Quantifying discrepancies in opinion spectra from online and offline networks

Online social media such as Twitter are widely used for mining public opinions and sentiments on various issues and topics. The sheer volume of the data generated and the eager adoption by the online-savvy public are helping to raise the profile of online media as a convenient source of news and public opinions on social and political issues as well. Due to the uncontrollable biases in the population who heavily use the media, however, it is often difficult to measure how accurately the online sphere reflects the offline world at large, undermining the usefulness of online media. One way of identifying and overcoming the online-offline discrepancies is to apply a common analytical and modeling framework to comparable data sets from online and offline sources and cross-analyzing the patterns found therein. In this paper we study the political spectra constructed from Twitter and from legislators' voting records as an example to demonstrate the potential limits of online media as the source for accurate public opinion mining.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Crossover from Endogenous to Exogenous Activity in Open-Source Software Development

We have investigated the origin of fluctuations in the aggregated behaviour of an open-source software community. In a recent series of papers, de Menezes and co-workers have shown how to separate internal dynamics from external fluctuations by capturing the simultaneous activity of many system's components. In spite of software development being a planned activity, the analysis of fluctuations reveals how external driving forces can be only observed at weekly and higher time scales. Hourly and higher change frequencies mostly relate to internal maintenance activities. There is a crossover from endogenous to exogenous activity depending on the average number of file changes. This new evidence suggests that software development is a non-homogeneous design activity where stronger efforts focus in a few project files. The crossover can be explained with a Langevin equation associated to the cascading process, where changes to any file trigger additional changes to its neighbours in the software network. In addition, analysis of fluctuations enables us to detect whether a software system can be decomposed in several subsystems with different development dynamics.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter

Clustering properties of a generalised critical Euclidean network

Many real-world networks exhibit scale-free feature, have a small diameter and a high clustering tendency. We have studied the properties of a growing network, which has all these features, in which an incoming node is connected to its $i$th predecessor of degree $k_i$ with a link of length $\ell$ using a probability proportional to $k^\beta_i \ell^{\alpha}$. For $\alpha > -0.5$, the network is scale free at $\beta = 1$ with the degree distribution $P(k) \propto k^{-\gamma}$ and $\gamma = 3.0$ as in the Barab\'asi-Albert model ($\alpha =0, \beta =1$). We find a phase boundary in the $\alpha-\beta$ plane along which the network is scale-free. Interestingly, we find scale-free behaviour even for $\beta > 1$ for $\alpha < -0.5$ where the existence of a new universality class is indicated from the behaviour of the degree distribution and the clustering coefficients. The network has a small diameter in the entire scale-free region. The clustering coefficients emulate the behaviour of most real networks for increasing negative values of $\alpha$ on the phase boundary.Comment: 4 pages REVTEX, 4 figure

Drive level dependency in quartz resonators

AbstractCommon piezoelectric resonators such as quartz resonators have a very high Q and ultra stable resonant frequency. However, due to small material nonlinearities in the quartz crystal, the resonator is drive level dependent, that is, the resonator level of activity and its frequency are dependent on the driving, or excitation, voltage. The size of these resonators will be reduced to one fourth of their current sizes in the next few years, but the electrical power which is applied will not be reduced as much. Hence, the applied power to resonator size ratio will be larger, and the drive level dependency may play a role in the resonator designs.We study this phenomenon using the Lagrangian nonlinear stress equations of motion and Piola–Kirchhoff stress tensor of the second kind. Solutions are obtained using COMSOL for the AT-cut, BT-cut, SC-cut and other doubly rotated cut quartz resonators and the results compared well with experimental data. The phenomenon of the drive level dependence is discussed in terms of the voltage drive, electric field, power density and current density. It is found that the drive level dependency is best described in terms of the power density. Experimental results for the AT-, BT- and SC-cut resonators in comparison with our model results are presented. Results for new doubly rotated cuts are presented. The effects of spurious modes, quality factor and air damping on DLD are presented

