4,112 research outputs found
COST COMPARISONS OF ALTERNATIVE METHODS FOR PROCESSING RECYCLED WASTE NEWSPAPERS INTO FARM-ANIMAL BEDDING
The United States is facing a seemingly overwhelming problem of how to dispose of its solid waste. For disposal solutions to be viable, they must be environmentally sound and economically viable. Processing waste newspapers for farm-animal bedding offers a successful partial solution that meets both criteria. Centralized newspaper chopping is found to cost less than on-farm chopping. Both chopped and unchopped waste newspapers can be economically transported considerable distances. The use of waste newspapers for animal bedding is economically attractive at the farm level and can provide a partial solution to the solid-waste disposal problem.Environmental Economics and Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,
Time lower bounds for nonadaptive turnstile streaming algorithms
We say a turnstile streaming algorithm is "non-adaptive" if, during updates,
the memory cells written and read depend only on the index being updated and
random coins tossed at the beginning of the stream (and not on the memory
contents of the algorithm). Memory cells read during queries may be decided
upon adaptively. All known turnstile streaming algorithms in the literature are
non-adaptive.
We prove the first non-trivial update time lower bounds for both randomized
and deterministic turnstile streaming algorithms, which hold when the
algorithms are non-adaptive. While there has been abundant success in proving
space lower bounds, there have been no non-trivial update time lower bounds in
the turnstile model. Our lower bounds hold against classically studied problems
such as heavy hitters, point query, entropy estimation, and moment estimation.
In some cases of deterministic algorithms, our lower bounds nearly match known
upper bounds
Photoelectron diffraction: from phenomenological demonstration to practical tool
The potential of photoelectron diffraction—exploiting the coherent interference of directly-emitted and elastically scattered components of the photoelectron wavefield emitted from a core level of a surface atom to obtain structural information—was first appreciated in the 1970s. The first demonstrations of the effect were published towards the end of that decade, but the method has now entered the mainstream armoury of surface structure determination. This short review has two objectives: First, to outline the way that the idea emerged and the way this evolved in my own collaboration with Neville Smith and his colleagues at Bell Labs in the early years: Second, to provide some insight into the current state-of-the art in application of (scanned-energy mode) photoelectron diffraction to address two key issue in quantitative surface structure determination, namely, complexity and precision. In this regard a particularly powerful aspect of photoelectron diffraction is its elemental and chemical-state specificity
The local adsorption structure of benzene on Si(001)-(2 × 1): a photoelectron diffraction investigation
Scanned-energy mode C 1s photoelectron diffraction has been used to investigate the local adsorption geometry of benzene on Si(001) at saturation coverage and room temperature. The results show that two different local bonding geometries coexist, namely the 'standard butterfly' (SB) and 'tilted bridge' (TB) forms, with a composition of 58 ± 29% of the SB species. Detailed structural parameter values are presented for both species including Si–C bond lengths. On the basis of published measurements of the rate of conversion of the SB to the TB form on this surface, we estimate that the timescale of our experiment is sufficient for achieving equilibrium, and in this case our results indicate that the difference in the Gibbs free energy of adsorption, ΔG(TB)−ΔG(SB), is in the range −0.023 to +0.049 eV. We suggest, however, that the relative concentration of the two species may also be influenced by a combination of steric effects influencing the kinetics, and a sensitivity of the adsorption energies of the adsorbed SB and TB forms to the nature of the surrounding benzene molecules
The structure of the Au(111)/methylthiolate interface : new insights from near-edge X-ray absorption spectroscopy and X-ray standing waves
