Informational Smallness and the Scope for Limiting Information Rents

For an incomplete-information model of public-good provision with interim participation constraints, we show that e¢ cient outcomes can be approximated, with approximately full surplus extraction, when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small. The result holds even if agents' payoffs cannot be unambiguously inferred from their beliefs, i.e., even if the so-called BDP property ("Beliefs Determine Preferences") of Neeman (2004) does not hold. The contrary result of Neeman (2004) rests on an implicit uniformity requirement that is incompatible with the notion that agents are informationally small because there are many other agents who have information about them.surplus extraction, mechanism design, BDP, informational smallness, correlated information

Epigenetics: Dissecting Gene Expression Alteration in PDAC

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths, with a low 5-year survival rate of about 7% due to its highly invasive nature. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) comprises more than 90% of all pancreatic cancer cases. At the time of detection, around 80% of cases harbor metastases due to the lack of early diagnosis. For decades, scientists have primarily focused on dissecting the origin of pancreatic cancer through genetic alterations and their contribution to diagnosis. Recently, PDAC research has turned into epigenetics to revolutionize our understanding about the silencing of critical regulatory genes. Epigenetic events can be divided mechanistically into various components, including DNA methylation, histone posttranslational modification, nucleosome remodeling, and regulation of transcription or translation by microRNA. The identified epigenetic processes in PDAC contribute to its specific epigenotype and are correlated phenotypic features. Strikingly, some of them have been suggested to have potential as cancer biomarkers, for disease monitoring, prognosis, and risk validation. As epigenetic aberrations are reversible, their correction will become as a promising therapeutic target

Representation of Africa online: sourcing practice and frames of reference

The dominant perspective on the representation of Africa in the western media claims that western media coverage is bias and crisis orientated and the liberal perspective claims that the coverage of Africa is not as negative as is often assumed. However, there is a paucity of literature on the representation of Africa online. This research enquiry is relevant because literature claims that the Internet has the potential to resolve the journalistic predicament of representing other culture through political participation and deliberation. But this requires a re-orientation of the sourcing practice of news organization to embrace sensitivity to and knowledge of African cultures. Moreover, the journalistic predicament can be resolved or not depending on the news gathering approach adopted by the news organization. Literature has identified two approaches, that is, ‘gatekeeping’ used mainly by dominant traditional media and ‘gatewatching’ used by alternative media in their quest to counter mainstream ideology. This study examines the impacts of the ‘gatewatching’ approach adopted by Africa Have Your Say (AHYS) website on its representation and frames of reference of Africa. It uses on-site observation, in-depth interviews and textual analysis to gather data. The study found that although the sourcing practice at the AHYS is elaborate and complex, the ‘gatewatching’ approach makes its susceptible to second level agenda setting. Hence, its frame repeats the attributes and tone used by the mainstream traditional media. However, a minority of users did not use repeat this frame in their comments

Polarisation Based Entanglement Distribution Quantum Networking

Quantum networks based on entanglement distribution have shown promise for building scalable and fully connected systems that support quantum key distribution. This work aims to go beyond simply implementing quantum key distribution and explore the potential of such networks for implementing quantum photonic interconnects. Our research demonstrates the passive polarization stability of these networks for over a week and highlights the benefits of dynamic reconfiguration to remove redundant resources. We discuss recent advancements in quantum frequency conversion and quantum memory-based networks, and argue that the development of scalable, long-distance interconnects is crucial for advancing quantum technology. Our findings have important implications for the future of quantum networking and highlight the need for entanglement based photonic interconnect networks, such that quantum technology can scale beyond monolithic systems

Towards a Fully Connected Many-User Entanglement Distribution Quantum Network Within Deployed Telecommunications Fibre-Optic Infrastructure

We present developments in entanglement distribution quantum networks towards a fully connected, scalable, many-user network, which is not limited to simple quantum key distribution protocol