The place of Zeno’s paradox

This paper begins by examining the recent history of interpretations of one of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, the paradox of dichotomy. It then returns to the record of antiquity to ask how Aristotle ‘solved’ the paradox and what decisions about place and motion were assumed in that solution. After appealing to Heidegger’s readings of the Aristotelian text, the paper then proceeds to offer an entirely original interpretation of Zeno’s paradox of dichotomy, which has important implications for a contemporary understanding of motion and place (rather than space). Instead, the paradox is read as a provocation to ‘see’ something which Zeno, it would appear, believed was ‘missing’, or had been forgotten and had disappeared, and to review all over again what Parmenides might have meant in his claim that being is one, singular, and indivisible

Inconstancy of finite and infinite sequences

In order to study large variations or fluctuations of finite or infinite sequences (time series), we bring to light an 1868 paper of Crofton and the (Cauchy-)Crofton theorem. After surveying occurrences of this result in the literature, we introduce the inconstancy of a sequence and we show why it seems more pertinent than other criteria for measuring its variational complexity. We also compute the inconstancy of classical binary sequences including some automatic sequences and Sturmian sequences.Comment: Accepted by Theoretical Computer Scienc

Seasonality and Costs of Production on Irish dairy farms from 1994-2008

working paperPrevious research has highlighted the economic advantages of spring calving in countries such as Ireland that have a long spring/summer grazing season. However, the widespread adoption of such a production system leads to a highly seasonal milk supply and a range of problems that are associated with seasonality. The objective of this paper is to use historical data to quantify the economic benefits of a spring calving system. Data from over 400 dairy farms in Ireland over a period of 15 years is examined. Fixed, random and between effects panel models are estimated to test the significance of calving season on production costs. The results show the effect of calving season is significant at lowering production costs. These models returned results suggesting that high compact early Spring herds have significantly lower costs than over seasons. However the fixed effect model demonstrates little difference between production costs in different seasons suggesting individual effects such as the ability of the farmer may play a role in reduction of costs. Herds that are calved over a shorter period tend to have lower production costs

Numerical solution of gravitational dynamics in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes

A variety of gravitational dynamics problems in asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime are amenable to efficient numerical solution using a common approach involving a null slicing of spacetime based on infalling geodesics, convenient exploitation of the residual diffeomorphism freedom, and use of spectral methods for discretizing and solving the resulting differential equations. Relevant issues and choices leading to this approach are discussed in detail. Three examples, motivated by applications to non-equilibrium dynamics in strongly coupled gauge theories, are discussed as instructive test cases. These are gravitational descriptions of homogeneous isotropization, collisions of planar shocks, and turbulent fluid flows in two spatial dimensions.Comment: 70 pages, 19 figures; v4: fixed minus sign typo in last term of eqn. (3.47

Holography and colliding gravitational shock waves in asymptotically AdS_5 spacetime

Using holography, we study the collision of planar shock waves in strongly coupled N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory. This requires the numerical solution of a dual gravitational initial value problem in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Very low bit-rate video coding focusing on moving regions using three-tier arbitrary-shaped pattern selection algorithm

Very low bit-rate video coding using patterns to represent moving regions in macroblocks exhibits good potential for improved coding efficiency. Recently an Arbitrary Shaped Pattern Selection (ASPS) algorithm and its Extended version(EASPS) were presented, that used a dynamically extracted set of patterns, of the two different sizes, based on actual video content. These algorithms, like other pattern matching algorithms failed to capture a large number of active-region macroblocks (RMB) especially when the object moving regions is relatively larger in a video sequence. As the size of the moving object may vary, superior coding performance is achievable by using dynamically extracted patterns of a larger size. This paper, proposes a three-tier Arbitrary Shaped Pattern Selection (ASPS-3) algorithm that uses three different pattern sizes for very low bit ate coding. Experimental results show that ASPS-3 exhibits better performance compared with other pattern matching algorithms, including the low-bit rate video coding standard H.263

Oil: Its Time Allocation and Project Independence

macroeconomics, oil

Paraphilias: definition, diagnosis and treatment

There is a great deal of controversy concerning paraphilia, and defining what is normal versus deviant or disordered, given that this is to some degree dependent on cultural views of acceptability. In this article, we outline these issues and describe recent progress in diagnosing and treating paraphilias