Mixing in thermally stratified nonlinear spin-up with sources and sinks

Stratified spin-up experiments in enclosed cylinders have reported the presence of small pockets of well-mixed fluids but quantitative measurements of the mixedness of the fluid has been lacking. Previous numerical simulations have not addressed these measurements. Here we present numerical simulations that address how the combined effect of spin-up and thermal boundary conditions enhances or hinders mixing of a fluid in a cylinder. Measurements of efficiency of mixing are based on the variance of temperature and explained in terms of the potential energy available. The numerical simulations of the Navier--Stokes equations for the problem with different sets of thermal boundary conditions at the horizontal walls helped shed some light on the physical mechanisms of mixing, for which a clear explanation was lacking.Comment: Submitted to Physics of Fluids, 9 figure

“¡Pobres Negros!” The Social Representations and Commemorations of Blacks in the River Plate from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First Half of the Twentieth (and Beyond)

To counter regnant arguments in the historiography about the putative historical “forgetting” of Afro-Platines in their nations, “‘¡Pobres negros!’” explores the various social representations and commemorations devoted to blacks in the River Plate over the period from the mid-1800s to the 1930s. While never uniformly or consistently positive, over the nineteenth century these social remembrances nevertheless experienced a radical transformation. Early intellectual nation builders among the Generation of 1837 associated blacks with the forces of social, political, and cultural “barbarism.” These representations remained a part of the national memory until well into the late 1800s in liberal and progressive circles. For these thinkers, European immigration was the solution to all of Argentina’s ills. However, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, blacks in Argentina and Uruguay became the objects of more favorable remembrances, especially among nationalists. Blacks were now often depicted and historically remembered (and reimagined) as Platine Creoles and national heroes. Their white compatriots remembered that Afro-Platines, for instance, fought for and died defending their nations, and often lamented the fate of the “Poor blacks!” By dying for the cause of national sovereignty, blacks were seen as having vanished from the national scene and became the convenient objects of Creole nostalgia. National leaders like Bartolomé Mitre, the founder of the modern Argentine state and its historiography, nostalgically recalled and reimagined them as loyal patriots and heroes. Especially in Argentina, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, this nostalgia was further encouraged by the social and political problems often blamed on foreigners, Jews, and radicals (i.e., non-Argentines). In this socio-political climate, therefore, Afro-Platines were fondly depicted in sites of social memory as loyal sons of the nation, as opposed to foreign anti-patriots and subversives. Even if incorporated as inferiors into the national imaginary, Afro-Platines were nonetheless variously commemorated by Creole elites at the turn of the nineteenth century (and, indeed, beyond)

Interactive composition of WSMO based semantic web services in IRS-III

The discovery and integration of services in a composition are challenging tasks due to the lack of semantic in the Web services' description. WSMO community is working on developing ontologies and infrastructures to support Semantic Web Services. In this paper, we present a tool that takes into account WSMO descriptions to support a user guided, interactive composition approach whereby Web services are discovered and recommended to the users according to the composition context. The generated composition is orchestrated in IRS-III by our Java API for dataflow orchestration

Características de las aguas minerales y medicinales de Cuba

Cuba cuenta con los acuíferos de agua mineral natural y mineromedicinal más importantes del Caribe. En este trabajo se presenta una compilación de sus características hidrogeológicas generales. Los acuíferos se encuentran predominantemente en rocas carbonatadas y terrígeno carbonatadas. En general, la recarga de la mayoría de los acuíferos de aguas minerales, mineromedicinales y termales en Cuba es el resultado de la infiltración de las aguas meteóricas. Las aguas minerales y mineromedicinales cubanas, de acuerdo al anión y al catión mayoritario, se clasifican en bicarbonatadas cálcicas, bicarbonatadas magnésicas y cloruradas sódicas. Los principales componentes medicinales son: sulfuro, bromo y silicio.Cuba has the most important aquifers of medicinal and natural mineral waters in the Caribbean area. In this work, we present an inventory of their hydrogeological characteristics. Aquifers are found in limestones and detritic carbonated rock formations. In general, the recharge of all the thermal, mineral and medicinal aquifers of Cuba has its origin by the infiltration of rainfall. According to the major anions and cations, these Cuban waters are classified as: calcium-bicarbonate, magnesium-bicarbonate and sodium- chloride facies. The main medical components are sulphurous, bromide and silica

A Hybrid intelligent system for diagnosing and solving financial problems

Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnologico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Produção2012-10-16T09:55:39

Perspectives on the Effectiveness of Madrid’s Regional Bilingual Programme: Exploring the Correlation between English Proficiency Level and Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs

This study aims to examine the opinions of prospective pre-primary and primary teachers about Madrid’s regional Bilingual Programme in Spain, assessing the correlations between their self-perceived level of English and their positioning concerning the effectiveness of the regional programme. Although there is a growing body of research in the field of education on how CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) provisions impact in-service teachers’ attitudes concerning bilingual education, there is a dearth of literature on the way student teachers depict the teaching reality. Thus, this paper explores pre-service teachers’ beliefs towards the Bilingual Programme via an ad hoc questionnaire, administered to a non-probabilistic sample of 170 undergraduate students at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The data collected were explored using Chi-square and Somers’ D tests. The results show that the self-perceived English level, greatly determined by prior bilingual schooling, has a strong influence on their perceptions about the Bilingual Programme. The findings also indicate that, although the learning experience at the pre-primary stage is valued positively by students, the acquisition of curricular contents in primary education is seen as negatively affected due to English medium instruction

