Material and the Arts Research Facilities Booklet

A booklet to demonstrate the MATAR equipment which is now available for use at London College of Communication and Camberwell College of Arts. The booklet was created for, and launched at, The MATAR Open Day in May 2010, and is now used to advertise the facilities available

Swing-out rail system separates overhead crane rails

Swing-out rail system separates and reconnects the overhead traveling crane rails of a building to provide for the passage of a thick concrete radiation shield sliding door through the rails. In the swing-out position, the rail cantilevered from an axial shaft

Binary system delays and timing noise in searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars

The majority of fast millisecond pulsars are in binary systems, so that any periodic signal they emit is modulated by both Doppler and relativistic effects. Here we show how well-established binary models can be used to account for these effects in searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars within binary systems. A seperate issue affecting certain pulsar signals is that of timing noise and we show how this, with particular reference to the Crab pulsar, can be compensated for by using regularly updated timing ephemerides.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

A summary period measure of immigrant advancement in the U.S.

This paper proposes a method for summarizing the pace of advancement of the foreign-born population in a given period. The method standardizes for variations in the duration of residence or age composition of immigrant groups, attainments possessed by different groups when first observed after entry, and other temporal effects on measured advances, forming an index of Expected Lifetime Advance based on the pace of change in a period. The measure is applied to Mexican and Asian immigrants. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the rates of advancement for Mexicans accelerated in six out of seven social, economic, and civic outcomes. Rates of advancement for Asians were similar in both decades.advancement, assimilation, immigration, integration, methods, USA

Human operator dynamics for aural compensatory tracking

The human operator's ability to control using aural information only and using combined aural and visual displays was investigated for a simple tracking task. Tracking error was presented to the test subjects using one- and two-ear displays. For both displays the pitch of the tone represented the magnitude of the tracking error. The operator's aural control characteristics were modeled as a describing function plus a remnant. The effects on the measured describing function and remnant of different system dynamics, changes in the frequency content of the input and different displays were determined during the study. The describing function and remnant data indicate that humans can control as well with aural cues as with visual cues for the task considered. However, the reduction in operator time delays, expected because of the generally faster human response to aural stimuli, was not evident in the results. It was also determined that the operators could control equally well with either the one- or two-ear display

Peeking Inside the Black Box: Visualizing Statistical Learning with Plots of Individual Conditional Expectation

This article presents Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots, a tool for visualizing the model estimated by any supervised learning algorithm. Classical partial dependence plots (PDPs) help visualize the average partial relationship between the predicted response and one or more features. In the presence of substantial interaction effects, the partial response relationship can be heterogeneous. Thus, an average curve, such as the PDP, can obfuscate the complexity of the modeled relationship. Accordingly, ICE plots refine the partial dependence plot by graphing the functional relationship between the predicted response and the feature for individual observations. Specifically, ICE plots highlight the variation in the fitted values across the range of a covariate, suggesting where and to what extent heterogeneities might exist. In addition to providing a plotting suite for exploratory analysis, we include a visual test for additive structure in the data generating model. Through simulated examples and real data sets, we demonstrate how ICE plots can shed light on estimated models in ways PDPs cannot. Procedures outlined are available in the R package ICEbox.Comment: 22 pages, 14 figures, 2 algorithm

Detecting Beyond-Einstein Polarizations of Continuous Gravitational Waves

The direct detection of gravitational waves with the next generation detectors, like Advanced LIGO, provides the opportunity to measure deviations from the predictions of General Relativity. One such departure would be the existence of alternative polarizations. To measure these, we study a single detector measurement of a continuous gravitational wave from a triaxial pulsar source. We develop methods to detect signals of any polarization content and distinguish between them in a model independent way. We present LIGO S5 sensitivity estimates for 115 pulsars.Comment: submitted to PR

Projected Impacts of U.S. Immigration on Per Capita Greenhouse Gas Emissions, 2050 and 2100

Immigration affects long-run projections of U.S. CO2 emissions, via the impacts on population scale, population aging, and labor supply. This article estimates the labor supply effects, complementing an earlier paper in which the authors have modeled the effects of scale and aging. Labor supply effects on future CO2 emissions are approximated based on recent survey data on earnings differences between immigrant and native-born households and on existing demographic projections. Gaps in average earnings are found to be substantial only for Hispanic immigrants, between 25 and 47 percent below native-born peers, depending on the age group and measure used. Impacts are estimated using a range of population projections and assumptions about future convergence, or assimilation, of the earnings of immigrants and their descendents to those of the descendents of the native-born population. If per capita earnings differences remain near current levels, the aggregate effects on per capita earnings and consumption are found to be affected more by the rate at which the immigrant population's earnings converge to native-born levels than by projected differences in future immigration. If assimilation is rapid, the impacts of immigration are proportional to the size of the first generation and negligible, regardless of the level of immigration. If future assimilation is impeded, the marginal impacts will be more substantial and vary with the level of immigration but still well below 10% in 2100 when calculated using the preferred measure of earning differences and only exceed 10% when the impacts are calculated using the alternate per capita earnings differences