High-strength tungsten alloy with improved ductility

Alloy combines superior strength at elevated temperatures with improved ductility at lower temperatures relative to unalloyed tungsten. Composed of tungsten, rhenium, hafnium, and carbon, the alloy is prepared by consumable electrode vacuum arc-melting and can be fabricated into rod, plate, and sheet

Causal Consistency of Structural Equation Models

Complex systems can be modelled at various levels of detail. Ideally, causal models of the same system should be consistent with one another in the sense that they agree in their predictions of the effects of interventions. We formalise this notion of consistency in the case of Structural Equation Models (SEMs) by introducing exact transformations between SEMs. This provides a general language to consider, for instance, the different levels of description in the following three scenarios: (a) models with large numbers of variables versus models in which the `irrelevant' or unobservable variables have been marginalised out; (b) micro-level models versus macro-level models in which the macro-variables are aggregate features of the micro-variables; (c) dynamical time series models versus models of their stationary behaviour. Our analysis stresses the importance of well specified interventions in the causal modelling process and sheds light on the interpretation of cyclic SEMs.Comment: equal contribution between Rubenstein and Weichwald; accepted manuscrip

Unfolding cross-linkers as rheology regulators in F-actin networks

We report on the nonlinear mechanical properties of a statistically homogeneous, isotropic semiflexible network cross-linked by polymers containing numerous small unfolding domains, such as the ubiquitous F-actin cross-linker Filamin. We show that the inclusion of such proteins has a dramatic effect on the large strain behavior of the network. Beyond a strain threshold, which depends on network density, the unfolding of protein domains leads to bulk shear softening. Past this critical strain, the network spontaneously organizes itself so that an appreciable fraction of the Filamin cross-linkers are at the threshold of domain unfolding. We discuss via a simple mean-field model the cause of this network organization and suggest that it may be the source of power-law relaxation observed in in vitro and in intracellular microrheology experiments. We present data which fully justifies our model for a simplified network architecture.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures. to appear in Physical Review

Coupled dynamics of voltage and calcium in paced cardiac cells

We investigate numerically and analytically the coupled dynamics of transmembrane voltage and intracellular calcium cycling in paced cardiac cells using a detailed physiological model and its reduction to a three-dimensional discrete map. The results provide a theoretical framework to interpret various experimentally observed modes of instability ranging from electromechanically concordant and discordant alternans to quasiperiodic oscillations of voltage and calcium

Comparative Monte Carlo Efficiency by Monte Carlo Analysis

We propose a modified power method for computing the subdominant eigenvalue $\lambda_2$ of a matrix or continuous operator. Here we focus on defining simple Monte Carlo methods for its application. The methods presented use random walkers of mixed signs to represent the subdominant eigenfuction. Accordingly, the methods must cancel these signs properly in order to sample this eigenfunction faithfully. We present a simple procedure to solve this sign problem and then test our Monte Carlo methods by computing the $\lambda_2$ of various Markov chain transition matrices. We first computed ${\lambda_2}$ for several one and two dimensional Ising models, which have a discrete phase space, and compared the relative efficiencies of the Metropolis and heat-bath algorithms as a function of temperature and applied magnetic field. Next, we computed $\lambda_2$ for a model of an interacting gas trapped by a harmonic potential, which has a mutidimensional continuous phase space, and studied the efficiency of the Metropolis algorithm as a function of temperature and the maximum allowable step size $\Delta$. Based on the $\lambda_2$ criterion, we found for the Ising models that small lattices appear to give an adequate picture of comparative efficiency and that the heat-bath algorithm is more efficient than the Metropolis algorithm only at low temperatures where both algorithms are inefficient. For the harmonic trap problem, we found that the traditional rule-of-thumb of adjusting $\Delta$ so the Metropolis acceptance rate is around 50% range is often sub-optimal. In general, as a function of temperature or $\Delta$, $\lambda_2$ for this model displayed trends defining optimal efficiency that the acceptance ratio does not. The cases studied also suggested that Monte Carlo simulations for a continuum model are likely more efficient than those for a discretized version of the model.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure

