This 19th century US gynaecologist still arouses controversy in the 21st century " PASS ME THE SIMS " is a request heard every day during gynaecological surgery and as often in outpatient practice. The Sims speculum has been a valuable gynaecological aid throughout the world since the first example was crudely fashioned from a pewter spoon in 1845 by James Marion Sims, a general practitioner in...

This paper is a preliminary description on an integrated benchmark suite for database systems, SIMS, which offers generic benchmarks and custom benchmarks to users in a unified interface. Currently SIMS supports three generic benchmarks (Wisconsin, BORD, and TPC-C) and four user-defined benchmarks. Any new custom benchmarks can be easily accommodated into SIMS. SIMS consists of four modules. Ea...

This article discusses some ideological issues related with the simulation of social systems in The Sims, proposing an interpretation of The Sims as an ideological game. This paper will focus on describing The Sims as a social simulator of a postcapitalist society: what The Sims proposes as an ideological game is a simulation of a specific set of values linked with a capitalist culture. Therefo...

High resolution imaging mass spectrometry could become a valuable tool for cell and developmental biology, but both, high spatial and mass spectral resolution are needed to enable this. In this report, we employed Bi3 bombardment time-of-flight (Bi3 ToF-SIMS) and C60 bombardment Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance secondary ion mass spectrometry (C60 FTICR-SIMS) to image Dictyostelium dis...

This is the report of a project with the aim to make a new implementation of the Schreier-Sims algorithm in GAP, specialized for matrix groups. The standard Schreier-Sims algorithm is described in some detail, followed by descriptions of the probabilistic Schreier-Sims algorithm and the Schreier-Todd-Coxeter-Sims algorithm. Then we discuss our implementation and some optimisations, and finally ...

We present our complete reimplementation of Karl Sims’ system for evolving and coevolving autonomous creatures in a physically realistic three-dimensional (3D) environment. Creatures are articulated structures composed of rigid blocks and controlled by embedded neural networks. The main differences with Sims are, first, the use of standard McCullochPitts neurons (instead of a set of ad hoc, com...

Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS) enables chemically imaging the distributions of various lipid species in model membranes. However, discriminating the TOF-SIMS data of structurally similar lipids is very difficult because the high intensity, low mass fragment ions needed to achieve submicrometer lateral resolution are common to multiple lipid species. Here, we demonstra...

Polyoxometalate (POM) chemistry has recently offered excellent examples of single ion magnets (SIMs) and molecular spin qubits. Compared with conventional coordination compounds, POMs provide rigid and highly symmetric coordination sites. However, all POM-based SIMs reported to date exhibit a very limited range of possibilities for chemical processability. We present herein two new families of ...

Karl Sims' work on evolving body shapes and controllers for three-dimensional, physically simulated creatures generated wide interest on its publication in 1994. The purpose of this article is threefold: (a) to highlight a spate of recent work by a number of researchers in replicating, and in some cases extending, Sims' results using standard PCs (Sims' original work was done on a Connection Ma...

For 1,500 years Jewish society had been designed to produce intellectuals. . . . Jewish society was geared to support them. . . . Rich merchants married sages’ daughters; . . . Quite suddenly, around the year 1800, this ancient and highly efficient social machine for the production of intellectuals began to shift its output. Instead of pouring all its products into the closed circuit of rabbini...