Single pion production in intermediate energy range K+P reactions

Imperial Users onl

Walking across Wikipedia: a scale-free network model of semantic memory retrieval.

Semantic knowledge has been investigated using both online and offline methods. One common online method is category recall, in which members of a semantic category like "animals" are retrieved in a given period of time. The order, timing, and number of retrievals are used as assays of semantic memory processes. One common offline method is corpus analysis, in which the structure of semantic knowledge is extracted from texts using co-occurrence or encyclopedic methods. Online measures of semantic processing, as well as offline measures of semantic structure, have yielded data resembling inverse power law distributions. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether these patterns in data might be related. A semantic network model of animal knowledge is formulated on the basis of Wikipedia pages and their overlap in word probability distributions. The network is scale-free, in that node degree is related to node frequency as an inverse power law. A random walk over this network is shown to simulate a number of results from a category recall experiment, including power law-like distributions of inter-response intervals. Results are discussed in terms of theories of semantic structure and processing

Modeling Collaboration in Academia: A Game Theoretic Approach

In this work, we aim to understand the mechanisms driving academic collaboration. We begin by building a model for how researchers split their effort between multiple papers, and how collaboration affects the number of citations a paper receives, supported by observations from a large real-world publication and citation dataset, which we call the h-Reinvestment model. Using tools from the field of Game Theory, we study researchers' collaborative behavior over time under this model, with the premise that each researcher wants to maximize his or her academic success. We find analytically that there is a strong incentive to collaborate rather than work in isolation, and that studying collaborative behavior through a game-theoretic lens is a promising approach to help us better understand the nature and dynamics of academic collaboration.Comment: Presented at the 1st WWW Workshop on Big Scholarly Data (2014). 6 pages, 5 figure

The seriality dividend of American magazines

This essay argues that the preconsumption cycle of material creation and supply exerted powerful effects as periodicals journeyed from paper mill to reader. So powerful were these effects that they generated a “seriality dividend,” or a return on financial and cultural investment whose impact went beyond the significance of individual or groups of periodical titles, or their content, and turned the periodical into a cultural form of such significance that it produced effects larger than the sum of its parts. Periodicals became prosperous cultural forms in the nineteenth century because their serial production generated a capacity and scale that other forms, including books, could not match. The seriality dividend consolidated the periodical as a cultural form with structural significance. Focusing on literary periodicals and their relation to literary culture more generally, this essay argues that the dividend from magazine seriality helped establish the infrastructure—the publication outlets, jobs, careers, connections, and networks—that allowed literary culture to develop in America’s major geographical centers, where the seriality dividend exerted its effects most powerfully

“Frank Lloyd Oop”: microserfs, modern migration, and the architecture of the nineties

If the early development of the computing industry in America was marked by a preoccupation with hardware, as companies like UNIVAC, DEC, and IBM filled the nation’s corporate and government offices with mainframes, then a similar pre­occupation has so far marked the response of cultural criticism to contemporary technology. For Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz, American technoculture is founded on the way that hardware permeates all sections of society: “The Amish have their wagons and farm equipment, the hippies their Volkswagen buses. The rap DJ has his or her turntable … the cyberpunk has a computer complete with modem” (10). Even in a recent article about the interaction between people and computers, Kevin J. Porter treats the computer, without exception, as a piece of machinery (43-83). Software – the medium through which human-computer inter­action takes place – is nowhere to be found in either of these accounts

'Dead letters! … Dead men?': the rhetoric of the office in Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the scrivener’

Although a good deal of recent critical attention to Melville's writing has followed the lead of Robert K. Martin in addressing the issue of sexuality, the predominant themes in discussions of “Bartleby” remain changes in the nature of the workplace in antebellum America and transformations in capitalism. But, if one of the abiding mysteries of the story is the failure of the lawyer–narrator to sever his relationship with his young scrivener once Bartleby embarks upon his policy of preferring not to, it is a mystery that makes sense within both of these critical discourses. On the one hand, the longevity of the relationship dramatizes a tension implicit in Michael Gilmore's suggestion that the lawyer–narrator straddles the old and the new economic orders of the American market-place. Although he may employ his scriveners “as a species of productive property and little else”, his attachment to his employees is overwhelmingly paternalistic and protective. On the other hand, James Creech suggests that Pierre (published the year before “Bartleby”) is a novel preoccupied with the closeting of homosexual identity within the values of an American middleclass family, while Gregory Woods describes Melville as the nearest thing in the prose world of the American Renaissance to the Good Gay Poet Whitman. In this critical context the longevity of the relationship suggests that the lawyer–narrator's desire to know Bartleby, to protect him, to tolerate him, to be close to him, to have him for his own, and then to retell the story of their relationship, needs to be considered in relation to sexual desire