HASS on the Hill

Deborah Henderson attended the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) on the Hill event as one of two NTEU Representatives. The NTEU has consistently supported the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) as a peak body representing this sector, and the participation of the National Policy and Research Unit Coordinator, Andrew Nette, in a panel on the Briefing Day provided more of a public face to this support. Deborah’s report provides an overview of this recent event and commences with an account of how CHASS was formed and why this lobby group is so significant for the state of the Australian humanities. For as one prominent Australian academic, Simon During (2005), noted there has been much concern that the humanities are able to defend themselves against government policies that prioritise science and technology

Synonymity Test

The Smarandache's Synonymity Test: similar to, and an extension of, the antonym test in psychology, is a verbal test where the subject must supply as many as possible synonyms of a given word within a as short as possible period of time

Potential Impacts of Avocado Imports from Mexico on the Florida Avocado Industry

Changes in agricultural policies shape the way markets and industries react. A recent policy issue expecting to have impacts on Florida Greenskin avocado industry is an entry of Mexican Hass avocados to all states in the United States in 2007. After 93 years of banning Mexican Hass avocados in Florida, the allowance of Hass variety from Mexico to Florida in 2007 may lead a different path to the Florida Greenskin avocado industry. This research addresses this issue by incorporating Florida avocados, together with California, Chile, Mexico, and Dominican Republic avocados into the analysis of the demand for avocados in the United States using a Rotterdam Inverse Demand System.International Relations/Trade,

Minimal Fibrations of Hyperbolic 3-manifolds

There are hyperbolic 3-manifolds that fiber over the circle but that do not admit fibrations by minimal surfaces. These manifolds do not admit fibrations by surfaces that are even approximately minimal

Double Bubbles Minimize

The classical isoperimetric inequality in R^3 states that the surface of smallest area enclosing a given volume is a sphere. We show that the least area surface enclosing two equal volumes is a double bubble, a surface made of two pieces of round spheres separated by a flat disk, meeting along a single circle at an angle of 120 degrees.Comment: 57 pages, 32 figures. Includes the complete code for a C++ program as described in the article. You can obtain this code by viewing the source of this articl

Invariants of Knot Diagrams

We construct a new order 1 invariant for knot diagrams. We use it to determine the minimal number of Reidemeister moves needed to pass between certain pairs of knot diagrams

How round is a protein? Exploring protein structures for globularity using conformal mapping.

We present a new algorithm that automatically computes a measure of the geometric difference between the surface of a protein and a round sphere. The algorithm takes as input two triangulated genus zero surfaces representing the protein and the round sphere, respectively, and constructs a discrete conformal map f between these surfaces. The conformal map is chosen to minimize a symmetric elastic energy E S (f) that measures the distance of f from an isometry. We illustrate our approach on a set of basic sample problems and then on a dataset of diverse protein structures. We show first that E S (f) is able to quantify the roundness of the Platonic solids and that for these surfaces it replicates well traditional measures of roundness such as the sphericity. We then demonstrate that the symmetric elastic energy E S (f) captures both global and local differences between two surfaces, showing that our method identifies the presence of protruding regions in protein structures and quantifies how these regions make the shape of a protein deviate from globularity. Based on these results, we show that E S (f) serves as a probe of the limits of the application of conformal mapping to parametrize protein shapes. We identify limitations of the method and discuss its extension to achieving automatic registration of protein structures based on their surface geometry

Configurations of curves and geodesics on surfaces

We study configurations of immersed curves in surfaces and surfaces in 3-manifolds. Among other results, we show that primitive curves have only finitely many configurations which minimize the number of double points. We give examples of minimal configurations not realized by geodesics in any hyperbolic metric.Comment: 13 pages. Published copy, also available at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon2/paper11.abs.htm