The Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect: simulation and observation

The Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect (SZ effect) is a complete probe of ionized baryons, the majority of which are likely hiding in the intergalactic medium. We ran a $512^3$ $\Lambda$CDM simulation using a moving mesh hydro code to compute the statistics of the thermal and kinetic SZ effect such as the power spectra and measures of non-Gaussianity. The thermal SZ power spectrum has a very broad peak at multipole $l\sim 2000-10^4$ with temperature fluctuations $\Delta T \sim 15\mu$K. The power spectrum is consistent with available observations and suggests a high $\sigma_8\simeq 1.0$ and a possible role of non-gravitational heating. The non-Gaussianity is significant and increases the cosmic variance of the power spectrum by a factor of $\sim 5$ for $l<6000$. We explore optimal driftscan survey strategies for the AMIBA CMB interferometer and their dependence on cosmology. For SZ power spectrum estimation, we find that the optimal sky coverage for a 1000 hours of integration time is several hundred square degrees. One achieves an accuracy better than 40% in the SZ measurement of power spectrum and an accuracy better than 20% in the cross correlation with Sloan galaxies for $2000<l<5000$. For cluster searches, the optimal scan rate is around 280 hours per square degree with a cluster detection rate 1 every 7 hours, allowing for a false positive rate of 20% and better than 30% accuracy in the cluster SZ distribution function measurement.Comment: 34 pages, 20 figures. Submitted to ApJ. Simulation maps have been replaced by high resolution images. For higher resolution color images, please download from http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~zhangpj/research/SZ/ We corrected a bug in our analysis. the SZ power spectrum decreases 50% and y parameter decrease 25

Tripartite Graph Clustering for Dynamic Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

The growing popularity of social media (e.g, Twitter) allows users to easily share information with each other and influence others by expressing their own sentiments on various subjects. In this work, we propose an unsupervised \emph{tri-clustering} framework, which analyzes both user-level and tweet-level sentiments through co-clustering of a tripartite graph. A compelling feature of the proposed framework is that the quality of sentiment clustering of tweets, users, and features can be mutually improved by joint clustering. We further investigate the evolution of user-level sentiments and latent feature vectors in an online framework and devise an efficient online algorithm to sequentially update the clustering of tweets, users and features with newly arrived data. The online framework not only provides better quality of both dynamic user-level and tweet-level sentiment analysis, but also improves the computational and storage efficiency. We verified the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches on the November 2012 California ballot Twitter data.Comment: A short version is in Proceeding of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of dat

The conduciveness of CA-rule graphs

Given two subsets A and B of nodes in a directed graph, the conduciveness of the graph from A to B is the ratio representing how many of the edges outgoing from nodes in A are incoming to nodes in B. When the graph's nodes stand for the possible solutions to certain problems of combinatorial optimization, choosing its edges appropriately has been shown to lead to conduciveness properties that provide useful insight into the performance of algorithms to solve those problems. Here we study the conduciveness of CA-rule graphs, that is, graphs whose node set is the set of all CA rules given a cell's number of possible states and neighborhood size. We consider several different edge sets interconnecting these nodes, both deterministic and random ones, and derive analytical expressions for the resulting graph's conduciveness toward rules having a fixed number of non-quiescent entries. We demonstrate that one of the random edge sets, characterized by allowing nodes to be sparsely interconnected across any Hamming distance between the corresponding rules, has the potential of providing reasonable conduciveness toward the desired rules. We conjecture that this may lie at the bottom of the best strategies known to date for discovering complex rules to solve specific problems, all of an evolutionary nature

Charge renormalization and phase separation in colloidal suspensions

We explore the effects of counterion condensation on fluid-fluid phase separation in charged colloidal suspensions. It is found that formation of double layers around the colloidal particles stabilizes suspensions against phase separation. Addition of salt, however, produces an instability which, in principle, can lead to a fluid-fluid separation. The instability, however, is so weak that it should be impossible to observe a fully equilibrated coexistence experimentally.Comment: 7 pages, Europhysics Letters (in press

Indexação de plantas básicas de citros da Embrapa Mandioca e Fruticultura para a presença de viróides.

Os citros são hospedeiros naturais de espécies de viróides: viróide da exocorte dos citros (Citrus exocortis viroid, CEVd), viróide do nanismo do lúpulo (Hop stunt viroid, HSVd), Citrus bark cracking viroid (CBCVd), viróide da folha curvada dos citros (Citrus bent leaf viroid, CBLVd), viróide do nanismo dos citros (Citrus dwarfing viroid, CDVd) e, mais recentemente, também foi descrita a ocorrência do Citrus Viroid V (CVd-V) e Citrus viroid VI (CVd-VI). Somente o CEVd e variantes do HSVd são agentes causais de doenças, exocorte e xiloporose, respectivamente. No Brasil já foram identificados as espécies CEVd, HSVd e o CDVd

Study of the Van der Pol Oscillator with Fractional Derivatives

In this paper we propose a modified version of the classical Van der Pol oscillator by introducing fractional-order time derivatives into the state-space model. The resulting fractional-order Van der Pol oscillator is analyzed in the time and frequency domains, by using phase portraits, spectral analysis and bifurcation diagrams. The fractional-order dynamics is illustrated through numerical simulations of the proposed schemes by using approximations to fractional-order operators. Finally, the analysis is extended to the forced Van der Pol oscillator.N/

EVALUATION OF ACCIDENTS WITH DOMINO EFFECT IN LPG STORAGE AREAS

The term domino effect denotes a chain of accidents, or situations, in which a fire/explosion load generated by an accident in one unit in an industry causes secondary and higher order accidents in other units. Such chains of accidents have a greater propensity to cause damage than stand-alone accidents. Most of the past risk assessment studies deal with accident in a single industry, more so in one of the units of an industry. But, often, accident in one unit causes a secondary accident in a nearby unit, which in turn may trigger a tertiary accident, and so on. The probability of occurrence and adverse impacts of such domino or cascading effects are increasing due to increasing congestion in industrial complexes and increasing density of human population around such complexes. Accidents with domino effect are seldom studied. LPG storage areas could produce the worst possible consequences in the event of an unforeseen incident. This work illustrates the application of models to evaluate the impacts of events with fire and explosion in LPG tanks on other similar units in the park and the possibility of occurrence of a domino effect. The criteria for occurrence of accidents with domino effect adopted in this work were 37.5 kW/m2 in case of fire radiation and an overpressure of 0.7 atm in explosion cases in a receptor body. The spacing between LPG tanks was evaluated. The results show that such spacing is minimal and does not represent, as it should, a parameter indicating a safe distance able to prevent the propagation of an accident with domino effect