We examine the possibility to extend leap second extrapolation for a near future based on some periodic terms in the Earths rotation changes. The IERS data, covering the interval from 1962.15 to 2006.95, are analyzed. The difference $Delta T$ is extrapolated till to 2035 and compared with the IERS extrapolated values to the 2012. It can be seen that for the interval from 2006 to 2024 only 1 leap seconds (negative) will be operated.
Before atomic timekeeping, clocks were set to the skies. But starting in 1972, radio signals began broadcasting atomic seconds and leap seconds have occasionally been added to that stream of atomic seconds to keep the signals synchronized with the actual rotation of Earth. Such adjustments were considered necessary because Earths rotation is less regular than atomic timekeeping. In January 2012, a United Nations-affiliated organization could permanently break this link by redefining Coordinated Universal Time. To understand the importance of this potential change, its important to understand the history of human timekeeping.
After reviewing the problematic behavior of some previously suggested finite interval spatial operators of the symmetric Riesz type, we create a wish list leading toward a new spatial operator suitable to use in the space-time fractional differential equation of anomalous diffusion when the transport of material is strictly restricted to a bounded domain. Based on recent studies of wall effects, we introduce a new definition of the spatial operator and illustrate its favorable characteristics. We provide two numerical methods to solve the modified space-time fractional differential equation and show particular results illustrating compliance to our established list of requirements, most important to the conservation principle and the second law of thermodynamics.
Substantial progress has been made on modeling rigid 3D objects using deep implicit representations. Yet, extending these methods to learn neural models of human shape is still in its infancy. Human bodies are complex and the key challenge is to learn a representation that generalizes such that it can express body shape deformations for unseen subjects in unseen, highly-articulated, poses. To address this challenge, we introduce LEAP (LEarning Articulated occupancy of People), a novel neural occupancy representation of the human body. Given a set of bone transformations (i.e. joint locations and rotations) and a query point in space, LEAP first maps the query point to a canonical space via learned linear blend skinning (LBS) functions and then efficiently queries the occupancy value via an occupancy network that models accurate identity- and pose-dependent deformations in the canonical space. Experiments show that our canonicalized occupancy estimation with the learned LBS functions greatly improves the generalization capability of the learned occupancy representation across various human shapes and poses, outperforming existing solutions in all settings.
A new second-order method for approximating the compressible Euler equations is introduced. The method preserves all the known invariant domains of the Euler system: positivity of the density, positivity of the internal energy and the local minimum principle on the specific entropy. The technique combines a first-order, invariant domain preserving, Guaranteed Maximum Speed method using a Graph Viscosity (GMS-GV1) with an invariant domain violating, but entropy consistent, high-order method. Invariant domain preserving auxiliary states, naturally produced by the GMS-GV1 method, are used to define local bounds for the high-order method which is then made invariant domain preserving via a convex limiting process. Numerical tests confirm the second-order accuracy of the new GMS-GV2 method in the maximum norm, where 2 stands for second-order. The proposed convex limiting is generic and can be applied to other approximation techniques and other hyperbolic systems.
We describe a study on the conceptual difficulties faced by college students in understanding hydrodynamics of ideal fluids. This study was based on responses obtained in hundreds of written exams and oral interviews, which were held with first-year Engineering and Science university students. Their responses allowed us to identify a series of misconceptions unreported in the literature so far. The study findings demonstrate that the most important difficulties arise from the students inability to establish a link between the kinematics and dynamics of moving fluids, and from a lack of understanding regarding how different regions of a system interact.