Monte Carlo renormalization group with evolution in the space of parameters

Using data from a single simulation we obtain Monte Carlo renormalization-group information in a finite region of parameter space by adapting the Ferrenberg-Swendsen histogram method. Several quantities are calculated in the two-dimensional N 2 Ashkin-Teller and Ising models to show the feasibility of the method. We show renormalization-group Hamiltonian flows and critical-point location by matching of correlations by doing just two simulations at a single temperature in lattices of different sizes to partially eliminate finite-size effects.

Interference in hyperbolic space

The interference in a phase space algorithm of Schleich and Wheeler [Nature 326, 574 (1987)] is extended to the hyperbolic space underlying the group SU(1,1). The extension involves introducing the notion of weighted areas. Analytic expressions for the asymptotic forms for overlaps between the eigenstates of the generators of su(1,1) thus obtained are found to be in excellent agreement with the numerical results.[S1050-2947(98)08602-8].

Controllability of Volterra-Fredholm type systems in Banach spaces

We show the results in Chalishajar [Controllability of mixed Volterra-Fredholm-type integro-differential systems in Banach space, J. Franklin Inst. 344(1) (2007) 12-21] and Chang and Chalishajar [Controllability of mixed Volterra-Fredholm type integro-differential systems in Banach space, J. Franklin Inst., doi:10.1016/j. jfranklin.2008.02.002] are only valid for ordinary differential control systems. As a result the examples provided cannot be recovered as applications of the abstract results. (C) 2008 The Franklin Institute. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Post space debridement in oval-shaped canals: The use of a new ultrasonic tip with oval section

This study evaluates the effect on post space debridement in oval-shaped canals of an experimental ultrasonic tip with oval section (Satelec) compared with a circular ultrasonic tip (KaVo). Thirty teeth with an oval-shaped canal were endodontically treated and obturated and then randomly divided into 3 groups (n = 10) according to the procedure used for post space debridement: Satelec tip, Largo #2 drill + KaVo file, and Largo #2 drill + water. Debris and dentin tubules were evaluated by assigning scores to scanning electron microscope post spaces images; lower scores corresponded to fewer debris and higher number of open tubules. The Satelec group showed significantly lower debris and open tubules scores than KaVo group (p < .05) and control group (p < .05), which differed significantly between each other (p < .05). Also the debris and open tubules scores in different post space regions differed significantly among the experimental groups (p < .001). The oval ultrasonic tip resulted in a better post space debridement than a circular ultrasonic tip in oval-shaped canals.

Personality, emotion, and mood in agent-based group decision making

Group decision making plays an important role in organizations, especially in the present-day economy that demands high-quality, yet quick decisions. Group decision-support systems (GDSSs) are interactive computer-based environments that support concerted, coordinated team efforts toward the completion of joint tasks. The need for collaborative work in organizations has led to the development of a set of general collaborative computer-supported technologies and specific GDSSs that support distributed groups (in time and space) in various domains. However, each person is unique and has different reactions to various arguments. Many times a disagreement arises because of the way we began arguing, not because of the content itself. Nevertheless, emotion, mood, and personality factors have not yet been addressed in GDSSs, despite how strongly they influence results. Our group’s previous work considered the roles that emotion and mood play in decision making. In this article, we reformulate these factors and include personality as well. Thus, this work incorporates personality, emotion, and mood in the negotiation process of an argumentbased group decision-making process. Our main goal in this work is to improve the negotiation process through argumentation using the affective characteristics of the involved participants. Each participant agent represents a group decision member. This representation lets us simulate people with different personalities. The discussion process between group members (agents) is made through the exchange of persuasive arguments. Although our multiagent architecture model4 includes two types of agents—the facilitator and the participant— this article focuses on the emotional, personality, and argumentation components of the participant agent.

Gauge group and reality conditions in Ashtekar's complex formulation of canonical gravity

We discuss reality conditions and the relation between spacetime diffeomorphisms and gauge transformations in Ashtekars complex formulation of general relativity. We produce a general theoretical framework for the stabilization algorithm for the reality conditions, which is different from Diracs method of stabilization of constraints. We solve the problem of the projectability of the diffeomorphism transformations from configuration-velocity space to phase space, linking them to the reality conditions. We construct the complete set of canonical generators of the gauge group in the phase space which includes all the gauge variables. This result proves that the canonical formalism has all the gauge structure of the Lagrangian theory, including the time diffeomorphisms.

