712 research outputs found
Ernst Jünger and the problem of Nihilism in the age of total war
As a singular witness and actor of the tumultuous twentieth century, Ernst Jünger remains a controversial and enigmatic figure known above all for his vivid autobiographical accounts of experience in the trenches of the First World War. This article will argue that throughout his entire oeuvre, from personal diaries to novels and essays, he never ceased to grapple with what he viewed as the central question of the age, namely that of the problem of nihilism and the means to overcome it. Inherited from Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Western civilization in the late nineteenth century to which he added an acute observation of the particular role of technology within it, Jünger would employ this lens to make sense of the seemingly absurd industrial slaughter of modern war and herald the advent of a new voluntarist and bellicist order that was to imminently sweep away timorous and decadent bourgeois societies obsessed with security and self-preservation. Jünger would ultimately see his expectations dashed, including by the forms of rule that National Socialism would take, and eventually retreated into a reclusive quietism. Yet he never abandoned his central problematique of nihilism, developing it further in exchanges with Martin Heidegger after the Second World War. And for all the ways in which he may have erred, his life-long struggle with meaning in the age of technique and its implications for war and security continue to make Jünger a valuable interlocutor of the present
Ordered Level Planarity, Geodesic Planarity and Bi-Monotonicity
We introduce and study the problem Ordered Level Planarity which asks for a
planar drawing of a graph such that vertices are placed at prescribed positions
in the plane and such that every edge is realized as a y-monotone curve. This
can be interpreted as a variant of Level Planarity in which the vertices on
each level appear in a prescribed total order. We establish a complexity
dichotomy with respect to both the maximum degree and the level-width, that is,
the maximum number of vertices that share a level. Our study of Ordered Level
Planarity is motivated by connections to several other graph drawing problems.
Geodesic Planarity asks for a planar drawing of a graph such that vertices
are placed at prescribed positions in the plane and such that every edge is
realized as a polygonal path composed of line segments with two adjacent
directions from a given set of directions symmetric with respect to the
origin. Our results on Ordered Level Planarity imply -hardness for any
with even if the given graph is a matching. Katz, Krug, Rutter and
Wolff claimed that for matchings Manhattan Geodesic Planarity, the case where
contains precisely the horizontal and vertical directions, can be solved in
polynomial time [GD'09]. Our results imply that this is incorrect unless
. Our reduction extends to settle the complexity of the Bi-Monotonicity
problem, which was proposed by Fulek, Pelsmajer, Schaefer and
\v{S}tefankovi\v{c}.
Ordered Level Planarity turns out to be a special case of T-Level Planarity,
Clustered Level Planarity and Constrained Level Planarity. Thus, our results
strengthen previous hardness results. In particular, our reduction to Clustered
Level Planarity generates instances with only two non-trivial clusters. This
answers a question posed by Angelini, Da Lozzo, Di Battista, Frati and Roselli.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Universality-class dependence of energy distributions in spin glasses
We study the probability distribution function of the ground-state energies
of the disordered one-dimensional Ising spin chain with power-law interactions
using a combination of parallel tempering Monte Carlo and branch, cut, and
price algorithms. By tuning the exponent of the power-law interactions we are
able to scan several universality classes. Our results suggest that mean-field
models have a non-Gaussian limiting distribution of the ground-state energies,
whereas non-mean-field models have a Gaussian limiting distribution. We compare
the results of the disordered one-dimensional Ising chain to results for a
disordered two-leg ladder, for which large system sizes can be studied, and
find a qualitative agreement between the disordered one-dimensional Ising chain
in the short-range universality class and the disordered two-leg ladder. We
show that the mean and the standard deviation of the ground-state energy
distributions scale with a power of the system size. In the mean-field
universality class the skewness does not follow a power-law behavior and
converges to a nonzero constant value. The data for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick
model seem to be acceptably well fitted by a modified Gumbel distribution.
