831 research outputs found
Data Portraits and Intermediary Topics: Encouraging Exploration of Politically Diverse Profiles
In micro-blogging platforms, people connect and interact with others.
However, due to cognitive biases, they tend to interact with like-minded people
and read agreeable information only. Many efforts to make people connect with
those who think differently have not worked well. In this paper, we
hypothesize, first, that previous approaches have not worked because they have
been direct -- they have tried to explicitly connect people with those having
opposing views on sensitive issues. Second, that neither recommendation or
presentation of information by themselves are enough to encourage behavioral
change. We propose a platform that mixes a recommender algorithm and a
visualization-based user interface to explore recommendations. It recommends
politically diverse profiles in terms of distance of latent topics, and
displays those recommendations in a visual representation of each user's
personal content. We performed an "in the wild" evaluation of this platform,
and found that people explored more recommendations when using a biased
algorithm instead of ours. In line with our hypothesis, we also found that the
mixture of our recommender algorithm and our user interface, allowed
politically interested users to exhibit an unbiased exploration of the
recommended profiles. Finally, our results contribute insights in two aspects:
first, which individual differences are important when designing platforms
aimed at behavioral change; and second, which algorithms and user interfaces
should be mixed to help users avoid cognitive mechanisms that lead to biased
behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures. To be presented at ACM Intelligent User
Interfaces 201
On Varieties of Ordered Automata
The Eilenberg correspondence relates varieties of regular languages to
pseudovarieties of finite monoids. Various modifications of this correspondence
have been found with more general classes of regular languages on one hand and
classes of more complex algebraic structures on the other hand. It is also
possible to consider classes of automata instead of algebraic structures as a
natural counterpart of classes of languages. Here we deal with the
correspondence relating positive -varieties of languages to
positive -varieties of ordered automata and we present various
specific instances of this correspondence. These bring certain well-known
results from a new perspective and also some new observations. Moreover,
complexity aspects of the membership problem are discussed both in the
particular examples and in a general setting
Free profinite R-trivial, locally idempotent and locally commutative semigroups
This paper is concerned with the structure of implicit operations on R intersection with LJ1, the pseudovariety of all R-trivial, locally idempotent and locally commutative semigroups. We give a unique factorization statement, in terms of component projections and idempotent elements, for the implicit operations on R intersection with LJ1. As an application we give a combinatorial description of the languages that are both R-trivial and locally testable. A similar study is conducted for the pseudovariety DA intersection with LJ1 of locally idempotent and locally commutative semigroups in which each regular D-class is a rectangular band.INVOTAN, grant 4/ A/94/PO.PRC-GdR AM
An Essential Staphylococcus Aureus Cell Division Protein Directly Regulates FtsZ Dynamics
Binary fission has been well studied in rod-shaped bacteria, but the mechanisms underlying cell division in spherical bacteria are poorly understood. Rod-shaped bacteria harbor regulatory proteins that place and remodel the division machinery during cytokinesis. In the spherical human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, we found that the essential protein GpsB localizes to mid-cell during cell division and co-constricts with the division machinery. Depletion of GpsB arrested cell division and led to cell lysis, whereas overproduction of GpsB inhibited cell division and led to the formation of enlarged cells. We report that S. aureus GpsB, unlike other Firmicutes GpsB orthologs, directly interacts with the core divisome component FtsZ. GpsB bundles and organizes FtsZ filaments and also stimulates the GTPase activity of FtsZ. We propose that GpsB orchestrates the initial stabilization of the Z-ring at the onset of cell division and participates in the subsequent remodeling of the divisome during cytokinesis
Position Automaton Construction for Regular Expressions with Intersection
Positions and derivatives are two essential notions in the conversion methods from regular expressions to equivalent finite automata. Partial derivative based methods have recently been extended to regular expressions with intersection. In this paper, we present a position automaton construction for those expressions. This construction generalizes the notion of position making it compatible with intersection. The resulting automaton is homogeneous and has the partial derivative automaton as its quotient
Insulin-Insulin-like Growth Factors Hybrids as Molecular Probes of Hormone : Receptor Binding Specificity
Insulin, insulin-like growth factors 1 and 2 (IGF-1 and -2, respectively), and their receptors (IR and IGF-1R) are the key elements of a complex hormonal system that is essential for the development and functioning of humans. The C and D domains of IGFs (absent in insulin) likely play important roles in the differential binding of IGF-1 and -2 to IGF-1R and to the isoforms of IR (IR-A and IR-B) and specific activation of these receptors. Here, we attempted to probe the impact of IGF-1 and IGF-2 D domains (DI and DII, respectively) and the IGF-2 C domain (CII) on the receptor specificity of these hormones. For this, we made two types of insulin hybrid analogues: (i) with the C-terminus of the insulin A chain extended by the amino acids from the DI and DII domains and (ii) with the C-terminus of the insulin B chain extended by some amino acids derived from the CII domain. The receptor binding affinities of these analogues and their receptor autophosphorylation potentials were characterized. Our results indicate that the DI domain has a more negative impact than the DII domain does on binding to IR, and that the DI domain Pro-Leu-Lys residues are important factors for a different IR-A versus IR-B binding affinity of IGF-1. We also showed that the additions of amino acids that partially "mimic" the CII domain, to the C-terminus of the insulin B chain, change the binding and autophosphorylation specificity of insulin in favor of the "metabolic" IR-B isoform. This opens new venues for rational enhancement of insulin IR-B specificity by modifications beyond the C-terminus of its B chain
6U CubeSat deployable telescope for optical Earth observation and astronomical optical imaging
A search for interstellar anthracene toward the Perseus anomalous microwave emission region
We report the discovery of a new broad interstellar (or circumstellar) band
at 7088.8 +- 2.0 \AA coincident to within the measurement uncertainties with
the strongest band of the anthracene cation (CH) as measured
in gas-phase laboratory spectroscopy at low temperatures (Sukhorukov et
al.2004). The band is detected in the line of sight of star Cernis 52, a likely
member of the very young star cluster IC 348, and is probably associated with
cold absorbing material in a intervening molecular cloud of the Perseus star
forming region where various experiments have recently detected anomalous
microwave emission. From the measured intensity and available oscillator
strength we find a column density of N= 1.1(+-0.4) x 10
cm implying that ~0.008% of the carbon in the cloud could be in the form
of CH. A similar abundance has been recently claimed for the
naphthalene cation (Iglesias-Groth et al. 2008) in this cloud. This is the
first location outside the Solar System where specific PAHs are identified. We
report observations of interstellar lines of CH and CH that support a
rather high column density for these species and for molecular hydrogen. The
strength ratio of the two prominent diffuse interstellar bands at 5780 and 5797
\AA suggests the presence of a ``zeta'' type cloud in the line of sight
(consistent with steep far-UV extinction and high molecular content). The
presence of PAH cations and other related hydrogenated carbon molecules which
are likely to occur in this type of clouds reinforce the suggestion that
electric dipole radiation from fast spinning PAHs is responsible of the
anomalous microwave emission detected toward Perseus.Comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Societ
On the interplay between Babai and Černý’s conjectures
Motivated by the Babai conjecture and the Černý conjecture, we study the reset thresholds of automata with the transition monoid equal to the full monoid of transformations of the state set. For automata with n states in this class, we prove that the reset thresholds are upperbounded by 2n2 -6n + 5 and can attain the value (Formula presented). In addition, we study diameters of the pair digraphs of permutation automata and construct n-state permutation automata with diameter (formula presented). © Springer International Publishing AG 2017
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