1,633 research outputs found
Election Law and Government Ethics
This article surveys developments in Virginia election and government ethics laws for 2014 and 2015, with an emphasis on legislative developments. The focus is on those statutory developments thathave significance or general applicability to the implementation of Virginia\u27s election and ethics laws
A Variational Principle Based Study of KPP Minimal Front Speeds in Random Shears
Variational principle for Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov (KPP) minimal front
speeds provides an efficient tool for statistical speed analysis, as well as a
fast and accurate method for speed computation. A variational principle based
analysis is carried out on the ensemble of KPP speeds through spatially
stationary random shear flows inside infinite channel domains. In the regime of
small root mean square (rms) shear amplitude, the enhancement of the ensemble
averaged KPP front speeds is proved to obey the quadratic law under certain
shear moment conditions. Similarly, in the large rms amplitude regime, the
enhancement follows the linear law. In particular, both laws hold for the
Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process in case of two dimensional channels. An asymptotic
ensemble averaged speed formula is derived in the small rms regime and is
explicit in case of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process of the shear. Variational
principle based computation agrees with these analytical findings, and allows
further study on the speed enhancement distributions as well as the dependence
of enhancement on the shear covariance. Direct simulations in the small rms
regime suggest quadratic speed enhancement law for non-KPP nonlinearities.Comment: 28 pages, 14 figures update: fixed typos, refined estimates in
section
Anomalous Electron Transport in Field-Effect Transistors with Titanium Ditelluride Semimetal Thin-Film Channels
We report on "graphene-like" mechanical exfoliation of thin films of titanium
ditelluride and investigation of their electronic properties. The exfoliated
crystalline TiTe2 films were used as the channel layers in the back-gated
field-effect transistors fabricated with Ti/Al/Au metal contacts on SiO2/Si
substrates. The room-temperature current-voltage characteristics revealed
strongly non-linear behavior with signatures of the source-drain threshold
voltage similar to those observed in the charge-density-wave devices. The
drain-current showed an unusual non-monotonic dependence on the gate bias
characterized by the presence of multiple peaks. The obtained results can be
potentially used for implementation of the non-Boolean logic gates.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
The effects of cognitive-behavioural therapy on mood-related ruminative response style in depressed adolescents
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A mood-related ruminative response style increases the risk of onset and persistence of depression. This preliminary study investigated whether, in depressed adolescents, cognitive-behaviour therapy reduces mood-related ruminative response style. Whether specific factors within the rumination scale were differentially affected by CBT is also reported.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>26 depressed adolescents were randomised to receiving serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor antidepressants (SSRI) plus psychosocial treatment as usual or SSRI and psychosocial treatment as usual plus CBT. Ruminative response style and depressive symptoms were measured at baseline and after 30 weeks of treatment, with the Responses to Depression Questionnaire and Mood and Feelings Questionnaire.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There were significantly greater reductions in ruminations in the CBT group compared to the non-CBT group (<it>p </it>= .002). There was no significant difference in the reduction in self-reported depressive symptoms between the groups. Rumination was reduced to levels of never-depressed controls in adolescents who had recovered from depression and received CBT. There were greater falls in the CBT group in the more pathological 'brooding' factor of rumination.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These findings suggest that adding CBT to SSRI medication in the presence of active clinical care causes a greater reduction in mood-related ruminative response style in depressed adolescents. This may reduce the risk of future relapse.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Current Controlled Trials ISRCNT83809224.</p
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MC++: A parallel, portable, Monte Carlo neutron transport code in C++
