How Sandcastles Fall

How Does Casimir Energy Fall?

Stephen A. Fulling, ∗ Kimball A. Milton, † Prachi Parashar, August Romeo, K.V. Shajesh, and Jef Wagner Departments of Mathematics and Physics, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-3368 USA Oklahoma Center for High-Energy Physics and Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019-2061 USA Societat Catalana de F́ısica, Laboratori de F́ısica M...

Contracts and externalities: How things fall apart

A single principal interacts with several agents, offering them contracts. The crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside-option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many “free agents” there are (these are agents who are not under contract). We study how such a principal, unwelcome though he may be, approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination fai...

STylISTIC SaNdCaSTlES: RhETORICal FIGuRES aS COmPOSITION’S BuCKET aNd SPadE

Sculpting sandcastles grain by grain: self-assembled sand towers.

We study the spontaneous formation of granular towers produced when dry sand is poured on a wet sand bed. When the liquid content of the bed exceeds a threshold value W*, the impacting grains have a nonzero probability to stick on the wet grains due to instantaneous liquid bridges created during the impact. The trapped grains become wet by the capillary ascension of water and the process contin...

How to detect human fall in video? An overview

Every year, thousands of elderly people are victim of a fall incident. Sometimes with severe consequences such as hip fractures or even death but, in many cases, the main problem is that an injured elderly may be laying on the ground for several hours or even days after a fall incident has occurred. This makes it important to have a fall detection system. Commercial types of fall detection syst...