Message passing and Monte Carlo algorithms: connecting fixed points with metastable states

Mean field-like approximations (including naive mean field, Bethe and Kikuchi and more general Cluster Variational Methods) are known to stabilize ordered phases at temperatures higher than the thermodynamical transition. For example, in the Edwards-Anderson model in 2-dimensions these approximations predict a spin glass transition at finite $T$. Here we show that the spin glass solutions of the Cluster Variational Method (CVM) at plaquette level do describe well actual metastable states of the system. Moreover, we prove that these states can be used to predict non trivial statistical quantities, like the distribution of the overlap between two replicas. Our results support the idea that message passing algorithms can be helpful to accelerate Monte Carlo simulations in finite dimensional systems.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Ozone application in water sources: effects of operational parameters and water quality variables on ozone residual profiles and decay rates

Systematic ozonation tests were conducted by means of a mobile pilot plant. Water source 1 was a low turbidity stream with very low solids content and very low turbidity, apparent color and alkalinity. Water source 2 was reservoir water with higher turbidity, solids content and alkalinity than source 1. The ozone plant was a counter-current contactor composed of four columns in series. Variations in contact time, in the feed gas concentration (in terms of percent by weight of ozone) and in splitting of the total applied ozone dosage between columns 1 and 2 were tested. Concentration - time (CT) products were calculated and decay coefficients K were estimated from experimental data. The relative importance of water quality and certain operational parameters with regard to CT products and ozone decay was assessed. Total CT values seemed to increase with: (a) total applied ozone dosage, (b) percent by weight of ozone in the feed gas to the bubble contactor, (c) increasing contact time and (d) higher water quality, with regard to turbidity, apparent color, total organic carbon and particle counts. As the total applied ozone dosage was increased, the more important the contact time and ozone dosage configuration became for the total CT value. The apparent first order ozone decay rate constant (K) decreased with increasing total applied ozone dosage. The contact time appeared to exert a much stronger influence on total CT values than on K values, particularly so as the total applied ozone dosage was increased

Single-shot implementation of dispersion-scan for the characterization of ultrashort laser pulses

[EN] We demonstrate a single-shot ultrafast diagnostic, based on the dispersion-scan (d-scan) technique. In this implementation, rather than translating wedges to vary the dispersion as in scanning d-scan, the pulse to be measured experiences a spatially varying amount of dispersion in a prism. The resulting beam is then imaged into a second-harmonic generation crystal and an imaging spectrometer is used to measure the two-dimensional trace, which is analyzed using the d-scan retrieval algorithm. We compare the single-shot implementation with the scanning d-scan for the measurement of sub-3.5-fs pulses from a hollow core fiber pulse compressor. We show that the retrieval algorithm used to extract amplitude and phase of the pulse provides comparable results, proving the validity of the new single-shot implementation in the near single-cycle regime. (C)2015 Optical Society of Americ

Antileishmanial activity and evaluation of the mechanism of action of strychnobiflavone flavonoid isolated from Strychnos pseudoquina against Leishmania infantum

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. The present study aimed to investigate the in vitro antileishmanial activity of strychnobiflavone flavonoid against Leishmania infantum, as well as its mechanism of action, and evaluate the ex vivo biodistribution profile of the flavonoid in naive BALB/c mice. The antileishmanial activity (IC50 value) of strychnobiflavone against stationary promastigote and amastigote-like stages of the parasites was of 5.4 and 18.9 μM, respectively; with a 50% cytotoxic concentration (CC50) value of 125.0 μM on murine macrophages, resulting in selectivity index (SI) of 23.2 and 6.6, respectively. Amphotericin B, used as a positive control, presented SI values of 7.6 and 3.3 for promastigote and amastigote-like stages of L. infantum, respectively. The strychnobiflavone was also effective in reducing in significant levels the percentage of infected macrophages, as well as the number of amastigotes per macrophage, after the treatment of infected macrophages using the flavonoid. By using different fluorescent probes, we investigated the bioenergetics metabolism of L. infantum promastigotes and demonstrated that the flavonoid caused the depolarization of the mitochondrial membrane potential, without affecting the production of reactive oxygen species. In addition, using SYTOX® green as a fluorescent probe, the strychnobiflavone demonstrated no interference in plasma membrane permeability. For the ex vivo biodistribution assays, the flavonoid was labeled with technetium-99m and studied in a mouse model by intraperitoneal route. After a single dose administration, the scintigraphic images demonstrated a highest uptake by the liver and spleen of the animals within 60 min, resulting in low concentrations after 24 h. The present study therefore demonstrated, for the first time, the antileishmanial activity of the strychnobiflavone against L. infantum, and suggests that the mitochondria of the parasites may be the possible target organelle. The preferential distribution of this compound into the liver and spleen of the animals could warrant its employ in the treatment of visceral leishmaniasis.This work was supported by grants from Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Nanobiofarmacêutica (INCT-Nanobiofar), FAPEMIG (CBB-APQ-00819-12), CNPq (APQ-472090/2011-9, APQ- 482976/2012-8, and APQ-488237/2013-0) and São Paulo State Research Fundation (FAPESP 2012/18756-1). MACF is a grant recipient of FAPEMIG/CAPES. EAFC, VNC and AGT are grant recipient of CNPqPeer Reviewe

