To PB or not PB: making wikis work for your library

Library staff at Leeds Metropolitan University have recently launched a wiki to help them with the organisation of the information they need for their day-to-day enquiry and circulation duties. Here we outline the development of the project and the reasons behind choosing a wiki as the best format for this information

Moral imagination or heuristic toolbox? Events and the risk assessment of structured financial products in the financial bubble

The paper uses the example of the failure of bankers and financial managers to understand the risks of dealing in structured financial products, prior to the financial collapse, to investigate how people respond to crises. It focuses on whether crises cause people to challenge their habitual frames by the application of moral imagination. It is proposed that the structure of financial products and their markets triggered the use of heuristics that contributed to the underestimation of risks. It is further proposed that such framing heuristics are highly specialised to specific contexts, and are part of a wider set of heuristics that people carry in their cognitive ‘adaptive tool boxes’. Consequently, it is argued, when a crisis occurs the heuristics are not challenged, but are simply put away, and other more appropriate heuristics put to use until a sense of normality returns, and the use of the old heuristics is resumed

Fractal Droplets in Two Dimensional Spin Glasses

The two-dimensional Edwards-Anderson model with Gaussian bond distribution is investigated at T=0 with a numerical method. Droplet excitations are directly observed. It turns out that the averaged volume of droplets is proportional to l^D with D = 1.80(2) where l is the spanning length of droplets, revealing their fractal nature. The exponent characterizing the l dependence of the droplet excitation energy is estimated to be -0.42(4), clearly different from the stiffness exponent for domain wall excitations.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure

Energy Correlations In Random Transverse Field Ising Spin Chains

The end-to-end energy - energy correlations of random transverse-field quantum Ising spin chains are computed using a generalization of an asymptotically exact real-space renormalization group introduced previously. Away from the critical point, the average energy - energy correlations decay exponentially with a correlation length that is the same as that of the spin - spin correlations. The typical correlations, however, decay exponentially with a characteristic length proportional to the square root of the primary correlation length. At the quantum critical point, the average correlations decay sub-exponentially as $\bar{C_{L}}\sim e^{-const\cdot L^{1/3}}$, whereas the typical correlations decay faster, as $\sim e^{-K\sqrt{L}}$, with $K$ a random variable with a universal distribution. The critical energy-energy correlations behave very similarly to the smallest gap, computed previously; this is explained in terms of the RG flow and the excitation structure of the chain. In order to obtain the energy correlations, an extension of the previously used methods was needed; here this was carried out via RG transformations that involve a sequence of unitary transformations.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Laser Schlieren and ultraviolet diagnostics of rocket combustion

A low pressure oxygen/hydrogen turbine drive combustor hot-fire test series was conducted on the Turbine Drive Combustor Technology Program. The first objective was to gather data on an axisymmetric combustion system to support anchoring of a new combustion/fluid dynamics computer code under development on the same contract. The second objective was to gain insight into low mixture ratio combustion characteristics of coaxial injector elements