Landscape Predictions from Cosmological Vacuum Selection

In BP models with hundreds of fluxes, we compute the effects of cosmological dynamics on the probability distribution of landscape vacua. Starting from generic initial conditions, we find that most fluxes are dynamically driven into a different and much narrower range of values than expected from landscape statistics alone. Hence, cosmological evolution will access only a tiny fraction of the vacua with small cosmological constant. This leads to a host of sharp predictions. Unlike other approaches to eternal inflation, the holographic measure employed here does not lead to "staggering", an excessive spread of probabilities that would doom the string landscape as a solution to the cosmological constant problem.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, v4 prd format, minor editin

Dewetting on porous media with aspiration

We consider a porous solid covered with a water film (or with a drop) in situations where the liquid is pumped in, either spontaneously (if the porous medium is hydrophilic) or mechanically (by an external pump). The dynamics of dewetting is then strongly modified. We analyse a few major examples: a) horizontal films, which break at a certain critical thickness, b) the "modified Landau-Levich problem" where a porous plate moves up from a bath and carries a film: aspiration towards the plate limits the height H reached by the film, c) certain situation where the hysteresis of contact angles is important.Comment: Revised version: The analysis of the 'modified Landau-Levich problem' (section 3) has been significantly revised. It is now treated as a singular perturbation problem (using boundary-layer techniques), leading to a more accurate physical pictur

Tensor Microwave Background Fluctuations for Large Multipole Order

We present approximate formulas for the tensor BB, EE, TT, and TE multipole coefficients for large multipole order l. The error in using the approximate formula for the BB multipole coefficients is less than cosmic variance for l>10. These approximate formulas make various qualitative properties of the calculated multipole coefficients transparent: specifically, they show that, whatever values are chosen for cosmological parameters, the tensor EE multipole coefficients will always be larger than the BB coefficients for all l>15, and that these coefficients will approach each other for l<<100. These approximations also make clear how these multipole coefficients depend on cosmological parameters.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D, references and comments on earlier work on the subject added, cosmetic modification of figure

Inspection of fine wires simplified by capillary tube wire holder

Capillary tube wire holder provides a mount for fine wires for photomicrographs. The holder is mounted in a stainless steel tube and cast in a transparent casting material. It protects and permits easy location of the wire

Context Attentive Bandits: Contextual Bandit with Restricted Context

We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accessed by the learner at every iteration. This novel formulation is motivated by different online problems arising in clinical trials, recommender systems and attention modeling. Herein, we adapt the standard multi-armed bandit algorithm known as Thompson Sampling to take advantage of our restricted context setting, and propose two novel algorithms, called the Thompson Sampling with Restricted Context(TSRC) and the Windows Thompson Sampling with Restricted Context(WTSRC), for handling stationary and nonstationary environments, respectively. Our empirical results demonstrate advantages of the proposed approaches on several real-life datasetsComment: IJCAI 201

Strong screening in the plum pudding model

We study a generalized Thomson problem that appears in several condensed matter settings: identical point-charge particles can penetrate inside a homogeneously charged sphere, with global electro-neutrality. The emphasis is on scaling laws at large Coulombic couplings, and deviations from mean-field behaviour, by a combination of Monte Carlo simulations and an analytical treatment within a quasi-localized charge approximation, which provides reliable predictions. We also uncover a local overcharging phenomenon driven by ionic correlations alone

Simultaneous Perturbation Algorithms for Batch Off-Policy Search

We propose novel policy search algorithms in the context of off-policy, batch mode reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous state and action spaces. Given a batch collection of trajectories, we perform off-line policy evaluation using an algorithm similar to that by [Fonteneau et al., 2010]. Using this Monte-Carlo like policy evaluator, we perform policy search in a class of parameterized policies. We propose both first order policy gradient and second order policy Newton algorithms. All our algorithms incorporate simultaneous perturbation estimates for the gradient as well as the Hessian of the cost-to-go vector, since the latter is unknown and only biased estimates are available. We demonstrate their practicality on a simple 1-dimensional continuous state space problem