Self Consistent Expansion for the Molecular Beam Epitaxy Equation

Motivated by a controversy over the correct results derived from the dynamic renormalization group (DRG) analysis of the non linear molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) equation, a self-consistent expansion (SCE) for the non linear MBE theory is considered. The scaling exponents are obtained for spatially correlated noise of the general form $D({\vec r - \vec r',t - t'}) = 2D_0 | {\vec r - \vec r'} |^{2\rho - d} \delta ({t - t'})$. I find a lower critical dimension $d_c (\rho) = 4 + 2\rho$, above, which the linear MBE solution appears. Below the lower critical dimension a r-dependent strong-coupling solution is found. These results help to resolve the controversy over the correct exponents that describe non linear MBE, using a reliable method that proved itself in the past by predicting reasonable results for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) system, where DRG failed to do so.Comment: 16 page

Modeling the Internet's Large-Scale Topology

Network generators that capture the Internet's large-scale topology are crucial for the development of efficient routing protocols and modeling Internet traffic. Our ability to design realistic generators is limited by the incomplete understanding of the fundamental driving forces that affect the Internet's evolution. By combining the most extensive data on the time evolution, topology and physical layout of the Internet, we identify the universal mechanisms that shape the Internet's router and autonomous system level topology. We find that the physical layout of nodes form a fractal set, determined by population density patterns around the globe. The placement of links is driven by competition between preferential attachment and linear distance dependence, a marked departure from the currently employed exponential laws. The universal parameters that we extract significantly restrict the class of potentially correct Internet models, and indicate that the networks created by all available topology generators are significantly different from the Internet

An Application Of An Artificial Neural Network Investment System To Predict Takeover Targets

Artificial neural networks are a robust, effective complement to traditional statistical methods in financial applications. They can incorporate qualitative and quantitative information, and recognize underlying patterns and trends in large, complex data sets.  This paper applies a neural network model to identify potential acquisition targets. The model incorporates various factors based on acquisition theories suggested in the literature.  The resulting neural network model exhibits a highly successful prediction rate and a portfolio of predicted target stocks identified by the network substantially outperformed the market

Worm Phenotype Ontology: Integrating phenotype data within and beyond the C. elegans community

Background: Caenorhabditis elegans gene-based phenotype information dates back to the 1970’s, beginning with Sydney Brenner and the characterization of behavioral and morphological mutant alleles via classical genetics in order to understand nervous system function. Since then C. elegans has become an important genetic model system for the study of basic biological and biomedical principles, largely through the use of phenotype analysis. Because of the growth of C. elegans as a genetically tractable model organism and the development of large-scale analyses, there has been a significant increase of phenotype data that needs to be managed and made accessible to the research community. To do so, a standardized vocabulary is necessary to integrate phenotype data from diverse sources, permit integration with other data types and render the data in a computable form. Results: We describe a hierarchically structured, controlled vocabulary of terms that can be used to standardize phenotype descriptions in C. elegans, namely the Worm Phenotype Ontology (WPO). The WPO is currently comprised of 1,880 phenotype terms, 74% of which have been used in the annotation of phenotypes associated with greater than 18,000 C. elegans genes. The scope of the WPO is not exclusively limited to C. elegans biology, rather it is devised to also incorporate phenotypes observed in related nematode species. We have enriched the value of the WPO by integrating it with other ontologies, thereby increasing the accessibility of worm phenotypes to non-nematode biologists. We are actively developing the WPO to continue to fulfill the evolving needs of the scientific community and hope to engage researchers in this crucial endeavor. Conclusions: We provide a phenotype ontology (WPO) that will help to facilitate data retrieval, and cross-species comparisons within the nematode community. In the larger scientific community, the WPO will permit data integration, and interoperability across the different Model Organism Databases (MODs) and other biological databases. This standardized phenotype ontology will therefore allow for more complex data queries and enhance bioinformatic analyses