The anchoring of the nematic liquid crystal N-(p-methoxybenzylidene)-p-butylaniline (MBBA) on Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers of fatty acids (COOHC(n)H(2n+1)) was studied as a function of the length of the fatty acid alkyl chain n (n=15,17,19,21). The monolayers were deposited onto glass plates coated with indium tin oxide, which were used to assemble sandwich cells of various thicknesses that wer...

In the mean field approximation, we evaluate the temperature dependence of the anchoring energy strength of a nematic liquid crystal in contact with a solid substrate due to thermal fluctuations. Our study is limited to the weak anchoring case, where the microscopic surface energy is small with respect to the mean field energy due to the nematic phase. We assume furthermore that the physical pr...

Previous research on anchoring has shown this heuristic to be a very robust psychological phenomenon ubiquitous across many domains of human judgment and decision-making. Despite the prevalence of anchoring effects, researchers have only recently begun to investigate the underlying factors responsible for how and in what ways a person is susceptible to them. This paper examines how one such fac...

We report the results of an experiment probing the relative influence of centering and anchoring biases in reconstructive memory for line lengths. On each of 90 trials participants (N=120) viewed a target line, which they reproduced after a delay by adjusting a response line. We manipulated the starting size of this response line in three conditions: one provided an anchoring bias opposite the ...

We present an approach for recovery from perceptual failures, or more precisely anchoring failures. Anchoring is the problem of connecting symbols representing objects to sensor data corresponding to the same objects. The approach is based on using planning, but our focus is not on the plan generation per se. We focus on the very important aspect of situation assessment and how it is carried ou...

Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile meadows are recognized as priority habitat for conservation by the EU Habitats Directive. The La Maddalena Archipelago National Park (Mediterranean Sea) P. oceanica meadow, the dominant coastal habitat of the area, is mostly threatened by boat anchoring. 12 years after the establishment of mooring fields and anchoring restrictions, a study was conducted to measure...

The specific gray shades in a visual scene can be derived from relative luminance values only when an anchoring rule is followed. The double-anchoring theory I propose in this article, as a development of the anchoring theory of Gilchrist et al. (1999), assumes that any given region (a) belongs to one or more frameworks, created by Gestalt grouping principles, and (b) is independently anchored,...

Equilibrium configurations for smectic A liquid crystals in a ‘bookshelf’ geometry are determined from a nonlinear continuum model under strong and weak anchoring conditions at the boundary for the usual director n. Natural boundary conditions are derived for n and the smectic layer normal a when a preferred director orientation np, which generally induces a director pretilt, is prescribed on t...

Anchoring is the problem of how to connect, inside an artificial system, the symbol-level and signallevel representations of the same physical object. In most previous work on anchoring, symbol-level representations were meant to denote one specific object, like ‘the red pen p22’. These are also called definite descriptions. In this paper, we study anchoring in the case of indefinite descriptio...

We examine fluctuation-induced (pseudo-Casimir) interactions in nematic liquid-crystalline films confined between two surfaces, where one of the surfaces imposes a strong homeotropic anchoring (ensuring a uniform mean director profile), while the other one is assumed to be a chemically disordered substrate exhibiting an annealed distribution of anchoring energies. We employ a saddle-point appro...