Fluid Flow Simulation and Optimisation with Lattice Boltzmann Methods on High Performance Computers - Application to the Human Respiratory System

An overall strategy for numerical simulations of the full human respiratory system is introduced. The integrative approach takes advantage of numerical simulation, high performance computing and newly developed mathematical optimisation techniques, all based on a mesoscopic model description and on lattice Boltzmann methods as discretisation strategies. Validated numerical results are presented for the simulation of respirations in a real human lung and nose geometry captured by CT

Care in Healthcare: Reflections on Theory and Practice

This book examines the concept of care and care practices in healthcare from the interdisciplinary perspectives of continental philosophy, care ethics, the social sciences, and anthropology. Areas addressed include dementia care, midwifery, diabetes care, psychiatry, and reproductive medicine. Special attention is paid to ambivalences and tensions within both the concept of care and care practices. Contributions in the first section of the book explore phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to care and reveal historical precursors to care ethics. Empirical case studies and reflections on care in institutionalised and standardised settings form the second section of the book. The concluding chapter, jointly written by many of the contributors, points at recurring challenges of understanding and practicing care that open up the field for further research and discussion. This collection will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of medicine, ethics, philosophy, social science and history

Discovery of an X-ray cavity near the radio lobes of Cygnus A indicating previous AGN activity

Cygnus A harbours the nearest powerful radio jet of an Fanaroff-Riley (FR) class II radio galaxy in a galaxy cluster where the interaction of the jet with the intracluster medium (ICM) can be studied in detail. We use a large set of Chandra archival data, VLA and new LOFAR observations to shed new light on the interaction of the jets with the ICM. We identify an X-ray cavity in the distribution of the X-ray emitting plasma in the region south of the Cyg A nucleus which has lower pressure than the surrounding medium. The LOFAR and VLA radio observations show that the cavity is filled with synchrotron emitting plasma. The spectral age and the buoyancy time of the cavity indicates an age at least as large as the current Cyg A jets and not much larger than twice this time. We suggest that this cavity was created in a previous active phase of Cyg A when the energy output of the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) was about two orders of magnitude less than today.Comment: Letter submitted on 4 May 2012 to A&A, 4 pages, 4 figure

Anisotropic Diffusion Stencils: From Simple Derivations over Stability Estimates to ResNet Implementations

Anisotropic diffusion processes with a diffusion tensor are important in image analysis, physics, and engineering. However, their numerical approximation has a strong impact on dissipative artefacts and deviations from rotation invariance. In this work, we study a large family of finite difference discretisations on a 3 x 3 stencil. We derive it by splitting 2-D anisotropic diffusion into four 1-D diffusions. The resulting stencil class involves one free parameter and covers a wide range of existing discretisations. It comprises the full stencil family of Weickert et al. (2013) and shows that their two parameters contain redundancy. Furthermore, we establish a bound on the spectral norm of the matrix corresponding to the stencil. This gives time step size limits that guarantee stability of an explicit scheme in the Euclidean norm. Our directional splitting also allows a very natural translation of the explicit scheme into ResNet blocks. Employing neural network libraries enables simple and highly efficient parallel implementations on GPUs

Stand der Weiterentwicklung und Umsetzung des Standards XPlanung in Deutschland

Das XPlanung Datenmodell zur verlustfreien Übertragung digitaler Bauleit-, Raumordnungs- und Landschaftspläne zwischen unterschiedlichen IT-Systemen wurde auf früheren CORP Konferenzen bereits mehrfach vorgestellt. Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet den aktuellen Stand bei der Weiterentwicklung von XPlanung sowie bei der Umsetzung und Einführung des Standards in der öffentlichen Verwaltung in Deutschland. Dabei wird insbesondere auf die aktuell laufenden Bemühungen eingegangen, XPlanung und den verwandten XBau-Standard aus dem Bauwesen zu offiziellen, für bestimmte Anwendungsfälle verpflichtend zu benutzende Standards des IT-Planungsrates zu machen. Im Rahmen dieses Prozesses ist eine Bedarfsbeschreibung erstellt worden, die allgemein die Anforderungen an Austauschstandards im Planungs- und Bauwesen sowie die Anwendungsfälle, die von derartigen Standards profitieren würden, beleuchtet. Weiterhin geht der Beitrag auf die aktuelle Weiterentwicklung von XPlanung im Bereich der Raumordnungsplanung sowie auf die laufende Umsetzung und Einführung von XPlanung in der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg ein

Deutschland und die Kosovo-Krise

"An der deutschen Politik bezüglich der Kosovo-Krise zeigt sich das gewandelte Selbstverständnis der Bundesrepublik. Der Autor zeigt die Entwicklung des Konflikts auf und zeichnet die deutsche Debatte um militärische Intervention nach." (Autorenreferat