12,206 research outputs found
The Constitutional Convention and Court Merger in New York State
In November 2017, voters in New York, for the first time in twenty years, will be asked to decide whether there â[s]hall be a convention to revise the constitution and amend the same?â If it is decided by the electorate to call a convention, âdelegates will be elected in November 2018, and the convention will convene in April 2019.â One of the significant goals of a convention would be the achievement of court merger in the Empire State. The purpose of this perspective is to discuss the pros and cons of a constitutional convention with an emphasis on court merger
Simulating quantum effects of cosmological expansion using a static ion trap
We propose a new experimental testbed that uses ions in the collective ground
state of a static trap for studying the analog of quantum-field effects in
cosmological spacetimes, including the Gibbons-Hawking effect for a single
detector in de Sitter spacetime, as well as the possibility of modeling
inflationary structure formation and the entanglement signature of de Sitter
spacetime. To date, proposals for using trapped ions in analog gravity
experiments have simulated the effect of gravity on the field modes by directly
manipulating the ions' motion. In contrast, by associating laboratory time with
conformal time in the simulated universe, we can encode the full effect of
curvature in the modulation of the laser used to couple the ions' vibrational
motion and electronic states. This model simplifies the experimental
requirements for modeling the analog of an expanding universe using trapped
ions and enlarges the validity of the ion-trap analogy to a wide range of
interesting cases.Comment: (v2) revisions based on referee comments, figure added for clarity;
(v1) 17 pages, no figure
An Attempt to Detect the Galactic Bulge at 12 microns with IRAS
Surface brightness maps at 12 microns, derived from observations with the
Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), are used to estimate the integrated
flux at this wavelength from the Galactic bulge as a function of galactic
latitude along the minor axis. A simple model was used to remove Galactic disk
emission (e.g. unresolved stars and dust) from the IRAS measurements. The
resulting estimates are compared with predictions for the 12 micron bulge
surface brightness based on observations of complete samples of optically
identified M giants in several minor axis bulge fields. No evidence is found
for any significant component of 12m emission in the bulge other than that
expected from the optically identified M star sample plus normal, lower
luminosity stars. Known large amplitude variables and point sources from the
IRAS catalogue contribute only a small fraction to the total 12 micron flux.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 13 pages of text including tables in
MS WORD97 generated postscript; 3 figures in postscript by Sigma Plo
Isolating intrinsic noise sources in a stochastic genetic switch
The stochastic mutual repressor model is analysed using perturbation methods. This simple model of a gene circuit consists of two genes and three promotor states. Either of the two protein products can dimerize, forming a repressor molecule that binds to the promotor of the other gene. When the repressor is bound to a promotor, the corresponding gene is not transcribed and no protein is produced. Either one of the promotors can be repressed at any given time or both can be unrepressed, leaving three possible promotor states. This model is analysed in its bistable regime in which the deterministic limit exhibits two stable fixed points and an unstable saddle, and the case of small noise is considered. On small time scales, the stochastic process fluctuates near one of the stable fixed points, and on large time scales, a metastable transition can occur, where fluctuations drive the system past the unstable saddle to the other stable fixed point. To explore how different intrinsic noise sources affect these transitions, fluctuations in protein production and degradation are eliminated, leaving fluctuations in the promotor state as the only source of noise in the system. Perturbation methods are then used to compute the stability landscape and the distribution of transition times, or first exit time density. To understand how protein noise affects the system, small magnitude fluctuations are added back into the process, and the stability landscape is compared to that of the process without protein noise. It is found that significant differences in the random process emerge in the presence of protein noise
Evidence Inference 2.0: More Data, Better Models
How do we most effectively treat a disease or condition? Ideally, we could
consult a database of evidence gleaned from clinical trials to answer such
questions. Unfortunately, no such database exists; clinical trial results are
instead disseminated primarily via lengthy natural language articles. Perusing
all such articles would be prohibitively time-consuming for healthcare
practitioners; they instead tend to depend on manually compiled systematic
reviews of medical literature to inform care.
NLP may speed this process up, and eventually facilitate immediate consult of
published evidence. The Evidence Inference dataset was recently released to
facilitate research toward this end. This task entails inferring the
comparative performance of two treatments, with respect to a given outcome,
from a particular article (describing a clinical trial) and identifying
supporting evidence. For instance: Does this article report that chemotherapy
performed better than surgery for five-year survival rates of operable cancers?
In this paper, we collect additional annotations to expand the Evidence
Inference dataset by 25\%, provide stronger baseline models, systematically
inspect the errors that these make, and probe dataset quality. We also release
an abstract only (as opposed to full-texts) version of the task for rapid model
prototyping. The updated corpus, documentation, and code for new baselines and
evaluations are available at http://evidence-inference.ebm-nlp.com/.Comment: Accepted as workshop paper into BioNLP Updated results from SciBERT
to Biomed RoBERT
A mechanistic study of the ECⲠmechanism â the split wave in cyclic voltammetry and square wave voltammetry
In this paper, a detailed investigation of electrochemical reactions coupled with homogenous chemical steps using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and square wave voltammetry (SWV) was carried out to study the electrocatalytic (ECâ) mechanism. In CV, parameters including scan rate, electrode material and redox reactant were investigated while in SWV, parameters including substrate concentrations and frequencies were altered to demonstrate ECâ mechanism. Mechanistic studies focused on the ECâ mechanism using L-cysteine with ferrocenecarboxylic acid and 1,1 â˛-ferrocenedicarboxylic acid respectively. Voltammetric responses were recorded and under conditions of high chemical rate constant and low substrate concentration, a split wave was observed in both CV and SWV studies
Steric Hindrance as a Mechanistic Probe for Olefin Reactivity:â Variability of the Hydrogenic Canopy over the Isomeric Adamantylideneadamantane/Sesquihomoadamantene Pair (A Combined Experimental and Theoretical Study)
Access to each CC face of adamantylideneadamantane (AA) and sesquihomoadamantene (SA) is hindered by the hydrogenic canopy consisting of four β-hydrogens; otherwise, these olefins have quite normal environments. X-ray crystallography and density functional (DFT) calculations show a 0.5 Ă
larger annular opening in the protective cover of AA than that in SA. This contributes to the remarkable differences in reactivity toward various reagents, not only by limiting access to the olefin site in SA but also by inhibiting reactions which force these hydrogens closer together. Thus, AA is subject to typical olefin-addition reactions with bromine, sulfuryl chloride, m-chloroperbenzoic acid, dioxygen, and so forth, albeit sometimes at attenuated rates. On the other hand, SA is singularly unreactive under identical reaction conditions, except for the notable exceptions that include Brønsted (protonic) acids, a nitrosonium cation, and dichlorine. The exceptions are characterized as three sterically limited (electrophilic) reagents whose unique reactivity patterns are shown to be strongly influenced by steric access to the CC center. As such, the different degrees of steric encumbrance in the isomeric donors AA and SA shed considerable light on the diverse nature of olefinic reactions. In particular, they evoke mechanistic features in electrophilic addition versus electron transfer, which are otherwise not readily discernible with other less hindered olefinic donors. Transient structures of the olefinic-reaction intermediates such as the protonated carbocations AAâH+ and SAâH+ as well as the cation radicals AAâ˘+ and SAâ˘+ are probed by the combination of X-ray crystallographic analyses and density functional theoretical computations
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