1,192 research outputs found
A proof of the Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture for large even
A Latin square of order is an by grid filled using symbols so
that each symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. A transversal in
a Latin square is a collection of cells which share no symbol, row or column.
The Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture, with origins from 1967, states that every
Latin square of order contains a transversal with cells, and a
transversal with cells if is odd. Keevash, Pokrovskiy, Sudakov and
Yepremyan recently improved the long-standing best known bounds towards this
conjecture by showing that every Latin square of order has a transversal
with cells. Here, we show, for sufficiently large ,
that every Latin square of order has a transversal with cells.
We also apply our methods to show that, for sufficiently large , every
Steiner triple system of order has a matching containing at least
edges. This improves a recent result of Keevash, Pokrovskiy, Sudakov and
Yepremyan, who found such matchings with edges, and
proves a conjecture of Brouwer from 1981 for large .Comment: 71 pages, 13 figure
IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -
Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ‘visual novel’, ‘dating simulator’ and ‘adult computer game’.
As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the game’s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ‘character intimacy games’, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the game’s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies.
The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases – The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyōron Kūkan – with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the game’s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics
Modern meat: the next generation of meat from cells
Modern Meat is the first textbook on cultivated meat, with contributions from over 100 experts within the cultivated meat community.
The Sections of Modern Meat comprise 5 broad categories of cultivated meat: Context, Impact, Science, Society, and World.
The 19 chapters of Modern Meat, spread across these 5 sections, provide detailed entries on cultivated meat. They extensively tour a range of topics including the impact of cultivated meat on humans and animals, the bioprocess of cultivated meat production, how cultivated meat may become a food option in Space and on Mars, and how cultivated meat may impact the economy, culture, and tradition of Asia
Electron Thermal Runaway in Atmospheric Electrified Gases: a microscopic approach
Thesis elaborated from 2018 to 2023 at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía under the supervision of Alejandro Luque (Granada, Spain) and Nikolai Lehtinen (Bergen, Norway). This thesis presents a new database of atmospheric electron-molecule collision cross sections which was published separately under the DOI :
With this new database and a new super-electron management algorithm which significantly enhances high-energy electron statistics at previously unresolved ratios, the thesis explores general facets of the electron thermal runaway process relevant to atmospheric discharges under various conditions of the temperature and gas composition as can be encountered in the wake and formation of discharge channels
Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology
The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same
psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both
clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an
exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing
psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys
or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed
to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for
continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or
smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were
previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a
cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals.
To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it
will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification.
There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current
technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge --
one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning
techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted.
In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on
digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding
discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure
where relevant, with extensive documentation.
Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results
for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research
datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a
proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop
Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media
"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations
On the structure of graphs with forbidden induced substructures
One of the central goals in extremal combinatorics is to understand how the global structure of a combinatorial object, e.g. a graph, hypergraph or set system, is affected by local constraints.
In this thesis we are concerned with structural properties of graphs and hypergraphs which locally do not look like some type of forbidden induced pattern. Patterns can be single subgraphs, families of subgraphs, or in the multicolour version colourings or families of colourings of subgraphs.
Erdős and Szekeres\u27s quantitative version of Ramsey\u27s theorem asserts that in every -edge-colouring of the complete graph on vertices there is a monochromatic clique on at least vertices. The famous Erdős-Hajnal conjecture asserts that forbidding fixed colourings on subgraphs ensures much larger monochromatic cliques. The conjecture is open in general, though a few partial results are known. The first part of this thesis will be concerned with different variants of this conjecture: A bipartite variant, a multicolour variant, and an order-size variant for hypergraphs.
In the second part of this thesis we focus more on order-size pairs; an order-size pair is the family consisting of all graphs of order and size , i.e. on vertices with edges. We consider order-size pairs in different settings: The graph setting, the bipartite setting and the hypergraph setting. In all these settings we investigate the existence of absolutely avoidable pairs, i.e. fixed pairs that are avoided by all order-size pairs with sufficiently large order, and also forcing densities of order-size pairs , i.e. for approaching infinity, the limit superior of the fraction of all possible sizes , such that the order-size pair does not avoid the pair
Specificity of the innate immune responses to different classes of non-tuberculous mycobacteria
Mycobacterium avium is the most common nontuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) species causing infectious disease. Here, we characterized a M. avium infection model in zebrafish larvae, and compared it to M. marinum infection, a model of tuberculosis. M. avium bacteria are efficiently phagocytosed and frequently induce granuloma-like structures in zebrafish larvae. Although macrophages can respond to both mycobacterial infections, their migration speed is faster in infections caused by M. marinum. Tlr2 is conservatively involved in most aspects of the defense against both mycobacterial infections. However, Tlr2 has a function in the migration speed of macrophages and neutrophils to infection sites with M. marinum that is not observed with M. avium. Using RNAseq analysis, we found a distinct transcriptome response in cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction for M. avium and M. marinum infection. In addition, we found differences in gene expression in metabolic pathways, phagosome formation, matrix remodeling, and apoptosis in response to these mycobacterial infections. In conclusion, we characterized a new M. avium infection model in zebrafish that can be further used in studying pathological mechanisms for NTM-caused diseases
The existence of subspace designs
We prove the existence of subspace designs with any given parameters,
provided that the dimension of the underlying space is sufficiently large in
terms of the other parameters of the design and satisfies the obvious necessary
divisibility conditions. This settles an open problem from the 1970s. Moreover,
we also obtain an approximate formula for the number of such designs.Comment: 61 page
Essentially tight bounds for rainbow cycles in proper edge-colourings
An edge-coloured graph is said to be rainbow if no colour appears more than
once. Extremal problems involving rainbow objects have been a focus of much
research over the last decade as they capture the essence of a number of
interesting problems in a variety of areas. A particularly intensively studied
question due to Keevash, Mubayi, Sudakov and Verstra\"ete from 2007 asks for
the maximum possible average degree of a properly edge-coloured graph on
vertices without a rainbow cycle. Improving upon a series of earlier bounds,
Tomon proved an upper bound of for this question. Very
recently, Janzer-Sudakov and Kim-Lee-Liu-Tran independently removed the
term in Tomon's bound, showing a bound of . We prove an upper
bound of for this maximum possible average degree when
there is no rainbow cycle. Our result is tight up to the term, and so it
essentially resolves this question. In addition, we observe a connection
between this problem and several questions in additive number theory, allowing
us to extend existing results on these questions for abelian groups to the case
of non-abelian groups
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