I describe a modification to Shanks’ baby-step giant-step algorithm for computing the order n of an element g of a group G, assuming n is finite. My method has the advantage of being able to compute n quickly, which Shanks’ method fails to do when the order of G is infinite, unknown, or much larger than n. I describe the algorithm in detail. I also present the results of implementations of my a...

Baby boomers will begin entering old age in 2011. They will be the largest and most diverse cohort ever to experience this life-course transition. The sheer number of baby boomers has challenged institutions time after time (Dychtwald, 1990). Despite extensive speculation regarding the political, economic, and social impact that the aging of baby boomers will have on American society, no one ha...

We argue that the giant graviton configurations known from the literature have a complementary, microscopical description in terms of multiple gravitational waves undergoing a dielectric (or magnetic moment) effect. We present a non-Abelian effective action for these gravitational waves with dielectric couplings and show that stable dielectric solutions exist. These solutions agree in the large...

Field Alignment is a useful and often necessary preprocessing step in contemporary geophysical state and parameter estimation of coherent structures. In an advance, we introduce a new framework for using Field Alignment to quantify uncertainty from an ensemble of coherent structures. Our method, called Coalescence, discovers the mean field under non-trivial misalignments of fields with complex ...

Here, we report a study of the morphology and growth dynamics of a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of the amide containing poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) thiol (CH3O(CH2CH2O)17NHCO(CH2)2SH) on atomically flat Au(111) surfaces. SAM growth from a 20 muM ethanolic solution reveals island growth through three distinct steps: island nucleation, island growth, and coalescence. The coalescence-step, filli...

We use a micro-device where micro-droplets of reagents are generated and coalesce in a carrier continuous phase. The work focuses on the characterization of the mixing step inside the droplets, in the perspective to use them for chemical kinetic data acquisition. A dye and water are used, and an acid-base instantaneous chemical reaction is monitored thanks to a colored indicator. Acquisitions a...

In next generation information systems there will be a coalescence of (object-oriented) database management systems and information retrieval systems. Especially the integration of content-based retrieval techniques into object-oriented database management systems is an interesting requirement in this respect. Whereas the aspects of this coalescence dealing with the query language and the data ...

Recent conjectures suggest the universe may have large extra dimensions, through which gravity propagates. This implies gross departures from Newton’s law of gravity at small length scales. Here I consider some implications for particle dynamics on scales comparable to the compactification radius, Rc ∼ 1 mm. During planet formation, coalescence of micron sized dust grains to planetesimals is a ...

In microfluidics, electric fields are widely used to assist the generation and the manipulation of droplets or jets. However, uncontrolled electric field can disrupt the operation of an integrated microfluidic system, for instance, through undesired coalescence of droplets, undesired changes in the wettability of the channel wall or unexpected death of cells. Therefore, an approach to control t...