Constructing Space for Science at the Royal Institution of Great Britain

Those who have worked in the Royal Institution of Great Britain have, since its foundation in 1799, made significant contributions to scientific knowledge, to its practical application, and to its communication to a wide variety of audiences. Such work cannot be carried out in an architectural vacuum, and in this paper we examine how the buildings of the Royal Institution, 20 and 21 Albemarle Street in central London, have shaped the work undertaken within its walls and how, on a number of occasions, the buildings have been reconfigured to take account of the evolving needs of scientific research and communication. This paper is based on the Conservation Plan of the Royal Institution that we wrote during 2003. The Conservation Plan did not examine the land owned by the Royal Institution to the north (i.e., 22 and 23 Albemarle Street; for this area see Richard Garnier, “Grafton Street, Mayfair,” Georgian Group Journal 13 (2003), 210–272), but it did discuss 18 and 19 Albemarle Street. In this paper we concentrate on the core Royal Institution buildings at 20 and 21 Albemarle Street. Other studies of the relationship of architecture,space, and science include Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, ed., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Peter Galison and Emily Thompson, ed., The Architecture of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); and Sophie Forgan,“The architecture of science and the idea of a university,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 20 (1989), 405–434. Frank A.J.L. James is Professor of the History of Science at the Royal Institution; he has written widely on the history of nineteenth-century science in its social and cultural contexts and is editor of the Correspondence of Michael Faraday. He is President of the British Society for the History of Science. Anthony Peers is an Associate of Rodney Melville and Partners where he works in the field of building conservation as an architectural historian. He is a Council member of the Ancient Monument Society.     

Weighted Kolmogrov–Smirnov type tests for grouped Rayleigh data

We consider goodness of fit tests for the Rayleigh distribution with grouped data. New Kolmogrov–Smirnov type tests are suggested and compared with the traditional chi-square and likelihood ratio tests. The results show that some of the suggested tests have a good power performance as compared with the traditional ones.     

几种基于散乱数据拟合的局部插值方法

本文首先针对散乱数据拟合的Shepard方法,结合截断多项式、B样条基函数和指数函数来构造其权函数,使新的权函数具有更高的光滑度和更好的衰减性,并且其光滑性和衰减性可以根据实际需要自由调节,从而提高了曲面的拟合质量．同时还给出一种类似的局部插值方法．另外,本文还基于多重二次插值,结合多元样条的思想,给出了两个局部插值算法．该算法较好地继承了多重二次插值曲面的性质,从而保证了拟合曲面具有好地光顺性和拟合精度．曲面整体也具有较高的光滑性．     

A MINI MULTI-GAS DETECTION SYSTEM BASED ON INFRARED PRINCIPLE

To counter the problems of gas accidents in coal mines, family safety resulted from using gas, a new infrared detection system with integration and miniaturization has been developed. The infrared detection optics principle used in developing this system is mainly analyzed. The idea that multi gas detection is introduced and guided through analyzing single gas detection is got across. Through researching the design of cell structure, the cell with integration and miniaturization has been devised. The way of data transmission on Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is explained. By taking Single-Chip Microcomputer (SCM) as intelligence handling, the functional block diagram of gas detection system is designed with its hardware and software system analyzed and devised. This system designed has reached the technology requirement of lower power consumption, mini-volume, big measure range, and able to realize multi-gas detection.     

Colliding stacks: A large deviations analysis

We analyze the performance of a prototypical scheme for shared storage allocation: two initially empty stacks evolving in a contiguous block of memory of size m. We treat the case in which the stacks are more likely to shrink than grow, but with the probabilities of insertion and deletion allowed to depend arbitrarily on stack height as a fraction of m. New results are obtained on the m → ∞ asymptotics of the stack collision time, and of the final stack heights. The results of Wentzell and Freidlin on the large deviations of Markov chains are used, and the relation of their formalism to the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics is emphasized. Certain results on higher-order asymptotics follow from WKB expansions.     

Determination of a control parameter in a one-dimensional parabolic equation using the method of radial basis functions

In this work, the method of radial basis functions is used for finding the solution of an inverse problem with source control parameter. Because a much wider range of physical phenomena are modelled by nonclassical parabolic initial-boundary value problems, theoretical behavior and numerical approximation of these problems have been active areas of research. The radial basis functions (RBF) method is an efficient mesh free technique for the numerical solution of partial differential equations. The main advantage of numerical methods which use radial basis functions over traditional techniques is the meshless property of these methods. In a meshless method, a set of scattered nodes are used instead of meshing the domain of the problem. The results of numerical experiments are presented and some comparisons are made with several well-known finite difference schemes.     

浅析用图像法处理实验数据

指出了图像法在解决物理问题中的优势及应注意的问题,并对用图像法处理实验数据的考题进行了归类．     

Multiscale kernels

This paper reconstructs multivariate functions from scattered data by a new multiscale technique. The reconstruction uses standard methods of interpolation by positive definite reproducing kernels in Hilbert spaces. But it adopts techniques from wavelet theory and shift-invariant spaces to construct a new class of kernels as multiscale superpositions of shifts and scales of a single compactly supported function φ. This means that the advantages of scaled regular grids are used to construct the kernels, while the advantages of unrestricted scattered data interpolation are maintained after the kernels are constructed. Using such a multiscale kernel, the reconstruction method interpolates at given scattered data. No manipulations of the data (e.g., thinning or separation into subsets of certain scales) are needed. Then, the multiscale structure of the kernel allows to represent the interpolant on regular grids on all scales involved, with cheap evaluation due to the compact support of the function φ, and with a recursive evaluation technique if φ is chosen to be refinable. There also is a wavelet-like data reduction effect, if a suitable thresholding strategy is applied to the coefficients of the interpolant when represented over a scaled grid. Various numerical examples are presented, illustrating the multiresolution and data compression effects.     

Transformations in optics: Novel perspectives,approaches, applications and implementations

This paper summarizes a set of novel techniques for obtaining optical transformations, which are useful tools for signal processing. Then the paper focuses on deriving several interesting discrete transformations. The discussed transforms include continuous fractional transformations, hybrid transforms and discrete transform kernels.