The Glasgow Necropolis : theft, bribery and drunken gate keepers in a city of the dead

Wun Fung Chan is a geographer working at the University of Strathclyde. On visiting Glasgow City Archives he came across nine Necropolis Committee books containing some lively insights into Victorian landscapes of death

Heuristic Solutions for Loading in Flexible Manufacturing Systems

Production planning in flexible manufacturing system deals with the efficient organization of the production resources in order to meet a given production schedule. It is a complex problem and typically leads to several hierarchical subproblems that need to be solved sequentially or simultaneously. Loading is one of the planning subproblems that has to addressed. It involves assigning the necessary operations and tools among the various machines in some optimal fashion to achieve the production of all selected part types. In this paper, we first formulate the loading problem as a 0-1 mixed integer program and then propose heuristic procedures based on Lagrangian relaxation and tabu search to solve the problem. Computational results are presented for all the algorithms and finally, conclusions drawn based on the results are discussed

Adaptive cyclically dominating game on co-evolving networks: Numerical and analytic results

A co-evolving and adaptive Rock (R)-Paper (P)-Scissors (S) game (ARPS) in which an agent uses one of three cyclically dominating strategies is proposed and studied numerically and analytically. An agent takes adaptive actions to achieve a neighborhood to his advantage by rewiring a dissatisfying link with a probability $p$ or switching strategy with a probability $1-p$. Numerical results revealed two phases in the steady state. An active phase for $p<p_{\text{cri}}$ has one connected network of agents using different strategies who are continually interacting and taking adaptive actions. A frozen phase for $p>p_{\text{cri}}$ has three separate clusters of agents using only R, P, and S, respectively with terminated adaptive actions. A mean-field theory of link densities in co-evolving network is formulated in a general way that can be readily modified to other co-evolving network problems of multiple strategies. The analytic results agree with simulation results on ARPS well. We point out the different probabilities of winning, losing, and drawing a game among the agents as the origin of the small discrepancy between analytic and simulation results. As a result of the adaptive actions, agents of higher degrees are often those being taken advantage of. Agents with a smaller (larger) degree than the mean degree have a higher (smaller) probability of winning than losing. The results are useful in future attempts on formulating more accurate theories.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Giant spin-orbit splitting of point defect states in monolayer WS2_2

The spin-orbit coupling (SOC) effect has been known to be profound in monolayer pristine transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Here we show that point defects, which are omnipresent in the TMD membranes, exhibit even stronger SOC effects and change the physics of the host materials drastically. In this Article we chose the representative monolayer WS\sub{2} slabs from the TMD family together with seven typical types of point defects including monovacancies, interstitials, and antisites. We calculated the formation energies of these defects, and studied the effect of spin-orbit coupling (SOC) on the corresponding defect states. We found that the S monovacancy (V\sub{S} ) and S interstitial (adatom) have the lowest formation energies. In the case of V\sub{S} and both of the W\sub{S and W\sub{S2} antisites, the defect states exhibit giant splitting up to 296 meV when SOC is considered. Depending on the relative position of the defect state with respect to the conduction band minimum (CBM), the hybrid functional HSE will either increase the splitting by up to 60 meV (far from CBM), or decrease the splitting by up to 57 meV (close to CBM). Furthermore, we found that both the W\sub{S} and W\sub{S2} antisites possess a magnetic moment of 2 $\mu_{B}$ localized at the antisite W atom and the neighboring W atoms. All these findings provide new insights in the defect behavior under SOC point to new possibilities for spintronics applications for TMDs.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Engineering a recombinant adenovirus system for the in vitro expression of ?-myosin

Over three hundred mutations in the molecular motor, myosin, cause a variety of cardiac and skeletal myopathies. One of our goals is to understand the functional implications of these mutations on the myosin molecule. Because myosin motors require a muscle cell context to be functional, the expression system for producing these proteins involves infecting differentiated muscle cells with recombinant adenoviruses. However, the growth of these adenoviruses in nonmuscle cells is limited by an apparent toxic effect of myosin-production in HEK 293 cells during viral expansion. Thus adenovirus generation is the rate-limiting step in this process. To ameliorate this low adenovirus yield, we designed a system of repressing transgene expression in the virus packaging cell line by incorporating microRNA targets into the 3\u27 UTR of the myosin transgene. As a proof of principle, using the kidney-specific miRNA, miR-192, multimers of the miR-192 target were introduced into a luciferase reporter through cloning. Subsequent experiments using the miR-192 reporter indicated an unexpectedly low expression of miR-192 in HEK 293 cells. Here, we use miR-192 and an artificial miRNA, miR-1-1sc to optimize the transgene repression in HEK 293 cultures through miRNA expressing cell lines. We expect transgene repression in this new miRNA-expressing, virus-packaging cell line will restore virus yields for generating sufficient β-myosin in vitro

Not Only a Pipeline: Schools as Carceral Sites

Conversations surrounding school discipline have largely focused on the ways that schools and their punitive policies have funneled students into the criminal justice system through the school to prison pipeline. Recently, there has been an increase in scholarship from scholars who argue that schools are not only funneling students into prisons, but that schools and prisons operate as a nexus – the two working symbiotically to discipline and punish students of color, predominantly Black male students (Meiners, 2010; Sojoyner, 2013). Drawing from these analyses, I argue that schools are characterized by multi-layered disciplinary landscapes that operate as carceral sites onto themselves, specifically in relationship to Black girls

High Speed Networking In The Multi-Core Era

High speed networking is a demanding task that has traditionally been performed in dedicated, purpose built hardware or specialized network processors. These platforms sacrifice flexibility or programmability in favor of performance. Recently, there has been much interest in using multi-core general purpose processors for this task, which have the advantage of being easily programmable and upgradeable. The best way to exploit these new architectures for networking is an open question that has been the subject of much recent research. In this dissertation, I explore the best way to exploit multi-core general purpose processors for packet processing applications. This includes both new architectural organizations for the processors as well as changes to the systems software. I intend to demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques by using them to build an open and extensible network security and monitoring platform that can out perform existing solutions