3,916 research outputs found
A post-tsunami assessment of coastal living resources of Langkawi Archipelago, Peninsular Malaysia
Rapid and detailed post-tsunami surveys carried out in the Langkawi archipelago in January 2005 showed that the coral reefs dOld_ID not suffer any significant structural damage. Nevertheless, there were signs of recent sediment resuspension at the sites studied. The diversity and abundance of coral reef fishes and invertebrates were low. However, this was not attributed to the tsunami effect but rather to the present environmental conditions. The extent of damage at the villages of Kubang Badak and Kuala Teriang may indicate that intact coastal ecosystems such as mangroves have the potential to protect lives and property during natural disasters
Modeling flocculation processes: continuous particle size distribution method
The flocculation process of cohesive sediment suspended in water consists of aggregation of the fine particles and breakup of the large flocs. The population balance equation (PBE) is a statement of continuity for particulate systems, and it is used to model the flocculation process and predict the particle size distribution (PSD). Different numerical methods are developed to solve the PBE, however most of the methods have difficulties in representing the continuous PSD or improving computational efficiency. In this research, the B-spline FEM and Galerkin FEM are studied to simulate the continuous PSD. The B-spline FEM solves the PBE over the whole domain, which is truncated to finite domain; the open non-uniform B-splines are used as basis function to approximate the PSD; the curve of PSD is required to be smooth enough. The Galerkin FEM discretizes the PBE on each sub-domain (the whole domain is split to several sub-domains), and it is used to solve less-smooth problems. The adaptive technique is applied to readjust the computational grid (particle size domain) to improve computational efficiency and the accuracy, and it is also applied in varied time step to get suitable time step to improve the stability. The analytical solutions of the PBE in special conditions and the experimental data are used to validate both B-spline FEM and Galerkin FEM, and the results are compared with that of the classical DPBE method. It shows that both B-spline FEM and Galerkin FEM can solve the PBE and simulate continuous PSD accurately and efficiently
Phase diagram of congested traffic flow: an empirical study
We analyze traffic data from a highway section containing one effective
on-ramp. Based on two criteria, local velocity variation patterns and expansion
(or nonexpansion) of congested regions, three distinct congested traffic states
are identified. These states appear at different levels of the upstream flux
and the on-ramp flux, thereby generating a phase diagram of the congested
traffic flow. Compared to our earliear reports (including cond-mat/9905292)
based on 14 day traffic data, the present paper uses a much larger data set
(107 days) and the analysis is carried in a more systematic way, which leads to
the modification of a part of interpretation in the earlier reports. Observed
traffic states are compared with recent theoretical analyses and both agreeing
and disagreeing features are found.Comment: More extensive and systematic version of earlier reports (including
cond-mat/9905292). A part of interpretation in earlier reports is modified. 6
two-column pages. To appear in Phys. Rev. E (tentatively scheduled for Oct. 1
issue
SELF-DUAL ANYONS IN UNIFORM BACKGROUND FIELDS
We study relativistic self-dual Chern-Simons-Higgs systems in the presence of
uniform background fields that explicitly break CTP. A rich, but discrete
vacuum structure is found when the gauge symmetry is spontaneously broken,
while the symmetric phase can have an infinite vacuum degeneracy at tree level.
The latter is due to the proliferation of neutral solitonic states that cost
zero energy. Various novel self-dual solitons, such as these, are found in both
the symmetric and the asymmetric phases. Also by considering a similar system
on a two-sphere and the subsequent large sphere limit, we isolate sensible and
finite expressions for the conserved angular and linear momenta, which satisfy
anomalous commutation relations. We conclude with a few remarks on unresolved
issues.Comment: LaTeX, 20 pages, 4 uuencoded figures included
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The visibility of environmental rights in the EU legal order: eurolegalism in action?
