Self-adjoint extensions and spectral analysis in the generalized Kratzer problem

We present a mathematically rigorous quantum-mechanical treatment of a one-dimensional non-relativistic motion of a particle in the potential field V(x) = g(1)x(-1) + g(2)x(-2), x is an element of R(+) = [0, infinity). For g(2) > 0 and g(1) < 0, the potential is known as the Kratzer potential V(K)(x) and is usually used to describe molecular energy and structure, interactions between different molecules and interactions between non-bonded atoms. We construct all self-adjoint Schrodinger operators with the potential V(x) and represent rigorous solutions of the corresponding spectral problems. Solving the first part of the problem, we use a method of specifying self-adjoint extensions by (asymptotic) self-adjoint boundary conditions. Solving spectral problems, we follow Krein`s method of guiding functionals. This work is a continuation of our previous works devoted to the Coulomb, Calogero and Aharonov-Bohm potentials.

Self-dual hopfions

We construct static and time-dependent exact soliton solutions with nontrivial Hopf topological charge for a field theory in 3 + 1 dimensions with the target space being the two dimensional sphere S(2). The model considered is a reduction of the so-called extended Skyrme-Faddeev theory by the removal of the quadratic term in derivatives of the fields. The solutions are constructed using an ansatz based on the conformal and target space symmetries. The solutions are said self-dual because they solve first order differential equations which together with some conditions on the coupling constants, imply the second order equations of motion. The solutions belong to a sub-sector of the theory with an infinite number of local conserved currents. The equation for the profile function of the ansatz corresponds to the Bogomolny equation for the sine-Gordon model.

On the motion under focal attraction in a rotating medium

New results are established here on the phase portraits and bifurcations of the kinematic model in system (1), first presented by H.K. Wilson in [3], and by him attributed to L. Markus (unpublished). A new, self-sufficient, study which extends that of [3] and allows an essential conclusion for the applicability of the model is reported here.

The roles of static depth information and object-image relative motion in perception of heading

In a series of 6 experiments, two hypotheses were tested: that nominal heading perception is determined by the relative motion of images of objects positioned at different depths (R. F. Wang & J. E. Cutting 1999) and that static depth information contributes to this determination. By manipulating static depth information while holding retinal-image motion constant during  simulated self-movement, the authors found that static depth information played a role in determining perceived heading. Some support was also found for the involvement of R. F. Wang and J. E. Cutting’s (1999) categories of object-image relative motion in determining perceived heading. However, results suggested an unexpected functional dominance of information about heading relative to apparently near objects.

Classification of self-consumable highlights for soccer video summaries

An effective scheme for soccer summarization is significant to improve the usage of this massively growing video data. The paper presents an extension to our recent work which proposed a framework to integrate highlights into play-breaks to construct more complete soccer summaries. The current focus is to demonstrate the benefits of detecting some specific audio-visual features during play-break sequences in order to classify highlights contained within them. The main purpose is to generate summaries which are self-consumable individually. To support this framework, the algorithms for shot classification and detection of near-goal and slow-motion replay scenes is described. The results of our experiment using 5 soccer videos (20 minutes each) show the performance and reliability of our framework.

Toward a broader appreciation of human motion in education

Motion is a fundamental activity for the healthy functioning human organism. Its importance, however, is increasingly de-valued in Western cultures as they speed toward adopting technologies and virtual experiences as adjuncts to, and even replacements for7 traditional educational structures and processes that involve physical activity. Organised and reflective experience of human motion is becoming increasingly marginalised in teaching methodologies and learning programs in educational institutions at all levels around the globe. This inquiry sets out to gain a greater understanding of why people and human motion become disconnected, particularly during periods of formal education. A central question and two sub-questions form the basis of the inquiry. The central question asks why human motion is not valued and more utilised in education. In particular, why do learning areas that directly represent involvement with human motion, such as physical education, continually struggle in education programs. It directs the investigation to focus on the causes rather than the symptoms of the disuse and devaluation of human motion in Australian education. The two sub-questions split the praxis of the study. The first seeks to understand how the causes of devaluation work in the educational context lo affect the lack of acknowledgement; and the second considers ways to counter the disuse of human movement in education programs. To address these questions, the research focuses on rebutting the notion of a mind-body dualism. Rather, it seeks to better understand how humans learn and function as monists - integrated beings, acquiring self-knowledge in their 'world of being' in which bodily and emotional experiences, and reasoning are inextricably intertwined. I have approached this qualitative research as an ethnographic sociologist examining the issues from a critical high modernist perspective in order to demonstrate the pervading influence in Australian education of strong beliefs and values from the era of Enlightenment. Narrative analysis of 'memoir' in the form of self-defining memories was selected to gain a sensibility of the connectedness between human emotion, motion and reasoning in the lived experiences of students in three primary and three secondary schools across Years 2-12. An opportunity for human movement to be more valued and utilised in emerging educational frameworks that have life knowledge, dispositions and capabilities at their core is identified. The inquiry proposes a conceptualisation of human motion in education for new times characterised by the need for people to develop personal resources and strong positive identities in order to cope with a world of rapid change and uncertainty.

