The Economy of Heart

"The Economy of Heart", by Peter F. Brown, Chairman of The FutureWorld Association, at "http://futurerealm.com/fwa/". 6 pages. This article explores the philosophical and theoretical application of unselfish ethics as the base of a new economy. It compares the efficacy of economics centered on heart to the economics of socialism and capitalism. Permission granted to distribute or publish as long as there is no charge attached and the copyright information is kept intact. ..................future theory culture heart altruism money

Thermal history of the early Miocene Waitemata Basin and adjacent Waipapa Group, North Island, New Zealand

Apatite fission track (AFT) and vitrinite reflectance (VR) data for early Miocene outcrops from the Waitemata Basin reveal that the basin sequence was subjected to shallow burial before denudation. AFT results suggest that the total sediment thickness within the basin was <=1 km and maximum paleotemperatures during burial never exceeded c. 60deg.C. Statistical analyses of the detrital AFT ages distinguish four dominant sources of sediment supply: contemporaneous volcanism; metagreywacke rocks of the Waipapa Group; the Northland Allochthon; and an unidentified source south of the basin. The apatite and zircon fission track results from the Waipapa Group rocks (Gondwana Terrane) adjacent to the basin suggest two discrete phases of accelerated cooling: the first during the early Cretaceous (c. 117 Ma) and the second during the mid Cretaceous (c. 84 Ma). These events probably reflect key stages in the tectonic development of the New Zealand microcontinent during the Cretaceous period, the earlier event being related to the climax of compressional deformation (Rangitata Orogeny) and the latter to extensional tectonism associated with the opening of the Tasman Sea. Waipapa Group rocks now exposed at the surface cooled from maximum paleotemperatures of c. 250deg.C at an estimated rate of c. 180-36deg.C/m.y., involving substantial denudation

Joint evolution of multiple social traits: a kin selection analysis

General models of the evolution of cooperation, altruism and other social behaviours have focused almost entirely on single traits, whereas it is clear that social traits commonly interact. We develop a general kin-selection framework for the evolution of social behaviours in multiple dimensions. We show that whenever there are interactions among social traits new behaviours can emerge that are not predicted by one-dimensional analyses. For example, a prohibitively costly cooperative trait can ultimately be favoured owing to initial evolution in other (cheaper) social traits that in turn change the cost-benefit ratio of the original trait. To understand these behaviours, we use a two-dimensional stability criterion that can be viewed as an extension of Hamilton's rule. Our principal example is the social dilemma posed by, first, the construction and, second, the exploitation of a shared public good. We find that, contrary to the separate one-dimensional analyses, evolutionary feedback between the two traits can cause an increase in the equilibrium level of selfish exploitation with increasing relatedness, while both social (production plus exploitation) and asocial (neither) strategies can be locally stable. Our results demonstrate the importance of emergent stability properties of multidimensional social dilemmas, as one-dimensional stability in all component dimensions can conceal multidimensional instability

Heating in the Accreted Neutron Star Ocean: Implications for Superburst Ignition

We perform a self-consistent calculation of the thermal structure in the crust of a superbursting neutron star. In particular, we follow the nucleosynthetic evolution of an accreted fluid element from its deposition into the atmosphere down to a depth where the electron Fermi energy is 20 MeV. We include temperature-dependent continuum electron capture rates and realistic sources of heat loss by thermal neutrino emission from the crust and core. We show that, in contrast to previous calculations, electron captures to excited states and subsequent gamma-emission significantly reduce the local heat loss due to weak-interaction neutrinos. Depending on the initial composition these reactions release up to a factor of 10 times more heat at densities < 10^{11} g/cc than obtained previously. This heating reduces the ignition depth of superbursts. In particular, it reduces the discrepancy noted by Cumming et al. between the temperatures needed for unstable 12C ignition on timescales consistent with observations and the reduction in crust temperature from Cooper pair neutrino emission.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, the Astrophysical Journal, in press (scheduled for v. 662). Revised from v1 in response to referee's comment

In Situ Two-Thermocouple Sensor Characterisation using Cross-Relation Blind Deconvolution with Signal Conditioning for Improved Robustness

Thermocouples are one of the most widely used temperature measurement devices due to their low cost, ease of manufacture and robustness. However, their robustness is obtained at the expense of limited sensor bandwidth. Consequently, in many applications signal compensation techniques are needed to recover the true temperature from the attenuated measurements. This, is turn, necessitates in situ thermocouple characterisation. Recently the authors proposed a novel characterisation technique based on the cross-relation method of blind deconvolution applied to the output of two thermocouples simultaneously measuring the same temperature. This offers a number of advantages over competing methods including low estimation variance and no need for a priori knowledge of the time constant ratio. A weakness of the proposed method is that it yields biased estimates in the presence of measurement noise. In this paper we propose the inclusion of a signal conditioning step in the characterisation algorithm to improve the robustness to noise. The enhanced performance of the resulting algorithm is demonstrated using both simulated and experimental data

