A Markovian model for assessment of personnel hiring plans

As a result of the current economic environment, many organizations are having to operate with fewer resources. In the manpower area, these constraints have forced organizations to operate within well-defined hiring plans. Exceeding personnel ceilings is in most cases an intolerable situation. A mathematical model, based on the theory of Markov processes, is presented which can be used to assess the chances of success of personnel hiring plans. The model considers a plan to be successful if the final population size, at the end of the planning period, lies within a range specified by management. Although this model was developed to assess personnel hiring plans at the Goddard Space Flight Center, it is directly applicable wherever personnel hiring plans are used

When hot water freezes before cold

I suggest that the origin of the Mpemba effect (the freezing of hot water before cold) is freezing-point depression by solutes, either gaseous or solid, whose solubility decreases with increasing temperature so that they are removed when water is heated. They are concentrated ahead of the freezing front by zone refining in water that has not been heated, reduce the temperature of the freezing front, and thereby reduce the temperature gradient and heat flux, slowing the progress of the front. I present a simple calculation of this effect, and suggest experiments to test this hypothesis.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Qualitative and quantitative analysis of mixtures of compounds containing both hydrogen and deuterium

Method allows qualitative and quantitative analysis of mixtures of partially deuterated compounds. Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy determines location and amount of deuterium in organic compounds but not fully deuterated compounds. Mass spectroscopy can detect fully deuterated species but not the location

Superpotentials from variational derivatives rather than Lagrangians in relativistic theories of gravity

The prescription of Silva to derive superpotential equations from variational derivatives rather than from Lagrangian densities is applied to theories of gravity derived from Lovelock Lagrangians in the Palatini representation. Spacetimes are without torsion and isolated sources of gravity are minimally coupled. On a closed boundary of spacetime, the metric is given and the connection coefficients are those of Christoffel. We derive equations for the superpotentials in these conditions. The equations are easily integrated and we give the general expression for all superpotentials associated with Lovelock Lagrangians. We find, in particular, that in Einstein's theory, in any number of dimensions, the superpotential, valid at spatial and at null infinity, is that of Katz, Bicak and Lynden-Bell, the KBL superpotential. We also give explicitly the superpotential for Gauss-Bonnet theories of gravity. Finally, we find a simple expression for the superpotential of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theories with an anti-de Sitter background: it is minus the KBL superpotential, confirming, as it should, the calculation of the total mass-energy of spacetime at spatial infinity by Deser and Tekin.Comment: Scheduled to appear in Class. Quantum Grav. August 200

Insulin mediated upregulation of the renin angiotensin system in human subcutaneous adipocytes is reduced by Rosiglitazone

Background: Obesity associated hypertension is likely to be due to multiple mechanisms. Identification of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) within adipose tissue does, however, suggest a potential causal role for it in obesity-associated hypertension. Obese patients are often hyperinsulinaemic, but mechanisms underlying insulin upregulation of the RAS in adipose tissue are unclear. TNFα, an inducer of angiotensinogen in hepatocytes, is elevated in hyperinsulinaemic, obese individuals, and may provide a link in mediating insulin upregulation of the RAS in adipose tissue. Further, thiazolidinediones lower blood pressure in vivo and downregulation of the RAS in adipose tissue may contribute to this effect. We therefore examined the effect of rosiglitazone (RSG), on the insulin mediated upregulation of the RAS. Methods and Results: Sera were obtained from the arterial circulation and from venous blood draining subcutaneous abdominal adipose tissue. Isolated human abdominal subcutaneous adipocytes (n=12) were treated with insulin (1-1000nM) and insulin in combination with RSG (10nM), and RSG (10nM) alone to determine angiotensinogen expression, angiotensin II, bradykinin and TNFα secretion. Subcutaneous adipocytes were also treated with TNFα (10-100ng/mL) to examine the direct effect on angiotensinogen expression and angiotensin II secretion. The findings showed that the arterio-venous difference in angiotensin II levels was significant (↑23%; p<0.001). Insulin increased TNFα secretion in a concentration-dependent manner (p<0.01) whilst RSG (10nM) significantly reduced the insulin mediated rise in TNFα (p<0.001), as well as AGT and angiotensin II. TNFα also increased angiotensinogen and angiotensin II in isolated adipocytes. Conclusions: Our in vivo data suggest that human subcutaneous adipose tissue is a significant source of angiotensin II. This study also demonstrates a potential TNFα mediated mechanism through which insulin may stimulate the RAS and may contribute to explain obesity associated hypertension. RSG downregulates the RAS in subcutaneous adipose tissue and this effect may contribute to the long-term effect of RSG on blood pressure

