9,476 research outputs found
Reply to "Comment on 'Universal Behavior of Load Distribution in Scale-Free Networks'"
Reply to "Comment on 'Universal Behavior of Load Distribution in Scale-Free
Networks.'"Comment: 1 page, 1 figur
Safely dissolvable and healable active packaging films based on alginate and pectin
Extensive usage of long-lasting petroleum based plastics for short-lived application such as packaging has raised concerns regarding their role in environmental pollution. In this research, we have developed active, healable, and safely dissolvable alginate-pectin based biocomposites that have potential applications in food packaging. The morphological study revealed the rough surface of these biocomposite films. Tensile properties indicated that the fabricated samples have mechanical properties in the range of commercially available packaging films while possessing excellent healing effciency. Biocomposite films exhibited higher hydrophobicity properties compared to neat alginate films. Thermal analysis indicated that crosslinked biocomposite samples possess higher thermal stability in temperatures below 120 °C, while antibacterial analysis against E. coli and S. aureus revealed the antibacterial properties of the prepared samples against different bacteria. The fabricated biodegradable multi-functional biocomposite films possess various imperative properties, making them ideal for utilization as packaging material
A Stimulatory Role for Cytokinin in the Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Symbiosis of Pea
The arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbiosis between terrestrial plants and AM fungi is regulated by plant hormones. For most of these, a role has been clearly assigned in this mutualistic interaction; however, there are still contradictory reports for cytokinin (CK). Here, pea plants, the wild type (WT) cv. Sparkle and its mutant E151 (Pssym15), were inoculated with the AM fungus Rhizophagus irregularis. E151 has previously been characterized as possessing high CK levels in non-mycorrhizal (myc-) roots and exhibiting high number of fungal structures in mycorrhizal (myc+) roots. Myc- and myc+ plants were treated 7, 9, and 11 days after inoculation (DAI) with synthetic compounds known to alter CK status. WT plants were treated with a synthetic CK [6-benzylaminopurine (BAP)] or the CK degradation inhibitor INCYDE, whereas E151 plants were treated with the CK receptor antagonist PI-55. At 13 DAI, plant CK content was analyzed by mass spectrometry. The effects of the synthetic compounds on AM colonization were assessed at 28 (WT) or 35 (E151) DAI via a modified magnified intersections method. The only noticeable difference seen between myc- and myc+ plants in terms of CK content was in the levels of nucleotides (NTs). Whereas WT plants responded to fungi by lowering their NT levels, E151 plants did not. Since NTs are thought to be converted into active CK forms, this result suggests that active CKs were synthesized more effectively in WT than in E151. In general, myc+ and myc- WT plants responded similarly to INCYDE by lowering significantly their NT levels and increasing slightly their active CK levels; these responses were less obvious in BAP-treated WT plants. In contrast, the response of E151 plants to PI-55 depended on the plant mycorrhizal status. Whereas treated myc- plants exhibited high NT and low active CK levels, treated myc+ plants displayed low levels of both NTs and active CKs. Moreover, treated WT plants were more colonized than treated E151 plants. We concluded that CKs have a stimulatory role in AM colonization because increased active CK levels were paralleled with increased AM colonization while decreased CK levels corresponded to reduced AM colonization
High-pressure spin shifts in the pseudogap regime of superconducting YBa2Cu4O8 as revealed by 17O NMR
A new NMR anvil cell design is used for measuring the influence of high
pressure on the electronic properties of the high-temperature superconductor
YBaCuO above the superconducting transition temperature . It is found that pressure increases the spin shift at all temperatures in
such a way that the pseudo-gap feature has almost disappeared at 63 kbar. This
change of the temperature dependent spin susceptibility can be explained by a
pressure induced proportional decrease (factor of two) of a temperature
dependent component, and an increase (factor of 9) of a temperature independent
component, contrary to the effects of increasing doping. The results
demonstrate that one can use anvil cell NMR to investigate the tuning of the
electronic properties of correlated electronic materials with pressure.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Fairness Beyond Disparate Treatment & Disparate Impact: Learning Classification without Disparate Mistreatment
Automated data-driven decision making systems are increasingly being used to
assist, or even replace humans in many settings. These systems function by
learning from historical decisions, often taken by humans. In order to maximize
the utility of these systems (or, classifiers), their training involves
minimizing the errors (or, misclassifications) over the given historical data.
However, it is quite possible that the optimally trained classifier makes
decisions for people belonging to different social groups with different
misclassification rates (e.g., misclassification rates for females are higher
than for males), thereby placing these groups at an unfair disadvantage. To
account for and avoid such unfairness, in this paper, we introduce a new notion
of unfairness, disparate mistreatment, which is defined in terms of
misclassification rates. We then propose intuitive measures of disparate
mistreatment for decision boundary-based classifiers, which can be easily
incorporated into their formulation as convex-concave constraints. Experiments
on synthetic as well as real world datasets show that our methodology is
effective at avoiding disparate mistreatment, often at a small cost in terms of
accuracy.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the 26th International World Wide Web
Conference (WWW), 2017. Code available at:
https://github.com/mbilalzafar/fair-classificatio
An SO(10) Grand Unified Theory of Flavor
We present a supersymmetric SO(10) grand unified theory (GUT) of flavor based
on an family symmetry. It makes use of our recent proposal to use SO(10)
with type II seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses combined with a simple ansatz
that the dominant Yukawa matrix (the {\bf 10}-Higgs coupling to matter) has
rank one. In this paper, we show how the rank one model can arise within some
plausible assumptions as an effective field theory from vectorlike {\bf 16}
dimensional matter fields with masses above the GUT scale. In order to obtain
the desired fermion flavor texture we use flavon multiplets which acquire
vevs in the ground state of the theory. By supplementing the theory with
an additional discrete symmetry, we find that the flavon vacuum field
alignments take a discrete set of values provided some of the higher
dimensional couplings are small. Choosing a particular set of these vacuum
alignments appears to lead to an unified understanding of observed quark-lepton
flavor:
(i) the lepton mixing matrix that is dominantly tri-bi-maximal with small
corrections related to quark mixings; (ii) quark lepton mass relations at GUT
scale: and and (iii) the solar to
atmospheric neutrino mass ratio in agreement with observations. The model predicts the neutrino
mixing parameter, ,
which should be observable in planned long baseline experiments.Comment: Final version of the paper as it will appear in JHEP
-free families in the Boolean lattice
For a family of subsets of [n]=\{1, 2, ..., n} ordered by
inclusion, and a partially ordered set P, we say that is P-free
if it does not contain a subposet isomorphic to P. Let be the
largest size of a P-free family of subsets of [n]. Let be the poset with
distinct elements a, b, c, d, a<b, c<d; i.e., the 2-dimensional Boolean
lattice. We show that where . We also prove that the largest -free
family of subsets of [n] having at most three different sizes has at most
2.20711N members.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure
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