Inference Time Optimization Using BranchyNet Partitioning

Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications with edge computing presents a trade-off between responsiveness and computational resources. On one hand, edge computing can provide high responsiveness deploying computational resources close to end devices, which may be prohibitive for the majority of cloud computing services. On the other hand, DNN inference requires computational power to be executed, which may not be available on edge devices, but a cloud server can provide it. To solve this problem (trade-off), we partition a DNN between edge device and cloud server, which means the first DNN layers are processed at the edge and the other layers at the cloud. This paper proposes an optimal partition of DNN, according to network bandwidth, computational resources of edge and cloud, and parameter inherent to data. Our proposal aims to minimize the inference time, to allow high responsiveness applications. To this end, we show the equivalency between DNN partitioning problem and shortest path problem to find an optimal solution, using Dijkstra's algorithm.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications 202

Mobile resource management for better user experience: an audio case study

Ubiquitous environment's research has evolved considerably over the last years. The wide range of mobile devices, their high diversity and mobility have raised a variety of challenges being resource management a predominant, and therefore attracting special attention in the research community. The Composable-Adaptive Resource Management (CARM) middleware library provides a exi- ble infrastructure where personal devices create seamlessly on-demand interconnections links to share ubiquitous resources. In this paper we present a CARM interesting use case, consisting of an improved audio listening experience by sharing a high quality audio resource. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided, and a testbed comprised of two CARM enabled mobile phones with Bluetooth connectivity making use of remote device's audio resource is described. Our approach demonstrates the importance and usability of enhancing the dynamic resource sharing experience without altering the bandwidth efficiency.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Environmental modulation of microbial ecosystems

Natural microbiota are essential to the health of living systems - from the human gut to coral reefs. Although advances in DNA sequencing have allowed us to catalogue many of the different organisms that make up these microbial communities, significant challenges remain in understanding the complex networks of interspecies metabolic interactions they exhibit. These interactions are crucial to community stability and function, and are highly context-dependent: the availability of different nutrients can determine whether a set of microbes will interact cooperatively or competitively, which can drastically change a community’s structure. Disentangling the environmental factors that determine these behaviors will not only fundamentally enhance our knowledge of their ecological properties, but will also bring us closer to the rational engineering of synthetic microbiomes with novel functions. Here, I integrate modeling and experimental approaches to quantify the dependence of microbial communities on environmental composition. I then show how this relationship can be leveraged to facilitate the design of synthetic consortia. The first chapter of this dissertation is a review article that introduces a framework for cataloguing interaction mechanisms, which enables quantitative comparisons and predictive models of these complex phenomena. The second chapter is a computational study that explores one such attribute – metabolic cost – in high detail. It demonstrates how a large variety of molecules can be secreted without imposing a fitness cost on microbial organisms, allowing for the emergence of beneficial interspecies interactions. The third chapter is an experimental study that determines how the number of unique environmental nutrients affects microbial community growth and taxonomic diversity. The integration of stoichiometric and consumer resource models enabled the discovery of basic ecological principles that govern this environment-phenotype relationship. The fourth chapter applies these principles to the design of engineered communities via a search algorithm that identifies environmental compositions that yield specific ecosystem properties. This dissertation then concludes with extensions of the modeling methods used throughout this work to additional model systems. Future work could further quantify how microbial community phenotypes depend on each of the individual factors explored in this thesis, while also leveraging emerging knowledge on interaction mechanisms to design synthetic consortia

Efecto de la tasa de crecimiento y del tamaño del fruto sobre la aparición de “Blotchy Ripening” en tomate (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.)

Tesis para optar al grado académico de Magíster en Cultivos Intensivos, de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, en abril de 2011Blotchy ripening es un desorden de maduración que afecta los frutos de tomate a nivel mundial y se caracteriza por manchas irregulares en forma y tamaño, de color verde claro, amarillas o casi decoloradas, asociadas a áreas necrosadas que afectan el tejido vascular del fruto. El desorden posee una alta incidencia en la zona hortícola de la Provincia de Corrientes. El objetivo de este trabajo fue determinar la relación que existe entre el tamaño y la tasa de crecimiento del fruto sobre la aparición del desorden. El desorden no se distribuye uniformemente a lo largo del año, y su incidencia varía entre campañas. La temperatura no sería el principal factor determinante del problema. También se encontró una relación lineal entre el tamaño de fruto y el grado de aparición del desorden, independientemente de la práctica agronómica aplicada, manejo de densidad o raleo de flores. Lo que cambia entre tratamientos y entre años es la pendiente de la relación. El peso medio de los frutos con el desorden fue mayor que los respectivos pesos medios totales. Esto relacionaría mayor peso de fruto con la aparición del desorden. Con raleo de flores y manejo de densidad de plantación se logran mayores pesos medios de los frutos que presentan el desorden, pero varía entre años.Blotchy ripening is a disorder that affects ripening tomato fruits worldwide and is characterized by irregular patches in size and shape, light green, yellow or almost faded, associated with necrotic areas affecting the vascular tissue of the fruit. The disorder has a high incidence in the horticultural zone of the province of Corrientes. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between size and growth rate of the fruit on the occurrence of the disorder. The disorder is not evenly distributed throughout the year, and its incidence varies between years. The temperature would not be the main determinant of the problem. We also found a linear relationship between fruit size and degree of occurrence of the disorder, regardless of the applied agronomic practices, handling of plant density or flower thinning. What changes between treatments and between years is the slope of the relationship. The average weight of fruit with the disorder was higher than the respective total average weights. This increased fruit weight relate to the appearance of disorder. With flower thinning and plant density management result in higher mean weight of the fruits that have the disorder, but varies between years.Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Bella VistaFil: Pacheco, Roberto Matias. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Bella Vista; Argentin