Finally, we discuss the distribution of the internal energy of the
Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model at finite temperatures and show that it behaves
similar to the ground-state energy of the system if the temperature is smaller
than the critical temperature.Comment: 15 pages, 20 figures, 1 tabl
A note on computing a maximal planar subgraph using PQ-trees
The problem of computing a maximal planar subgraph of a non planar graph has been deeply investigated over the last 20 years. Several attempts have been tried to solve the problem with the help of PQ-trees. The latest attempt has been reported by Jayakumar et al. [10]. In this paper we show that the algorithm presented by Jayakumar et al. is not correct. We show that it does not necessarily compute a maximal planar subgraph and we note that the same holds for a modified version of the algorithm presented by Kant [12]. Our conclusions most likely suggest not to use PQ-trees at all for this specific problem
Straight-line Drawability of a Planar Graph Plus an Edge
We investigate straight-line drawings of topological graphs that consist of a
planar graph plus one edge, also called almost-planar graphs. We present a
characterization of such graphs that admit a straight-line drawing. The
characterization enables a linear-time testing algorithm to determine whether
an almost-planar graph admits a straight-line drawing, and a linear-time
drawing algorithm that constructs such a drawing, if it exists. We also show
that some almost-planar graphs require exponential area for a straight-line
drawing
Optimization by thermal cycling
Thermal cycling is an heuristic optimization algorithm which consists of
cyclically heating and quenching by Metropolis and local search procedures,
respectively, where the amplitude slowly decreases. In recent years, it has
been successfully applied to two combinatorial optimization tasks, the
traveling salesman problem and the search for low-energy states of the Coulomb
glass. In these cases, the algorithm is far more efficient than usual simulated
annealing. In its original form the algorithm was designed only for the case of
discrete variables. Its basic ideas are applicable also to a problem with
continuous variables, the search for low-energy states of Lennard-Jones
clusters.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the Workshop "Complexity, Metastability
and Nonextensivity", held in Erice 20-26 July 2004. Latex, 7 pages, 3 figure
The critical exponents of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass revisited: Exact Ground State Calculations and Monte Carlo Simulations
The critical exponents for of the two-dimensional Ising spin glass
model with Gaussian couplings are determined with the help of exact ground
states for system sizes up to and by a Monte Carlo study of a
pseudo-ferromagnetic order parameter. We obtain: for the stiffness exponent
, for the magnetic exponent
and for the chaos exponent . From Monte Carlo simulations we
get the thermal exponent . The scaling prediction is
fulfilled within the error bars, whereas there is a disagreement with the
relation .Comment: 8 pages RevTeX, 7 eps-figures include
Identification of challenges to the availability and accessibility of opioids in twelve European countries:conclusions from two ATOME six-country workshops
Background: Access to many controlled medicines is inadequate in a number of European countries. This leads to deficits in the treatment of moderate to severe pain as well as in opioid agonist therapy. Objective: The study objective was to elaborate the reasons for this inadequacy. The work plan of the Access to Opioid Medication in Europe (ATOME) project included two six-country workshops. These workshops comprised a national situational analysis, drafting tailor-made recommendations for improvement and developing action plans for their implementation. Methods: In total, 84 representatives of the national Ministries of Health, national controlled substances authorities, experts representing regulatory and law enforcement authorities, leading health care professionals, and patient representatives from 13 European countries participated in either one of the workshops. The delegates used breakout sessions to identify key common challenges. Content analysis was used for the evaluation of protocols and field notes. Results: A number of challenges to opioid accessibility in the countries was identified in the domains of knowledge and educational, regulatory, legislative, as well as public awareness and training barriers that limit opioid prescription. In addition, short validity of prescriptions and bureaucratic practices resulting in overregulation impeded availablity of some essential medicines. Stigmatization and criminalisation of people who use drugs remained the major impediment to increasing opioid agonist program coverage. Conclusions: The challenges identified during outcomes of the workshops were used as the basis for subsequent dissemination and implementation activities in the ATOME project, and in some countries the workshop proceedings already served as a stepping-stone for the first changes in regulations and legislation
Simultaneous Orthogonal Planarity
We introduce and study the problem: Given planar
graphs each with maximum degree 4 and the same vertex set, do they admit an
OrthoSEFE, that is, is there an assignment of the vertices to grid points and
of the edges to paths on the grid such that the same edges in distinct graphs
are assigned the same path and such that the assignment induces a planar
orthogonal drawing of each of the graphs?
We show that the problem is NP-complete for even if the shared
graph is a Hamiltonian cycle and has sunflower intersection and for
even if the shared graph consists of a cycle and of isolated vertices. Whereas
the problem is polynomial-time solvable for when the union graph has
maximum degree five and the shared graph is biconnected. Further, when the
shared graph is biconnected and has sunflower intersection, we show that every
positive instance has an OrthoSEFE with at most three bends per edge.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016
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