Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Current challenges in software solutions for mass spectrometry-based quantitative proteomics

This work was in part supported by the PRIME-XS project, grant agreement number 262067, funded by the European Union seventh Framework Programme; The Netherlands Proteomics Centre, embedded in The Netherlands Genomics Initiative; The Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre; and the Centre for Biomedical Genetics (to S.C., B.B. and A.J.R.H); by NIH grants NCRR RR001614 and RR019934 (to the UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility, director: A.L. Burlingame, P.B.); and by grants from the MRC, CR-UK, BBSRC and Barts and the London Charity (to P.C.

Locating previously unknown patterns in data-mining results: a dual data- and knowledge-mining method

BACKGROUND: Data mining can be utilized to automate analysis of substantial amounts of data produced in many organizations. However, data mining produces large numbers of rules and patterns, many of which are not useful. Existing methods for pruning uninteresting patterns have only begun to automate the knowledge acquisition step (which is required for subjective measures of interestingness), hence leaving a serious bottleneck. In this paper we propose a method for automatically acquiring knowledge to shorten the pattern list by locating the novel and interesting ones. METHODS: The dual-mining method is based on automatically comparing the strength of patterns mined from a database with the strength of equivalent patterns mined from a relevant knowledgebase. When these two estimates of pattern strength do not match, a high "surprise score" is assigned to the pattern, identifying the pattern as potentially interesting. The surprise score captures the degree of novelty or interestingness of the mined pattern. In addition, we show how to compute p values for each surprise score, thus filtering out noise and attaching statistical significance. RESULTS: We have implemented the dual-mining method using scripts written in Perl and R. We applied the method to a large patient database and a biomedical literature citation knowledgebase. The system estimated association scores for 50,000 patterns, composed of disease entities and lab results, by querying the database and the knowledgebase. It then computed the surprise scores by comparing the pairs of association scores. Finally, the system estimated statistical significance of the scores. CONCLUSION: The dual-mining method eliminates more than 90% of patterns with strong associations, thus identifying them as uninteresting. We found that the pruning of patterns using the surprise score matched the biomedical evidence in the 100 cases that were examined by hand. The method automates the acquisition of knowledge, thus reducing dependence on the knowledge elicited from human expert, which is usually a rate-limiting step

Scaling violations of quark and gluon jet fragmentation functions in e+e- annihilations at sqrt(s) = 91.2 and 183-209 GeV

Flavour inclusive, udsc and b fragmentation functions in unbiased jets, and flavour inclusive, udsc, b and gluon fragmentation functions in biased jets are measured in e+e- annihilations from data collected at centre-of-mass energies of 91.2, and 183-209 GeV with the OPAL detector at LEP. The unbiased jets are defined by hemispheres of inclusive hadronic events, while the biased jet measurements are based on three-jet events selected with jet algorithms. Several methods are employed to extract the fragmentation functions over a wide range of scales. Possible biases are studied in the results are obtained. The fragmentation functions are compared to results from lower energy e+e- experiments and with earlier LEP measurements and are found to be consistent. Scaling violations are observed and are found to be stronger for the fragmentation functions of gluon jets than for those of quarks. The measured fragmentation functions are compared to three recent theoretical next-to-leading order calculations and to the predictions of three Monte Carlo event generators. While the Monte Carlo models are in good agreement with the data, the theoretical predictions fail to describe the full set of results, in particular the b and gluon jet measurements.Comment: 46 pages, 17 figures, Submitted to Eur. Phys J.

