360 research outputs found
From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed
fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand
contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist
wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity
distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with
exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law
with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we
analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe -
Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and
injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in
Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite
substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law
coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value
characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a
plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which
can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or
[email protected]
Multirelational Organization of Large-scale Social Networks in an Online World
The capacity to collect fingerprints of individuals in online media has
revolutionized the way researchers explore human society. Social systems can be
seen as a non-linear superposition of a multitude of complex social networks,
where nodes represent individuals and links capture a variety of different
social relations. Much emphasis has been put on the network topology of social
interactions, however, the multi-dimensional nature of these interactions has
largely been ignored in empirical studies, mostly because of lack of data.
Here, for the first time, we analyze a complete, multi-relational, large social
network of a society consisting of the 300,000 odd players of a massive
multiplayer online game. We extract networks of six different types of
one-to-one interactions between the players. Three of them carry a positive
connotation (friendship, communication, trade), three a negative (enmity, armed
aggression, punishment). We first analyze these types of networks as separate
entities and find that negative interactions differ from positive interactions
by their lower reciprocity, weaker clustering and fatter-tail degree
distribution. We then proceed to explore how the inter-dependence of different
network types determines the organization of the social system. In particular
we study correlations and overlap between different types of links and
demonstrate the tendency of individuals to play different roles in different
networks. As a demonstration of the power of the approach we present the first
empirical large-scale verification of the long-standing structural balance
theory, by focusing on the specific multiplex network of friendship and enmity
relations.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in PNA
An Applied Electromagnetics Course with a Conceiving-Designing-Implementing-Operating Approach in Engineering Education
This paper describes and discusses the implementation of a project-based undergraduate course on applied electromagnetics in electronics engineering with a conceiving-designing-implementing-operating (CDIO) approach involving active project-based learning (PBL). The course, which requires a combination of mathematical and physics concepts for its completion, allows students to understand the principles of electromagnetic transmission theory in wireless communication systems. This paper presents the course proposal, its project description, and results hinting at the relationship with the CDIO process. The proposed projects allow students to engage in core concepts such as complex vectors, Maxwell’s equations, boundary conditions, Poynting\u27s theorem, uniform plane waves, reflection and transmission of waves, waveguides, cavity resonators, and computer-assisted design. The proposed methodology results suggest that students lowered their perception of the difficulty of the course, and most students recognized a better learning process of the core concepts for this course. In addition, students’ final course grades showed an average improvement of approximately 6% compared with the final grades of other groups with different methodologies
Las traducciones al francés (Cohen 2012) y al inglés (Wynne 2014) de la novela ¡Que viva la música! de Andrés Caicedo. Comparación, análisis, problemas de la traducción cultural
Se ha realizado un análisis comparativo de las diferentes problemáticas surgidas durante el
proceso de traducción. Para ello, se ha hecho un estudio minucioso de los procedimientos
usados por los traductores de esta obra en particular: ¡Que viva la música!, de Andrés
Caicedo, al inglés y al francés. Este es un autor de culto con un lenguaje vernáculo, que a su
vez, emplea canciones de salsa y la jerga de su época, representa el inconformismo juvenil y
la realidad de la Colombia de los años setenta, en particular de la ciudad de Cali, que quiere
separarse del Boom de la literatura latinoamericana y del realismo mágico para mostrar una
mirada más urbana. El pensamiento del Grupo de Cali, su forma de ver, de enfrentar el
mundo, la influencia en la cultura popular a partir de ese momento.
Se analizan varios autores que investigan el modo en el que el contexto cultural puede incidir
en el campo lingüÃstico y en los referentes culturales. Algunos estudiosos de la traducción
afirman que las lenguas se distinguen en cuanto a su manera como ven y segmenta la realidad
y cómo intentan resolver las diferencias culturales; y si es el traductor quien debe moverse
entre ambos idiomas y qué estrategias deberá aplicar para lograrlo.
Las técnicas de traducción sirven como instrumentos de análisis para la descripción y la
comparación de las diversas traducciones. Se ofrece un detalle de los autores que plantean
que un traductor debe trabajar con su lengua materna para albergar el texto ajeno y lograr
que la obra original no se confunda con su traducción.Fil: RamÃrez Bohorquez, Diana Miranda. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de FilosofÃa y Letra
Moving boulders in flash floods and estimating flow conditions using boulders in ancient deposits
Boulders moving in flash floods cause considerable damage and casualties. More and bigger boulders move in flash floods than predicted from published theory. The interpretation of flow conditions from the size of large particles within flash flood deposits has, until now, generally assumed that the velocity (or discharge) is unchanging in time (i.e. flow is steady), or changes instantaneously between periods of constant conditions. Standard practice is to apply theories developed for steady flow conditions to flash floods, which are however inherently very unsteady flows. This is likely to lead to overestimates of peak flow velocity (or discharge). Flash floods are characterised by extremely rapid variations in flow that generate significant transient forces in addition to the mean-flow drag. These transient forces, generated by rapid velocity changes, are generally ignored in published theories, but they are briefly so large that they could initiate the motion of boulders. This paper develops a theory for the initiation of boulder movement due to the additional impulsive force generated by unsteady flow, and discusses the implications. Keywords
Reducing Rydberg state dc polarizability by microwave dressing
We demonstrate reduction of the dc polarizability of Cesium atom Rydberg
states in a 77 K environment utilizing microwave field dressing. In particular
we reduce the polarizability of states which have resonances at
5.35 GHz to , suitable for interfacing Rydberg atoms to
superconducting resonators in a cryogenic environment. We measure the
polarizability of the Rydberg states using Magneto-Optical-Trap (MOT) loss
spectroscopy. Using an off-resonant radio-frequency (RF) dressing field
coupling and we demonstrate a reduction in dc
polarizability of the states over 80. Experimental findings
are in good agreement with a numerical model of the atom-dressing field system
developed using the Shirley-Floquet formalism. We also demonstrate that the dc
polarizability reduction is highly anisotropic, with near total nulling
possible when the dc and dressing fields are aligned, but only a factor of two
reduction in polarizability when the fields are orthogonal. These results may
aid in stabilizing Rydberg resonances against varying dc fields present near
surfaces, enabling advancement in the development of hybrid Rydberg atom -
superconducting resonator quantum gates
A Universal Model of Global Civil Unrest
Civil unrest is a powerful form of collective human dynamics, which has led
to major transitions of societies in modern history. The study of collective
human dynamics, including collective aggression, has been the focus of much
discussion in the context of modeling and identification of universal patterns
of behavior. In contrast, the possibility that civil unrest activities, across
countries and over long time periods, are governed by universal mechanisms has
not been explored. Here, we analyze records of civil unrest of 170 countries
during the period 1919-2008. We demonstrate that the distributions of the
number of unrest events per year are robustly reproduced by a nonlinear,
spatially extended dynamical model, which reflects the spread of civil disorder
between geographic regions connected through social and communication networks.
