826 research outputs found
Privatization in Ukraine: Economics, Law, and Politics
Many in the Ukrainfan Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR or Ukraine), as in other Soviet Republics and in Eastern Europe, no longer view the traditional Soviet economic system as an adequate basis for a modern, efficient, and prosperous economy. They see the solution to wasteful resource allocation, shortages of commodities, and general economic stagnation as lying in the transformation of the basis of the Ukrainian economy from command and control to market principles. In Ukraine, market principles continue to gain official endorsement by various government bodies, despite increasingly apparent hesitation at the Soviet All-Union level. The economic transformation of a socialist economic system is a massive and unprecedented task, carrying with it unforeseeable risks of social, economic, and political instability. The position of the USSR as a nuclear superpower in the current world order highlights the significance of such a transition
Design and Control of a Flight-Style AUV with Hovering Capability
The small flight-style Delphin AUV is designed to evaluate the performance of a long range survey AUV with the additional capability to hover and manoeuvre at slow speed. Delphin’s hull form is based on a scaled version of Autosub6000, and in addition to the main thruster and control surfaces at the rear of the vehicle, Delphin is equipped with four rim driven tunnel thrusters. In order to reduce the development cycle time, Delphin was designed to use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) sensors and thrusters interfaced to a standard PC motherboard running the control software within the MS Windows environment. To further simplify the development, the autonomy system uses the State-Flow Toolbox within the Matlab/Simulink environment. While the autonomy software is running, image processing routines are used for obstacle avoidance and target tracking, within the commercial Scorpion Vision software. This runs as a parallel thread and passes results to Matlab via the TCP/IP communication protocol. The COTS based development approach has proved effective. However, a powerful PC is required to effectively run Matlab and Simulink, and, due to the nature of the Windows environment, it is impossible to run the control in hard real-time. The autonomy system will be recoded to run under the Matlab Windows Real-Time Windows Target in the near future. Experimental results are used to demonstrating the performance and current capabilities of the vehicle are presented
Action-gradient-minimizing pseudo-orbits and almost-invariant tori
Transport in near-integrable, but partially chaotic,
degree-of-freedom Hamiltonian systems is blocked by invariant tori and is
reduced at \emph{almost}-invariant tori, both associated with the invariant
tori of a neighboring integrable system. "Almost invariant" tori with rational
rotation number can be defined using continuous families of periodic
\emph{pseudo-orbits} to foliate the surfaces, while irrational-rotation-number
tori can be defined by nesting with sequences of such rational tori. Three
definitions of "pseudo-orbit," \emph{action-gradient--minimizing} (AGMin),
\emph{quadratic-flux-minimizing} (QFMin) and \emph{ghost} orbits, based on
variants of Hamilton's Principle, use different strategies to extremize the
action as closely as possible. Equivalent Lagrangian (configuration-space
action) and Hamiltonian (phase-space action) formulations, and a new approach
to visualizing action-minimizing and minimax orbits based on AGMin
pseudo-orbits, are presented.Comment: Accepted for publication in a special issue of Communications in
Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation (CNSNS) entitled "The mathematical
structure of fluids and plasmas : a volume dedicated to the 60th birthday of
Phil Morrison
Determination of micro-scale plastic strain caused by orthogonal cutting
An electron beam lithography technique has been used to produce microgrids in order to measure local plastic strains, induced during an orthogonal cutting process, at the microscopic scale in the shear zone and under the machined surface. Microgrids with a 10 μm pitch and a line width less than 1 μm have been printed on the polished surface of an aluminium alloy AA 5182 to test the applicability of the technique in metal cutting operations. Orthogonal cutting tests were carried out at 40 mm/s. Results show that the distortion of the grids could successfully be used to compute plastic strains due to orthogonal cutting with higher accuracy compared to other techniques reported in the literature. Strain maps of the machined specimens have been produced and show high-strain gradients very close to the machined surface with local values reaching 2.2. High-resolution strain measurements carried out in the primary deformation zone also provide new insight into the material deformation during the chip formation process
Historical roots of Agile methods: where did “Agile thinking” come from?
