The NASA Space Station program plans

The design of a permanently manned space station is discussed. The role of the space shuttle, planning guidelines, international cooperation, and commercial possibilities are among the topics discussed

The modular variety of hyperelliptic curves of genus three

The modular variety of non singular and complete hyperelliptic curves with level-two structure of genus 3 is a 5-dimensional quasi projective variety which admits several standard compactifications. The first one, X, comes from the realization of this variety as a sub-variety of the Siegel modular variety of level two and genus three .We will be to describe the equations of X in a suitable projective embedding and its Hilbert function. It will turn out that X is normal. A further model comes from geometric invariant theory using so-called semistable degenerated point configurations in (P^1)^8 . We denote this GIT-compactification by Y. The equations of this variety in a suitable projective embedding are known. This variety also can by identified with a Baily-Borel compactified ball-quotient. We will describe these results in some detail and obtain new proofs including some finer results for them. We have a birational map between Y and X . In this paper we use the fact that there are graded algebras (closely related to algebras of modular forms) A,B such that X=proj(A) and Y=proj(B). This homomorphism rests on the theory of Thomae (19th century), in which the thetanullwerte of hyperelliptic curves have been computed. Using the explicit equations for $A,B$ we can compute the base locus of the map from Y to X. Blowing up the base locus and the singularity of Y, we get a dominant, smooth model {\tilde Y}. We will see that {\tilde Y} is isomorphic to the compactification of families of marked projective lines (P^1,x_1,...,x_8), usually denoted by {\bar M_{0,8}}. There are several combinatorial similarities between the models X and Y. These similarities can be described best, if one uses the ball-model to describe Y.Comment: 39 page

Some Siegel threefolds with a Calabi-Yau model II

In the paper [FSM] we described some Siegel modular threefolds which admit a Calabi-Yau model. Using a different method we give in this paper an enlarged list of such varieties that admits a Calabi-Yau model in the following weak sense: there exists a desingularization in the category of complex spaces of the Satake compactification which admits a holomorphic three-form without zeros and whose first Betti number vanishes Basic for our method is the paper [GN] of van Geemen and Nygaard.Comment: 23 pages, no figure

A Siegel cusp form of degree 12 and weight 12

The theta series of the two unimodular even positive definite lattices of rank 16 are known to be linearly dependent in degree at most 3 and linearly independent in degree 4. In this paper we consider the next case of the 24 Niemeier lattices of rank 24. The associated theta series are linearly dependent in degree at most 11 and linearly independent in degree 12. The resulting Siegel cusp form of degree 12 and weight 12 is a Hecke eigenform which seems to have interesting properties.Comment: 12 pages, plain te

Improved approximate inspirals of test-bodies into Kerr black holes

We present an improved version of the approximate scheme for generating inspirals of test-bodies into a Kerr black hole recently developed by Glampedakis, Hughes and Kennefick. Their original "hybrid" scheme was based on combining exact relativistic expressions for the evolution of the orbital elements (the semi-latus rectum p and eccentricity e) with approximate, weak-field, formula for the energy and angular momentum fluxes, amended by the assumption of constant inclination angle, iota, during the inspiral. Despite the fact that the resulting inspirals were overall well-behaved, certain pathologies remained for orbits in the strong field regime and for orbits which are nearly circular and/or nearly polar. In this paper we eliminate these problems by incorporating an array of improvements in the approximate fluxes. Firstly, we add certain corrections which ensure the correct behaviour of the fluxes in the limit of vanishing eccentricity and/or 90 degrees inclination. Secondly, we use higher order post-Newtonian formulae, adapted for generic orbits. Thirdly, we drop the assumption of constant inclination. Instead, we first evolve the Carter constant by means of an approximate post-Newtonian expression and subsequently extract the evolution of iota. Finally, we improve the evolution of circular orbits by using fits to the angular momentum and inclination evolution determined by Teukolsky based calculations. As an application of the improved scheme we provide a sample of generic Kerr inspirals and for the specific case of nearly circular orbits we locate the critical radius where orbits begin to decircularise under radiation reaction. These easy-to-generate inspirals should become a useful tool for exploring LISA data analysis issues and may ultimately play a role in source detection.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figures, some typos corrected, short section on conservative corrections added, minor changes for consistency with published versio

