A Fullerene-Like Ball in a Second Century Roman Mosaic?

A fullerene-like ball is found in a second century mosaic from Porta Marina Roman Baths near Ostia. Although it could be an hexadecahedral ball (28 vertices, 4 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal faces), it is probably an erroneous representation of a dodecahedral ball.     

Packaging production and consumption in the world and in some industrialized countries

This paper reports on statistics concerning production and consumption of packaging (as a whole or per capita) in Europe, in the USA, in Japan and in the world. Data have been provided by National Trade Associations and by consultants specialized in packaging and in economics. It is estimated that in 1986 the global consumption of packaging reached 150 millions of tonnes valued at 1200 billions of French francs. Consumption could reach 247 million tonnes by the year 2000. Paper and board have the highest consumption rate, but plastics have the highest rate of growth. Nevertheless, consumption per capita in the industrialized countries will be more than 10 times the consumption in underdeveloped countries. The packaging industries take fourth place in the USA, sixth in Western Germany and twelfth in France. In Europe, as in the world, paper and board is the material most used (40%), with glass (a high density material) taking second place and plastics third, i.e. if we consider the quantity of materials and not their value. Some differences appear between the various countries, but the figures for USA and Japan lead to similar conclusions. The survey shows clearly that the USA as compared with Europe has twice the consumption of packaging materials per capita and this difference is even greater compared with the rest of the world.     

Distributed constraint optimization with MULBS: A case study on collaborative meeting scheduling

This paper introduces MULBS, a new DCOP (distributed constraint optimization problem) algorithm and also presents a DCOP formulation for scheduling of distributed meetings in collaborative environments. Scheduling in CSCWD can be seen as a DCOP where variables represent time slots and values are resources of a production system (machines, raw-materials, hardware components, etc.) or management system (meetings, project tasks, human resources, money, etc). Therefore, a DCOP algorithm must find a set of variable assignments that maximize an objective function taking constraints into account. However, it is well known that such problems are NP-complete and that more research must be done to obtain feasible and reliable computational approaches. Thus, DCOP emerges as a very promising technique: the search space is decomposed into smaller spaces and agents solve local problems, collaborating in order to achieve a global solution. We show with empirical experiments that MULBS outperforms some of the state-of-the-art algorithms for DCOP, guaranteeing high quality solutions using less computational resources for the distributed meeting scheduling task.     

Hepatic Δ9 and Δ6 desaturase activities during the recovery period following carbon tetrachloride poisoningdesaturase activities during the recovery period following carbon tetrachloride poisoning

The liver microsomal Δ⁹ and Δ⁶ desaturase activities have been studied in rats with carbon tetrachloride-induced hepatitis. Immediately after poisoning, significant decreases were observed for both types of desaturase activity. However, recovery kinetics were slower for the Δ⁶ desaturase than for the Δ⁹ desaturase. The activities of NADH-ferricyanide and NADH-cytochrome C reductases, proteins involved in the electron transfers associated with microsomal desaturation, were also measured. There was a fall in both activities after poisoning, but this decrease was less than that of the desaturase activities.     

Ultrafast imaging of polyatomic molecules with simplex algorithm

A simplex algorithm used to solve molecular structure from asymptotic momentum values is reported. The geometry of ${\text{CO}}_2^{3+}$ molecular ions in linear and bent configurations is reconstructed. A polyatomic molecular ion with trigonal planar symmetry is used to demonstrate the scalability of the algorithm.     

