Search for: All records

East Asian inks are a major component of calligraphy, paintings, and prints in China, Japan, and Korea and are historically made from either pine soot or oil‐lamp soot mixed with a proteinaceous binder. Although the inks from the two different soot sources have different properties in East Asian works of art, no non‐destructive methods to differentiate them scientifically currently exist. Raman spectroscopy (RS) of carbonaceous materials is commonly used to extract information about their properties and has been applied here to East Asian inks. Soots used in making modern inks were collected from 10 sources in China and Japan and analyzed using RS. RS using 405‐, 633‐, and 785‐nm excitation has been able to differentiate pine soot from oil‐lamp soot, also called lampblack. In addition, principal component analysis (PCA) of only 785‐nm Raman spectra has been able to discriminate between two different soots used in a 19th‐century Japanese woodblock printing ofKaishien Gaden. In addition to allowing discrimination between inks on East Asian works of art, these results may be of use to other fields using carbonaceous materials.

 

There has been growing research interest in developing methodology to evaluate healthcare centers' performance with respect to patient outcomes. Conventional assessments can be conducted using fixed or random effects models, as seen in provider profiling. We propose a new method, using fusion penalty to cluster healthcare centers with respect to a survival outcome. Without any prior knowledge of the grouping information, the new method provides a desirable data‐driven approach for automatically clustering healthcare centers into distinct groups based on their performance. An efficient alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is developed to implement the proposed method. The validity of our approach is demonstrated through simulation studies, and its practical application is illustrated by analyzing data from the national kidney transplant registry. 

A beam splitter for phonons completes the toolbox required to develop a mechanically based quantum computing system. 

Over the past decade, a series of airborne experiments in the Arctic and Antarctica explored microwave emission from sea ice and ice sheets at frequencies from 0.5 to 2 GHz. The experiments were motivated by the fact that lower frequencies penetrate deeper into a frozen surface, thus offering the possibility to measure physical temperatures at great depths in ice sheets and, subsequently, other unique geophysical observables including sea ice salinity. These experiments were made feasible by recent engineering advances in electronics, antenna design, and noise removal algorithms when operating outside of protected bands in the electromagnetic spectrum. These technical advances permit a new type of radiometer that not only operates at low frequency, but also obtains continuous spectral information over the band from 0.5 to 2 GHz. Spectral measurements facilitate an understanding of the physical processes controlling emission and also support the interpretation of results from single frequency instruments. This paper reviews the development of low-frequency, wide band radiometry and its application to cryosphere science over the past 10 years. The paper summarizes the engineering design of an airborne instrument and the associated algorithms to mitigate radio frequency interference. Theoretical models of emission built around the morphologic and electrical properties of cryospheric components are also described that identify the dominant physical processes contributing to emission spectra. New inversion techniques for geophysical parameter retrieval are summarized for both Arctic and Antarctic scenarios. Examples that illustrate how the measurements are used to inform on glaciological problems are presented. The paper concludes with a description of new instrument concepts that are foreseen to extend the technology into operation from space.