325 research outputs found
Turning to God in the Face of Ostracism: Effects of Social Exclusion on Religiousness
The present research proposes that individuals who are socially excluded can turn to religion to cope with the experience. Empirical studies conducted to test this hypothesis consistently found that socially excluded persons reported (a) significantly higher levels of religious affiliation (Studies 1, 2, and 4) and (b) stronger intentions to engage in religious behaviors (Study 2) than comparable, nonexcluded individuals. Direct support for the stress-buffering function of religiousness was also found, with a religious prime reducing the aggression-eliciting effects of consequent social rejection (Study 5). These effects were observed in both Christian and Muslim samples, revealing that turning to religion can be a powerful coping response when dealing with social rejection. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed
Floffy: Designing an Outdoor Robot for Children
In our research we utilized the domain of entertainment robotics to educate children on the principles of environmental awareness by playful means outdoors. Our research revolved around the iterative design of Floffy: the environmental robot, which was essentially a playful toy robot that would respond positively to interaction that was beneficial for the environment and the child’s own well being and negatively to interaction or behaviour that was detrimental to the surroundings. We conducted an explorative, informal evaluation of Floffy with two small groups of children and they rated their experience with it positively. Our results show that there is potential in utilizing entertainment robots to educate children on serious and critical issues such as saving our environment and being sustainable
An iterative semi-implicit scheme with robust damping
An efficient, iterative semi-implicit (SI) numerical method for the time
integration of stiff wave systems is presented. Physics-based assumptions are
used to derive a convergent iterative formulation of the SI scheme which
enables the monitoring and control of the error introduced by the SI operator.
This iteration essentially turns a semi-implicit method into a fully implicit
method. Accuracy, rather than stability, determines the timestep. The scheme is
second-order accurate and shown to be equivalent to a simple preconditioning
method. We show how the diffusion operators can be handled so as to yield the
property of robust damping, i.e., dissipating the solution at all values of the
parameter \mathcal D\dt, where is a diffusion operator and \dt
the timestep. The overall scheme remains second-order accurate even if the
advection and diffusion operators do not commute. In the limit of no physical
dissipation, and for a linear test wave problem, the method is shown to be
symplectic. The method is tested on the problem of Kinetic Alfv\'en wave
mediated magnetic reconnection. A Fourier (pseudo-spectral) representation is
used. A 2-field gyrofluid model is used and an efficacious k-space SI operator
for this problem is demonstrated. CPU speed-up factors over a CFL-limited
explicit algorithm ranging from to several hundreds are obtained,
while accurately capturing the results of an explicit integration. Possible
extension of these results to a real-space (grid) discretization is discussed.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of Computational Physics. Clarifications and
caveats in response to referees, numerical demonstration of convergence rate,
generalized symplectic proo
Summer CO2 evasion from streams and rivers in the Kolyma River basin, north-east Siberia
Inland water systems are generally supersaturated in carbon dioxide (CO2) and are increasingly recognized as playing an important role in the global carbon cycle. The Arctic may be particularly important in this respect, given the abundance of inland waters and carbon contained in Arctic soils; however, a lack of trace gas measurements from small streams in the Arctic currently limits this understanding.We investigated the spatial variability of CO2 evasion during the summer low-flow period from streams and rivers in the northern portion of the Kolyma River basin in north-eastern Siberia. To this end, partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2) and gas exchange velocities (k) were measured at a diverse set of streams and rivers to calculate CO2 evasion fluxes.