The current article responds to a key puzzle and a question. First, why, given the potential for ‘rights talk’ that has been seen in other countries and other policy areas, have environmental rights in the EU legal order been relatively invisible until recently? And second, with Daniel Kelemen’s influential work on Eurolegalism arguing that the EU has become much more reliant on US-style adversarial legalism, including a shift towards rights-based litigation, do EU environmental rights fit the picture Kelemen has painted, or are they an exception? The article explores the visibility of EU environmental rights at EU level and then seeks to explain the possible reasons for visibility/invisibility
Lessons from the Pandemic: Analyzing the Experience of Distant Learning in Secondary Schools
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions switched to distance learning in March 2020. The study focuses on how the sudden transition affected the level of teachers’ anxiety and professional burnout. A total of 282 teachers from general education schools participated in the study. The results showed that the teachers successfully coped with the transition: the level of anxiety and burnout was similar to the results of previous studies of teachers before the pandemic. A significant role in the adaptation of teachers to the urgent transition to online education was played by their attitudes. In particular, those who adapted to the change and were able to get used to the distance format of work showed the lowest levels of anxiety compared with other groups who resisted the change and experienced difficulties. An important condition for successful distance learning, according to teachers, is the detailed regulation of infrastructural aspects of the educational process by the administration. The article discusses the next steps to improve the quality of distance learning based on experience
Stress-Minimizing Orthogonal Layout of Data Flow Diagrams with Ports
We present a fundamentally different approach to orthogonal layout of data
flow diagrams with ports. This is based on extending constrained stress
majorization to cater for ports and flow layout. Because we are minimizing
stress we are able to better display global structure, as measured by several
criteria such as stress, edge-length variance, and aspect ratio. Compared to
the layered approach, our layouts tend to exhibit symmetries, and eliminate
inter-layer whitespace, making the diagrams more compact
The Erpenbeck high frequency instability theorem for ZND detonations
The rigorous study of spectral stability for strong detonations was begun by
J.J. Erpenbeck in [Er1]. Working with the Zeldovitch-von Neumann-D\"oring (ZND)
model, which assumes a finite reaction rate but ignores effects like viscosity
corresponding to second order derivatives, he used a normal mode analysis to
define a stability function V(\tau,\eps) whose zeros in
correspond to multidimensional perturbations of a steady detonation profile
that grow exponentially in time. Later in a remarkable paper [Er3] he provided
strong evidence, by a combination of formal and rigorous arguments, that for
certain classes of steady ZND profiles, unstable zeros of exist for
perturbations of sufficiently large transverse wavenumber \eps, even when the
von Neumann shock, regarded as a gas dynamical shock, is uniformly stable in
the sense defined (nearly twenty years later) by Majda. In spite of a great
deal of later numerical work devoted to computing the zeros of V(\tau,\eps),
the paper \cite{Er3} remains the only work we know of that presents a detailed
and convincing theoretical argument for detecting them.
The analysis in [Er3] points the way toward, but does not constitute, a
mathematical proof that such unstable zeros exist. In this paper we identify
the mathematical issues left unresolved in [Er3] and provide proofs, together
with certain simplifications and extensions, of the main conclusions about
stability and instability of detonations contained in that paper.
The main mathematical problem, and our principal focus here, is to determine
the precise asymptotic behavior as \eps\to \infty of solutions to a linear
system of ODEs in , depending on \eps and a complex frequency as
parameters, with turning points on the half-line
Single Pion Production in Neutrino Reactions and Estimates for Charge-Exchange Effects
We calculate single pion production by neutrinos in the resonance region. We
consider both charged and neutral current reactions on free protons and
neutrons. We present differential and total cross sections which can be
compared with experiments. Then we use these results to calculate the spectra
of the emerging pions including the Pauli suppression factor and rescattering
corrections for reactions in heavy nuclei. Our results will be useful for
studying single pion production and for investigating neutrino oscillations in
future experiments.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figure
The ^4He trimer as an Efimov system
We review the results obtained in the last four decades which demonstrate the
Efimov nature of the He three-atomic system.Comment: Review article for a special issue of the Few-Body Systems journal
devoted to Efimov physic
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