An Algorithm For Photometric Identification Of Transiting Circumbinary Planets

Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while in transit. These propertied make the popular transit finding algorithm BLS almost ineffective so a modified version of BLS for the identification of CB planets was developed - CB-BLS. We show that using this algorithm it is possible to find CB planets in the residuals of light curves of eclipsing binaries that have noise levels of 1% and more - quality that is routinely achieved by current ground-based transit surveys. Previous searches for CB planets using variation of eclipse times minima of CM Dra and elsewhere are more closely related to radial velocity than to transit searches and so are quite distinct from CB-BLS. Detecting CB planets is expected to have significant impact on our understanding of exoplanets in general, and exoplanet formation in particular. Using CB-BLS will allow to easily harness the massive ground- and space- based photometric surveys in operation to look for these hard-to-find objects.Comment: MNRAS accepted. 8 pages, 8 figures (fig. 1 may appear cut - less important, and will be replaced later with a correct version

Improving Fingerprint Verification Using Minutiae Triplets

Improving fingerprint matching algorithms is an active and important research area in fingerprint recognition. Algorithms based on minutia triplets, an important matcher family, present some drawbacks that impact their accuracy, such as dependency to the order of minutiae in the feature, insensitivity to the reflection of minutiae triplets, and insensitivity to the directions of the minutiae relative to the sides of the triangle. To alleviate these drawbacks, we introduce in this paper a novel fingerprint matching algorithm, named M3gl. This algorithm contains three components: a new feature representation containing clockwise-arranged minutiae without a central minutia, a new similarity measure that shifts the triplets to find the best minutiae correspondence, and a global matching procedure that selects the alignment by maximizing the amount of global matching minutiae. To make M3gl faster, it includes some optimizations to discard non-matching minutia triplets without comparing the whole representation. In comparison with six verification algorithms, M3gl achieves the highest accuracy in the lowest matching time, using FVC2002 and FVC2004 databases

Self-concept and self-esteem in elementary school children

Confusion exists with regard to the empirical and substantive link between self-concept and self-esteem in elementary school children and their relationship to self-description, self-evaluation, and global beliefs and feelings about oneself as a person. This study reports the results of investigating the relationships between these self-constructs using 957 elementary school children in Grades 3 to 7. The evidence suggests that self-concept is comprised of both descriptive and evaluative beliefs that children hold about certain characteristics, whereas self-esteem can be viewed as the global feelings and beliefs that children have about themselves as people

An efficient MIP model for the capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setups

This paper presents a novel mathematical programming approach to the single-machine capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem with sequence-dependent setup times and setup costs. The approach is partly based on the earlier work of Haase and Kimms [2000. Lot sizing and scheduling with sequence-dependent setup costs and times and efficient rescheduling opportunities. International Journal of Production Economics 66(2), 159-169] which determines during pre-processing all item sequences that can appear in given time periods in optimal solutions. We introduce a new mixed-integer programming model in which binary variables indicate whether individual items are produced in a period, and parameters for this program are generated by a heuristic procedure in order to establish a tight formulation. Our model allows us to solve in reasonable time instances where the product of the number of items and number of time periods is at most 60-70. Compared to known optimal solution methods, it solves significantly larger problems, often with orders of magnitude speedup.Lot-sizing Scheduling Sequence-dependent setups Mixed-integer programming