Towards a new full-sky list of radial velocity standard stars

The calibration of the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) onboard the ESA Gaia satellite (to be launched in 2012) requires a list of standard stars with a radial velocity (RV) known with an accuracy of at least 300 m/s. The IAU Commission 30 lists of RV standard stars are too bright and not dense enough. We describe the selection criteria due to the RVS constraints for building an adequate full-sky list of at least 1000 RV standards from catalogues already published in the literature. A preliminary list of 1420 candidate standard stars is built and its properties are shown. An important re-observation programme has been set up in order to ensure within it the selection of objects with a good stability until the end of the Gaia mission (around 2018). The present list of candidate standards is available at CDS and usable for many other projects.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, in press, 8 pages, 8 figure

Feature-Guided Black-Box Safety Testing of Deep Neural Networks

Despite the improved accuracy of deep neural networks, the discovery of adversarial examples has raised serious safety concerns. Most existing approaches for crafting adversarial examples necessitate some knowledge (architecture, parameters, etc.) of the network at hand. In this paper, we focus on image classifiers and propose a feature-guided black-box approach to test the safety of deep neural networks that requires no such knowledge. Our algorithm employs object detection techniques such as SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) to extract features from an image. These features are converted into a mutable saliency distribution, where high probability is assigned to pixels that affect the composition of the image with respect to the human visual system. We formulate the crafting of adversarial examples as a two-player turn-based stochastic game, where the first player's objective is to minimise the distance to an adversarial example by manipulating the features, and the second player can be cooperative, adversarial, or random. We show that, theoretically, the two-player game can con- verge to the optimal strategy, and that the optimal strategy represents a globally minimal adversarial image. For Lipschitz networks, we also identify conditions that provide safety guarantees that no adversarial examples exist. Using Monte Carlo tree search we gradually explore the game state space to search for adversarial examples. Our experiments show that, despite the black-box setting, manipulations guided by a perception-based saliency distribution are competitive with state-of-the-art methods that rely on white-box saliency matrices or sophisticated optimization procedures. Finally, we show how our method can be used to evaluate robustness of neural networks in safety-critical applications such as traffic sign recognition in self-driving cars.Comment: 35 pages, 5 tables, 23 figure

Growth, Characterization, and Electrochemical Properties of Doped n-Type KTaO_3 Photoanodes

The effects of compositionally induced changes on the semiconducting properties, optical response, chemical stability, and overall performance of KTaO_3 photoanodes in photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells have been investigated. Single crystals of n-type Ca- and Ba-doped KTaO_3 with carrier concentrations ranging from 0.45 to 11.5×10^(19) cm^(−3) were grown and characterized as photoanodes in basic aqueous electrolyte PEC cells. The PEC properties of the crystals, including the photocurrent, photovoltage, and flatband potential in contact with 8.5 M NaOH(aq) were relatively independent of whether Ca or Ba was used to produce the semiconducting form of KTaO_3. All of the Ca- or Ba-doped KTaO_3 single-crystal photoanodes were chemically stable in the electrolyte and, based on the open-circuit potential and the band-edge positions, were capable of unassisted photochemical H_2 and O_2 evolution from H_2O. The minority-carrier diffusion lengths values were small and comparable to the depletion region width. Photoanodic currents were only observed for photoanode illumination with light above the bandgap (i.e., λ<340 nm). The maximum external quantum yield occurred at λ=255 nm (4.85 eV), and the depletion width plus the minority-carrier diffusion length ranged from 20 to 65 nm for the various KTaO_3-based photoanode materials