Indeterminacy of Spatiotemporal Cardiac Alternans

Cardiac alternans, a beat-to-beat alternation in action potential duration (at the cellular level) or in ECG morphology (at the whole heart level), is a marker of ventricular fibrillation, a fatal heart rhythm that kills hundreds of thousands of people in the US each year. Investigating cardiac alternans may lead to a better understanding of the mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmias and eventually better algorithms for the prediction and prevention of such dreadful diseases. In paced cardiac tissue, alternans develops under increasingly shorter pacing period. Existing experimental and theoretical studies adopt the assumption that alternans in homogeneous cardiac tissue is exclusively determined by the pacing period. In contrast, we find that, when calcium-driven alternans develops in cardiac fibers, it may take different spatiotemporal patterns depending on the pacing history. Because there coexist multiple alternans solutions for a given pacing period, the alternans pattern on a fiber becomes unpredictable. Using numerical simulation and theoretical analysis, we show that the coexistence of multiple alternans patterns is induced by the interaction between electrotonic coupling and an instability in calcium cycling.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Incompatibility of the Digital Economy Act 2010 subscriber appeal process provisions with Article 6 of the ECHR

This is the accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Review of Law, Computers and Technology on 10 January 2014. The version of record [Romero-Moreno, F. (2014) Incompatibility of the Digital Economy Act 2010 subscriber appeal process provisions with Article 6 of the ECHR', International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 28(1): 81-97, first published on line January 10, 2014] is available online via doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2013.869912Through case-law research, this paper critically assesses the compatibility of the Digital Economy Act 2010 (DEA) subscriber appeal process provisions (Section 13 of the DEA) with Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Drawing on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case-law, Ofcom's Initial Obligations Code (the Code), and the DEA judicial review decision, namely, BT PLC and Talk Talk PLC v Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills and others, this paper focuses on the three Strasbourg Court principles of equality of arms, admissibility of evidence, and presumption of innocence, in an effort to determine whether Section 13 of the DEA infringes them, and whether this constitutes a breach of a subscriber's right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the ECHR. The paper examines these three ECtHR principles. It contrasts such principles with the Code's provisions, and considers the compatibility of Section 13 of the DEA with Article 6 of the ECHR. It concludes that the DEA subscriber appeal process provisions do indeed infringe these principles, thus constituting a violation of subscribers' right to a fair trial. It also recommends that the UK government start taking seriously human rights in general, and Article 6 of the ECHR in particular.Peer reviewe

Word Embeddings for Entity-annotated Texts

Learned vector representations of words are useful tools for many information retrieval and natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture lexical semantics. However, while many such tasks involve or even rely on named entities as central components, popular word embedding models have so far failed to include entities as first-class citizens. While it seems intuitive that annotating named entities in the training corpus should result in more intelligent word features for downstream tasks, performance issues arise when popular embedding approaches are naively applied to entity annotated corpora. Not only are the resulting entity embeddings less useful than expected, but one also finds that the performance of the non-entity word embeddings degrades in comparison to those trained on the raw, unannotated corpus. In this paper, we investigate approaches to jointly train word and entity embeddings on a large corpus with automatically annotated and linked entities. We discuss two distinct approaches to the generation of such embeddings, namely the training of state-of-the-art embeddings on raw-text and annotated versions of the corpus, as well as node embeddings of a co-occurrence graph representation of the annotated corpus. We compare the performance of annotated embeddings and classical word embeddings on a variety of word similarity, analogy, and clustering evaluation tasks, and investigate their performance in entity-specific tasks. Our findings show that it takes more than training popular word embedding models on an annotated corpus to create entity embeddings with acceptable performance on common test cases. Based on these results, we discuss how and when node embeddings of the co-occurrence graph representation of the text can restore the performance.Comment: This paper is accepted in 41st European Conference on Information Retrieva