397,468 research outputs found
Of Cherries, Fudge, and Onions: Science and Its Courtroom Perversion
The thesis of this article is that the Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.\u27s focus on the scientific method, however rigorously applied, invites certain classes of abuses. There are instances in which evidence can be made to look more scientific by a process that in fact and substance makes is utterly unscientific
Comparison and Mapping Facilitate Relation Discovery and Predication
Relational concepts play a central role in human perception and cognition, but little is known about how they are acquired. For example, how do we come to understand that physical force is a higher-order multiplicative relation between mass and acceleration, or that two circles are the same-shape in the same way that two squares are? A recent model of relational learning, DORA (Discovery of Relations by Analogy; Doumas, Hummel & Sandhofer, 2008), predicts that comparison and analogical mapping play a central role in the discovery and predication of novel higher-order relations. We report two experiments testing and confirming this prediction
Epilogue: Superconducting Materials Past, Present and Future
Experimental contributors to the field of Superconducting Materials share
their informal views on the subject.Comment: Epilogue to Physica C Special Issue on Superconducting Materials,
Volume 514 (2015
Pretrial Case Management Under the Amended Rules: Too Many Words for a Good Idea
To cope with the increasing complexity of embedded and cyber-physical system design, different system-level design approaches are proposed which start from abstract models and implement them using design flows with high degrees of automation. However, creating models of such systems and also formulating the mathematical problems arising in these design flows are themselves challenging tasks. A promising approach is the composable construction of these models and problems from more basic entities. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial to propose such compositional formulations today because the current practice in the electronic design automation domain tends to be on using imperative languages and frameworks due to legacy and performance-oriented reasons. This thesis addresses the system design complexity by first promoting proper formalisms and frameworks for capturing models and formulating design-space exploration problems for electronic system-level design in a declarative style; and second, propose realizations based on the industrially accepted languages and frameworks which hold the interesting properties such as composability and parallelism. For modeling, ForSyDe, a denotational system-level modeling formalism for heterogeneous embedded systems is chosen, extended with timed domains to make it more appropriate for capturing cyber-physical systems, and mapped on top of the IEEE standard system design language SystemC. The realized modeling framework, called ForSyDe-SystemC, can be used for modeling systems of heterogeneous nature and their composition to form more sophisticated systems and also conducting parallel and distributed simulation for boosting the simulation speed. Another extension to ForSyDe, named wrapper processes, introduces the ability to compose formal ForSyDe models with legacy IP blocks running in external execution environments to perform a heterogeneous co-simulation. In platform-based design flows, the correct and optimal mapping of an application model onto a flexible platform involves solving a hard problem, named design space exploration. This work proposes Tahmuras, a constraint- based framework to construct generic design space exploration problems as the composition of three individual sub-problems: the application, the platform, and the mapping and scheduling problems. In this way, the model of the design space exploration problem in Tahmuras is automatically generated for each combination of application semantics, target platform, and mapping and scheduling policy simply by composing their respective problems. Using constraint programming, problems can be modeled in a declarative style, while they can be solved in a variety of different styles, including imperative solving heuristics commonly used to solve difficult problems. Efficient parallel solvers exists for constraint programming.Ā Den oĢkande komplexiteten aĢr en stor utmaning foĢr konstruktionen av framtida inbyggda system. FoĢr att moĢta utmaningen utvecklas nu konstruktionsmetoder som har som maĢl att starta fraĢn en abstrakt modell och att generera en implementering genom ett konstruktionsfloĢde med hoĢg automatiseringsgrad. DessvaĢrre aĢr dock skapandet av abstrakta systemmodeller och formaliseringen av de relaterade matematiska problemen i sig ett mycket utmanande problem. Konstruktion genom komposition av basenheter aĢr en lovande ideĢ, men tyvaĢrr aĢr det vaĢldigt svaĢrt att introducera metoden i dagens industriella konstruktionsfloĢden paĢ grund av imperativa programmeringsspraĢk och ett gammalt arv i form av existerande kodbas och aĢldre konstruktioner. Avhandlingen adresserar komplexiten inom systemkonstruktion genom att foĢreslaĢ passande formalismer foĢr att uttrycka modeller i en deklarativ stil och angripa problemet att hitta en passande implementering. Dessutom visar avhandlingen hur dessa formalismer kan realiseras i en form som kan anvaĢndas i ett industriellt sammanhang utan att foĢrlora formalismens viktiga grundlaĢggande egenskaper som komposition och parallelism. Modelleringen anvaĢnder och utoĢkar ForSyDe, en konstruktionsmetod foĢr heterogena inbyggda system. TillaĢggen bestaĢr av en modelleringsmodell som kan faĢnga specifika egenskaper hos heterogena inbyggda system, samt en implementering av ForSyDe i SystemC, ett industriellt modelleringsspraĢk som aĢr standardiserat av IEEE. Den nya utvecklingsmiljoĢn, ForSyDe-SystemC, kan anvaĢndas foĢr att modellera inbyggda system, komponera systemmodeller till stoĢrre system, samt moĢjliggoĢr genomfoĢrandet av parallella och distribuerade simuleringar med medfoĢljande hoĢg