Search for Yukawa Production of a Light Neutral Higgs Boson at LEP

Within a Two-Higgs-Doublet Model (2HDM) a search for a light Higgs boson in the mass range of 4-12 GeV has been performed in the Yukawa process e+e- -> b bbar A/h -> b bbar tau+tau-, using the data collected by the OPAL detector at LEP between 1992 and 1995 in e+e- collisions at about 91 GeV centre-of-mass energy. A likelihood selection is applied to separate background and signal. The number of observed events is in good agreement with the expected background. Within a CP-conserving 2HDM type II model the cross-section for Yukawa production depends on xiAd = |tan beta| and xihd = |sin alpha/cos beta| for the production of the CP-odd A and the CP-even h, respectively, where tan beta is the ratio of the vacuum expectation values of the Higgs doublets and alpha is the mixing angle between the neutral CP-even Higgs bosons. From our data 95% C.L. upper limits are derived for xiAd within the range of 8.5 to 13.6 and for xihd between 8.2 to 13.7, depending on the mass of the Higgs boson, assuming a branching fraction into tau+tau- of 100%. An interpretation of the limits within a 2HDM type II model with Standard Model particle content is given. These results impose constraints on several models that have been proposed to explain the recent BNL measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures, Submitted to Euro. Phys. J.

Tests of model of color reconnection and a search for glueballs using gluon jets with a rapidity gap

Gluon jets with a mean energy of 22 GeV and purity of 95% are selected from hadronic Z0 decay events produced in e+e- annihilations. A subsample of these jets is identified which exhibits a large gap in the rapidity distribution of particles within the jet. After imposing the requirement of a rapidity gap, the gluon jet purity is 86%. These jets are observed to demonstrate a high degree of sensitivity to the presence of color reconnection, i.e. higher order QCD processes affecting the underlying color structure. We use our data to test three QCD models which include a simulation of color reconnection: one in the Ariadne Monte Carlo, one in the Herwig Monte Carlo, and the other by Rathsman in the Pythia Monte Carlo. We find the Rathsman and Ariadne color reconnection models can describe our gluon jet measurements only if very large values are used for the cutoff parameters which serve to terminate the parton showers, and that the description of inclusive Z0 data is significantly degraded in this case. We conclude that color reconnection as implemented by these two models is disfavored. The signal from the Herwig color reconnection model is less clear and we do not obtain a definite conclusion concerning this model. In a separate study, we follow recent theoretical suggestions and search for glueball-like objects in the leading part of the gluon jets. No clear evidence is observed for these objects.Comment: 42 pages, 18 figure

Determination of alpha_s using Jet Rates at LEP with the OPAL detector

Hadronic events produced in e+e- collisions by the LEP collider and recorded by the OPAL detector were used to form distributions based on the number of reconstructed jets. The data were collected between 1995 and 2000 and correspond to energies of 91 GeV, 130-136 GeV and 161-209 GeV. The jet rates were determined using four different jet-finding algorithms (Cone, JADE, Durham and Cambridge). The differential two-jet rate and the average jet rate with the Durham and Cambridge algorithms were used to measure alpha(s) in the LEP energy range by fitting an expression in which order alpah_2s calculations were matched to a NLLA prediction and fitted to the data. Combining the measurements at different centre-of-mass energies, the value of alpha_s (Mz) was determined to be alpha(s)(Mz)=0.1177+-0.0006(stat.)+-0.0012$(expt.)+-0.0010(had.)+-0.0032(theo.) \.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figures, Submitted to Euro. Phys. J.

Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson with the OPAL Detector at LEP

This paper summarises the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson in e+e- collisions at centre-of-mass energies up to 209 GeV performed by the OPAL Collaboration at LEP. The consistency of the data with the background hypothesis and various Higgs boson mass hypotheses is examined. No indication of a signal is found in the data and a lower bound of 112.7GeV/C^2 is obtained on the mass of the Standard Model Higgs boson at the 95% CL.Comment: 51 pages, 21 figure

Measurement of triple gauge boson couplings from WW production at LEP energies up to 189 GeV

A measurement of triple gauge boson couplings is presented, based on W-pair data recorded by the OPAL detector at LEP during 1998 at a centre-of-mass energy of 189 GeV with an integrated luminosity of 183 pb^-1. After combining with our previous measurements at centre-of-mass energies of 161-183 GeV we obtain k_g=0.97 +0.20 -0.16, g_1^z=0.991 +0.060 -0.057 and lambda_g=-0.110 +0.058 -0.055, where the errors include both statistical and systematic uncertainties and each coupling is determined by setting the other two couplings to their SM values. These results are consistent with the Standard Model expectations.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Eur. Phys. J.