730 research outputs found
Doing Biopolitics Differently? Radical Potential in the Post-2015 MDG and SDG Debates
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Parallelisation and application of AD3 as a method for solving large scale combinatorial auctions
Auctions, and combinatorial auctions (CAs), have been successfully employed to solve coordination problems in a wide range of application domains. However, the scale of CAs that can be optimally solved is small because of the complexity of the winner determination problem (WDP), namely of finding the bids that maximise the auctioneerâs revenue. A way of approximating the solution of a WDP is to solve its linear programming relaxation. The recently proposed Alternate Direction Dual Decomposition algorithm (AD3) has been shown to ef- ficiently solve large-scale LP relaxations. Hence, in this paper we show how to encode the WDP so that it can be approximated by means of AD3. Moreover, we present PAR-AD3, the first parallel implementation of AD3. PAR-AD3 shows to be up to 12.4 times faster than CPLEX in a single-thread execution, and up to 23 times faster than parallel CPLEX in an 8-core architecture. Therefore PAR- AD3 becomes the algorithm of choice to solve large-scale WDP LP relaxations for hard instances. Furthermore, PAR-AD3 has potential when considering large- scale coordination problems that must be solved as optimisation problems.Research supported by MICINN projects TIN2011-28689-C02-01, TIN2013-45732-C4-4-P and TIN2012-38876-C02-01Peer reviewe
The Supercooling of a Nematic Liquid Crystal
We investigate the supercooling of a nematic liquid crystal using fluctuating
non-linear hydrodynamic equations. The Martin-Siggia-Rose formalism is used to
calculate renormalized transport coefficients to one-loop order. Similar
theories for isotropic liquids have shown substantial increases of the
viscosities as the liquid is supercooled or compressed due to feedback from the
density fluctuations which are freezing. We find similar results here for the
longitudinal and various shear viscosities of the nematic. However, the two
viscosities associated with the nematic director motion do not grow in any
dramatic way; i.e.\ there is no apparent freezing of the director modes within
this hydrodynamic formalism. Instead a glassy state of the nematic may arise
from a ``random anisotropy" coupling of the director to the frozen density.Comment: Late
Dynamics of the Local Moment Induced by Nonmagnetic Defects in Cuprates
We present a study of the spin dynamics of magnetic defects induced by Li
substitution of the plane Cu in the normal state of YBaCuO. The
fluctuations of the coupled Cu magnetic moments in the vicinity of Li are
probed by near-neighbour Y {\it and} Li NMR spin lattice relaxation.
The data indicates that the magnetic perturbation fluctuates as a single entity
with a correlation time which scales with the local static
susceptibility. This behaviour is reminiscent of the low Kondo state of
magnetic impurities in conventional metals. Surprisingly it extends well above
the ``Kondo'' temperature for the underdoped pseudogapped case.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures (same), major modifications to text, accepted in
PR
Expression and Differential Responsiveness of Central Nervous System Glial Cell Populations to the Acute Phase Protein Serum Amyloid A
Acute-phase response is a systemic reaction to environmental/inflammatory insults and involves hepatic production of acute-phase proteins, including serum amyloid A (SAA). Extrahepatically, SAA immunoreactivity is found in axonal myelin sheaths of cortex in Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis (MS), although its cellular origin is unclear. We examined the responses of cultured rat cortical astrocytes, microglia and oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) to master pro-inflammatory cytokine tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-\u3b1 and lipopolysaccaride (LPS). TNF-\u3b1 time-dependently increased Saa1 (but not Saa3) mRNA expression in purified microglia, enriched astrocytes, and OPCs (as did LPS for microglia and astrocytes). Astrocytes depleted of microglia were markedly less responsive to TNF-\u3b1 and LPS, even after re-addition of microglia. Microglia and enriched astrocytes showed complementary Saa1 expression profiles following TNF-\u3b1 or LPS challenge, being higher in microglia with TNF-\u3b1 and higher in astrocytes with LPS. Recombinant human apo-SAA stimulated production of both inflammatory mediators and its own mRNA in microglia and enriched, but not microglia-depleted astrocytes. Co-ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide/luteolin, an established anti-inflammatory/neuroprotective agent, reduced Saa1 expression in OPCs subjected to TNF-\u3b1 treatment. These last data, together with past findings suggest that co-ultramicronized palmitoylethanolamide/luteolin may be a novel approach in the treatment of inflammatory demyelinating disorders like MS
Unconventional ferromagnetic and spin-glass states of the reentrant spin glass Fe0.7Al0.3
Spin excitations of single crystal Fe0.7Al0.3 were investigated over a wide
range in energy and reciprocal space with inelastic neutron scattering. In the
ferromagnetic phase, propagating spin wave modes become paramagnon-like
diffusive modes beyond a critical wave vector q0, indicating substantial
disorder in the long-range ordered state. In the spin glass phase, spin
dynamics is strongly q-dependent, suggesting remnant short-range spin
correlations. Quantitative model for S(energy,q) in the ``ferromagnetic'' phase
is determined.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
A combined first and second order variational approach for image reconstruction
In this paper we study a variational problem in the space of functions of
bounded Hessian. Our model constitutes a straightforward higher-order extension
of the well known ROF functional (total variation minimisation) to which we add
a non-smooth second order regulariser. It combines convex functions of the
total variation and the total variation of the first derivatives. In what
follows, we prove existence and uniqueness of minimisers of the combined model
and present the numerical solution of the corresponding discretised problem by
employing the split Bregman method. The paper is furnished with applications of
our model to image denoising, deblurring as well as image inpainting. The
obtained numerical results are compared with results obtained from total
generalised variation (TGV), infimal convolution and Euler's elastica, three
other state of the art higher-order models. The numerical discussion confirms
that the proposed higher-order model competes with models of its kind in
avoiding the creation of undesirable artifacts and blocky-like structures in
the reconstructed images -- a known disadvantage of the ROF model -- while
being simple and efficiently numerically solvable.Comment: 34 pages, 89 figure
Serum amyloid A primes microglia for ATP-dependent interleukin-1\u3b2 release
Acute-phase response is a systemic reaction to environmental/inflammatory insults and involves production of acute-phase proteins, including serum amyloid A (SAA). Interleukin-1\u3b2 (IL-1\u3b2), a master regulator of neuroinflammation produced by activated inflammatory cells of the myeloid lineage, in particular microglia, plays a key role in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic diseases of the peripheral nervous system and CNS. IL-1\u3b2 release is promoted by ATP acting at the purinergic P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) in cells primed with toll-like receptor (TLR) ligands
Quantum-Phase Transitions of Interacting Bosons and the Supersolid Phase
We investigate the properties of strongly interacting bosons in two
dimensions at zero temperature using mean-field theory, a variational Ansatz
for the ground state wave function, and Monte Carlo methods. With on-site and
short-range interactions a rich phase diagram is obtained. Apart from the
homogeneous superfluid and Mott-insulating phases, inhomogeneous charge-density
wave phases appear, that are stabilized by the finite-range interaction.
Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates the existence of a supersolid phase, in
which both long-range order (related to the charge-density wave) and
off-diagonal long-range order coexist. We also obtain the critical exponents
for the various phase transitions.Comment: RevTex, 20 pages, 10 PostScript figures include
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