With the 2014 FIFA World Cup kicking off on June 12th, billions of fans across the world have turned their attention toward host country Brazil to root for their teams. Soccer (or football, if you prefer) fans are loud; you need only remember the last World Cup’s infamous vuvuzelas for a demonstration. But fans are not only loud in stadiums. They also make their voices heard across social media...

The surfaces of alluvial fans and river deltas (collectively fans) are often dissected by a small number of channels radiating from the fan apex. On long timescales, channels migrate via avulsion, the process of channel bed deposition and abandonment that often results in catastrophic flooding and loss of life on densely populated fans. We present results of an experimental fan that creates rea...

[1] Longitudinal profiles from six alluvial fans surveyed in southwestern California have quantitative attributes that can distinguish formation processes. The radial slope of fans where debris flow processes dominated is constant while fluvially-fed fans have a concave-upward shape. We find the power law regression of upstream slope-distance profiles is the preferred approach for assessing con...

The study of sport spectatorship has an increasing focus on the importance of fandom beyond fan violence. Fundamental to understanding fan behavior are the meaningful rituals and emotions experienced by fans. In this paper, I use the theoretical work of Randall Collins to examine the ritualistic outcomes of collective effervescence, emotional energy, and group symbols and solidarity among sport...

Bustling around their reef homes, Red Sea dascyllus damselfish (Dascyllus marginatus) do quite well out of their co-habiting arrangement with hood coral (Stylophora pistillata). ‘The coral provide the fish with shelter from predators and a place for social interactions and egg laying’, says Nur Garcia-Herrera, from the Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Germany. Yet the agreement isn’t entirely one sided...

We propose an algorithm for computing the facets of a pure connected polyhedral fan up to symmetry. The fan is represented by an oracle. With suitable implementations of the oracle the same algorithm can be used for computing secondary fans, Gröbner fans, Tropical varieties and Minkowski sums up to symmetry. The algorithm has been implemented in the software Gfan.