The results also expose the similarity between global social instability and
the dynamics of natural hazards and epidemics.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
Well-posed and ill-posed behaviour of the μ(I)-rheology for granular flow
In light of the successes of the Navier–Stokes equations in the study of fluid flows, similar continuum treatment of granular materials is a long-standing ambition. This is due to their wide-ranging applications in the pharmaceutical and engineering industries as well as to geophysical phenomena such as avalanches and landslides. Historically this has been attempted through modification of the dissipation terms in the momentum balance equations, effectively introducing pressure and strain-rate dependence into the viscosity. Originally, a popular model for this granular viscosity, the Coulomb rheology, proposed rate-independent plastic behaviour scaled by a constant friction coefficient μ . Unfortunately, the resultant equations are always ill-posed. Mathematically ill-posed problems suffer from unbounded growth of short-wavelength perturbations, which necessarily leads to grid-dependent numerical results that do not converge as the spatial resolution is enhanced. This is unrealistic as all physical systems are subject to noise and do not blow up catastrophically. It is therefore vital to seek well-posed equations to make realistic predictions. The recent μ(I) -rheology is a major step forward, which allows granular flows in chutes and shear cells to be predicted. This is achieved by introducing a dependence on the non-dimensional inertial number I in the friction coefficient μ . In this paper it is shown that the μ(I) -rheology is well-posed for intermediate values of I , but that it is ill-posed for both high and low inertial numbers. This result is not obvious from casual inspection of the equations, and suggests that additional physics, such as enduring force chains and binary collisions, becomes important in these limits. The theoretical results are validated numerically using two implicit schemes for non-Newtonian flows. In particular, it is shown explicitly that at a given resolution a standard numerical scheme used to compute steady-uniform Bagnold flow is stable in the well-posed region of parameter space, but is unstable to small perturbations, which grow exponentially quickly, in the ill-posed domain
FASN-dependent de novo lipogenesis is required for brain development
Fate and behavior of neural progenitor cells are tightly regulated during mammalian brain development. Metabolic pathways, such as glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation, that are required for supplying energy and providing molecular building blocks to generate cells govern progenitor function. However, the role of de novo lipogenesis, which is the conversion of glucose into fatty acids through the multienzyme protein fatty acid synthase (FASN), for brain development remains unknown. Using Emx1Cre-mediated, tissue-specific deletion of Fasn in the mouse embryonic telencephalon, we show that loss of FASN causes severe microcephaly, largely due to altered polarity of apical, radial glia progenitors and reduced progenitor proliferation. Furthermore, genetic deletion and pharmacological inhibition of FASN in human embryonic stem cell-derived forebrain organoids identifies a conserved role of FASN-dependent lipogenesis for radial glia cell polarity in human brain organoids. Thus, our data establish a role of de novo lipogenesis for mouse and human brain development and identify a link between progenitor-cell polarity and lipid metabolism
Metabolic and chromosomal changes in a <i>Bacillus subtilis whiA</i> mutant
The conserved protein WhiA is present in most Gram-positive bacteria and plays a role in cell division. WhiA contains a DNA-binding motif and is a transcription regulator of the key cell division gene ftsZ in actinomycetes. In Bacillus subtilis, the absence of WhiA influences both cell division and chromosome segregation; however, the protein does not regulate any gene involved in these processes. In this study, we addressed three alternative mechanisms by which WhiA might exert its activity in B. subtilis and examined whether WhiA influences either (i) central carbon metabolism, (ii) fatty acid composition of the cell membrane, or (iii) chromosome organization. Mutations in glycolytic enzymes have been shown to influence both cell division and DNA replication. To measure the effect of WhiA on carbon metabolism, we tested different carbon sources and measured exometabolome fluxes. This revealed that the absence of WhiA does not affect glycolysis but does influence the pool of branched-chain fatty acid precursors. Due to the effect of WhiA on chromosome segregation, we examine chromosome organization in a ∆whiA mutant using chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) analysis. This revealed a local reduction in short-range chromosome interactions. Together, these findings provide new avenues for future research into how this protein works in the non-actinomycete firmicutes
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