Letting Go of Self: The Creation of the Nonattachment to Self Scale

The Buddhist notion of nonattachment relates to an engagement with experience with flexibility and without fixation on achieving specified outcomes. The present study sought to define, create and validate a new measure of nonattachment as it applies to notions of the self. A new construct of “nonattachment to self” (NTS) was developed, defined the absence of fixation on self-related concepts, thoughts and feelings, and a capacity to flexibly interact with these concepts, thoughts and feelings without trying to control them. Two studies were conducted in the development of the new scale. With expert consultation, study 1 (n = 445) established a single factor, internally consistent 7-item scale via exploratory factor analysis. Study 2 (n = 388, n = 338) confirmed the factor structure of the new 7-item scale using confirmatory factor analyses. Study 2 also found the new scale to be internally consistent, with evidence supporting its test-retest reliability, criterion, and construct validity. Nonattachment to self-emerged as a unique way of relating to the self, distinct from general nonattachment, that aligned with higher levels of well-being and adaptive functioning

Exploring the psychosocial and behavioural determinants of household water conservation and intention

Securing urban freshwater supplies is a major challenge for policy makers globally. This study investigated the determinants of household water conservation to identify the relative contribution of psychosocial and behavioural determinants. Using a survey of 1196 households across the UK, we found that attitudes, norms and habits play an important role in determining intention to conserve water, and that habits were the single most important predictor of water conservation intentions and self-reported water bills. Changing ingrained water conservation habits is therefore an important component of managing urban water demand

Semiclassical almost isometry

Let M be a complex projective manifold, and L an Hermitian ample line bundle on it. A fundamental theorem of Gang Tian, reproved and strengthened by Zelditch, implies that the Khaeler form of L can be recovered from the asymptotics of the projective embeddings associated to large tensor powers of L. More precisely, with the natural choice of metrics the projective embeddings associated to the full linear series |kL| are asymptotically symplectic, in the appropriate rescaled sense. In this article, we ask whether and how this result extends to the semiclassical setting. Specifically, we relate the Weinstein symplectic structure on a given isodrastic leaf of half-weighted Bohr-Sommerfeld Lagrangian submanifolds of M to the asymptotics of the the pull-back of the Fubini-Study form under the semiclassical projective maps constructed by Borthwick, Paul and Uribe.Comment: exposition improve

Computing the Casimir energy using the point-matching method

We use a point-matching approach to numerically compute the Casimir interaction energy for a two perfect-conductor waveguide of arbitrary section. We present the method and describe the procedure used to obtain the numerical results. At first, our technique is tested for geometries with known solutions, such as concentric and eccentric cylinders. Then, we apply the point-matching technique to compute the Casimir interaction energy for new geometries such as concentric corrugated cylinders and cylinders inside conductors with focal lines.Comment: 11 pages, 18 figure

Benchmarking 2D hydraulic models for urban flood simulations

This paper describes benchmark testing of six two-dimensional (2D) hydraulic models (DIVAST, DIVASTTVD, TUFLOW, JFLOW, TRENT and LISFLOOD-FP) in terms of their ability to simulate surface flows in a densely urbanised area. The models are applied to a 1·0 km × 0·4 km urban catchment within the city of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, and are used to simulate a flood event that occurred at this site on 30 July 2002. An identical numerical grid describing the underlying topography is constructed for each model, using a combination of airborne laser altimetry (LiDAR) fused with digital map data, and used to run a benchmark simulation. Two numerical experiments were then conducted to test the response of each model to topographic error and uncertainty over friction parameterisation. While all the models tested produce plausible results, subtle differences between particular groups of codes give considerable insight into both the practice and science of urban hydraulic modelling. In particular, the results show that the terrain data available from modern LiDAR systems are sufficiently accurate and resolved for simulating urban flows, but such data need to be fused with digital map data of building topology and land use to gain maximum benefit from the information contained therein. When such terrain data are available, uncertainty in friction parameters becomes a more dominant factor than topographic error for typical problems. The simulations also show that flows in urban environments are characterised by numerous transitions to supercritical flow and numerical shocks. However, the effects of these are localised and they do not appear to affect overall wave propagation. In contrast, inertia terms are shown to be important in this particular case, but the specific characteristics of the test site may mean that this does not hold more generally

