"Narco" Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media during the Mexican Drug War

Social media platforms have emerged as prominent information sharing ecosystems in the context of a variety of recent crises, ranging from mass emergencies, to wars and political conflicts. We study affective responses in social media and how they might indicate desensitization to violence experienced in communities embroiled in an armed conflict. Specifically, we examine three established affect measures: negative affect, activation, and dominance as observed on Twitter in relation to a number of statistics on protracted violence in four major cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War. During a two year period (Aug 2010-Dec 2012), while violence was on the rise in these regions, our findings show a decline in negative emotional expression as well as a rise in emotional arousal and dominance in Twitter posts: aspects known to be psychological markers of desensitization. We discuss the implications of our work for behavioral health, facilitating rehabilitation efforts in communities enmeshed in an acute and persistent urban warfare, and the impact on civic engagement.Comment: Best paper award at the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pages 3563-357

DBI Galileon inflation in background SUGRA

We introduce a model of potential driven DBI Galileon inflation in background N=1,D=4 SUGRA. Starting from D4-$\bar{D4}$ brane-antibrane in the bulk N=2,D=5 SUGRA including quadratic Gauss-Bonnet corrections, we derive an effective N=1,D=4 SUGRA by dimensional reduction, that results in a Coleman-Weinberg type Galileon potential. We employ this potential in modeling inflation and in subsequent study of primordial quantum fluctuations for scalar and tensor modes. Further, we estimate the major observable parameters in both de Sitter (DS) and beyond de Sitter (BDS) limits and confront them with recent observational data from WMAP7 by using the publicly available code CAMB.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, Accepted for publication in Nuclear Physics

Quantification of miRNAs and Their Networks in the light of Integral Value Transformations

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) which are on average only 21-25 nucleotides long are key post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression in metazoans and plants. A proper quantitative understanding of miRNAs is required to comprehend their structures, functions, evolutions etc. In this paper, the nucleotide strings of miRNAs of three organisms namely Homo sapiens (hsa), Macaca mulatta (mml) and Pan troglodytes (ptr) have been quantified and classified based on some characterizing features. A network has been built up among the miRNAs for these three organisms through a class of discrete transformations namely Integral Value Transformations (IVTs), proposed by Sk. S. Hassan et al [1, 2]. Through this study we have been able to nullify or justify one given nucleotide string as a miRNA. This study will help us to recognize a given nucleotide string as a probable miRNA, without the requirement of any conventional biological experiment. This method can be amalgamated with the existing analysis pipelines, for small RNA sequencing data (designed for finding novel miRNA). This method would provide more confidence and would make the current analysis pipeline more efficient in predicting the probable candidates of miRNA for biological validation and filter out the improbable candidates

New Constraints On Lepton Nonconserving R-parity Violating Couplings

Strong upper bounds are derived on certain product combinations of lepton nonconserving couplings in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with explicit $R$-parity violation. The input is information from rare leptonic decays of the long-lived neutral kaon, the muon and the tau as well as from the mixings of neutral $K$- and $B$-mesons. One of these bounds is comparable and another superior to corresponding ones obtained recently from neutrinoless double beta decay.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, uses style files fullpage.sty and subeqn.sty (included

Testing Anomalous WW Couplings in e−e−e^- e^- Collisions

We analyze the influence of anomalous gauge couplings in the reaction $e^- \: e^- \longrightarrow e^- \: W^- \: \nu_e$ at a 500 GeV linear collider. The limits imposed by this process on deviations from the standard model of electro-weak interaction, are competitive with those inferred from other high energy experiments. Furthermore, the allowed domain in the parameter space is quite different, and hence such an experiment would more than complement the other direct searches.Comment: LaTex, 9 pages + 5 figures (not included) Full postscript version available by anonymous ftp from HEP.PHYSIK.UNI-MUENCHEN.DE (or 129.187.198.1) and is located in preprints/mpi9398.ps, preprint : MPI-Ph/93-9

Gestão ambiental do agronegócio hortifrutícola.

O conceito de sustentabilidade resgata a necessidade de um balanço entre fatores sociais, ambientais e econômicos.1 CD-ROM. Palestra

The Generalized Dilaton Supersymmetry Breaking Scenario

We show that the usual dilaton dominance scenario, derived from the tree level K\"ahler potential, can never correspond to a global minimum of the potential at $V=0$. Similarly, it cannot correspond to a local minimum either, unless a really big conspiracy of different contributions to the superpotential $W(S)$ takes place. These results, plus the fact that the K\"ahler potential is likely to receive sizeable string non-perturbative contributions, strongly suggest to consider a more general scenario, leaving the K\"ahler potential arbitrary. In this way we obtain generalized expressions for the soft breaking terms but a predictive scenario still arises. Finally, we explore the phenomenological capability of some theoretically motivated forms for non-perturbative K\"ahler potentials, showing that it is easy to stabilize the dilaton at the realistic value $S\sim 2$ with just one condensate and no fine-tuning.Comment: 10 pages, plain LaTeX. Some references added and eq.(35) simplifie