The objective of this work is to develop a Simple Land-Interface Model (SLIM) that captures the seasonal and interannual behavior of land–atmosphere coupling, as well as the subsequent subsurface temperature evolution. The model employs the one-dimensional thermal diffusion equation driven by a surface flux boundary condition. While the underlying physics is straightforward, the SLIM framework ...

Commentary Most practitioners who treat epilepsy will encounter patients using marijuana (Cannabis sativa) as alternative therapy. Anecdotal evidence of its efficacy against seizures is com-mon—in one study of an epilepsy center, 21% admitted using marijuana in the prior year, with the majority of these individuals feeling that it benefited seizure control (1). However, other patients may repor...

We describe the slim approach for making presentations using mind maps, which is particularly useful to assist the “slide maker” while thinking about and structuring her presentations. As presentations become larger, like for teaching purposes when creating and updating a course, we believe this approach to be particularly effective, and that common tools like PowerPoint fail to provide support...

Thermal instability driven by radiation pressure might be relevant for intrinsically bright accreting sources. The most promising candidate where this instability seems to be at work is one of the two known galactic superluminal sources, GRS 1915+105 (Belloni et al. 1997). In spite of being of relevance, this scenario has not yet been confirmed by proper time-dependent modelling. Non-linear tim...

A recent result of G. Czédli and E. T. Schmidt gives a construction of slim (planar) semimodular lattices from planar distributive lattices by adding elements, adding “forks”. We give a construction that accomplishes the same by deleting elements, by “resections”.

We reexamine the hypothesis that the optical/UV/soft X-ray continuum of Active Galactic Nuclei is thermal emission from an accretion disk. Previous studies have shown that fitting the spectra with the standard, optically thick and geometrically thin accretion disk models often led to luminosities which contradict the basic assumptions adopted in the standard model. There is no known reason why ...

SLiM is an efficient forward population genetic simulation designed for studying the effects of linkage and selection on a chromosome-wide scale. The program can incorporate complex scenarios of demography and population substructure, various models for selection and dominance of new mutations, arbitrary gene structure, and user-defined recombination maps.

Data replication serves to improve the availability and performance of distributed systems. The price to be paid consists of costs caused by protocols by which a sufficient degree of consistency of replicated data is maintained. Different kinds of targeted applications require different kinds of replication protocols, each one requiring a different set of metadata. We discuss the middleware arc...

Metropolis-Hasting method allows for designing a reversible Markov chain P on a given graph G for a target stationary distribution π. Such a Markov chain may suffer from its slow mixing time due to reversibility. Diaconis, Holmes and Neal (1997) for the ring-like chain P , and later Chen, Lovasz and Pak (2002) for an arbitrary chain P provided an explicit construction of a non-reversible Markov...

The responses of perturbations added into the optically thick, advection-dominated accretion disk (ADAD), what we call the slim disk (SD), are investigated through numerical simulations. Although it is proposed that the SD is thermally stable, I find that a perturbation added into the disk is not rapidly damped and moves through the disk in its free-fall time. After the perturbation moves, the ...