91,850 research outputs found
Testing of a cascaded thermoelectric module Final report
Life testing of cascaded thermoelectric converter, and coolant pump failur
Emergence of highly-designable protein-backbone conformations in an off-lattice model
Despite the variety of protein sizes, shapes, and backbone configurations
found in nature, the design of novel protein folds remains an open problem.
Within simple lattice models it has been shown that all structures are not
equally suitable for design. Rather, certain structures are distinguished by
unusually high designability: the number of amino-acid sequences for which they
represent the unique ground state; sequences associated with such structures
possess both robustness to mutation and thermodynamic stability. Here we report
that highly designable backbone conformations also emerge in a realistic
off-lattice model. The highly designable conformations of a chain of 23 amino
acids are identified, and found to be remarkably insensitive to model
parameters. While some of these conformations correspond closely to known
natural protein folds, such as the zinc finger and the helix-turn-helix motifs,
others do not resemble known folds and may be candidates for novel fold design.Comment: 7 figure
Pass-Through And The Prediction Of Merger Price Effects
We use Monte Carlo experiments to study how pass-through can improve merger price predictions, focusing on the first order approximation (FOA) proposed in Jaffe and Weyl [2013]. FOA addresses the functional form misspecification that can exist in standard merger simulations. We find that the predictions of FOA are tightly distributed around the true price effects if pass-through is precise, but that measurement error in pass-through diminishes accuracy. As a comparison to FOA, we also study a methodology that uses pass-through to select among functional forms for use in simulation. This alternative also increases accuracy relative to standard merger simulation and proves more robust to measurement error
Upward Pricing Pressure As A Predictor Of Merger Price Effects
We use Monte Carlo experiments to evaluate whether “upward pricing pressure” (UPP) accurately predicts the price effects of mergers, motivated by the observation that UPP is a restricted form of the first order approximation derived in Jaffe and Weyl (2013). Results indicate that UPP is quite accurate with standard log-concave demand systems, but understates price effects if demand exhibits greater convexity. Prediction error does not systematically exceed that of misspecified simulation models, nor is it much greater than that of correctly-specified models simulated with imprecise demand elasticities. The results also support that UPP provides accurate screens for anticompetitive mergers
Verifying black hole orbits with gravitational spectroscopy
Gravitational waves from test masses bound to geodesic orbits of rotating
black holes are simulated, using Teukolsky's black hole perturbation formalism,
for about ten thousand generic orbital configurations. Each binary radiates
power exclusively in modes with frequencies that are
integer-linear-combinations of the orbit's three fundamental frequencies. The
following general spectral properties are found with a survey of orbits: (i)
99% of the radiated power is typically carried by a few hundred modes, and at
most by about a thousand modes, (ii) the dominant frequencies can be grouped
into a small number of families defined by fixing two of the three integer
frequency multipliers, and (iii) the specifics of these trends can be
qualitatively inferred from the geometry of the orbit under consideration.
Detections using triperiodic analytic templates modeled on these general
properties would constitute a verification of radiation from an adiabatic
sequence of black hole orbits and would recover the evolution of the
fundamental orbital frequencies. In an analogy with ordinary spectroscopy, this
would compare to observing the Bohr model's atomic hydrogen spectrum without
being able to rule out alternative atomic theories or nuclei. The suitability
of such a detection technique is demonstrated using snapshots computed at
12-hour intervals throughout the last three years before merger of a kludged
inspiral. Because of circularization, the number of excited modes decreases as
the binary evolves. A hypothetical detection algorithm that tracks mode
families dominating the first 12 hours of the inspiral would capture 98% of the
total power over the remaining three years.Comment: 18 pages, expanded section on detection algorithms and made minor
edits. Final published versio
Type-Constrained Representation Learning in Knowledge Graphs
Large knowledge graphs increasingly add value to various applications that
require machines to recognize and understand queries and their semantics, as in
search or question answering systems. Latent variable models have increasingly
gained attention for the statistical modeling of knowledge graphs, showing
promising results in tasks related to knowledge graph completion and cleaning.
Besides storing facts about the world, schema-based knowledge graphs are backed
by rich semantic descriptions of entities and relation-types that allow
machines to understand the notion of things and their semantic relationships.
In this work, we study how type-constraints can generally support the
statistical modeling with latent variable models. More precisely, we integrated
prior knowledge in form of type-constraints in various state of the art latent
variable approaches. Our experimental results show that prior knowledge on
relation-types significantly improves these models up to 77% in link-prediction
tasks. The achieved improvements are especially prominent when a low model
complexity is enforced, a crucial requirement when these models are applied to
very large datasets. Unfortunately, type-constraints are neither always
available nor always complete e.g., they can become fuzzy when entities lack
proper typing. We show that in these cases, it can be beneficial to apply a
local closed-world assumption that approximates the semantics of relation-types
based on observations made in the data
Grain opacity and the bulk composition of extrasolar planets. I. Results from scaling the ISM opacity
The opacity due to grains in the envelope of a protoplanet regulates the
accretion rate of gas during formation, thus the final bulk composition of
planets with primordial H/He is a function of it. Observationally, for
exoplanets with known mass and radius it is possible to estimate the bulk
composition via internal structure models. We first determine the reduction
factor of the ISM grain opacity f_opa that leads to gas accretion rates
consistent with grain evolution models. We then compare the bulk composition of
synthetic low-mass and giant planets at different f_opa with observations. For
f_opa=1 (full ISM opacity) the synthetic low-mass planets have too small radii,
i.e., too low envelope masses compared to observations. At f_opa=0.003, the
value calibrated with the grain evolution models, synthetic and actual planets
occupy similar mass-radius loci. The mean enrichment of giant planets relative
to the host star as a function of planet mass M can be approximated as
Z_p/Z_star = beta*(M/M_Jup)^alpha. We find alpha=-0.7 independent of f_opa in
synthetic populations in agreement with the observational result (-0.71+-0.10).
The absolute enrichment level decreases from beta=8.5 at f_opa=1 to 3.5 at
f_opa=0. At f_opa=0.003 one finds beta=7.2 which is similar to the
observational result (6.3+-1.0). We thus find observational hints that the
opacity in protoplanetary atmospheres is much smaller than in the ISM even if
the specific value of the grain opacity cannot be constrained here. The result
for the enrichment of giant planets helps to distinguish core accretion and
gravitational instability. In the simplest picture of core accretion where
first a critical core forms and afterwards only gas is added, alpha=-1. If a
core accretes all planetesimals inside the feeding zone, alpha=-2/3. The
observational result lies between these values, pointing to core accretion as
the formation mechanism.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for A&
A short note on the presence of spurious states in finite basis approximations
The genesis of spurious solutions in finite basis approximations to operators
which possess a continuum and a point spectrum is discussed and a simple
solution for identifying these solutions is suggested
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