12,114 research outputs found
First-order layering and critical wetting transitions in non-additive hard sphere mixtures
Using fundamental-measure density functional theory we investigate entropic
wetting in an asymmetric binary mixture of hard spheres with positive
non-additivity. We consider a general planar hard wall, where preferential
adsorption is induced by a difference in closest approach of the different
species and the wall. Close to bulk fluid-fluid coexistence the phase rich in
the minority component adsorbs either through a series of first-order layering
transitions, where an increasing number of liquid layers adsorbs sequentially,
or via a critical wetting transition, where a thick film grows continuously.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
A Review of China\u27s New Civil Evidence Law
On December 21, 2001, China\u27s Supreme People\u27s Court promulgated landmark rules concerning the production and use of evidence in civil cases. These rules became effective on April 1, 2002 and apply to legal actions initiated after that date. The rules apply in all Chinese courts, from the high and intermediate level courts found at the provincial and prefecture level, down to the basic level courts found in rural counties and in urban districts. Of the eighty-three newly promulgated rules, more than half concern procedures for exchanging, confronting, investigating, or discovering evidence. Eleven are strict rules of evidence. The remainder is comprised of decision guidelines, implementation provisions, or some other type of rule. Despite the guidelines\u27 occasionally remedial tone, Chinese practitioners will want to memorize these rules and use the language found within them during their debates and summaries to the court. The new strict rules of evidence provide litigators with direction, while at the same time providing new avenues for courtroom strategy. The rules require Chinese lawyers to focus not only on how they will present evidence but also on how such evidence may be excluded and how they might work to exclude an opponent\u27s evidence. The new rules of evidence are a welcome new addition to Chinese jurisprudence
A Review of China\u27s New Civil Evidence Law
On December 21, 2001, China\u27s Supreme People\u27s Court promulgated landmark rules concerning the production and use of evidence in civil cases. These rules became effective on April 1, 2002 and apply to legal actions initiated after that date. The rules apply in all Chinese courts, from the high and intermediate level courts found at the provincial and prefecture level, down to the basic level courts found in rural counties and in urban districts. Of the eighty-three newly promulgated rules, more than half concern procedures for exchanging, confronting, investigating, or discovering evidence. Eleven are strict rules of evidence. The remainder is comprised of decision guidelines, implementation provisions, or some other type of rule. Despite the guidelines\u27 occasionally remedial tone, Chinese practitioners will want to memorize these rules and use the language found within them during their debates and summaries to the court. The new strict rules of evidence provide litigators with direction, while at the same time providing new avenues for courtroom strategy. The rules require Chinese lawyers to focus not only on how they will present evidence but also on how such evidence may be excluded and how they might work to exclude an opponent\u27s evidence. The new rules of evidence are a welcome new addition to Chinese jurisprudence
A model for orientation effects in electronâtransfer reactions
A method for solving the singleâparticle Schrödinger equation with an oblate spheroidal potential of finite depth is presented. The wave functions are then used to calculate the matrix element T_BA which appears in theories of nonadiabatic electron transfer. The results illustrate the effects of mutual orientation and separation of the two centers on TBA. Trends in these results are discussed in terms of geometrical and nodal structure effects. Analytical expressions related to T_BA for states of spherical wells are presented and used to analyze the nodal structure effects for T_BA for the spheroidal wells
A Software Retina for Egocentric & Robotic Vision Applications on Mobile Platforms
We present work in progress to develop a low-cost highly
integrated camera sensor for egocentric and robotic vision. Our underlying
approach is to address current limitations to image analysis by Deep
Convolutional Neural Networks, such as the requirement to learn simple
scale and rotation transformations, which contribute to the large computational
demands for training and opaqueness of the learned structure,
by applying structural constraints based on known properties of the human
visual system. We propose to apply a version of the retino-cortical
transform to reduce the dimensionality of the input image space by a
factor of ex100, and map this spatially to transform rotations and scale
changes into spatial shifts. By reducing the input image size accordingly,
and therefore learning requirements, we aim to develop compact and
lightweight egocentric and robot vision sensor using a smartphone as the
target platfor
A Biologically Motivated Software Retina for Robotic Sensors Based on Smartphone Technology
A key issue in designing robotics systems is the cost of an integrated camera sensor that meets the bandwidth/processing requirement for many advanced robotics applications, especially lightweight robotics applications, such as visual surveillance or SLAM in autonomous aerial vehicles. There is currently much work going on to adapt smartphones to provide complete robot vision systems, as the phone is so exquisitely integrated having camera(s), inertial sensing, sound I/O and excellent wireless connectivity. Mass market production makes this a very low-cost platform and manufacturers from quadrotor drone suppliers to childrenâs toys, such as the Meccanoid robot, employ a smartphone to provide a vision system/control system.
Accordingly, many research groups are attempting to optimise image analysis, computer vision and machine learning libraries for the smartphone platform. However current approaches to robot vision remain highly demanding for mobile processors such as the ARM, and while a number of algorithms have been developed, these are very stripped down, i.e. highly compromised in function or performance For example, the semi-dense visual odometry implementation of [1] operates on images of only 320x240pixels.
In our research we have been developing biologically motivated foveated vision algorithms, potentially some 100 times more efficient than their conventional counterparts, based on a model of the mammalian retina we have developed. Vision systems based on the foveated architectures found in mammals have the potential to reduce bandwidth and processing requirements by about x100 - it has been estimated that our brains would weigh ~60Kg if we were to process all our visual input at uniform high resolution. We have reported a foveated visual architecture that implements a functional model of the retina-visual cortex to produce feature vectors that can be matched/classified using conventional methods, or indeed could be adapted to employ Deep Convolutional Neural Nets for the classification/interpretation stage, [2,3,4].
We are now at the early stages of investigating how best to port our foveated architecture onto a smartphone platform. To achieve the required levels of performance we propose to optimise our retina model to the ARM processors utilised in smartphones, in conjunction with their integrated GPUs, to provide a foveated smart vision system on a smartphone. Our current goal is to have a foveated system running in real-time to serve as a front-end robot sensor for tasks such as general purpose object recognition and reliable dense SLAM using a commercial off-the-shelf smartphone which communicates with conventional hardware performing back-end visual classification/interpretation. We believe that, as in Nature, space-variance is the key to achieving the necessary data reduction to be able to implement the complete visual processing chain on the smartphone itself
Slugging or Sacrifice: A Statistical Comparison of Japanese and American Baseball
A statistical/cultural comparison and analysis of baseball in Japan and the United States
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