Discharge-generated electrical fields and electrical tree structures

The discharge-avalanche (D-A) model for electrical tree propagation in polymers is founded entirely upon basic physical concepts. Electrical discharges in an existing tree structure are taken to raise the electrical field in the polymer both along the discharge path and particularly at the tree tips. As a result of the field increase, electron multiplication avalanches occur within the polymer causing damage, possibly through ionisation of polymer molecules, which is accumulated over a period of thousands (or more) cycles and eventually leads to a tree extension of limited size. The assumption that the damage produced in an avalanche is proportional to the number of ionisations allows the model to be expressed quantitatively in terms of material properties: such as the ionisation potential, I; the impact-ionisation length parameter λ; the critical number of ionisations for tree extension Nc; discharge features such as the number of 1-electron initiated avalanches per half cycle, Nb ; and the potential difference ΔV between the start and end of the avalanche over a distance Lb

Models of helically symmetric binary systems

Results from helically symmetric scalar field models and first results from a convergent helically symmetric binary neutron star code are reported here; these are models stationary in the rotating frame of a source with constant angular velocity omega. In the scalar field models and the neutron star code, helical symmetry leads to a system of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic character. The scalar field models involve nonlinear terms that mimic nonlinear terms of the Einstein equation. Convergence is strikingly different for different signs of each nonlinear term; it is typically insensitive to the iterative method used; and it improves with an outer boundary in the near zone. In the neutron star code, one has no control on the sign of the source, and convergence has been achieved only for an outer boundary less than approximately 1 wavelength from the source or for a code that imposes helical symmetry only inside a near zone of that size. The inaccuracy of helically symmetric solutions with appropriate boundary conditions should be comparable to the inaccuracy of a waveless formalism that neglects gravitational waves; and the (near zone) solutions we obtain for waveless and helically symmetric BNS codes with the same boundary conditions nearly coincide.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Expanded version of article to be published in Class. Quantum Grav. special issue on Numerical Relativit

Informed pair selection for self-paced metric learning in Siamese neural networks.

Siamese Neural Networks (SNNs) are deep metric learners that use paired instance comparisons to learn similarity. The neural feature maps learnt in this way provide useful representations for classification tasks. Learning in SNNs is not reliant on explicit class knowledge; instead they require knowledge about the relationship between pairs. Though often ignored, we have found that appropriate pair selection is crucial to maximising training efficiency, particularly in scenarios where examples are limited. In this paper, we study the role of informed pair selection and propose a 2-phased strategy of exploration and exploitation. Random sampling provides the needed coverage for exploration, while areas of uncertainty modeled by neighbourhood properties of the pairs drive exploitation. We adopt curriculum learning to organise the ordering of pairs at training time using similarity knowledge as a heuristic for pair sorting. The results of our experimental evaluation show that these strategies are key to optimising training

Review: Consumption-stage food waste reduction interventions - What works and how to design better interventions

Food waste prevention has become an issue of international concern, with Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 aiming to halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030. However there is no review that has considered the effectiveness of interventions aimed at preventing food waste in the consumption stages of the food system. This significant gap, if filled, could help support those working to reduce food waste in the developed world, providing knowledge of what interventions are specifically effective at preventing food waste. This paper fills this gap, identifying and summarizing food-waste prevention interventions at the consumption/consumer stage of the supply chain via a rapid review of global academic literature from 2006 to 2017. We identify 17 applied interventions that claim to have achieved food waste reductions. Of these, 13 quantified food waste reductions. Interventions that changed the size or type of plates were shown to be effective (up to 57% food waste reduction) in hospitality environments. Changing nutritional guidelines in schools were reported to reduce vegetable waste by up to 28%, indicating that healthy diets can be part of food waste reduction strategies. Information campaigns were also shown to be effective with up to 28% food waste reduction in a small sample size intervention. Cooking classes, fridge cameras, food sharing apps, advertising and information sharing were all reported as being effective but with little or no robust evidence provided. This is worrying as all these methods are now being proposed as approaches to reduce food waste and, except for a few studies, there is no reproducible quantified evidence to assure credibility or success. To strengthen current results, a greater number of longitudinal and larger sample size intervention studies are required. To inform future intervention studies, this paper proposes a standardised guideline, which consists of: (1) intervention design; (2) monitoring and measurement; (3) moderation and mediation; (4) reporting; (5) systemic effects. Given the importance of food-waste reduction, the findings of this review highlight a significant evidence gap, meaning that it is difficult to make evidence-based decisions to prevent or reduce consumption-stage food waste in a cost-effective manner

