Singular Moment Research Articles

PRACTICE OF PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES OF A MAN WITH POSITIVE RESULT FROM COVID 19

Practicing physical activity is essential for physical and mental health. In addition, this behavior can be a great way to increase immunity, especially in times of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). In this sense, this study aimed to analyze the practice of physical activities performed by a man with a positive result of COVID-19 during his period of social isolation, as well as his perceptions and difficulties about this practice. Qualitative case study carried out with a man from the northwest region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul with a positive diagnosis of COVID 19. For this, a questionnaire with open / closed questions was used as an instrument for data collection, the same was applied through the whatsapp and interpreted by content analysis. The participant reported that while in social isolation he practiced physical activities with his own body weight and with tools, in addition to abdominals. He performed them in his own room due to social isolation and had no symptoms during practice. In addition, he reported that the greatest difficulty was performing physical activities alone, without company, as usual in the weight training gym. Even in the face of such a singular moment, it is observed that the study participant followed an exercise routine, which can be explained by the adherence to the physical training that he has, and may have benefited in the recovery of the clinical condition during the diagnosis of Covid 19.

Meshless approach based on MLS with additional constraints for large deformation analysis

In the present work, we are interested to develop a meshless approach, based on the strong form MLS approximation with additional constraints, to solve the nonlinear elastic and elsto-plastic problems for regular and irregular distribution of points. We adopt a plastic behavior law based on the total deformation theory, which is very convenient when the physical nonlinearity is more important than the effect of irreversible process and the loading history. In plasticity, one encounters discontinuities of rigidity where the application of asymptotic developments seems difficult or impossible. To apply the Taylor series expansion, regularization methods have been adapted. The strong form MLS approximation allows us to avoid the inconvenient of the numerical integration, while the asymptotic developments help us to reduce the computation cost observed in the incremental law of plasticity and the iterative methods. For irregular points distribution, we can get an ill-posed least squares problems due to a singular moment matrix of MLS approximation. To avoid this difficulty, we propose a modified MLS approximation by introducing additional constraints which allows to increase the error functional used in the derivation of the shape functions.

REFUSAL IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Much critical attention has been given to Isabella’s non-answer to Duke Vincentio’s marriage proposal at the conclusion of Measure for Measure. What critics have failed to notice is that Isabella’s non-answer is not a unique or singular moment in the play. In fact, this paper will apply the theories of Slavoj Žižek to argue that the logic of subtraction, the negative gesture of non-compliance to which Isabella gives especially pronounced form, is fundamental to the structure of the play in its entirety. Two characters in particular, Isabella and Barnardine, demonstrate the possibility of occupying a subjective orientation that is at once under the sway of the law and aware of the law’s incomplete hold on the subject. Ultimately, I will show that the logic of subtraction and refusal has important implications for how the play understands the potential political power of various forms of labor, especially sexual labor.

Educação no contexto da pandemia da Covid-19:

Diante do atual contexto de pandemia global ocasionado pela Covid-19, houve uma necessidade célere de ressignificar os modos de vida da sociedade, sobretudo, em virtude do isolamento social, face ao alto grau de contaminação e letalidade do novo coronavírus. Nessa perspectiva, a escola, como um ambiente propício à convivência, teve suas atividades subitamente alteradas. O ensino, até então presencial, transportou-se para ambientes virtuais, obrigando profissionais da educação e estudantes a buscarem, repentinamente, novas práticas. Considerando esse momento singular, de adversidades e possibilidades, este trabalho objetiva discutir perspectivas de práticas educativas, por meio do uso de metodologias ativas, para aulas remotas. Foi realizada uma pesquisa qualitativa, com revisão bibliográfica, para elucidar os conceitos de ensino remoto e metodologias ativas, visando contribuir para a permanência e êxito dos estudantes na escola. Para tanto, abordou-se, também, conceitos freirianos, os quais vão ao encontro da necessidade de enfrentamento das adversidades advindas desse contexto atual, como a aceitação do novo, a alegria e esperança no ato do professor, a convicção de que a mudança é possível. A partir das discussões apresentadas, conclui-se que o ensino remoto favorece a adoção de novas práticas pedagógicas que podem contribuir para o re(pensar) das práticas dos professores, também para o período pós-pandemia.

