We develop heuristics for a problem that models the static balancing of turbine fans: Load point masses at regularly spaced positions on the periphery of a circle so that the residual unbalance about the center | which corresponds to the axis of rotation of the fan | is as small as possible. We prove that our heuristics provide the same worst-case guarantee in terms of residual unbalance as doe...

The increased performance of close series stacked tube axial fans due to the introduction of a diffuser element between the primary and secondary fan is investigated in this paper. Experimental results showed that there was a 15% increase on average in the performance of two stacked Delta FFB0412VHN 40 mm fans across their operating range when a diffuser element was introduced between the two f...

Even though mainstream cultural constructions of geeks (and, through it, fans) have been changing recently, they remain heavily gendered. I describe how fans internalize these concepts, and how gender and gendering of fannish activities continues to affect interand intra-fannish policing. What underlies much of this border policing is a clear sense of protecting one’s own sense of fan community...

The emerging social media brand communities provide a good platform for marketers to promote brands to their members. Marketers are devoting time and efforts to building their social media fan pages; however, the elusive question of whether their social media fans exhibit any behavioural loyalty in terms of actual purchase behaviour remains unanswered. Based on the characteristics of social med...

The interface between combinatorial optimization and fuzzy sets-based methodologies is the subject of very active and increasing research. In this context we describe FANS, a fuzzy adaptive neighborhood search optimization heuristic that uses a fuzzy valuation to qualify solutions and adapts its behavior as a function of the search state. FANS may also be regarded as a local search framework. W...

This article draws on 3,500 responses from fans and professionals involved in association football (soccer) to an anonymous online survey posted from June 2010 to October 2010 regarding their views towards gay footballers. The overall findings are that, contrary to assumptions of homophobia, there is evidence of rapidly decreasing homophobia within the culture of football fandom. The results ad...

Multi-fan is an analogous notion of fan in toric theory. Fan is a combinatorial object associated to a toric variety. Multi-fan is associated to an orbifold with an action of half the dimension of the orbifold. In this paper the equivariant elliptic genus and the equivariant orbifold elliptic genus of multi-fans are defined and their character formulas are exhibited. A vanishing theorem concern...

We posted a survey on the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)’s EURO 2012 Facebook profile to evaluate whether public health travel advice, specifically on the importance of measles vaccination,reached fans attending EURO 2012. Responses suggested that these messages were missed by 77% of fans. Social networks could serve as innovative platforms to conduct surveys, enabling rapid acc...

The GIT chamber decomposition arising from a subtorus action on a polarized quasiprojective toric variety is a polyhedral complex. Denote by Σ the fan that is the cone over the polyhedral complex. In this paper we show that the toric variety defined by the fan Σ is the normalization of the toric Chow quotient of a closely related affine toric variety by a complementary torus.