Voting power measurement: a story of misreinvention

In this account of the history of voting-power measurement, we confine ourselves to the concept of a priori voting power. We show how the concept was re-invented several times and how the circumstances in which it was reinvented led to conceptual confusion as to the true meaning of what is being measured. In particular, power-as-influence was conflated with value in the sense of transferable utility cooperative game theory (power as share in constant total payoff). Influence was treated, improperly, as though it were transferable utility, and hence an additive and distributive quantity. We provide examples of the resulting misunderstanding and mis-directed criticism

Duality Invariant Actions and Generalised Geometry

We construct the non-linear realisation of the semi-direct product of E(11) and its first fundamental representation at lowest order and appropriate to spacetime dimensions four to seven. This leads to a non-linear realisation of the duality groups and introduces fields that depend on a generalised space which possess a generalised vielbein. We focus on the part of the generalised space on which the duality groups alone act and construct an invariant action.Comment: 59 pages (typos fixed and added comments

Gauss-Bonnet Black Holes and Heavy Fermion Metals

We consider charged black holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Gravity with Lifshitz boundary conditions. We find that this class of models can reproduce the anomalous specific heat of condensed matter systems exhibiting non-Fermi-liquid behaviour at low temperatures. We find that the temperature dependence of the Sommerfeld ratio is sensitive to the choice of Gauss-Bonnet coupling parameter for a given value of the Lifshitz scaling parameter. We propose that this class of models is dual to a class of models of non-Fermi-liquid systems proposed by Castro-Neto et.al.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, pdfLatex; small corrections to figure 10 in this versio

On Inflation with Non-minimal Coupling

A simple realization of inflation consists of adding the following operators to the Einstein-Hilbert action: (partial phi)^2, lambda phi^4, and xi phi^2 R, with xi a large non-minimal coupling. Recently there has been much discussion as to whether such theories make sense quantum mechanically and if the inflaton phi can also be the Standard Model Higgs. In this note we answer these questions. Firstly, for a single scalar phi, we show that the quantum field theory is well behaved in the pure gravity and kinetic sectors, since the quantum generated corrections are small. However, the theory likely breaks down at ~ m_pl / xi due to scattering provided by the self-interacting potential lambda phi^4. Secondly, we show that the theory changes for multiple scalars phi with non-minimal coupling xi phi dot phi R, since this introduces qualitatively new interactions which manifestly generate large quantum corrections even in the gravity and kinetic sectors, spoiling the theory for energies > m_pl / xi. Since the Higgs doublet of the Standard Model includes the Higgs boson and 3 Goldstone bosons, it falls into the latter category and therefore its validity is manifestly spoiled. We show that these conclusions hold in both the Jordan and Einstein frames and describe an intuitive analogy in the form of the pion Lagrangian. We also examine the recent claim that curvature-squared inflation models fail quantum mechanically. Our work appears to go beyond the recent discussions.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Version 2: Clarified findings and improved wording. Elaborated important sections and removed an unnecessary section. Added references. Version 3: Updated towards JHEP version. Version 4: Final JHEP versio

ReadNet: A Hierarchical Transformer Framework for Web Article Readability Analysis

Analyzing the readability of articles has been an important sociolinguistic task. Addressing this task is necessary to the automatic recommendation of appropriate articles to readers with different comprehension abilities, and it further benefits education systems, web information systems, and digital libraries. Current methods for assessing readability employ empirical measures or statistical learning techniques that are limited by their ability to characterize complex patterns such as article structures and semantic meanings of sentences. In this paper, we propose a new and comprehensive framework which uses a hierarchical self-attention model to analyze document readability. In this model, measurements of sentence-level difficulty are captured along with the semantic meanings of each sentence. Additionally, the sentence-level features are incorporated to characterize the overall readability of an article with consideration of article structures. We evaluate our proposed approach on three widely-used benchmark datasets against several strong baseline approaches. Experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on estimating the readability for various web articles and literature.Comment: ECIR 202

Mammographic screening before age 50 years in the UK: comparison of the radiation risks with the mortality benefits

