DEVICES FOR DETERMINING THE STRENGTH OF SNOW AND ICE FORMATIONS

В статье представлен анализ существующих средств определения прочности снежно-ледовых образований, выявлены их недостатки, преимущества и отличительные способности. Целью данной работы является разработка компактных средств измерения прочности компонентов дорожных покрытий и обеспечения контроля качества уплотнения полотна сооружаемых зимних дорог по глубине покрытия. Предложено техническое решение, которое позволяет достичь более высокого технического результата по сравнению с известными аналогами, который заключается в повышении точности измерений, упрощении фиксации шарового элемента в корпусе, обеспечении фиксации подвижных элементов при транспортировке и расширении функциональных возможностей за счет определения прочности на поверхности и по глубине снежного покрова с наконечниками разного профиля, а также позволяет снизить стоимость изготовления и трудоемкость работ при измерениях. Предложенный прибор (твердомер) позволяет расширить область применения, как для свежевыпавшего снега, так и для лежалого, за счёт применения разных нижних поверхностей профиля наконечников в виде конуса, цилиндра или шара. Шаровая поверхность увеличивает площадь соприкосновения нижней поверхности его со снежными образованиями для свежевыпавшего снега. Прибор спроектирован, изготовлен и позволяет определять прочностные свойства снежно-ледовых образований при выполнении научно-исследовательских работ. The article presents an analysis of the existing means for determining the strength of snow-ice formations, reveals their disadvantages, advantages and distinctive abilities. The purpose of this work is to develop compact means for measuring the strength of road pavement components and ensuring quality control of the compaction of the roadbed of winter roads under construction by the depth of the pavement. A technical solution is proposed that allows achieving a higher technical result in comparison with known analogues, which consists in increasing the measurement accuracy, simplifying the fixing of the ball element in the housing, ensuring the fixation of the moving elements during transportation and expanding the functionality by determining the strength on the surface and in depth snow cover with tips of different profiles, and also allows you to reduce the manufacturing cost and laboriousness of work during measurements. The proposed device (hardness tester) allows you to expand the field of application, both for freshly fallen snow, and for old, due to the use of different lower surfaces of the profile of the tips in the form of a cone, cylinder or ball. The spherical surface increases the contact area of ​​its lower surface with snow formations for freshly fallen snow. The device has been designed, manufactured and allows to determine the strength properties of snow-ice formations during scientific research.

Large violations in Kochen Specker contextuality and their applications

It is of interest to study how contextual quantum mechanics is, in terms of the violation of Kochen Specker state-independent and state-dependent non-contextuality inequalities. We present state-independent non-contextuality inequalities with large violations, in particular, we exploit a connection between Kochen-Specker proofs and pseudo-telepathy games to show KS proofs in Hilbert spaces of dimension $d \geq 2^{17}$ with the ratio of quantum value to classical bias being $O(\sqrt{d}/\log d)$. We study the properties of this KS set and show applications of the large violation. It has been recently shown that Kochen-Specker proofs always consist of substructures of state-dependent contextuality proofs called $01$-gadgets or bugs. We show a one-to-one connection between $01$-gadgets in $\mathbb{C}^d$ and Hardy paradoxes for the maximally entangled state in $\mathbb{C}^d \otimes \mathbb{C}^d$. We use this connection to construct large violation $01$-gadgets between arbitrary vectors in $\mathbb{C}^d$, as well as novel Hardy paradoxes for the maximally entangled state in $\mathbb{C}^d \otimes \mathbb{C}^d$, and give applications of these constructions. As a technical result, we show that the minimum dimension of the faithful orthogonal representation of a graph in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is not a graph monotone, a result that may be of independent interest.

Exponential mixing of frame flows for convex cocompact hyperbolic manifolds

The aim of this paper is to establish exponential mixing of frame flows for convex cocompact hyperbolic manifolds of arbitrary dimension with respect to the Bowen–Margulis–Sullivan measure. Some immediate applications include an asymptotic formula for matrix coefficients with an exponential error term as well as the exponential equidistribution of holonomy of closed geodesics. The main technical result is a spectral bound on transfer operators twisted by holonomy, which we obtain by building on Dolgopyat's method.

The Reachability Problem for Two-Dimensional Vector Addition Systems with States

We prove that the reachability problem for two-dimensional vector addition systems with states is NL-complete or PSPACE-complete, depending on whether the numbers in the input are encoded in unary or binary. As a key underlying technical result, we show that, if a configuration is reachable, then there exists a witnessing path whose sequence of transitions is contained in a bounded language defined by a regular expression of pseudo-polynomially bounded length. This, in turn, enables us to prove that the lengths of minimal reachability witnesses are pseudo-polynomially bounded.