Performance evaluation of wheels for lunar vehicles

Performance evaluation of wheels for lunar vehicle

CSM-365 - Using schema theory to explore interactions of multiple operators

In the last two years the schema theory for Genetic Programming (GP) has been applied to the problem of understanding the length biases of a variety of crossover and mutation operators on variable length linear structures. In these initial papers, operators were studied in isolation. In practice, however, they are typically used in various combinations, and in this paper we present the first schema theory analysis of the complex interactions of multiple operators. In particular we apply the schema theory to the use of standard subtree crossover, full mutation, and grow mutation (in varying proportions) to variable length linear structures in the one-then-zeros problem. We then show how the results can be used to guide choices about the relative proportion of these operators in order to achieve certain structural goals during a run

Harvesting Entities from the Web Using Unique Identifiers -- IBEX

In this paper we study the prevalence of unique entity identifiers on the Web. These are, e.g., ISBNs (for books), GTINs (for commercial products), DOIs (for documents), email addresses, and others. We show how these identifiers can be harvested systematically from Web pages, and how they can be associated with human-readable names for the entities at large scale. Starting with a simple extraction of identifiers and names from Web pages, we show how we can use the properties of unique identifiers to filter out noise and clean up the extraction result on the entire corpus. The end result is a database of millions of uniquely identified entities of different types, with an accuracy of 73--96% and a very high coverage compared to existing knowledge bases. We use this database to compute novel statistics on the presence of products, people, and other entities on the Web.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures, 9 tables. Complete technical report for A. Talaika, J. A. Biega, A. Amarilli, and F. M. Suchanek. IBEX: Harvesting Entities from the Web Using Unique Identifiers. WebDB workshop, 201

Carrier scattering, mobilities and electrostatic potential in mono-, bi- and tri-layer graphenes

The carrier density and temperature dependence of the Hall mobility in mono-, bi- and tri-layer graphene has been systematically studied. We found that as the carrier density increases, the mobility decreases for mono-layer graphene, while it increases for bi-layer/tri-layer graphene. This can be explained by the different density of states in mono-layer and bi-layer/tri-layer graphenes. In mono-layer, the mobility also decreases with increasing temperature primarily due to surface polar substrate phonon scattering. In bi-layer/tri-layer graphene, on the other hand, the mobility increases with temperature because the field of the substrate surface phonons is effectively screened by the additional graphene layer(s) and the mobility is dominated by Coulomb scattering. We also find that the temperature dependence of the Hall coefficient in mono-, bi- and tri-layer graphene can be explained by the formation of electron and hole puddles in graphene. This model also explains the temperature dependence of the minimum conductance of mono-, bi- and tri-layer graphene. The electrostatic potential variations across the different graphene samples are extracted.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Nuclear Black Hole Formation in Clumpy Galaxies at High Redshift

Massive stellar clumps in high redshift galaxies interact and migrate to the center to form a bulge and exponential disk in <1 Gyr. Here we consider the fate of intermediate mass black holes (BHs) that might form by massive-star coalescence in the dense young clusters of these disk clumps. We find that the BHs move inward with the clumps and reach the inner few hundred parsecs in only a few orbit times. There they could merge into a supermassive BH by dynamical friction. The ratio of BH mass to stellar mass in the disk clumps is approximately preserved in the final ratio of BH to bulge mass. Because this ratio for individual clusters has been estimated to be ~10^{-3}, the observed BH-to-bulge mass ratio results. We also obtain a relation between BH mass and bulge velocity dispersion that is compatible with observations of present-day galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Ap