We combined these CO2 evasion estimates with satellite remote sensing and geographic information system techniques to calculate total areal CO2 emissions. Our results show that small streams are substantial sources of atmospheric CO2 owing to high pCO2 and k, despite being a small portion of total inland water surface area. In contrast, large rivers were generally near equilibrium with atmospheric CO2. Extrapolating our findings across the Panteleikha-Ambolikha sub-watersheds demonstrated that small streams play a major role in CO2 evasion, accounting for 86% of the total summer CO2 emissions from inland waters within these two sub-watersheds. Further expansion of these regional CO2 emission estimates across time and space will be critical to accurately quantify and understand the role of Arctic streams and rivers in the global carbon budget
Moduli Stabilization from Fluxes in a Simple IIB Orientifold
We study novel type IIB compactifications on the T^6/Z_2 orientifold. This
geometry arises in the T-dual description of Type I theory on T^6, and one
normally introduces 16 space-filling D3-branes to cancel the RR tadpoles. Here,
we cancel the RR tadpoles either partially or fully by turning on three-form
flux in the compact geometry. The resulting (super)potential for moduli is
calculable. We demonstrate that one can find many examples of N=1
supersymmetric vacua with greatly reduced numbers of moduli in this system. A
few examples with N>1 supersymmetry or complete supersymmetry breaking are also
discussed.Comment: 49 pages, harvmac big; v2, corrected some typo
Gaugino Condensation and Nonperturbative Superpotentials in Flux Compactifications
There are two known sources of nonperturbative superpotentials for K\"ahler
moduli in type IIB orientifolds, or F-theory compactifications on Calabi-Yau
fourfolds, with flux: Euclidean brane instantons and low-energy dynamics in D7
brane gauge theories. The first class of effects, Euclidean D3 branes which
lift in M-theory to M5 branes wrapping divisors of arithmetic genus 1 in the
fourfold, is relatively well understood. The second class has been less
explored. In this paper, we consider the explicit example of F-theory on with flux. The fluxes lift the D7 brane matter fields, and stabilize
stacks of D7 branes at loci of enhanced gauge symmetry. The resulting theories
exhibit gaugino condensation, and generate a nonperturbative superpotential for
K\"ahler moduli. We describe how the relevant geometries in general contain
cycles of arithmetic genus (and how divisors can
contribute to the superpotential, in the presence of flux). This second class
of effects is likely to be important in finding even larger classes of models
where the KKLT mechanism of moduli stabilization can be realized. We also
address various claims about the situation for IIB models with a single
K\"ahler modulus.Comment: 24 pages, harvmac, no figures, references adde
de Sitter Vacua in String Theory
We outline the construction of metastable de Sitter vacua of type IIB string
theory. Our starting point is highly warped IIB compactifications with
nontrivial NS and RR three-form fluxes. By incorporating known corrections to
the superpotential from Euclidean D-brane instantons or gaugino condensation,
one can make models with all moduli fixed, yielding a supersymmetric AdS
vacuum. Inclusion of a small number of anti-D3 branes in the resulting warped
geometry allows one to uplift the AdS minimum and make it a metastable de
Sitter ground state. The lifetime of our metastable de Sitter vacua is much
greater than the cosmological timescale of 10^10 years. We also prove, under
certain conditions, that the lifetime of dS space in string theory will always
be shorter than the recurrence time.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figs, added comments on the thin wall approximation to
tunnelin
D-Sitter Space: Causal Structure, Thermodynamics, and Entropy
We study the entropy of concrete de Sitter flux compactifications and
deformations of them containing D-brane domain walls. We determine the relevant
causal and thermodynamic properties of these "D-Sitter" deformations of de
Sitter spacetimes. We find a string scale correspondence point at which the
entropy localized on the D-branes (and measured by probes sent from an observer
in the middle of the bubble) scales the same with large flux quantum numbers as
the entropy of the original de Sitter space, and at which Bousso's bound is
saturated by the D-brane degrees of freedom (up to order one coefficients) for
an infinite range of times. From the geometry of a static patch of D-Sitter
space and from basic relations in flux compactifications, we find support for
the possibility of a low energy open string description of the static patch of
de Sitter space.Comment: 46 pages, harvmac big; 14 figure
On the Taxonomy of Flux Vacua
We investigate several predictions about the properties of IIB flux vacua on
Calabi-Yau orientifolds, by constructing and characterizing a very large set of
vacua in a specific example, an orientifold of the Calabi-Yau hypersurface in
. We find support for the prediction of Ashok and Douglas
that the density of vacua on moduli space is governed by where and are curvature and K\"ahler forms on the moduli
space. The conifold point on moduli space therefore serves as an
attractor, with a significant fraction of the flux vacua contained in a small
neighborhood surrounding . We also study the functional dependence of
the number of flux vacua on the D3 charge in the fluxes, finding simple power
law growth.Comment: 22 pages, harvmac; v2 typos corrected, refs added; v3 minor error
correcte
Nongeometric Flux Compactifications
We investigate a simple class of type II string compactifications which
incorporate nongeometric "fluxes" in addition to "geometric flux" and the usual
H-field and R-R fluxes. These compactifications are nongeometric analogues of
the twisted torus. We develop T-duality rules for NS-NS geometric and
nongeometric fluxes, which we use to construct a superpotential for the
dimensionally reduced four-dimensional theory. The resulting structure is
invariant under T-duality, so that the distribution of vacua in the IIA and IIB
theories is identical when nongeometric fluxes are included. This gives a
concrete framework in which to investigate the possibility that generic string
compactifications may be nongeometric in any duality frame. The framework
developed in this paper also provides some concrete hints for how mirror
symmetry can be generalized to compactifications with arbitrary H-flux, whose
mirrors are generically nongeometric.Comment: 26 pages, JHEP3. v3: references, minor corrections, and
clarifications added. v4: sign correcte
- …