Ultraviolet Luminescence in Mg0.12Zn0.88O Alloy Films

We investigate the origin of ultraviolet （UV） emission from Mg0.12 Zn0.88 O alloy thin films with a wurtzite structure fabricated on c-plane Al2O3 substrates by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy. At room temperature, the absorption edge and UV emission band of the Mg0.12Zn0.88O film shift to high-energy side compared with ZnO films. Temperature dependence of the photoluminescence spectra shows that the UV emission is composed of free exciton and neutral donor bound exciton emissions. Two-step dissociation processes of the UV emission are observed with the increasing temperature. The thermal quenching mechanism is attributed to the dissociation of the free exciton from the neutral donor bound exciton in the low temperature region and the dissociation of free electron and hole from the free exciton in the high temperature region.     

A Generalization of the Mean Size Formula of Wavelet Packets in Lp

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mean size formula of wavelet packets in Lp for 0 〈 p ≤ ∞. We generalize a mean size formula of wavelet packets given in terms of the p-norm joint spectral radius and we also give some asymptotic formulas for the Lp-norm or quasi-norm on the subdivision trees. All results will be given in the general setting,     

一维粗糙表面散射特征的数值分析

使用Monte Carlo模拟的方法得出了随机粗糙表面，在Kirchhoff近似的基础上，利用数值分析的方法分析了一维随机粗糙表面的散射特征，得出了一维随机粗糙表面散射分布曲线，我们还考虑了遮蔽效应的影响，并且讨论了Kirchhoff近似的有效性。     

When should you sack a football manager? Results from a simple model applied to the English Premiership

What strategy should a football (soccer, in American parlance) club adopt when deciding whether to sack its manager? This paper introduces a simple model assuming that a club's objective is to maximize the number of league points that it scores per season. The club's strategy consists of three choices: the length of the honeymoon period during which it will not consider sacking a new manager, the level of the performance trapdoor below which the manager get the sack, and the weight that it will give to more recent games compared to earlier ones. Some data from the last six seasons of the English Premiership are used to calibrate the model. At this early stage of the research, the best strategy appears to have only a short honeymoon period of eight games (much less than the actual shortest period of 12 games), to set the trapdoor at 0.74 points per game, and to put 47% of the weight on the last five games. A club adopting this strategy would obtain on average 56.8 points per season, compared to a Premiership average of 51.8 points.     

Effect of ion impinging on the microstructure and field emission of carbon nanotubes

Effects of ion impinging on the microstructure and field electron emission properties of screen-printed carbon nanotube films were investigated. We observed that the plasma treatment modified the microstructure of CNTs along with the remarkable increase of emission site density. With the prolongation of ion impinging time, the emission current falls down first, and then rises up to higher than that of the untreated films. It is proposed that the change of emission characteristics is due to the different emission mechanisms. After the treatment, electrons are emitted predominantly from the nano-nodes on the tube wall instead from the nanotube tips.     

Crystallization and morphology of poly(vinylidene fluoride)/poly(3‐hydroxybutyrate) blends. I. Spherulitic morphology and growth by polarized microscopy

The development of the poly(3‐hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) morphology in the presence of already existent poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) spherulites was studied by two‐stage solidification with two separate crystallization temperatures. PVDF formed irregular dendrites at lower temperatures and regular, banded spherulites at elevated temperatures. The transition temperature of the spherulitic morphology from dendrites to regular, banded spherulites increased with increasing PVDF content. A remarkable amount of PHB was included in the PVDF dendrites, whereas PHB was rejected into the remaining melt from the banded spherulites. When PVDF crystallized as banded spherulites, PHB could consequently crystallize only around them, if at all. In contrast, PHB crystallized with a common growth front, starting from a defined site in the interfibrillar regions of volume‐filling PVDF dendrites. It formed by itself dendritic spherulites that included a large number of PVDF spherulites. For blends with a PHB content of more than 80 wt %, for which the PVDF dendrites were not volume‐filling, PHB first formed regular spherulites. Their growth started from outside the PVDF dendrites but could later interpenetrate them, and this made their own morphology dendritic. These PHB spherulites melted stepwise because the lamellae inside the PVDF dendrites melted at a lower temperature than those from outside. This reflected the regularity of the two fractions of the lamellae because that of those inside the dendrites of PVDF was controlled by the intraspherulitic order of PVDF, whereas that from outside was only controlled by the temperature and the melt composition. The described morphologies developed without mutual nucleating efficiency of the components. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 41: 873–882, 2003     

On Bayes and unbiased estimators of loss

We consider estimation of loss for generalized Bayes or pseudo-Bayes estimators of a multivariate normal mean vector, θ. In 3 and higher dimensions, the MLEX is UMVUE and minimax but is inadmissible. It is dominated by the James-Stein estimator and by many others. Johnstone (1988, On inadmissibility of some unbiased estimates of loss,Statistical Decision Theory and Related Topics, IV (eds. S. S. Gupta and J. O. Berger), Vol. 1, 361–379, Springer, New York) considered the estimation of loss for the usual estimatorX and the James-Stein estimator. He found improvements over the Stein unbiased estimator of risk. In this paper, for a generalized Bayes point estimator of θ, we compare generalized Bayes estimators to unbiased estimators of loss. We find, somewhat surprisingly, that the unbiased estimator often dominates the corresponding generalized Bayes estimator of loss for priors which give minimax estimators in the original point estimation problem. In particular, we give a class of priors for which the generalized Bayes estimator of θ is admissible and minimax but for which the unbiased estimator of loss dominates the generalized Bayes estimator of loss. We also give a general inadmissibility result for a generalized Bayes estimator of loss. Research supported by NSF Grant DMS-97-04524.