Determinacy and Weakly Ramsey sets in Banach spaces

We give a sufficient condition for a set of block subspaces in an infinite-dimensional Banach space to be weakly Ramsey. Using this condition we prove that in the Levy-collapse of a Mahlo cardinal, every projective set is weakly Ramsey. This, together with a construction of W. H. Woodin, is used to show that the Axiom of Projective Determinacy implies that every projective set is weakly Ramsey. In the case of co we prove similar results for a stronger Ramsey property. And for hereditarily indecomposable spaces we show that the Axiom of Determinacy plus the Axiom of Dependent Choices imply that every set is weakly Ramsey. These results are the generalizations to the class of projective sets of some theorems from W. T. Gowers, and our paper "Weakly Ramsey sets in Banach spaces."

Banach spaces without minimal subspaces

We prove three new dichotomies for Banach spaces a la W.T. Gowers` dichotomies. The three dichotomies characterise respectively the spaces having no minimal subspaces, having no subsequentially minimal basic sequences, and having no subspaces crudely finitely representable in all of their subspaces. We subsequently use these results to make progress on Gowers` program of classifying Banach spaces by finding characteristic spaces present in every space. Also, the results are used to embed any partial order of size K I into the subspaces of any space without a minimal subspace ordered by isomorphic embeddability. (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All fights reserved.

Brain injury in experimental neonatal meningitis due to group B streptococci

We have characterized the pattern of brain injury in a rat model of meningitis caused by group B streptococci (GBS). Infant rats (12-14 days old; n = 69) were infected intracisternally with 10 microliters of GBS (log10(2.3) to 4.5 colony-forming units). Twenty hours later, illness was assessed clinically and cerebrospinal fluid was cultured. Animals were either immediately euthanized for brain histopathology or treated with antibiotics and examined later. Early GBS meningitis was characterized clinically by severe obtundation and seizures, and histopathologically by acute inflammation in the subarachnoid space and ventricles, a vasculopathy characterized by vascular engorgement, and neuronal injury that was most prominent in the cortex and often followed a vascular pattern. Incidence of seizures, vasculopathy and neuronal injury correlated with the inoculum size (p < 0.01). Early injury was almost completely prevented by treatment with dexamethasone. Within days after meningitis, injured areas became well demarcated and showed new cellular infiltrates. Thirty days post-infection, brain weights of infected animals treated with antibiotics were decreased compared to uninfected controls (1.39 +/- 0.18 vs 1.64 +/- 0.1 g; p < 0.05). Thus, GBS meningitis in this model caused extensive cortical neuronal injury resembling severe neonatal meningitis in humans.

Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator in convex domains of Banach spaces

Studiamo l'operatore di Ornstein-Uhlenbeck e il semigruppo di Ornstein-Uhlenbeck in un sottoinsieme aperto convesso $\Omega$ di uno spazio di Banach separabile $X$ dotato di una misura Gaussiana centrata non degnere $\gamma$. In particolare dimostriamo la disuguaglianza di Sobolev logaritmica e la disuguaglianza di Poincaré, e grazie a queste disuguaglianze deduciamo le proprietà spettrali dell'operatore di Ornstein-Uhlenbeck. Inoltre studiamo l'equazione ellittica $\lambdau+L^{\Omega}u=f$ in $\Omega$, dove $L^\Omega$ è l'operatore di Ornstein-Uhlenbeck. Dimostriamo che per $\lambda>0$ e $f\in L^2(\Omega,\gamma)$ la soluzione debole $u$ appartiene allo spazio di Sobolev $W^{2,2}(\Omega,\gamma)$. Inoltre dimostriamo che $u$ soddisfa la condizione di Neumann nel senso di tracce al bordo di $\Omega$. Questo viene fatto finita approssimazione dimensionale.

A Mean Value Theorem for non Differentiable Mappings in Banach Spaces

We prove that if f is a real valued lower semicontinuous function on a Banach space X and if there exists a C^1, real valued Lipschitz continuous function on X with bounded support and which is not identically equal to zero, then f is Lipschitz continuous of constant K provided all lower subgradients of f are bounded by K. As an application, we give a regularity result of viscosity supersolutions (or subsolutions) of Hamilton-Jacobi equations in infinite dimensions which satisfy a coercive condition. This last result slightly improves some earlier work by G. Barles and H. Ishii.

