Synthesis and characteristics of microspheres of polystyrene derivatives

Two sytrene derivatives formylstyrene and styrene sulfonylcholoride, were synthesized. Polymeric microspheres in diameters ranging from 0.1 to 2 μm were synthesized by polymerization of chlormoethylstyrene, formylstyrene, and styrene sulfonylcholoride in organic solvents, in the presence of appropriate surfactants. The kinetics of microsphere formation were studied. The molecular weight distribution of the products was determined by gel permeation chromatography. Conditions for binding various amino ligands to the microspheres were also established.     

Doping silver nanoparticles in AOT lyotropic lamellar phases

The organic lyotropic liquid crystal with long-range structural order is used as template to assemble inorganic/organic hybrid by doping pre-fabricated Ag nanoparticles. The lamellar hybrid with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic particles doped simultaneously is realized for the first time. The change of template structure after doping and the stability origin of dual-doped system are characterized by small angle X-ray scattering and polarized optical microscopy. Results show that the interaction and space matching between surfactant bilayers and doped particles are key factors to obtain stable hybrid.     

Response times in gated M/G/1 queues: The processor-sharing case

A class of single server queues with Poisson arrivals and a gated server is considered. Whenever the server becomes idle the gate separating it from the waiting line opens, admitting all the waiting customers into service, and then closes again. The batch admitted into service may be served according to some arbitrary scheme. The equilibrium waiting time distribution is provided for the subclass of conservative schemes with arbitrary service times and the processor-sharing case is treated in some detail to produce the equilibrium time-in-service and response time distributions, conditional on the length of required service. The LIFO and random order of service schemes and the case of compound Poisson arrivals are treated briefly as examples of the effectiveness of the proposed method of analysis. All distributions are provided in terms of their Laplace transforms except for the case of exponential service times where the L.T. of the waiting time distribution is inverted. The first two moments of the equilibrium waiting and response times are provided for most treated cases and in the exponential service times case the batch size distribution is also presented.     

The Moore Bound for Irregular Graphs

 What is the largest number of edges in a graph of order n and girth g? For d-regular graphs, essentially the best known answer is provided by the Moore bound. This result is extended here to cover irregular graphs as well, yielding an affirmative answer to an old open problem ([4] p. 163, problem 10). Received: June 27, 2000 Final version received: July 3, 2001     

Saint-Venant's principle in nonlinear plane elasticity with sufficiently small strains

A homogeneous, isotropic cylinder in an equilibrium state of plane strain, whose cross-section is a rectangle R : [0 < y ₁ < 2L; 0 < y ₂ < h] with h/L 1, is considered. There are no body forces and the long sides are stress free. At y ₁ = 0 and y ₁ = 2L, there are arbitrary loadings, each statically equivalent to a uniformly distributed tensile or compressive stress c. Within the theory of nonlinear elasticity and with the strains and strain gradients assumed to be sufficiently small (but with no such assumptions on the displacement gradients), it is proved that if (,=1,2) represents the Cauchy stress tensor and the Kronecker delta, then |–c₁₁| decays exponentially to zero in R with distance from the nearer end, and the decay constant depends only upon the material but is independent of L.     

Stability and fairness in models with a multiple membership

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no coalition would reject a proposed arrangement. When projects are indivisible, stable allocations may fail to exist and, for those cases, we resort to the least core in order to estimate the degree of instability. We also examine the compatibility of stability and fairness in metric environments with indivisible projects, where we also explore the performance of well-known solutions, such as the Shapley value and the nucleolus.     

A note on conjugate gradient convergence – Part III

Summary. In this paper we again consider the rate of convergence of the conjugate gradient method. We start with a general analysis of the conjugate gradient method for uniformly bounded solutions vectors and matrices whose eigenvalues are uniformly bounded and positive. We show that in such cases a fixed finite number of iterations of the method gives some fixed amount of improvement as the the size of the matrix tends to infinity. Then we specialize to the finite element (or finite difference) scheme for the problem . We show that for some classes of function we see this same effect. For other functions we show that the gain made by performing a fixed number of iterations of the method tends to zero as the size of the matrix tends to infinity. Received July 9, 1998 / Published online March 16, 2000     

Memory in the occurrence of earthquakes

We study the statistics of the recurrence times tau between earthquakes above a certain magnitude M in six (one global and five regional) earthquake catalogs. We find that the distribution of the recurrence times strongly depends on the previous recurrence time tau0, such that small and large recurrence times tend to cluster in time. This dependence on the past is reflected in both the conditional mean recurrence time and the conditional mean residual time until the next earthquake, which increase monotonically with tau0. As a consequence, the risk of encountering the next event within a certain time span after the last event depends significantly on the past, an effect that has to be taken into account in any effective earthquake prognosis.     

A generalization of the fast LUP matrix decomposition algorithm and applications

We show that any m × n matrix A, over any field, can be written as a product, LSP, of three matrices, where L is a lower triangular matrix with l's on the main diagonal, S is an m × n matrix which reduces to an upper triangular matrix with nonzero diagonal elements when the zero rows are deleted, and P is an n × n permutation matrix. Moreover, L, S, and P can be found in O(m^α?1n) time, where the complexity of matrix multiplication is O(m^α). We use the LSP decomposition to construct fast algorithms for some important matrix problems. In particular, we develop O(m^α?1n) algorithms for the following problems, where A is any m × n matrix: (1) Determine if the system of equations $\text{A}\text{x}\text{=}\text{b}$ (where $\text{b}$ is a column vector) has a solution, and if so, find one such solution. (2) Find a generalized inverse, $\text{A}{}^1$, of A (i.e., $\text{AA}{}^1\text{A = A}$). (3) Find simultaneously a maximal independent set of rows and a maximal independent set of columns of A.