On Implied Wishes for Olympic Victory in Pindar

published or submitted for publicatio

Elemental Psychology And The Date Of Semonides-Of-Amorgos

Classic

The Paradox of "Natural" Heterosexuality with "Unnatural" Women

This essay examines the debates between advocates of heterosexual and pederastic love in Plutarch's Amatorius, Achilles Tatius 2.33-38, and the Lucianic Erotes. The heterosexual side condemns pederasts for "unnatural" practices, drawing on Platonic and Stoic precedents. I shall demonstrate that the opposition between "natural" heterosexuality and "unnatural" homosexuality predated even Plato, with its roots in the physis vs. nomos opposition of the Sophists. For their part, the pederasts portray the heterosexual obsession with "nature" as bestial, and present their own preference as a mark of advanced cultural evolution, drawing upon a strain of Greek anthropological theory.Classic

Horace and Catullus: the Case of the Suppressed Precursor in 'Odes' 1.22 and 1.32

Classic

Adaptive smartphone-based sensor fusion for estimating competitive rowing kinematic metrics.

Competitive rowing highly values boat position and velocity data for real-time feedback during training, racing and post-training analysis. The ubiquity of smartphones with embedded position (GPS) and motion (accelerometer) sensors motivates their possible use in these tasks. In this paper, we investigate the use of two real-time digital filters to achieve highly accurate yet reasonably priced measurements of boat speed and distance traveled. Both filters combine acceleration and location data to estimate boat distance and speed; the first using a complementary frequency response-based filter technique, the second with a Kalman filter formalism that includes adaptive, real-time estimates of effective accelerometer bias. The estimates of distance and speed from both filters were validated and compared with accurate reference data from a differential GPS system with better than 1 cm precision and a 5 Hz update rate, in experiments using two subjects (an experienced club-level rower and an elite rower) in two different boats on a 300 m course. Compared with single channel (smartphone GPS only) measures of distance and speed, the complementary filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed, boat distance traveled, and distance per stroke by 44%, 42%, and 73%, respectively, while the Kalman filter improved the accuracy and precision of boat speed, boat distance traveled, and distance per stroke by 48%, 22%, and 82%, respectively. Both filters demonstrate promise as general purpose methods to substantially improve estimates of important rowing performance metrics

Performance of Quality Assurance Procedures for an Applied Climate Information System

Valid data are required to make climate assessments and to make climate-related decisions. The objective of this paper is threefold: to introduce an explicit treatment of Type I and Type II errors in evaluating the performance of quality assurance procedures, to illustrate a quality control approach that allows tailoring to regions and subregions, and to introduce a new spatial regression test. Threshold testing, step change, persistence, and spatial regression were included in a test of three decades of temperature and precipitation data at six weather stations representing different climate regimes. The magnitude of thresholds was addressed in terms of the climatic variability, and multiple thresholds were tested to determine the number of Type I errors generated. In a separate test, random errors were seeded into the data and the performance of the tests was such that most Type II errors were made in the range of 1C for temperature, not too different from the sensor field accuracy. The study underscores the fact that precipitation is more difficult to quality control than temperature. The new spatial regression test presented in this document outperformed all the other tests, which together identified only a few errors beyond those identified by the spatial regression test

The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014: implications for sex workers and their clients

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 introduced new powers to deal with behaviour deemed to be ‘anti-social’. In this paper we consider how the new law could be used against sex workers and their clients and the impact this may have. Although the new powers were not intentionally designed to respond to prostitution, we suggest that they will be utilised to tackle it. We argue that the law will be used inconsistently in a way which will go directly against policy which seeks to ‘tackle demand’ and take a less punitive approach to dealing with sex workers. Despite a policy shift to see sex workers more as victims and less as offenders, we draw on existing evidence to demonstrate that the new anti-social behaviour order law will be utilised to exclude street sex workers from public spaces. We claim that a degree of ‘policy re-fraction’ will occur when the new laws are implemented by practitioners

Steric constraints in model proteins

A simple lattice model for proteins that allows for distinct sizes of the amino acids is presented. The model is found to lead to a significant number of conformations that are the unique ground state of one or more sequences or encodable. Furthermore, several of the encodable structures are highly designable and are the non-degenerate ground state of several sequences. Even though the native state conformations are typically compact, not all compact conformations are encodable. The incorporation of the hydrophobic and polar nature of amino acids further enhances the attractive features of the model.Comment: RevTex, 5 pages, 3 postscript figure

Kondo effect in systems with dynamical symmetries

This paper is devoted to a systematic exposure of the Kondo physics in quantum dots for which the low energy spin excitations consist of a few different spin multiplets $|S_{i}M_{i}>$. Under certain conditions (to be explained below) some of the lowest energy levels $E_{S_{i}}$ are nearly degenerate. The dot in its ground state cannot then be regarded as a simple quantum top in the sense that beside its spin operator other dot (vector) operators ${\bf R}_{n}$ are needed (in order to fully determine its quantum states), which have non-zero matrix elements between states of different spin multiplets $\ne 0$. These "Runge-Lenz" operators do not appear in the isolated dot-Hamiltonian (so in some sense they are "hidden"). Yet, they are exposed when tunneling between dot and leads is switched on. The effective spin Hamiltonian which couples the metallic electron spin ${\bf s}$ with the operators of the dot then contains new exchange terms, $J_{n} {\bf s} \cdot {\bf R}_{n}$ beside the ubiquitous ones $J_{i} {\bf s}\cdot {\bf S}_{i}$. The operators ${\bf S}_{i}$ and ${\bf R}_{n}$ generate a dynamical group (usually SO(n)). Remarkably, the value of $n$ can be controlled by gate voltages, indicating that abstract concepts such as dynamical symmetry groups are experimentally realizable. Moreover, when an external magnetic field is applied then, under favorable circumstances, the exchange interaction involves solely the Runge-Lenz operators ${\bf R}_{n}$ and the corresponding dynamical symmetry group is SU(n). For example, the celebrated group SU(3) is realized in triple quantum dot with four electrons.Comment: 24 two-column page