Optimal Flood Levee Designs by Dynamic Programming

An economic optimal development of a levee system along a river is investigated and a dynamic programming (DP) approach is used to find the optima under various conditions. The system consists of a number of levee reaches or stages. A random input of flood wave is regarded at the upstream point of the system. There are two failure modes considered and, consequently, two parameters of the flood wave (state variables) to trigger failure modes in every stage. Stochastic DP is used since the state transition functions (flood routing along the stages) are random functions. Three methods are discussed. In Method I, the expected value of the objective function is taken first, then DP is used as a numerical technique. In Method II, a fixed design flood is chosen as an input under which both optimum cost and policy is determined. In Method III, the value of the expected optimum objective function is calculated. It is shown that the full power of DP cannot be used if Method I is applied. Future research involves comparing the solutions of the three methods

From amines to (form)amides: a simple and successful mechanochemical approach

Two easily accessible routes for preparing an array of formylated and acetylated amines under mechanochemical conditions are presented. The two methodologies exhibit complementary features as they enable the derivatization of aliphatic and aromatic amines

Negative Energy Modes and Gravitational Instability of Interpenetrating Fluids

We study the longitudinal instabilities of two interpenetrating fluids interacting only through gravity. When one of the constituents is of relatively low density, it is possible to have a band of unstable wave numbers well separated from those involved in the usual Jeans instability. If the initial streaming is large enough, and there is no linear instability, the indefinite sign of the free energy has the possible consequence of explosive interactions between positive and negative energy modes in the nonlinear regime. The effect of dissipation on the negative energy modes is also examined

Persistent Hyperprolactinemia and Bilateral Galactocele in a Male Infant

Galactocele is a benign breast lesion, usually occurring in nursing women. This lesion is a rare cause of breast enlargement in children. In this paper we describe the case of an infant with hyperprolactinemia (which persisted throughout 15 years of clinical observation) and bilateral galactocele. We speculate that a congenital midline defect in our patient might have impaired the normal dopaminergic inhibitory tone on pituitary lactotroph cells, thus leading to an increased prolactin secretion by the pituitary gland; this, in turn, might have favored the development of the galactocele

Complexity, Language, and Life: Mathematical Approaches

In May 1984 the Swedish Council for Scientific Research convened a small group of investigators at the scientific research station at Abisko, Sweden, for the purpose of examining various conceptual and mathematical views of the evolution of complex systems. The stated theme of the meeting was deliberately kept vague, with only the purpose of discussing alternative mathematically based approaches to the modeling of evolving processes being given as a guideline to the participants. In order to limit the scope to some degree, it was decided to emphasize living rather than nonliving processes and to invite participants from a range of disciplinary specialities spanning the spectrum from pure and applied mathematics to geography and analytic philosophy. The results of the meeting were quite extraordinary; while there was no intent to focus the papers and discussion into predefined channels, an immediate self-organizing effect took place and the deliberations quickly oriented themselves into three main streams: conceptual and formal structures for characterizing system complexity; evolutionary processes in biology and ecology; the emergence of complexity through evolution in natural languages. The chapters presented in this volume are not the proceedings of the meeting. Following the meeting, the organizers felt that the ideas and spirit of the gathering should be preserved in some written form, so the participants were each requested to produce a chapter, explicating the views they presented at Abisko, written specifically for this volume. The results of this exercise are contained in this book

STZ-diabetic rat heart maintains developed tension amplitude by increasing sarcomere length and crossbridge density

