No Name, No Game

In an interesting contribution Joppa et al. (2011) revisit some aspects of the taxonomic impediment (Evenhuis 2007; http://www.cbd.int/gti/) and come to the conclusion that, contrary to the generally accepted idea, both the rates of species description and the number of taxonomists have increased exponentially since the 1950’s. Joppa et al. (2011) also note a marked decline in the number of species described per taxonomist which they attribute to the difficulty of finding new species in an ever declining ‘missing species pool’. Therefore, their results might be interpreted that today’s taxonomic workforce is sufficient to describe the remaining (shallow) ‘pool of missing species’. In this contribution, we question if this is indeed the case and propose a solution for speeding up taxonomic descriptions

The role of game rules in architectural design environments

'Experimenting' and 'observing' are crucial actions in architectural design thinking. They rely heavily on the representation environment used (e.g. sketching, scale models, sketch tools, CAD tools, etc.) and the 'game rules' at play in these environments. In this brief paper, we study the role of this representation environment in the overall architectural design thinking process. From this brief study, we indicate two design and implementation approaches to implement and design with such game rules in virtual design environments

Conservation of aspidochirotid holothurians in the littoral waters of Kenya

Aspidochirotid sea cucumbers (Echinodermata: Holothuroidea) are heavily fished in the littoral waters of Kenya, and stocks have plummeted. In order to conserve and manage these natural resources, appropriate conservation and management plans must to be developed. This can only occur if high quality research on different levels is done. This paper discusses five layers of understanding that should be achieved before holothurian conservation in East Africa can be effective

Further explorations of Skyrme-Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov mass formulas. II: Role of the effective mass

We have constructed four new complete mass tables, referred to as HFB-4 to HFB-7, each one including all the 9200 nuclei lying between the two drip lines over the range of Z and N>8 and Z<120. HFB-4 and HFB-5 have the isoscalar effective mass M*_s$ constrained to the value 0.92 M, with the former having a density-independent pairing, and the latter a density-dependent pairing. HFB-6 and HFB-7 are similar, except that M*_s is constrained to 0.8 M. The rms errors of the mass-data fits are 0.680, 0.675, 0.686, and 0.676 MeV, respectively, almost as good as for the HFB-2 mass formula, for which M*_s was unconstrained. However, as usual, the single-particle spectra depend significantly on M*_s. This decoupling of the mass fits from the fits to the single-particle spectra has been achieved only by making the cutoff parameter of the delta-function pairing force a free parameter. An improved treatment of the center-of-mass correction was adopted, but although this makes a difference to individual nuclei it does not reduce the overall rms error of the fit. The extrapolations of all four new mass formulas out to the drip lines are essentially the same as for the original HFB-2 mass formula.Comment: 12 pages revtex, 9 eps figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Maior Garcia, uma soldadeira na corte de Alfonso X

IX Congresso Brasileiro de Hispanistas realizado nos dias 22 a 25 agosto 2016Alfonso X de Castela, alcunhado "El Sabio" pelos muitos investimentos culturais, científicos e jurídicos realizados ao longo de seu reinado, logrou transformar a corte castelhana em um dos mais importantes centros peninsulares durante o período de vigência do trovadorismo. O próprio rei contribuiu ativamente para a produção trovadoresca, tanto por intermédio da composição de cantigas profanas – especialmente de escárnio e maldizer – quanto por intermédio das Cantigas de Santa Maria. A partir de estudos acerca da condição das mulheres no contexto ibérico medievo e de sua representação na lírica trovadoresca – de autores como Pallares Méndez, Corral Díaz, Giuseppe Tavani e Resende de Oliveira –, articulados a questionamentos teóricos em torno das concepções de sexualidade e gênero no contexto medievo – para o que utilizaremos estudos de Joyce Salisbury e Albrecht Classen, entre outros –, nosso trabalho pretende abordar um tema específico compartilhado por um conjunto de trovadores e jograis que frequentaram a corte alfonsina: as representações de soldadeiras, em que é perceptível um uso recorrente do repertório misógino presente no imaginário medievo. Concentrarnosemos principalmente na figura de Maior Garcia, tematizada em um corpus composto por quatro cantigas satíricas atribuídas a três jograis que conviveram naquele ambiente: Pedr' Amigo de Sevilha, Pero Garcia d' Ambroa e Joan Baveca.UNILA­-UNIOEST

Microscopic HFB+QRPA predictions of dipole strength for astrophysics applications

Large-scale QRPA calculations of the E1 strength are performed on top of HFB calculations in order to derive the radiative neutron capture cross sections for the whole nuclear chart. The spreading width of the GDR is taken into account by analogy with the second-RPA (SRPA) method. The accuracy of HFB+QRPA model based on various Skyrme forces with different pairing prescription and parameterization is analyzed. It is shown that the present model allows to constrain the effective nucleon-nucleon interaction with the GDR data and to provide quantitative predictions of dipole strengths.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure