Perturbative unitarity bounds for effective composite models

In this paper we present the partial wave unitarity bound in the parameter space of dimension-5 and dimension-6 effective operators that arise in a compositeness scenario. These are routinely used in experimental searches at the LHC to constraint contact and gauge interactions between ordinary Standard Model fermions and excited (composite) states of mass $M$. After deducing the unitarity bound for the production process of a composite neutrino, we implement such bound and compare it with the recent experimental exclusion curves for Run 2, the High-Luminosity and High-Energy configurations of the LHC. Our results also applies to the searches where a generic single excited state is produced via contact interactions. We find that the unitarity bound, so far overlooked, is quite complelling and significant portions of the parameter space ($M,\Lambda$) become excluded in addition to the standard request $M \le \Lambda$.Comment: This version of the paper merges the previous version published in Phys. Lett. B 795 (2019) 644-649 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2019.06.042) with the subsequent Erratum currently in press in Physics Letters B (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2019.134990

Microfog lubricant application system for advanced turbine engine components, phase 3

The wetting characteristics and deposit forming tendencies of a series of lubricants were evaluated using a microfog jet delivery system to wet a flat heated rotating disc. The performances of the nine lubricants are discussed in terms of the various testing parameters which include temperature, disc speed and lubricant gas flow rates. Also discussed are the heat transfer characteristics of two of the lubricants on that same plane disc specimen. The wetting characteristics and heat transfer characteristics of one of the lubricants on a complex disc simulating bearing geometry are also discussed

Hunting for heavy composite Majorana neutrinos at the LHC

We investigate the search for heavy Majorana neutrinos stemming from a composite model scenario at the upcoming LHC Run II at a center of mass energy of 13 TeV. While previous studies of the composite Majorana neutrino were focussed on gauge interactions via magnetic type transition coupling between ordinary and heavy fermions (with mass $m^*$) here we complement the composite model with contact interactions at the energy scale $\Lambda$ and we find that the production cross sections are dominated by such contact interactions by roughly two/three orders of magnitude. This mechanism provides therefore very interesting rates at the prospected luminosities. We study the same sign di-lepton and di-jet signature ($pp \to \ell\ell jj$) and perform a fast detector simulation based on Delphes. We compute 3$\sigma$ and 5$\sigma$ contour plots of the statistical significance in the parameter space ($\Lambda,m^*$). We find that the potentially excluded regions at $\sqrt{s} =13$ TeV are quite larger than those excluded so far at Run I considering searches with other signatures.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, Minor comments and few references added. Version accepted by the European Physical Journal C (EPJC

Estimating Dynamic Traffic Matrices by using Viable Routing Changes

Abstract: In this paper we propose a new approach for dealing with the ill-posed nature of traffic matrix estimation. We present three solution enhancers: an algorithm for deliberately changing link weights to obtain additional information that can make the underlying linear system full rank; a cyclo-stationary model to capture both long-term and short-term traffic variability, and a method for estimating the variance of origin-destination (OD) flows. We show how these three elements can be combined into a comprehensive traffic matrix estimation procedure that dramatically reduces the errors compared to existing methods. We demonstrate that our variance estimates can be used to identify the elephant OD flows, and we thus propose a variant of our algorithm that addresses the problem of estimating only the heavy flows in a traffic matrix. One of our key findings is that by focusing only on heavy flows, we can simplify the measurement and estimation procedure so as to render it more practical. Although there is a tradeoff between practicality and accuracy, we find that increasing the rank is so helpful that we can nevertheless keep the average errors consistently below the 10% carrier target error rate. We validate the effectiveness of our methodology and the intuition behind it using commercial traffic matrix data from Sprint's Tier-1 backbon

Town centre improvements through sustainable procurement

The project is investigating the potential to reduce town centre business costs and negative environmental impacts through the use of innovations in procurement and freight transport. These innovations include collaborative procurement, Business Improvement Districts, and Delivery and Servicing Plans. These approaches were being trialled and evaluated in three British towns: Cambridge, Lowestoft and Norwich. 17 companies were developing and applying a Delivery and Servicing Plan. Transport reduction effects were achieved

QoE in Pull Based P2P-TV Systems: Overlay Topology Design Tradeoff

Abstract—This paper presents a systematic performance anal-ysis of pull P2P video streaming systems for live applications, providing guidelines for the design of the overlay topology and the chunk scheduling algorithm. The contribution of the paper is threefold: 1) we propose a realistic simulative model of the system that represents the effects of access bandwidth heterogeneity, latencies, peculiar characteristics of the video, while still guaranteeing good scalability properties; 2) we propose a new latency/bandwidth-aware overlay topology design strategy that improves application layer performance while reducing the underlying transport network stress; 3) we investigate the impact of chunk scheduling algorithms that explicitly exploit properties of encoded video. Results show that our proposal jointly improves the actual Quality of Experience of users and reduces the cost the transport network has to support. I

Simple Tools for Abstraction and Instantiation

A simplified version of tools for abstraction and instantiation [1,2,3] are proposed here. The tools are merely two new attributes applicable to any DS instances. The merit of abstraction and instantiation is the economy of description and clarification of structural commonality. Abstractions allow you to avoid repeating similar descriptions. You write one template to address the shared structure of descriptions and reuse it when you want similar descriptions. Suppose you want to describe many occurrences of a common pattern of events and states of affairs, such as a type of configuration of soccer players in the field. You will describe the positions of eleven or twenty two people to address this configuration. Once you have described this common pattern, you can capture each occurrence of the pattern by just substituting the eleven or twenty-two people to with particular players, without repeating the descriptions of their positions, among others. Although the AbstractionLevel DataType in MPEG-7 FDIS is apparently claimed to address abstraction and instantiation, its usage and semantics have not been clarified enough to actually employ it. What follows should provide a far simpler and practically usable set of tools for abstraction and instantiation

