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The sophistication of recent experimental procedures has made it possible to detect experimentally the so-called Quantum Jumps (QJ), i.e. the stop and restart of the wave function as a real phenomenon. In this work, we connect this experimental evidence to a foundational interpretation of QM, based on an a-temporal vacuum. In that picture, the QJ is a localization process, defined as the time-symmetric action of a self-conjugate projection operator. The compatibility of these discontinuous processes with the Theory of Relativity is demonstrated using the Bohm representation of quantum mechanics.

Single molecule detection has become instrumental in our understanding of the molecular world. The ability to perform experiments molecule by molecule and probe directly the static and dynamic disorder in a system has revealed new insights into a range of fundamental problems in physics, chemistry, and biology. These insights are now laying the foundations for engineering devices such as optical switches and photonic wires at the molecular level. Of the many single molecule techniques available, fluorescence microscopy has proved an invaluable tool by virtue of its high sensitivity, time-resolution, noninvasive nature, and compatibility with other spectroscopic techniques. The development of specific detection modalities has allowed a multitude of previously impracticable experiments to be realized, from photon antibunching to single particle tracking in living cells. Advances in fluorescent probe design, detectors, modes of acquisition and data analysis will undoubtedly push single molecule techniques to new limits of sensitivity and into new areas of application.

Catholicism, a global religion, has been blended with local cultures and customs over a long period during the spread of the religion. Our Lady of China has become a bridge between Catholicism and local cultures, as faith communities change and integrate with local cultures. The Diocese of Tainan is located in southwestern Taiwan. Features of Chinese and Western cultures have been merged into the architecture of Our Lady Queen of China of Cathedral Tainan Diocese. Its decoration and murals are historical, local, and unique with obvious ethnic features. Historical and field study has been adopted as the method of this study. We also analyzed religious images in an iconological analysis method. Religious images have been analyzed, described, interpreted, and compared in terms of their symbolic meanings by using the Our Lady Queen of China Cathedral Tainan Diocese as the study object. Our analysis reveals that the religious images are a fusion of representative religious images of Chinese and Western culture and presented with decorative themes such as figures, costumes, bible stories, geometrical patterns, and abstract patterns. The Our Lady Queen of China Cathedral Tainan Diocese adopts the local culture to highlight the characteristics of the sacred space of the church. Through the spread of beliefs and the transition between geographic regions and the cultures which were originally in conflict with each other merge and deliver the beliefs of Jesus Christ.

We conducted comparison and summary of WeChat article contents in order to classify and collect statistics of the types and sources of cartoon characters involved. For this, we used articles recommended by WeChat public numbers of Xiamen large business community as sample sources and selected the WeChat articles containing cartoon characters of the last three years as research data. The result showed that commercial brands mainly use two-dimensional cartoon characters for display and propaganda with a much smaller proportion of real cartoon objects. At the same time, it is the overseas cartoon models that occupy the dominant position in quantity rather than the domestic ones which are less often seen. Such results can be due to the high investment cost, high market risk of real cartoon character objects and less influential power of local cartoon characters to the public, etc. With this result, we hope to deliver information about what influence the public space display of cartoon characters can make on itself and commercial brand impact, as well as what innovations can be made for the local cartoon characters so that they become more attractive. In addition, this study can be a reference for those industries which have just set foot on the use of cartoon models in actual business operations.

We study interlayer frictional drag between two-dimensional electron systems in the strong magnetic field limit by evaluating the weak-coupling Kubo formula for interlayer drag numerically. The key quantity in this theory is the disorder averaged “triangle function”, a product of three Greens functions of electrons that represents the dc current response of electrons in one layer to charge fluctuations in a remote current-carrying layer. We find that the disorder averaged triangle functions are proportional to the momentum transfer at small and that they change sign under a ν → 1 – ν particle-hole transformations, vanishing for half-filled Landau levels.

