Depletion forces between two spheres in a rod solution

We study the depletion interaction between spherical particles of radius R immersed in a dilute solution of rigid rods of length L. The computed interaction potential is, within numerical accuracy, exact for any value of L/R. In particular we find that for L of order R, the depth of the depletion well is smaller than the prediction of the Derjaguin approximation. Our results bring new light into the discussion on the lack of phase separation in colloidal mixtures of spheres and rods.Comment: 12 pages including figures. 5 eps figures. LaTeX with REVTe

Market Power and Efficiency of Islamic Banking and Conventional Banking in Indonesia

ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) of banking industry requires both Islamic and conventional banking to improve their efficiency because the competition in banking market industry will be more intense. Therefore, this study aims to identify the type of hyphotesis of industrial organization which exists in Islamic and conventional banks in order to investigate their readiness for AEC. The research sampling consists of 10 Islamic banks and 10 conventional banks from January 2009 to December 2016. To measure x-efficiency and scale efficiency, this research uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Meanwhile, the concentration is measured by Lerner index. The hypothesis is tested by using panel regression. The result shows SCP (Structure-Conduct-Performance) hypothesis is closely applied to Islamic and conventional banks because market concentration significantly influences profitability. RMP (Relative Market Power) hypothesis is also closely applied to Islamic and conventional banking, this indicates Indonesian banking has market power in determining prices and this condition makes the profit higher. RES (Relative Efficiency Structure) and SES (Scale Efficiency Structure) hypothesis do not exist in both conventional and Islamic banks because x-efficiency and scale efficiency do not affect profitability, concentration, and market share simultaneously. Market power and efficiency researches are commonly conducted in conventional banking, however there are only a few research in Islamic banking area. The novelty of this study is the comparison between conventional and Islamic banking in the term of market structure and efficiency

An MRI-Derived Definition of MCI-to-AD Conversion for Long-Term, Automati c Prognosis of MCI Patients

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), continue to be widely studied. While there is no consensus on whether MCIs actually "convert" to AD, the more important question is not whether MCIs convert, but what is the best such definition. We focus on automatic prognostication, nominally using only a baseline image brain scan, of whether an MCI individual will convert to AD within a multi-year period following the initial clinical visit. This is in fact not a traditional supervised learning problem since, in ADNI, there are no definitive labeled examples of MCI conversion. Prior works have defined MCI subclasses based on whether or not clinical/cognitive scores such as CDR significantly change from baseline. There are concerns with these definitions, however, since e.g. most MCIs (and ADs) do not change from a baseline CDR=0.5, even while physiological changes may be occurring. These works ignore rich phenotypical information in an MCI patient's brain scan and labeled AD and Control examples, in defining conversion. We propose an innovative conversion definition, wherein an MCI patient is declared to be a converter if any of the patient's brain scans (at follow-up visits) are classified "AD" by an (accurately-designed) Control-AD classifier. This novel definition bootstraps the design of a second classifier, specifically trained to predict whether or not MCIs will convert. This second classifier thus predicts whether an AD-Control classifier will predict that a patient has AD. Our results demonstrate this new definition leads not only to much higher prognostic accuracy than by-CDR conversion, but also to subpopulations much more consistent with known AD brain region biomarkers. We also identify key prognostic region biomarkers, essential for accurately discriminating the converter and nonconverter groups

Rods Near Curved Surfaces and in Curved Boxes

We consider an ideal gas of infinitely rigid rods near a perfectly repulsive wall, and show that the interfacial tension of a surface with rods on one side is lower when the surface bends towards the rods. Surprisingly we find that rods on both sides of surfaces also lower the energy when the surface bends. We compute the partition functions of rods confined to spherical and cylindrical open shells, and conclude that spherical shells repel rods, whereas cylindrical shells (for thickness of the shell on the order of the rod-length) attract them. The role of flexibility is investigated by considering chains composed of two rigid segments.Comment: 39 pages including figures and tables. 12 eps figures. LaTeX with REVTe

Compromising system and user interests in shelter location and evacuation planning

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Traffic management during an evacuation and the decision of where to locate the shelters are of critical importance to the performance of an evacuation plan. From the evacuation management authority’s point of view, the desirable goal is to minimize the total evacuation time by computing a system optimum (SO). However, evacuees may not be willing to take long routes enforced on them by a SO solution; but they may consent to taking routes with lengths not longer than the shortest path to the nearest shelter site by more than a tolerable factor. We develop a model that optimally locates shelters and assigns evacuees to the nearest shelter sites by assigning them to shortest paths, shortest and nearest with a given degree of tolerance, so that the total evacuation time is minimized. As the travel time on a road segment is often modeled as a nonlinear function of the flow on the segment, the resulting model is a nonlinear mixed integer programming model. We develop a solution method that can handle practical size problems using second order cone programming techniques. Using our model, we investigate the importance of the number and locations of shelter sites and the trade-off between efficiency and fairness. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The Robust Network Loading Problem under Hose Demand Uncertainty: Formulation, Polyhedral Analysis, and Computations

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We consider the network loading problem (NLP) under a polyhedral uncertainty description of traffic demands. After giving a compact multicommodity flow formulation of the problem, we state a decomposition property obtained from projecting out the flow variables. This property considerably simplifies the resulting polyhedral analysis and computations by doing away with metric inequalities. Then we focus on a specific choice of the uncertainty description, called the “hose model,” which specifies aggregate traffic upper bounds for selected endpoints of the network. We study the polyhedral aspects of the NLP under hose demand uncertainty and use the results as the basis of an efficient branch-and-cut algorithm. The results of extensive computational experiments on well-known network design instances are reported

SHOP2: An HTN Planning System

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains