A Gibbs approach to Chargaff's second parity rule

Chargaff's second parity rule (CSPR) asserts that the frequencies of short polynucleotide chains are the same as those of the complementary reversed chains. Up to now, this hypothesis has only been observed empirically and there is currently no explanation for its presence in DNA strands. Here we argue that CSPR is a probabilistic consequence of the reverse complementarity between paired strands, because the Gibbs distribution associated with the chemical energy between the bonds satisfies CSPR. We develop a statistical test to study the validity of CSPR under the Gibbsian assumption and we apply it to a large set of bacterial genomes taken from the GenBank repository.Comment: 16 page

Ground-layer wavefront reconstruction from multiple natural guide stars

Observational tests of ground layer wavefront recovery have been made in open loop using a constellation of four natural guide stars at the 1.55 m Kuiper telescope in Arizona. Such tests explore the effectiveness of wide-field seeing improvement by correction of low-lying atmospheric turbulence with ground-layer adaptive optics (GLAO). The wavefronts from the four stars were measured simultaneously on a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS). The WFS placed a 5 x 5 array of square subapertures across the pupil of the telescope, allowing for wavefront reconstruction up to the fifth radial Zernike order. We find that the wavefront aberration in each star can be roughly halved by subtracting the average of the wavefronts from the other three stars. Wavefront correction on this basis leads to a reduction in width of the seeing-limited stellar image by up to a factor of 3, with image sharpening effective from the visible to near infrared wavelengths over a field of at least 2 arc minutes. We conclude that GLAO correction will be a valuable tool that can increase resolution and spectrographic throughput across a broad range of seeing-limited observations.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Astrophys.

Vision in the peafowl (Aves : Pavo cristatus)

The visual sense of the Indian blue-shouldered peafowl Pavo cristatus was investigated with respect to the spectral absorption characteristics of the retinal photoreceptors, the spectral transmittance of the ocular media and the topographic distribution of cells in the retinal ganglion cell layer. Microspectrophotometry revealed a single class of rod, four spectrally distinct types of single cone and a single class of double cone. In the case of the single cone types, which contained visual pigments with wavelengths of maximum absorbance (lambda(max)) at 424, 458, 505 and 567 nm, spectral filtering by the ocular media and the different cone oil droplets with which each visual pigment is associated gives predicted peak spectral sensitivities of 432, 477, 537 and 605 nm, respectively. Topographic analysis of retinal ganglion cell distribution revealed a large central area of increased cell density (at peak, 35,609 cells mm(-2)) with a poorly defined visual streak extending nasally. The peafowl has a calculated maximum spatial resolution (visual acuity) in the lateral visual field of 20.6 cycles degrees(-1). These properties of the peafowl eye are discussed with respect to its visual ecology and are compared with those of other closely related species

Willingness to participate in future HIV prevention studies among gay and bisexual men in Scotland, UK: a challenge for intervention trials

This article examines willingness to participate in future HIV prevention research among gay and bisexual men in Scotland, UK. Anonymous, self-complete questionnaires and Orasure Gäó oral fluid samples were collected in commercial gay venues. 1,320 men were eligible for inclusion. 78.2% reported willingness to participate in future HIV prevention research; 64.6% for an HIV vaccine, 57.4% for a behaviour change study, and 53.0% for a rectal microbicide. In multivariate analysis, for HIV vaccine research, greater age, minority ethnicity, and not providing an oral fluid sample were associated with lower willingness; heterosexual orientation and not providing an oral fluid sample were for microbicides; higher education and greater HIV treatment optimism were for behaviour change. STI testing remained associated with being more willing to participate in microbicide research and frequent gay scene use remained associated with being more willing to participate in behaviour change research. Having an STI in the past 12 months remained significantly associated with being willing to participate in all three study types. There were no associations between sexual risk behaviour and willingness. Although most men expressed willingness to participate in future research, recruitment of high-risk men, who have the potential to benefit most, is likely to be more challenging

A Novel Hybrid CNN-AIS Visual Pattern Recognition Engine

Machine learning methods are used today for most recognition problems. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have time and again proved successful for many image processing tasks primarily for their architecture. In this paper we propose to apply CNN to small data sets like for example, personal albums or other similar environs where the size of training dataset is a limitation, within the framework of a proposed hybrid CNN-AIS model. We use Artificial Immune System Principles to enhance small size of training data set. A layer of Clonal Selection is added to the local filtering and max pooling of CNN Architecture. The proposed Architecture is evaluated using the standard MNIST dataset by limiting the data size and also with a small personal data sample belonging to two different classes. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid CNN-AIS based recognition engine works well when the size of training data is limited in siz

Heavy Quark Free Energies and Screening in SU(2) Gauge Theory

We investigate the singlet, triplet and colour average heavy quark free energies in SU(2) pure gauge theory at various temperatures T. We focus on the long distance behaviour of the free energies, studying in particular the temperature dependence of the string tension and the screening masses. The results are qualitatively similar to the SU(3) scenario, except near the critical temperature Tc of the deconfining transition. Finally we test a recently proposed method to renormalize the Polyakov loop.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, contribution to the Proceedings of SEWM 2002 (Heidelberg

Theory of Networked Minority Games based on Strategy Pattern Dynamics

We formulate a theory of agent-based models in which agents compete to be in a winning group. The agents may be part of a network or not, and the winning group may be a minority group or not. The novel feature of the present formalism is its focus on the dynamical pattern of strategy rankings, and its careful treatment of the strategy ties which arise during the system's temporal evolution. We apply it to the Minority Game (MG) with connected populations. Expressions for the mean success rate among the agents and for the mean success rate for agents with $k$ neighbors are derived. We also use the theory to estimate the value of connectivity $p$ above which the Binary-Agent-Resource system with high resource level goes into the high-connectivity state.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PR