794 research outputs found
Sike B. Gahleitner/Hans G. Homfeldt (Hrsg.): Kinder und Jugendliche mit speziellem Versorgungsbedarf. Beispiele und Lösungswege für Kooperation der sozialen Dienste, Weinheim und Basel: Beltz-Juventa 2012 (290 S.) [Rezension]
Rezension von: Sike B. Gahleitner/Hans G. Homfeldt (Hrsg.): Kinder und Jugendliche mit speziellem Versorgungsbedarf. Beispiele und Lösungswege für Kooperation der sozialen Dienste, Weinheim und Basel: Beltz-Juventa 2012(290 S.; ISBN 978-3-7799-2263-6
The dynamics of crack patterns in soil induced by desiccation
Many soil types develop cracks due to desiccation. The resulting crack patterns were simulated with the help of a network of springs, representing the breaking material. A spring breaks if the tensile stress on it exceeds a threshold. Based on existing models in the literature a numerical model was developed. It was used to study the time evolution of cracking and to investigate the nal crack pattern. It came out, that the model repro- duces some phenomena which can be observed in natural crack patterns (90 degree angles of intersections, dynamics of emerging cracks). Two parameters of the model - the disorder in the distribution of stress thresholds for the individual springs and a slipping threshold (resembling friction) - were varied and their impact on the crack pattern was studied. It was found that friction induces a characteristic scale. Varying disorder, a continuous transition from loop-like closed cracks (loops) to a system of not interconnected cracks was observed. The number of loops in the topology of the crack pattern, was introduced as an order parameter. Besides the theoretical part, an experiment was carried out. A bentonite-sand-water mixture was prepared as a layer on a glass plate and dried at room temperature. As a result of drying crack patterns developed. These were recorded by a digital camera. Binary pictures were obtained and the number of loops in the crack patterns of the completely dried mixtures counted. Varying the mass ratio of bentonite to sand a similar transition sas in the model was observed
Sliced Wasserstein Distance for Learning Gaussian Mixture Models
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many
applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization
(EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However,
EM guarantees only convergence to a stationary point of the log-likelihood
function, which could be arbitrarily worse than the optimal solution. Inspired
by the relationship between the negative log-likelihood function and the
Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, we propose an alternative formulation for
estimating the GMM parameters using the sliced Wasserstein distance, which
gives rise to a new algorithm. Specifically, we propose minimizing the
sliced-Wasserstein distance between the mixture model and the data distribution
with respect to the GMM parameters. In contrast to the KL-divergence, the
energy landscape for the sliced-Wasserstein distance is more well-behaved and
therefore more suitable for a stochastic gradient descent scheme to obtain the
optimal GMM parameters. We show that our formulation results in parameter
estimates that are more robust to random initializations and demonstrate that
it can estimate high-dimensional data distributions more faithfully than the EM
algorithm
Descriptive characterisation of the variational Henstock-Kurzweil-Stieltjes integral and applications
We derive a descriptive characterisation of the vector-valued variational Henstock-Kurzweil-Stieltjes integral extending and improving previous results. We also give several applications of our characterisation, e.g., to the recover of a function from a relative derivative, the characterisation of Banach spaces with the Radon-Nikodým property and to the study of certain normed algebras of differentiable functions on compact plane sets
Capturing Vacuum Fluctuations and Photon Correlations in Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics with Multi-Trajectory Ehrenfest Dynamics
We describe vacuum fluctuations and photon-field correlations in interacting
quantum mechanical light-matter systems, by generalizing the application of
mixed quantum-classical dynamics techniques. We employ the multi-trajectory
implementation of Ehrenfest mean field theory, traditionally developed for
electron-nuclear problems, to simulate the spontaneous emission of radiation in
a model quantum electrodynamical cavity-bound atomic system. We investigate the
performance of this approach in capturing the dynamics of spontaneous emission
from the perspective of both the atomic system and the cavity photon field,
through a detailed comparison with exact benchmark quantum mechanical
observables and correlation functions. By properly accounting for the quantum
statistics of the vacuum field, while using mixed quantum-classical (mean
field) trajectories to describe the evolution, we identify a surprisingly
accurate and promising route towards describing quantum effects in realistic
correlated light-matter systems
Laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry: a new tool for trace element analysis in ice cores
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