846 research outputs found
Dust explosions: A report on recent major explosions in Argentina and Brazil
In South America, grain elevators have not been exempt from dust explosions. Between 2001 & 2002 there were three major dust explosions, TOEPFER, Puerto San Martin (Argentina), San Lorenzo Terminal (Argentina) and COINBRA, ParanaguĂĄ (Brazil), with both great loss of lives and material. This presentation has three specific targets: 1. Explanation of how each of these explosions occurred.2. How local industries reacted to prevent future explosions and reduce their severity.3. Reinforce safety issues offering new perspectives on the explosion threat.In Argentina and Brazil, due to this recent explosion frequency, there is a bigger industry alert on the hazard of grain dust explosions. We will see specifications and regulations to guide the building new facilites. Facilities must be kept thoroughly clean; dust control systems must be installed and up-graded, together with the installation of adequate electronic hazard monitors which add higher levels of security. I hope this article will help prevent future explosions by alerting and reminding the industry of the need to reinforce safety issues and standards
Closed Timelike Curves in Relativistic Computation
In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using closed timelike curves
(CTCs) in relativistic hypercomputation. We introduce a wormhole based
hypercomputation scenario which is free from the common worries, such as the
blueshift problem. We also discuss the physical reasonability of our scenario,
and why we cannot simply ignore the possibility of the existence of spacetimes
containing CTCs.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure
Polarization of tightly focused laser beams
The polarization properties of monochromatic light beams are studied. In
contrast to the idealization of an electromagnetic plane wave, finite beams
which are everywhere linearly polarized in the same direction do not exist.
Neither do beams which are everywhere circularly polarized in a fixed plane. It
is also shown that transversely finite beams cannot be purely transverse in
both their electric and magnetic vectors, and that their electromagnetic energy
travels at less than c. The electric and magnetic fields in an electromagnetic
beam have different polarization properties in general, but there exists a
class of steady beams in which the electric and magnetic polarizations are the
same (and in which energy density and energy flux are independent of time).
Examples are given of exactly and approximately linearly polarized beams, and
of approximately circularly polarized beams.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
Prolonging somatic cell proliferation through constitutive hox gene expression in C. elegans
hox genes encode a conserved family of homeodomain transcription factors that are essential to determine the identity of body segments during embryogenesis and maintain adult somatic stem cells competent to regenerate organs. In contrast to higher organisms, somatic cells in C. elegans irreversibly exit the cell cycle after completing their cell lineage and the adult soma cannot regenerate. Here, we show that hox gene expression levels in C. elegans determine the temporal competence of somatic cells to proliferate. Down-regulation of the central hox gene lin-39 in dividing vulval cells results in their premature cell cycle exit, whereas constitutive lin-39 expression causes precocious Pn.p cell and sex myoblast divisions and prolongs the proliferative phase of the vulval cells past their normal point of arrest. Furthermore, ectopic expression of hox genes in the quiescent anchor cell re-activates the cell cycle and induces proliferation until young adulthood. Thus, constitutive expression of a single hox transcription factor is sufficient to prolong somatic cell proliferation beyond the restriction imposed by the cell lineage. The down-regulation of hox gene expression in most somatic cells at the end of larval development may be one cause for the absence of cell proliferation in adult C. elegans
Four consecutive dry years in Lake Balaton (Hungary): consequences for phytoplankton biomass and composition
Multifractality of Posture Modulates Multisensory Perception of Stand-On-Ability
By definition, perception is a multisensory process that unfolds in time as a complex sequence of exploratory activities of the organism. In such a system perception and action are integrated, and multiple energy arrays are available simultaneously. Perception of affordances interweaves sensory and motor activities into meaningful behavior given task constraints. The present contribution offers insight into the manner in which perception and action usher the organism through competent functional apprehension of its surroundings. We propose that the tensegrity structure of the body, manifested via multifractality of exploratory bodily movements informs perception of affordances. The affordance of stand-on-ability of ground surfaces served as the experimental paradigm. Observers viewed a surface set to a discrete angle and attempted to match it haptically with a continuously adjustable surface occluded by a curtain, or felt an occluded surface set to a discrete angle then matched it visually with a continuously adjustable visible surface. The complex intertwining of perception and action was demonstrated by the interactions of multifractality of postural sway with multiple energy arrays, responses, and changing geometric task demands
Helicity, polarization, and Riemann-Silberstein vortices
Riemann-Silberstein (RS) vortices have been defined as surfaces in spacetime
where the complex form of a free electromagnetic field given by F=E+iB is null
(F.F=0), and they can indeed be interpreted as the collective history swept out
by moving vortex lines of the field. Formally, the nullity condition is similar
to the definition of "C-lines" associated with a monochromatic electric or
magnetic field, which are curves in space where the polarization ellipses
degenerate to circles. However, it was noted that RS vortices of monochromatic
fields generally oscillate at optical frequencies and are therefore
unobservable while electric and magnetic C-lines are steady. Here I show that
under the additional assumption of having definite helicity, RS vortices are
not only steady but they coincide with both sets of C-lines, electric and
magnetic. The two concepts therefore become one for waves of definite frequency
and helicity. Since the definition of RS vortices is relativistically invariant
while that of C-lines is not, it may be useful to regard the vortices as a
wideband generalization of C-lines for waves of definite helicity.Comment: 5 pages, no figures. Submitted to J of Optics A, special issue on
Singular Optics; minor changes from v.
Efficient Triangle Counting in Large Graphs via Degree-based Vertex Partitioning
The number of triangles is a computationally expensive graph statistic which
is frequently used in complex network analysis (e.g., transitivity ratio), in
various random graph models (e.g., exponential random graph model) and in
important real world applications such as spam detection, uncovering of the
hidden thematic structure of the Web and link recommendation. Counting
triangles in graphs with millions and billions of edges requires algorithms
which run fast, use small amount of space, provide accurate estimates of the
number of triangles and preferably are parallelizable.
In this paper we present an efficient triangle counting algorithm which can
be adapted to the semistreaming model. The key idea of our algorithm is to
combine the sampling algorithm of Tsourakakis et al. and the partitioning of
the set of vertices into a high degree and a low degree subset respectively as
in the Alon, Yuster and Zwick work treating each set appropriately. We obtain a
running time
and an approximation (multiplicative error), where is the number
of vertices, the number of edges and the maximum number of
triangles an edge is contained.
Furthermore, we show how this algorithm can be adapted to the semistreaming
model with space usage and a constant number of passes (three) over the graph
stream. We apply our methods in various networks with several millions of edges
and we obtain excellent results. Finally, we propose a random projection based
method for triangle counting and provide a sufficient condition to obtain an
estimate with low variance.Comment: 1) 12 pages 2) To appear in the 7th Workshop on Algorithms and Models
for the Web Graph (WAW 2010
A tabu search heuristic for the Equitable Coloring Problem
The Equitable Coloring Problem is a variant of the Graph Coloring Problem
where the sizes of two arbitrary color classes differ in at most one unit. This
additional condition, called equity constraints, arises naturally in several
applications. Due to the hardness of the problem, current exact algorithms can
not solve large-sized instances. Such instances must be addressed only via
heuristic methods. In this paper we present a tabu search heuristic for the
Equitable Coloring Problem. This algorithm is an adaptation of the dynamic
TabuCol version of Galinier and Hao. In order to satisfy equity constraints,
new local search criteria are given. Computational experiments are carried out
in order to find the best combination of parameters involved in the dynamic
tenure of the heuristic. Finally, we show the good performance of our heuristic
over known benchmark instances
- âŠ