同步语言的时间可预测多线程代码生成方法

能够提供更强计算能力的多核处理器将在安全关键系统中得到广泛应用.但是,由于现代处理器所使用的流水线、乱序执行、动态分支预测、Cache等性能提高机制以及多核之间的资源共享,使得系统的最坏执行时间分析变得非常困难.为此,国际学术界提出时间可预测系统设计的思想,以降低系统的最坏执行时间分析难度.已有研究主要关注硬件层次及其编译方法的调整和优化,而较少关注软件层次,即时间可预测多线程代码的构造方法以及到多核硬件平台的映射.本文提出一种基于同步语言模型驱动的时间可预测多线程代码生成方法,并对代码生成器的语义保持进行证明;提出一种基于AADL(Architecture Analysis and Design Language)的时间可预测多核体系结构模型,作为本文研究的目标平台;最后,给出多线程代码到多核体系结构模型的映射方法,并给出系统性质的分析框架.     

Maintaining strong mutual visibility of an evader moving over the reduced visibility graph

In this paper, we address the problem of determining whether a mobile robot, called the pursuer, is able to maintain strong mutual visibility (a visibility notion between regions over a convex partition of the environment) of an antagonist agent, called the evader. We frame the problem as a non cooperative game. We consider the case in which the pursuer and the evader move at bounded speed, traveling in a known polygonal environment with or without holes, and in which there are no restrictions as to the distance that might separate the agents. Unlike our previous efforts (Murrieta-Cid et al. in Int J Robot Res 26:233–253, 2007), we give special attention to the combinatorial problem that arises when searching for a solution through visiting several locations in an environment with obstacles. In this paper we take a step further, namely, we assume an antagonistic evader who moves continuously and unpredictably, but with a constraint over its set of admissible motion policies, as the evader moves in the shortest-path roadmap, also called the reduced visibility graph (RVG). The pursuer does not know which among the possible paths over the RVG the evader will choose, but the pursuer is free to move within all the environment. We provide a constructive method to solve the decision problem of determining whether or not the pursuer is able to maintain strong mutual visibility of the evader. This method is based on an algorithm that computes the safe areas (areas that keep evader surveillance) at all times. We prove decidability of this problem, and provide a complexity measure to this evader surveillance game; both contributions hold for any general polygonal environment that might or not contain holes. All our algorithms have been implemented and we show simulation results.     

A multiphase compressible model for the simulation of multiphase flows

A compressible model able to manage incompressible two-phase flows as well as compressible motions is proposed. After a presentation of the multiphase compressible concept, the new model and related numerical methods are detailed on fixed structured grids. The presented model is a 1-fluid model with a reformulated mass conservation equation which takes into account the effects of compressibility. The coupling between pressure and flow velocity is ensured by introducing mass conservation terms in the momentum and energy equations. The numerical model is then validated with four test cases involving the compression of an air bubble by water, the liquid injection in a closed cavity filled with air, a bubble subjected to an ultrasound field and finally the oscillations of a deformed air bubble in melted steel. The numerical results are compared with analytical results and convergence orders in space are provided.     

Consensus in the presence of mortal Byzantine faulty processes

We consider the problem of reaching agreement in distributed systems in which some processes may deviate from their prescribed behavior before they eventually crash. We call this failure model “mortal Byzantine”. After discussing some application examples where this model is justified, we provide matching upper and lower bounds on the number of faulty processes, and on the required number of rounds in synchronous systems. We then continue our study by varying different system parameters. On the one hand, we consider the failure model under weaker timing assumptions, namely for partially synchronous systems and asynchronous systems with unreliable failure detectors. On the other hand, we vary the failure model in that we limit the occurrences of faulty steps that actually lead to a crash in synchronous systems.     

Ant colony optimization algorithm for the Euclidean location-allocation problem with unknown number of facilities

This paper addresses the Euclidean location-allocation problem with an unknown number of facilities, and an objective of minimizing the fixed and transportation costs. This is a NP-hard problem and in this paper, a three-stage ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is introduced and its performance is evaluated by comparing its solutions to the solutions of genetic algorithms (GA). The results show that ACO outperformed GA and reached better solutions in a faster computational time. Furthermore, ACO was tested on the relaxed version of the problem where the number of facilities is known, and compared to existing methods in the literature. The results again confirmed the superiority of the proposed algorithm.