GOAL-DTU: Development of Distributed Intelligence for the Multi-Agent Programming Contest

We provide a brief description of the GOAL-DTU system for the agent contest, including the overall strategy and how the system is designed to apply this strategy. Our agents are implemented using the GOAL programming language. We evaluate the performance of our agents for the contest, and finally also discuss how to improve the system based on analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.Comment: 28 pages, 45 figure

Cool Stars and Space Weather

Stellar flares, winds and coronal mass ejections form the space weather. They are signatures of the magnetic activity of cool stars and, since activity varies with age, mass and rotation, the space weather that extra-solar planets experience can be very different from the one encountered by the solar system planets. How do stellar activity and magnetism influence the space weather of exoplanets orbiting main-sequence stars? How do the environments surrounding exoplanets differ from those around the planets in our own solar system? How can the detailed knowledge acquired by the solar system community be applied in exoplanetary systems? How does space weather affect habitability? These were questions that were addressed in the splinter session "Cool stars and Space Weather", that took place on 9 Jun 2014, during the Cool Stars 18 meeting. In this paper, we present a summary of the contributions made to this session.Comment: Proceedings of the 18th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun, Eds G. van Belle & H. Harris, 13 pages, 1 figur

Changes in the behavioural determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic: gender, socioeconomic and ethnic inequalities in five British cohort studies

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have far-reaching consequences on population health. We investigated whether these consequences included changes in health-impacting behaviours which are important drivers of health inequalities. METHODS: Using data from five representative British cohorts (born 2000-2002, 1989-1990, 1970, 1958 and 1946), we investigated sleep, physical activity (exercise), diet and alcohol intake (N=14 297). We investigated change in each behaviour (pre/during the May 2020 lockdown), and differences by age/cohort, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic position (childhood social class, education attainment and adult financial difficulties). Logistic regression models were used, accounting for study design and non-response weights, and meta-analysis used to pool and test cohort differences in association. RESULTS: Change occurred in both directions-shifts from the middle part of the distribution to both declines and increases in sleep, exercise and alcohol use. Older cohorts were less likely to report changes in behaviours while the youngest reported more frequent increases in sleep, exercise, and fruit and vegetable intake, yet lower alcohol consumption. Widening inequalities in sleep during lockdown were more frequent among women, socioeconomically disadvantaged groups and ethnic minorities. For other outcomes, inequalities were largely unchanged, yet ethnic minorities were at higher risk of undertaking less exercise and consuming lower amounts of fruit and vegetables. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide new evidence on the multiple changes to behavioural outcomes linked to lockdown, and the differential impacts across generation, gender, socioeconomic circumstances across life, and ethnicity. Lockdown appeared to widen some (but not all) forms of health inequality

The plasticity of human breast carcinoma cells is more than epithelial to mesenchymal conversion

The human breast comprises three lineages: the luminal epithelial lineage, the myoepithelial lineage, and the mesenchymal lineage. It has been widely accepted that human breast neoplasia pertains only to the luminal epithelial lineage. In recent years, however, evidence has accumulated that neoplastic breast epithelial cells may be substantially more plastic in their differentiation repertoire than previously anticipated. Thus, along with an increasing availability of markers for the myoepithelial lineage, at least a partial differentiation towards this lineage is being revealed frequently. It has also become clear that conversions towards the mesenchymal lineage actually occur, referred to as epithelial to mesenchymal transitions. Indeed, some of the so-called myofibroblasts surrounding the tumor may have an epithelial origin rather than a mesenchymal origin. Because myoepithelial cells, epithelial to mesenchymal transition-derived cells, genuine stromal cells and myofibroblasts share common markers, we now need to define a more ambitious set of markers to distinguish these cell types in the microenvironment of the tumors. This is necessary because the different microenvironments may confer different clinical outcomes. The aim of this commentary is to describe some of the inherent complexities in defining cellular phenotypes in the microenvironment of breast cancer and to expand wherever possible on the implications for tumor suppression and progression

Comparison theory and smooth minimal C*-dynamics

We prove that the C*-algebra of a minimal diffeomorphism satisfies Blackadar's Fundamental Comparability Property for positive elements. This leads to the classification, in terms of K-theory and traces, of the isomorphism classes of countably generated Hilbert modules over such algebras, and to a similar classification for the closures of unitary orbits of self-adjoint elements. We also obtain a structure theorem for the Cuntz semigroup in this setting, and prove a conjecture of Blackadar and Handelman: the lower semicontinuous dimension functions are weakly dense in the space of all dimension functions. These results continue to hold in the broader setting of unital simple ASH algebras with slow dimension growth and stable rank one. Our main tool is a sharp bound on the radius of comparison of a recursive subhomogeneous C*-algebra. This is also used to construct uncountably many non-Morita-equivalent simple separable amenable C*-algebras with the same K-theory and tracial state space, providing a C*-algebraic analogue of McDuff's uncountable family of II_1 factors. We prove in passing that the range of the radius of comparison is exhausted by simple C*-algebras.Comment: 30 pages, no figure

Evidence for a stem cell hierarchy in the adult human breast

Cellular pathways that contribute to adult human mammary gland architecture and lineages have not been previously described. In this study, we identify a candidate stem cell niche in ducts and zones containing progenitor cells in lobules. Putative stem cells residing in ducts were essentially quiescent, whereas the progenitor cells in the lobules were more likely to be actively dividing. Cells from ducts and lobules collected under the microscope were functionally characterized by colony formation on tissue culture plastic, mammosphere formation in suspension culture, and morphogenesis in laminin-rich extracellular matrix gels. Staining for the lineage markers keratins K14 and K19 further revealed multipotent cells in the stem cell zone and three lineage-restricted cell types outside this zone. Multiparameter cell sorting and functional characterization with reference to anatomical sites in situ confirmed this pattern. The proposal that the four cell types are indeed constituents of an as of yet undescribed stem cell hierarchy was assessed in long-term cultures in which senescence was bypassed. These findings identify an adult human breast ductal stem cell activity and its earliest descendants