In her review of the National Reading Panel's (NRP) report on phonics,Elaine Garan concluded that the report involved "a limited number of studies of a narrow population. . ."1 In this note, I will argue that this problem is not limited to the section on phonics: It also applies to the NRP's section on "fluency." It is only by omitting a large number of relevant studies, and misinterpreting the...

Sidles and Sigg have shown that advanced LIGO interferometers will encounter a serious tilt instability, in which symmetric tilts of the mirrors of an arm cavity cause the cavity’s light beam to slide sideways, so its radiation pressure exerts a torque that increases the tilt. Sidles and Sigg showed that the strength T of this torque is 26.2 times greater for advanced LIGO’s baseline cavities—n...

Conventional mirrors convert right-handed circularly polarized waves (RCP) into left-handed circularly polarized waves (LCP) and vice versa, see Fig. 1(a-c). Here we demonstrate a novel type of chiral mirror that will reflect one circular polarization without changing its handedness, while absorbing waves of the opposite handedness, see Fig. 1(d-f). This functionality, which fundamentally relie...

We show that the Casimir force between mirrors with arbitrary frequency dependent reflectivities obeys bounds due to causality and passivity properties. The force is always smaller than the Casimir force between two perfectly reflecting mirrors. For narrow-band mirrors in particular, the force is found to decrease with the mirrors bandwidth. PACS: 03.65; 12.20; 42.50

It has been previously shown how mirrors can be used to capture stereo images with a single camera, an approach termed catadioptric stereo. In this paper, we present novel catadioptric sensors that use mirrors to produce rectified stereo images. The scanline correspondence of these images benefits real-time stereo by avoiding the computational cost and image degradation due to resampling when r...

In July 2002, lightning strikes ignited over 250 fires in Quebec, Canada, destroying over one million hectares of forest. The smoke plume generated from the fires had a major impact on air quality across the east coast of the U.S. Using data from the Medicare National Claims History File and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National air pollution monitoring network, we evaluated t...

Considerable time and effort often go into designing and implementing experimental set-ups (ES) in robotics. These activities are usually not at the focus of our research and thus go underreported. This results in replication of work and lack of comparability. This paper lays out our view of the theoretical considerations necessary when deciding on the type of experiment to conduct. It describe...

P-type GaAs/AlAs distributed Bragg mirrors have been grown using molecular beam epitaxy on (100) and (311)A GaAs substrates in a similar conditions. A comparison of I-V measurements shows that the resistance of the ungraded mirrors grown on the (311)A substrate is 35 times lower than those grown on the (100) substrate with similar structure. The effective barrier heights for both (311 )A and (1...