Line Emission from an Accretion Disk around a Rotating Black Hole: Toward a Measurement of Frame Dragging

Line emission from an accretion disk and a corotating hot spot about a rotating black hole are considered for possible signatures of the frame-dragging effect. We explicitly compare integrated line profiles from a geometrically thin disk about a Schwarzschild and an extreme Kerr black hole, and show that the line profile differences are small if the inner radius of the disk is near or above the Schwarzschild stable-orbit limit of radius 6GM/c^2. However, if the inner disk radius extends below this limit, as is possible in the extreme Kerr spacetime, then differences can become significant, especially if the disk emissivity is stronger near the inner regions. We demonstrate that the first three moments of a line profile define a three-dimensional space in which the presence of material at small radii becomes quantitatively evident in broad classes of disk models. In the context of the simple, thin disk paradigm, this moment-mapping scheme suggests formally that the iron line detected by the Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics mission from MCG-6-30-15 (Tanaka et al. 1995) is 3 times more likely to originate from a disk about a rotating black hole than from a Schwarzschild system. A statistically significant detection of black hole rotation in this way may be achieved after only modest improvements in the quality of data. We also consider light curves and frequency shifts in line emission as a function of time for corotating hot spots in extreme Kerr and Schwarzschild geometries. Both the frequency-shift profile and the light curve from a hot spot are valuable measures of orbital parameters and might possibly be used to detect frame dragging even at radii approaching 6GM/c^2 if the inclination angle of the orbital plane is large.Comment: 15 pages (LaTex), 7 postscript figures; color plot (Figure 1) available at http://cfata2.harvard.edu/bromley/nu_nofun.html (This version contains a new subsection as well as minor corrections.

Boring bivalve traces in modern reef and deeper-water macroid and rhodolith beds

Macroids and rhodoliths, made by encrusting acervulinid foraminifera and coralline algae, are widely recognized as bioengineers providing relatively stable microhabitats and increasing biodiversity for other species. Macroid and rhodolith beds occur in different depositional settings at various localities and bathymetries worldwide. Six case studies of macroid/rhodolith beds from 0 to 117m water depth in the Pacific Ocean (northern Central Ryukyu Islands, French Polynesia), eastern Australia (Fraser Island, One Tree Reef, Lizard Island), and the Mediterranean Sea (southeastern Spain) show that nodules in the beds are perforated by small-sized boring bivalve traces (Gastrochanolites). On average, boring bivalve shells (gastrochaenids and mytilids) are more slender and smaller than those living inside shallow-water rocky substrates. In the Pacific, Gastrochaena cuneiformis, Gastrochaena sp., Leiosolenus malaccanus, L. mucronatus, L. spp., and Lithophaga/Leiosolenus sp., for the first time identified below 20m water depth, occur as juvenile forms along with rare small-sized adults. In deep-water macroids and rhodoliths the boring bivalves are larger than the shallower counterparts in which growth of juveniles is probably restrained by higher overturn rates of host nodules. In general, most boring bivalves are juveniles that grew faster than the acervulinid foraminiferal and coralline red algal hosts and rarely reached the adult stage. As a consequence of phenotypic plasticity, small-sized adults with slow growth rates coexist with juveniles. Below wave base macroids and rhodoliths had the highest amounts of bioerosion, mainly produced by sponges and polychaete worms. These modern observations provide bases for paleobiological inferences in fossil occurrences.Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) 25247083Erasmus+FAR2012-2017FIR2016FIR2018PRIN "Biotic resilience to global change: biomineralization of planktonic and benthic calcifiers in the past, present and future" 2017RX9XXXYBioMed Central-Prepay Membership at the University of FerraraJunta de Andalucía RNM 190Committee on ResearchMuseum of PaleontologyDepartment of Integrative Biology, UC BerkeleyUC Pacific Rim Projec

Learning to compare with few data for personalised human activity recognition.

