Spatio-temporal variation of conversational utterances on Twitter

Conversations reflect the existing norms of a language. Previously, we found that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years. In this work, we show that this shortening occurs even for a brief period of 3 years (September 2009-December 2012) using 229 million utterances from Twitter. Furthermore, the subset of geographically-tagged tweets from the United States show an inverse proportion between utterance lengths and the state-level percentage of the Black population. We argue that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, published in PLoS On

Opportunities for weed manipulation using GMHT row crops

The herbicides and cultivation systems available in most non-GM crops allow farmers little flexibility as to when they control weeds. However, glyphosate and glufosinate-ammonium, as used in GM herbicide tolerant crops, offer the opportunity to control large weeds and weed control can be timed according to the agronomic and environmental aims of the user. This paper will use sugar beet as a model crop and report results where different approaches to weed control have been used and discuss their relevance in the wider agricultural and environmental contextNon peer reviewe

The future of sustainable cities: governance, policy and knowledge

The aim of this special issue is to address a conceptual and empirical gap in the existing literature on sustainable cities. Uniquely, it brings together questions about the “what” (in this case, the content and representation of urban policy) of research on urban sustainability with “how” (the social organisation of knowledge and action) through the results of collaborative and comparative work. The special issue contains curated contributions that draw upon the findings of a comparative international project funded by Mistra (Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) through the Mistra Urban Futures Centre, based in Gothenburg. The project sought to bring together two questions that are usually treated as separate in existing research approaches. They are the “what” and “how” of sustainable cities’ debates. By working in partnership with local policy-makers, practitioners and universities, each local area entered into a process of collaborative design in order to examine assumptions, expectations, processes and the outcomes of knowledge co-production. This paper introduces the conceptual ideas behind this initiative and so provides a frame for the reader to situate the contributions. It then outlines those articles to draw connections between them and concludes with a short summary of what research and societal lessons can be learnt from the project

Altruistic Contents of Quantum Prisoner's Dilemma

We examine the classical contents of quantum games. It is shown that a quantum strategy can be interpreted as a classical strategies with effective density-dependent game matrices composed of transposed matrix elements. In particular, successful quantum strategies in dilemma games are interpreted in terms of a symmetrized game matrix that corresponds to an altruistic game plan.Comment: Revised according to publisher's request: 4 pgs, 2 fgs, ReVTeX4. For more info, go to http://www.mech.kochi-tech.ac.jp/cheon