A computer test-bed is being established for the first-principle simulation of multi-scale structural failure under b last loads. Since t he structural failure due to explosion involves plasticity, damage, localization, thermal softening, phase transition and fragmentation, accurate constitutive models are not yet available for building materials. Also, a robust spatial discretization method is a necessity for large-scale simulation of the transition from continuous to discontinuous failure modes without invoking a fixed mesh connectivity. In this paper, the transition from continuous to discontinuous failure modes in brittle solids is identified through the bifurcation analysis of the acoustic tensor governing rate-dependent damage. A discrete constitutive model is then used to predict material failure as a decohesion or separation of continuum. To accommodate the multi-scale discontinuities involved in structural failure, the Material Point Method is developed to be a robust spatial discretization tool for the computer test-bed. As a result, the model parameters can be calibrated based on experimental data available, and routine simulation can be performed with limited computational resources. Sample problems are considered to illustrate the potential of the proposed simple procedure.

In this paper, a mechanism-based strain gradient dependent constitutive equation for two-phase particle reinforced metal matrix composites is presented. By using this strain gradient dependent constitutive equation and the linear perturbation analysis, the effect of strain gradient on adiabatic shear banding in particle reinforced metal matrix composites is investigated. The results have demonstrated that the onset of adiabatic shear banding in the composite with small particles is more prone to occur than in the composite with large particles. This result also means that high strain gradient is a strong driving force for adiabatic shear banding in metal matrix composites.

We argue that there is a unique transition state of moderate density between the nuclear matter and superconducting quark matter alternatives. The distinguishing features of this state are discussed.

A strategy for working with incomplete information is called competitive if it solves each problem instance at a cost not exceeding the cost of an optimal solution (with full information available), times a constant. This paper strives to demonstrate why competitive strategies are useful for the design of autonomous robots. They guarantee a good worst-case behaviour, they are easy to implement, and they allow to deal with some problems whose optimal solution would be NP-hard. We survey competitive strategies for the following problems. How to find a door in a long wall, how to find a goal in an unknown environment, how to find a point from which an unknown environment is fully visible, and how to determine a robot's location on a known map from local visibility.

A simple non-linear mechanical system comprising a pin-jointed string of finite-length links, supported by elastic springs at the pins and compressed by an axial load, is viewed from two perspectives. When seen as an initial-value problem, equilibrium equations provide an iterative non-linear mapping. When seen as a boundary-value problem, it becomes a simple finite element model. At loads less than the critical buckling load, a preferred buckling configuration is found that is localized along the length. In the limit of infinite length this is described as a homoclinic connection in phase space, joining the flat equilibrium state to itself. The infinite sequence of homoclinic points thus defined embeds within the complex topological structure of a homoclinic tangle, within which also appear periodic, quasi-periodic, and chaotic spatial solutions. Implications in the finite element setting are discussed. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Compressed sandwich structures, comprising two stiff face plates separated by a softer core material, while designed principally as efficient integral structures, can lose this quality when faces buckle locally. Interaction between overall (Euler) buckling and local buckling of one face suggests that failure will localize into the centre. A variational formulation, leading to a pair of nonlinear differential equations subject to integral constraints, describes the post-buckling response. These are solved by a combination of numerical shooting and continuation techniques, such that the response far into the unstable post-buckling regime can be portrayed. Solutions with both linear and nonlinear constitutive core relations are compared with the results of an engineering (body-force) approach, and with those of earlier (periodic) Rayleigh-Ritz analyses. The latter demonstrate the extra destabilization that comes with localization.

INS/GPS integration navigation method has existing disadvantages of high-cost and discontinuous signal for indoor robot localization. In this paper, a wireless sensor network (WSN) associated with the INS method was integrated to estimate the robot target positioning. Real-time measurement of INS associated with received signal strength indication (RSSI) was processed by the extendeded Kalman filter (EKF) framework. To improve the estimation precision of the noise covariance of traditional EKF, an adaptive EKF algorithm adjusted by conventional auto-covariance least squares (ALS) method was proposed. ALS was implemented to estimate the covariance of both process noise and measurement noise matrix. Simulation results further demonstrate that AEKF proposed in this paper can provide better localization accuracy, in comparison with traditional EKF methods.

