572 research outputs found
"It's the real thing": performance and murder in Sweden.
The article investigates contemporary experimental theatre in Sweden. It sums up and probes the implications of Sju tre (1999), the most controversial theatre production in Sweden in modern times. Lars Nor'n, the playwright and director, staged a dialogue involving three real convicts, of whom two were outspoken Nazis. The article explores the uncertain boundaries between aesthetic, ethical, and political issues with ramifications regarding the wider public opinion in Sweden, on racism and crime. It is methodologically motivated by reception research, performativity and idealogical discourse. By virtue of its performative impact, the theatrical event proved to be directly linked with critical questions of democracy, although conceivably at the expense of the artistic integrity of the director and the theatre as creator of public opinion. The article points to a paradox of democracy whereby hate speech is at once allowed and unjustified in the theatre as national arena. The actors are described and analysed as parasites in a societal body, that in Sju tre, becomes politically epitomised
The influence of nanostructure on the mechanical properties of 3D printed polylactide/nanoclay composites
An obstacle for wider application of 3D printed parts is their inferior mechanical performance compared with those from conventional fabrication. This research aims to overcome this deficiency by developing nanostructured PLA/clay composite filaments that are 3D printable by the FFF technique, investigating the effect of filament composition on mechanical properties, and correlating it with the extent of intercalation of different types of clay. The results showed the addition of 5 wt% organomodified clay to PLA raised the elastic and flexural modulus by 10% and 14% respectively. Einstein’s composite theory did not hold for the PLA/organoclay composites but the Halpin-Tsai model was successful in interpreting the measured moduli of the organoclays. The model also showed that increasing the clay intercalation was much more effective than raising the total clay content
Accelerated Stochastic Sampling of Discrete Statistical Systems
We propose a method to reduce the relaxation time towards equilibrium in
stochastic sampling of complex energy landscapes in statistical systems with
discrete degrees of freedom by generalizing the platform previously developed
for continuous systems. The method starts from a master equation, in contrast
to the Fokker-Planck equation for the continuous case. The master equation is
transformed into an imaginary-time Schr\"odinger equation. The Hamiltonian of
the Schr\"odinger equation is modified by adding a projector to its known
ground state. We show how this transformation decreases the relaxation time and
propose a way to use it to accelerate simulated annealing for optimization
problems. We implement our method in a simplified kinetic Monte Carlo scheme
and show an acceleration by an order of magnitude in simulated annealing of the
symmetric traveling salesman problem. Comparisons of simulated annealing are
made with the exchange Monte Carlo algorithm for the three-dimensional Ising
spin glass. Our implementation can be seen as a step toward accelerating the
stochastic sampling of generic systems with complex landscapes and long
equilibration times.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Prewetting transition on a weakly disordered substrate : evidence for a creeping film dynamics
We present the first microscopic images of the prewetting transition of a
liquid film on a solid surface. Pictures of the local coverage map of a helium
film on a cesium metal surface are taken while the temperature is raised
through the transition. The film edge is found to advance at constant
temperature by successive avalanches in a creep motion with a macroscopic
correlation length. The creep velocity varies strongly in a narrow temperature
range. The retreat motion is obtained only at much lower temperature,
conforming to the strong hysteresis observed for prewetting transition on a
disordered surface. Prewetting transition on such disordered surfaces appears
to give rise to dynamical phenomena similar to what is observed for domain wall
motions in 2D magnets.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Euro.Phys.Let
Mechanical probing of liquid foam aging
We present experimental results on the Stokes experiment performed in a 3D
dry liquid foam. The system is used as a rheometric tool : from the force
exerted on a 1cm glass bead, plunged at controlled velocity in the foam in a
quasi static regime, local foam properties are probed around the sphere. With
this original and simple technique, we show the possibility of measuring the
foam shear modulus, the gravity drainage rate and the evolution of the bubble
size during coarsening
Packing While Traveling: Mixed Integer Programming for a Class of Nonlinear Knapsack Problems
Packing and vehicle routing problems play an important role in the area of
supply chain management. In this paper, we introduce a non-linear knapsack
problem that occurs when packing items along a fixed route and taking into
account travel time. We investigate constrained and unconstrained versions of
the problem and show that both are NP-hard. In order to solve the problems, we
provide a pre-processing scheme as well as exact and approximate mixed integer
programming (MIP) solutions. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of
the MIP solutions and in particular point out that the approximate MIP approach
often leads to near optimal results within far less computation time than the
exact approach
Renormalization for Discrete Optimization
The renormalization group has proven to be a very powerful tool in physics
for treating systems with many length scales. Here we show how it can be
adapted to provide a new class of algorithms for discrete optimization. The
heart of our method uses renormalization and recursion, and these processes are
embedded in a genetic algorithm. The system is self-consistently optimized on
all scales, leading to a high probability of finding the ground state
configuration. To demonstrate the generality of such an approach, we perform
tests on traveling salesman and spin glass problems. The results show that our
``genetic renormalization algorithm'' is extremely powerful.Comment: 4 pages, no figur
Tunnelling Crossover Networks for the Asymmetric TSP
Local optima networks are a compact representation of fitness landscapes that can be used for analysis and visualisation. This paper provides the first analysis of the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem using local optima networks. These are generated by sampling the search space by recording the progress of an existing evolutionary algorithm based on the Generalised Asymmetric Partition Crossover. They are compared to networks sampled through the Chained Lin-Kernighan heuristic across 25 instances. Structural differences and similarities are identified, as well as examples where crossover smooths the landscape
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