Aspects and values of buddhism for the women of the west

Living in India, which is not yet linked into the electronic autobahn at quite the screaming pace of the rest of the world, I received my information about this conference in two barely legible faxes, which arrived more than three weeks apart and presented me with two different titles for my paper. The first was "Aspects and Values of Buddhism That Are Attractive to Peoples in the West" and the second was that printed in the conference program, "Aspects and Values of Buddhism for Women in the West." These are rather different topics, but in another way they are not so different. ..

Environmental Degradation and the Legal Imperatives of Improvement: Forest Policy in Western Australia from European Settlement to 1918

The Australian forests have experienced deforestation since European settlement in 1788. According to Bradshaw, Australia has lost nearly 40% of its forests and the remaining forest is highly fragmented and degraded. In Western Australia (WA), Australia’s only biodiversity hotspot, forests cover approximately 16% or 21.0 million hectares. In the southwest and central parts of the state these forests are significantly cutover and degraded. In some instances, particularly in the wheatbelt, the local cutover has been complete. For example, in the Avon Botanical District (the central part of the wheatbelt) over 93% of the original vegetation and 97% of the woodlands were removed. William Wallace, an officer of the Forest Department, estimated that between 1829 and 1920, 1 million acres of forest was cut. The Forests Department Annual 1921 Report lamented: [S]eventy five years of practically uncontrolled cutting, and entirely uncontrolled burning have reduced this national asset to such a condition that only a negligible quantity of sound young trees is growing to the acre on the portion that has been cutover. Today the only significant forests that remain in Western Australia are the Jarrah, Karri and Wandoo forests. However, these forests have been significantly degraded and contain approximately 30% of their original forest cover

Virtual Network Embedding Approximations: Leveraging Randomized Rounding

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The Virtual Network Embedding Problem (VNEP) captures the essence of many resource allocation problems. In the VNEP, customers request resources in the form of Virtual Networks. An embedding of a virtual network on a shared physical infrastructure is the joint mapping of (virtual) nodes to physical servers together with the mapping of (virtual) edges onto paths in the physical network connecting the respective servers. This work initiates the study of approximation algorithms for the VNEP for general request graphs. Concretely, we study the offline setting with admission control: given multiple requests, the task is to embed the most profitable subset while not exceeding resource capacities. Our approximation is based on the randomized rounding of Linear Programming (LP) solutions. Interestingly, we uncover that the standard LP formulation for the VNEP exhibits an inherent structural deficit when considering general virtual network topologies: its solutions cannot be decomposed into valid embeddings. In turn, focusing on the class of cactus request graphs, we devise a novel LP formulation, whose solutions can be decomposed. Proving performance guarantees of our rounding scheme, we obtain the first approximation algorithm for the VNEP in the resource augmentation model. We propose different types of rounding heuristics and evaluate their performance in an extensive computational study. Our results indicate that good solutions can be achieved even without resource augmentations. Specifically, heuristical rounding achieves 77.2% of the baseline’s profit on average while respecting capacities.BMBF, 01IS12056, Software Campus GrantEC/H2020/679158/EU/Resolving the Tussle in the Internet: Mapping, Architecture, and Policy Making/ResolutioNe

Cyperaceae of East Africa - III

Volume: XX

AGGREGATE FRUIT PRICE EQUATIONS AND CONDITIONAL PRICE FORECASTS

Demand and Price Analysis,

Cyperaceae of East Africa - V

Volume: 2

Transitions of tethered polymer chains: A simulation study with the bond fluctuation lattice model

A polymer chain tethered to a surface may be compact or extended, adsorbed or desorbed, depending on interactions with the surface and the surrounding solvent. This leads to a rich phase diagram with a variety of transitions. To investigate these transitions we have performed Monte Carlo simulations of a bond-fluctuation model with Wang-Landau and umbrella sampling algorithms in a two-dimensional state space. The simulations' density of states results have been evaluated for interaction parameters spanning the range from good to poor solvent conditions and from repulsive to strongly attractive surfaces. In this work, we describe the simulation method and present results for the overall phase behavior and for some of the transitions. For adsorption in good solvent, we compare with Metropolis Monte Carlo data for the same model and find good agreement between the results. For the collapse transition, which occurs when the solvent quality changes from good to poor, we consider two situations corresponding to three-dimensional (hard surface) and two-dimensional (very attractive surface) chain conformations, respectively. For the hard surface, we compare tethered chains with free chains and find very similar behavior for both types of chains. For the very attractive surface, we find the two-dimensional chain collapse to be a two-step transition with the same sequence of transitions that is observed for three-dimensional chains: a coil-globule transition that changes the overall chain size is followed by a local rearrangement of chain segments.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, to appear in J. Chem. Phy

Coordinated Self-Adaptation in Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Overlays

Self-adaptive systems typically rely on a closed control loop which detects when the current behavior deviates too much from the optimal one, determines new optimal values for system parameters, and applies changes to the system configuration. In decentralized systems, implementing each of these steps is challenging, especially when nodes need to coordinate their local configurations. In this paper, we propose a decentralized method to automatically tune global system parameters in a coordinated manner. We use gossip-based protocols to continuously monitor system properties and to disseminate parameter updates. We show that this method applied to a decentralized resource selection service allows the system to quickly adapt to changes in workload types and node properties, and only incurs a negligible communication overhead

Absorption/Expulsion of Oligomers and Linear Macromolecules in a Polymer Brush

The absorption of free linear chains in a polymer brush was studied with respect to chain size $L$ and compatibility $\chi$ with the brush by means of Monte Carlo (MC) simulations and Density Functional Theory (DFT) / Self-Consistent Field Theory (SCFT) at both moderate, $\sigma_g = 0.25$, and high, $\sigma_g = 1.00$, grafting densities using a bead-spring model. Different concentrations of the free chains $0.0625 \le \phi_o \le 0.375$ are examined. Contrary to the case of $\chi = 0$ when all species are almost completely ejected by the polymer brush irrespective of their length $L$, for $\chi < 0$ we find that the degree of absorption (absorbed amount) $\Gamma(L)$ undergoes a sharp crossover from weak to strong ($\approx 100$) absorption, discriminating between oligomers, $1\le L\le 8$, and longer chains. For a moderately dense brush, $\sigma_g = 0.25$, the longer species, $L > 8$, populate predominantly the deep inner part of the brush whereas in a dense brush $\sigma_g = 1.00$ they penetrate into the "fluffy" tail of the dense brush only. Gyration radius $R_g$ and end-to-end distance $R_e$ of absorbed chains thereby scale with length $L$ as free polymers in the bulk. Using both MC and DFT/SCFT methods for brushes of different chain length $32 \le N \le 256$, we demonstrate the existence of unique {\em critical} value of compatibility $\chi = \chi^{c}<0$. For $\chi^{c}(\phi_o)$ the energy of free chains attains the {\em same} value, irrespective of length $L$ whereas the entropy of free chain displays a pronounced minimum. At $\chi^{c}$ all density profiles of absorbing chains with different $L$ intersect at the same distance from the grafting plane. The penetration/expulsion kinetics of free chains into the polymer brush after an instantaneous change in their compatibility $\chi$ displays a rather rich behavior. We find three distinct regimes of penetration kinetics of free chains regarding the length $L$: I ($1\le L\le 8$), II ($8 \le L \le N$), and III ($L > N$), in which the time of absorption $\tau$ grows with $L$ at a different rate. During the initial stages of penetration into the brush one observes a power-law increase of $\Gamma \propto t^\alpha$ with power $\alpha \propto -\ln \phi_o$ whereby penetration of the free chains into the brush gets {\em slower} as their concentration rises