494 research outputs found
Zone Determinant Expansions for Nuclear Lattice Simulations
We introduce a new approximation to nucleon matrix determinants that is
physically motivated by chiral effective theory. The method involves breaking
the lattice into spatial zones and expanding the determinant in powers of the
boundary hopping parameter.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, revtex4 (version to appear in PRC
Monte Carlo simulations of fluid vesicles with in plane orientational ordering
We present a method for simulating fluid vesicles with in-plane orientational
ordering. The method involves computation of local curvature tensor and
parallel transport of the orientational field on a randomly triangulated
surface. It is shown that the model reproduces the known equilibrium
conformation of fluid membranes and work well for a large range of bending
rigidities. Introduction of nematic ordering leads to stiffening of the
membrane. Nematic ordering can also result in anisotropic rigidity on the
surface leading to formation of membrane tubes.Comment: 11 Pages, 12 Figures, To appear in Phys. Rev.
Sustainable Occupational Safety and Health Interventions: A Study on the Factors for an Effective Design
Effective interventions are a priority in continuously changing occupational environments, particularly in
companies struggling to manage health and safety in the workplace. Practitioners may consider practical solutions
for Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) improvement as a panacea for all major problems. However, they
may overlook a range of other factors that affect the success of such solutions. The way in which a solution is
developed, designed, implemented, and evaluated determines its impact. Participatory interventions are one way
of ensuring better results. Consequently, this study proposes a way of establishing sustainable, effective, and
efficient interventions by defining the required processes and actively involving responsible actors (i.e., who,
when, and how).
A national OSH intervention for introducing a near-miss management system, funded by the Italian National
Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), is used as a reference because its development process
includes an accurate design stage. Based on this intervention, a multistep design process is built to answer how
(how the intervention will persist by defining the context, processes, and scenarios), who (who will be the
responsible actors actively participating), and when (when actors will be involved) questions.
The design process established for the intervention, although within a specific context, provides clues to
discriminant factors that would enable effectiveness in general interventions, and the proposed system for near-
miss management generates insights that may be generalizable to other OSH interventions developed in different
environments
A machine learning pipeline for discriminant pathways identification
Motivation: Identifying the molecular pathways more prone to disruption
during a pathological process is a key task in network medicine and, more in
general, in systems biology.
Results: In this work we propose a pipeline that couples a machine learning
solution for molecular profiling with a recent network comparison method. The
pipeline can identify changes occurring between specific sub-modules of
networks built in a case-control biomarker study, discriminating key groups of
genes whose interactions are modified by an underlying condition. The proposal
is independent from the classification algorithm used. Three applications on
genomewide data are presented regarding children susceptibility to air
pollution and two neurodegenerative diseases: Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Availability: Details about the software used for the experiments discussed
in this paper are provided in the Appendix
BDDC and FETI-DP under Minimalist Assumptions
The FETI-DP, BDDC and P-FETI-DP preconditioners are derived in a particulary
simple abstract form. It is shown that their properties can be obtained from
only on a very small set of algebraic assumptions. The presentation is purely
algebraic and it does not use any particular definition of method components,
such as substructures and coarse degrees of freedom. It is then shown that
P-FETI-DP and BDDC are in fact the same. The FETI-DP and the BDDC
preconditioned operators are of the same algebraic form, and the standard
condition number bound carries over to arbitrary abstract operators of this
form. The equality of eigenvalues of BDDC and FETI-DP also holds in the
minimalist abstract setting. The abstract framework is explained on a standard
substructuring example.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, also available at
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/ccm/reports
C24 Sphingolipids Govern the Transbilayer Asymmetry of Cholesterol and Lateral Organization of Model and Live-Cell Plasma Membranes
Mammalian sphingolipids, primarily with C24 or C16 acyl chains, reside in the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane. Curiously, little is known how C24 sphingolipids impact cholesterol and membrane microdomains. Here, we present evidence that C24 sphingomyelin, when placed in the outer leaflet, suppresses microdomains in giant unilamellar vesicles and also suppresses submicron domains in the plasma membrane of HeLa cells. Free energy calculations suggested that cholesterol has a preference for the inner leaflet if C24 sphingomyelin is in the outer leaflet. We indeed observe that cholesterol enriches in the inner leaflet (80%) if C24 sphingomyelin is in the outer leaflet. Similarly, cholesterol primarily resides in the cytoplasmic leaflet (80%) in the plasma membrane of human erythrocytes where C24 sphingolipids are naturally abundant in the outer leaflet. We conclude that C24 sphingomyelin uniquely interacts with cholesterol and regulates the lateral organization in asymmetric membranes, potentially by generating cholesterol asymmetry
Secure multiparty PageRank algorithm for collaborative fraud detection
Collaboration between financial institutions helps to improve detection of fraud. However, exchange of relevant data between these institutions is often not possible due to privacy constraints and data confidentiality. An important example of relevant data for fraud detection is given by a transaction graph, where the nodes represent bank accounts and the links consist of the transactions between these accounts. Previous works show that features derived from such graphs, like PageRank, can be used to improve fraud detection. However, each institution can only see a part of the whole transaction graph, corresponding to the accounts of its own customers. In this research a new method is described, making use of secure multiparty computation (MPC) techniques, allowing multiple parties to jointly compute the PageRank values of their combined transaction graphs securely, while guaranteeing that each party only learns the PageRank values of its own accounts and nothing about the other transaction graphs. In our experiments this method is applied to graphs containing up to tens of thousands of nodes. The execution time scales linearly with the number of nodes, and the method is highly parallelizable. Secure multiparty PageRank is feasible in a realistic setting with millions of nodes per party by extrapolating the results from our experiments
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