Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload

Email is a ubiquitous communications tool in the workplace and plays an important role in social interactions. Previous studies of email were largely based on surveys and limited to relatively small populations of email users within organizations. In this paper, we report results of a large-scale study of more than 2 million users exchanging 16 billion emails over several months. We quantitatively characterize the replying behavior in conversations within pairs of users. In particular, we study the time it takes the user to reply to a received message and the length of the reply sent. We consider a variety of factors that affect the reply time and length, such as the stage of the conversation, user demographics, and use of portable devices. In addition, we study how increasing load affects emailing behavior. We find that as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies. However, their responsiveness remains intact, and they may even reply to emails faster. Finally, we predict the time to reply, length of reply, and whether the reply ends a conversation. We demonstrate considerable improvement over the baseline in all three prediction tasks, showing the significant role that the factors that we uncover play, in determining replying behavior. We rank these factors based on their predictive power. Our findings have important implications for understanding human behavior and designing better email management applications for tasks like ranking unread emails.Comment: 11 page, 24th International World Wide Web Conferenc

The impossible regularization of the Nambu Jona-Lasinio model with vector interactions

We show that the procedure of regularizing the real part of the euclidean action, while leaving the imaginary part unregularized, leads to a non-analytic and highly singular functional of the fields. It is customary to work with an imaginary time component of the vector field, in order to avoid regularization of the anomalous processes. We show that this procedure is flawed by the fact that a stationary point of the action occurs for a real, not imaginary, time component of the vector field. Furthermore the action in the vicinity of the stationary point is singular. The regularized action is thus not suitable for an evaluation of the partition function using a saddle point method. We discuss proposed solutions to this problem, as well as other regularizations. They all lead to practical problems.Comment: 13 pages in Latex, available from [email protected]

Spin content of constituent quarks and one-spin asymmetries in inclusive processes

We consider mechanism for one-spin asymmetries observed in inclusive hadron production. The main role belongs to the orbital angular momentum of the quark-antiquark cloud in the internal structure of constituent quarks. We argue that the origin of the asymmetries in pion production is a result of retaining of this internal angular orbital momentum by the perturbative phase of QCD under transition from the non-perturbative phase. The non-perturbative hadron structure is based on the results of chiral quark models. PACS number(s): 11.30.Qc, 12.40.Pp, 13.75.Ni, 13.88.+eComment: 21 pages LaTeX + 8 figures (not included

Quark-Antiquark Bound States within a Dyson-Schwinger Bethe-Salpeter Formalism

Pion and kaon observables are calculated using a Dyson-Schwinger Bethe-Salpeter formalism. It is shown that an infrared finite gluon propagator can lead to quark confinement via generation of complex mass poles in quark propagators. Observables, including electromagnetic form factors, are calculated entirely in Euclidean metric for spacelike values of bound state momentum and final results are extrapolated to the physical region.Comment: Minor typographical corrections. Accepted for publication in Nucl. Phys.

Baryon form factors in a diquark-quark bound state description

Nucleon form factors are calculated in a relativistic diquark--quark picture based on the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. The nucleon wave function is obtained in a static approximation to the quark exchange interaction between the valence quark and the diquark. We evaluate the valence quark and $0^+$--diquark contribution to the nucleon electromagnetic and weak currents. We find reasonable electric charge radii, magnetic moments as in the additive diquark model, and $g_A \approx 1$. We discuss the dependence on the model parameters.Comment: 10 pages, latex, 1 postscript figure included (uuencoded

Strong and Radiative Meson Decays in a Generalized Nambu--Jona-Lasinio Model

We investigate strong and radiative meson decays in a generalized Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. The one loop order calculation provides a satisfactory agreement with the data for the mesonic spectrum and for radiative decays. Higher order effects for strong decays of $\rho$ and $K^*$ are estimated to be large. We also discuss the role of the flavour mixing determinantal interaction.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX, 2 figs available upon request, CRN 92-4

Note on Strange Quarks in the Nucleon

Scalar matrix elements involving strange quarks are studied in several models. Apart from a critical reexamination of results obtained in the Nambu and Jona-Lasinio model we study a scenario, motivated by instanton physics, where spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking is induced by the flavor-mixing 't Hooft interaction only. We also investigate possible contributions of virtual kaon loops to the strangeness content of the nucleon.Comment: 12 pages, latex style. One figure, available from the author upon request. University of Regensburg TPR-94-0

Quark Droplets in the NJL Mean Field

We study the conditions for the existence of stable quark matter in the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio mean field at zero temperature and discuss its interpretation.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX, 4 eps-figures included, to appear in the Proc. of the workshop 'QCD at Finite Baryon Density', Bielefeld, April 27-30, 199

ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging

The social demand for email end-to-end encryption is barely supported by mainstream service providers. Autocrypt is a new community-driven open specification for e-mail encryption that attempts to respond to this demand. In Autocrypt the encryption keys are attached directly to messages, and thus the encryption can be implemented by email clients without any collaboration of the providers. The decentralized nature of this in-band key distribution, however, makes it prone to man-in-the-middle attacks and can leak the social graph of users. To address this problem we introduce ClaimChain, a cryptographic construction for privacy-preserving authentication of public keys. Users store claims about their identities and keys, as well as their beliefs about others, in ClaimChains. These chains form authenticated decentralized repositories that enable users to prove the authenticity of both their keys and the keys of their contacts. ClaimChains are encrypted, and therefore protect the stored information, such as keys and contact identities, from prying eyes. At the same time, ClaimChain implements mechanisms to provide strong non-equivocation properties, discouraging malicious actors from distributing conflicting or inauthentic claims. We implemented ClaimChain and we show that it offers reasonable performance, low overhead, and authenticity guarantees.Comment: Appears in 2018 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'18