Continuous Forest Fire Propagation in a Local Small World Network Model

This paper presents the development of a new continuous forest fire model implemented as a weighted local small-world network approach. This new approach was designed to simulate fire patterns in real, heterogeneous landscapes. The wildland fire spread is simulated on a square lattice in which each cell represents an area of the land's surface. The interaction between burning and non-burning cells, in the present work induced by flame radiation, may be extended well beyond nearest neighbors. It depends on local conditions of topography and vegetation types. An approach based on a solid flame model is used to predict the radiative heat flux from the flame generated by the burning of each site towards its neighbors. The weighting procedure takes into account the self-degradation of the tree and the ignition processes of a combustible cell through time. The model is tested on a field presenting a range of slopes and with data collected from a real wildfire scenario. The critical behavior of the spreading process is investigated

Fundamento científico de la armonía

Fil: Fuentes, Juan B.

Quantile regression for mixed models with an application to examine blood pressure trends in China

Cardiometabolic diseases have substantially increased in China in the past 20 years and blood pressure is a primary modifiable risk factor. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we examine blood pressure trends in China from 1991 to 2009, with a concentration on age cohorts and urbanicity. Very large values of blood pressure are of interest, so we model the conditional quantile functions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure. This allows the covariate effects in the middle of the distribution to vary from those in the upper tail, the focal point of our analysis. We join the distributions of systolic and diastolic blood pressure using a copula, which permits the relationships between the covariates and the two responses to share information and enables probabilistic statements about systolic and diastolic blood pressure jointly. Our copula maintains the marginal distributions of the group quantile effects while accounting for within-subject dependence, enabling inference at the population and subject levels. Our population-level regression effects change across quantile level, year and blood pressure type, providing a rich environment for inference. To our knowledge, this is the first quantile function model to explicitly model within-subject autocorrelation and is the first quantile function approach that simultaneously models multivariate conditional response. We find that the association between high blood pressure and living in an urban area has evolved from positive to negative, with the strongest changes occurring in the upper tail. The increase in urbanization over the last twenty years coupled with the transition from the positive association between urbanization and blood pressure in earlier years to a more uniform association with urbanization suggests increasing blood pressure over time throughout China, even in less urbanized areas. Our methods are available in the R package BSquare.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS841 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The glitch activity of neutron stars

We present a statistical study of the glitch population and the behaviour of the glitch activity across the known population of neutron stars. An unbiased glitch database was put together based on systematic searches of radio timing data of 898 rotation-powered pulsars obtained with the Jodrell Bank and Parkes observatories. Glitches identified in similar searches of 5 magnetars were also included. The database contains 384 glitches found in the rotation of 141 of these neutron stars. We confirm that the glitch size distribution is at least bimodal, with one sharp peak at approximately $20\, \rm{\mu\,Hz}$, which we call large glitches, and a broader distribution of smaller glitches. We also explored how the glitch activity $\dot{\nu}_{\rm{g}}$, defined as the mean frequency increment per unit of time due to glitches, correlates with the spin frequency $\nu$, spin-down rate $|\dot{\nu}|$, and various combinations of these, such as energy loss rate, magnetic field, and spin-down age. It is found that the activity is insensitive to the magnetic field and that it correlates strongly with the energy loss rate, though magnetars deviate from the trend defined by the rotation-powered pulsars. However, we find that a constant ratio $\dot\nu_{\rm{g}}/|\dot\nu| = 0.010 \pm 0.001$ is consistent with the behaviour of all rotation-powered pulsars and magnetars. This relation is dominated by large glitches, which occur at a rate directly proportional to $|\dot{\nu}|$. The only exception are the rotation-powered pulsars with the highest values of $|\dot{\nu}|$, such as the Crab pulsar and PSR B0540$-$69, which exhibit a much smaller glitch activity, intrinsically different from each other and from the rest of the population. The activity due to small glitches also shows an increasing trend with $|\dot\nu|$, but this relation is biased by selection effects.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Berry Phase Quantum Thermometer

We show how Berry phase can be used to construct an ultra-high precision quantum thermometer. An important advantage of our scheme is that there is no need for the thermometer to acquire thermal equilibrium with the sample. This reduces measurement times and avoids precision limitations.Comment: Updated to published version. I. Fuentes previously published as I. Fuentes-Guridi and I. Fuentes-Schulle

Criterios generales de intervención en monumentos de piedra

La piedra ha sido utilizada desde antiguo como material de construcción por su durabilidad y resistencia. En la actualidad, la contaminación ha producido graves alteraciones en la misma, poniendo en peligro la integridad de nuestro patrimonio histórico-artístico. El proceso de intervención deberá incluir los tratamientos adecuados que devuelvan al material su resistencia original y la cohesión entre sus partículas teniendo en cuenta que cada obra presenta una problemática diferente, sin olvidar la importancia de un adecuado y continuo mantenimiento.Stone has been used since remote ages as a construction material due to its durability and resistance. Nowadays, pollution is introducing severe damage in stone works and is al so harming the artistic legacy of our cities. This paper proposes a restoration process that includes adequate treatment to restore the original resistance and cohesion of the material. It al so stresses the importance of an adequate maintenance process

Entanglement of Dirac fields in an expanding spacetime

We study the entanglement generated between Dirac modes in a 2-dimensional conformally flat Robertson-Walker universe. We find radical qualitative differences between the bosonic and fermionic entanglement generated by the expansion. The particular way in which fermionic fields get entangled encodes more information about the underlying space-time than the bosonic case, thereby allowing us to reconstruct the parameters of the history of the expansion. This highlights the importance of bosonic/fermionic statistics to account for relativistic effects on the entanglement of quantum fields.Comment: revtex4, 7 figures, I.F. previously published as Fuentes-Guridi and Fuentes-Schuller. Journal reference update