We investigate how the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), dominant mode of tropical subseasonal variability, modulates lifecycle cool-season North Pacific atmospheric rivers (ARs). When enhanced (suppressed) convection center is located over Indian Ocean (western Pacific), more AR events originate eastern Asia and with fewer subtropical northern Pacific. western (Indian Ocean), opposite changes o...

As distance education rapidly appears on the horizon, distance learning technologies are becoming more important in delivering contents and allowing collaboration between students and teachers in globally disparate environments. One of the recent innovative technologies to be explored in distance learning field is immersive environments and sense of presence that offers. The primary purpose of ...

Understanding the conditions under which Virtual Environment (VE) users experience a sense of presence may, in the long term, yield valuable insights into human cognition and psychology. More immediately, however, the general assumption is that a sense of presence impacts a user’s ability to perform a task and, therefore, that insights into presence offer a potential payoff in terms of task per...

3-D sound field reproduction systems can provide listeners with a sense of presence. In this study, we have proposed the 3-D sound field localization system using parametric loudspeakers. This system can easily represent sound images on the wall by using parametric loudspeakers that have a high directivity. In contrast, it is difficult to reproduce reverberant environments such as a concert hal...

The ergodicity breaking parameter is a measure for the heterogeneity among different trajectories of one ensemble. In this report, this parameter is calculated for fractional Brownian motion with a random change of time scale, often called "subordination." We show that this quantity is the same as the known continuous time random walks case.

We recently reported that direct subjective ratings of the sense of presence are potentially unstable and can be biased by previous judgments of the same stimuli (Freeman et al., 1999). Objective measures of the behavioral realism elicited by a display offer an alternative to subjective ratings. Behavioral measures and presence are linked by the premise that, when observers experience a mediate...

We study the anomalous Hall conductivity in spin-polarized, asymmetrically confined two-dimensional electron and hole systems, taking into account the intrinsic, side-jump, and skew-scattering contributions to the transport. We find that the skew scattering, principally responsible for the extrinsic contribution to the anomalous Hall effect, vanishes for the two-dimensional electron system if b...

Density-functional-theory calculations of twin-boundary energies in hexagonal close packed metals reveal anomalously low values for elemental Tc and Re, which can be lowered further by alloying with solutes that reduce the electron per atom ratio. The anomalous behavior is linked to atomic geometries in the interface similar to those observed in bulk tetrahedrally close packed phases. The resul...

Two cases are reported of fetal valproate syndrome in association with anomalous right pulmonary artery origin. Both diagnoses were confirmed following cardiac catheterisation as echocardiography alone was inadequate to define the anatomy. Anomalous right pulmonary artery origin is extremely rare making a chance association with fetal valproate syndrome very unlikely. We recommend that anomalou...