Feminist poetics : symbolism in an emblematic journey reflecting self and vision

My thesis tilled Feminist Poetics: Symbolism in an Emblematic Journey Reflecting Self and Vision, consists of thirty oil paintings on canvas, several preparatory sketches and drawings in different media on paper, and is supported and elucidated by an exegesis. The paintings on unframed canvases reveal mise en scčnes and emblems that present to the viewer a drama about links between identities, differences, relationships and vision. Images of my daughter, friends and myself fill single canvases, suites of paintings, diptyches and triptychs. The impetus behind my research derives from my recognition of the cultural means by which women's experience is excluded from a representational norm or ideal. I use time-honoured devices, such as, illusionist imagery, aspects of portraiture, complex fractured atmospheric space, paintings and drawings within paintings, mirrors and reflective surfaces, shadows and architectural devices. They structure my compositions in a way that envelops the viewer in my internal world of ideas. Some of these features function symbolically, as emblems. A small part of the imagery relies on verisimilitude, such as my hands and their shadow and my single observing eye enclosed by my glasses. What remains is a fantasy world, ‘seen’ by the image of my other eye, or ‘faction’, based on memories and texts explaining the significance of ancient Minoan symbols. In my paintings, I base the subjects of this fantasy on my memories of the Knossos Labyrinth and matristic symbols, such as the pillar, snake, blood, eye and horn. They suggest the presence of a ritual where initiates descended into the adyton (holy of holies) or sunken areas in the labyrinth. The paintings attempt a ‘rewriting’ of sacrality and gender by adopting the symbolism of death, transformation and resurrection in the adyton. The significance of my emblematic imagery is that it constructs a foundation narrative about vision and insight. I sought symbolic attributes shared by European oil painting and Minoan antiquity. Both traditions share symbolic attributes with male dying gods in Greek myths and Medusa plays a central part in this linkage. I argue that her attributes seem identical to both those of the dying gods and Minoan goddesses. In the Minoan context these symbols suggest metaphors for the female body and the mother and daughter blood line. When the symbols align with the beheaded Medusa in a patriarchal context, both her image and her attributes represent cautionary tales about female sexuality that have repercussions for aspects of vision. In Renaissance and Baroque oil painting Medusa's image served as a vehicle for an allegory that personified the triumph of reason over the senses. In the twentieth century, the vagina dentata suggests her image, a personified image of irrational emotion that some male Surrealists celebrated as a muse. She is implicated in the male gaze as a site of castration and her representation suggests a symbolic form pertaining to perspective. Medusa's image, its negative sexual and violent connotations, seemed like a keystone linking iconographic codes in European oil painting to Minoan antiquity. I fused aspects of matristic Minoan antiquity with elements of European oil paintings in the form of disguised attribute gestures, objects and architectural environments. I selected three paintings, Dürer's Setf-Portrait, 1500, Gentileschi's Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630 and Velazquez's Las Meniruis, 1656 as models because 1 detected echoes of Minoan symbolism in the attributes of their subjects and backgrounds. My revision of Medusa's image by connecting it to Minoan antiquity established a feminist means of representation in the largely male-dominated tradition of oil painting. These paintings also suggested painting techniques that were useful to me. Through my representations of my emblematic journey I questioned the narrow focus placed on phallic symbols when I explored how their meanings may have been formed within a matricentric culture. I retained the key symbols of the patriarchal foundation narratives about vision but removed images of violence and their link to desire and replaced it with a ritual form of symbolic death. I challenged the binary oppositional defined Self as opposed to Other by constructing a complex, fluid Self that interacts with others. A multi-directional gaze between subjects, viewers and artist replaces the male gaze. Different qualities of paint, coagulation and random flow form a blood symbolism. Many layers of paint retaining some aspects of the Gaze and Glance, fuse and separate intermittently to construct and define form. The sense of motion and fluidity constructs a form of multi-faceted selves. The supporting document, the exegesis is in two parts. In the first part, I discuss the Minoan sources of my iconography and the symbolic gender specific meanings suggested by particular symbols and their changed meanings in European oil painting, I explain how I integrate Minoan symbols into European oil paintings as a form of disguised symbolism. In the second part I explain how my alternative use of symbolism and paint alludes to a feminist poetic.

