Enjambment – Irony, Wit, Emotion. A Case Study Suggesting Wider Principles

This study submits to empirical investigation an old idea of Tsur’s regarding the effect of enjambment on the perceived subtleness of irony in a poetic passage. We submitted two versions of a Milton passage to over 50 participants with “background in literary studies”, ranging from undergraduates to tenured professors, asking them to rate the perceived subtleness of irony and forthrightness of expression. We received four incompatible combinations of relative subtleness and forthrightness in the two passages. Two of the combinations were logically reasonable (though resulting from opposite performances), and two were internally inconsistent. An analysis of these results revealed two sources of this discrepancy: enjambments can be performed in three different ways, and participants respond not to abstract enjambments, but to performed enjambments; and they act upon partly overlapping definitions of irony. Assuming different performances of the enjambment, both logically acceptable response patterns support our hypothesis. Yet, a large part of the responses in this study were incoherent to some extent. This highlights the difficulty in collecting subjective interpretations of complex aesthetic events. We discuss this methodological issue at length

The Tone of Management Forward Looking Statements and Asymmetric Cost Behavior

The documentation of asymmetric cost behavior in response to changes in demand has attracted much scholarly attention over the past decade. Most studies propose that this cost asymmetry is due to the influence of management expectations on their deliberate resource allocation decisions. This study examines empirically the effect of management expectations on cost asymmetry, and, principally, the tension between these expectation-based decisions and constrains imposed on these decisions by two economic drivers of the cost asymmetry — the availability of initial slack resources and adjustment costs. Using the tone in the forward-looking statements (FLS) of a sample of 10-K reports as a measure of management expectations, we document a positive and significant relation between the favorableness of management FLS tone and the degree of cost stickiness. Furthermore, we demonstrate that managers’ expectation-driven decisions can reverse the previously documented anti-sticky cost behavior imposed by high slack resources. Notably, we find the impact of management expectations on the degree of cost asymmetry is strongest when both the initial amount of slack resources and the magnitude of the adjustment costs are high. Conversely, when both the magnitude of the adjustment costs and the initial amount of slack resource are low, management expectations have no impact on the degree of cost asymmetry. Our combined evidence supports the theoretical explanation in the literature that management expectations influence their resource allocation decisions, and indicates that other economic determinants may need to be considered when assessing the impact of these decisions on a firm’s cost structure.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116063/8/SSRN-id2684164.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116063/6/1292_Lehavy_Sept2016.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116063/4/1292_Lehavy_May2016.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116063/1/1292_Lehavy.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116063/9/1292_Lehavy_Mar2017.pdfDescription of 1292_Lehavy_Sept2016.pdf : SUPERSEDED: September 2016 revisionDescription of 1292_Lehavy_May2016.pdf : SUPERSEDED: May 2016 RevisionDescription of 1292_Lehavy.pdf : SUPERSEDE

Radiation-induced growth and isothermal decay of infrared-stimulated luminescence from feldspar

Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages can determine a wide range of geological events or processes, such as the timing of sediment deposition, the exposure duration of a rock surface, or the cooling rate of bedrock. The accuracy of OSL dating critically depends on our capability to describe the growth and decay of laboratory-regenerated luminescence signals. Here we review a selection of common models describing the response of infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) of feldspar to constant radiation and temperature as administered in the laboratory. We use this opportunity to introduce a general-order kinetic model that successfully captures the behaviour of different materials and experimental conditions with a minimum of model parameters, and thus appears suitable for future application and validation in natural environments. Finally, we evaluate all the presented models by their ability to accurately describe a recently published feldspar multi-elevated temperature post-IR IRSL (MET-pIRIR) dataset, and highlight each model's strengths and shortfalls

