Review of: Nick Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality. Formalism and the Limits of Description, Routledge, 2015,

Review of: Nick Zangwill, Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of Descriptio

Helicity fractions of W bosons from top quark decays at NNLO in QCD

Decay rates of unpolarized top quarks into longitudinally and transversally polarized W bosons are calculated to second order in the strong coupling constant alpha_s. Including the finite bottom quark mass and electroweak effects, the Standard Model predictions for the W boson helicity fractions are F_L=0.687(5), F_+=0.0017(1), and F_-=0.311(5).Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

The fully automated construction of metabolic pathways using text mining and knowledge-based constraints

Understanding metabolic pathways is one of the most important fields in bioscience in the post-genomic era, but curating metabolic pathways requires considerable man-power. As such there is a lack of reliable experimentally verified metabolic pathways in databases and databases are forced to predict all but the most immediately useful pathways by inheriting annotations from other organisms where the pathway has been curated. Due to the lack of curated data there has been no large scale study to assess the accuracy of current methods for inheriting metabolic pathway annotations. In this thesis I describe the development of the Literature Metabolic Pathway Extraction Tool (LiMPET), a text-mining tool designed for the automated extraction of metabolic pathways from article abstracts and full-text open-access articles. I propose the use of LiMPET by metabolic pathway curators to increase the rate of curation and by individual researchers interested in a particular pathway. The mining of metabolic pathways from the literature has been largely neglected by the textmining community. The work described in this thesis shows the tractability of the problem, however, and it is my hope that it attracts more research into the area

A text-mining system for extracting metabolic reactions from full-text articles

Background: Increasingly biological text mining research is focusing on the extraction of complex relationships relevant to the construction and curation of biological networks and pathways. However, one important category of pathway—metabolic pathways—has been largely neglected. Here we present a relatively simple method for extracting metabolic reaction information from free text that scores different permutations of assigned entities (enzymes and metabolites) within a given sentence based on the presence and location of stemmed keywords. This method extends an approach that has proved effective in the context of the extraction of protein–protein interactions. Results: When evaluated on a set of manually-curated metabolic pathways using standard performance criteria, our method performs surprisingly well. Precision and recall rates are comparable to those previously achieved for the well-known protein-protein interaction extraction task. Conclusions: We conclude that automated metabolic pathway construction is more tractable than has often been assumed, and that (as in the case of protein–protein interaction extraction) relatively simple text-mining approaches can prove surprisingly effective. It is hoped that these results will provide an impetus to further research and act as a useful benchmark for judging the performance of more sophisticated methods that are yet to be developed

Semileptonic decays in the limit of a heavy daughter quark

The rate of the semileptonic decay b to c l v is calculated with order alphas^2 accuracy, as an expansion around the limit of equal masses of the b and c quarks. Recent results obtained around the limit of the c-quark much lighter than b are confirmed. Details of the new expansion method are described.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Radiative-nonrecoil corrections of order alpha^2 (Z alpha) E_F to the hyperfine splitting of muonium

We present results for the corrections of order alpha^2 (Z alpha) E_F to the hyperfine splitting of muonium. We compute all the contributing Feynman diagrams in dimensional regularization and a general covariant gauge using a mixture of analytical and numerical methods. We improve the precision of previous results.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; v2: corrected several typos and replaced figure 3, final results and conclusions unchange