The RoboFlag SURF competition: results, analysis, and future work

The culmination of the 2002 RoboFlag Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, jointly operated between California Institute of Technology and Cornell University, was a final competition between two teams of three undergraduate researchers. After ten weeks of preparation, Team Pasadena defeated Team Ithaca in two of the three final games. This paper provides the detailed results of the competition, an analysis of the competition, and reviews the future work

Shingle 2.0: generalising self-consistent and automated domain discretisation for multi-scale geophysical models

The approaches taken to describe and develop spatial discretisations of the domains required for geophysical simulation models are commonly ad hoc, model or application specific and under-documented. This is particularly acute for simulation models that are flexible in their use of multi-scale, anisotropic, fully unstructured meshes where a relatively large number of heterogeneous parameters are required to constrain their full description. As a consequence, it can be difficult to reproduce simulations, ensure a provenance in model data handling and initialisation, and a challenge to conduct model intercomparisons rigorously. This paper takes a novel approach to spatial discretisation, considering it much like a numerical simulation model problem of its own. It introduces a generalised, extensible, self-documenting approach to carefully describe, and necessarily fully, the constraints over the heterogeneous parameter space that determine how a domain is spatially discretised. This additionally provides a method to accurately record these constraints, using high-level natural language based abstractions, that enables full accounts of provenance, sharing and distribution. Together with this description, a generalised consistent approach to unstructured mesh generation for geophysical models is developed, that is automated, robust and repeatable, quick-to-draft, rigorously verified and consistent to the source data throughout. This interprets the description above to execute a self-consistent spatial discretisation process, which is automatically validated to expected discrete characteristics and metrics.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Submitted for publication and under revie

The four-letter word, ou comment traduire les mots fuck et fucking dans un texte littéraire

The four-letter word, ou comment traduire les mots fuck et fucking dans un texte littéraire ? — Principale difficulté de traduction de la nouvelle « A Summer Girl », de John McKenna, les mots « fuck » et « fucking » apparaissent trente-quatre fois dans un texte d'environ 8 900 mots. La traductrice a puisé dans le vocabulaire oral pour rendre la charge affective et esthétique de ces deux mots, emblématiques des sentiments de haine et d'amour qu'éprouve la narratrice envers son interlocuteur. Pour reproduire un effet similaire à celui du texte original, il fallait étudier les diverses valeurs des mots « fuck » et « fucking » selon le contexte. On distingue quatre grands types d'emploi : sens littéral, injure, formules marquant la colère, le mépris ou l'amertume et enfin formules d'insistance.The Four-letter Word, or How to Translate the Words fuck ana fucking in a Literary Text ? — John McKenna's short story "A Summer Girl" raises the problem of how to translate the words "fuck" and "fucking," occurring thirty-four times in a text of about 8 900 words. In order to convey the emotional and aesthetic power of these two words, emblematic of the narrator's feelings of love and hatred, the translator had recourse to oral expressions of Quebec French. Since the essential goal is to reproduce the same effect as the original text, the various meanings of the words "fuck" and "fucking" have been examined according to their contexts. Four main meanings emerge: literal meaning; insult; expressions of anger, contempt, or bitterness; and expressions of emphasis

Diffuse Atomic and Molecular Gas in the Interstellar Medium of M82 toward SN 2014J