simuleringshastighet. Avhandlingen introducerar ocksaĢ āwrapperā-konceptet i ForSyDe som moĢjliggoĢr integrationen av existerande modeller och system som en del av en formell ForSyDe-modell och deras co-simulering. ForSyDe-SystemC har anvaĢnts inom EU-projekt av industriella partner foĢr modellering av egna system. Att hitta en korrekt och effektiv implementering av en abstrakt systemmodell aĢr maĢlet inom aktiviteten ādesign space explorationā (DSE) som aĢr ett svaĢrt problem foĢr parametriserbara och flexibla plattformar. Avhandlingen presenterar tvaĢ generationer av Tahmuras, som aĢr baserade paĢ villkorsprogrammering och har som maĢl att konstruera DSE-problemet som en komposition av tre olika delproblem: applikation, plattform, och bindning. Ett integrerat DSE-problem kan sedan automatiskt genereras genom en kombination av dessa delproblem. Olika metoder, fraĢn heuristisk till komplett soĢkning, kan anvaĢndas inom villkorsprogrammering foĢr att loĢsa DSE-problemet. FoĢr att visa Tahmuras potential har DSE-metoden validerats med hjaĢlp av olika systemapplikationer av skilda tidsegenskaper och olika plattformar.Ā QC 20141117</p
Resolving Malpractice Disputes: Imaging the Juryās Shadow
The ability of juries to resolve malpractice suits was studied. Results showed that most of the time, jury outcomes represent a fair resolution of the claim, but the risk that the result will not be fair is real and troubling
Resolving Malpractice Disputes: Imaging the Juryās Shadow
The ability of juries to resolve malpractice suits was studied. Results showed that most of the time, jury outcomes represent a fair resolution of the claim, but the risk that the result will not be fair is real and troubling
Multiple locus linkage analysis of genomewide expression in yeast.
With the ability to measure thousands of related phenotypes from a single biological sample, it is now feasible to genetically dissect systems-level biological phenomena. The genetics of transcriptional regulation and protein abundance are likely to be complex, meaning that genetic variation at multiple loci will influence these phenotypes. Several recent studies have investigated the role of genetic variation in transcription by applying traditional linkage analysis methods to genomewide expression data, where each gene expression level was treated as a quantitative trait and analyzed separately from one another. Here, we develop a new, computationally efficient method for simultaneously mapping multiple gene expression quantitative trait loci that directly uses all of the available data. Information shared across gene expression traits is captured in a way that makes minimal assumptions about the statistical properties of the data. The method produces easy-to-interpret measures of statistical significance for both individual loci and the overall joint significance of multiple loci selected for a given expression trait. We apply the new method to a cross between two strains of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and estimate that at least 37% of all gene expression traits show two simultaneous linkages, where we have allowed for epistatic interactions. Pairs of jointly linking quantitative trait loci are identified with high confidence for 170 gene expression traits, where it is expected that both loci are true positives for at least 153 traits. In addition, we are able to show that epistatic interactions contribute to gene expression variation for at least 14% of all traits. We compare the proposed approach to an exhaustive two-dimensional scan over all pairs of loci. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that an exhaustive two-dimensional scan is less powerful than the sequential search used here. In addition, we show that a two-dimensional scan does not truly allow one to test for simultaneous linkage, and the statistical significance measured from this existing method cannot be interpreted among many traits
What Are We Doing with the Website: Transition, Templates, and User Experience in One Special Collections Library
[Excerpt] At the Eberly Family Special Collections Library (SCL), we have found that our website is often the first place a researcher will look to learn about our repository. Our online web presence is a business card, our chance to make a positive first impression. While our library, among others, has devoted time and resources to the development of new access tools and discovery layers, we have learned that our online presence also needs updates, revisions, and improvements. New tools and access points are valuable, but we can also improve existing tools even as we look forward to new developments in access and discovery.
Through conscious efforts to include end usersā feedback in our website design decisions, we create more effective online tools. Our website is a crucial component of our efforts to direct users to our collections, and to publicize our services and programs. In this same vein, our end users can contribute to this design partnership through dedicated user experience testing. The SCL experimented with collaborative decision-making with its website committee, as well as with user experience testing in order to support our requests for additional web development work from the Librariesā Information Technology department (I-Tech). Through this process, our library gained a more holistic understanding of the needs of online special collections and archives users; we also learned how to communicate more effectively between the department who worked with end users (SCL) and the department performing the actual web development work (I-Tech). While development work was limited to working within the mandatory web template, our user experience testing and the efforts of our internal website committee resulted in a better online experience for our stakeholders, based on the feedback we received from usability testing. Although our website is always a work in progress, we feel that we were able to develop practical ways to adjust to a website migration within in a dispersed and hierarchical information technology environment
- ā¦