1,573 research outputs found
Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data
Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental
planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial
applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such
purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However,
our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial
enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work
contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant
commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for
mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations,
articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study
within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these
were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of
mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and
transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held
notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the
behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based
services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and
data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and
also follow best-practice
Tiny jubilations: using photography in fiction
Zoë Strachan offers here an examination of the haunting power of
photography as a creative stimulus. She discusses the use of photographs in
Janice Galloway’s two autobiographies This is Not About Me (2008) and All
Made Up (2011), as well as her own use of photographic inspiration for her
currently untitled new novel, an extract from which closes the special issue
Programming Service Oriented Agents
This paper introduces a programming language for service-oriented
agents. JADL++ combines the ease of use of scripting-languages
with a state-of-the-art service oriented approach which allows the seamless
integration of web-services. Furthermore, the language includes OWL-based
ontologies for semantic descriptions of data and services, thus allowing
agents to make intelligent decisions about service calls
Differences in polyadenylation site choice between somatic and male germ cells
BACKGROUND: We have previously noted that there were differences in somatic and male germ cell polyadenylation site choices. First, male germ cells showed a lower incidence of the sequence AAUAAA (an important element for somatic polyadenylation site choice) near the polyadenylation site choice. Second, the polyadenylation sites chosen in male germ cells tended to be nearer the 5' end of the mRNA than those chosen in somatic cells. Finally, a number of mRNAs used a different polyadenylation site in male germ cells than in somatic cells. These differences suggested that male germ cell-specific polyadenylation sites may be poor substrates for polyadenylation in somatic cells. We therefore hypothesized that male germ cell-specific polyadenylation sites would be inefficiently used in somatic cells. RESULTS: We tested whether pre-mRNA sequences surrounding male germ cell-specific polyadenylation sites (polyadenylation cassettes) could be used to direct polyadenylation efficiently in somatic cells. To do this, we developed a luciferase reporter system in which luciferase activity correlated with polyadenylation efficiency. We showed that in somatic cells, somatic polyadenylation cassettes were efficiently polyadenylated, while male germ cell-specific polyadenylation cassettes were not. We also developed a sensitive, 3' RACE-based assay to analyze polyadenylation site choice. Using this assay, we demonstrated that male germ cell-specific polyadenylation cassettes were not polyadenylated at the expected site in somatic cells, but rather at aberrant sites upstream of the sites used in male germ cells. Finally, mutation of the male germ cell-specific poly(A) signal to a somatic poly(A) signal resulted in more efficient polyadenylation in somatic cells. CONCLUSION: These data suggest that regulated polyadenylation site choice of male germ cell-specific polyadenylation sites requires one or more factors that are absent from somatic cells
Kepler-1656b: a Dense Sub-Saturn With an Extreme Eccentricity
Kepler-1656b is a 5 planet with an orbital period of 32 days initially
detected by the prime Kepler mission. We obtained precision radial velocities
of Kepler-1656 with Keck/HIRES in order to confirm the planet and to
characterize its mass and orbital eccentricity. With a mass of ,
Kepler-1656b is more massive than most planets of comparable size. Its high
mass implies that a significant fraction, roughly 80%, of the planet's total
mass is in high density material such as rock/iron, with the remaining mass in
a low density H/He envelope. The planet also has a high eccentricity of , the largest measured eccentricity for any planet less than 100
. The planet's high density and high eccentricity may be the result of one
or more scattering and merger events during or after the dispersal of the
protoplanetary disk.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, published in The Astronomical Journa
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