A spatiotemporal analysis of oil spill severity using a multi-criteria decision framework

The evaluation of oil spills and their coastal impacts remains a fundamental scientific challenge. This includes the prediction and subsequent evaluation of environmental damage caused by the spills, the development of impact mitigation and cleanup tactics, as well as community preparedness strategies. Much of the recent scientific research in this domain leverages case studies based on spill simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the predictive models and methods and their implications for community response. Although many of these studies provide a good snapshot of anticipated consequences of an oil spill at a singular moment in time and in a specific place – the need to evaluate changes in impact at different times and locations remains a fundamental aspect for response policy and contingency planning. The purpose of this paper is to improve the fidelity of spill evaluations, response, and preparedness by using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solutions (TOPSIS) method. In short, TOPSIS is used to rank and compare the spatiotemporal dynamics of spill impacts. It also provides a means for evaluating worst case discharge scenarios. The results of this work can help inform response preparedness by highlighting the geographic and seasonal nuances of potential spill impacts while also detailing an objective approach to ranking oil spill severity.

Virginia Woolf in the River: The Intersection of Eastern Philosophy and Western Modernism in Mrs. Dalloway

The modernist period ushered forth numerous scientific and philosophical theories that had a notable influence on art, literature, psychology, and philosophy. Discoveries such as Einstein’s general theory of relativity inspired theologians, philosophers, and psychologists to focalize new concepts of self, identity, time, reality, and human experience. These shifts in contemporary human understanding developed in concurrence with increased global travel and intellectual exchange between Western and Eastern countries. As a result, writers, philosophers, and artists became more interested in Buddhism and other Eastern philosophical beliefs. Virginia Woolf, while being a self-proclaimed atheist, was deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy and well versed in contemporary scientific theories. Drawing on literary and biographical criticism of Virginia Woolf, I trace the intersections of Eastern philosophical beliefs and Western scientific theories through the stream of consciousness narration of Mrs. Dalloway by analyzing both what and how things are experienced by individual characters. In the novel, the integration of each character's stream of consciousness fabricates a dissonant medium in which singular moments in the present time are experienced through the minds of multiple characters, while they simultaneously navigate past spans of time within their individual narrative consciousness. Through the analysis of narrative form and narrative consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, it is possible to track the impact of Eastern philosophies and Western scientific theories in the novel’s exploration of external and internal perceptions of reality.

The novel boundary integral equation with adaptive orthogonal IMLS based line integration method for cracked domains under thermal stress

For finite cracked domain under unknown thermal field distribution, based on the direct boundary element method (BEM) and the displacement discontinuity method (DDM), a set of novel boundary integral equations (BIEs) are derived. The main BIE is derived based on the displacement BIE, followed by two supplementary equations for ensuring enough equations as the unknowns on crack are considered. Besides, the two supplementary BIEs are alternatively used depending on the type of known quantities, traction or displacement. The thermal field is simulated by heat conduction BIEs firstly, then thermal stress analysis for cracked domains is performed by the new derived thermo-elastic BIEs. To treat the domain integrals caused by considering the thermal field, the adaptive orthogonal interpolating moving least-square (IMLS) method based line integration method (AOIMLS-LIM) is proposed for domain integrals containing unknown functions. With AOIMLS-LIM, domain integrals are reduced into boundary integrals with line integrals dimensionally and calculated by adding the line integrals up next. All the necessary temperature values for the line integral points can be interpolated from discretize nodes. The AOIMLS method can avoid singular moment matrices while calculating its shape functions, besides, the shape functions own a vital property, i.e., the interpolating property.

The Point Interpolation Method for Static Analysis Using Quadratically Consistent Three-Point Integration Scheme

The element free Galerkin method (EFG) is much interest in recent years due to its merits of only node information needed in constructing shape functions and high precision. However, its low computational efficiency becomes a technical issue in the simulation of realistic problems. To develop a more efficient and accurate method, the point interpolation method using quadratically consistent three-point integration scheme (PIM-QC3) is proposed, based on consistency framework for meshfree nodal shape function and its derivatives. And the shape functions along with corrected nodal derivatives at integration points, adopt quadratic basis, meet the differentiation of the approximation consistency (DAC) and the discrete divergence consistency (DDC). In addition, they possess Kronecker delta property and could enforce displacement boundary conditions simply. The T6-Scheme is utilized for node selection in constructing approximation, to avoid the singular moment matrix and make the computation of shape functions simple. Numerical results show the excellence of the proposed method in accuracy and efficiency of all tested methods. Specially, it is more efficient than three-point integration scheme based on element-free Galerkin method. The research in this paper could provide an efficient and reliable tool for analysis of engineering structure.

The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures

The End of the English Department: Decolonizing Futures Ronald Cummings (bio) Call this apocalyptic propaganda if you must:The World Ended in the Spring of 2006.But how much you are willing to accept this storydepends on how far your minds can stretch. Kei Miller A Light Song of Light The epigraph which opens this brief discussion is taken from a poem by the Jamaican writer Kei Miller. The poem begins with a declaration of the end of the world, which Miller locates in 2006. Although he is not specific in identifying any single apocalyptic event, he references a confluence of happenings: “America, Iraq, Korea; / the pressing of buttons; the detonation of bombs / from one pole to the next; the grand explosion / of people” (32). He declares “what we most feared / would happen has happened.” If 2006, in Miller’s narrative, marks one end of the world, it proves interesting now to look back on that time from a fearful and unsettled present. We can find another accounting of that time and of the detonation of lives daily in Dionne Brand’s book Inventory, published in that fateful year, 2006. She closes that volume with an important declaration about [End Page 1] the need for truth telling in times of crisis: “I have nothing soothing to tell you, / that’s not my job” (100). My own attempts here to reflect on what I am calling the end of the English department is similarly saying soothing things in these troubled times. It is a call to attend urgently to the fraught and precarious present in relation to the work we do as scholars within universities and in literature departments. But to understand the end of the English department as an event, or a singular moment, is also to miss the point. Rather, this work is joining a call, one variously echoed, revisited, and reframed in the essays in the discussion forum by Nadine Attewell, Sonnet L’Abbé, and Aubrey Hanson, where they each urge us to think collectively about and, even more importantly, to meaningfully and purposely engage in the decolonization of the study of literature. They ask us to think seriously about the terms on which we continue to do literary studies as well as about the institutional contexts that enable and, even more tellingly, constrain decolonizing work. While they each extend a keen invitation to dialogue and deeper thinking about our individual and collective praxis, in my own reflections here I want to further suggest that what might be at stake in ongoing calls for decolonization is perhaps also an end of the English department. At the very least, we are being asked to think seriously about the restructuring of our discipline, its function, purpose, and interventions. In our current moment of Black and Indigenous political insurgency, with calls to decolonize the curriculum and diversity initiatives within the university, what does it mean to continue to do work under the sign of English studies? What new formations and possibilities might our current moment of institutional precarity and change, including the panic of the pandemic, allow us to imagine? Whither the future of the English department? In Miller’s poem, referenced above, what he calls the end of the world is not a finite end of things. It is the end of a particular formation of things. Much like Francis Fukuyama’s haunting notion of the “end of history,” which attends to the end of a particular structuring of the geo-political world (the historic organization of political and economic life and futures through the ideological divide of communism and capitalism), Miller’s “end of the world” is importantly and strategically rendered as a potential opening to “parallel universes” (32). He offers an invitation to think about “the one thousand lives we lived simultaneously / and which could only be glimpsed through magic / mirrors or déjà vu” (32). This is also a rejection of linear formulations of histories. Particularly in his attention to déjà vu, as structuring affect, Miller asks us to sense and remember how the world, as one might know and feel it and as it has been ordered, has ended several [End Page 2...

Eternally oscillating zero energy universe

The question of whether the universe is eternal or if it had a singular moment of creation is deeply intriguing. Although different versions of steady state and oscillatory models of eternal universe have been envisaged, empirical evidence suggests a singular moment of creation at the big bang. Here we analyze the oscillatory solutions for the universe in a modified theory of gravity THED (Torsion Hides Extra-Dimension) and evaluate them by fitting Type 1a supernovae redshift data. THED-gravity exactly mimics General Relativity at the kinematical level, while the modifications in its dynamical equations allow the universe to bounce between a minimum size and a maximum size with a zero average energy within each oscillation. The optimally fit oscillatory solutions correspond to a universe with (i) a small matter density requiring little to no dark matter, (ii) a significantly negative spatial curvature, (iii) a tiny negative dark energy. Alternatively, there exists non-oscillating solutions that appear as an ever-expanding universe from a single bounce preceded by a collapse from the infinite past. These ever-expanding solutions provide marginally better fits to the supernova redshift data, but require larger matter densities and positive dark energy along with a positive spatial curvature. A qualitative analysis of CMB power spectrum in the modified theory suggests a significant negative spatial curvature, which is in stark contrast to a near-zero curvature in the standard big bang theory. An independent constraint on the spatial curvature can further shed light on discriminating the ever expanding and oscillatory universe scenarios.

Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time by John H. Muse

Reviewed by: Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time by John H. Muse Matthew Wilson Smith MICRODRAMAS: CRUCIBLES FOR THEATER AND TIME. By John H. Muse. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; pp. 246. It is tempting to think of modernity as an age of gigantism, of not only skyscrapers, steelyards, and world wars, but also the Ring cycle, Mahler's Symphony no. 3, and In Search of Lost Time. And yet it was also, and not so incidentally, an age of the miniscule, of not only viruses, atoms, and telegraphic speech, but also Satie's Gymnopédies, Pound's "In the Station of the Metro," and the tales of Kafka and Musil. John Muse's Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time is a study of theatrical reduction—more specifically, of modern plays clocking in at less than twenty minutes. Muse demonstrates that this wide terrain, which includes works by Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Marinetti, Beckett, Parks, and Churchill, constitutes, if not a subgenre, then at least an important lineage of theatrical form. The book's historical argument begins in chapter 2, which focuses on that famous yin-yang of fin-desiècle aesthetics, naturalism, and symbolism. While the former drew inspiration from faits-divers (the quick news items that peppered French tabloids) to construct fifteen-minute microdramas on workaday sensations, the latter offered the gauzy lyricism of gnomic dreams. And yet Muse shows how, despite their obvious differences, these two movements actually shared significant common ground—not only in the sense that they both rebelled against the grandeur of so much nineteenth-century culture, but also, and more subtly, in the sense that both experimented with ways to thicken dramatic structure by compacting it into a "small but cohesive block of time, a singular moment, redefined as a dramatic whole" (50). In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, this strategy of compression was aided by technological developments such as the adoption of controlled electric lighting, which enabled theatre artists to spotlight and thereby intensify the world of the stage. This strategy of temporal compression set the stage for the Futurists, who wrote and performed hundreds of microdramas (some as short as a few lines) that are the focus of chapter 3. While Marinetti and company argued for the microdrama as a way of intensifying the entire theatrical event to a single moment of explosion, in fact, as Muse demonstrates, Futurists' performances often exhibited greater ambiguity than was dreamt of in their philosophy. The chapter culminates in a brilliant analysis of Francesco Cangiullo's Detonation and Lights!, the former of which is perhaps the most "micro" microdrama ever written, consisting of a single place ("Road at night, cold, deserted"), a single character (a bullet), and a single action (a minute of silence followed by a gunshot). Muse unpacks this atom of a play to demonstrate, convincingly, that it "stands at a crossroads in the history of dramatic form" (82). Marking the endpoint and reductio ad absurdum of Aristotle's unity of action on one hand, it points toward the all-but-deserted "Country Road" of Godot on the other. [End Page 263] In chapter 4, Muse takes up the necessary question of Beckett, whose attempts to escape the gravitational pull of Joyce and Proust recall Maeterlinck's earlier attempts to slip free of Wagner and Tolstoy. One of the many astute insights of this chapter is the revealing connection Muse draws between Beckett and the pre-Socratics, whose fragmentary writings inspired Beckett to question, through his microdramas, "the logic by which small parts or small moments ever become wholes" (119). As so often in this book, Muse is sharply attuned to unintended ironies. He argues, for example, that Beckett's turn to increasing compression was in part motivated by a desire for increased order and control, and yet this led him to a form that "ultimately revealed the instability of theater, space, and time" (97). Concluding with a close reading of Beckett's often overlooked one-acter, That Time, Muse shows how Beckett's atomization of action serves less to clarify "the logic by which a succession of instants coheres into an event" (18...

David I. Dubrovsky and Merab Mamardashvili: Adam’s Second Fall and the Advent of the Cyber-Leviathan

In his speech “The European Responsibility,” the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili summarizes his utopia of a fulfilled humanity by presenting it as an integration of two main traditions: the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian ones. In contrast, David Dubrovsky launches a new perspective for present and future human evolution: the cyber-superman, i.e. the perfect merging of human mind and digital brain—or the bio-digital interface. “Intelligence” here is not just an artificial by-product of a highly organized technological structure, but the reproduction of mental operations through the techno-replication of the bio-brain as material substrate: the Dubrovskyan avatar. In the present article, I focus on Dubrovsky’s and Mamardashvili’s anthropological paradigms, and their relationship to the phenomena of cyberbeing and cyberculture. I examine the phenomenon of cyberbeing as a “built-in” feature of a bio-electronic, transhuman ontology that impacts and transforms personhood into “cyborghood” in the context of an interactive digital framework of fictional transcendences, body-deconstruction and bio-technological interplays. My aim is to develop a critical approach to Dubrovsky’s cybernetic anthropology and avatar-theory, along with its meaning and implications for our world-epoch, in contrast to Mamardashvili’s ontology, which proves essentially incompatible with the moment of technological singularity—i.e. with the creation of a transhuman bio-digital avatar as envisioned and prophesized by Dubrovsky.

Paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic and stratigraphic implications of the mineralogical content of the Irati Formation, Paraná Basin, Brazil

The Irati Formation documents a singular moment in the evolution of the Paraná Basin, when an effective restriction of water circulation between the syneclise and the Panthalassa Ocean finally established a favorable environment for the deposition of oil shales. The present study presents data from X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) for the determination of different mineralogical components in the entire interval of the Irati Formation. Seeking to correlate the varying mineralogical content of the formation with the paleoenvironmental, paleoclimatic and stratigraphic conditions, total organic carbon (TOC), total sulfur (S) and insoluble residue (IR) data were also utilized. The results showed that variations in mineralogical content occurred mainly in the interval where the greatest values of TOC, S and IR are found. The authigenesis of minerals such as analcime, pyrite, gypsite and barite are closely tied to the environment where they were formed, and these minerals bear within them characteristics of paleoenvironmental conditions, such as restricted water circulation, abundant organic matter, alkalinity and pelagic sedimentation. Variations in the mineralogical content of clay minerals point to an enrichment of illite in the upper interval of the Assistência Member, thus constituting a syndepositional process. The mineralogical data indicate a predominance of illite, chlorite and kaolinite in the Taquaral Member. However, clay mineral suite change in the different depositional domains of the Assistência Member: the internal platform has clay mineral suite dominated primarily by illite and saponite. Kaolinite increase in the intermediary platform and disappear in distal platform. The kaolinite increase probably is the result of intensified weathering due to increase temperature and precipitation. Kaolinite characterizes the transgressive systems tracts under warm and humid paleoclimatic conditions. In contrast, illite and saponite indicate warm and dry conditions in the highstand systems tracts.

Michał Boym, the Sum Xu, and the Reappearing Image

Abstract By examining images of the imaginary Chinese animal Sum Xu, this essay engages with questions about artistic origins and authorial originality, two art-historical concepts that so often exclude peripheral artists and their supposedly derivative artworks. Drawn by the Polish-Ruthenian Jesuit Michał Boym, the Sum Xu challenges the conventional accounts of images’ origins. As will be demonstrated, Boym’s image cannot be associated with a single place; its visual form derives its appearance from a multitude of sources, and the creature’s erratic afterlives further destabilize the concept of origin as an authorial act tied to a singular moment in space and time.

Space, painting and music: Houston chapel, Rothko, Feldman and the total work of art in contemporary aesthetics.

This article traces the history of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, as a representative example of a total work of art in contemporary art. Taking into account the meaning of this concept, we study the genesis of the construction and the creation of Rothko’s paintings. At the same time, the singular moment in which the chapel is fully converted into a total work of art is analyzed, when, for the first time, the piece with the same title, Rothko Chapel, composed by Morton Feldman is performed here as a tribute to his friend the missing Rothko at the request of the promoters of the chapel, De Menils. The piece ends with the current testimony of the place as a living point of meeting between the work of art in itself, and the vital, spiritual and aesthetic experience of the visitors who come to it today.

El enigma Brasil en las tramas del golpe de 2016: impasses y dilemas de la democracia en tiempos contemporáneos

<p>El artículo tiene por objetivo discutir las tramas y derivaciones del golpe de Estado de 2016 en Brasil. Es un esfuerzo de síntesis crítica del grave momento de la vida brasileña que pone en jaque a la democracia, en el marco de una crisis en la que confluyen la economía y la política. Presentamos aportes en el sentido de aprehender los caminos sinuosos de este momento singular de la lucha de clases en Brasil, ante una fuerte ofensiva de las fuerzas del capital y en medio de las protestas e intentos de resistencia de las fuerzas vinculadas al ámbito del trabajo. Nos adentramos en la pesada arquitectura del golpe, discutiendo las redefiniciones del Estado brasileño en medio de la radicalización de la ortodoxia neoliberal. Enfatizamos los ataques a la democracia que convive con un Estado de excepción. Se trata de un análisis del Brasil actual, buscando demarcar dilemas e <em>impasses</em> en la construcción de una contra-hegemonía. Nuestra pretensión es contribuir a la tarea histórica e inaplazable de desentrañar el enigma Brasil en su versión contemporánea, teniendo como horizonte la reconstrucción de la democracia.</p>

