A Biased Review of Sociophysics

Various aspects of recent sociophysics research are shortly reviewed: Schelling model as an example for lack of interdisciplinary cooperation, opinion dynamics, combat, and citation statistics as an example for strong interdisciplinarity.Comment: 16 pages for J. Stat. Phys. including 2 figures and numerous reference

Computational tool to foster systematic thinking and sustainable environmental conscience in the selection of energy sources systems in agrifood companies

The agrifood sector is mainly composed by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The large majority of these companies does not have the resources, either financial or human, to develop or use with tailored computational systems aimed to improve the organizational management of the company. There are undeniable advantages of the extended use of real-time software systems like Enterprise Resources Management (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) devoted to practices, strategies and technologies in the integrated management and interaction between all sectors of companies. However, these SMEs have limited resources to implement and use the abovementioned solutions, which in turns may reflect on the competitiveness. This paper describes an easy and expedite computational tool to help the decision-making concerning the selection of energy sources systems in agrifood companies. The tool provides an overview of types of energy sources used in specific agrifood sectors, as well as their major sources of pollution. Several scenarios (balance between energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions) are predicted to help decision-making on these topics. These scenarios results are compared with the average results of the specific agrifood sector. The results are also provided graphically to help an easy and expedite analysis. The use of this tool aims to foster systematic thinking and sustainable environmental conscience, promoting the energy efficiency and consequently improving the competitiveness by reducing one of today’s largest fixed costs of companies: energy consumption. Additionally, this tool also provides a prediction of the greenhouse gas emissions, to help a more sustainable and responsible commitment with the environment. The main goal of this tool is to provide the opportunity to perform individualized analysis of scenarios of energy-sources mix leading to the improvement of the performance of companies, and implementing a new thinking of continuous improvement, in order to increase competitiveness.+AGRO - Organizational qualification, energy and health and safety in the work of the agrifood industryinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Measurement of D*+/- meson production in jets from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper reports a measurement of D*+/- meson production in jets from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is based on a data sample recorded with the ATLAS detector with an integrated luminosity of 0.30 pb^-1 for jets with transverse momentum between 25 and 70 GeV in the pseudorapidity range |eta| < 2.5. D*+/- mesons found in jets are fully reconstructed in the decay chain: D*+ -> D0pi+, D0 -> K-pi+, and its charge conjugate. The production rate is found to be N(D*+/-)/N(jet) = 0.025 +/- 0.001(stat.) +/- 0.004(syst.) for D*+/- mesons that carry a fraction z of the jet momentum in the range 0.3 < z < 1. Monte Carlo predictions fail to describe the data at small values of z, and this is most marked at low jet transverse momentum.Comment: 10 pages plus author list (22 pages total), 5 figures, 1 table, matches published version in Physical Review

Detecting respiratory bacterial communities of wild dolphins: Implications for animal health

Infectious diseases contribute to the vulnerable status of marine mammals, including respiratory illnesses. This study aimed to capture exhaled breath condensate (blow) for microbial identification from wild Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins Tursiops aduncus. Individual dolphins were sampled by holding a funnel connected to a 50 ml centrifuge tube over the blowhole of the animal near shore in Shark Bay (SB), Western Australia. Four individuals were sampled on 2 occasions along with seawater samples. Comparative blow and pool water samples were collected from 4 individual common bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus housed in the National Aquarium (NA), Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Bacteria were identified using the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene from extracted DNA. We identified bacteria independent of seawater in SB dolphins, which included the classes Alphaproteobacteria (26.1%) and Gammaproteobacteria (25.8%); the phyla Bacteroidetes (15.6%) and Fusobacteria (7.2%); and the genera Pseudomonas (11.5%), Pedomicrobium (4.5%), Streptobacillus (3.7%), Phenylobacterium (2.2%) and Sphingomonas (2.1%). There were broad similarities in phyla between SB and NA dolphins yet there were differences between lower taxonomic groups. A number of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were shared between dolphin individuals, which may be a result of their genetic lineage (siblings or parentage), shared living and social interactions. A number of genera were observed in SB dolphins which have species known to be infectious in marine mammals such as Pseudomonas, Mycoplasma and Streptococcus. This study successfully characterised bacteria from DNA captured in blow from wild dolphins. The ability to capture these communities from individuals in the wild provides a novel health indicator

Combined aerobic and resistance training: are there additional benefits for older hypertensive adults?

