1,509 research outputs found
Performing in the Lap and at the Feet of God: Ramleela in Trinidad, 2006–2008
The island of Trinidad is home to one of the world’s largest annual performances of the Hindu epic drama known locally as Ramleela. Far away from their ancestral homeland, Indo-Trinidadians perform their own identities as a Caribbean people in a drama of exile that hauntingly replicates their diasporic experience
Renormalized coordinate approach to the thermalization process
We consider a particle in the harmonic approximation coupled linearly to an
environment. modeled by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators. The system
(particle--environment) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We
employ the recently introduced notion of renormalized coordinates to
investigate the time evolution of the particle occupation number. For
comparison we first present this study in bare coordinates. For a long ellapsed
time, in both approaches, the occupation number of the particle becomes
independent of its initial value. The value of ocupation number of the particle
is the physically expected one at the given temperature. So we have a Markovian
process, describing the particle thermalization with the environment. With
renormalized coordinates no renormalization procedure is required, leading
directly to a finite result.Comment: 16 pages, LATEX, 2 figure
Development of an open-source toolbox for the analysis and visualization of remotely sensed time series
The GEONETCast data-dissemination system delivers free multi-source raw satellite images and processed products to users worldwide; from these data, users can construct long time series to study dynamic phenomena. To explore these dynamics, using an animation with few controls is common practice. But animations easily produce information overload leading to change blindness, a problem that can be addressed in various ways. We present a combination of analytical and visual functionalities to better support visual exploration of animated time series. Analytical pre-processing functions include slicing and tracking of objects of interest. Results of the slicing and the tracking are input to the visualization environment, which is further enriched by tools to make various time, attribute, and area selections and by options to visually enhance selections relative to their surroundings, visualize the path of moving objects, and multiple layers. The resulting toolbox is dedicated to visual exploration and analysis of dynamic phenomena in time series. A case study demonstrates, with a use scenario, how it works. Early exposure of some visualization functions to users has already led to improvements, but more extensive testing will follow after further enrichment of the toolbox. Directions of future research are described
Critical temperature for first-order phase transitions in confined systems
We consider the Euclidean -dimensional
() model with () compactified dimensions.
Introducing temperature by means of the Ginzburg--Landau prescription in the
mass term of the Hamiltonian, this model can be interpreted as describing a
first-order phase transition for a system in a region of the -dimensional
space, limited by pairs of parallel planes, orthogonal to the coordinates
axis . The planes in each pair are separated by distances
. We obtain an expression for the transition temperature as
a function of the size of the system, , . For
D=3 we particularize this formula, taking for the
physically interesting cases (a film), (an infinitely long wire
having a square cross-section), and for (a cube). For completeness, the
corresponding formulas for second-order transitions are also presented.
Comparison with experimental data for superconducting films and wires shows
qualitative agreement with our theoretical expressionsComment: REVTEX, 11 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Eur. Phys. Journal
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