Self-assembling of phenothiazine compounds investigated by small-angle X-ray scattering and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) have been carried out to investigate the structure of the self-aggregates of two phenothiazine drugs, chlorpromazine (CPZ) and trifluoperazine (TFP), in aqueous solution. In the SAXS studies, drug solutions of 20 and 60 mM, at pH 4.0 and 7.0, were investigated and the best data fittings were achieved assuming several different particle form factors with a homogeneous electron density distribution in respect to the water environment. Because of the limitation of scattering intensity in the q range above 0.15 angstrom(-1), precise determination of the aggregate shape was not possible and all of the tested models for ellipsoids, cylinders, or parallelepipeds fitted the experimental data equally well. The SAXS data allows inferring, however, that CPZ molecules might self-assemble in a basis set of an orthorhombic cell, remaining as nanocrystallites in solution. Such nanocrystals are composed of a small number of unit cells (up to 10, in c-direction), with CPZ aggregation numbers of 60-80. EPR spectra of 5- and 16-doxyl stearic acids bound to the aggregates were analyzed through simulation, and the dynamic and magnetic parameters were obtained. The phenothiazine concentration in EPR experiments was in the range of 5-60 mM. Critical aggregation concentration of TFP is lower than that for CPZ, consistent with a higher hydrophobicity of TFP. At acidic pH 4.0 a significant residual motion of the nitroxide relative to the aggregate is observed, and the EPR spectra and corresponding parameters are similar to those reported for aqueous surfactant micelles. However, at pH 6.5 a significant motional restriction is observed, and the nitroxide rotational correlation times correlate very well with those estimated for the whole aggregated particle from SAXS data. This implies that the aggregate is densely packed at this pH and that the nitroxide is tightly bound to it producing a strongly immobilized EPR spectrum. Besides that, at pH 6.5 the differences in motional restriction observed between 5- and 16-DSA are small, which is different from that observed for aqueous surfactant micelles.

Self-dual hopfions

We construct static and time-dependent exact soliton solutions with nontrivial Hopf topological charge for a field theory in 3 + 1 dimensions with the target space being the two dimensional sphere S(2). The model considered is a reduction of the so-called extended Skyrme-Faddeev theory by the removal of the quadratic term in derivatives of the fields. The solutions are constructed using an ansatz based on the conformal and target space symmetries. The solutions are said self-dual because they solve first order differential equations which together with some conditions on the coupling constants, imply the second order equations of motion. The solutions belong to a sub-sector of the theory with an infinite number of local conserved currents. The equation for the profile function of the ansatz corresponds to the Bogomolny equation for the sine-Gordon model.

Short comments on self-synchronization of two non-ideal sources supported by a flexible portal frame structure

A practical problem of synchronization of a non-ideal (i.e. when the excitation is influenced by the response of the system) and non-linear vibrating system was posed and investigated by means of numerical simulations. Two rotating unbalanced motors compose the mathematical model considered here with limited power supply mounted on the horizontal beam of a simple portal frame. As a starting point, the problem is reduced to a four-degrees-of-freedom model and its equations of motion, derived elsewhere via a Lagrangian approach, are presented. The numerical results show the expected phenomena associated with the passage through resonance with limited power. Further, for a two-to-one relationship between the frequencies associated with the first symmetric mode and the sway mode, by using the variation of torque constants, the control of the self-synchronization and synchronization (in the system) are observed at certain levels of excitations.

Electrodynamics of helium with retardation and self-interaction effects

We show that an extra constant of motion with an analytic form can exist in the neighborhood of some discrete circular orbits of helium when one includes retardation and self-interaction effects. The energies of these discrete stable circular orbits are in the correct atomic magnitude. The highest frequency in the stable manifold of one such orbit agrees with the highest frequency sharp line of parahelium to within 2%. The generic term of the frequency in the stable manifold to higher orbits is also in agreement with the asymptotic form of quantum mechanics for helium.

