Communication advantages of line drawings

This paper investigates a the cognitive foundations of a pragmatic account of line drawings. It sets to highlight those features of line drawings that make them, as opposed to other types of visual representations, particularly conducive to communication. It is argued that representational and artifactual properties of drawings must be investigated together in order to understand the peculiarities of drawings as communicative tools

The Integrative Market Hypothesis for Stock Market Fluctuations

This article provides a new understanding of stock market price fluctuations, applying the concepts of quantum physics. This new approach challenges traditional theories of stock price movement, such as Random Walk, finding them antiquated and incomplete. The paper compares the stock price fluctuations to the quantum movement of particles. Specifically, the movement of stock prices on the NASDAQ index is fitted to a curve derived from Plank\u27s equation for black body radiation. The market is ultimately found to be not totally reactive nor random, but taking on an emergent quality. This independent movement is not expected from the interaction of individual traders. These results are astonishing as they are contrary to the prevalent reactive view of market price movement and suggest a radically new understanding of the market. A parallel to human consciousness is drawn to help explain this new understanding. Ultimately, this article is meant to provide a new perspective on the stock market and not as an exhaustive theory of it

Mirror and canonical neurons are not constitutive of aesthetic responses

The alleged neural basis of empathic responses to artworks is only of marginal relevance for aesthetics and for cognitive theories of ar

Effect of annealing temperature on microstructure and high-temperature tensile behaviour of Ti-6242S alloy produced by Laser Powder Bed Fusion

This work is focussed at investigating the properties of additive manufactured Ti-6242S, a Ti alloy with excellent mechanical strength and stability up to 550 °C. Special attention is given to the effect of different heat treatment routes on microstructure and high-temperature mechanical behaviour of the Ti-6242S alloy produced by Laser Powder Bed Fusion. Annealing was performed in the α/β field (at 940 °C, 960 °C, 980 °C) or above the β transus (at 1050 °C). Annealing step was followed by Ar gas cooling and ageing at 595 °C. The as-built material exhibits high strength and anisotropic behaviour, showing lower fracture elongation in the direction parallel to the build platform. Heat treatments are responsible for a reduction of material strength but an increase in fracture elongation. Tensile tests at high temperature show that the best heat treatment for applications up to 300 °C is the annealing at 940 °C followed by Ar cooling and ageing. For applications at higher temperatures (namely 550 °C, 750 °C) the annealing step should be performed above the β transus temperature, at 1050 °C, to achieve the best tensile properties

Super KP equations and Darboux transformations: another perspective on the Jacobian Super KP hierarchy

We generalize to the supersymmetric case the representation of the KP hierarchy as a set of conservation laws for the generating series of the conserved densities. We show that the hierarchy so obtained is isomorphic to the JSKP of Mulase and Rabin. We identify its ``bosonic content'' with the so-called Darboux-KP hierarchy, which geometrically encompasses the theory of Darboux-B\"acklund transformations, and is an extension both of the KP theory and of the modified KP theory. Finally, we show how the hierarchy can be linearized and how the supersymmetric counterpart of a wide class of rational solution can be quite explicitly worked out.Comment: Latex, 36 pages, 1 figur

Transport properties of a periodically driven superconducting single electron transistor

We discuss coherent transport of Cooper pairs through a Cooper pair shuttle. We analyze both the DC and AC Josephson effect in the two limiting cases where the charging energy $E_C$ is either much larger or much smaller than the Josephson coupling $E_J$. In the limit $E_J \ll E_C$ we present the detailed behavior of the critical current as a function of the damping rates and the dynamical phases. The AC effect in this regime is very sensitive to all dynamical scales present in the problem. The effect of fluctuations of the external periodic driving is discussed as well. In the opposite regime the system can be mapped onto the quantum kicked rotator, a classically chaotic system. We investigate the transport properties also in this regime showing that the underlying classical chaotic dynamics emerges as an incoherent transfer of Cooper pairs through the shuttle. For an appropriate choice of the parameters the Cooper pair shuttle can exhibit the phenomenon of dynamical localization. We discuss in details the properties of the localized regime as a function of the phase difference between the superconducting electrodes and the decoherence due to gate voltage fluctuations. Finally we point how dynamical localization is reflected in the noise properties of the shuttle.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures; v3 (published version): added references, improved readabilit

GC-MS analysis of soil faecal biomarkers uncovers mammalian species and the economic management of the archeological site "Le Colombare di Negrar"

: The identification of the mammalian species based on faecal sediments in modern and ancient environments is the aim of the research of archaeologists, forensic scientists and ecologists. Here, we set up and validated an optimized gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) method, characterized by a time-saving sample preparation protocol, for the simultaneous analysis of faecal biomarkers (6 sterols/stanols and 5 bile acids) in 14 soil samples from the archaeological site of "Le Colombare di Negrar" in northern Italy. Although the archaeological sediment samples examined are numerically exiguous, a comparative reading of our faecal biomarkers findings with new studies on faunal materials collected in the same stratigraphic detail during recent excavation campaigns will allow to better clarify the economic interest of the animal species farmed in the Colombare site (such as bovines, goats, sheep and pigs) and to shed light on the management of breeding. Together with archaeozoological and archaeobotanical analyses, the investigation of faecal biomarkers can increase our knowledge of how ancient local communities exploited natural resources and may allow us to deduce what their impact on the landscape was