197 research outputs found
Solving Problems of Practice in Education
The authors identify and discuss the many complexities involved in the translation of scientific information in the social sciences into forms usable for solving problems of practice in education. As a means of appropriately handling these complexities and the issues that arise, they prescribe a series of stages to be followed from the advent of a practitioner's situational problem to the design of a response to it. They assert that unless the process of translation is conducted with the prescribed level of understanding, appreciation, and rigor, the application of knowledge will be inaccurate.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68934/2/10.1177_107554708400600103.pd
Vectorial dissipative solitons in vertical-cavity surface-emitting Lasers with delays
We show that the nonlinear polarization dynamics of a vertical-cavity
surface-emitting laser placed into an external cavity leads to the formation of
temporal vectorial dissipative solitons. These solitons arise as cycles in the
polarization orientation, leaving the total intensity constant. When the cavity
round-trip is much longer than their duration, several independent solitons as
well as bound states (molecules) may be hosted in the cavity. All these
solutions coexist together and with the background solution, i.e. the solution
with zero soliton. The theoretical proof of localization is given by the
analysis of the Floquet exponents. Finally, we reduce the dynamics to a single
delayed equation for the polarization orientation allowing interpreting the
vectorial solitons as polarization kinks.Comment: quasi final resubmission version, 12 pages, 9 figure
Patchiness and Demographic Noise in Three Ecological Examples
Understanding the causes and effects of spatial aggregation is one of the
most fundamental problems in ecology. Aggregation is an emergent phenomenon
arising from the interactions between the individuals of the population, able
to sense only -at most- local densities of their cohorts. Thus, taking into
account the individual-level interactions and fluctuations is essential to
reach a correct description of the population. Classic deterministic equations
are suitable to describe some aspects of the population, but leave out features
related to the stochasticity inherent to the discreteness of the individuals.
Stochastic equations for the population do account for these
fluctuation-generated effects by means of demographic noise terms but, owing to
their complexity, they can be difficult (or, at times, impossible) to deal
with. Even when they can be written in a simple form, they are still difficult
to numerically integrate due to the presence of the "square-root" intrinsic
noise. In this paper, we discuss a simple way to add the effect of demographic
stochasticity to three classic, deterministic ecological examples where
aggregation plays an important role. We study the resulting equations using a
recently-introduced integration scheme especially devised to integrate
numerically stochastic equations with demographic noise. Aimed at scrutinizing
the ability of these stochastic examples to show aggregation, we find that the
three systems not only show patchy configurations, but also undergo a phase
transition belonging to the directed percolation universality class.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures. To appear in J. Stat. Phy
Spatial Pattern Enhances Ecosystem Functioning in an African Savanna
Termites indirectly enhance plant and animal productivity near their mounds, and the uniform spatial patterning of these mounds enhances the overall productivity of the entire landscape
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