95,598 research outputs found
Gas field scheduling
Woodside Offshore Petroleum is the operator in the development of new gas fields in Australia's North West Shelf project. Sequencing the development of new gas fields in this project is a key determinant of its return on investment. This development sequence has constraints imposed by infrastructure and contractual obligations as well as natural features. The determination of an optimal or very good solution may involve a number of techniques from operations research. The study group attempted several approaches to the problem, principal amongst them being mathematical programming and dynamic programming. A few other heuristic approaches were also considered. The mathematical programming approach was able to yield solutions to small instances of the problem. The group was able to identify several avenues for further research and work on the problem is ongoing
A climate for change
This paper reports on the findings of a research project investigating the nature of participation of secondary school students in a collaborative research programme. Four groups of students, aged 14 to 15 years old, from a secondary school in the United Kingdom (UK) participated in the study. The students involved in the programme took the role of researchers investigating their peers’ perceptions of climate change using video to visually record their findings. University researchers worked collaboratively with the school students and a teacher from the school through an approach that empowered the students within the research process. Drawing from the ideas and issues raised from an initial briefing session, each group of students developed a short interview schedule to be used whilst investigating the views of their peers. Although the project was on a small scale, the data gathered from the brainstorming activity, video reports and reflective discussions provided a useful snap shot of how the participating students perceived their experience and the nature of their involvement in the research process. The research approach enabled students to take on the role of investigator when interviewing their peers and to offer a voice for both themselves and their peers. Introduction</p
Efficient approximations of neutrino physics for three-dimensional simulations of stellar core collapse
Neutrino transport in spherically symmetric models of stellar core collapse
and bounce has achieved a technically complete level, rewarded by the agreement
among independent groups that a multi-dimensional treatment of the
fluid-instabilities in the post-bounce phase is indispensable to model
supernova explosions. While much effort is required to develop a reliable
neutrino transport technique in axisymmetry, we explore neutrino physics
approximations and parameterizations for an efficient three-dimensional
simulation of the fluid-instabilities in the shock-heated matter that
accumulates between the accretion shock and the protoneutron star. We
demonstrate the reliability of a simple parameterization scheme in the collapse
phase and extend our 3D magneto-hydrodynamical collapse simulations to a
preliminary postbounce evolution. The growth of magnetic fields is
investigated.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, in Proceedings of "Nuclei in the Cosmos IX,
Geneva, Jun 25-30", associated movies are displayed at
http://www.physik.unibas.ch/~liebend/displa
SGR 1806-20 Is a Set of Independent Relaxation Systems
The Soft Gamma Repeater 1806-20 produced patterns of bursts during its 1983
outburst that indicate multiple independent energy accumulation sites, each
driven by a continuous power source, with sudden, incomplete releases of the
accumulated energy. The strengths of the power sources and their durations of
activity vary over several orders of magnitude.Comment: Accepted ApJLett, 15 pages, 3 figure
A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations
Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly
difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases.
Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type,
such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our
solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized
recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We
present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as
an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item
attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are
unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and
used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user
model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a
conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly
reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory
item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive
version of the system
Laser cooling in the Penning trap: an analytical model for cooling rates in the presence of an axializing field
Ions stored in Penning traps may have useful applications in the field of
quantum information processing. There are, however, difficulties associated
with the laser cooling of one of the radial motions of ions in these traps,
namely the magnetron motion. The application of a small radio-frequency
quadrupolar electric potential resonant with the sum of the two radial motional
frequencies has been shown to couple these motions and to lead to more
efficient laser cooling. We present an analytical model that enables us to
determine laser cooling rates in the presence of such an 'axializing' field. It
is found that this field leads to an averaging of the laser cooling rates for
the two motions and hence improves the overall laser cooling efficiency. The
model also predicts shifts in the motional frequencies due to the axializing
field that are in qualitative agreement with those measured in recent
experiments. It is possible to determine laser cooling rates experimentally by
studying the phase response of the cooled ions to a near resonant excitation
field. Using the model developed in this paper, we study the expected phase
response when an axializing field is present.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure
Constraining crystalline color superconducting quark matter with gravitational-wave data
We estimate the maximum equatorial ellipticity sustainable by compact stars
composed of crystalline color-superconducting quark matter. For the
theoretically allowed range of the gap parameter , the maximum
ellipticity could be as large as , which is about 4 orders of
magnitude larger than the tightest upper limit obtained by the recent science
runs of the LIGO and GEO600 gravitational wave detectors based on the data from
78 radio pulsars. We point out that the current gravitational-wave strain upper
limit already has some implications for the gap parameter. In particular, the
upper limit for the Crab pulsar implies that is less than O(20) MeV
for a range of quark chemical potential accessible in compact stars, assuming
that the pulsar has a mass , radius 10 km, breaking strain
, and that it has the maximum quadrupole deformation it can sustain
without fracturing.Comment: Minor changes to match the published versio
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