Observational advances over the last decade have left little doubt that neutron stars received a large kick velocity (of order a few hundred to a thousand kms) at birth. The physical origin of the kicks and the related supernova asymmetry is one of the central unsolved mysteries of supernova research. We review the physics of different kick mechanisms, including hydrodynamically driven, neutrin...

In RoboCup, robots must make quick decisions under uncertainty. To this end, this paper introduces a new approach to enable humanoid soccer robots to execute kicks quickly and ensure that they move the ball down field. This paper presents a kick engine capable of kicking at a variety of distances and angles and then describes a novel kick decision method for selecting from among a large set of ...

People can often anticipate the outcome of another person's actions based on visual information available in the movements of the other person's body. We investigated this problem by studying how goalkeepers anticipate the direction of a penalty kick in soccer. The specific aim was to determine whether the information used to anticipate kick direction is best characterized as local to a particu...

A novel low-power kick-back reduced comparator for use in high-speed flash analog-to-digital converters (ADC) is presented. The proposed comparator combines cascode transistors to reduce the kick-back noise with a built-in threshold voltage to remove the static power consumption of a reference. Without degrading other figures, the kick-back noise is reduced by a factor 8, compared to a previous...

We examine the utility of the Large-Step Markov Chain (LSMC) technique [13], a variant of the iterated descent heuristic of Baum [2], for VLSI netlist bipartitioning. LSMC iteratively nds a local optimum solution according to some greedy search (in our case, the Fiduccia-Mattheyses heuristic) and then perturbs this local optimum via a \kick move" into the starting solution of the next greedy de...

We consider the formation of short period low-mass X-ray binaries using standard evolutionary scenario which involves a common envelope phase and a supernova explosion. We consider three models of systems and assume several values of the efficiency factor for the common envelope evolution (αCE). In most cases the systems can only be formed if the neutron stars in the systems receive a kick velo...

It has been noted that the Crab and Vela pulsar proper motions lie along the symmetry axes of their wind nebulae. In an effort to promote this observation to a serious test of kick physics, we are using CXO images and other data to estimate the angle between the proper motion and PWN (i.e., spin) axis for a number of pulsars. Here we give a progress report on this work and the constraints that ...

We use recent information on geodetic precession of the binary pulsar B1913+16 along with measurements of its orbital parameters and proper motion to derive new constraints on the immediate progenitor of this double neutron star system. As part of our analysis we model the motion of the binary in the Galaxy after the second supernova explosion, and we derive constraints on the unknown radial ve...

STUDY DESIGN Controlled laboratory study. OBJECTIVES To quantify phase duration and lower extremity muscle activation and alignment during the most common types of soccer kick-the instep kick and side-foot kick. A second purpose was to test the hypotheses that different patterns of lower extremity muscle activation occur between the 2 types of kicks and between the kicking limb compared to th...

Many studies have investigated the kinematics of sports skills with the majority describing the kinematics of the technique or investigating significant kinematic variables that affect performance. Many sports skills are complex three-dimensional movements involving many joints. However, few studies have investigated the relationships between kinematic variables during performance of such skill...