Theoretical and technological building blocks for an innovation accelerator

The scientific system that we use today was devised centuries ago and is inadequate for our current ICT-based society: the peer review system encourages conservatism, journal publications are monolithic and slow, data is often not available to other scientists, and the independent validation of results is limited. Building on the Innovation Accelerator paper by Helbing and Balietti (2011) this paper takes the initial global vision and reviews the theoretical and technological building blocks that can be used for implementing an innovation (in first place: science) accelerator platform driven by re-imagining the science system. The envisioned platform would rest on four pillars: (i) Redesign the incentive scheme to reduce behavior such as conservatism, herding and hyping; (ii) Advance scientific publications by breaking up the monolithic paper unit and introducing other building blocks such as data, tools, experiment workflows, resources; (iii) Use machine readable semantics for publications, debate structures, provenance etc. in order to include the computer as a partner in the scientific process, and (iv) Build an online platform for collaboration, including a network of trust and reputation among the different types of stakeholders in the scientific system: scientists, educators, funding agencies, policy makers, students and industrial innovators among others. Any such improvements to the scientific system must support the entire scientific process (unlike current tools that chop up the scientific process into disconnected pieces), must facilitate and encourage collaboration and interdisciplinarity (again unlike current tools), must facilitate the inclusion of intelligent computing in the scientific process, must facilitate not only the core scientific process, but also accommodate other stakeholders such science policy makers, industrial innovators, and the general public

A First Search for coincident Gravitational Waves and High Energy Neutrinos using LIGO, Virgo and ANTARES data from 2007

We present the results of the first search for gravitational wave bursts associated with high energy neutrinos. Together, these messengers could reveal new, hidden sources that are not observed by conventional photon astronomy, particularly at high energy. Our search uses neutrinos detected by the underwater neutrino telescope ANTARES in its 5 line configuration during the period January - September 2007, which coincided with the fifth and first science runs of LIGO and Virgo, respectively. The LIGO-Virgo data were analysed for candidate gravitational-wave signals coincident in time and direction with the neutrino events. No significant coincident events were observed. We place limits on the density of joint high energy neutrino - gravitational wave emission events in the local universe, and compare them with densities of merger and core-collapse events.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, science summary page at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S5LV_ANTARES/index.php. Public access area to figures, tables at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=p120000

Racial discrimination, the superwoman schema, and allostatic load: exploring an integrative stress-coping model among African American women

Racial discrimination has been linked to allostatic load (i.e., cumulative biological stress) among African American women. However, limited attention has been given to psychosocial processes involved in the stress response—critical for understanding biological pathways to health—in studies examining racial discrimination as a social determinant of health. We examined whether the superwoman schema (SWS), a multidimensional culture-specific framework characterizing psychosocial responses to stress among African American women, modifies the association between racial discrimination and allostatic load. We used purposive sampling to recruit a community sample of African American women ages 30–50 from five San Francisco Bay Area counties (n = 208). Path analysis was used to test for interactions while accounting for the covariance among SWS subscales using both linear and quadratic models. Significant interactions were observed between racial discrimination and four of the five SWS subscales. Feeling obligated to present an image of strength and an obligation to suppress emotions were each protective whereas feeling an intense motivation to succeed and feeling an obligation to help others exacerbated the independent health risk associated with experiencing racial discrimination. Our findings affirm the need to consider individual variability in coping and potentially other psychosocial processes involved in the stress response process, and offer several insights that may help elucidate the mechanisms by which racial discrimination gets “under the skin.

Track A Basic Science

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138319/1/jia218438.pd

Corrections for rooting volume and plant size reveal negative effects of neighbour presence on root allocation in peaplant

1. Plants are able to detect the presence of their neighbours below-ground. The associated root responses may affect plant performance, plant–plant interactions and community dynamics, but the extent and direction of these responses is heavily debated. 2. Some studies suggest that plants will over-proliferate roots in response to neighbours at the expense of reproduction, which was framed as a ‘tragedy of the commons’. Others propose an ‘ideal free distribution’ hypothesis stating that plants produce roots simply as a function of the amount of available nutrients. However, experimental evidence for either hypothesis that is unbiased by confounding effects of rooting volume and plant size in their experimental set-ups is still lacking. 3. We grew split-root pea plants in the presence or absence of a below-ground neighbour at a range of rooting volumes, while providing equal amounts of nutrients per plant. Path analyses were used to disentangle the direct effects of neighbour presence on allocation patterns from the confounding effects of rooting volume and plant size. 4. Within the chosen range of rooting volumes, the presence of a below-ground neighbour generally reduced plant root mass by 21% and total mass by 9%. A doubling of rooting volume generally increased plant root mass by 22% and total mass by 11%. Pod mass was only directly and positively correlated with vegetative mass. 5. The presence of a below-ground neighbour induced less root allocation but more pod allocation, whereas increased rooting volume caused a reduction in reproductive allocation. A large part of these effects, however, was indirectly mediated through the influence on plant total mass. 6. Synthesis. Not considering the effects of rooting volume and plant size may lead to misinterpretations of plant growth strategies in response to neighbours. Accounting for these factors, we found pea allocating less mass to roots in the presence of a below-ground neighbour. The obtained results can help to reconcile the various responses to below-ground neighbours as they are published in the literature