The appearance of Agile methods has been the most noticeable change to software process thinking in the last fifteen years [16], but in fact many of the “Agile ideas” have been around since 70’s or even before. Many studies and reviews have been conducted about Agile methods which ascribe their emergence as a reaction against traditional methods. In this paper, we argue that although Agile methods are new as a whole, they have strong roots in the history of software engineering. In addition to the iterative and incremental approaches that have been in use since 1957 [21], people who criticised the traditional methods suggested alternative approaches which were actually Agile ideas such as the response to change, customer involvement, and working software over documentation. The authors of this paper believe that education about the history of Agile thinking will help to develop better understanding as well as promoting the use of Agile methods. We therefore present and discuss the reasons behind the development and introduction of Agile methods, as a reaction to traditional methods, as a result of people's experience, and in particular focusing on reusing ideas from histor
Simulations of cubic-tetragonal ferroelastics
We study domain patterns in cubic-tetragonal ferroelastics by solving
numerically equations of motion derived from a Landau model of the phase
transition, including dissipative stresses. Our system sizes, of up to 256^3
points, are large enough to reveal many structures observed experimentally.
Most patterns found at late stages in the relaxation are multiply banded; all
three tetragonal variants appear, but inequivalently. Two of the variants form
broad primary bands; the third intrudes into the others to form narrow
secondary bands with the hosts. On colliding with walls between the primary
variants, the third either terminates or forms a chevron. The multipy banded
patterns, with the two domain sizes, the chevrons and the terminations, are
seen in the microscopy of zirconia and other cubic-tetragonal ferroelastics. We
examine also transient structures obtained much earlier in the relaxation;
these show the above features and others also observed in experiment.Comment: 7 pages, 6 colour figures not embedded in text. Major revisions in
conten
SU(N) Evolution of a Frustrated Spin Ladder
Recent studies indicate that the weakly coupled spin-1/2 Heisenberg
antiferromagnet with next nearest neighbor frustration supports massive spinons
when suitably tuned. The straightforward SU(N) generalization of the low energy
ladder Hamiltonian yields two independent SU(N) Thirring models with N-1
multiplets of massive ``spinon'' excitations. We study the evolution of the
complete set of low-energy dynamical structure factors using form factors.
Those corresponding to the smooth (staggered) magnetizations are qualitatively
different (the same) in the N=2 and N>2 cases. The absence of single-particle
peaks preserves the notion of spinons stabilized by frustration. In contrast to
the ladder, we note that the N=infinity limit of the four chain magnet is not a
trivial free theory.Comment: 10 pages, RevTex, 5 figures; SU(N) approach clarifie
Constraining the low energy pion electromagnetic form factor with space-like data
The pionic contribution to the g-2 of the muon involves a certain integral
over the the modulus squared of F_\pi(t), the pion electromagnetic form factor.
We extend techniques that use cut-plane analyticity properties of F_\pi(t) in
order to account for present day estimates of the pionic contribution and
experimental information at a finite number of points in the space-like region.
Using data from several experiments over a large kinematic range for |t|, we
find bounds on the expansion coefficients of F_\pi(t), sub-leading to the
charge radius. The value of one of these coefficients in chiral perturbation
theory respects these bounds. Furthermore, we present a sensitivity analysis to
the inputs. A brief comparison with results in the literature that use
observables other than the g-2 and timelike data is presented.Comment: 11 pages in EPJ journal style, to appear in European Physical Journal
The triangular seed mass-leaf area relationship holds for annual plants and is determined by habitat productivity.
Dynamical properties of liquid Al near melting. An orbital-free molecular dynamics study
The static and dynamic structure of liquid Al is studied using the orbital
free ab-initio molecular dynamics method. Two thermodynamic states along the
coexistence line are considered, namely T = 943 K and 1323 K for which X-ray
and neutron scattering data are available. A new kinetic energy functional,
which fulfills a number of physically relevant conditions is employed, along
with a local first principles pseudopotential. In addition to a comparison with
experiment, we also compare our ab-initio results with those obtained from
conventional molecular dynamics simulations using effective interionic pair
potentials derived from second order pseudopotential perturbation theory.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, submitted to PR
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