Catching up to current affairs, I stumbled across this beauty. Now, I find this paper starts a little bit chaotic, but very quickly we come across some very useful equations indeed, and a link between the used equation for their analysis of phase transitions in fluids, and various other equations such as the Ornstein-Zernike structure factor and the Debye-Bueche equation. The equations published in this paper appear ready to be applied to a wide variety of amorphous scattering patterns, capable of extracting quite a few physical parameters! There will likely be much more on this topic as I get to apply these. To top it all off, the data used in the paper has been “extracted” from published graphics by Ms. A. Höhle. I can see her sitting there now with a ruler and a paper, meticulously noting down her estimates for the q and S values for each datapoint…. Perhaps it would be a good starting point for publishing some of our best data online so others can have a go at analysing it?
On another note, I want to point you towards the horror of textbooks. How fitting then, that the next special issue of the J. of Appl. Cryst. is about teaching! As you may have read on Slashdot a few weeks ago, textbooks are still very expensive, even for topics as stagnant as elementary mathematics. prof. Feynman also had a few words to say on the topic of textbooks. And there are now some alternatives popping up allowing your students an alternative to ridiculous and expensive textbooks: Free textbooks.
http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
http://about.ck12.org/
http://www.lightandmatter.com/
http://www.wikibooks.org/
If you know more, let me know and I will add them to the list!
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