Copyright Tensions in a Digital Age

The rapid and exponential expansion of our ability to duplicate and disseminate information by digital means has rejuvenated inherent tensions in the law pertaining to copyright and has created some new ones. Not since the advent of radio in the early 1900s have such tensions come so squarely into focus. Even though courts are rarely, if ever, called upon to address certain of these tensions since the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, they are being called upon to do so no

Frio pilot in CO2 sequestration in brine-bearing sandstones: The University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology, report to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to accompany a class V application for an experimental technology pilot injection well.

GEOSEQ project (LBNL, LLNL, ORNL), NETL, Schlumberger–Doll Research Center, Transpetco, Sandia TechnologiesJackson School of Geoscience

When Do People Trust Their Social Groups?

Trust facilitates cooperation and supports positive outcomes in social groups, including member satisfaction, information sharing, and task performance. Extensive prior research has examined individuals' general propensity to trust, as well as the factors that contribute to their trust in specific groups. Here, we build on past work to present a comprehensive framework for predicting trust in groups. By surveying 6,383 Facebook Groups users about their trust attitudes and examining aggregated behavioral and demographic data for these individuals, we show that (1) an individual's propensity to trust is associated with how they trust their groups, (2) smaller, closed, older, more exclusive, or more homogeneous groups are trusted more, and (3) a group's overall friendship-network structure and an individual's position within that structure can also predict trust. Last, we demonstrate how group trust predicts outcomes at both individual and group level such as the formation of new friendship ties.Comment: CHI 201

Experimental evidence for the influence of structure and meaning on linear order in the noun phrase

Recent work has used artificial language experiments to argue that hierarchical representations drive learners’ expectations about word order in complex noun phrases like these two green cars (Culbertson & Adger 2014; Martin, Ratitamkul, et al. 2019). When trained on a novel language in which individual modifiers come after the Noun, English speakers overwhelmingly assume that multiple nominal modifiers should be ordered such that Adjectives come closest to the Noun, then Numerals, then Demonstratives (i.e., N-Adj-Num-Dem or some subset thereof). This order transparently reflects a constituent structure in which Adjectives combine with Nouns to the exclusion of Numerals and Demonstratives, and Numerals combine with Noun+Adjective units to the exclusion of Demonstratives. This structure has also been claimed to derive frequency asymmetries in complex noun phrase order across languages (e.g., Cinque 2005). However, we show that features of the methodology used in these experiments potentially encourage participants to use a particular metalinguistic strategy that could yield this outcome without implicating constituency structure. Here, we use a more naturalistic artificial language learning task to investigate whether the preference for hierarchy-respecting orders is still found when participants do not use this strategy. We find that the preference still holds, and, moreover, as Culbertson & Adger (2014) speculate, that its strength reflects structural distance between modifiers. It is strongest when ordering Adjectives relative to Demonstratives, and weaker when ordering Numerals relative to Adjectives or Demonstratives relative to Numerals. Our results provide the strongest evidence yet for the psychological influence of hierarchical structure on word order preferences during learning

The short memory limit for long time statistics in a stochastic Coleman-Gurtin model of heat conduction

We study a class of semi-linear differential Volterra equations with polynomial-type potentials that incorporates the effects of memory while being subjected to random perturbations via an additive Gaussian noise. We show that for a broad class of non-linear potentials and sufficiently regular noise the system always admits invariant probability measures, defined on the extended phase space, that possess higher regularity properties dictated by the structure of the nonlinearities in the equation. Furthermore, we investigate the singular limit as the memory kernel collapses to a Dirac function. Specifically, provided sufficiently many directions in the phase space are stochastically forced, we show that there is a unique stationary measure to which the system converges, in a suitable Wasserstein distance, at exponential rates independent of the decay of the memory kernel. We then prove the convergence of the statistically steady states to the unique invariant probability of the classical stochastic reaction-diffusion equation in the desired singular limit. As a consequence, we establish the validity of the small memory approximation for solutions on the infinite time horizon $[0,\infty)$

Identification of a novel picornavirus related to cosaviruses in a child with acute diarrhea

Diarrhea, the third leading infectious cause of death worldwide, causes approximately 2 million deaths a year. Approximately 40% of these cases are of unknown etiology. We previously developed a metagenomic strategy for identification of novel viruses from diarrhea samples. By applying mass sequencing to a stool sample collected in Melbourne, Australia from a child with acute diarrhea, one 395 bp sequence read was identified that possessed only limited identity to known picornaviruses. This initial fragment shared only 55% amino acid identity to its top BLAST hit, the VP3 protein of Theiler's-like virus, suggesting that a novel picornavirus might be present in this sample. By using a combination of mass sequencing, RT-PCR, 5' RACE and 3' RACE, 6562 bp of the viral genome was sequenced, which includes the entire putative polyprotein. The overall genomic organization of this virus was similar to known picornaviruses. Phylogenetic analysis of the polyprotein demonstrated that the virus was divergent from previously described picornaviruses and appears to belong to the newly proposed picornavirus genus, Cosavirus. Based on the analysis discussed here, we propose that this virus represents a new species in the Cosavirus genus, and it has tentatively been named Human Cosavirus E1 (HCoSV-E1)

Enhancement of the Binding Energy of Charged Excitons in Disordered Quantum Wires

Negatively and positively charged excitons are identified in the spatially-resolved photoluminescence spectra of quantum wires. We demonstrate that charged excitons are weakly localized in disordered quantum wires. As a consequence, the enhancement of the "binding energy" of a charged exciton is caused, for a significant part, by the recoil energy transferred to the remaining charged carrier during its radiative recombination. We discover that the Coulomb correlation energy is not the sole origin of the "binding energy", in contrast to charged excitons confined in quantum dots.Comment: 4 Fig