Hyperboloidal evolution of test fields in three spatial dimensions

We present the numerical implementation of a clean solution to the outer boundary and radiation extraction problems within the 3+1 formalism for hyperbolic partial differential equations on a given background. Our approach is based on compactification at null infinity in hyperboloidal scri fixing coordinates. We report numerical tests for the particular example of a scalar wave equation on Minkowski and Schwarzschild backgrounds. We address issues related to the implementation of the hyperboloidal approach for the Einstein equations, such as nonlinear source functions, matching, and evaluation of formally singular terms at null infinity.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

A nonstationary form of the range refraction parabolic equation and its application as an artificial boundary condition for the wave equation in a waveguide

The time-dependent form of Tappert's range refraction parabolic equation is derived using Daletskiy-Krein formula form noncommutative analysis and proposed as an artificial boundary condition for the wave equation in a waveguide. The numerical comparison with Higdon's absorbing boundary conditions shows sufficiently good quality of the new boundary condition at low computational cost.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Would You Choose to be Happy? Tradeoffs Between Happiness and the Other Dimensions of Life in a Large Population Survey

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health? Tackling this question has largely been the preserve of philosophers. In this article, we find out just how much happiness matters to ordinary citizens. Our sample consists of nearly 13,000 members of the UK and US general populations. We ask them to choose between, and make judgments over, lives that are high (or low) in different types of happiness and low (or high) in income, physical health, family, career success, or education. We find that people by and large choose the life that is highest in happiness but health is by far the most important other concern, with considerable numbers of people choosing to be healthy rather than happy. We discuss some possible reasons for this preference

Mode signature and stability for a Hamiltonian model of electron temperature gradient turbulence

Stability properties and mode signature for equilibria of a model of electron temperature gradient (ETG) driven turbulence are investigated by Hamiltonian techniques. After deriving the infinite families of Casimir invariants, associated with the noncanonical Poisson bracket of the model, a sufficient condition for stability is obtained by means of the Energy-Casimir method. Mode signature is then investigated for linear motions about homogeneous equilibria. Depending on the sign of the equilibrium "translated" pressure gradient, stable equilibria can either be energy stable, i.e.\ possess definite linearized perturbation energy (Hamiltonian), or spectrally stable with the existence of negative energy modes (NEMs). The ETG instability is then shown to arise through a Kre\u{\i}n-type bifurcation, due to the merging of a positive and a negative energy mode, corresponding to two modified drift waves admitted by the system. The Hamiltonian of the linearized system is then explicitly transformed into normal form, which unambiguously defines mode signature. In particular, the fast mode turns out to always be a positive energy mode (PEM), whereas the energy of the slow mode can have either positive or negative sign

Absorbing boundary conditions for the Westervelt equation

The focus of this work is on the construction of a family of nonlinear absorbing boundary conditions for the Westervelt equation in one and two space dimensions. The principal ingredient used in the design of such conditions is pseudo-differential calculus. This approach enables to develop high order boundary conditions in a consistent way which are typically more accurate than their low order analogs. Under the hypothesis of small initial data, we establish local well-posedness for the Westervelt equation with the absorbing boundary conditions. The performed numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency of the proposed boundary conditions for different regimes of wave propagation

Universality of Performance Indicators based on Citation and Reference Counts

We find evidence for the universality of two relative bibliometric indicators of the quality of individual scientific publications taken from different data sets. One of these is a new index that considers both citation and reference counts. We demonstrate this universality for relatively well cited publications from a single institute, grouped by year of publication and by faculty or by department. We show similar behaviour in publications submitted to the arXiv e-print archive, grouped by year of submission and by sub-archive. We also find that for reasonably well cited papers this distribution is well fitted by a lognormal with a variance of around 1.3 which is consistent with the results of Radicchi, Fortunato, and Castellano (2008). Our work demonstrates that comparisons can be made between publications from different disciplines and publication dates, regardless of their citation count and without expensive access to the whole world-wide citation graph. Further, it shows that averages of the logarithm of such relative bibliometric indices deal with the issue of long tails and avoid the need for statistics based on lengthy ranking procedures.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 11 pages of supplementary material. Submitted to Scientometric

Criticality Analysis of Activity Networks under Interval Uncertainty

Dedicated to the memory of Professor Stefan Chanas - The extended abstract version of this paper has appeared in Proceedings of 11th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP2005) ("Interval Analysis in Scheduling", Fortin et al. 2005)International audienceThis paper reconsiders the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) scheduling problem when information about task duration is incomplete. We model uncertainty on task durations by intervals. With this problem formulation, our goal is to assert possible and necessary criticality of the different tasks and to compute their possible earliest starting dates, latest starting dates, and floats. This paper combines various results and provides a complete solution to the problem. We present the complexity results of all considered subproblems and efficient algorithms to solve them

Evidence and Epistemology in Early Modern English Drama

Evidence and Epistemology in Early Modern English Drama focuses on ways of knowing in a period before the disciplinary paradigms that we use today crystallized. Operating in a period of epistemological flux, writers in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England were faced with two competing knowledge systems: late Renaissance humanism from their schooling and early empiricism emerging in the works of Francis Bacon and others. Throughout their writing, commercial playwrights— Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton among them—attempted to work through these competing knowledge structures and presented spectacles using methods from both paradigms. These dramatists, I argue, adapt strategies of mixed method verification and use their dramatic art as the overarching mediating mode to unite oftentimes competing modes of knowledge. I first examine oral reporting in Hamlet as a dramatic tool that conveys information not only about the plot, but also the speaker’s ethos and reliability. I argue that Shakespeare exploits the convention of the anonymous messenger-character (or nuntius) to create a skeptical space wherein the murderer Claudius is ironically the most reliable reporter. Next, I contrast “ocular proof” in Othello with Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. In Othello, the visual is made verbal through ekphrastic and logical proofs as Iago offers rhetorical evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity that Othello internalizes as concrete. In The Changeling, the verbal becomes visual as Beatrice-Joanna embodies the expectations of virginity both in her speech and n fabricating the results of the virginity-revealing potions. Then, I posit that in Bartholomew Fair, Jonson uses Justice Overdo as a negative exemplum of the poor interpretative practices criticized in the play’s Induction. Blending the sensory, rhetorical, and historical modes of inquiry, I finally explore how Shakespeare translates methods of knowing the past into dramatic tools that present history as a dynamic continuum that simultaneously touches the past, present, future, and imaginative spaces in-between in 1-3 Henry VI and Richard III. Ultimately, this dissertation clarifies the historical context needed for comprehending how playgoers may have understood the transition between humanism and empiricism, and illustrates the methods playwrights used to negotiate this understanding