Partitioned Sampling of Public Opinions Based on Their Social Dynamics

Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In this paper, we explore the idea of partitioned sampling, which partitions individuals with high opinion similarities into groups and then samples every group separately to obtain an accurate estimate of the population opinion. We rigorously formulate the above idea as an optimization problem. We then show that the simple partitions which contain only one sample in each group are always better, and reduce finding the optimal simple partition to a well-studied Min-r-Partition problem. We adapt an approximation algorithm and a heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Moreover, to obtain opinion similarity efficiently, we adapt a well-known opinion evolution model to characterize social interactions, and provide an exact computation of opinion similarities based on the model. We use both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate that the partitioned sampling method results in significant improvement in sampling quality and it is robust when some opinion similarities are inaccurate or even missing

A convergent method for linear half-space kinetic equations

We give a unified proof for the well-posedness of a class of linear half-space equations with general incoming data and construct a Galerkin method to numerically resolve this type of equations in a systematic way. Our main strategy in both analysis and numerics includes three steps: adding damping terms to the original half-space equation, using an inf-sup argument and even-odd decomposition to establish the well-posedness of the damped equation, and then recovering solutions to the original half-space equation. The proposed numerical methods for the damped equation is shown to be quasi-optimal and the numerical error of approximations to the original equation is controlled by that of the damped equation. This efficient solution to the half-space problem is useful for kinetic-fluid coupling simulations

Alternative Route to Strong Interaction: Narrow Feshbach Resonance

We show that a narrow resonance produces strong interaction effects far beyond its width on the side of the resonance where the bound state has not been formed. This is due to a resonance structure of its phase shift, which shifts the phase of a large number of scattering states by $\pi$ before the bound state emerges. As a result, the magnitude of the interaction energy when approaching the resonance on the "upper" and "lower" branch from different side of the resonance is highly asymmetric, unlike their counter part in wide resonances. Measurements of these effects are experimentally feasible.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Outbreaks of coinfections: the critical role of cooperativity

Modeling epidemic dynamics plays an important role in studying how diseases spread, predicting their future course, and designing strategies to control them. In this letter, we introduce a model of SIR (susceptible-infected-removed) type which explicitly incorporates the effect of {\it cooperative coinfection}. More precisely, each individual can get infected by two different diseases, and an individual already infected with one disease has an increased probability to get infected by the other. Depending on the amount of this increase, we observe different threshold scenarios. Apart from the standard continuous phase transition for single disease outbreaks, we observe continuous transitions where both diseases must coexist, but also discontinuous transitions are observed, where a finite fraction of the population is already affected by both diseases at the threshold. All our results are obtained in a mean field model using rate equations, but we argue that they should hold also in more general frameworks.Comment: 5 pages, including 5 figure

Bose Gases Near Unitarity

We study the properties of strongly interacting Bose gases at the density and temperature regime when the three-body recombination rate is substantially reduced. In this regime, one can have a Bose gas with all particles in scattering states (i.e. the "upper branch") with little loss even at unitarity over the duration of the experiment. We show that because of bosonic enhancement, pair formation is shifted to the atomic side of the original resonance (where scattering length $a_s<0$), opposite to the fermionic case. In a trap, a repulsive Bose gas remains mechanically stable when brought across resonance to the atomic side until it reaches a critical scattering length $a_{s}^{\ast}<0$. For $a_s<a_{s}^{\ast}$, the density consists of a core of upper branch bosons surrounded by an outer layer of equilibrium phase. The conditions of low three-body recombination requires that the particle number $N<\alpha (T/\omega)^{5/2}$ in a harmonic trap with frequency $\omega$, where $\alpha$ is a constant.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure