Fundamentals of Philosophy - an introduction

A very basic introduction meant for Chinese lay people, who only have a background in the official historic-materialist worldview. A version in Chinese is available as 基础哲学 ― 概论, philpapers rec DUR-

The Canonical Form of the Rabi Hamiltonian

The Rabi Hamiltonian, describing the coupling of a two-level system to a single quantized boson mode, is studied in the Bargmann-Fock representation. The corresponding system of differential equations is transformed into a canonical form in which all regular singularities between zero and infinity have been removed. The canonical or Birkhoff-transformed equations give rise to a two-dimensional eigenvalue problem, involving the energy and a transformational parameter which affects the coupling strength. The known isolated exact solutions of the Rabi Hamiltonian are found to correspond to the uncoupled form of the canonical system.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX, no figures, to appear in J.Math.Phy

Laboratory Detection of the Antiphospholipid Syndrome via Calibrated Automated Thrombography

Lupus anticoagulants (LAC) consist of anti phospholipid antibodies, detected via their anti coagulant properties in vitro. Strong LAC relate to thromboembolic events, a hallmark of the anti-phospholipid syndrome. We have analyzed whether detection of this syndrome would benefit from thrombin generation measurements. Therefore, calibrated automated thrombography was done in normal plasma (n=30) and LAC patient plasma (n=48 non-anticoagulated, n=12 on oral anti coagulants), diluted 1: 1 with a normal plasma pool. The anti-beta(2)-glycoprotein I monoclonal antibody 23H9, with known LAC properties, delayed the lag time and reduced the peak height during thrombin generation induction in normal plasma dose-dependently (0-150 mu g/ml). At variance, LAC patient 1: 1 plasma mixtures manifested variable lag time prolongations and/or peak height reductions. Coupling these two most informative thrombin generation parameters in a peak height/lag time ratio,and upon normalization versus the normal plasma pool, this ratio distributed normally and was reduced in the plasma mixtures, for 59/60 known LAC plasmas. The normalized peak height/lag time ratio correlated well with the normalized dilute prothrombin time,diluted Russell's viper venom time and silica clotting time, measured in 1: 1 plasma mixtures (correlation coefficients 0.59-0.72). The anticoagulant effects of activated protein C (0-7.5 nM) or 23H9 (0-150 mu g/ml), spiked in the 1: 1 LAC plasma mixtures were reduced for the majority of patients, compatible with functional competition between patient LAC and activated protein C and LAC and 23H9, respectively. Hence,the normalized thrombin gene ration-derived peak height/lag time ratio identifies LAC in plasma with high sensitivity in a single assay, irrespective of the patient's treatment with oral anticoagulants

The periodic vehicle routing problem: a case study.

This paper deals with a case study which is a variant of the Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem (PVRP). As in the traditional Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), customer locations each with a certain daily demand are given, as well as a set of capacitated vehicles. In addition, the PVRP has a horizon, say T days, and there is a frequency for each customer stating how often within this T-day period this customer must be visited. A solution to the PVRP consists of T sets of routes that jointly satisfy the demand constraints and the frequency constraints. The objective is to minimize the sum of the costs of all routes over the planning horizon. We develop different algorithms solving the instances of the case studied. Using these algorithms we are able to realize considerable cost reductions compared to the current situation.Periodic vehicle routing; Case study;