Percolation theory applied to measures of fragmentation in social networks

We apply percolation theory to a recently proposed measure of fragmentation $F$ for social networks. The measure $F$ is defined as the ratio between the number of pairs of nodes that are not connected in the fragmented network after removing a fraction $q$ of nodes and the total number of pairs in the original fully connected network. We compare $F$ with the traditional measure used in percolation theory, $P_{\infty}$, the fraction of nodes in the largest cluster relative to the total number of nodes. Using both analytical and numerical methods from percolation, we study Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi (ER) and scale-free (SF) networks under various types of node removal strategies. The removal strategies are: random removal, high degree removal and high betweenness centrality removal. We find that for a network obtained after removal (all strategies) of a fraction $q$ of nodes above percolation threshold, $P_{\infty}\approx (1-F)^{1/2}$. For fixed $P_{\infty}$ and close to percolation threshold ($q=q_c$), we show that $1-F$ better reflects the actual fragmentation. Close to $q_c$, for a given $P_{\infty}$, $1-F$ has a broad distribution and it is thus possible to improve the fragmentation of the network. We also study and compare the fragmentation measure $F$ and the percolation measure $P_{\infty}$ for a real social network of workplaces linked by the households of the employees and find similar results.Comment: submitted to PR

An analysis of the Brown-Biefeld effect

When a high voltage is applied on an asymmetric capacitor, it experiences a force acting toward its thinner electrode. This effect is called Brown-Biefeld effect (BB), after its discoverers Thomas-Townsend Brown and Paul-Alfred Biefeld. Many theories have been proposed to explain this effect, and many speculations can be found on the net suggesting the effect is an antigravitation or a space warp effect. However, in the recent years, more an more researchers attribute the BB effect to a unicharge ion wind. This work calculates the levitation force due to ion wind and presents experimental results which confirm the theoretical results.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure

Presentation Mode of Glycans Affect Recognition of Human Serum anti-Neu5Gc IgG Antibodies

Recognition of carbohydrates by antibodies can be affected by antigen composition and density. This had been investigated in a variety of controllable multivalent systems using synthetic carbohydrate antigens, yet such effects on anticarbohydrate antibodies in circulating human serum have not been fully addressed thus far. All humans develop a polyclonal and diverse response against carbohydrates containing a nonhuman sialic acid form, N-glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc). This red meat-derived monosaccharide is incorporated into a diverse collection of human glycans resulting in circulating anti-Neu5Gc antibodies in human sera. Such antibodies can cause exacerbation of diseases mediated by chronic inflammation such as cancer and atherosclerosis. We aimed to evaluate how different presentation modes of Neu5Gc-glycans can affect the detection of anti-Neu5Gc IgGs in human serum. Here, we compare serum IgG recognition of Neu5Gc-containing glycoproteins, glycopeptides, and synthetic glycans. First, Neu5Gc-positive or Neu5Gc-deficient mouse strains were used to generate glycopeptides from serum glycoproteins. Then we developed a reproducible ELISA to screen human sera against Neu5Gc-positive glycopeptides for detection of human serum anti-Neu5Gc IgGs. Finally, we evaluated ELISA screens against glycopeptides in comparison with glycoproteins, as well as against elaborated arrays displaying synthetic Neu5Gc-glycans. Our results demonstrate that the presentation mode and diversity of Neu5Gc-glycans are critical for detection of the full collection of human serum anti-Neu5Gc IgGs

Optimal Path and Minimal Spanning Trees in Random Weighted Networks

We review results on the scaling of the optimal path length in random networks with weighted links or nodes. In strong disorder we find that the length of the optimal path increases dramatically compared to the known small world result for the minimum distance. For Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi (ER) and scale free networks (SF), with parameter $\lambda$ ($\lambda >3$), we find that the small-world nature is destroyed. We also find numerically that for weak disorder the length of the optimal path scales logaritmically with the size of the networks studied. We also review the transition between the strong and weak disorder regimes in the scaling properties of the length of the optimal path for ER and SF networks and for a general distribution of weights, and suggest that for any distribution of weigths, the distribution of optimal path lengths has a universal form which is controlled by the scaling parameter $Z=\ell_{\infty}/A$ where $A$ plays the role of the disorder strength, and $\ell_{\infty}$ is the length of the optimal path in strong disorder. The relation for $A$ is derived analytically and supported by numerical simulations. We then study the minimum spanning tree (MST) and show that it is composed of percolation clusters, which we regard as "super-nodes", connected by a scale-free tree. We furthermore show that the MST can be partitioned into two distinct components. One component the {\it superhighways}, for which the nodes with high centrality dominate, corresponds to the largest cluster at the percolation threshold which is a subset of the MST. In the other component, {\it roads}, low centrality nodes dominate. We demonstrate the significance identifying the superhighways by showing that one can improve significantly the global transport by improving a very small fraction of the network.Comment: review, accepted at IJB