Epigenetic aging signatures in mice livers are slowed by dwarfism, calorie restriction and rapamycin treatment

Background: Global but predictable changes impact the DNA methylome as we age, acting as a type of molecular clock. This clock can be hastened by conditions that decrease lifespan, raising the question of whether it can also be slowed, for example, by conditions that increase lifespan. Mice are particularly appealing organisms for studies of mammalian aging; however, epigenetic clocks have thus far been formulated only in humans. Results: We first examined whether mice and humans experience similar patterns of change in the methylome with age. We found moderate conservation of CpG sites for which methylation is altered with age, with both species showing an increase in methylome disorder during aging. Based on this analysis, we formulated an epigenetic-aging model in mice using the liver methylomes of 107 mice from 0.2 to 26.0 months old. To examine whether epigenetic aging signatures are slowed by longevity-promoting interventions, we analyzed 28 additional methylomes from mice subjected to lifespan-extending conditions, including Prop1df/df dwarfism, calorie restriction or dietary rapamycin. We found that mice treated with these lifespan-extending interventions were significantly younger in epigenetic age than their untreated, wild-type age-matched controls. Conclusions: This study shows that lifespan-extending conditions can slow molecular changes associated with an epigenetic clock in mice livers

Arabidopsis nucleolar protein database (AtNoPDB)

The Arabidopsis Nucleolar Protein Database (http://bioinf.scri.sari.ac.uk/cgi-bin/atnopdb/home) provides information on 217 proteins identified in a proteomic analysis of nucleoli isolated from Arabidopsis cell culture. The database is organized on the basis of the Arabidopsis gene identifier number. The information provided includes protein description, protein class, whether or not the plant protein has a homologue in the most recent human nucleolar proteome and the results of reciprocal BLAST analysis of the human proteome. In addition, for one-third of the 217 Arabidopsis nucleolar proteins, localization images are available from analysis of full-length cDNA–green fluorescent protein (GFP) fusions and the strength of signal in different parts of the cell—nucleolus, nucleolus-associated structures, nucleoplasm, nuclear bodies and extra-nuclear—is provided. For each protein, the most likely human and yeast orthologues, where identifiable through BLASTX analysis, are given with links to relevant information sources

Tiresias: Predicting Security Events Through Deep Learning

With the increased complexity of modern computer attacks, there is a need for defenders not only to detect malicious activity as it happens, but also to predict the specific steps that will be taken by an adversary when performing an attack. However this is still an open research problem, and previous research in predicting malicious events only looked at binary outcomes (e.g., whether an attack would happen or not), but not at the specific steps that an attacker would undertake. To fill this gap we present Tiresias, a system that leverages Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to predict future events on a machine, based on previous observations. We test Tiresias on a dataset of 3.4 billion security events collected from a commercial intrusion prevention system, and show that our approach is effective in predicting the next event that will occur on a machine with a precision of up to 0.93. We also show that the models learned by Tiresias are reasonably stable over time, and provide a mechanism that can identify sudden drops in precision and trigger a retraining of the system. Finally, we show that the long-term memory typical of RNNs is key in performing event prediction, rendering simpler methods not up to the task

Spectroscopy of resonance decays in high-energy heavy-ion collisions

Invariant mass distributions of the hadronic decay products from resonances formed in relativistic heavy ion collision (RHIC) experiments are investigated with a view to disentangle the effects of thermal motion and the phase space of decay products from those of intrinsic changes in the structure of resonances at the freeze-out conditions. Analytic results of peak mass shifts for the cases of both equal and unequal mass decay products are derived. The shift is expressed in terms of the peak mass and width of the vacuum or medium-modified spectral functions and temperature. Examples of expected shifts in meson (e.g., rho, omega, and sigma) and baryon (e.g., Delta) resonances that are helpful to interpret recent RHIC measurements at BNL are provided. Although significant downward mass shifts are caused by widened widths of the $\rho-$meson in medium, a downward shift of at least 50 MeV in its intrinsic mass is required to account for the reported downward shift of 60-70 MeV in the peak of the rho-invariant mass distribution. An observed downward shift from the vacuum peak value of the Delta distinctively signals a significant downward shift in its intrinsic peak mass, since unlike for the rho-meson, phase space functions produce an upward shift for the Delta isobar.Comment: published version with slight change of title and some typos corrected, 12 pages, 5 figure

Flexible Lipid Bilayers in Implicit Solvent

A minimalist simulation model for lipid bilayers is presented. Each lipid is represented by a flexible chain of beads in implicit solvent. The hydrophobic effect is mimicked through an intermolecular pair potential localized at the ``water''/hydrocarbon tail interface. This potential guarantees realistic interfacial tensions for lipids in a bilayer geometry. Lipids self assemble into bilayer structures that display fluidity and elastic properties consistent with experimental model membrane systems. Varying molecular flexibility allows for tuning of elastic moduli and area/molecule over a range of values seen in experimental systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure