530 research outputs found
A Reconciliation of Viscous and Inviscid Approaches to Computing Locomotion of Deforming Bodies
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Synthesis of iron based hydrocracking catalysts
Disclosed are method of preparing a fine particle iron based hydrocracking catalyst and the catalyst prepared thereby. An iron (III) oxide powder and elemental sulfur are reacted with a liquid hydrogen donor having a hydroaromatic structure present in the range of from about 5 to about 50 times the weight of iron (III) oxide at 180C to 240C for 0 to 8 hours. Various specific hydrogen donors are disclosed. The catalysts are active at low temperature (<350C) and low pressure
Hierarchy Theory of Evolution and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Some Epistemic Bridges, Some Conceptual Rifts
Contemporary evolutionary biology comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of evolutionary theory. Since the mid-eighties, some of these conceptual frameworks have denounced the ontologies of the Modern Synthesis and of the updated Standard Theory of Evolution as unfinished or even flawed. In this paper, we analyze and compare two of those conceptual frameworks, namely Niles Eldredge’s Hierarchy Theory of Evolution (with its extended ontology of evolutionary entities) and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (with its proposal of an extended ontology of evolutionary processes), in an attempt to map some epistemic bridges (e.g. compatible views of causation; niche construction) and some conceptual rifts (e.g. extra-genetic inheritance; different perspectives on macroevolution; contrasting standpoints held in the “externalism–internalism” debate) that exist between them. This paper seeks to encourage theoretical, philosophical and historiographical discussions about pluralism or the possible unification of contemporary evolutionary biology
Branching Processes and Evolution at the Ends of a Food Chain
In a critically self--organized model of punctuated equilibrium, boundaries
determine peculiar scaling of the size distribution of evolutionary avalanches.
This is derived by an inhomogeneous generalization of standard branching
processes, extending previous mean field descriptions and yielding
together with , as distribution exponent of avalanches starting from
species at the ends of a food chain. For the nearest neighbor chain one obtains
numerically , and for the
first return times of activity, again distinct from bulk exponents.Comment: REVTex file, 12 pages, 2 figures in eps-files uuencoded, psfig.st
IGRT After Prostatectomy: Evaluation of Corrective Shifts and Toxicity Using Online Cone Beam CT vs. Weekly Port Films for Target Localization
Purpose/Objective(s): Image guidance (IG) may permit higher radiotherapy (RT) doses (\u3e65 Gy) after radical prostatectomy (RP) without increased toxicity, with improved accuracy and smaller margins. Conebeam (CBCT) allows IGRT with volumetric images. This study evaluated CBCT shifts and toxicity after conformal IGRT, compared to RT with port films.
American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) 52nd Annual Meeting October 31 - November 4, San Diego, C
Evolutionary dynamics of the most populated genotype on rugged fitness landscapes
We consider an asexual population evolving on rugged fitness landscapes which
are defined on the multi-dimensional genotypic space and have many local
optima. We track the most populated genotype as it changes when the population
jumps from a fitness peak to a better one during the process of adaptation.
This is done using the dynamics of the shell model which is a simplified
version of the quasispecies model for infinite populations and standard
Wright-Fisher dynamics for large finite populations. We show that the
population fraction of a genotype obtained within the quasispecies model and
the shell model match for fit genotypes and at short times, but the dynamics of
the two models are identical for questions related to the most populated
genotype. We calculate exactly several properties of the jumps in infinite
populations some of which were obtained numerically in previous works. We also
present our preliminary simulation results for finite populations. In
particular, we measure the jump distribution in time and find that it decays as
as in the quasispecies problem.Comment: Minor changes. To appear in Phys Rev
Evolutionary trajectories in rugged fitness landscapes
We consider the evolutionary trajectories traced out by an infinite
population undergoing mutation-selection dynamics in static, uncorrelated
random fitness landscapes. Starting from the population that consists of a
single genotype, the most populated genotype \textit{jumps} from a local
fitness maximum to another and eventually reaches the global maximum. We use a
strong selection limit, which reduces the dynamics beyond the first time step
to the competition between independent mutant subpopulations, to study the
dynamics of this model and of a simpler one-dimensional model which ignores the
geometry of the sequence space. We find that the fit genotypes that appear
along a trajectory are a subset of suitably defined fitness \textit{records},
and exploit several results from the record theory for non-identically
distributed random variables. The genotypes that contribute to the trajectory
are those records that are not \textit{bypassed} by superior records arising
further away from the initial population. Several conjectures concerning the
statistics of bypassing are extracted from numerical simulations. In
particular, for the one-dimensional model, we propose a simple relation between
the bypassing probability and the dynamic exponent which describes the scaling
of the typical evolution time with genome size. The latter can be determined
exactly in terms of the extremal properties of the fitness distribution.Comment: Figures in color; minor revisions in tex
Tangled Nature: A model of emergent structure and temporal mode among co-evolving agents
Understanding systems level behaviour of many interacting agents is
challenging in various ways, here we'll focus on the how the interaction
between components can lead to hierarchical structures with different types of
dynamics, or causations, at different levels. We use the Tangled Nature model
to discuss the co-evolutionary aspects connecting the microscopic level of the
individual to the macroscopic systems level. At the microscopic level the
individual agent may undergo evolutionary changes due to mutations of
strategies. The micro-dynamics always run at a constant rate. Nevertheless, the
system's level dynamics exhibit a completely different type of intermittent
abrupt dynamics where major upheavals keep throwing the system between
meta-stable configurations. These dramatic transitions are described by a
log-Poisson time statistics. The long time effect is a collectively adapted of
the ecological network. We discuss the ecological and macroevolutionary
consequences of the adaptive dynamics and briefly describe work using the
Tangled Nature framework to analyse problems in economics, sociology,
innovation and sustainabilityComment: Invited contribution to Focus on Complexity in European Journal of
Physics. 25 page, 1 figur
Comparing the hierarchy of keywords in on-line news portals
The tagging of on-line content with informative keywords is a widespread
phenomenon from scientific article repositories through blogs to on-line news
portals. In most of the cases, the tags on a given item are free words chosen
by the authors independently. Therefore, relations among keywords in a
collection of news items is unknown. However, in most cases the topics and
concepts described by these keywords are forming a latent hierarchy, with the
more general topics and categories at the top, and more specialised ones at the
bottom. Here we apply a recent, cooccurrence-based tag hierarchy extraction
method to sets of keywords obtained from four different on-line news portals.
The resulting hierarchies show substantial differences not just in the topics
rendered as important (being at the top of the hierarchy) or of less interest
(categorised low in the hierarchy), but also in the underlying network
structure. This reveals discrepancies between the plausible keyword association
frameworks in the studied news portals
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