Conjugate persuasion

We consider a class of persuasion games in which the sender has rank-dependent (Yaari (1987)) preferences. Like much of the recent Bayesian persuasion literature, we allow the sender to choose from a rich set of information structures and assume the receiver’s action depends only on her posterior expectation of a scalar state variable. Conjugate to the standard problem, our sender’s utility is linear in posterior the mean, but may be nonlinear in probabilities. We geometrically characterize the sender’s optimal commitment payoff and identify the corresponding optimal information structure. When the state is continuously distributed, communication takes a monotone partitional form. Our characterization admits a simple analysis of comparative statics—for instance, we find that “grading on a curve” is a feature of optimal design. Finally, we apply our analysis to several problems of economic interest including information design in auctions and elections, as well as the design of equilibrium insurance contracts in the face of the ‘favorite-longshot’ bias

Conformal Invariance of (0,2) Sigma Models on Calabi-Yau Manifolds

Long ago, Nemeschansky and Sen demonstrated that the Ricci-flat metric on a Calabi-Yau manifold could be corrected, order by order in perturbation theory, to produce a conformally invariant (2,2) nonlinear sigma model. Here we extend this result to (0,2) sigma models for stable holomorphic vector bundles over Calabi-Yaus.Comment: 15 pages; references adde

Book Reviews

Creating a Local History Archive at Your Public Library. Faye Phillips. Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. Kirsten Weld. The Silence of the Archives. David Thomas, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World\u27s Most Precious Manuscripts. Joshua Hammer. The International Business Archives Handbook: Understanding and Managing the Historical Records of Business. Edited by Alison Turton. Putting Descriptive Standards to Work. Edited by Kris Kiesling and Christopher J. Prom. Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists. Anthony Cocciolo

Maritime search and rescue in Nunavut, Canada : strengthening the system from the bottom up

Due to the impacts of climate change, maritime search and rescue requirements are increasing across Nunavut. The region’s vast size and cold climate combine to make time the enemy of all responders. The substantial distances involved in responding with Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) icebreakers or Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft based in the South mean that the arrival of federal resources on scene can take significant time. There are few vessels of opportunity in the region. Historically, however, there has been little sustained investment in community-based marine Search and Rescue (SAR) capabilities in the territory. This started to change in 2015 with the launch of the CCG’s Arctic SAR Project and, in 2018, with the creation of the Coast Guard’s new Arctic Region. This poster outlines the status of the community-based marine SAR system in Nunavut, assess efforts by the Coast Guard and its partners to strengthen the system, and suggest broadly applicable best practices

Planetary Rover Simulation for Lunar Exploration Missions

When planning planetary rover missions it is useful to develop intuition and skills driving in, quite literally, alien environments before incurring the cost of reaching said locales. Simulators make it possible to operate in environments that have the physical characteristics of target locations without the expense and overhead of extensive physical tests. To that end, NASA Ames and Open Robotics collaborated on a Lunar rover driving simulator based on the open source Gazebo simulation platform and leveraging ROS (Robotic Operating System) components. The simulator was integrated with research and mission software for rover driving, system monitoring, and science instrument simulation to constitute an end-to-end Lunar mission simulation capability. Although we expect our simulator to be applicable to arbitrary Lunar regions, we designed to a reference mission of prospecting in polar regions. The harsh lighting and low illumination angles at the Lunar poles combine with the unique reflectance properties of Lunar regolith to present a challenging visual environment for both human and computer perception. Our simulator placed an emphasis on high fidelity visual simulation in order to produce synthetic imagery suitable for evaluating human rover drivers with navigation tasks, as well as providing test data for computer vision software development.In this paper, we describe the software used to construct the simulated Lunar environment and the components of the driving simulation. Our synthetic terrain generation software artificially increases the resolution of Lunar digital elevation maps by fractal synthesis and inserts craters and rocks based on Lunar size-frequency distribution models. We describe the necessary enhancements to import large scale, high resolution terrains into Gazebo, as well as our approach to modeling the visual environment of the Lunar surface. An overview of the mission software system is provided, along with how ROS was used to emulate flight software components that had not been developed yet. Finally, we discuss the effect of using the high-fidelity synthetic Lunar images for visual odometry. We also characterize the wheel slip model, and find some inconsistencies in the produced wheel slip behaviour