Limitations of the MPEG-7 Generic DS: Reorganizing the Syntactic/Semantic DS’s

In this document, we propose some modifications to the MPEG-7 Description Scheme (DS) [1] in order to enrich the structure of the Syntactic DS and Semantic DS by addressing some functionalities for semantically characterizing segments and for highlighting and ordering key-items in a multimedia document. In our opinion, the Generic DS and in particular the syntactic DS can demonstrate some weakness in describing hierarchically organized documents. In other words, even if it is enunciated [1] that the Syntactic DS should act as the Table of Contents for the multimedia document being described, the description of the document temporal structure seems complicated. Therefore we start our discussion by implementing the ToC DS part of our old MPEG-7 proposal (the ToCAI DS [3]) using the MPEG-7 Generic DS [1]. In our opinion, due to the simpler structure of the ToC DS, this implementation allows to show the complexity of the MPEG-7 DS. For overcoming such a problem, we propose a simble extension of the Syntactic DS of the MPEG-7 Generic DS in order to handle semantic aspects of each segment directly at the Segment DS level. Another issue that we analyze in this document is a possible extension of the MPEG-7 Generic DS for the inclusion of some important functionalities: the capability to (1) highlight description items (e.g. images, sounds, events, objects etc.) most relevant to the purpose for which a certain content description of a multimedia (MM) document has been created and (2) the capability of description information ordering . In other words, due to a possible large amount of description items, an entity who will create descriptions of multimedia (MM) documents, according to MPEG-7 specification (i.e. a description provider), shall highlight certain items most representative for the kind of document being described in order to facilitate user queries. Besides we consider the need of providing users with ordering mechanisms a very relevant issue for MPEG-7. Such ordering mechanisms are derivable from descriptors (e.g. a set of key – frames ordered on the basis a color descriptor or a set of sounds ordered by means of a loudness D). However a possible large variety in the types of descriptors composing a description could lead to a consequent high number of ordering criteria to arrange description items. Therefore we propose that the description provider should also select which set of descriptors should be combined to order a subset of description elements (e.g. key frames, events etc.) most pertinent to the MM document being described. The document is organized as follows: in Section 2 we explain the motivations for a representation of the ToC DS based on the MPEG-7 Generic DS. In Section 3 after a brief overview of the ToCAI DS, we present the implementations of the ToC DS according to the MPEG-7 Generic DS specifications; we also suggest in this sections some changes to the current specifications to better handle the ToC DS functionalities. Section 4 provides an example of implementation of such a DS. In Section 5, we explain, after a quick overview of the current Generic DS, the motivations behind the proposal for adding highlighting and ordering functionalities. In Section 6, we show the structure of the DS that enable these functionalities. In Section 7, we give an example in order to clarify the concepts of key-items and ordering keys. Finally in Section 8, we provide a brief summary of the contribution

TRAIL, DR5 and Caspase 3-dependent Apoptosis in Vessels of Diseased Human Temporomandibular Joint Disc. An Immunohistochemical Study

To evaluate the apoptosis involvement in the angiogenesis as a self-limiting process in patients with temporomandibular joint (TMJ) degenerated disc vessels, we assessed, by immunohistochemistry, the detection of TRAIL, its death receptor DR5 and caspase 3. TRAIL, its death receptor DR5 and caspase 3 expression were studied by immunohistochemistry in 15 TMJ discs displaced without reduction and in 4 unaffected discs. These apoptosis molecules were detected in the intima and media layers of newly formed vessels affected discs. In conclusion, vessels apoptosis activation in TMJ disc with ID could be regarded as a self-limiting process that try to leads to vessel regression; in this way an inhibition of angiogenic vessels may prove a key strategy in limiting pathological angiogenesis, by cutting off blood supply to tumors, or by reducing harmful inflammation

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Semantic Indexing of Multimedia

The aim of this work consists in proposing a dual approach for the sake of semantic indexing of audio-visual documents. We present two dierent algorithms based respectively on a bottom-up and a top-down strategy. Considering the top-down approach, we propose an algorithm which implements a nite-state machine and uses low-level motion indices extracted from an MPEG compressed bit-stream. Simulation results show that the proposed method can eectively detect the presence of relevant events in sport programs. Using the bottom-up approach, the indexing is performed by means of Hidden Markov Models (HMM), with an innovative approach: the input signal is considered as a non-stationary stochastic process, modeled by a HMM in which each state is associated with a different property of audio-visual material. Several samples from the MPEG-7 content set have been analyzed using the proposed scheme, demonstrating the performance of the overall approach to provide insights about the content of audio-visual programmes. Moreover, what appears quite attractive instead is to use low-level descriptors in providing a feedback for non-expert users of the content of the described audio-visual programme. The experiments have demonstrated that, by adequate visualization or presentation, low-level features carry instantly semantic information about the programme content, given a certain programme category, which may thus help the viewer to use such low-level information for navigation or retrieval of relevant events