What Motivates Barrier-Crossing Leadership?

From large-scale wars, natural disasters, and pandemics to community-level religious and ethnic conflicts, many leaders wield power during crises by championing their group’s goals against those of rivals. But there is also a rarer breed of leader—barrier-crossers who pursue group interests by recognizing rivals’ interests and working with them to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Though such leaders have played vital roles in resolving conflicts, little is known about their extraordinary motivation. Here we report survey results contrasting barrier-crossing with barrier-bound leaders from seven communities. In line with new theories from group psychology and anthropology, we found that barrier-crossers uniquely reported intense, family-like bonds to both ingroups and outgroups. Further evidence suggests that these outgroup bonds result from past, personally transformative experiences shared with outgroup members

The Clarens web services architecture

Clarens is a uniquely flexible web services infrastructure providing a unified access protocol to a diverse set of functions useful to the HEP community. It uses the standard HTTP protocol combined with application layer, certificate based authentication to provide single sign-on to individuals, organizations and hosts, with fine-grained access control to services, files and virtual organization (VO) management. This contribution describes the server functionality, while client applications are described in a subsequent talk.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, PSN MONT00

Clarens Client and Server Applications

Several applications have been implemented with access via the Clarens web service infrastructure, including virtual organization management, JetMET physics data analysis using relational databases, and Storage Resource Broker (SRB) access. This functionality is accessible transparently from Python scripts, the Root analysis framework and from Java applications and browser applets.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, LaTeX, no figures, PSN TUCT00

Causes and consequences of representational drift.

The nervous system learns new associations while maintaining memories over long periods, exhibiting a balance between flexibility and stability. Recent experiments reveal that neuronal representations of learned sensorimotor tasks continually change over days and weeks, even after animals have achieved expert behavioral performance. How is learned information stored to allow consistent behavior despite ongoing changes in neuronal activity? What functions could ongoing reconfiguration serve? We highlight recent experimental evidence for such representational drift in sensorimotor systems, and discuss how this fits into a framework of distributed population codes. We identify recent theoretical work that suggests computational roles for drift and argue that the recurrent and distributed nature of sensorimotor representations permits drift while limiting disruptive effects. We propose that representational drift may create error signals between interconnected brain regions that can be used to keep neural codes consistent in the presence of continual change. These concepts suggest experimental and theoretical approaches to studying both learning and maintenance of distributed and adaptive population codes.This work is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program, ERC grant StG 716643 FLEXNEURO, and NIH grants (NS108410, NS089521, MH107620)

Nanoscale protein analysis utilizing capillary electrophoresis and laser-induced fluorescence detection

The trend towards high throughput applications and miniaturization necessitates approaches capable of microlitre volume sampling and low protein concentration detection. Furthermore, one of the major trends in high throughput screening is the growing replacement of technologies that depend on radioactivity to generate a signal with those that rely on fluorescence. This trend towards non-radioactive detection in general can be understood by some of the advantages inherent to these methods over radioactive modes. These include a significant reduction in safety concerns leading to a relaxation of strict laboratory procedures, elimination of expensive waste disposal, extended shelf-life of labeled reagents, and the possibility of acquiring multiplexed data through the spectral isolation of different wavelength signals. A variety of capillary electrophoretic (CE) approaches utilizing laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) have thus been developed, providing researchers with valuable tools in protein analysis. Various covalent and non-covalent fluorescent derivatization approaches have been investigated, with emphasis on biochemical and/or clinical applications. The non-covalent dye, NanoOrange, is used as a clinical diagnostic tool for early disease diagnosis, quantitating nanomolar concentrations of human serum albumin in solution, and obtaining fluorescence-based biofluid profiles. An alternate non-covalent labeling approach utilizing the fluorescent probe, Sypro Red, and capillary gel electrophoresis allows for rapid, sensitive analysis of protein sample purity as well as molecular weight determination. These two non-covalent approaches are complemented by the development of a fluorescent Insulin-Like Growth Factor-I (IGF-I) analog for use in bioanalytical applications. Specific derivatization reaction conditions were developed to selectively label the N-terminus of the analog hence preserve biological activity. High-performance liquid chromatography and electrospray mass spectrometry were used to confirm the extent of labeling and modification site. Antibody recognition of this fluorescent analog was evaluated using CE-LIF, illustrating the clinical utility of this diagnostic reagent. In addition to the above CE-LIF approaches, a fourth capillary electrophoretic tool is provided for the clinical chemist. Rapid analysis of biofluids is of significant importance in early disease diagnosis. As such, an extensive CE-based analysis of human seminal plasma is presented. Separation conditions, sample stability, and protein/non-protein zone identification issues are addressed. This study and the CE-LIF methodologies discussed above represent original approaches to nanoscale protein analysis

Measuring Entangled Qutrits and Their Use for Quantum Bit Commitment

We produce and holographically measure entangled qudits encoded in transverse spatial modes of single photons. With the novel use of a quantum state tomography method that only requires two-state superpositions, we achieve the most complete characterisation of entangled qutrits to date. Ideally, entangled qutrits provide better security than qubits in quantum bit-commitment: we model the sensitivity of this to mixture and show experimentally and theoretically that qutrits with even a small amount of decoherence cannot offer increased security over qubits.Comment: Paper updated to match published version; 5 pages, 4 figures, images have been included at slightly lower quality for the archiv