Digital Dilemma 2018: Digital Presentations in Biological Anthropology and Bioarchaeology

In academia, funding for conference attendance is limited, and both students and early-career researchers are therefore only able to attend a limited number of conferences. This means that, typically, researchers need to choose between attending multiple local and, at times, more affordable conferences, or one or two large, expensive, international conferences. Local and less expensive conferences may be research-specific but will have a smaller audience and lower networking potential. In biological anthropology and bioarchaeology, the majority of these larger annual conferences are held in North America and Western Europe where travel and accommodation costs can be very high for those outside of these regions. These costs, in addition to visa restrictions, reduce the diversity of participants at academic conferences, skewing attendance to students and researchers from the host countries. Not only does this disadvantage individuals outside of the typical host-countries, but it also limits the breadth of academic dialogue, with inclusion in academic conferences determined all too often by financial resources rather than academic value. This paper discusses the demographics and lack of diversity at some of these large conferences and the factors that are known to limit international conference travel. It then presents the benefits of digital presentation methods using Digital Dilemma 2018 as a case study for how digital presentation methods can be combined with physical presentations at minimal cost and time. We hope that this will encourage more conferences to offer a digital presentation option in the future

Digital Dilemma 2018

In October 2018 a one-day conference was held at the UCL Institute of Archaeology focussing on the ‘Digital Dilemma’ in biological archaeology —specifically human remains research where the use of digitisation methods have increased exponentially over the last decade while comparatively little discussion of the ethical and legal considerations of these data has taken place. Papers presented at Digital Dilemma 2018 explored the use of digital data in human remains research, discussing both the benefits provided by these data, areas of ethical or methodological concern and suggestions for future research. This paper and the following conference proceedings will discuss this research demonstrating the importance that this Digital Dilemma in archaeology continues to be discussed and considered in future research

Quality control of automatically defined cancer cases by the automated registration system of the Venetian Tumour Registry

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Application of a renormalization group algorithm to nonequilibrium cellular automata with one absorbing state

We improve a recently proposed dynamically driven renormalization group algorithm for cellular automata systems with one absorbing state, introducing spatial correlations in the expression for the transition probabilities. We implement the renormalization group scheme considering three different approximations which take into account correlations in the stationary probability distribution. The improved scheme is applied to a probabilistic cellular automaton already introduced in the literature.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Volcanic forcing improves Atmosphere-Ocean Coupled General Circulation Model scaling performance

Recent Atmosphere-Ocean Coupled General Circulation Model (AOGCM) simulations of the twentieth century climate, which account for anthropogenic and natural forcings, make it possible to study the origin of long-term temperature correlations found in the observed records. We study ensemble experiments performed with the NCAR PCM for 10 different historical scenarios, including no forcings, greenhouse gas, sulfate aerosol, ozone, solar, volcanic forcing and various combinations, such as it natural, anthropogenic and all forcings. We compare the scaling exponents characterizing the long-term correlations of the observed and simulated model data for 16 representative land stations and 16 sites in the Atlantic Ocean for these scenarios. We find that inclusion of volcanic forcing in the AOGCM considerably improves the PCM scaling behavior. The scenarios containing volcanic forcing are able to reproduce quite well the observed scaling exponents for the land with exponents around 0.65 independent of the station distance from the ocean. For the Atlantic Ocean, scenarios with the volcanic forcing slightly underestimate the observed persistence exhibiting an average exponent 0.74 instead of 0.85 for reconstructed data.Comment: 4 figure

Maximal height statistics for 1/f^alpha signals

Numerical and analytical results are presented for the maximal relative height distribution of stationary periodic Gaussian signals (one dimensional interfaces) displaying a 1/f^alpha power spectrum. For 0<alpha<1 (regime of decaying correlations), we observe that the mathematically established limiting distribution (Fisher-Tippett-Gumbel distribution) is approached extremely slowly as the sample size increases. The convergence is rapid for alpha>1 (regime of strong correlations) and a highly accurate picture gallery of distribution functions can be constructed numerically. Analytical results can be obtained in the limit alpha -> infinity and, for large alpha, by perturbation expansion. Furthermore, using path integral techniques we derive a trace formula for the distribution function, valid for alpha=2n even integer. From the latter we extract the small argument asymptote of the distribution function whose analytic continuation to arbitrary alpha > 1 is found to be in agreement with simulations. Comparison of the extreme and roughness statistics of the interfaces reveals similarities in both the small and large argument asymptotes of the distribution functions.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, RevTex

Dynamic behavior of anisotropic non-equilibrium driving lattice gases

It is shown that intrinsically anisotropic non-equilibrium systems relaxing by a dynamic process exhibit universal critical behavior during their evolution toward non-equilibrium stationary states. An anisotropic scaling anzats for the dynamics is proposed and tested numerically. Relevant critical exponents can be evaluated self-consistently using both the short- and long-time dynamics frameworks. The obtained results allow us to clarify a long-standing controversy about the theoretical description, the universality and the origin of the anisotropy of driven diffusive systems, showing that the standard field theory does not hold and supporting a recently proposed alternative theory.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Una procedura per la valutazione dei limiti di utilizzo di O-Ring sottoposti ad intensi fasci di neutroni

Si presenta una procedura per la previsione della durata di utilizzo di O-ring in materiale polimerico impiegati nei bersagli per la produzione di fasci di ioni radioattivi. Si sono dapprima condotte prove di tenuta a vuoto e analisi a elementi finiti di un O-ring di riferimento operante con diversi livelli di interferenza con la cava, identificando la precompressione limite per la tenuta e la corrispondente pressione di contatto con la cava. Si sono poi effettuate prove di trazione e di Compression Set su campioni di O-ring in EPDM, preventivamente sottoposti a diversi livelli di irraggiamento in campi misti di neutroni e gamma, analizzando l’effetto della dose assorbita sul comportamento meccanico del materiale e sulle corrispondenti proprietà resistenziali, e definendo opportune leggi costitutive. Si sono infine simulate le progressive modifiche di comportamento della guarnizione indotte dall’irraggiamento, prevedendone la durata in esercizio in termini di tenuta e di resistenza strutturale

Numerical study of a first-order irreversible phase transition in a CO+NO catalyzed reaction model

The first-order irreversible phase transitions (IPT) of the Yaldran-Khan model (Yaldran-Khan, J. Catal. 131, 369, 1991) for the CO+NO reaction is studied using the constant coverage (CC) ensemble and performing epidemic simulations. The CC method allows the study of hysteretic effects close to coexistence as well as the location of both the upper spinodal point and the coexistence point. Epidemic studies show that at coexistence the number of active sites decreases according to a (short-time) power law followed by a (long-time) exponential decay. It is concluded that first-order IPT's share many characteristic of their reversible counterparts, such as the development of short ranged correlations, hysteretic effects, metastabilities, etc.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

An algorithm to calculate the transport exponent in strip geometries

An algorithm for solving the random resistor problem by means of the transfer-matrix approach is presented. Preconditioning by spanning clusters extraction both reduces the size of the conductivity matrix and speed up the calculations.Comment: 17 pages, RevTeX2.1, HLRZ - 97/9