No Fine-Tuning, No Cry: Robust SVD for Compressing Deep Networks

A common technique for compressing a neural network is to compute the k-rank ℓ2 approximation Ak of the matrix A∈Rn×d via SVD that corresponds to a fully connected layer (or embedding layer). Here, d is the number of input neurons in the layer, n is the number in the next one, and Ak is stored in O((n+d)k) memory instead of O(nd). Then, a fine-tuning step is used to improve this initial compression. However, end users may not have the required computation resources, time, or budget to run this fine-tuning stage. Furthermore, the original training set may not be available. In this paper, we provide an algorithm for compressing neural networks using a similar initial compression time (to common techniques) but without the fine-tuning step. The main idea is replacing the k-rank ℓ2 approximation with ℓp, for p∈[1,2], which is known to be less sensitive to outliers but much harder to compute. Our main technical result is a practical and provable approximation algorithm to compute it for any p≥1, based on modern techniques in computational geometry. Extensive experimental results on the GLUE benchmark for compressing the networks BERT, DistilBERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa confirm this theoretical advantage.

Everything is NOT Awesome. A Lego Brick as a 3D Trade Mark

This paper discusses the reasoning of the protection of the flagship Lego products – the rectangular brick and the Lego minifigure as the trade marks from the perspective of European Union trade mark system and the Polish legal system. The main part is dedicated to the most important absolute grounds for refusal of trade mark registration, i. e. the distinctive character and the shape of goods necessary to obtain a technical result. However, it is crucial to understand the history, especially the history of legal protection, of both the brick and the minifigure. In the end, the Lego case allows to draw general conclusions about the overlapping of different intellectual property protection regimes and the relation of public domain to the trade mark registration. All these considerations are presented with the use of both comparative and doctrinal method.

Method for cutting semi-carried beef for export

The experiment relates to the meat industry and can be used for cutting beef half-carcasses in slaughterhouses for wholesale trade, mainly for export. The technical result of the claimed experiment is the cutting of beef half-carcass in accordance with international standards, which allows to export beef meat to foreign companies, since it fully meets all the stated requirements for these companies.

Strategic Knowledge Acquisition

The article proposes a trimodal logical system that can express the strategic ability of coalitions to learn from their experience. The main technical result is the completeness of the proposed system.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE OPTIMAL DESIGN OF MANUAL GARDEN FORK WITH THE ABILITY TO QUICKLY CLEAN THE WORKING SURFACE

Manual garden tools help a lot with different types of work with soil: digging, removing roots and weeds, harvesting root crops and bulbs, and much more would be much more difficult if it were not for the forks. This tool has a wide range of features. There are many varieties of this tool differing in shapes and sizes: manure, harvesting, hay, flower, pointed, fork-shovel, telescopic, digging, ball-pointed. A common problem for all manual garden forks is clogging of the tines. This reduces the productivity of those who use them. Attempts are constantly being made to solve the problem of quick cleaning of the tines of manual garden forks. Many technical solutions to this problem are patented and are actively used in practice. The employee of the FSBEI of Higher Education “Pskov State University” has developed a manual self-cleaning fork. The design of the manual self-cleaning fork consists of a handle and a frame with many elongated spaced tines, which is fixed at one end of the handle, as well as a cleaning plate that is fixed to the movable handle, and a spring located on top of the handle inside the movable handle. The movable handle has lateral longitudinal grooves. The movable handle provides movement of the cleaning plate relative to the handle, and, consequently, compression and releasing of the spring. The overall dimensions of the proposed device are accepted according to the existing standards for such structures. The principle of operation of the proposed device: during the operation of the fork, the cleaning plate is pressed against the frame by spring force. Cleaning of the tines is made by a cleaning plate, which is moved along the tines. To do this, the user withdraws the movable handle, overcoming the resistance of the spring. By doing so, the frame passes through the longitudinal grooves and serves as one guide for the movable handle, and the handle serves as the second guide. The fork returns to its original state by releasing the spring after the user releases the movable handle. The main technical result of the proposed device is an increase in the operational characteristics of the fork, reduction in the time and effort spent on cleaning of the tines.

An unit for fixation of small ruminants during veterinary treatments and the use of biophysical methods of exposure

Sheep breeding is a rapidly developing branch of animal husbandry, both in Russia and in other countries. Due to the growth of the number of small ruminants in Russia since the beginning of the XXI century, the number has increased by more than 7,5 million heads. The development and implementation of apparatuses and units that facilitate the work of agricultural workers is still relevant. When conducting veterinary treatments in animal husbandry a large amount of time is spent on catching and especially on fixation due to the fact that the animal is scared and is in a state of stress. In this state, the animal is able to injure itself and the employee, but when using the unit, which has been developed by us for fixation, these undesirable consequences can be avoided. Some technological manipulations for the treatment and care of farm animals, the employee is not able to carry out independently due to the peculiarities of the procedure. All this increases the cost of maintaining small ruminants. The proposed unit relates to the agricultural direction, in particular to machines for fixation small ruminants, and can be used to fix the trunk and head of young animals during veterinary treatments and the use of biophysical methods to stimulate the productivity of animals. The technical result that can be achieved with the help of the proposed device is reduced to high reliability, convenience of fixation the animal, reducing labour costs and improving the quality of veterinary treatments.