Unbounded violation of tripartite Bell inequalities

We prove that there are tripartite quantum states (constructed from random unitaries) that can lead to arbitrarily large violations of Bell inequalities for dichotomic observables. As a consequence these states can withstand an arbitrary amount of white noise before they admit a description within a local hidden variable model. This is in sharp contrast with the bipartite case, where all violations are bounded by Grothendieck's constant. We will discuss the possibility of determining the Hilbert space dimension from the obtained violation and comment on implications for communication complexity theory. Moreover, we show that the violation obtained from generalized GHZ states is always bounded so that, in contrast to many other contexts, GHZ states do in this case not lead to extremal quantum correlations. The results are based on tools from the theories of operator spaces and tensor norms which we exploit to prove the existence of bounded but not completely bounded trilinear forms from commutative C*-algebras.Comment: Substantial changes in the presentation to make the paper more accessible for a non-specialized reade

Engineering Design Education - Core Competencies

In the past, it was very common for students to come to the university to study engineering with basic design and build skills acquired through hands-on experiences acquired through play with friends, work on farms, work on cars and general tinkering. Engineering students were predominantly white males and eager to dive into design projects that could call upon skills in spatial reasoning, problem solving, working with others, and more. Currently, students who enter the university to study engineering are more diverse in race, gender, and background. The pervasiveness of computers, computer gaming, and social networking has also shifted the competencies of most incoming students. Many incoming students do not have the background and skills required to succeed in the design of solutions to engineering problems. This paper suggests there is a need to identify and better understand the basic set of core competencies that, if possessed by the student, would assure their success in the engineering education environment as well as in industry upon graduation. This paper identifies industry lists and critiques and academic efforts to catalogue core competencies and gives an example of one core competency, after being identified as being weak and remediated, showed dramatically improved student performance.This proceeding was published in the Proceedings of the 50th AIAA Aerospace Sciences Meeting including the New Horizons Forum and Aerospace Exposition, Paper No. AIAA 2012-1222, doi:10.2514/6.2012-1222. Posted with permission.</p

M01 as a novel drug enhancer for specifically targeting the blood-brain barrier

Drug delivery to the brain is limited for most pharmaceuticals by the blood-brain barrier (BBB) where claudin-5 dominates the paraendothelial tightening. For circumventing the BBB, we identified the compound M01 as a claudin-5 interaction inhibitor. M01 causes transient permeabilisation of the BBB depending on the concentration of small molecules in different cell culture models within 3 to 48 h. In mice, brain uptake of fluorescein peaked within the first 3 h after M01 injection and normalised within 48 h. Compared to the cytostatic paclitaxel alone, M01 improved delivery of paclitaxel to mouse brain and reduced orthotopic glioblastoma growth. Results on interactions of M01 with claudin-5 were incorporated into a binding model which suggests association of its aromatic parts with highly conserved residues of the extracellular domain of claudin-5 and adjacent transmembrane segments. Our results indicate the following mode of action: M01 preferentially binds to the extracellular claudin-5 domain, which weakens trans-interactions between adhering cells. Further decrease in membranous claudin-5 levels due to internalization and transcriptional downregulation enables the paracellular passage of small molecules. In summary, the first small molecule is introduced here as a drug enhancer, which specifically permeabilises the BBB for a sufficient interval for allowing neuropharmaceuticals to enter the brain

Developing a predictive modelling capacity for a climate change-vulnerable blanket bog habitat: Assessing 1961-1990 baseline relationships

Aim: Understanding the spatial distribution of high priority habitats and developing predictive models using climate and environmental variables to replicate these distributions are desirable conservation goals. The aim of this study was to model and elucidate the contributions of climate and topography to the distribution of a priority blanket bog habitat in Ireland, and to examine how this might inform the development of a climate change predictive capacity for peat-lands in Ireland. Methods: Ten climatic and two topographic variables were recorded for grid cells with a spatial resolution of 1010 km, covering 87% of the mainland land surface of Ireland. Presence-absence data were matched to these variables and generalised linear models (GLMs) fitted to identify the main climatic and terrain predictor variables for occurrence of the habitat. Candidate predictor variables were screened for collinearity, and the accuracy of the final fitted GLM was evaluated using fourfold cross-validation based on the area under the curve (AUC) derived from a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) plot. The GLM predicted habitat occurrence probability maps were mapped against the actual distributions using GIS techniques. Results: Despite the apparent parsimony of the initial GLM using only climatic variables, further testing indicated collinearity among temperature and precipitation variables for example. Subsequent elimination of the collinear variables and inclusion of elevation data produced an excellent performance based on the AUC scores of the final GLM. Mean annual temperature and total mean annual precipitation in combination with elevation range were the most powerful explanatory variable group among those explored for the presence of blanket bog habitat. Main conclusions: The results confirm that this habitat distribution in general can be modelled well using the non-collinear climatic and terrain variables tested at the grid resolution used. Mapping the GLM-predicted distribution to the observed distribution produced useful results in replicating the projected occurrence of the habitat distribution over an extensive area. The methods developed will usefully inform future climate change predictive modelling for Irelan

Study of doubly strange systems using stored antiprotons

Bound nuclear systems with two units of strangeness are still poorly known despite their importance for many strong interaction phenomena. Stored antiprotons beams in the GeV range represent an unparalleled factory for various hyperon-antihyperon pairs. Their outstanding large production probability in antiproton collisions will open the floodgates for a series of new studies of systems which contain two or even more units of strangeness at the P‾ANDA experiment at FAIR. For the first time, high resolution γ-spectroscopy of doubly strange ΛΛ-hypernuclei will be performed, thus complementing measurements of ground state decays of ΛΛ-hypernuclei at J-PARC or possible decays of particle unstable hypernuclei in heavy ion reactions. High resolution spectroscopy of multistrange Ξ−-atoms will be feasible and even the production of Ω−-atoms will be within reach. The latter might open the door to the |S|=3 world in strangeness nuclear physics, by the study of the hadronic Ω−-nucleus interaction. For the first time it will be possible to study the behavior of Ξ‾+ in nuclear systems under well controlled conditions

Self-esteem, interpersonal risk, and preference for e-mail to face-to-face communication

The media choices made by high and low self-esteem Internet users were studied using webbased methodology (n = 265). Participants were asked to rank four media (face-to-face, e-mail, letter, and telephone) in order of preference across four different communication scenarios designed to pose an interpersonal risk. The level of interpersonal risk posed by two of the scenarios (asking for a pay rise and asking for a date) were also experimentally manipulated by randomly allocating participants to a 25%, 50%, or 75% chance of rejection. Low selfesteem users (LSE) showed a significant preference toward e-mail communication compared to high self-esteem users (HSE). This pattern was reversed for face-to-face preferences. Similarly, a greater chance of rejection in a scenario led to e-mail being preferred to face-to-face communication. The results are discussed in light of both the strategic use of different media and the motivated Internet use