29,998 research outputs found
Constrained structure of ancient Chinese poetry facilitates speech content grouping
Ancient Chinese poetry is constituted by structured language that deviates from ordinary language usage [1, 2]; its poetic genres impose unique combinatory constraints on linguistic elements [3]. How does the constrained poetic structure facilitate speech segmentation when common linguistic [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and statistical cues [5, 9] are unreliable to listeners in poems? We generated artificial Jueju, which arguably has the most constrained structure in ancient Chinese poetry, and presented each poem twice as an isochronous sequence of syllables to native Mandarin speakers while conducting magnetoencephalography (MEG) recording. We found that listeners deployed their prior knowledge of Jueju to build the line structure and to establish the conceptual flow of Jueju. Unprecedentedly, we found a phase precession phenomenon indicating predictive processes of speech segmentation—the neural phase advanced faster after listeners acquired knowledge of incoming speech. The statistical co-occurrence of monosyllabic words in Jueju negatively correlated with speech segmentation, which provides an alternative perspective on how statistical cues facilitate speech segmentation. Our findings suggest that constrained poetic structures serve as a temporal map for listeners to group speech contents and to predict incoming speech signals. Listeners can parse speech streams by using not only grammatical and statistical cues but also their prior knowledge of the form of language
Towards Assume-Guarantee Profiles for Autonomous Vehicles
Rules or specifications for autonomous vehicles are currently formulated on a case-by-case basis, and put together in a rather ad-hoc fashion. As a step towards eliminating this practice, we propose a systematic procedure for generating a set of supervisory specifications for self-driving cars that are 1) associated with a distributed assume-guarantee structure and 2) characterizable by the notion of consistency and completeness. Besides helping autonomous vehicles make better decisions on the road, the assume-guarantee contract structure also helps address the notion of blame when undesirable events occur. We give several game-theoretic examples to demonstrate applicability of our framework
In-Beam Background Suppression Shield
The long (3ms) proton pulse of the European Spallation Source (ESS) gives
rise to unique and potentially high backgrounds for the instrument suite. In
such a source an instrument capabilities will be limited by it's Signal to
Noise (S/N) ratio. The instruments with a direct view of the moderator, which
do not use a bender to help mitigate the fast neutron background, are the most
challenging. For these beam lines we propose the innovative shielding of
placing blocks of material directly into the guide system, which allow a
minimum attenuation of the cold and thermal fluxes relative to the background
suppression. This shielding configuration has been worked into a beam line
model using Geant4. We study particularly the advantages of single crystal
sapphire and silicon blocks .Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, proceeding of NDS 2015, 4th International
Workshop on Neutron Delivery Systems, 28 -30 September 2015, ILL Grenoble,
Franc
Influence of statistical fluctuations on ratios in relativistic heavy ion collisions
The influence of pure statistical fluctuations on ratio is
investigated in an event-by-event way. Poisson and the modified negative
binomial distributions are used as the multiplicity distributions since they
both have statistical background. It is shown that the distributions of the
ratio in these cases are Gaussian, and the mean and relative variance are given
analytically.Comment: 6 pages in RevTeX, 3 eps figures include
Combinations of antioxidants and/or of epigenetic enzyme inhibitors allow for enhanced collection of mouse bone marrow hematopoietic stem cells in ambient air
Hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) is a treatment for malignant and non-malignant disorders. However, sometimes the numbers of donor hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are limiting, which can compromise the success of HCT. We recently published that collection and processing of mouse bone marrow (BM) and human cord blood cells in a hypoxic atmosphere of 3% O2 or in ambient air (~21% O2) in the presence of cyclosporine A yields increased numbers of HSC. We now show that collection and processing of mouse BM cells in ambient air in the presence of specific combinations of anti-oxidants and/or inhibitors of epigenetic enzymes can also enhance the collection of HSC, information of potential relevance for enhanced efficacy of HCT
Shortcuts through Colocation Facilities
Network overlays, running on top of the existing Internet substrate, are of
perennial value to Internet end-users in the context of, e.g., real-time
applications. Such overlays can employ traffic relays to yield path latencies
lower than the direct paths, a phenomenon known as Triangle Inequality
Violation (TIV). Past studies identify the opportunities of reducing latency
using TIVs. However, they do not investigate the gains of strategically
selecting relays in Colocation Facilities (Colos). In this work, we answer the
following questions: (i) how Colo-hosted relays compare with other relays as
well as with the direct Internet, in terms of latency (RTT) reductions; (ii)
what are the best locations for placing the relays to yield these reductions.
To this end, we conduct a large-scale one-month measurement of inter-domain
paths between RIPE Atlas (RA) nodes as endpoints, located at eyeball networks.
We employ as relays Planetlab nodes, other RA nodes, and machines in Colos. We
examine the RTTs of the overlay paths obtained via the selected relays, as well
as the direct paths. We find that Colo-based relays perform the best and can
achieve latency reductions against direct paths, ranging from a few to 100s of
milliseconds, in 76% of the total cases; 75% (58% of total cases) of these
reductions require only 10 relays in 6 large Colos.Comment: In Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC '17),
London, GB, 201
Non-existence of New Quantum Ergosphere Effect of a Vaidya-type Black Hole
Hawking evaporation of Dirac particles and scalar fields in a Vaidya-type
black hole is investigated by the method of generalized tortoise coordinate
transformation. It is shown that Hawking radiation of Dirac particles does not
exist for components but for components in any
Vaidya-type black holes. Both the location and the temperature of the event
horizon change with time. The thermal radiation spectrum of Dirac particles is
the same as that of Klein-Gordon particles. We demonstrates that there is no
new quantum ergosphere effect in the thermal radiation of Dirac particles in
any spherically symmetry black holes.Comment: Latex, 9 pages, no figure, submitted to Mod. Phys. Lett.
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