Prebiotic effects: metabolic and health benefits

The different compartments of the gastrointestinal tract are inhabited by populations of micro-organisms. By far the most important predominant populations are in the colon where a true symbiosis with the host exists that is a key for well-being and health. For such a microbiota, 'normobiosis' characterises a composition of the gut 'ecosystem' in which micro-organisms with potential health benefits predominate in number over potentially harmful ones, in contrast to 'dysbiosis', in which one or a few potentially harmful micro-organisms are dominant, thus creating a disease-prone situation. The present document has been written by a group of both academic and industry experts (in the ILSI Europe Prebiotic Expert Group and Prebiotic Task Force, respectively). It does not aim to propose a new definition of a prebiotic nor to identify which food products are classified as prebiotic but rather to validate and expand the original idea of the prebiotic concept (that can be translated in 'prebiotic effects'), defined as: 'The selective stimulation of growth and/or activity(ies) of one or a limited number of microbial genus(era)/species in the gut microbiota that confer(s) health benefits to the host.' Thanks to the methodological and fundamental research of microbiologists, immense progress has very recently been made in our understanding of the gut microbiota. A large number of human intervention studies have been performed that have demonstrated that dietary consumption of certain food products can result in statistically significant changes in the composition of the gut microbiota in line with the prebiotic concept. Thus the prebiotic effect is now a well-established scientific fact. The more data are accumulating, the more it will be recognised that such changes in the microbiota's composition, especially increase in bifidobacteria, can be regarded as a marker of intestinal health. The review is divided in chapters that cover the major areas of nutrition research where a prebiotic effect has tentatively been investigated for potential health benefits. The prebiotic effect has been shown to associate with modulation of biomarkers and activity(ies) of the immune system. Confirming the studies in adults, it has been demonstrated that, in infant nutrition, the prebiotic effect includes a significant change of gut microbiota composition, especially an increase of faecal concentrations of bifidobacteria. This concomitantly improves stool quality (pH, SCFA, frequency and consistency), reduces the risk of gastroenteritis and infections, improves general well-being and reduces the incidence of allergic symptoms such as atopic eczema. Changes in the gut microbiota composition are classically considered as one of the many factors involved in the pathogenesis of either inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome. The use of particular food products with a prebiotic effect has thus been tested in clinical trials with the objective to improve the clinical activity and well-being of patients with such disorders. Promising beneficial effects have been demonstrated in some preliminary studies, including changes in gut microbiota composition (especially increase in bifidobacteria concentration). Often associated with toxic load and/or miscellaneous risk factors, colon cancer is another pathology for which a possible role of gut microbiota composition has been hypothesised. Numerous experimental studies have reported reduction in incidence of tumours and cancers after feeding specific food products with a prebiotic effect. Some of these studies (including one human trial) have also reported that, in such conditions, gut microbiota composition was modified (especially due to increased concentration of bifidobacteria). Dietary intake of particular food products with a prebiotic effect has been shown, especially in adolescents, but also tentatively in postmenopausal women, to increase Ca absorption as well as bone Ca accretion and bone mineral density. Recent data, both from experimental models and from human studies, support the beneficial effects of particular food products with prebiotic properties on energy homaeostasis, satiety regulation and body weight gain. Together, with data in obese animals and patients, these studies support the hypothesis that gut microbiota composition (especially the number of bifidobacteria) may contribute to modulate metabolic processes associated with syndrome X, especially obesity and diabetes type 2. It is plausible, even though not exclusive, that these effects are linked to the microbiota-induced changes and it is feasible to conclude that their mechanisms fit into the prebiotic effect. However, the role of such changes in these health benefits remains to be definitively proven. As a result of the research activity that followed the publication of the prebiotic concept 15 years ago, it has become clear that products that cause a selective modification in the gut microbiota's composition and/or activity(ies) and thus strengthens normobiosis could either induce beneficial physiological effects in the colon and also in extra-intestinal compartments or contribute towards reducing the risk of dysbiosis and associated intestinal and systemic pathologies

Reproducibility of in-vivo OCT measured three-dimensional human lamina cribrosa microarchitecture

Purpose: To determine the reproducibility of automated segmentation of the three-dimensional (3D) lamina cribrosa (LC) microarchitecture scanned in-vivo using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Methods: Thirty-nine eyes (8 healthy, 19 glaucoma suspects and 12 glaucoma) from 49 subjects were scanned twice using swept-source (SS-) OCT in a 3.5x3.5x3.64 mm (400x400x896 pixels) volume centered on the optic nerve head, with the focus readjusted after each scan. The LC was automatically segmented and analyzed for microarchitectural parameters, including pore diameter, pore diameter standard deviation (SD), pore aspect ratio, pore area, beam thickness, beam thickness SD, and beam thickness to pore diameter ratio. Reproducibility of the parameters was assessed by computing the imprecision of the parameters between the scans. Results: The automated segmentation demonstrated excellent reproducibility. All LC microarchitecture parameters had an imprecision of less or equal to 4.2%. There was little variability in imprecision with respect to diagnostic category, although the method tends to show higher imprecision amongst healthy subjects. Conclusion: The proposed automated segmentation of the LC demonstrated high reproducibility for 3D LC parameters. This segmentation analysis tool will be useful for in-vivo studies of the LC. © 2014 Wang et al

Digging Into Data White Paper:Trading Consequences

Scholars interested in nineteenth century global economic history face a voluminous historical record. Conventional approaches to primary source research on the economic and environmental implications of globalised commodity flows typically restrict researchers to specific locations or a small handful of commodities. By taking advantage of cutting edge computational tools, the project was able to address much larger data sets for historical research, and thereby provides historians with the means to develop new data driven research questions. In particular, this project has demonstrated that text mining techniques applied to tens of thousands of documents about nineteenth century commodity trading can yield a novel understanding of how economic forces connected distant places all over the globe and how efforts to generate wealth from natural resources impacted on local environments. The large scale findings that result from the application of these new methodologies would be barely feasible using conventional research methods. Moreover, the project vividly demonstrates how the digital humanities can benefit from transdisciplinary collaboration between humanists, computational linguists and information visualisation expertsPostprin

Evidence for a Large-Scale Brain System Supporting Allostasis and Interoception in Humans

Large-scale intrinsic brain systems have been identified for exteroceptive senses (e.g., sight, hearing, touch). We introduce an analogous system for representing sensations from within the body, called interoception, and demonstrate its relation to regulating peripheral systems in the body, called allostasis. Employing the recently introduced Embodied Predictive Interoception Coding (EPIC) model, we used tract-tracing studies of macaque monkeys, followed by two intrinsic functional magnetic resonance imaging samples (N = 280 and N = 270) to evaluate the existence of an intrinsic allostatic/interoceptive system in the human brain. Another sample (N = 41) allowed us to evaluate the convergent validity of the hypothesized allostatic/interoceptive system by showing that individuals with stronger connectivity between system hubs performed better on an implicit index of interoceptive ability related to autonomic fluctuations. Implications include insights for the brain’s functional architecture, dissolving the artificial boundary between mind and body, and unifying mental and physical illness