Who guards the guardians of monetary stability and financial stability? That is the key question behind the debate about the accountability of the Bank of England

Rosa Lastra unpicks the debate surrounding the accountability of the increasingly powerful Bank of England. She argues that the Bank of England should be made accountable to Parliament, and calls for a better understanding of how we should assess the Bank’s role in creating financial stability

Entanglement properties in the Inhomogeneous Tavis-Cummings model

In this work we study the properties of the atomic entanglement in the eigenstates spectrum of the inhomogeneous Tavis-Cummings Model. The inhomogeneity is present in the coupling among the atoms with quantum electromagnetic field. We calculate analytical expressions for the concurrence and we found that this exhibits a strong dependence on the inhomogeneity.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Accelerated anaerobic hydrolysis rates under a combination of intermittent aeration and anaerobic conditions

Anaerobic hydrolysis in activated return sludge was investigated in laboratory scale experiments to find if intermittent aeration would accelerate anaerobic hydrolysis rates compared to anaerobic hydrolysis rates under strict anaerobic conditions. The intermittent reactors were set up in a 240 h experiment with intermittent aeration (3 h:3 h) in a period of 24 h followed by a subsequent anaerobic period of 24 h in a cycle of 48 h which was repeated five times during the experiment. The anaerobic reactors were kept under strict anaerobic conditions in the same period (240 h). Two methods for calculating hydrolysis rates based on soluble chemical oxygen demand were compared. Two-way analysis of variance with the Bonferroni post-test was performed in order to register any significant difference between reactors with intermittent aeration and strictly anaerobic conditions respectively. The experiment demonstrated a statistically significant difference in favor of the reactors with intermittent aeration showing a tendency towards accelerated anaerobic hydrolysis rates due to application of intermittent aeration. The conclusion of the work is thus that intermittent aeration applied in the activated return sludge process can improve the treatment capacity further in full scale applications.</jats:p

Web based system architecture for long pulse remote experimentation

Remote experimentation (RE) methods will be essential in next generation fusion devices. Requirements for long pulse RE will be: on-line data visualization, on-line data acquisition processes monitoring and on-line data acquisition systems interactions (start, stop or set-up modifications). Note that these methods are not oriented to real-time control of fusion plant devices. INDRA Sistemas S.A., CIEMAT (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas Medioambientales y Tecnológicas) and UPM (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) have designed a specific software architecture for these purposes. The architecture can be supported on the BeansNet platform, whose integration with an application server provides an adequate solution to the requirements. BeansNet is a JINI based framework developed by INDRA, which makes easy the implementation of a remote experimentation model based on a Service Oriented Architecture. The new software architecture has been designed on the basis of the experience acquired in the development of an upgrade of the TJ-II remote experimentation system

Towards an analytical description of active microswimmers in clean and in surfactant-covered drops

Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the low-Reynolds-number locomotion of a self-propelled microswimmer moving inside a clean viscous drop or a drop covered with a homogeneously distributed surfactant, is theoretically examined. The interfacial viscous stresses induced by the surfactant are described by the well-established Boussinesq-Scriven constitutive rheological model. Moreover, the active agent is represented by a force dipole and the resulting fluid-mediated hydrodynamic couplings between the swimmer and the confining drop are investigated. We find that the presence of the surfactant significantly alters the dynamics of the encapsulated swimmer by enhancing its reorientation. Exact solutions for the velocity images for the Stokeslet and dipolar flow singularities inside the drop are introduced and expressed in terms of infinite series of harmonic components. Our results offer useful insights into guiding principles for the control of confined active matter systems and support the objective of utilizing synthetic microswimmers to drive drops for targeted drug delivery applications.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Regular article contributed to the Topical Issue of the European Physical Journal E entitled "Physics of Motile Active Matter" edited by Gerhard Gompper, Clemens Bechinger, Holger Stark, and Roland G. Winkle

Quantum recoil effects in finite-time disentanglement of two distinguishable atoms

Starting from the requirement of distinguishability of two atoms by their positions, it is shown that photon recoil has a strong influence on finite-time disentanglement and in some cases prevents its appearance. At near-field inter atomic distances well localized atoms, with maximally one atom being initially excited, may suffer disentanglement at a single finite time or even at a series of equidistant finite times, depending on their mean inter atomic distance and their initial electronic preparation.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physical Review on august 2

Filogenia de aislamientos entomopatógenos de Isaria spp. (Ascomycota: Hypocreales) provenientes de Argentina y Brasil.

