38,217 research outputs found
Examining collusion and voting biases between countries during the Eurovision song contest since 1957
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual event which attracts millions
of viewers. It is an interesting activity to examine since the participants of
the competition represent a particular country's musical performance that will
be awarded a set of scores from other participating countries based upon a
quality assessment of a performance. There is a question of whether the
countries will vote exclusively according to the artistic merit of the song, or
if the vote will be a public signal of national support for another country.
Since the competition aims to bring people together, any consistent biases in
the awarding of scores would defeat the purpose of the celebration of
expression and this has attracted researchers to investigate the supporting
evidence for biases. This paper builds upon an approach which produces a set of
random samples from an unbiased distribution of score allocation, and extends
the methodology to use the full set of years of the competition's life span
which has seen fundamental changes to the voting schemes adopted.
By building up networks from statistically significant edge sets of vote
allocations during a set of years, the results display a plausible network for
the origins of the culture anchors for the preferences of the awarded votes.
With 60 years of data, the results support the hypothesis of regional collusion
and biases arising from proximity, culture and other irrelevant factors in
regards to the music which that alone is intended to affect the judgment of the
contest.Comment: to be published in JASS
Theory of small charge solitons in one-dimensional arrays of Josephson junctions
We identify and investigate the new parameter regime of small charge solitons
in one-dimensional arrays of Josephson junctions. We obtain the dispersion
relation of the soliton and show that it unexpectedly flattens in the outer
region of the Brillouin zone. We demonstrate Lorentz contraction of the soliton
in the middle of the Brillouin zone as well as broadening of the soliton in the
flat band regime.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, final published versio
Flexoelectric effect in finite samples
Static flexoelectric effect in a finite sample of a solid is addressed in
terms of phenomenological theory for the case of a thin plate subjected to
bending. It has been shown that despite an explicit asymmetry inherent to the
bulk constitutive electromechanical equations which take into account the
flexoelectric coupling, the electromechanical response for a finite sample is
"symmetric". "Symmetric" means that if a sensor and an actuator are made of a
flexoelectric element, performance of such devices can be characterized by the
same effective piezoelectric coefficient. This behavior is consistent with the
thermodynamic arguments offered earlier, being in conflict with the current
point of view on the matter in literature. This result was obtained using
standard mechanical boundary conditions valid for the case where the
polarization vanishes at the surface. It was shown that, for the case where
there is the polarization is nonzero at the surface, the aforementioned
symmetry of electromechanical response may be violated if standard mechanical
boundary conditions are used, leading to a conflict with the thermodynamic
arguments. It was argued that this conflict may be resolved when using modified
mechanical boundary conditions. It was also shown that the contribution of
surface piezoelectricity to the flexoelectric response of a finite sample is
expected to be comparable to that of the static bulk contribution (including
the material with high values of the dielectric constant) and to scale as the
bulk value of the dielectric constant (similar to the bulk contribution). This
finding implies that if the experimentally measured flexoelectric coefficient
scales as the dielectric constant of the material, this does not imply that the
measured flexoelectric response is controlled by the static bulk contribution
to the flexoelectric effect
Cosmic ray production in modified gravity
This paper is a reply to the criticism of our work on particle production in
modified gravity by D. Gorbunov and A. Tokareva. We show that their arguments
against efficient particle production are invalid. theories can lead to
an efficient generation of high energy cosmic rays in contracting systems.Comment: In response to criticism by referees several clarifying comments are
added. The results of the paper remain largely unchanged. Version to appear
on EPJ
Quadratic Quantum Measurements
We develop a theory of quadratic quantum measurements by a mesoscopic
detector. It is shown that quadratic measurements should have non-trivial
quantum information properties, providing, for instance, a simple way of
entangling two non-interacting qubits. We also calculate output spectrum of a
quantum detector with both linear and quadratic response continuously
monitoring coherent oscillations in two qubits.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
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