Democratic constitutionalism in the time of the postcolony: beyond triumph and betrayal

This paper situates the South African constitutional project in a wider temporal and ideological frame of reference as an anticolonial project and asks what the postcolonial critique of the constitutional project and the postcolonial state can offer to deepen our understanding of contemporary forms of cruelty and injustice in the form of inequality and misrecognition. It identifies the limits of ‘Constitutional legalism’ and is critical of the ‘triumphalist’ mode of appreciating the Constitution. Constitutional legalism postulates a text that contains a comprehensive conception of justice that awaits implementation and has settled all relevant questions arising from our colonial past. Instead, the Constitution should be conceived as an ‘incompletely theorised agreement’ which deferred many questions and which conceals many ongoing disagreements. But this paper also recognises the Constitution and its central propositions - human rights, the rule of law and popular self-government as genuine anticolonial achievements, which provide framework concepts and institutions for collective action and democratic politics. So the paper is also critical of the ‘culturalist’ critique that denounces the Constitution as a ‘betrayal’ that inscribes Eurocentric forms of reason as a permanent obstacle to the attainment of a genuinely postcolonial society. It proposes, as an alternative to both the ‘legalist’ defence and ‘culturalist’ critique that the idea of the ‘demos’ should be restored to its central place in the imaginary of South African constitutionalism. The Constitution can then be reconceived not as the perfect product of a singular moment in South African history but as an ongoing activity requiring dialogue, including inter-generational dialogue, and a democratic framework within which to strive for social change.

The effect of non-spherical aspect of a dimer on the dynamic behaviors

Shape-anisotropic particles on vibrating plates exert diverse behaviors of interest. But there is very limited work that devoted to the effect of particle shape, let along the dynamic reasons behind. In this paper, we exhibit that a non-spherical particle called a dimer encounters double impacts with friction, superstatic problems and the Painleve paradox, which are different from those of a spherical particle, when it is put on a harmonically vibrating plate. The dimer system was firstly presented by Dorbolo et al. (Phys Rev Lett 95:044101, 2005), who found experimentally that the bouncing dimer exerted a horizontal drift on the vertically vibrating plate, forwards or backwards. We reveal that the drifting direction of the dimer is closely related to a dual singularity, a superstatic singularity during a double impact when the tangential velocities vanish simultaneously at the two impacting tips. A correlative coefficient of friction (CCoF) is defined on the basis of the Coulomb frictional law to determine stick or slip at the tips at the moment of the dual singularity. The CCoF correlates the static coefficient of friction between the dimer and the plate to its aspect ratio. It decides the bifurcation of the drifting directions. Interestingly, the CCoF is independent of the characteristics of the plate’s vibration, which is also verified by the experiment of Dorbolo. The non-spherical aspect of the dimer also leads to the Painleve paradox where the solution is inconsistent or indeterminate. A parametric study is carried out in this paper to identify the Painleve paradox in the dimer system.

Regularity of solutions to scalar conservation laws with a force

We prove regularity estimates for entropy solutions to scalar conservation laws with a force. Based on the kinetic form of a scalar conservation law, a new decomposition of entropy solutions is introduced, by means of a decomposition in the velocity variable, adapted to the non-degeneracy properties of the flux function. This allows a finer control of the degeneracy behavior of the flux. In addition, this decomposition allows to make use of the fact that the entropy dissipation measure has locally finite singular moments. Based on these observations, improved regularity estimates for entropy solutions to (forced) scalar conservation laws are obtained.

Modified moving least squares method for two-dimensional linear and nonlinear systems of integral equations

We extended the moving least squares (MLS) and modified moving least squares (MMLS) methods for solving two-dimensional linear and nonlinear systems of integral equations. This modification is proposed on the quadratic base functions $$(m=2)$$ by imposing additional terms based on the coefficients of the polynomial base functions. This approach prevents the singular moment matrix in the context of MLS based on meshfree methods. Additionally, finding the optimum value for the radius of the domain influence is an open problem for MLS-based methods. So an efficient algorithm is introduced for computing a suitable value of dilatation parameter to determine the radius of the support domain. This algorithm able to prevent the singular matrix which is an outcome of adverse selection of the radius of influence domain. In numerical examples are provided to enable us to compare MMLS method and standard MLS method by the new proposed algorithm. Comparing the errors of MMLS and MLS method determines the capability and accuracy of applied techniques to solve systems of integral equation problems. This indicates the advantage of the proposed method respect to MLS method.