James Wright is in Japan at the RIMS Conference – The 6th CREST-SBM International Conference: New Directions in Applied Dynamical Systems, held at Kyoto University during 10-14 March.  He gave a talk on “The effects of time dependent dissipation on basins of attraction“, reporting on joint work with Michele Bartuccelli and Guido Gentile (Roma III).  An abstract of the talk follows: in real world systems it is unlikely the coefficient of dissipation will be a periodic function of time or constant throughout the entire time evolution of the system. Despite this, previously when calculating the basins of attraction for a system, only these two cases have been considered. Using numerical simulations, progress has been made to determine how basins of attraction change when dissipation is initially non constant in a system. Some results and expectations are presented in the talk.  The website for the conference is here.