999 research outputs found
Comparative health and safety assessment of the SPS and alternative electrical generation systems
A comparative analysis of health and safety risks is presented for the Satellite Power System and five alternative baseload electrical generation systems: a low-Btu coal gasification system with an open-cycle gas turbine combined with a steam topping cycle; a light water fission reactor system without fuel reprocessing; a liquid metal fast breeder fission reactor system; a central station terrestrial photovoltaic system; and a first generation fusion system with magnetic confinement. For comparison, risk from a decentralized roof-top photovoltaic system with battery storage is also evaluated. Quantified estimates of public and occupational risks within ranges of uncertainty were developed for each phase of the energy system. The potential significance of related major health and safety issues that remain unquantitied are also discussed
A comprehensive computer program for predicting solar cell performance
Comprehensive computer program for predicting solar cell performanc
Probabilistic models of individual and collective animal behavior
Recent developments in automated tracking allow uninterrupted,
high-resolution recording of animal trajectories, sometimes coupled with the
identification of stereotyped changes of body pose or other behaviors of
interest. Analysis and interpretation of such data represents a challenge: the
timing of animal behaviors may be stochastic and modulated by kinematic
variables, by the interaction with the environment or with the conspecifics
within the animal group, and dependent on internal cognitive or behavioral
state of the individual. Existing models for collective motion typically fail
to incorporate the discrete, stochastic, and internal-state-dependent aspects
of behavior, while models focusing on individual animal behavior typically
ignore the spatial aspects of the problem. Here we propose a probabilistic
modeling framework to address this gap. Each animal can switch stochastically
between different behavioral states, with each state resulting in a possibly
different law of motion through space. Switching rates for behavioral
transitions can depend in a very general way, which we seek to identify from
data, on the effects of the environment as well as the interaction between the
animals. We represent the switching dynamics as a Generalized Linear Model and
show that: (i) forward simulation of multiple interacting animals is possible
using a variant of the Gillespie's Stochastic Simulation Algorithm; (ii)
formulated properly, the maximum likelihood inference of switching rate
functions is tractably solvable by gradient descent; (iii) model selection can
be used to identify factors that modulate behavioral state switching and to
appropriately adjust model complexity to data. To illustrate our framework, we
apply it to two synthetic models of animal motion and to real zebrafish
tracking data.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figure
-graded Heisenberg algebras and deformed supersymmetries
The notion of -grading on the enveloping algebra generated by products of
q-deformed Heisenberg algebras is introduced for complex number in the unit
disc. Within this formulation, we consider the extension of the notion of
supersymmetry in the enveloping algebra. We recover the ordinary
grading or Grassmann parity for associative superalgebra, and a modified
version of the usual supersymmetry. As a specific problem, we focus on the
interesting limit for which the Arik and Coon deformation of the
Heisenberg algebra allows to map fermionic modes to bosonic ones in a modified
sense. Different algebraic consequences are discussed.Comment: 2 figure
Exact Solution of Semi-Flexible and Super-Flexible Interacting Partially Directed Walks
We provide the exact generating function for semi-flexible and super-flexible
interacting partially directed walks and also analyse the solution in detail.
We demonstrate that while fully flexible walks have a collapse transition that
is second order and obeys tricritical scaling, once positive stiffness is
introduced the collapse transition becomes first order. This confirms a recent
conjecture based on numerical results. We note that the addition of an
horizontal force in either case does not affect the order of the transition. In
the opposite case where stiffness is discouraged by the energy potential
introduced, which we denote the super-flexible case, the transition also
changes, though more subtly, with the crossover exponent remaining unmoved from
the neutral case but the entropic exponents changing
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