Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common type of arthritis worldwide and rapidly increasing with ageing populations. It is a major source of pain and disability for individuals and economic burden for health economies. Modern imaging, in particular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has helped us to understand that OA is a dynamic remodelling process involving all the structures within the joint. ...

The arena normally used in black holes thermodynamics was recently generalized to incorporate a broad class of physically interesting situations. The key idea is to replace the notion of stationary event horizons by that of ‘isolated horizons.’ Unlike event horizons, isolated horizons can be located in a space-time quasi-locally. Furthermore, they need not be Killing horizons. In particular, a ...

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) fails as a valid model of financial markets. The fractal market hypothesis (FMH) is a more general alternative way to the EMH. The FMH is formed on the following parameter space: agents’ investment horizons. A financial market is more stable when a fractal character in the structures of agent’s investment horizons is adopted. For computer simulations, the c...

Surface coal mining and reclamation methods in the Appalachians have changed dramatically since the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) of 1977 and subsequent improvements in mining and reclamation technology. In this study, 30 pre-SMCRA mine soil profiles (4-20 yr old) were examined and sampled in 1980 and compared to 20 mine soil profiles (8-13 yr old) described ...

We study the mechanics of Hayward's trapping horizons, taking isolated horizons as equilibrium states. Zeroth and second laws of dynamic horizon mechanics come from the isolated and trapping horizon formalisms, respectively. We derive a dynamical first law by introducing a new perturbative formulation for dynamic horizons in which "slowly evolving" trapping horizons may be viewed as perturbativ...

We investigate fast simulation techniques for estimating the unreliability in large Markovian models of highly reliable systems for which analytical0numerical techniques are difficult to apply+ We first show mathematically that for “small” time horizons, the relative simulation error, when using the importance sampling techniques of failure biasing and forcing, remains bounded as component fail...

This study aims to evaluate the efficiency of the concentration-number (C-N) fractal model for discrimination of soil horizon regarding the depth distribution profile. In this regard, soil parameters such as pH, organic carbon content, calcareous mineral content, electrical conductivity and available phosphorus of Ziarat forestland in Golestan Province, north of Iran, has been investigated. The...

Two dimensional charged black holes in string theory can be obtained as exact SL(2,IR)×U(1) U(1) quotient CFTs. The geometry of the quotient is induced from that of the group, and in particular includes regions beyond the black hole singularities. Moreover, wavefunctions in such black holes are obtained from gauge invariant vertex operators in the SL(2, IR) CFT, hence their behavior beyond the ...

In this study, we located and compared different types of horizons in the spherically symmetric Vaidya solution. The horizons we found were trapping horizons, which can be null, timelike, or spacelike, null surfaces with constant area change and also conformal Killing horizons. The conformal Killing horizons only exist for certain choices of the mass function. Under a conformal transformation, ...