The ADT package for the Verbmobil interface term

This documentation describes an interface ADT called the "Verbmobil Interface Term\u27; (VIT) used in the "Verbmobil Forschungsprototyp\u27; (FP) in several software components. We present the contents of the VIT and the ADT package for Prolog components of the FP. Among others the ADT package can be used for creating, for manipulating, for printing and for checking the contents of a VIT

’The Compassionate Stock-keeper’ and other Virtous Ideals

This report aims at identifying, analyzing and comparing both explicit and implicit values and definitions found within the animal welfare laws of the UK, Spain and Argentina. In the course of doing this, the animal welfare legislations of these countries are summarized and compared to EU legislation. While the legislation of Spain is nearly identical to that of the EU, the Argentinean is comparable to EU legislation and the one of the UK differs in certain regards. Regarding values, there are two main themes found in all three legislations. The first of these is the ethical concern to reduce the suffering of animals used for human ends. This ethical view was historically inspired by proponents of utilitarianism on the one hand and by new physiological and anatomical discoveries on the other. The other theme regarding ethical values, concerns the morale and character of people working with animals. This is a view that to a large extent can be identified as virtue ethics. In combination with a revalued Biblical view of man’s relation to the rest of creation, it may explain the very foundation of laws aimed at protecting animals as restrictions on the supposed inherent rights of humans to use other animals as means for our own ends. The definition of animal welfare found in the three legislations differs in some regards and is similar in others. British legislation is largely based on a view where the welfare needs of animals are divided into five so called ‘freedoms’. These are freedoms from undesirable states such as hunger, pain etc. As this definition of animal welfare has proved very influential, it has had a great impact on EU legislation and in turn on the definition of animal welfare in Spanish national legislation. Argentinean legislation, however, contains a somewhat different view of animal welfare where ‘coping’ is mentioned and where the needs of animals are divided into two subgroups, the need not to suffer from hunger or thirst and the need to live in a fitting environment

The power of controversy: the allure of controversial brands

Powerlessness can encourage people to increase their consumption. They do so to restore their feelings of control. It is interesting to understand what characteristics of a brand attract them in powerless states. The allure of controversy could be the answer. Controversial behaviors bear a social cost, e.g. social backlash and gossip,which can signal power and authority. A brand that is perceived that way could display the same authority that is seemingly soattractive. That is, by embodying controversial attributes which help powerless consumers restore their power. An experiment in the context of a recent brand controversy did not find support for these hypotheses

Non-human Welfare : Well-being, Health and Longevity in the Animal Context

This thesis aims to answer the question of what quality of life is constituted of in a non-human context. Or differently put, ‘what is it that makes an animal's life worth living?’ In the procedure of reviewing this question other concepts and issues are addressed. One of these being the composite concept of 'animal welfare', mainly due to its popularity and frequent use in discussions and referrals to the goodness or badness of animal lives. For instance, it appears as if animal welfare may encompass concepts like quality of life, health, good production or the necessary conditions for the above. The other issue being dealt with, apart from quality of life and health, is the inquiry whether, all other things being equal, a longer life is preferable or not. Thus, the first problem presented is the concept of health and its place and definition in a nonhuman context. After considering three main theories of health from the human context and one animal-oriented concept of health, this thesis argues for a multi-factorial and holistic approach. On this view animal health is defined as being constituted by both biomedical health, functioning and subjective well-being. The second, and main, issue to be addressed is the one concerning animal quality of life, i.e. what has final positive or negative value for an animal. These are the components of quality of life, as opposed to instrumental values or means to quality of life. After presenting a large variety of theories of well-being they are all criticized. In the end a pure hedonistic approach is proposed, where it is claimed that what ultimately is in the interest of an animal is to have pleasurable feelings and to avoid suffering. However, the importance of instrumental values in the practical realm is emphasized (for examples see below). The third issue to be dealt with is longevity. This is to a large extent an unaddressed issue in the animal sciences and in discussions of animal welfare. This thesis defends a view where, given a decent level of well-being, a longer life is preferable to a shorter one and in the interest of the animal. Lastly, the relationships between the concepts of health, longevity and QoL as proposed are sorted out along with an illustration of how these approaches may support one another in a more practical sense, taking into consideration also states of seemingly important instrumental values like preference satisfaction, the meeting of innate needs and the realization of strongly motivated behaviours

Progress of Beam-Beam compensation schemes

We review wire-based beam-beam compensation experiments in the SPS, prospects of wire-compensation studies at RHIC, exploratory ideas for future pulsed wire devices, simulations of LHC wire compensation, and requirements for LHC crab cavities

The role of pharmacometabonomics in predicting drug pharmacokinetics

Individual variability in drug response is a key challenge in current clinical practice and in drug discovery and development. Pharmacological response is closely associated with drug concentration at the site of action and therefore knowledge of drug pharmacokinetics is vital to delivering effective therapy. In addition to genetic polymorphisms, environmental factors also play an important role in determining drug efficacy, safety, metabolism and pharmacokinetics. The newly emerging field of pharmacometabonomics uses information from pre-dose metabolite profiles to predict individual drug responses, can be sensitive to both genetic and environmental factors and thus has great promise to help the future delivery of personalized medicine. This article introduces pharmacometabonomics and covers its application to the prediction of pharmacokinetics

Fast and scalable inference of multi-sample cancer lineages.

Somatic variants can be used as lineage markers for the phylogenetic reconstruction of cancer evolution. Since somatic phylogenetics is complicated by sample heterogeneity, novel specialized tree-building methods are required for cancer phylogeny reconstruction. We present LICHeE (Lineage Inference for Cancer Heterogeneity and Evolution), a novel method that automates the phylogenetic inference of cancer progression from multiple somatic samples. LICHeE uses variant allele frequencies of somatic single nucleotide variants obtained by deep sequencing to reconstruct multi-sample cell lineage trees and infer the subclonal composition of the samples. LICHeE is open source and available at http://viq854.github.io/lichee

An Improved Trickle-Down Theorem for Partite Complexes

Given a $d+1$-partite $d$-dimensional simplicial complex, we prove a generalization of the trickle-down theorem. We show that if "on average" faces of co-dimension 2 are $\frac{1-\delta}{d}$-(one-sided) spectral expanders, then any face of co-dimension $k$ is an $O(\frac{1-\delta}{k\delta})$-(one-sided) spectral expander, for all $3\leq k\leq d+1$. For an application, using our theorem as a black-box, we show that links of faces of co-dimension $k$ in recent constructions of bounded degree high dimensional expanders have local spectral expansion at most $O(1/k)$ fraction of the local expansion of worst faces of co-dimension $2$