The Symmetric Group Defies Strong Fourier Sampling

The dramatic exponential speedups of quantum algorithms over their best existing classical counterparts were ushered in by the technique of Fourier sampling, introduced by Bernstein and Vazirani and developed by Simon and Shor into an approach to the hidden subgroup problem. This approach has proved successful for abelian groups, leading to efficient algorithms for factoring, extracting discrete logarithms, and other number-theoretic problems. We show, however, that this method cannot resolve the hidden subgroup problem in the symmetric groups, even in the weakest, information-theoretic sense. In particular, we show that the Graph Isomorphism problem cannot be solved by this approach. Our work implies that any quantum approach based upon the measurement of coset states must depart from the original framework by using entangled measurements on multiple coset states

Indonesia at home and abroad: economics, politics and security

Overview: This inaugural suite of papers for the National Security College Issue Brief Series is also a component of an NSC research grant investigating the prospects, challenges and opportunities associated with Indonesia’s ascent in the political-security, economic, and socio-cultural spheres. The chief investigators for this project are Dr Christopher Roberts, Dr Ahmad Habir, and Associate Professor Leonard Sebastian. These issue briefs represent a short precursor to a fi fteen chapter edited book, titled Indonesia’s Ascent: Power, Leadership and the Regional Order, to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in late 2014. The project also involved conferences and fi eldwork in both Canberra and Jakarta between 2012 and 2013

Master of Science

thesisThe chromosomal inversions of D. persimilis and D. pseudoobscura have deeply influenced our understanding of the evolutionary forces that shape natural variation, speciation, and selfish chromosome dynamics. Here, we perform a comprehensive reconstruction of the evolutionary histories of the chromosomal inversions in these species and provide a solution to the puzzling origins of the selfish Sex-Ratio chromosome in D. persimilis. We show that this Sex-Ratio chromosome directly descends from an ancestrally-arranged chromosome, suggesting that unsuppressed selfish chromosomes may remain polymorphic within populations for long periods of time. We further show that all fixed inversions between D. persimilis and D. pseudoobscura were segregating in the ancestral population long before speciation, and that the genes contributing to reproductive barriers must have evolved within them afterwards. We propose a new model for the role of chromosomal inversions in speciation and suggest that higher levels of divergence and an over-abundance of hybrid incompatibilities are emergent properties of ancestrally segregating inversions. Our findings force a reconsideration of the role of chromosomal inversions in speciation, not as a protector of existing hybrid incompatibility alleles, but as fertile ground for their formation

Can climate models capture the structure of extratropical cyclones?

Composites of wind speeds, equivalent potential temperature, mean sea level pressure, vertical velocity, and relative humidity have been produced for the 100 most intense extratropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere winter for the 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) and the high resolution global environment model (HiGEM). Features of conceptual models of cyclone structure—the warm conveyor belt, cold conveyor belt, and dry intrusion—have been identified in the composites from ERA-40 and compared to HiGEM. Such features can be identified in the composite fields despite the smoothing that occurs in the compositing process. The surface features and the three-dimensional structure of the cyclones in HiGEM compare very well with those from ERA-40. The warm conveyor belt is identified in the temperature and wind fields as a mass of warm air undergoing moist isentropic uplift and is very similar in ERA-40 and HiGEM. The rate of ascent is lower in HiGEM, associated with a shallower slope of the moist isentropes in the warm sector. There are also differences in the relative humidity fields in the warm conveyor belt. In ERA-40, the high values of relative humidity are strongly associated with the moist isentropic uplift, whereas in HiGEM these are not so strongly associated. The cold conveyor belt is identified as rearward flowing air that undercuts the warm conveyor belt and produces a low-level jet, and is very similar in HiGEM and ERA-40. The dry intrusion is identified in the 500-hPa vertical velocity and relative humidity. The structure of the dry intrusion compares well between HiGEM and ERA-40 but the descent is weaker in HiGEM because of weaker along-isentrope flow behind the composite cyclone. HiGEM’s ability to represent the key features of extratropical cyclone structure can give confidence in future predictions from this model

Visual Task Performance Assessment using Complementary and Redundant Information within Fused Imagery

Image fusion is the process of combining information from a set of source images to obtain a single image with more relevant information than any individual source image. The intent of image fusion is to produce a single image that renders a better description of the scene than any of the individual source images. Information within source images can be classified as either redundant or complementary. The relevant amounts of complementary and redundant information within the source images provide an effective metric for quantifying the benefits of image fusion. Two common reasons for using image fusion for a particular task are to increase task reliability or to increase capability. It seems natural to associate reliability with redundancy of information between source bands, whereas increased capability is associated with complementary information between source bands. The basic idea is that the more redundant the information between the source images being fused, the less likely an increase in task performance can be realized using the fused imagery. Intuitively, the benefits of image fusion with regards to task performance are maximized when the source images contain large amounts of complementary information. This research introduces a new performance measure based on mutual information which, under the assumption the fused imagery has been properly prepared for human perception, can be used as a predictor of human task performance using the complementary and redundant information in fused imagery. The ability of human observers to identify targets of interest using fused imagery is evaluated using human perception experiments. In the perception experiments, imagery of the same scenes containing targets of interest, captured in different spectral bands, is fused using various fusion algortihms and shown to human observers for identification. The results of the experiments show a correlation exists between the proposed measure and human visual identification task performance. The perception experiments serve to validate the performance prediction accuracy of the new performance measure. the development of the proposed metric introduces into the image fusion community a new image fusion evaluation measure that has the potential to fill many voids within the image fusion literature

Toxicity of Tolyltriazole to Bacillus Microorganisms

The safety of air travel in cold weather depends upon the use of aircraft deicing fluids (ADAF). The environmental and toxic effects of the ADAF component tolyltriazole are not well understood. Tolyltriazole is a potential human carcinogen and has exhibited microbial toxicity in Microtox test. This research used two methods to investigate the toxicity of tolyltriazole on bacillus shaped microorganisms. The first method compared the dissolved oxygen uptake of microcosms exposed to varying concentrations of tolyltriazole. When exposed to 1000 ppm tolyltriazole, all isolated species showed inhibition in respiration. There was no evidence that tolyltriazole a

2019-2020 New Music Festival

Fourteenth Annual New Music Festival Christopher Theofanidis, Composer-in-Residence Lisa Leonard, Director Sunday, January 12, 2020 at 4:00 PM Faculty Favorites Monday, January 13, 2020 at 7:30 PM Spotlight I: Young Composers Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 7:30 PM Spotlight II: Bassoon Chamber Music Composition Competition Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 7:30 PM Spotlight III: The Art of Theofanidishttps://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_newmusicfest/1013/thumbnail.jp

The biomechanics of human locomotion

Includes bibliographical references. The thesis on CD-ROM includes Animate, GaitBib, GaitBook and GaitLab, four quick time movies which focus on the functional understanding of human gait. The CD-ROM is available at the Health Sciences Library