New Findings: What is the central question of this study? In the papillary muscle from type I diabetic rats, does diabetes-associated altered ventricular function result from changes of acto-myosin interactions and are these modifications attributable to a possible sarcomere rearrangement? What is the main finding and its importance? For the first time, we showed that type-I diabetes altered sarcomeric ultrastructure, as seen by transmission electron microscopy, consistent with physiological parameters. The diabetic condition induced slower timing parameters, which is compatible with a diastolic dysfunction. At the sarcomeric level, augmented β-myosin heavy chain content and increased sarcomere length and crossbridges' number preserve myocardial stroke and could concur to maintain the ejection fraction. Abstract: We investigated whether diabetes-associated altered ventricular function, in a type I diabetes animal model, results from a modification of acto-myosin interactions, through the in vitro recording of left papillary muscle mechanical parameters and examination of sarcomere morphology by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Experiments were performed on streptozotocin-induced diabetic and age-matched control female Wistar rats. Mechanical isometric and isotonic indexes and timing parameters were determined. Using Huxley's equations, we calculated mechanics, kinetics and energetics of myosin crossbridges. Sarcomere length and A-band length were measured on TEM images. Type I and III collagen and β-myosin heavy chain (MHC) expression were determined by immunoblotting. No variation in resting and developed tension or maximum extent of shortening was evident between groups, but diabetic rats showed lower maximum shortening velocity and prolonged timing parameters. Compared to controls, diabetics also displayed a higher number of crossbridges with lower unitary force. Moreover, no change in type I and III collagen was associated to diabetes, but pathological rats showed a two-fold enhancement of β-MHC content and longer sarcomeres and A-band, detected by ultrastructural morphometry. Overall, these data address whether a preserved systolic function accompanied by an altered diastolic phase results from a recruitment of super-relaxed myosin heads or the phosphorylation of the regulatory light chain site in myosin. Although the early signs of diabetic cardiomyopathy were well expressed, the striking finding of our study was that, in diabetics, sarcomere modification may be a possible compensatory mechanism that preserves systolic function

Numerical Solutions of Matrix Differential Models using Cubic Matrix Splines II

This paper presents the non-linear generalization of a previous work on matrix differential models. It focusses on the construction of approximate solutions of first-order matrix differential equations Y'(x)=f(x,Y(x)) using matrix-cubic splines. An estimation of the approximation error, an algorithm for its implementation and illustrative examples for Sylvester and Riccati matrix differential equations are given.Comment: 14 pages; submitted to Math. Comp. Modellin

How is stimulus processing of the lateral geniculate nucleus derived from its input(s)?

LGN neurons can respond with extreme precision to a variety of temporally varying stimuli [1]. This precision requires non-linear processing of the stimulus and therefore cannot be described by standard linear (or linear-non-linear, LN) models. Rather, in previous work, we have found that precision arises through the interplay of an excitatory receptive field and a similarly tuned – but delayed – suppressive receptive field, allowing for fine time scales in the LGN response to arise in the brief window where excitation exceeds the suppression [2]. However, it is not clear whether such non-linear interaction arises in the retina, at the retinogeniculate synapse itself or involves other secondary LGN inputs. To investigate this, we applied a newly developed a Generalized Non-Linear Modeling (GNLM) framework to data involving the simultaneous recording of LGN neurons and their predominant retinal ganglion cell (RGC) input. This framework uses efficient maximum-likelihood optimization [3], adapted to include nested non-linear terms [2, 4]. Using this novel approach, we simultaneously optimize the shape of postsynaptic currents resulting from RGC stimulation along with other non-linear excitatory and inhibitory elements tuned to the visual stimulus, based on the observed RGC and LGN spike trains alone. We also can directly characterize the non-linear elements in the RGC. We found that while there were subtle non-linear elements in the RGC response, they were amplified in that of the LGN. Consistent with previous reports [5], summation with a threshold explains a large part of the increased sparseness of LGN responses relative to those of the input RGC. However, an additional opposite-sign suppressive term was also present, possibly contributing to the push-pull nature of the LGN response observed in intracellular recordings [6]. In many cases, we also detected additional non-linear excitatory inputs, possibly resulting from other RGC inputs. Interestingly, such additional terms were much more sensitive to contrast than the dominant input, possible resulting in the well-known contrast gain control effects, though present both at the level of the retina and LGN. Thus, the GNLM modeling methods reveal how non-linear computation performed is performed the RG synapse, and allows for more general characterization of non-linear computation throughout the visual pathway.https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2202-10-S1-P12

Multi-Agent Complex Systems and Many-Body Physics

Multi-agent complex systems comprising populations of decision-making particles, have many potential applications across the biological, informational and social sciences. We show that the time-averaged dynamics in such systems bear a striking resemblance to conventional many-body physics. For the specific example of the Minority Game, this analogy enables us to obtain analytic expressions which are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: Accepted for publication in Europhysics Letter

Detection of Solar Coronal Mass Ejections from Raw Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are massive releases of plasma from the solar corona. When the charged material is ejected towards the Earth, it can cause geomagnetic storms and severely damage electronic equipment and power grids. Early detection of CMEs is therefore crucial for damage containment. In this paper, we study detection of CMEs from sequential images of the solar corona acquired by a satellite. A low-complexity deep neural network is trained to process the raw images, ideally directly on the satellite, in order to provide early alerts