A three-component theory of sedimentation equilibrium in a density gradient

In the original analysis (1) of the behavior of macromolecules and viruses in a density gradient at equilibrium in the ultracentrifuge, only two incompressible components were considered to be present. These were the polymer and the solvent which forms the density gradient. The pressure-dependent terms and the cross terms in the chemical potential which describe the chemical reactions between the polymer and the solute were neglected. It has been pointed out from theoretical considerations (2-4) that these terms are important. In experimental studies of the buoyant behavior of bovine mercaptalbumin in aqueous cesium chloride,(5) it was observed that both solvation and pressure effects are large

Adaptive Sentence Boundary Disambiguation

Labeling of sentence boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for many natural language processing tasks, including part-of-speech tagging and sentence alignment. End-of-sentence punctuation marks are ambiguous; to disambiguate them most systems use brittle, special-purpose regular expression grammars and exception rules. As an alternative, we have developed an efficient, trainable algorithm that uses a lexicon with part-of-speech probabilities and a feed-forward neural network. After training for less than one minute, the method correctly labels over 98.5\% of sentence boundaries in a corpus of over 27,000 sentence-boundary marks. We show the method to be efficient and easily adaptable to different text genres, including single-case texts.Comment: This is a Latex version of the previously submitted ps file (formatted as a uuencoded gz-compressed .tar file created by csh script). The software from the work described in this paper is available by contacting [email protected]

ImageSieve: Exploratory search of museum archives with named entity-based faceted browsing

Over the last few years, faceted search emerged as an attractive alternative to the traditional "text box" search and has become one of the standard ways of interaction on many e-commerce sites. However, these applications of faceted search are limited to domains where the objects of interests have already been classified along several independent dimensions, such as price, year, or brand. While automatic approaches to generate faceted search interfaces were proposed, it is not yet clear to what extent the automatically-produced interfaces will be useful to real users, and whether their quality can match or surpass their manually-produced predecessors. The goal of this paper is to introduce an exploratory search interface called ImageSieve, which shares many features with traditional faceted browsing, but can function without the use of traditional faceted metadata. ImageSieve uses automatically extracted and classified named entities, which play important roles in many domains (such as news collections, image archives, etc.). We describe one specific application of ImageSieve for image search. Here, named entities extracted from the descriptions of the retrieved images are used to organize a faceted browsing interface, which then helps users to make sense of and further explore the retrieved images. The results of a user study of ImageSieve demonstrate that a faceted search system based on named entities can help users explore large collections and find relevant information more effectively

Do peers see more in a paper than its authors?

Recent years have shown a gradual shift in the content of biomedical publications that is freely accessible, from titles and abstracts to full text. This has enabled new forms of automatic text analysis and has given rise to some interesting questions: How informative is the abstract compared to the full-text? What important information in the full-text is not present in the abstract? What should a good summary contain that is not already in the abstract? Do authors and peers see an article differently? We answer these questions by comparing the information content of the abstract to that in citances-sentences containing citations to that article. We contrast the important points of an article as judged by its authors versus as seen by peers. Focusing on the area of molecular interactions, we perform manual and automatic analysis, and we find that the set of all citances to a target article not only covers most information (entities, functions, experimental methods, and other biological concepts) found in its abstract, but also contains 20% more concepts. We further present a detailed summary of the differences across information types, and we examine the effects other citations and time have on the content of citances

What Others Say About This Work? Scalable Extraction of Citation Contexts from Research Papers

This work presents a new, scalable solution to the problem of extracting citation contexts: the textual fragments surrounding citation references. These citation contexts can be used to navigate digital libraries of research papers to help users in deciding what to read. We have developed a prototype system which can retrieve, on-demand, citation contexts from the full text of over 15 million research articles in the Mendeley catalog for a given reference research paper. The evaluation results show that our citation extraction system provides additional functionality over existing tools, has two orders of magnitude faster runtime performance, while providing a 9% improvement in F-measure over the current state-of-the-art

Escape from the List: Courage, Sacrifice, Survival

Anne Frank has been described as Hitler’s most famous victim. By virtue of her diary, which was in fact a heavily revised memoir that today might be considered to belong to the genre of creative non-fiction, Anne Frank has attained a kind of immortality that the art form of writing frequently provides. This should not, of course, trivialize her fate, nor the suffering of the multitudes of other victims of the Nazi regime, a group comprised of Jews, as well as non-Jews. Some of these stories have been told in great detail, while many others have not. What follows is the story of Elisabeth Rodrigues Lopes de la Peña, a Jewish girl whose family had fled the Spanish Inquisition to settle in the Netherlands. During the German occupation of Amsterdam during the Second World War, this family faced yet another existential threat, one that some of them did not survive. Elisabeth may well have ended up as yet one more entry in the long list of the Nazi’s victims, if not for the intervention and courageous efforts of her non-Jewish neighbors—efforts that were based in large part on their own deeply held religious beliefs and sense of morals. Elisabeth’s rescuers are known to Holocaust historians, and their names are enshrined in the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Museum in Israel, as well as in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Along with my Research Assistant Angelica Roman, I have conducted personal meetings and interviews with Elisabeth’s daughter, Carolyn Stewart. Ms. Stewart has graciously shared many heretofore unknown details of her mother’s story of rescue, as well as photographs and documents, including some that have been unseen by anyone in over sixty years. What follows is new insight into Elisabeth Rodrigues’ escape from the list: a true story of courage, sacrifice, and survival. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance and support of the following people: Jennifer Crespo, Student Success Coordinator at Pace University in New York City, who generously provided funding for this project as part of the Pace Undergraduate Student – Faculty Research Program; Bonnie and Howard J. Price, without whose help this project would never have seen the light of day; my colleague at Pace University Dr. Maria Plochocki, for reviewing the manuscript and providing valuable suggestions; Gertjan Broek and Karolien Stocking Korzen at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam; Beth Slepian at The Anne Frank Center NYC, and my superbly talented Research Assistant, Angelica E. Roman ‘19, who tirelessly conducted research, helped revise early drafts, and patiently fielded a multitude of my requests while putting up with my numerous anxieties. Special thanks go to Carolyn Stewart, who traveled from Maryland to New York City for interviews, and who spent many hours communicating with Angelica and me over the course of several months. Carolyn shared many details and primary historical artifacts with us, and she relates her mother’s fascinating tale in a captivating and compelling manner. Our hope is that we can do this wonderful, inspiring story justice in the pages that follow