Event-based personal retrieval

People who work in a research, academic or business environment often have personal information collections which are large enough to need retrieval aids. A major difference between personal information retrieval and normal document retrieval is that the items to be retrieved are often associated with events in the searcher's life and can be retrieved by their relationship to other events as well as by content. This paper describes some of the background to event-based retrieval and then describes a prototype graphical event-based retrieval system

Transition to sustainability: towards a humane and diverse world

Copyright: © 2008 International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Reproduction of this publication for educational or other non-commercial purposes is authorized without prior written permission from the copyright holder provided the source is fully acknowledged.The environmental movement has made huge progress over the last decades. Among others, it has raised awareness of challenges facing humanity, helped develop a critical mass of policies, and worked towards the implementation of many of these policies in collaboration with other stakeholders. Now, however, we are at a turning point in the history of the global environmental movement. In order to rise to challenges of the 21st century such as climate change and peak oil it will not be possible to do business as usual; a step change will be needed. As IUCN celebrates its 60th anniversary, and marks six decades of global conservation achievement, it is also taking stock of the urgent challenges facing life on earth and reviewing its strategies. The key to future conservation action will lie in reconciling the needs of the environment with those of society in a manner which is equitable and just, and in promoting sustainable lifestyles and livelihoods as well as protecting endangered species and spaces. This document outlines IUCN’s Future of Sustainability initiative, the rationale for its implementation and describes how the conservation movement can play new and decisive roles in the transition to sustainability

Schubert calculus of Richardson varieties stable under spherical Levi subgroups

We observe that the expansion in the basis of Schubert cycles for $H^*(G/B)$ of the class of a Richardson variety stable under a spherical Levi subgroup is described by a theorem of Brion. Using this observation, along with a combinatorial model of the poset of certain symmetric subgroup orbit closures, we give positive combinatorial descriptions of certain Schubert structure constants on the full flag variety in type $A$. Namely, we describe $c_{u,v}^w$ when $u$ and $v$ are inverse to Grassmannian permutations with unique descents at $p$ and $q$, respectively. We offer some conjectures for similar rules in types $B$ and $D$, associated to Richardson varieties stable under spherical Levi subgroups of SO(2n+1,\C) and SO(2n,\C), respectively.Comment: Section 4 significantly shortened, and other minor changes made as suggested by referees. Final version, to appear in Journal of Algebraic Combinatoric

Transport properties and Langevin dynamics of heavy quarks and quarkonia in the Quark Gluon Plasma

Quark Gluon Plasma transport coefficients for heavy quarks and quark-antiquark pairs are computed through an extension of the results obtained for a hot QED plasma by describing the heavy-quark propagation in the eikonal approximation and by weighting the gauge field configurations with the Hard Thermal Loop effective action. It is shown that such a model allows to correctly reproduce, at leading logarithmic accuracy, the results obtained by other independent approaches. The results are then inserted into a relativistic Langevin equation allowing to follow the evolution of the heavy-quark momentum spectra. Our numerical findings are also compared with the ones obtained in a strongly-coupled scenario, namely with the transport coefficients predicted (though with some limitations and ambiguities) by the AdS/CFT correspondence.Comment: Minor changes. One figure added. Final version accepted for publication by Nucl. Phys.

Strange form factors of the proton: a new analysis of the neutrino (antineutrino) data of the BNL-734 experiment

We consider ratios of elastic neutrino(antineutrino)-proton cross sections measured by the Brookhaven BNL-734 experiment and use them to obtain the neutral current (NC) over charged current (CC) neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry. We discuss the sensitivity of these ratios and of the asymmetry to the electric, magnetic and axial strange form factors of the nucleon and to the axial cutoff mass M_A. We show that the effects of the nuclear structure and interactions on the asymmetry and, in general, on ratios of cross sections are negligible. We find some restrictions on the possible values of the parameters characterizing the strange form factors. We show that a precise measurement of the neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry would allow the extraction of the axial and vector magnetic strange form factors in a model independent way. The neutrino-antineutrino asymmetry turns out to be almost independent on the electric strange form factor and on the axial cutoff mass.Comment: 12 page

Modified Hagedorn formula including temperature fluctuation - Estimation of temperatures at RHIC experiments -

We have systematically estimated the possible temperatures obtained from an analysis of recent data on $p_t$ distributions observed at RHIC experiments. Using the fact that observed $p_t$ distributions cannot be described by the original Hagedorn formula in the whole range of transverse momenta (in particular above 6 GeV/c), we propose a modified Hagedorn formula including temperature fluctuation. We show that by using it we can fit $p_t$ distributions in the whole range and can estimate consistently the relevant temperatures, including their fluctuations.Comment: Some misprints corrected, references updated. To be published in Eur. Phys. J. C (2006

Final State Interactions in Hypernuclear Decay

We present an update of the One-Meson-Exchange (OME) results for the weak decay of s- and p-shell hypernuclei (Ref. Phys. Rev. C {\bf 56}, 339 (1997)), paying special attention to the role played by final state interactions between the emitted nucleons. The present study also corrects for a mistake in the inclusion of the $K$ and $K^*$ exchange mechanisms, which substantially increases the ratio of neutron-induced to proton-induced transitions, $\Gamma_n/\Gamma_p$. With the most up-to-date model ingredients, we find that the OME approach is able to describe very satisfactorily most of the measured observables, including the ratio $\Gamma_n/\Gamma_p$.Comment: 20 pages, 2 eps figure

Magnetic trapping of ultracold neutrons

Three-dimensional magnetic confinement of neutrons is reported. Neutrons are loaded into an Ioffe-type superconducting magnetic trap through inelastic scattering of cold neutrons with 4He. Scattered neutrons with sufficiently low energy and in the appropriate spin state are confined by the magnetic field until they decay. The electron resulting from neutron decay produces scintillations in the liquid helium bath that results in a pulse of extreme ultraviolet light. This light is frequency downconverted to the visible and detected. Results are presented in which 500 +/- 155 neutrons are magnetically trapped in each loading cycle, consistent with theoretical predictions. The lifetime of the observed signal, 660 s +290/-170 s, is consistent with the neutron beta-decay lifetime.Comment: 17 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Chiral Symmetry and light resonances in hot and dense matter

We present a study of the $\pi\pi$ scattering amplitude in the $\sigma$ and $\rho$ channels at finite temperature and nuclear density within a chiral unitary framework. Meson resonances are dynamically generated in our approach, which allows us to analyze the behavior of their associated scattering poles when the system is driven towards chiral symmetry restoration. Medium effects are incorporated in three ways: (a) by thermal corrections of the unitarized scattering amplitudes, (b) by finite nuclear density effects associated to a renormalization of the pion decay constant, and complementarily (c) by extending our calculation of the scalar-isoscalar channel to account for finite nuclear density and temperature effects in a microscopic many-body implementation of pion dynamics. Our results are discussed in connection with several phenomenological aspects relevant for nuclear matter and Heavy-Ion Collision experiments, such as $\rho$ mass scaling vs broadening from dilepton spectra and chiral restoration signals in the $\sigma$ channel. We also elaborate on the molecular nature of $\pi\pi$ resonances.Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures. Contribution to Hard Probes 2008, Illa de A Toxa, Spain, June 8th-14th 200

Topology optimisation using level set methods and the discontinuous Galerkin method

This paper presents a topology optimisation approach that combines an adjoint-based sensitivity analysis [1] with level set methods (LSM) [2] for front propagation, and the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) symmetric interior penalty (SIP) method [3]. The problems considered in this paper will be limited to the minimum compliance design of two-dimensional linear elastic structures