28,208 research outputs found
A medieval fallacy: the crystalline lens in the center of the eye.
ObjectiveTo determine whether, as most modern historians have written, ancient Greco-Roman authors believed the crystalline lens is positioned in the center of the eye.BackgroundHistorians have written that statements about cataract couching by Celsus, or perhaps Galen of Pergamon, suggested a centrally located lens. Celsus specifically wrote that a couching needle placed intermediate between the corneal limbus and the lateral canthus enters an empty space, presumed to represent the posterior chamber.MethodsAncient ophthalmic literature was analyzed to understand where these authors believed the crystalline lens was positioned. In order to estimate where Celsus proposed entering the eye during couching, we prospectively measured the distance from the temporal corneal limbus to the lateral canthus in 30 healthy adults.ResultsRufus of Ephesus and Galen wrote that the lens is anterior enough to contact the iris. Galen wrote that the lens equator joins other ocular structures at the corneoscleral junction. In 30 subjects, half the distance from the temporal corneal limbus to the lateral canthus was a mean of 4.5 mm (range: 3.3-5.3 mm). Descriptions of couching by Celsus and others are consistent with pars plana entry of the couching needle. Anterior angulation of the needle would permit contact of the needle with the lens.ConclusionAncient descriptions of anatomy and couching do not establish the microanatomic relationships of the ciliary region with any modern degree of accuracy. Nonetheless, ancient authors, such as Galen and Rufus, clearly understood that the lens is located anteriorly. There is little reason to believe that Celsus or other ancient authors held a variant understanding of the anatomy of a healthy eye. The notion of the central location of the lens seems to have arisen with Arabic authors in 9th century Mesopotamia, and lasted for over 7 centuries
Lexicographic choice functions without archimedeanicity
We investigate the connection between choice functions and lexicographic probabilities, by means of the convexity axiom considered by Seidenfeld, Schervisch and Kadane (2010) but without imposing any Archimedean condition. We show that lexicographic probabilities are related to a particular type of sets of desirable gambles, and investigate the properties of the coherent choice function this induces via maximality. Finally, we show that the convexity axiom is necessary but not sufficient for a coherent choice function to be the infimum of a class of lexicographic ones
A volumetric Penrose inequality for conformally flat manifolds
We consider asymptotically flat Riemannian manifolds with nonnegative scalar
curvature that are conformal to , and so that
their boundary is a minimal hypersurface. (Here, is open
bounded with smooth mean-convex boundary.) We prove that the ADM mass of any
such manifold is bounded below by , where is the
Euclidean volume of and is the volume of the Euclidean
unit -ball. This gives a partial proof to a conjecture of Bray and Iga
\cite{brayiga}. Surprisingly, we do not require the boundary to be outermost.Comment: 7 page
The nature of the long time decay at a second order transition point
We show that at a second order phase transition, of \phi^4 like system, a
necessary condition for streched exponential decay of the time structure factor
is obeyed. Using the ideas presented in this proof a crude estimate of the
decay of the structure factor is obtained and shown to yield stretched
exponential decay under very reasonable conditions.Comment: 7 page
Hybrid simulations of lateral diffusion in fluctuating membranes
In this paper we introduce a novel method to simulate lateral diffusion of
inclusions in a fluctuating membrane. The regarded systems are governed by two
dynamic processes: the height fluctuations of the membrane and the diffusion of
the inclusion along the membrane. While membrane fluctuations can be expressed
in terms of a dynamic equation which follows from the Helfrich Hamiltonian, the
dynamics of the diffusing particle is described by a Langevin or Smoluchowski
equation. In the latter equations, the curvature of the surface needs to be
accounted for, which makes particle diffusion a function of membrane
fluctuations. In our scheme these coupled dynamic equations, the membrane
equation and the Langevin equation for the particle, are numerically integrated
to simulate diffusion in a membrane. The simulations are used to study the
ratio of the diffusion coefficient projected on a flat plane and the
intramembrane diffusion coefficient for the case of free diffusion. We compare
our results with recent analytical results that employ a preaveraging
approximation and analyze the validity of this approximation. A detailed
simulation study of the relevant correlation functions reveals a surprisingly
large range where the approximation is applicable.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Hall effect in quasi one-dimensional organic conductors
We study the Hall effect in a system of weakly coupled Luttinger Liquid
chains, using a Memory function approach to compute the Hall constant in the
presence of umklapp scattering along the chains. In this approximation, the
Hall constant decomposes into two terms: a high-frequency term and a Memory
function term. For the case of zero umklapp scattering, where the Memory
function vanishes, the Hall constant is simply the band value, in agreement
with former results in a similar model with no dissipation along the chains.