Los hongos entomopatógenos del genero Isaria (Ascomycota: Hypocreales) son agentes de control natural de insectos plaga. La clasificación de sus especies generalmente se realiza por descripción de las características morfológicas, sin embargo, debido al carácter pleomórfico de algunas especies, su identificación se torna difícil. Actualmente, existen técnicas moleculares que permiten estudiar la variabilidad genética y establecer relaciones filogenéticas entre aislamientos fúngicos, como por ejemplo el secuenciamiento de las regiones espaciadoras intergénicas (ITS1-5,8S-ITS2) y el factor de elongación 1 alfa (EF1-?). En este trabajo investigamos las relaciones filogenéticas de 20 aislamientos de Isaria provenientes de Argentina y Brasil, con 51 especies fúngicas de la familia Clavicipitaceae, Cordycipitaceae y Ophiocordycipitaceae. La metodología consistió en la amplificación y el secuenciamiento de un fragmento de 1100pb correspondiendo a EF1-? y de un fragmento de 600pb correspondiente a ITS1-5,8S-ITS2. Las secuencias nucleotídicas de EF1-? fueron alineadas con el programa Clustal X y las secuencias de ITS1-5,8S-ITS2 con el programa Mafft. Los análisis de máxima parsimonia fueron realizados con el programa TNT y los árboles filogenéticos editados con el programa Dendroscope. Los resultados indicaron que el genero Isaria es polifilético y que se encuentra ubicado taxonómicamente dentro de la Familia Cordycipitaceae. Los aislamientos de I. fumosorosea, I. farinosa e I. tenuipes formaron tres clados fuertemente soportados y cercanamente emparentados con las especies de Beauveria, Lecanicillium y Simplicillium. Asimismo, se establecieron relaciones filogenéticas entre los estados anamórficos Isaria, Beauveria y Lecanicillium con los estados teleomórficos Cordyceps y Torrubiella. Por lo tanto, se puede concluir que los genes nucleares (EF1-? y ITS1-5,8S-ITS2) son una excelente herramienta para confirmar la identificación de los aislamientos fúngicos y establecer relaciones filogenéticas entre especies de hongos entomopatógenos

Epidemiological profile of deaths after the 2010 earthquake in Chile

Indexación: Web of Science; ScieloBackground: On February 27, 2010 a powerful earthquake followed by a tsunami stroke Chile. The study of mortality during this emergency can provide important public health information. Aim: To describe the main characteristics of people who died during the earthquake and the following three months. Material and Methods: Cross sectional analysis of death records databases obtained from Department of Health Statistics and Information of the Ministry of Health and the Coroner office. Results: Until May 25,2010, 505 corpses were completely identified. Seventy two of these corresponded to people aged 80 years or more. The higher age adjusted death rates per 100,000 inhabitants were observed among subjects aged more than 80 years and those aged 70 to 79 years (22.6 and 7.7 respectively). The higher rates of deaths were observed in regions where the earthquake had a higher intensity and coastal regions affected by the tsunami. The causes of death were trauma in 75% of cases and drowning in 25%. There was no association between the Mercalli scale of earthquake intensity and rates of death. Among deceased subjects, there was a concentration of unemployed, under educated and low socioeconomic status subjects. Conclusions: After the earthquake, the higher rates of deaths occurred among older people and in the region of the epicenter of the earthquake. Most deaths were due to trauma.http://ref.scielo.org/gmq43

A first step to accelerating fingerprint matching based on deformable minutiae clustering

Fingerprint recognition is one of the most used biometric methods for authentication. The identification of a query fingerprint requires matching its minutiae against every minutiae of all the fingerprints of the database. The state-of-the-art matching algorithms are costly, from a computational point of view, and inefficient on large datasets. In this work, we include faster methods to accelerating DMC (the most accurate fingerprint matching algorithm based only on minutiae). In particular, we translate into C++ the functions of the algorithm which represent the most costly tasks of the code; we create a library with the new code and we link the library to the original C# code using a CLR Class Library project by means of a C++/CLI Wrapper. Our solution re-implements critical functions, e.g., the bit population count including a fast C++ PopCount library and the use of the squared Euclidean distance for calculating the minutiae neighborhood. The experimental results show a significant reduction of the execution time in the optimized functions of the matching algorithm. Finally, a novel approach to improve the matching algorithm, considering cache memory blocking and parallel data processing, is presented as future work.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech