2,113 research outputs found
Numerical Determination of the Distribution of Energies for the XY-model
We compute numerically the distribution of energies W(E,N) for the XY-model
with short-range and long-range interactions. We find that in both cases the
distribution can be fitted to the functional form: W(E,N) ~ exp(N f(E,N)), with
f(E,N) an intensive function of the energy.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Submitted to Physica
Microcanonical Analysis of Exactness of the Mean-Field Theory in Long-Range Interacting Systems
Classical spin systems with nonadditive long-range interactions are studied
in the microcanonical ensemble. It is expected that the entropy of such a
system is identical to that of the corresponding mean-field model, which is
called "exactness of the mean-field theory". It is found out that this
expectation is not necessarily true if the microcanonical ensemble is not
equivalent to the canonical ensemble in the mean-field model. Moreover,
necessary and sufficient conditions for exactness of the mean-field theory are
obtained. These conditions are investigated for two concrete models, the
\alpha-Potts model with annealed vacancies and the \alpha-Potts model with
invisible states.Comment: 23 pages, to appear in J. Stat. Phy
Promoting the scholarship of teaching: Results of a workshop on enhancing education in wildlife conservation
We describe the justification, format, and assessment of a workshop Enhancing Education in Wildlife Ecology, Conservation, Management: An Exchange of Ideas facilitated at the Wildlife Society\u27s Fourth Annual Conference. The workshop was designed to meet the professional development needs of college and university wildlife educators. Over 80 participants from academic and agency backgrounds attended a keynote address and breakout sessions to discuss pedagogical techniques and approaches to teaching specific wildlife course content. Breakout sessions on active learning in large classrooms, constructed controversies, and using writing in the classroom were identified by most participants as most important. The diverse backgrounds of session participants affected the nature of discussions in course-content focused sessions. Participants routinely expressed satisfaction about the opportunity to exchange ideas about teaching methods with colleagues
Public Opinion on Artificial Intelligence Development
In connection with the active role of Russia and other countries in the design and implementation of devices with artificial intelligence (AI), there is a need to study the opinion of different social groups on this technology and the problems that arise when using it. The purpose of this work is to analyze public opinion on AI, in Russia and various foreign countries, and the possible consequences of its implementation in different areas of human activity. The research has revealed students’ opinions about AI devices and the problems related to their development in Russia. The research methods adopted are a content analysis of foreign publications devoted to the study of public opinion on AI and a questionnaire survey. Overall, 190 students of the Ural Federal University enrolled in Bachelor’s and Master’s programs were interviewed. The analysis of publications devoted to the study of public opinion in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, as well as the results of our survey, has led to the conclusion that the majority of people have only a vague idea of what AI devices are. Our study has revealed that 23.6% of the respondents know nothing about AI. 36% of the respondents believe that in the near future the most demanded specialists in the labor market will be those who create robots and control their work. The survey has also shown the important role of mass media and general and special education institutions in informing the population about the opportunities and problems that arise when devices that exceed human mental capabilities are created and enter the social fabric.
Keywords: public opinion, artificial intelligence, subjects of public opinion, representations of social groups about artificial intelligenc
Dynamical stability criterion for inhomogeneous quasi-stationary states in long-range systems
We derive a necessary and sufficient condition of linear dynamical stability
for inhomogeneous Vlasov stationary states of the Hamiltonian Mean Field (HMF)
model. The condition is expressed by an explicit disequality that has to be
satisfied by the stationary state, and it generalizes the known disequality for
homogeneous stationary states. In addition, we derive analogous disequalities
that express necessary and sufficient conditions of formal stability for the
stationary states. Their usefulness, from the point of view of linear dynamical
stability, is that they are simpler, although they provide only sufficient
criteria of linear stability. We show that for homogeneous stationary states
the relations become equal, and therefore linear dynamical stability and formal
stability become equivalent.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experimen
Bubble propagation in a helicoidal molecular chain
We study the propagation of very large amplitude localized excitations in a
model of DNA that takes explicitly into account the helicoidal structure. These
excitations represent the ``transcription bubble'', where the hydrogen bonds
between complementary bases are disrupted, allowing access to the genetic code.