We present a comprehensive analysis of interstellar absorption lines seen in moderately-high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio optical spectra of SN 2014J in M82. Our observations were acquired over the course of six nights, covering the period from ~6 days before to ~30 days after the supernova reached its maximum B-band brightness. We examine complex absorption from Na I, Ca II, K I, Ca I, CH+, CH, and CN, arising primarily from diffuse gas in the interstellar medium (ISM) of M82. We detect Li I absorption over a range in velocity consistent with that exhibited by the strongest Na I and K I components associated with M82; this is the first detection of interstellar Li in a galaxy outside of the Local Group. There are no significant temporal variations in the absorption-line profiles over the 37 days sampled by our observations. The relative abundances of the various interstellar species detected reveal that the ISM of M82 probed by SN 2014J consists of a mixture of diffuse atomic and molecular clouds characterized by a wide range of physical/environmental conditions. Decreasing N(Na I)/N(Ca II) ratios and increasing N(Ca I)/N(K I) ratios with increasing velocity are indicative of reduced depletion in the higher-velocity material. Significant component-to-component scatter in the N(Na I)/N(Ca II) and N(Ca I)/N(Ca II) ratios may be due to variations in the local ionization conditions. An apparent anti-correlation between the N(CH+)/N(CH) and N(Ca I)/N(Ca II) ratios can be understood in terms of an opposite dependence on gas density and radiation field strength, while the overall high CH+ abundance may be indicative of enhanced turbulence in the ISM of M82. The Li abundance also seems to be enhanced in M82, which supports the conclusions of recent gamma-ray emission studies that the cosmic-ray acceleration processes are greatly enhanced in this starburst galaxy.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, accepted to ApJ; added table giving single-epoch equivalent widths; improved discussion regarding the lack of temporal variations; improved analysis of the Li I regio

Agent-based Analysis of the Spread of Awareness in the Population in the Prodromal Phase of Bushfires

Efficient communication is essential in disasters in order to coordinate a response and assure effective evacuation. This paper focuses on the case study of the Melbourne bushfires in 2009. We first analysed some interviews of the population to know who the population communicates with (neighbours, family, authorities, etc), and using what channel (radio, phone, internet, etc). We then developed and implemented communicative actions in a Belief-Desire-Intention model of the population\u27s behaviour. Finally, we ran experiments in order to compare the speed at which the population becomes aware of the fires in different scenarios with different types of communication (more or less organised). Our first results show that more organised modes of communication would provide significant benefits in terms of propagation of awareness in the population

Bringing Farm Advisors into the Sustainability Conversation: Results from a Nitrogen Workshop in the U.S. Midwest

Increasingly, farmers are looking to private sector advisors to inform their nitrogen decisions, but little is known about these important actors. We held a Sustainable Nitrogen Roundtable workshop to bring together important groups—private sector farm advisors, Extension educators, scientists, and farmers—to discuss new research and more sustainable use of nitrogen in midwestern cropping systems. We gained important insights by reaching outside academia and including private sector farm advisors as valued participants. Ninety percent of participants found that their understanding of varied viewpoints on nitrogen management improved, and an equal proportion would recommend such a workshop to a colleague

Coalitions and Cliques in the School Choice Problem

The school choice mechanism design problem focuses on assignment mechanisms matching students to public schools in a given school district. The well-known Gale Shapley Student Optimal Stable Matching Mechanism (SOSM) is the most efficient stable mechanism proposed so far as a solution to this problem. However its inefficiency is well-documented, and recently the Efficiency Adjusted Deferred Acceptance Mechanism (EADAM) was proposed as a remedy for this weakness. In this note we describe two related adjustments to SOSM with the intention to address the same inefficiency issue. In one we create possibly artificial coalitions among students where some students modify their preference profiles in order to improve the outcome for some other students. Our second approach involves trading cliques among students where those involved improve their assignments by waiving some of their priorities. The coalition method yields the EADAM outcome among other Pareto dominations of the SOSM outcome, while the clique method yields all possible Pareto optimal Pareto dominations of SOSM. The clique method furthermore incorporates a natural solution to the problem of breaking possible ties within preference and priority profiles. We discuss the practical implications and limitations of our approach in the final section of the article

Mechanisms of Neuroprotection by Protein Disulphide Isomerase in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterised by the progressive loss of motor neurons, leading to paralysis and death within several years of onset. Although protein misfolding is a key feature of ALS, the upstream triggers of disease remain elusive. Recently, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress was identified as an early and central feature in ALS disease models as well as in human patient tissues, indicating that ER stress could be an important process in disease pathogenesis. One important chaperone induced by ER stress is protein disulphide isomerase (PDI), which is both upregulated and posttranslationally inhibited by S-nitrosylation in ALS. In this paper, we present evidence from studies of genetics, model organisms, and patient tissues which indicate an active role for PDI and ER stress in ALS disease processes