When the fricative noise of a fricative-vowel syllable is replaced by a noise from a different vocalic context, listeners experience delays in identifying both the fricative and the vowel (Whalen, 1984): mismatching the information in the fricative noise for vowel and consonant identity with the information in the vocalic segment appears to hamper processing. This effect was argued to be due to...

Sir, I was not surprised that Dr Flytström and co-workers failed to cultivate Candida in the intertriginous areas of psoriatics (1). As I showed, over 30 years ago, Candida acts as a primer and disappears when Gram-negative bacteria come along to replace it (2). This does not mean that the yeast is unable to do harm to the skin. Once applied on the folding skin where occlusion is provided, it p...

It’s not easy being empathic. However, unlike snowboarding or yodeling or decoupage, most people manage to pick up empathy skills naturally without the aid of special lessons or designated practice sessions. Knowing what someone else is thinking and feeling allows people to coordinate their activities, something that is useful and necessary in interpersonal interactions. Like any skill, empathy...

We investigate the distribution of eigenvalues of completely nuclear maps on an operator space. We prove that eigenvalues of completely nuclear maps are square-summable in general and summable if the underlying operator space is Hilbertian and homogeneous. Conversely, if eigenvalues are summable for all completely nuclear maps, then every finite dimensional subspace of the underlying operator s...

The distribution function associated with a classical gas at equilibrium is considered. We prove that apart from a factorisable multiplier, the distribution function is fully determined by the correlations among local momenta fluctuations. Using this result we discuss the conditions which enable idealised local observers, who are immersed in the gas and form a part of it, to determine the distr...

The exact factorisable quantum S-matrices are known for simply laced as well as non-simply laced affine Toda field theories. Non-simply laced theories are obtained from the affine Toda theories based on simply laced algebras by folding the corresponding Dynkin diagrams. The same process, called classical ‘reduction’, provides solutions of a non-simply laced theory from the classical solutions w...

Many unsupervised learning algorithms make use of kernels that rely on the Euclidean distance between two samples. However, the Euclidean distance is optimal for Gaussian distributed data. In this paper, we relax the global Gaussian assumption made by the Euclidean distance, and propose a locale Gaussian modelling for the immediate neighbourhood of the samples, resulting in an augmented data sp...

The usual form of the C-metric has the structure function G(ξ) = 1 − ξ 2 − 2mAξ 3 , whose cubic nature can make calculations cumbersome, especially when explicit expressions for its roots are required. In this paper, we propose a new form of the C-metric, with the explicitly factorisable structure function G(ξ) = (1 − ξ 2)(1 + 2mAξ). Although this form is related to the usual one by a coordinat...