We propose these kind of excitations in alternative to kinks and breathers. The
model has been introduced by Barbi et al. [Phys. Lett. A 253, 358 (1999)], and
up to now it has been used to study on the one hand low amplitude breather
solutions, and on the other hand the DNA melting transition. We extend the
model to include the case of heterogeneous chains, in order to get closer to a
description of real DNA; in fact, the Morse potential representing the
interaction between complementary bases has two possible depths, one for A-T
and one for G-C base pairs. We first compute the equilibrium configurations of
a chain with a degree of uncoiling, and we find that a static bubble is among
them; then we show, by molecular dynamics simulations, that these bubbles, once
generated, can move along the chain. We find that also in the most unfavourable
case, that of a heterogeneous DNA in the presence of thermal noise, the
excitation can travel for well more 1000 base pairs.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.
Multi-scale Cover Selection by White-tailed Deer, Odocoileus virginianus, in an Agro-forested Landscape
Resource selection studies are commonly conducted at a single spatial scale, but this likely does not fully or accurately assess the hierarchical selection process used by animals. We used a multi-spatial scale approach to quantify White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) cover selection in south-central Michigan during 2004–2006 by varying definitions of use and availability and ranking the relative importance of cover types under each study design. The number of cover types assigned as selected (proportional use > proportional availability) decreased from coarse (landscape level) to fine (within home range) scales, although at finer scales, selection seemed to be more consistent. Although the relative importance changed substantially across spatial scales, two cover types (conifers, upland deciduous forests) were consistently ranked as the two most important, providing strong evidence of their value to deer in the study area. Testing for resource selection patterns using a multi-spatial scale approach would provide additional insight into the ecology and behavior of a particular species
Relaxation to thermal equilibrium in the self-gravitating sheet model
We revisit the issue of relaxation to thermal equilibrium in the so-called
"sheet model", i.e., particles in one dimension interacting by attractive
forces independent of their separation. We show that this relaxation may be
very clearly detected and characterized by following the evolution of order
parameters defined by appropriately normalized moments of the phase space
distribution which probe its entanglement in space and velocity coordinates.
For a class of quasi-stationary states which result from the violent relaxation
of rectangular waterbag initial conditions, characterized by their virial ratio
R_0, we show that relaxation occurs on a time scale which (i) scales
approximately linearly in the particle number N, and (ii) shows also a strong
dependence on R_0, with quasi-stationary states from colder initial conditions
relaxing much more rapidly. The temporal evolution of the order parameter may
be well described by a stretched exponential function. We study finally the
correlation of the relaxation times with the amplitude of fluctuations in the
relaxing quasi-stationary states, as well as the relation between temporal and
ensemble averages.Comment: 37 pages, 24 figures; some additional discussion of previous
literature and other minor modifications, final published versio
Methods for calculating nonconcave entropies
Five different methods which can be used to analytically calculate entropies
that are nonconcave as functions of the energy in the thermodynamic limit are
discussed and compared. The five methods are based on the following ideas and
techniques: i) microcanonical contraction, ii) metastable branches of the free
energy, iii) generalized canonical ensembles with specific illustrations
involving the so-called Gaussian and Betrag ensembles, iv) restricted canonical
ensemble, and v) inverse Laplace transform. A simple long-range spin model
having a nonconcave entropy is used to illustrate each method.Comment: v1: 22 pages, IOP style, 7 color figures, contribution for the JSTAT
special issue on Long-range interacting systems. v2: Open problem and
references added, minor typos corrected, close to published versio
Invariant measures of the 2D Euler and Vlasov equations
We discuss invariant measures of partial differential equations such as the
2D Euler or Vlasov equations. For the 2D Euler equations, starting from the
Liouville theorem, valid for N-dimensional approximations of the dynamics, we
define the microcanonical measure as a limit measure where N goes to infinity.
When only the energy and enstrophy invariants are taken into account, we give
an explicit computation to prove the following result: the microcanonical
measure is actually a Young measure corresponding to the maximization of a
mean-field entropy. We explain why this result remains true for more general
microcanonical measures, when all the dynamical invariants are taken into
account. We give an explicit proof that these microcanonical measures are
invariant measures for the dynamics of the 2D Euler equations. We describe a
more general set of invariant measures, and discuss briefly their stability and
their consequence for the ergodicity of the 2D Euler equations. The extension
of these results to the Vlasov equations is also discussed, together with a
proof of the uniqueness of statistical equilibria, for Vlasov equations with
repulsive convex potentials. Even if we consider, in this paper, invariant
measures only for Hamiltonian equations, with no fluxes of conserved
quantities, we think this work is an important step towards the description of
non-equilibrium invariant measures with fluxes.Comment: 40 page
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