1,555 research outputs found
A Survey of Addictive Software Design
The average smartphone owner checks their phone more than 150 times per day. As of 2015, 62% of smartphone users had used their phone to look up information about a health condition, while 57% had used their phone to do online banking. Mobile platforms have become the dominant medium of human-computer interaction. So how have these devices established themselves as our go to connection to the Internet? The answer lies in addictive design. Software designers have become well versed in creating software that captivates us at a primal level. In this article, we survey addictive software design strategies, their bases in psychology, and their applications in popular software products. We offer a novel taxonomy to better categorize these addictive design strategies. Additionally, we explore a study conducted at the California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo that illustrates the efficacy of one of the addictive design strategies
Treatment of the background error in the statistical analysis of Poisson processes
The formalism that allows to take into account the error sigma_b of the
expected mean background b in the statistical analysis of a Poisson process
with the frequentistic method is presented. It is shown that the error sigma_b
cannot be neglected if it is not much smaller than sqrt(b). The resulting
confidence belt is larger that the one for sigma_b=0, leading to larger
confidence intervals for the mean mu of signal events.Comment: 15 pages including 2 figures, RevTeX. Final version published in
Phys. Rev. D 59 (1999) 11300
Higgs look-alikes at the LHC
The discovery of a Higgs particle is possible in a variety of search channels
at the LHC. However the true identity of any putative Higgs boson will at first
remain ambiguous, until one has experimentally excluded other possible
assignments of quantum numbers and couplings. We quantify to what degree one
can discriminate a Standard Model Higgs boson from "look-alikes" at, or close
to, the moment of discovery at the LHC. We focus on the fully-reconstructible
"golden" decay mode to a pair of Z bosons and a four-lepton final state,
simulating sPlot-weighted samples of signal and background events. Considering
both on-shell and off-shell Z's, we show how to utilize the full decay
information from the events, including the distributions and correlations of
the five relevant angular variables. We demonstrate how the finite phase space
acceptance of any LHC detector sculpts the decay distributions, a feature
neglected in previous studies. We use likelihood ratios to discriminate a
Standard Model Higgs from look-alikes with other spins or nonstandard parity,
CP, or form factors. For a benchmark resonance mass of 200 GeV/c^2, we achieve
a median expected discrimination significance of 3 sigma with as few as 19
events, and even better discrimination for the off-shell decays of a 145
GeV/c^2 resonance.Comment: 39 pages, 55 figures, typos fixed, figures added, and minor
clarification
When Can Limited Randomness Be Used in Repeated Games?
The central result of classical game theory states that every finite normal
form game has a Nash equilibrium, provided that players are allowed to use
randomized (mixed) strategies. However, in practice, humans are known to be bad
at generating random-like sequences, and true random bits may be unavailable.
Even if the players have access to enough random bits for a single instance of
the game their randomness might be insufficient if the game is played many
times.
In this work, we ask whether randomness is necessary for equilibria to exist
in finitely repeated games. We show that for a large class of games containing
arbitrary two-player zero-sum games, approximate Nash equilibria of the
-stage repeated version of the game exist if and only if both players have
random bits. In contrast, we show that there exists a class of
games for which no equilibrium exists in pure strategies, yet the -stage
repeated version of the game has an exact Nash equilibrium in which each player
uses only a constant number of random bits.
When the players are assumed to be computationally bounded, if cryptographic
pseudorandom generators (or, equivalently, one-way functions) exist, then the
players can base their strategies on "random-like" sequences derived from only
a small number of truly random bits. We show that, in contrast, in repeated
two-player zero-sum games, if pseudorandom generators \emph{do not} exist, then
random bits remain necessary for equilibria to exist
Data-driven efficient score tests for deconvolution problems
We consider testing statistical hypotheses about densities of signals in
deconvolution models. A new approach to this problem is proposed. We
constructed score tests for the deconvolution with the known noise density and
efficient score tests for the case of unknown density. The tests are
incorporated with model selection rules to choose reasonable model dimensions
automatically by the data. Consistency of the tests is proved
Density-functional study of Cu atoms, monolayers, and coadsorbates on polar ZnO surfaces
The structure and electronic properties of single Cu atoms, copper monolayers
and thin copper films on the polar oxygen and zinc terminated surfaces of ZnO
are studied using periodic density-functional calculations. We find that the
binding energy of Cu atoms sensitively depends on how charge neutrality of the
polar surfaces is achieved. Bonding is very strong if the surfaces are
stabilized by an electronic mechanism which leads to partially filled surface
bands. As soon as the surface bands are filled (either by partial Cu coverage,
by coadsorbates, or by the formation of defects), the binding energy decreases
significantly. In this case, values very similar to those found for nonpolar
surfaces and for copper on finite ZnO clusters are obtained. Possible
implications of these observations concerning the growth mode of copper on
polar ZnO surfaces and their importance in catalysis are discussed.Comment: 6 pages with 2 postscript figures embedded. Uses REVTEX and epsf
macro
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