REVISITING THE FOSSIL GROUP CANDIDATES UGC 842 AND NGC 6034

We present a new insight on NGC 6034 and UGC 842, two groups of galaxies previously reported in the literature as being fossil groups. The study is based on optical photometry and spectroscopy obtained with the CTIO Blanco telescope and Sloan Digital Sky Survey archival data. We find that NGC 6034 is embedded in a large structure, dominated by three rich clusters and other small groups. Its first and next four ranked galaxies have magnitude differences in the r band and projected distances which violate the optical criteria to classify it as a fossil group. We confirm that the UGC 842 group is a fossil group, but with about half the velocity dispersion that is reported in previous works. The velocity distribution of its galaxies reveals the existence of two structures in its line of sight, one with sigma(nu) similar to 223 km s(-1) and another with sigma(nu) similar to 235 km s(-1), with a difference in velocity of similar to 820 km s(-1). The main structure is dominated by passive galaxies, while these represent similar to 60% of the second structure. The X-ray temperature for the intragroup medium of a group with such a velocity dispersion is expected to be kT similar to 0.5-1 keV, against the observed value of kT similar to 1.9 keV reported in the literature. This result makes UGC 842 a special case among fossil groups because (1) it represents more likely the interaction between two small groups, which warms the intragroup medium and/or (2) it could constitute evidence that member galaxies lost energy in the process of spiraling toward the group center, and decreased the velocity dispersion of the system. As far as we know, UGC 842 is the first low-mass fossil group studied in detail.

Quantum and pseudoclassical descriptions of nonrelativistic spinning particles in noncommutative space

We construct a nonrelativistic wave equation for spinning particles in the noncommutative space (in a sense, a theta modification of the Pauli equation). To this end, we consider the nonrelativistic limit of the theta-modified Dirac equation. To complete the consideration, we present a pseudoclassical model (a la Berezin-Marinov) for the corresponding nonrelativistic particle in the noncommutative space. To justify the latter model, we demonstrate that its quantization leads to the theta-modified Pauli equation. We extract theta-modified interaction between a nonrelativistic spin and a magnetic field from such a Pauli equation and construct a theta modification of the Heisenberg model for two coupled spins placed in an external magnetic field. In the framework of such a model, we calculate the probability transition between two orthogonal Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states for a pair of spins in an oscillatory magnetic field and show that some of such transitions, which are forbidden in the commutative space, are possible due to the space noncommutativity. This allows us to estimate an upper bound on the noncommutativity parameter.

Pseudodifferential operators with C*-algebra-valued symbols: Abstract characterizations

Given a separable unital C*-algebra C with norm parallel to center dot parallel to, let E-n denote the Banach-space completion of the C-valued Schwartz space on R-n with norm parallel to f parallel to(2)=parallel to < f, f >parallel to(1/2), < f, g >=integral f(x)* g(x)dx. The assignment of the pseudodifferential operator A=a(x,D) with C-valued symbol a(x,xi) to each smooth function with bounded derivatives a is an element of B-C(R-2n) defines an injective mapping O, from B-C(R-2n) to the set H of all operators with smooth orbit under the canonical action of the Heisenberg group on the algebra of all adjointable operators on the Hilbert module E-n. In this paper, we construct a left-inverse S for O and prove that S is injective if C is commutative. This generalizes Cordes' description of H in the scalar case. Combined with previous results of the second author, our main theorem implies that, given a skew-symmetric n x n matrix J and if C is commutative, then any A is an element of H which commutes with every pseudodifferential operator with symbol F(x+J xi), F is an element of B-C(R-n), is a pseudodifferential operator with symbol G(x - J xi), for some G is an element of B-C(R-n). That was conjectured by Rieffel.

Lumbar Epidural Anesthesia in the Treatment of Discal Lombosciatalgia: A Comparative Clinical Study between Methylprednisolone and Methylprednisolone with Levobupivacaine

Sousa FAEF, Colhado OCG - Lumbar Epidural Anesthesia in the Treatment of Discal Lombosciatalgia: A Comparative Clinical Study between Methylprednisolone and Methylprednisolone with Levobupivacaine. Background and objectives: Lumbar epidural technique has been used in the treatment of lombosciatalgia since 1953. In most cases, methylprednisolone is used along with a local anesthetic, and it is not known whether the isolated use of methylprednisolone is equally effective in relieving symptoms. The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of two different solutions - methylprednisolone with saline and methylprednisolone with levobupivacaine injected in the epidural space to heal lombosciatalgia secondary to lumbar herniated disk. Methods: Sixty individuals ASA I and II, of both genders, ages 18 to 65 years participated in this randomized, double-blind study over a period of one year. They underwent interlaminar lumbar epidural analgesia without radioscopic control to heal a lombosciatalgia and they were divided into two groups: G-M (methylprednisolone + saline) and G-M + L (methylprednisolone + levobupivacaine + saline) both at a volume of 10 mL. Diagnosis was based on history, physical exam, and imaging exam (MRI). The Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) was applied in a total of two blockades, 15 days apart. Results: A reduction in pain severity was observed in the methylprednisolone-levobupivacaine group, but without statistical significance. Conclusions: The analgesic efficacy of the G-M + L solution was superior to that of the G-M solution in the treatment of discal lombosciatalgia regarding the shorter time to onset of analgesia, but this was not significant at the time of discharge, and both solutions were effective in the treatment of discal lombosciatalgia.