The game of Twenty Questions has long been used to illustrate binary source coding. Recently, a physical device has been developed which mimics the process of playing Twenty Questions, with the device supplying the questions and the user providing the answers. However, this game differs from Twenty Questions in two ways: Answers need not be only “yes” and “no,” and the device continues to ask q...

Hawking radiation and Bekenstein-Hawking entropy are the two robust predictions of a yet unknown quantum theory of gravity. Any theory which fails to reproduce these predictions is certainly incorrect. While several approaches lead to Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, they all lead to different sub-leading corrections. In this article, we ask a question that is relevant for any approach: Using simple...

Species distribution modelling is central to both fundamental and applied research in biogeography. Over the past 10 years species distribution models have become commonplace in studies of biogeography, conservation biology, ecology, palaeoecology and wildlife management. Model fitting is usually based on pattern-recognition approaches, whereby associations between geographic occurrence of a sp...

Starting from the classical r-matrix of the non-standard (or Jordanian) quantum deformation of the sl(2,R) algebra, new triangular quantum deformations for the real Lie algebras so(2, 2), so(3, 1) and iso(2, 1) are simultaneously constructed by using a graded contraction scheme; these are realized as deformations of conformal algebras of (1 + 1)-dimensional spacetimes. Timetype and space-type q...

We present a 1-parameter family of finite action solutions to the S0(2, 1) Hitchin’s equations and explore some of its basic properties. For a fixed value of the parameter, the solution is smooth. We conclude by showing a multi-particle generalization of our basic solutions.