Wildly Ramified Actions and Surfaces of General Type Arising from Artin-Schreier Curves

We analyse the diagonal quotient for products of certain Artin--Schreier curves. The smooth models are almost always surfaces of general type, with Chern slopes tending asymptotically to 1. The calculation of numerical invariants relies on a close examination of the relevant quotient singularity in characteristic p. It turns out that the canonical model has q-1 rational double points of type A_{q-1}, and embeds as a divisor of degree q in P^3, which is in some sense reminiscent of the classical Kummer quartic.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures. Minor corrections, references adde

Self-motion perception from expanding and contracting optical flows overlapped with binocular disparity

AbstractExpanding and contracting patterns were presented on different disparity planes to investigate the role of stereo depth in vection. Experiment 1 tested the effect of stereo depth on inducing vection with expanding and contracting flows on different disparity planes. Subjects reported whether they felt forward or backward self-motion. The results clearly showed the dominance of the background flow in determining one’s self-motion direction. Experiment 2 tested the effect of stereo depth on a vection direction using two expanding flows. The center of each expansion was displaced to either horizontal side. The subjects judged in which direction they were going when they felt vection. The results demonstrated that the subjects felt their heading biased toward the direction of the center of the farther expansion while feeling vection. The heading perception from the expanding flow was determined only by the background flow, not by 2-D integration of the retinal motion. The result demonstrates the importance of background flow produced by stereo depth in determining one’s self-motion from an expanding/contracting motion

Factors influencing the strategic frame-building of para-athletes in Japan from the public relations perspective

Framing is used for strategic communication as a rhetorical tool by including and excluding certain elements to generate effective media messages to gain particular social attitudes. The frame-building process is affected by external and internal factors. Para-sports promoters have been struggling with the depiction of para-athletes, because the public seems to perceive messages about people with disabilities as unattractive or socially inappropriate. Public relations professionals involved in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics may very well face similar and other challenges, such as public censorship on the topic of disabilities, in Japan. This study investigates the external and internal factors that influenced the strategic frame-building process of para-athletes and sports at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics to achieve the objective of promoting an inclusive Japanese society. As this research was explorative, in-depth interviews were conducted according to the hierarchy of influences on media content with public relations practitioners engaged in this event. The findings suggest that multiple endogenous and exogenous factors, including the social circumstances and the COVID-19 pandemic, are likely to have influenced the public relations efforts supporting the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics. The findings further contribute to exploring questions regarding the strategic frame-building process and a new direction of the strategic frames of its promotion for future research

Acoustic pressure pulses from laser-irradiated suspensions containing gold nanospheres in water: Experimental and theoretical study

We present a physical model that describes the acoustic pressure pulses from diluted suspensions of metal nanospheres in a liquid medium irradiated by laser pulses. The experimental measurements of the photoacoustic signals are also reported, where the suspensions of 8-nm gold nanospheres in water at different concentrations and different temperatures were irradiated by 0.8-ns laser pulses. We mainly investigate how the nanosphere concentration and the suspension temperature influence the photoacoustic responses. The estimations from our model are found to be in good agreement with the results from the experiments