Performing in the Lap and at the Feet of God: Ramleela in Trinidad, 2006–2008

The island of Trinidad is home to one of the world’s largest annual performances of the Hindu epic drama known locally as Ramleela. Far away from their ancestral homeland, Indo-Trinidadians perform their own identities as a Caribbean people in a drama of exile that hauntingly replicates their diasporic experience

Renormalized coordinate approach to the thermalization process

We consider a particle in the harmonic approximation coupled linearly to an environment. modeled by an infinite set of harmonic oscillators. The system (particle--environment) is considered in a cavity at thermal equilibrium. We employ the recently introduced notion of renormalized coordinates to investigate the time evolution of the particle occupation number. For comparison we first present this study in bare coordinates. For a long ellapsed time, in both approaches, the occupation number of the particle becomes independent of its initial value. The value of ocupation number of the particle is the physically expected one at the given temperature. So we have a Markovian process, describing the particle thermalization with the environment. With renormalized coordinates no renormalization procedure is required, leading directly to a finite result.Comment: 16 pages, LATEX, 2 figure

Development of an open-source toolbox for the analysis and visualization of remotely sensed time series

The GEONETCast data-dissemination system delivers free multi-source raw satellite images and processed products to users worldwide; from these data, users can construct long time series to study dynamic phenomena. To explore these dynamics, using an animation with few controls is common practice. But animations easily produce information overload leading to change blindness, a problem that can be addressed in various ways. We present a combination of analytical and visual functionalities to better support visual exploration of animated time series. Analytical pre-processing functions include slicing and tracking of objects of interest. Results of the slicing and the tracking are input to the visualization environment, which is further enriched by tools to make various time, attribute, and area selections and by options to visually enhance selections relative to their surroundings, visualize the path of moving objects, and multiple layers. The resulting toolbox is dedicated to visual exploration and analysis of dynamic phenomena in time series. A case study demonstrates, with a use scenario, how it works. Early exposure of some visualization functions to users has already led to improvements, but more extensive testing will follow after further enrichment of the toolbox. Directions of future research are described

Critical temperature for first-order phase transitions in confined systems

We consider the Euclidean $D$-dimensional $-\lambda |\phi |^4+\eta |\phi |^6$ ($\lambda ,\eta >0$) model with $d$ ($d\leq D$) compactified dimensions. Introducing temperature by means of the Ginzburg--Landau prescription in the mass term of the Hamiltonian, this model can be interpreted as describing a first-order phase transition for a system in a region of the $D$-dimensional space, limited by $d$ pairs of parallel planes, orthogonal to the coordinates axis $x_1, x_2, ..., x_d$. The planes in each pair are separated by distances $L_1, L_2, ..., L_d$. We obtain an expression for the transition temperature as a function of the size of the system, $$, $i=1, 2, ..., d$. For D=3 we particularize this formula, taking $L_1=L_2=... =L_d=L$ for the physically interesting cases $d=1$ (a film), $d=2$ (an infinitely long wire having a square cross-section), and for $d=3$ (a cube). For completeness, the corresponding formulas for second-order transitions are also presented. Comparison with experimental data for superconducting films and wires shows qualitative agreement with our theoretical expressionsComment: REVTEX, 11 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Eur. Phys. Journal