We study an index for three-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theories placed on a sphere and immersed in external magnetic fields — in fact topologically twisted. We find an exact non-perturbative formula for this index, applying supersymmetric localization techniques. The index, different from the more common superconformal index, counts Landau-level ground states of the theories in magnetic field. It has physical applications: to the study of non-perturbative dualities, of moduli spaces, of Chern-Simons theory and Verlinde algebras, of wrapped branes in string theory and the quantum entropy of black holes; as well as mathematical applications: to quantum cohomology and its K-theoretic generalization.

This paper presents the architecture of a localization system for affordable service robots. The system utilizes a RGB-D sensor for visual global localization based on artificial landmarks. The unobtrusive and cheap landmarks are based on QR-codes. We demonstrate how to recognize printed QR-codes over a wide range of viewing ranges and angles, and compute the robot pose uncertainty related to the landmark measurement. The localization method is integrated in the Robot Operating System and demonstrated in a home-like environment.

Multi-legged robots are expected to be able to function in extreme environments to perform tasks such as planetary exploration and nuclear power plant maintenance. Localization of the robot body is important in the walking directional control of six-legged robots. Currently, localization measurements are carried out by extracting two landmark points using a laser range finder. However, it is not possible to estimate the exact amount of movement using this method. Thus, the authors propose the application of the iterative closest point algorithm (ICP) as a localization method in this study. The ICP algorithm is a well-known method of registering two shapes composed of point clouds to estimate the rigid transformation that minimizes the distance between corresponding points in the two point clouds. By iteratively obtaining the correspondence and estimating the rigid transformation, registration for given shapes can be performed. Moreover, the effectiveness of the walking directional control of a six-legged robot performed by localization using the ICP algorithm was verified in this study.

We find a new evidence of a gauge/gravity duality: an explicit correspondence between eigenvalue densities and geometries. We examine the duality between IIA supergravity solutions and SU(2|4) symmetric gauge theories, which are BMN matrix model, N = 8 super Yang-Mills theory on R × S² and N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory on R × S³/Z_k. We show that the corresponding geometries are realized as the solution to the saddle point equations in the gauge theories, and that typical scales of the geometries are characterized by the range of the eigenvalue distribution.

In this review, we give a brief introduction on the aspects of some extra dimension models and the five-dimensional thick brane models in extended theories of gravity. First, we briey introduce the Kaluza–Klein theory, the domain wall model, the large extra dimension model, and the warped extra dimension models. Then some thick brane solutions in extended theories of gravity are reviewed. Finally, localization of bulk matter fields on thick branes is discussed.

We investigated the influence on localization of simplifying HRTFs on the contralateral side. For the study described in this report, the spectral form of HRTFs are flattened in a region higher than a certain frequency. The results of a localization test suggest that the contralateral-side HRTFs at frequencies of 4 kHz or lower influenced front–back perception.

A Novel Intelligent Lift-Type Walking-Assist Mobile Robot (NILTWAMOR) has been presented to support the user's body weight and assist in walking motion. This paper focuses on walking and presents a method to estimate the current body center point of the user from the position of each leg. A kinematic model of NILTWAMOR is described, and then a tracking control system for human gait is constructed for building a reasonable walking-assist robot.

Let R = ℂ [x] be a polynomial ring with complex coefficients and D_X = ℂ〈x, ∂〉 be the Weyl algebra. Describing the localization R_f = R[f⁻¹] for nonzero f ∈ R as a D_X-module amounts to computing the annihilator A = Ann(f^a) ⊂ D_X of the cyclic generator f^a for a suitable negative integer a. We construct an iterative algorithm that uses truncated annihilators to build A for planar curves.