Diálogo entre Fídias e William Kentridge na paisagem cultural intertemporal da Acrópole de Atenas: interatividade e performance do público na arte antiga e contemporânea

The paper reflects on the dialogues that are established in the cultural landscape of the Acropolis between the frieze of the Parthenon carved by Phidias in the century. V a.C. and the expanded cinema artwork More Sweetly Play the Dance by William Kentridge, shown in 2017 in Athens. We show how the performance of the visitor’s walk around the Parthenon and on the sidewalk around the Acropolis where Kentridge’s work was exhibited makes its interactivity promote temporal and spatial intersections, between Antiquity, the medieval period, and contemporaneity.O artigo traz uma reflexão sobre os diálogos que são estabelecidos na paisagem cultural da Acrópole entre o friso do Partenon esculpido por Fídias no séc. V a.C. e a obra de cinema expandido More Sweetly Play the Dance de Willian Kentridge, exibida em 2017 em Atenas. Mostramos como a performance do visitante caminhando em torno do Partenon e no calçadão em torno da Acrópole, onde foi exibida a obra de Kentridge, faz com que a sua interatividade promova entrecruzamentos temporais e espaciais, antre Antiguidade, período medieval, e contemporaneidade

Replica Cluster Variational Method

We present a general formalism to make the Replica-Symmetric and Replica-Symmetry-Breaking ansatz in the context of Kikuchi's Cluster Variational Method (CVM). Using replicas and the message-passing formulation of CVM we obtain a variational expression of the replicated free energy of a system with quenched disorder, both averaged and on a single sample, and make the hierarchical ansatz using functionals of functions of fields to represent the messages. We begin to study the method considering the plaquette approximation to the averaged free energy of the Edwards-Anderson model in the paramagnetic Replica-Symmetric phase. In two dimensions we find that the spurious spin-glass phase transition of the Bethe approximation disappears and the paramagnetic phase is stable down to zero temperature in all the three regular 2D lattices. The quantitative estimates of the free energy and of various other quantities improve those of the Bethe approximation. We provide the physical interpretation of the beliefs in the replica-symmetric phase as disorder distributions of the local Hamiltonians. The messages instead do not admit such an interpretation and indeed they cannot be represented as populations in the spin-glass phase at variance with the Bethe approximation.Comment: 32 pages, 14 figures. In the revised version the content has been reorganized in order to imporve readabilit

Using tag-neighbors for query expansion in medical information retrieval

In the context of medical document retrieval, users often under-specified queries lead to undesired search results that suffer from not containing the information they seek, inadequate domain knowledge matches and unreliable sources. To overcome the limitations of under-specified queries, we utilize tags to enhance information retrieval capabilities by expanding users' original queries with context-relevant information. We compute a set of significant tag neighbor candidates based on the neighbor frequency and weight, and utilize the most frequent and weighted neighbors to expand an entry query that has terms matching tags. The proposed approach is evaluated using MedWorm medical article collection and standard evaluation methods from the text retrieval conference (TREC). We compared the baseline of 0.353 for Mean Average Precision (MAP), reaching a MAP 0.491 (+39%) with the query expansion. In-depth analysis shows how this strategy is beneficial when compared with different ranks of the retrieval results. © 2011 IEEE

Glauber Critical Dynamics: Exact Solution of the Kinetic Gaussian Model

In this paper, we have exactly solved Glauber critical dynamics of the Gaussian model on three dimensions. Of course, it is much easy to apply to low dimensional case. The key steps are that we generalize the spin change mechanism from Glauber's single-spin flipping to single-spin transition and give a normalized version of the transition probability . We have also investigated the dynamical critical exponent and found surprisingly that the dynamical critical exponent is highly universal which refer to that for one- two- and three-dimensions they have same value independent of spatial dimensionality in contrast to static (equilibrium) critical exponents.Comment: 9 page