With umklapp scattering along the chains, we find a power-law temperature
dependance of the Hall constant. We discuss the applications to quasi 1D
organic conductors at high temperatures.Comment: Proceedings of the ISCOM conference "Sixth International Symposium on
Crystalline Organic Metals, Superconductors, and Ferromagnets", Key West,
Florida, USA (Sept. 2005), to be plublished in the Journal of Low Temperature
Physic
Diversidade, síndromes de dispersão e formas de vida vegetal em diferentes estágios sucessionais de florestas secundárias em Tomé-Açu, Pará, Brasil.
Florestas secundárias (capoeiras) são formas de vegetação resultantes de processos sucessionais determinados pelo histórico de uso da terra, distância de florestas primárias bem como fatores estocásticos. O estágio sucessional pode indicar quais as formas de vida vegetal e as síndromes de dispersão dominantes no ambiente. Neste estudo foram avaliados: uma floresta primária (controle) e florestas secundárias de 25, 10 e 5 anos no município de Tomé-Açu, Pará, Brasil. A primeira apresentou 224 espécies e a floresta secundária de cinco anos teve 91, a menor quantidade. O número de espécies diferiu entre ambientes (χ2 = 59,6; p <0,001), mas não a quantidade de famílias (χ2 = 3,6; p = 0,305). O índice de Shannon-Weaner foi alto para todas as florestas, exceto para a capoeira de cinco anos. A distribuição de formas de vida e as síndromes de dispersão diferiram para todas as capoeiras quando comparadas com as distribuições observadas na floresta primária. As formas arbustivas predominaram na capoeira de cinco anos e as arbóreas nas demais. As espécies zoocóricas foram as mais frequentes, enquanto que as autocóricas e hidrocóricas as mais comuns na floresta primária. Devido às boas condições de diversidade das florestas secundárias de Tomé-Açu, sugerimos ações para um manejo florestal sustentável visando retornos econômicos e a conservação destes ambientes
Improving state-of-theart continuous speech recognition systems using the N-best paradigm with neural networks
In an effort to advance the state of the art in continuous speech recognition employing hidden Markov models (HMM), Segmental Neural Nets (SNN) were introduced recently to ameliorate the wellknown limitations of HMMs, namely, the conditional-independence limitation and the relative difficulty with which HMMs can handle segmental features. We describe a hybrid SNN/I-IMM system that combines the speed and performance of our HMM system with the segmental modeling capabilities of SNNs. The integration of the two acoustic modeling techniques is achieved successfully via the N-best rescoring paradigm. The N-best lists are used not only for recognition, but also during training. This discriminative training using N-best is demonstrated to improve performance. When tested on the DARPA Resource Management speaker-independent corpus, the hybrid SNN/HMM system decreases the error by about 20% compared to the state-of-the-art HMM system
Coherent tunneling by adiabatic passage in an optical waveguide system
We report on the first experimental demonstration of light transfer in an
engineered triple-well optical waveguide structure which provides a classic
analogue of Coherent Tunnelling by Adiabatic Passage (CTAP) recently proposed
for coherent transport in space of neutral atoms or electrons among
tunneling-coupled optical traps or quantum wells [A.D. Greentree et al., Phys.
Rev. B 70, 235317 (2004); K. Eckert et al., Phys. Rev. A 70, 023606 (2004)].
The direct visualization of CTAP wavepacket dynamics enabled by our simple
optical system clearly shows that in the counterintuitive passage scheme light
waves tunnel between the two outer wells without appreciable excitation of the
middle well.Comment: submitted for publicatio
Fluids with quenched disorder: Scaling of the free energy barrier near critical points
In the context of Monte Carlo simulations, the analysis of the probability
distribution of the order parameter , as obtained in simulation
boxes of finite linear extension , allows for an easy estimation of the
location of the critical point and the critical exponents. For Ising-like
systems without quenched disorder, becomes scale invariant at the
critical point, where it assumes a characteristic bimodal shape featuring two
overlapping peaks. In particular, the ratio between the value of at
the peaks () and the value at the minimum in-between ()
becomes -independent at criticality. However, for Ising-like systems with
quenched random fields, we argue that instead should be observed, where is the
"violation of hyperscaling" exponent. Since is substantially non-zero,
the scaling of with system size should be easily detectable in
simulations. For two fluid models with quenched disorder, versus
was measured, and the expected scaling was confirmed. This provides further
evidence that fluids with quenched disorder belong to the universality class of
the random-field Ising model.Comment: sent to J. Phys. Cond. Mat
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