The local structure of the Au(111)([square root of]3×[square root of]3)R30°-methylthiolate surface phase has been investigated by S K-edge near-edge s-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) both experimentally and theoretically and by experimental normal-incidence x-ray standing waves (NIXSW) at both the C and S atomic sites. NEXAFS shows not only excitation into the intramolecular sigma* S–C resonance but also into a sigma* S–Au orbital perpendicular to the surface, clearly identifying the local S headgroup site as atop a Au atom. Simulations show that it is not possible, however, to distinguish between the two possible adatom reconstruction models; a single thiolate species atop a hollow-site Au adatom or a dithiolate moiety comprising two thiolate species bonded to a bridge-bonded Au adatom. Within this dithiolate moiety a second sigma* S–Au orbital that lies near parallel to the surface has a higher energy that overlaps that of the sigma* S–C resonance. The new NIXSW data show the S–C bond to be tilted by 61° relative to the surface normal, with a preferred azimuthal orientation in , corresponding to the intermolecular nearest-neighbor directions. This azimuthal orientation is consistent with the thiolate being atop a hollow-site Au adatom, but not consistent with the originally proposed Au-adatom-dithiolate moiety. However, internal conformational changes within this species could, perhaps, render this model also consistent with the experimental data
Renormalisation-theoretic analysis of non-equilibrium phase transitions II: The effect of perturbations on rate coefficients in the Becker-Doring equations
We study in detail the application of renormalisation theory to models of
cluster aggregation and fragmentation of relevance to nucleation and growth
processes. In particular, we investigate the Becker-Doring (BD) equations,
originally formulated to describe and analyse non-equilibrium phase
transitions, but more recently generalised to describe a wide range of
physicochemical problems. We consider here rate coefficients which depend on
the cluster size in a power-law fashion, but now perturbed by small amplitude
random noise. Power-law rate coefficients arise naturally in the theory of
surface-controlled nucleation and growth processes. The noisy perturbations on
these rates reflect the effect of microscopic variations in such mean-field
coefficients, thermal fluctuations and/or experimental uncertainties. In the
present paper we generalise our earlier work that identified the nine classes
into which all dynamical behaviour must fall by investigating how random
perturbations of the rate coefficients influence the steady-state and kinetic
behaviour of the coarse-grained, renormalised system. We are hence able to
confirm the existence of a set of up to nine universality classes for such BD
systems.Comment: 30 pages, to appear in J Phys A Math Ge
Private Aggregation from Fewer Anonymous Messages
Consider the setup where parties are each given a number and the goal is to compute the sum in a secure
fashion and with as little communication as possible. We study this problem in
the anonymized model of Ishai et al. (FOCS 2006) where each party may broadcast
anonymous messages on an insecure channel.
We present a new analysis of the one-round "split and mix" protocol of Ishai
et al. In order to achieve the same security parameter, our analysis reduces
the required number of messages by a multiplicative factor. We
complement our positive result with lower bounds showing that the dependence of
the number of messages on the domain size, the number of parties, and the
security parameter is essentially tight.
Using a reduction of Balle et al. (2019), our improved analysis of the
protocol of Ishai et al. yields, in the same model, an -differentially private protocol for aggregation that, for any
constant and any ,
incurs only a constant error and requires only a constant number of messages
per party. Previously, such a protocol was known only for
messages per party.Comment: 31 pages; 1 tabl
The structure of epitaxial V2O3 films and their surfaces : a medium energy ion scattering study
Medium energy ion scattering, using 100 keV H+ incident ions, has been used to investigate the growth of epitaxial films, up to thicknesses of ~200 Å, of V2O3 on both Pd(111) and Au(111). Scattered-ion energy spectra provide a measure of the average film thickness and the variations in this thickness, and show that, with suitable annealing, the crystalline quality is good. Plots of the scattering yield as a function of scattering angle, so-called blocking curves, have been measured for two different incidence directions and have been used to determine the surface structure. Specifically, scattering simulations for a range of different model structures show poor agreement with experiment for half-metal (….V’O3V) and vanadyl (….V’O3V=O) terminations, with and without surface interlayer relaxations. However, good agreement with experiment is found for the modified oxygen-termination structure, first proposed by Kresse et al., in which a subsurface V half-metal layer is moved up into the outermost V buckled metal layer to produce a VO2 overlayer on the underlying V2O3, with an associated layer structure of ….O3VV’’V’O3
Optimal Principal Component Analysis in Distributed and Streaming Models
We study the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) problem in the distributed
and streaming models of computation. Given a matrix a
rank parameter , and an accuracy parameter , we
want to output an orthonormal matrix for which where is the best rank- approximation to .
This paper provides improved algorithms for distributed PCA and streaming
PCA.Comment: STOC2016 full versio
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