MC++ is an implicit multi-group Monte Carlo neutron transport code written in C++ and based on the Parallel Object-Oriented Methods and Applications (POOMA) class library. MC++ runs in parallel on and is portable to a wide variety of platforms, including MPPs, SMPs, and clusters of UNIX workstations. MC++ is being developed to provide transport capabilities to the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). It is also intended to form the basis of the first transport physics framework (TPF), which is a C++ class library containing appropriate abstractions, objects, and methods for the particle transport problem. The transport problem is briefly described, as well as the current status and algorithms in MC++ for solving the transport equation. The alpha version of the POOMA class library is also discussed, along with the implementation of the transport solution algorithms using POOMA. Finally, a simple test problem is defined and performance and physics results from this problem are discussed on a variety of platforms
Coulomb Energy of Nuclei
The density functional determining the Coulomb energy of nuclei is calculated
to the first order in . It is shown that the Coulomb energy includes three
terms: the Hartree energy; the Fock energy; and the correlation Coulomb energy
(CCE), which contributes considerably to the surface energy, the mass
difference between mirror nuclei, and the single-particle spectrum. A CCE-based
mechanism of a systematic shift of the single-particle spectrum is proposed. A
dominant contribution to the CCE is shown to come from the surface region of
nuclei. The CCE effect on the calculated proton drip line is examined, and the
maximum charge of nuclei near this line is found to decrease by 2 or 3
units. The effect of Coulomb interaction on the effective proton mass is
analyzed.Comment: 10 pages, Latex. Devoted to 90-th Anniversary of A.B. Migdal's
Birthda
Detecting depression in dyadic conversations with multimodal narratives and visualizations
Conversations contain a wide spectrum of multimodal information that gives us
hints about the emotions and moods of the speaker. In this paper, we developed
a system that supports humans to analyze conversations. Our main contribution
is the identification of appropriate multimodal features and the integration of
such features into verbatim conversation transcripts. We demonstrate the
ability of our system to take in a wide range of multimodal information and
automatically generated a prediction score for the depression state of the
individual. Our experiments showed that this approach yielded better
performance than the baseline model. Furthermore, the multimodal narrative
approach makes it easy to integrate learnings from other disciplines, such as
conversational analysis and psychology. Lastly, this interdisciplinary and
automated approach is a step towards emulating how practitioners record the
course of treatment as well as emulating how conversational analysts have been
analyzing conversations by hand.Comment: 12 page
Survey of charge symmetry breaking operators for dd -> alpha pi0
The charge-symmetry-breaking amplitudes for the recently observed d d ->
alpha pi0 reaction are investigated. Chiral perturbation theory is used to
classify and identify the leading-order terms. Specific forms of the related
one- and two-body tree level diagrams are derived. As a first step toward a
full calculation, a few tree-level two-body diagrams are evaluated at each
considered order, using a simplified set of d and alpha wave functions and a
plane-wave approximation for the initial dd state. The leading-order
pion-exchange term is shown to be suppressed in this model because of poor
overlap of the initial and final states. The higher-order one-body and
short-range (heavy-meson-exchange) amplitudes provide better matching between
the initial and final states and therefore contribute significantly and
coherently to the cross section. The consequences this might have for a full
calculation, with realistic wave functions and a more complete set of
amplitudes, are discussed.Comment: REVTeX 4, 35 pages, 8 eps figures, submitted to PR
Last passage percolation and traveling fronts
We consider a system of N particles with a stochastic dynamics introduced by
Brunet and Derrida. The particles can be interpreted as last passage times in
directed percolation on {1,...,N} of mean-field type. The particles remain
grouped and move like a traveling wave, subject to discretization and driven by
a random noise. As N increases, we obtain estimates for the speed of the front
and its profile, for different laws of the driving noise. The Gumbel
distribution plays a central role for the particle jumps, and we show that the
scaling limit is a L\'evy process in this case. The case of bounded jumps
yields a completely different behavior
The Off Shell - Mixing in the QCD Sum Rules
The dependence of the mixing amplitude is analyzed with
the use of the QCD sum rules and the dispersion relation. Going off shell the
mixing decreases, changes sign at and is
negative in the space like region. Implications of this result to the isospin
breaking part of the nuclear force are discussed.Comment: 26 pages + 11 figures (PostScript
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