere (Koribalski et al.
2003). This sample spans nearly four orders of magnitude in HI mass (from log
M_HI/M_sun=6.8 to 10.6, H0=75) and is the largest sample of HI selected
galaxies to date. We develop a bivariate maximum likelihood technique to
measure the space density of galaxies, and show that this is a robust method,
insensitive to the effects of large scale structure. The resulting HI mass
function can be fitted satisfactorily with a Schechter function with faint-end
slope alpha=-1.30. This slope is found to be dependent on morphological type,
with later type galaxies giving steeper slopes. We extensively test various
effects that potentially bias the determination of the HI mass function,
including peculiar motions of galaxies, large scale structure, selection bias,
and inclination effects, and quantify these biases. The large sample of
galaxies enables an accurate measurement of the cosmological mass density of
neutral gas: Omega_HI=(3.8 +/- 0.6) x 10^{-4}. Low surface brightness galaxies
contribute only 15% to this value, consistent with previous findings.Comment: accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal, 16 pages, including
17 figures. Corrected typos and reference
The opposites task: Using general rules to test cognitive flexibility in preschoolers
A brief narrative description of the journal article, document, or resource. Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial (the "opposites" task). Two types of inhibitory processing were measured: response interference (resistance to interference from a competing response) and proactive interference (resistance to interference from a previously relevant rule). Group data show 3-year-olds have difficulty inhibiting prepotent tendencies under these conditions, whereas 5-year-olds' accuracy is near ceiling in the task. (Contains 4 footnotes and 1 table.
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