The Scikit-HEP Project

The Scikit-HEP project is a community-driven and community-oriented effort with the aim of providing Particle Physics at large with a Python scientific toolset containing core and common tools. The project builds on five pillars that embrace the major topics involved in a physicist's analysis work: datasets, data aggregations, modelling, simulation and visualisation. The vision is to build a user and developer community engaging collaboration across experiments, to emulate scikit-learn's unified interface with Astropy's embrace of third-party packages, and to improve discoverability of relevant tools.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2018), 9-13 July 201

Design of evacuation plans for densely urbanised city centres

The high population density and tightly packed nature of some city centres make emergency planning for these urban spaces especially important, given the potential for human loss in case of disaster. Historic and recent events have made emergency service planners particularly conscious of the need for preparing evacuation plans in advance. This paper discusses a methodological approach for assisting decision-makers in designing urban evacuation plans. The approach aims at quickly and safely moving the population away from the danger zone into shelters. The plans include determining the number and location of rescue facilities, as well as the paths that people should take from their building to their assigned shelter in case of an occurrence requiring evacuation. The approach is thus of the location–allocation–routing type, through the existing streets network, and takes into account the trade-offs among different aspects of evacuation actions that inevitably come up during the planning stage. All the steps of the procedure are discussed and systematised, along with computational and practical implementation issues, in the context of a case study – the design of evacuation plans for the historical centre of an old European city

A Maxwell Like Formulation of Gravitational Theory in Minkowski Spacetime

In this paper using the Clifford bundle formalism a Lagrangian theory of the Yang-Mills type (with a gauge fixing term and an auto interacting term) for the gravitational field in Minkowski spacetime is presented. It is shown how two simple hypothesis permit the interpretation of the formalism in terms of effective Lorentzian or teleparallel geometries. In the case of a Lorentzian geometry interpretation of the theory the field equations are shown to be equivalent to Einstein's equations.Comment: This is a version of a paper published in Int. J. Mod. Phs. D 16(6), 1027-1041 (2007) where some misprints and typos have been corrected, some references have been updated, a footnote has been added and some few sentences have been rewritten to better explain the role of the (plastic) deformation tensor

Agricultural Credit Interest Rate Equalization Policy: A Growth Subsidy?

The Brazilian Interest Rate Equalization System (IRES) subsidizes farmers by providing them with credit at lower than market interest rates. The objective of this research is to evaluate the IRES by comparing its monetary cost with its benefits as measured by Brazilian GDP growth. Estimates are carried out using input-output matrix. The results suggest that each Brazilian real spent by IRES to assist Brazilian family farms increases Brazilian GDP by R$1.75 and that each real spent to assist commercial farms increases GDP by R$ 3.57. The IRES is a subsidy that generates economic growth greater than its cost to society.IRES subsidy, growth, input-output matrix, Agricultural Finance, Q18, C67, O40, H81,