Mammographic screening before age 50 years is less effective than at older ages and the associated radiation risks are higher. We estimated how many breast cancer deaths could be caused and how many could be prevented by a decade of annual two-view mammographic screening starting at ages 20, 30 and 40 years, respectively, in the UK; for all women, and for women with first-degree relatives affected with breast cancer. We extrapolated from a radiation risk model to estimate the number of radiation-induced breast cancer deaths, and used results from randomised trials, which suggest a reduction in breast cancer mortality of 10–20% in women invited to screening before age 50 years, to estimate the number of deaths that could be prevented. The net change in breast cancer deaths was defined as the number of radiation-induced deaths minus the number of prevented deaths. For all women, assuming a reduction in mortality from screening of 20%, a decade of annual screening was estimated to induce more deaths than it prevents if started at age 20 years and at age 30 years (net increase=0.86 and 0.37 breast cancer deaths, respectively, per 1000 women screened). The corresponding estimate for screening starting at age 40 years was a net decrease of 0.46 deaths/1000 women screened and a zero net change assuming a 10% mortality reduction. Results for women with first-degree relatives with breast cancer were generally in the same direction but, because their background incidence rates are higher, the net increases or decreases were greater. In conclusion, our estimates suggest that a decade of annual two-view mammographic screening before age 40 years would result in a net increase in breast cancer deaths, and that starting at age 40 years could result in a material net decrease only if breast cancer mortality is reduced by about 20% or more in women screened. Although these calculations were based on a number of uncertain parameters, in general, the conclusions were not altered when these parameters were varied within a feasible range

Pain outcomes in patients with bone metastases from advanced cancer: assessment and management with bone-targeting agents

Bone metastases in advanced cancer frequently cause painful complications that impair patient physical activity and negatively affect quality of life. Pain is often underreported and poorly managed in these patients. The most commonly used pain assessment instruments are visual analogue scales, a single-item measure, and the Brief Pain Inventory Questionnaire-Short Form. The World Health Organization analgesic ladder and the Analgesic Quantification Algorithm are used to evaluate analgesic use. Bone-targeting agents, such as denosumab or bisphosphonates, prevent skeletal complications (i.e., radiation to bone, pathologic fractures, surgery to bone, and spinal cord compression) and can also improve pain outcomes in patients with metastatic bone disease. We have reviewed pain outcomes and analgesic use and reported pain data from an integrated analysis of randomized controlled studies of denosumab versus the bisphosphonate zoledronic acid (ZA) in patients with bone metastases from advanced solid tumors. Intravenous bisphosphonates improved pain outcomes in patients with bone metastases from solid tumors. Compared with ZA, denosumab further prevented pain worsening and delayed the need for treatment with strong opioids. In patients with no or mild pain at baseline, denosumab reduced the risk of increasing pain severity and delayed pain worsening along with the time to increased pain interference compared with ZA, suggesting that use of denosumab (with appropriate calcium and vitamin D supplementation) before patients develop bone pain may improve outcomes. These data also support the use of validated pain assessments to optimize treatment and reduce the burden of pain associated with metastatic bone disease

Characterization of Synaptically Connected Nuclei in a Potential Sensorimotor Feedback Pathway in the Zebra Finch Song System

Birdsong is a learned behavior that is controlled by a group of identified nuclei, known collectively as the song system. The cortical nucleus HVC (used as a proper name) is a focal point of many investigations as it is necessary for song production, song learning, and receives selective auditory information. HVC receives input from several sources including the cortical area MMAN (medial magnocellular nucleus of the nidopallium). The MMAN to HVC connection is particularly interesting as it provides potential sensorimotor feedback to HVC. To begin to understand the role of this connection, we investigated the physiological relation between MMAN and HVC activity with simultaneous multiunit extracellular recordings from these two nuclei in urethane anesthetized zebra finches. As previously reported, we found similar timing in spontaneous bursts of activity in MMAN and HVC. Like HVC, MMAN responds to auditory playback of the bird's own song (BOS), but had little response to reversed BOS or conspecific song. Stimulation of MMAN resulted in evoked activity in HVC, indicating functional excitation from MMAN to HVC. However, inactivation of MMAN resulted in no consistent change in auditory responses in HVC. Taken together, these results indicate that MMAN provides functional excitatory input to HVC but does not provide significant auditory input to HVC in anesthetized animals. We hypothesize that MMAN may play a role in motor reinforcement or coordination, or may provide modulatory input to the song system about the internal state of the animal as it receives input from the hypothalamus

Scalar Three-point Functions in a CDL Background

Motivated by the FRW-CFT proposal by Freivogel, Sekino, Susskind and Yeh, we compute the three-point function of a scalar field in a Coleman-De Luccia instanton background. We first compute the three-point function of the scalar field making only very mild assumptions about the scalar potential and the instanton background. We obtain the three-point function for points in the FRW patch of the CDL instanton and take two interesting limits; the limit where the three points are near the boundary of the hyperbolic slices of the FRW patch, and the limit where the three points lie on the past lightcone of the FRW patch. We expand the past lightcone three-point function in spherical harmonics. We show that the near boundary limit expansion of the three-point function of a massless scalar field exhibits conformal structure compatible with FRW-CFT when the FRW patch is flat. We also compute the three-point function when the scalar is massive, and explain the obstacles to generalizing the conjectured field-operator correspondence of massless fields to massive fields.Comment: 42 pages + appendices, 10 figures; v2, v3: minor correction