With the introductory of internet forums, blogs, and social networks, large numbers of individuals are connected together in ways previously deemed difficult or impossible. These outlets can be used as a means of asking questions or freely displaying personal experiences, viewpoints, and anecdotal accounts. Once posted, these questions and remarks are open for other individuals to read, comment...

We discuss three finite Fermion systems in comparison: nuclei, metal clusters, and droplets of liquid 3He. A principle sorting in “natural units” of energy and length scales is given. We address the theoretical description in terms of self-consistent mean-field theories and their effective energy-density functionals. We look at the interplay of the different time scales from the various constit...

The occurrence of a probabilistic common-cause failure (PCCF) in a system results in failures of multiple system components with different probabilities. A PCCF can be caused by external shocks or propagated failures originating from some components within the system. This paper proposes an explicit method and an implicit method to analyze the reliability of systems subject to internal or exter...

We compare the convergence behavior of ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers), [F]ISTA ([fast] iterative shrinkage and thresholding algorithm) and CD (coordinate descent) methods on the model `1-regularized least squares problem (aka LASSO). We use an eigenanalysis of the operators to compare their local convergence rates when close to the solution. We find that, when applicable, CD...