Interview with John Baldacci by Andrea L’Hommedieu

Biographical NoteJohn Elias Baldacci was born January 30, 1955, in Bangor, Maine. He attended the University of Maine, Orono, was a member of the Bangor city council from 1978 to 1981, and served in the Maine state senate from 1982 to 1994. In 1994 he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representative and served four terms from 1995 to 2003. In 2003, he became governor of Maine and at the time of the interview was still serving in that capacity. Baldacci’s grandmother and George Mitchell’s mother were sisters. SummaryInterview includes discussion of: Baldacci’s family connection to Mitchell; Baldacci’s mother’s recollections of Mitchell as a child; Mitchell’s appointment to the Senate and Governor Brennan’s role; Baldacci’s Lebanese background; the relationship between Baldacci’s grandmother and Mitchell’s mother; Baldacci’s hiring people who had been on Mitchell’s staff to work for him; and Baldacci’s grandmother’s youth in Lebanon

A continuous population of variable stars up to about 1.5 mag above the horizontal branch?

Increasing samples of pulsating variable stars populating the classical instability strip from the horizontal branch to a few magnitudes brighter are being found in several Local Group galaxies, irrespective of the galaxy morphological type. We will review the observational scenario focusing in particular on the Anomalous Cepheids and related objects.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, invited review in JENAM 2003, "Minisymposium: Asteroseismology and Stellar Evolution", Communications in Asteroseismology, in pres

The Araucaria Project. Bright Variable Stars in NGC 6822 from a Wide-Field Imaging Survey

We have performed a search for variable stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822 using wide-field multi-epoch VI photometry down to a limiting magnitude $V$ $\sim$ 22. Apart from the Cepheid variables in this galaxy already reported in an earlier paper by Pietrzynski et al. (2004), we have found 1019 "non-periodic" variable stars, 50 periodically variable stars with periods ranging from 0.12 to 66 days and 146 probably periodic variables. Twelve of these stars are eclipsing binaries and fifteen are likely new, low-amplitude Cepheids. Interestingly, seven of these Cepheid candidates have periods longer than 100 days, have very low amplitudes (less than 0.2 mag in $I$), and are very red. They could be young, massive Cepheids still embedded in dusty envelopes. The other objects span a huge range in colours and represent a mixture of different types of luminous variables. Many of the variables classified as non-periodic in the present study may turn out to be {\it periodic} variables once a much longer time baseline will be available to study them. We provide the catalogue of photometric parameters and show the atlas of light curves for the new variable stars. Our present catalogue is complementary to the one of Baldacci et al. (2005) which has focussed on very short-period and fainter variables in a subfield in NGC 6822.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Robustness of solutions to the capacitated facility location problem with uncertain demand

We investigate the properties of robust solutions of the Capacitated Facility Location Problem with uncertain demand. We show that the monotonic behavior of the price of robustness is not guaranteed, and therefore that one cannot discriminate among alternative robust solutions by simply relying on the trade-off price-vs-robustness. Furthermore, we report a computational study on benchmark instances from the literature and on instances derived from a real-world application, which demonstrates the validity in practice of our findings

The bus sightseeing problem

The basic characteristic of vehicle routing problems with profits (VRPP) is that locations to be visited are not predetermined. On the contrary, they are selected in pursuit of maximizing the profit collected from them. Significant research focus has been directed toward profitable routing variants due to the practical importance of their applications and their interesting structure, which jointly optimizes node selection and routing decisions. Profitable routing applications arise in the tourism industry aiming to maximize the profit score of attractions visited within a limited time period. In this paper, a new VRPP is introduced, referred to as the bus sightseeing problem (BSP). The BSP calls for determining bus tours for transporting different groups of tourists with different preferences on touristic attractions. Two interconnected decision levels have to be jointly tackled: assignment of tourists to buses and routing of buses to the various attractions. A mixed-integer programming formulation for the BSP is provided and solved by a Benders decomposition algorithm. For large-scale instances, an iterated local search based metaheuristic algorithm is developed with some tailored neighborhood operators. The proposed methods are tested on a large family of test instances, and the obtained computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution approaches

Variable stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822: the photometric catalogue

Deep B,V time-series photometry obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope has been used to identify variable stars in the dwarf irregular galaxy NGC 6822. We surveyed a 6.8x6.8 arcmin area of the galaxy and detected a total number of 390 candidate variables with the optimal image subtraction technique (Alard 2000). Light curves on a magnitude scale were obtained for 262 of these variables. Differential flux light curves are available for the remaining sample. In this paper we present the photometric catalogue of calibrated light curves and time-series data, along with coordinates and classification of the candidate variables. A detailed description is provided of the procedures used to identify the variable stars and calibrate their differential flux light curves on a magnitude scale.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures only as JPEG. Revised version with corrected eq. 5. Full text with better resolution .ps figures available upon request from the authors. Uses aa.cls (included), in press on A&A. Table 2 will only be published at the CDS, Appendix A, Tables 4,5,6 will only be available in the electronic edition of the Journa

Cost-benefit analysis of different solutions for sustainable irrigation in Fucino Plain (Italy)

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