1,125 research outputs found
Flood impacts on a water distribution network
Floods cause damage to people, buildings and infrastructures. Water
distribution systems are particularly exposed, since water treatment plants
are often located next to the rivers. Failure of the system leads to both
direct losses, for instance damage to equipment and pipework contamination,
and indirect impact, since it may lead to service disruption and thus
affect populations far from the event through the functional dependencies of
the network. In this work, we present an analysis of direct and indirect
damages on a drinking water supply system, considering the hazard of riverine
flooding as well as the exposure and vulnerability of active system
components. The method is based on interweaving, through a semi-automated GIS
procedure, a flood model and an EPANET-based pipe network model with a
pressure-driven demand approach, which is needed when modelling water distribution networks in highly off-design conditions. Impact measures are defined and estimated so as to quantify service outage and potential pipe contamination. The method is applied to the water supply system of the city of Florence, Italy, serving approximately 380 000 inhabitants. The evaluation of flood impact on the water distribution network is carried out for different events with assigned recurrence intervals. Vulnerable elements exposed to the flood are identified and analysed in order to estimate their residual functionality and to simulate failure scenarios. Results show that in the worst failure scenario (no residual functionality of the lifting station and a 500-year flood), 420 km of pipework would require disinfection with an estimated cost of EUR 21 million, which is about 0.5 % of the direct flood losses
evaluated for buildings and contents. Moreover, if flood impacts on the water
distribution network are considered, the population affected by the flood is
up to 3 times the population directly flooded
On the completeness of quantum computation models
The notion of computability is stable (i.e. independent of the choice of an
indexing) over infinite-dimensional vector spaces provided they have a finite
"tensorial dimension". Such vector spaces with a finite tensorial dimension
permit to define an absolute notion of completeness for quantum computation
models and give a precise meaning to the Church-Turing thesis in the framework
of quantum theory. (Extra keywords: quantum programming languages, denotational
semantics, universality.)Comment: 15 pages, LaTe
Impurity and quaternions in nonrelativistic scattering from a quantum memory
Models of quantum computing rely on transformations of the states of a
quantum memory. We study mathematical aspects of a model proposed by Wu in
which the memory state is changed via the scattering of incoming particles.
This operation causes the memory content to deviate from a pure state, i.e.
induces impurity. For nonrelativistic particles scattered from a two-state
memory and sufficiently general interaction potentials in 1+1 dimensions, we
express impurity in terms of quaternionic commutators. In this context, pure
memory states correspond to null hyperbolic quaternions. In the case with point
interactions, the scattering process amounts to appropriate rotations of
quaternions in the frequency domain. Our work complements a previous analysis
by Margetis and Myers (2006 J. Phys. A 39 11567--11581).Comment: 16 pages, no figure
A novel role for the root cap in phosphate uptake and homeostasis
The root cap has a fundamental role in sensing environmental cues as well as regulating root growth via altered meristem activity. Despite this well-established role in the control of developmental processes in roots, the root cap's function in nutrition remains obscure. Here, we uncover its role in phosphate nutrition by targeted cellular inactivation or phosphate transport complementation in Arabidopsis, using a transactivation strategy with an innovative high-resolution real-time P-33 imaging technique. Remarkably, the diminutive size of the root cap cells at the root-to-soil exchange surface accounts for a significant amount of the total seedling phosphate uptake (approximately 20%). This level of Pi absorption is sufficient for shoot biomass production (up to a 180% gain in soil), as well as repression of Pi starvation-induced genes. These results extend our understanding of this important tissue from its previously described roles in environmental perception to novel functions in mineral nutrition and homeostasis control
A System F accounting for scalars
The Algebraic lambda-calculus and the Linear-Algebraic lambda-calculus extend
the lambda-calculus with the possibility of making arbitrary linear
combinations of terms. In this paper we provide a fine-grained, System F-like
type system for the linear-algebraic lambda-calculus. We show that this
"scalar" type system enjoys both the subject-reduction property and the
strong-normalisation property, our main technical results. The latter yields a
significant simplification of the linear-algebraic lambda-calculus itself, by
removing the need for some restrictions in its reduction rules. But the more
important, original feature of this scalar type system is that it keeps track
of 'the amount of a type' that is present in each term. As an example of its
use, we shown that it can serve as a guarantee that the normal form of a term
is barycentric, i.e that its scalars are summing to one
The substitution of a tetrahedron for the Einthoven triangle
In an experiment on a cadaver, a potential difference was rhythmically impressed upon two small electrodes thrust into the heart or its immediate neighborhood.The resulting differences in potential between a central terminal and four electrodes connected to it through equal resistances were recorded with the string galvanometer. The four electrodes were on the two arms, the left leg, and the left interscapular region.By assuming that the electrical field generated in the trunk was equivalent to that of a centric doublet in a homogeneous spherical conductor and that the four electrodes were at the apices of a tetrahedron inscribed in this sphere, the experimental and the theoretical amplitudes of the deflections in the four leads could be compared. In general, it may be said that, with one exception, the deflections in the limb leads had the relative magnitudes expected. The deflections in the lead from the back were much smaller than anticipated. The last result is attributed to circumstances peculiar to the single experiment performed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/32563/1/0000689.pd
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