Recent advances in meta-learning provides interesting opportunities for CBR research, in similarity learning, case comparison and personalised recommendations. Rather than learning a single model for a specific task, meta-learners adopt a generalist view of learning-to-learn, such that models are rapidly transferable to related (but different) new tasks. Unlike task-specific model training, a meta-learner’s training instance - referred to as a meta-instance - is a composite of two sets: a support set and a query set of instances. In our work, we introduce learning-to-learn personalised models from few data. We motivate our contribution through an application where personalisation plays an important role, mainly that of human activity recognition for self-management of chronic diseases. We extend the meta-instance creation process where random sampling of support and query sets is carried out on a reduced sample conditioned by a domain-specific attribute; namely the person or user, in order to create meta-instances for personalised HAR. Our meta-learning for personalisation is compared with several state-of-the-art meta-learning strategies: 1) matching network (MN), which learns an embedding for a metric function; 2) relation network (RN) that learns to predict similarity between paired instances; and 3) MAML, a model-agnostic machine-learning algorithm that optimizes the model parameters for rapid adaptation. Results confirm that personalised meta-learning significantly improves performance over non personalised meta-learners

Line Emission from an Accretion Disk around a Black hole: Effects of Disk Structure

The observed iron K-alpha fluorescence lines in Seyfert-1 galaxies provide strong evidence for an accretion disk near a supermassive black hole as a source of the line emission. These lines serve as powerful probes for examining the structure of inner regions of accretion disks. Previous studies of line emission have considered geometrically thin disks only, where the gas moves along geodesics in the equatorial plane of a black hole. Here we extend this work to consider effects on line profiles from finite disk thickness, radial accretion flow and turbulence. We adopt the Novikov and Thorne (1973) solution, and find that within this framework, turbulent broadening is the dominant new effect. The most prominent change in the skewed, double-horned line profiles is a substantial reduction in the maximum flux at both red and blue peaks. The effect is most pronounced when the inclination angle is large, and when the accretion rate is high. Thus, the effects discussed here may be important for future detailed modeling of high quality observational data.Comment: 21 pages including 8 figures; LaTeX; ApJ format; accepted by ApJ; short results of this paper appeared before as a conference proceedings (astro-ph/9711214

Collisional Cascades in Planetesimal Disks I. Stellar Flybys

We use a new multiannulus planetesimal accretion code to investigate the evolution of a planetesimal disk following a moderately close encounter with a passing star. The calculations include fragmentation, gas and Poynting-Robertson drag, and velocity evolution from dynamical friction and viscous stirring. We assume that the stellar encounter increases planetesimal velocities to the shattering velocity, initiating a collisional cascade in the disk. During the early stages of our calculations, erosive collisions damp particle velocities and produce substantial amounts of dust. For a wide range of initial conditions and input parameters, the time evolution of the dust luminosity follows a simple relation, L_d/L_{\star} = L_0 / [alpha + (t/t_d)^{beta}]. The maximum dust luminosity L_0 and the damping time t_d depend on the disk mass, with L_0 proportional to M_d and t_d proportional to M_d^{-1}. For disks with dust masses of 1% to 100% of the `minimum mass solar nebula' (1--100 earth masses at 30--150 AU), our calculations yield t_d approx 1--10 Myr, alpha approx 1--2, beta = 1, and dust luminosities similar to the range observed in known `debris disk' systems, L_0 approx 10^{-3} to 10^{-5}. Less massive disks produce smaller dust luminosities and damp on longer timescales. Because encounters with field stars are rare, these results imply that moderately close stellar flybys cannot explain collisional cascades in debris disk systems with stellar ages of 100 Myr or longer.Comment: 33 pages of text, 12 figures, and an animation. The paper will appear in the March 2002 issue of the Astronmomical Journal. The animation and a copy of the paper with full resolution figures are at S. Kenyon's planet formation website: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kenyon/p