Collaborative Development and Evaluation of Text-processing Workflows in a UIMA-supported Web-based Workbench

Challenges in creating comprehensive text-processing worklows include a lack of the interoperability of individual components coming from different providers and/or a requirement imposed on the end users to know programming techniques to compose such workflows. In this paper we demonstrate Argo, a web-based system that addresses these issues in several ways. It supports the widely adopted Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), which handles the problem of interoperability; it provides a web browser-based interface for developing workflows by drawing diagrams composed of a selection of available processing components; and it provides novel user-interactive analytics such as the annotation editor which constitutes a bridge between automatic processing and manual correction. These features extend the target audience of Argo to users with a limited or no technical background. Here, we focus specifically on the construction of advanced workflows, involving multiple branching and merging points, to facilitate various comparative evalutions. Together with the use of user-collaboration capabilities supported in Argo, we demonstrate several use cases including visual inspections, comparisions of multiple processing segments or complete solutions against a reference standard, inter-annotator agreement, and shared task mass evaluations. Ultimetely, Argo emerges as a one-stop workbench for defining, processing, editing and evaluating text processing tasks

SUSY Without Prejudice at the 7 and 8 TeV LHC: Gravitino LSPs

We have examined the capability of the LHC, running at both 7 and 8 TeV, to explore the 19(20)-dimensional parameter space of the pMSSM with neutralino(gravitino) LSPs and soft masses up to 4 TeV employing the ATLAS SUSY analysis suite. Here we present some preliminary results for the gravitino model set, following the ATLAS analyses whose data were publically available as of mid-September 2012. We find that the impact of the reduced MET, resulting from models with gravitino LSPs on sparticle searches is more than off-set by the detectability of the many possible long-lived NLSPs.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures; contibution to ICHEP 201

Counter-intuitive moral judgement following traumatic brain injury

Several neurological patient populations, including Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), appear to produce an abnormally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of judgements to moral dilemmas; they tend to make judgements that maximise the welfare of the majority, rather than deontological judgements based on the following of moral rules (e.g., do not harm others). However, this patient research has always used extreme dilemmas with highly valued moral rules (e.g., do not kill). Data from healthy participants, however, suggests that when a wider range of dilemmas are employed, involving less valued moral rules (e.g., do not lie), moral judgements demonstrate sensitivity to the psychological intuitiveness of the judgements, rather than their deontological or utilitarian content (Kahane et al., 2011). We sought the moral judgements of 30 TBI participants and 30 controls on moral dilemmas where content (utilitarian/deontological) and intuition (intuitive/counterintuitive) were measured concurrently. Overall TBI participants made utilitarian judgements in equal proportions to controls; disproportionately favouring utilitarian judgements only when they were counterintuitive, and deontological judgements only when they were counterintuitive. These results speak against the view that TBI causes a specific utilitarian bias, suggesting instead that moral intuition is broadly disrupted following TBI

Lessons and Prospects from the pMSSM after LHC Run I: Neutralino LSP

We study SUSY signatures at the 7, 8 and 14 TeV LHC employing the 19-parameter, R-Parity conserving p(henomenological)MSSM, in the scenario with a neutralino LSP. Our results were obtained via a fast Monte Carlo simulation of the ATLAS SUSY analysis suite. The flexibility of this framework allows us to study a wide variety of SUSY phenomena simultaneously and to probe for weak spots in existing SUSY search analyses. We determine the ranges of the sparticle masses that are either disfavored or allowed after the searches with the 7 and 8 TeV data sets are combined. We find that natural SUSY models with light squarks and gluinos remain viable. We extrapolate to 14 TeV with both 300 fb$^{-1}$ and 3 ab$^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity and determine the expected sensitivity of the jets + MET and stop searches to the pMSSM parameter space. We find that the high-luminosity LHC will be powerful in probing SUSY with neutralino LSPs and can provide a more definitive statement on the existence of natural Supersymmetry.Comment: 41 pages, 27 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1307.844

Density Matrix Renormalization for Model Reduction in Nonlinear Dynamics

We present a novel approach for model reduction of nonlinear dynamical systems based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). Our method, derived from Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG), provides a significant reduction in computational effort for the calculation of the reduced system, compared to a POD. The efficiency of the algorithm is tested on the one dimensional Burgers equations and a one dimensional equation of the Fisher type as nonlinear model systems.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure

Repeatable method of thermal stress fracture test of brittle materials

Method heats specimens slowly and with sufficient control so that the critical temperature gradient in the specimens cannot occur before temperature equilibrium is reached