Effective action for the field equations of charged black holes

In this article, we consistently reduce the equations of motion for the bosonic N = 2 supergravity action, using a multi-centered black hole ansatz for the metric. This reduction is done in a general, non-supersymmetric setup, in which we extend concepts of BPS black hole technology. First of all we obtain a more general form of the black hole potential, as part of an effective action for both the scalars and the vectors in the supergravity theory. Furthermore, we show that there are extra constraints specifying the solution, which we calculate explicitly. In the literature, these constraints have already been studied in the one-center case. We also show that the effective action we obtain for non-static metrics, can be linked to the "entropy function" for the spherically symmetric case, as defined by Sen and Cardoso et al.Comment: 18 pages, (v2: small corrections, version to be published in CQG

A Cosmic Census of Radio Pulsars with the SKA

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will make ground breaking discoveries in pulsar science. In this chapter we outline the SKA surveys for new pulsars, as well as how we will perform the necessary follow-up timing observations. The SKA's wide field-of-view, high sensitivity, multi-beaming and sub-arraying capabilities, coupled with advanced pulsar search backends, will result in the discovery of a large population of pulsars. These will enable the SKA's pulsar science goals (tests of General Relativity with pulsar binary systems, investigating black hole theorems with pulsar-black hole binaries, and direct detection of gravitational waves in a pulsar timing array). Using SKA1-MID and SKA1-LOW we will survey the Milky Way to unprecedented depth, increasing the number of known pulsars by more than an order of magnitude. SKA2 will potentially find all the Galactic radio-emitting pulsars in the SKA sky which are beamed in our direction. This will give a clear picture of the birth properties of pulsars and of the gravitational potential, magnetic field structure and interstellar matter content of the Galaxy. Targeted searches will enable detection of exotic systems, such as the ~1000 pulsars we infer to be closely orbiting Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre. In addition, the SKA's sensitivity will be sufficient to detect pulsars in local group galaxies. To derive the spin characteristics of the discoveries we will perform live searches, and use sub-arraying and dynamic scheduling to time pulsars as soon as they are discovered, while simultaneously continuing survey observations. The large projected number of discoveries suggests that we will uncover currently unknown rare systems that can be exploited to push the boundaries of our understanding of astrophysics and provide tools for testing physics, as has been done by the pulsar community in the past.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, to be published in: "Advancing Astrophysics with the Square Kilometre Array", Proceedings of Science, PoS(AASKA14)04

Simultaneous loss and excitation of projectile electrons in relativistic collisions of U90+^{90+}(1s2^2) ions with atoms

We study relativistic collisions between helium-like uranium ions initially in the ground state and atoms in which, in a single collision event, one of the electrons of the ion is emitted and the other is transferred into an excited state of the residual hydrogen-like ion. We consider this two-electron process at not very high impact energies, where the action of the atom on the electrons of the ion can be well approximated as occurring solely due to the interaction with the nucleus of the atom and, hence, the process can be regarded as a four-body problem. Using the independent electron model we show that a very substantial improvement in the calculated cross sections is obtained if, instead of the first order approximation, the relativistic symmetric eikonal and continuum-distorted-wave-eikonal-initial-state models are employed to describe the single-electron probabilities for the excitation and loss, respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to J.Phys.

Non-Supersymmetric Attractor Flow in Symmetric Spaces

We derive extremal black hole solutions for a variety of four dimensional models which, after Kaluza-Klein reduction, admit a description in terms of 3D gravity coupled to a sigma model with symmetric target space. The solutions are in correspondence with certain nilpotent generators of the isometry group. In particular, we provide the exact solution for a non-BPS black hole with generic charges and asymptotic moduli in N=2 supergravity coupled to one vector multiplet. Multi-centered solutions can also be generated with this technique. It is shown that the non-supersymmetric solutions lack the intricate moduli space of bound configurations that are typical of the supersymmetric case.Comment: 50 pages, 4 figures; v2: Reference added. To appear in JHE

Exact solutions for supersymmetric stationary black hole composites

Four dimensional N=2 supergravity has regular, stationary, asymptotically flat BPS solutions with intrinsic angular momentum, describing bound states of separate extremal black holes with mutually nonlocal charges. Though the existence and some properties of these solutions were established some time ago, fully explicit analytic solutions were lacking thus far. In this note, we fill this gap. We show in general that explicit solutions can be constructed whenever an explicit formula is known in the theory at hand for the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a single black hole as a function of its charges, and illustrate this with some simple examples. We also give an example of moduli-dependent black hole entropy.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur