An algorithm to locate perinatal facilities in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro

In order to reduce infant mortality in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro it is desired to encourage all mothers-to-be to attend the appropriate health care facilities. A 3-level hierarchical prenatal–neonatal health care system is described together with a basic model for optimising accessibility to facilities. A genetic algorithm to solve the basic model is developed and some numerical experience reported. Extensions to the basic model and planned future research are briefly indicated.     

Inversion of adjunction for non-degenerate hypersurfaces

 We prove a precise inversion of adjunction formula for the log variety (ℂ ^{d +1},X), where X is a non-degenerate hypersurface. As a corollary, the minimal log discrepancies of non-degenerate normal hypersurface singularities are bounded by dimension. Received: 17 September 2002 / Revised version: 22 November 2002 Published online: 14 February 2003 Current address: DPMMS, CMS, University of Cambridge, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WB, England. e-mail: f.ambro@dpmms.cam.ac.uk Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): Primary 14B05; Secondary 14M25, 52B20     

WEIGHTED APPROXIMATION ON SZASZ—TYPE OPERATORS

In this paper, we use weighted modules ω(?)(f,t)w to study the pointwise approximation on Szasz-type operators, and obtain the direct and converse theorem, as well as characterizations of the pointwise approximation of Jacobi-weighted Szasz-type operators.     

2‐Amino‐4‐chloro‐6‐[N‐methyl‐N‐(4‐methylphenyl)amino]pyrimidine: formation versus fragmentation of hydrogen‐bonded chains of edge‐fused R22(8) rings in 4,6‐disubstituted 2‐aminopyrimidines

Molecules of the title compound, C₁₂H₁₃ClN₄, are linked by two independent N—H...N hydrogen bonds into a chain of edge‐fused R₂²(8) rings. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to rationalize the patterns of supramolecular aggregation in the title compound and in a range of analogous 4,6‐disubstituted 2‐aminopyrimidines.     

Structural hierarchy of rock masses and the mechanisms of its formation

The formation mechanisms for the structural hierarchy in geological media are discussed. It is shown that the formation of such a hierarchy is caused by certain external and internal circumstances. The first ones consist in the fact that, because of external actions, the Earth’s poles continuously execute the translational and rotational motions responsible for a regular structure of rock fracture and for the appearance of the scale factor √2. The second ones consist in the fact that, under the action of many random factors and because of external actions, during the formation of geological media there appear dissipative structures and, hence, some self-similar fractal structures are formed.     

Adaptive server staffing in the presence of time-varying arrivals: a feed-forward control approach

We study the short-term staffing problem of systems that experience random, non-stationary demand. The typical method to accommodate changes in arrival rate is to use historical data to identify peak periods and associated forecasting for upcoming time windows. In this paper, we develop a method that instead detects change as it happens. Motivated by an automatic call distributor system in a call centre with time-varying arrivals, we propose a change detection algorithm based upon non-homogeneous Poisson processes. The proposed method is general and may be thought of as a feed-forward strategy, in which we detect a change in the arrival process, estimate the new magnitude of the arrival rate, and assign an appropriate number of servers to the tasks. The generalized likelihood ratio statistic is used and a recommendation for its decision limit is developed. Simulation results are used to evaluate the performance of the detector in the context of a telephone call centre.     

Receiver set partitioning and sequencing for multicasting traffic in a WDM lightwave single-hop network

This paper considers a receiver set partitioning and sequencing problem in a wavelength division multiplexing single-hop lightwave network for multicasting traffic. The problem is analysed in the approach of uncapacitated single batch-processing machine scheduling. In the analysis, several solution properties are characterized with respect to a mean flow time measure, based upon which two heuristic algorithms are developed, along with a dynamic programming algorithm. Several numerical experiments show that the heuristic algorithms generate good schedules. The problem is extended to consider two measures simultaneously including the mean flow time and the number of transmissions, for which the proposed algorithms also perform well.     

Electron-phonon interaction in tetrahedral semiconductors

Considerable progress has been made in recent years in the field of ab initio calculations of electronic band structures of semiconductors and insulators. The one-electron states (and the concomitant two-particle excitations) have been obtained without adjustable parameters, with a high degree of reliability. Also, more recently, the electron-hole excitation frequencies responsible for optical spectra have been calculated. These calculations, however, are performed with the constituent atoms fixed in their crystallographic positions and thus neglect the effects of the lattice vibrations (i.e. electron-phonon interaction) which can be rather large, even larger than the error bars assumed for ab initio calculations.Effects of electron-phonon interactions on the band structure can be experimentally investigated in detail by measuring the temperature dependence of energy gaps or critical points (van Hove singularities) of the optical excitation spectra. These studies have been complemented in recent years by observing the dependence of such spectra on isotopic mass whenever different stable isotopes of a given atom are available at affordable prices. In crystals composed of different atoms, the effect of the vibration of each separate atom can thus be investigated by isotopic substitution. Because of the zero-point vibrations, such effects are present even at zero temperature (T=0).In this paper, we discuss state-of-the-art calculations of the dielectric function spectra and compare them with experimental results, with emphasis on the differences introduced by the electron-phonon interaction. The temperature dependence of various optical parameters will be described by means of one or two (in a few cases three) Einstein oscillators, except at the lowest temperatures where the T⁴ law (contrary to the Varshni T² result) will be shown to apply. Increasing an isotopic mass increases the energy gaps, except in the case of monovalent Cu (e.g. CuCl) and possibly Ag (e.g. AgGaS₂). It will be shown that the gaps of tetrahedral materials containing an element of the first row of the periodic table (C,N,O) are strongly affected by the electron-phonon interaction. It will be conjectured that this effect is related to the superconductivity recently observed in heavily boron-doped carbon.