Quantum motion in superposition of Aharonov-Bohm with some additional electromagnetic fields

The structure of additional electromagnetic fields to the Aharonov-Bohm field, for which the Schrodinger, Klein-Gordon, and Dirac equations can be solved exactly are described and the corresponding exact solutions are found. It is demonstrated that aside from the known cases (a constant and uniform magnetic field that is parallel to the Aharonov-Bohm solenoid, a static spherically symmetrical electric field, and the field of a magnetic monopole), there are broad classes of additional fields. Among these new additional fields we have physically interesting electric fields acting during a finite time or localized in a restricted region of space. There are additional time-dependent uniform and isotropic electric fields that allow exact solutions of the Schrodinger equation. In the relativistic case there are additional electric fields propagating along the Aharonov-Bohm solenoid with arbitrary electric pulse shape. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4714352]

Anisotropic Brownian motion in ordered phases of DNA fragments

Using Fluorescence Recovery After Photobleaching, we investigate the Brownian motion of DNA rod-like fragments in two distinct anisotropic phases with a local nematic symmetry. The height of the measurement volume ensures the averaging of the anisotropy of the in-plane diffusive motion parallel or perpendicular to the local nematic director in aligned domains. Still, as shown in using a model specifically designed to handle such a situation and predicting a non-Gaussian shape for the bleached spot as fluorescence recovery proceeds, the two distinct diffusion coefficients of the DNA particles can be retrieved from data analysis. In the first system investigated (a ternary DNA-lipid lamellar complex), the magnitude and anisotropy of the diffusion coefficient of the DNA fragments confined by the lipid bilayers are obtained for the first time. In the second, binary DNA-solvent system, the magnitude of the diffusion coefficient is found to decrease markedly as DNA concentration is increased from isotropic to cholesteric phase. In addition, the diffusion coefficient anisotropy measured within cholesteric domains in the phase coexistence region increases with concentration, and eventually reaches a high value in the cholesteric phase.

Space and Motion Perception and Discomfort in Air Travel

RAMOS RT, MATTOS DA, REBOUCAS ITS, RANVAUD RD. Space and motion perception and discomfort in air travel. Aviat Space Environ Med 2012; 83:1162-6. Introduction: The perception of comfort during air trips is determined by several factors. External factors like cabin design and environmental parameters (temperature, humidity, air pressure, noise, and vibration) interact with individual characteristics (anxiety traits, fear of flying, and personality) from arrival at the airport to landing at the destination. In this study, we investigated the influence of space and motion discomfort (SMD), fear of heights, and anxiety on comfort perception during all phases of air travel. Methods: We evaluated 51 frequent air travelers through a modified version of the Flight Anxiety Situations Questionnaire (FAS), in which new items were added and where the subjects were asked to report their level of discomfort or anxiety (not fear) for each phase of air travel (Chronbach's alpha = 0.974). Correlations were investigated among these scales: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAB, Cohen's Acrophobia Questionnaire, and the Situational Characteristics Questionnaire (SitQ, designed to estimate SMD levels). Results: Scores of SitQ correlated with discomfort in situations involving space and movement perception (Pearson's rho = 0.311), while discomfort was associated with cognitive mechanisms related to scores in the anxiety scales (Pearson's rho = 0.375). Anxiety traits were important determinants of comfort perception before and after flight, while the influence of SMD was more significant during the time spent in the aircraft cabin. Discussion: SMD seems to be an important modulator of comfort perception in air travel. Its influence on physical well being and probably on cognitive performance, with possible effects on flight safety, deserves further investigation.

Dynamic texture analysis and segmentation using deterministic partially self-avoiding walks

Dynamic texture is a recent field of investigation that has received growing attention from computer vision community in the last years. These patterns are moving texture in which the concept of selfsimilarity for static textures is extended to the spatiotemporal domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic texture representation, that can be used for both texture analysis and segmentation. In this method, deterministic partially self-avoiding walks are performed in three orthogonal planes of the video in order to combine appearance and motion features. We validate our method on three applications of dynamic texture that present interesting challenges: recognition, clustering and segmentation. Experimental results on these applications indicate that the proposed method improves the dynamic texture representation compared to the state of the art.