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to compare the effects of a combination of aerobic and resistance training to those of isolated aerobic training on blood pressure, body composition, and insulin sensitivity in hypertensive older adults. METHOD: Forty-four patients were randomly assigned to the aerobic group, resistance and aerobic group, and control group. Before and after 10 weeks, the following data were obtained: 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure data, abdominal circumference, waist circumference, body mass index, lean mass, fat mass, and insulin sensitivity. The study was conducted with 3 training sessions per week. RESULTS: Comparison revealed significant reductions in the body mass index, abdominal and waist circumferences, and ambulatory blood pressure (24-hour, wakefulness and sleep systolic/diastolic blood pressures) in both the aerobic group and the resistance and aerobic (combined) group. The fat mass only changed in the combined group. There was no difference in the insulin sensitivity in any group. CONCLUSIONS: The combined treatment and aerobic treatment alone were equally effective in reducing the blood pressure, body mass index, and abdominal and waist circumferences, although the addition of the resistance component also helped reduce the fat mass

Search for supersymmetry in final states with jets, missing transverse momentum and one isolated lepton in sqrt{s} = 7 TeV pp collisions using 1 fb-1 of ATLAS data

We present an update of a search for supersymmetry in final states containing jets, missing transverse momentum, and one isolated electron or muon, using 1.04 fb^-1 of proton-proton collision data at sqrt{s} = 7 TeV recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in the first half of 2011. The analysis is carried out in four distinct signal regions with either three or four jets and variations on the (missing) transverse momentum cuts, resulting in optimized limits for various supersymmetry models. No excess above the standard model background expectation is observed. Limits are set on the visible cross-section of new physics within the kinematic requirements of the search. The results are interpreted as limits on the parameters of the minimal supergravity framework, limits on cross-sections of simplified models with specific squark and gluino decay modes, and limits on parameters of a model with bilinear R-parity violation.Comment: 18 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 9 figures, 4 tables, final version to appear in Physical Review

OCUPAÇÕES DE ENCOSTAS E IMPACTOS SOCIOAMBIENTAIS URBANOS NAS VILAS BANDEIRANTES I, II E III, LOCALIZADAS NOS BAIRROS PORTO DO CENTRO, SATÉLITE E SAM API, EM TERESINA (PI)

Nas últimas décadas o homem passou a ser um dos principais agentes modeladores do relevo urbano. Como agente produtor ou intensificador da paisagem ele a transforma e interfere nos processos naturais de esculturação do relevo. O objetivo é analisar impactos ambientais decorrentes das ocupações de encostas das Vilas Bandeirantes I, II e III em Teresina, Piauí. Resultados demonstram que esta ocupação levou à formação de sulcos e voçorocas e na presença de diferentes tipos de depósitos tecnógenos

Reducing heterotic M-theory to five dimensional supergravity on a manifold with boundary

This paper constructs the reduction of heterotic $M$-theory in eleven dimensions to a supergravity model on a manifold with boundary in five dimensions using a Calabi-Yau three-fold. New results are presented for the boundary terms in the action and for the boundary conditions on the bulk fields. Some general features of dualisation on a manifold with boundary are used to explain the origin of some topological terms in the action. The effect of gaugino condensation on the fermion boundary conditions leads to a `twist' in the chirality of the gravitino which can provide an uplifting mechanism in the vacuum energy to cancel the cosmological constant after moduli stabilisation.Comment: 16 pages, RevTe

Measurement of the splashback feature around SZ-selected Galaxy clusters with DES, SPT, and ACT

We present a detection of the splashback feature around galaxy clusters selected using the Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) signal. Recent measurements of the splashback feature around optically selected galaxy clusters have found that the splashback radius, rsp, is smaller than predicted by N-body simulations. A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that rsp inferred from the observed radial distribution of galaxies is affected by selection effects related to the optical cluster-finding algorithms. We test this possibility by measuring the splashback feature in clusters selected via the SZ effect in data from the South Pole Telescope SZ survey and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Polarimeter survey. The measurement is accomplished by correlating these cluster samples with galaxies detected in the Dark Energy Survey Year 3 data. The SZ observable used to select clusters in this analysis is expected to have a tighter correlation with halo mass and to be more immune to projection effects and aperture-induced biases, potentially ameliorating causes of systematic error for optically selected clusters. We find that the measured rsp for SZ-selected clusters is consistent with the expectations from simulations, although the small number of SZ-selected clusters makes a precise comparison difficult. In agreement with previous work, when using optically selected redMaPPer clusters with similar mass and redshift distributions, rsp is ∼2σ smaller than in the simulations. These results motivate detailed investigations of selection biases in optically selected cluster catalogues and exploration of the splashback feature around larger samples of SZ-selected clusters. Additionally, we investigate trends in the galaxy profile and splashback feature as a function of galaxy colour, finding that blue galaxies have profiles close to a power law with no discernible splashback feature, which is consistent with them being on their first infall into the cluster