Using a cognitive prosthesis to assist foodservice managerial decision-making

The artificial intelligence community has been notably unsuccessful in producing intelligent agents that think for themselves. However, there is an obvious need for increased information processing power in real life situations. An example of this can be witnessed in the training of a foodservice manager, who is expected to solve a wide variety of complex problems on a daily basis. This article explores the possibility of creating an intelligence aid, rather than an intelligence agent, to assist novice foodservice managers in making decisions that are congruent with a subject matter expert\u27s decision schema

Polymers in Curved Boxes

We apply results derived in other contexts for the spectrum of the Laplace operator in curved geometries to the study of an ideal polymer chain confined to a spherical annulus in arbitrary space dimension D and conclude that the free energy compared to its value for an uncurved box of the same thickness and volume, is lower when $D < 3$, stays the same when $D = 3$, and is higher when \mbox{$D > 3$}. Thus confining an ideal polymer chain to a cylindrical shell, lowers the effective bending elasticity of the walls, and might induce spontaneous symmetry breaking, i.e. bending. (Actually, the above mentioned results show that {\em {any}} shell in $D = 3$ induces this effect, except for a spherical shell). We compute the contribution of this effect to the bending rigidities in the Helfrich free energy expression.Comment: 20 pages RevTeX, epsf; 4 figures; submitted to Macromoledule

Lattice study of meson correlators in the epsilon-regime of two-flavor QCD

We calculate mesonic two-point functions in the epsilon-regime of two-flavor QCD on the lattice with exact chiral symmetry. We use gauge configurations of size 16^3 32 at the lattice spacing a \sim 0.11 fm generated with dynamical overlap fermions. The sea quark mass is fixed at \sim 3 MeV and the valence quark mass is varied in the range 1-4 MeV, both of which are in the epsilon-regime. We find a good consistency with the expectations from the next-to-leading order calculation in the epsilon-expansion of (partially quenched) chiral perturbation theory. From a fit we obtain the pion decay constant F=87.3(5.6) MeV and the chiral condensate Sigma^{MS}=[239.8(4.0) MeV ]^3 up to next-to-next-to-leading order contributions.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, final version to appear in PR