7,551 research outputs found
A model for melting of confined DNA
When DNA molecules are heated they denature. This occurs locally so that
loops of molten single DNA strands form, connected by intact double-stranded
DNA pieces. The properties of this "melting" transition have been intensively
investigated. Recently there has been a surge of interest in this question,
caused by experiments determining the properties of partially bound DNA
confined to nanochannels. But how does such confinement affect the melting
transition? To answer this question we introduce, and solve a model predicting
how confinement affects the melting transition for a simple model system by
first disregarding the effect of self-avoidance. We find that the transition is
smoother for narrower channels. By means of Monte-Carlo simulations we then
show that a model incorporating self-avoidance shows qualitatively the same
behaviour and that the effect of confinement is stronger than in the ideal
case.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, supplementary materia
Explaining Violation Traces with Finite State Natural Language Generation Models
An essential element of any verification technique is that of identifying and
communicating to the user, system behaviour which leads to a deviation from the
expected behaviour. Such behaviours are typically made available as long traces
of system actions which would benefit from a natural language explanation of
the trace and especially in the context of business logic level specifications.
In this paper we present a natural language generation model which can be used
to explain such traces. A key idea is that the explanation language is a CNL
that is, formally speaking, regular language susceptible transformations that
can be expressed with finite state machinery. At the same time it admits
various forms of abstraction and simplification which contribute to the
naturalness of explanations that are communicated to the user
Plant-level Productivity and Imputation of Missing Data in U.S. Census Manufacturing Data
Within-industry differences in measured plant-level productivity are large. A large literature has been devoted to explaining the causes and consequences of these differences. In the U.S. Census Bureau's manufacturing data, the Bureau imputes for missing values using methods known to result in underestimation of variability and potential bias in multivariate inferences. We present an alternative strategy for handling the missing data based on multiple imputation via sequences of classification and regression trees. We use our imputations and the Bureau's imputations to estimate within-industry productivity dispersions. The results suggest that there is more within-industry productivity dispersion than previous research has indicated. We also estimate relationships between productivity and market structure and between output prices, capital, and the probability of plant exit (controlling for productivity) based on the improved imputations. For some estimands, we find substantially different results than those based on the Census Bureau's imputations.
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