Minimum Bias and Underlying Event Studies at ATLAS and CMS

An overview of minimum bias and underlying event studies at the LHC with the ATLAS and CMS detectors is presented. Current uncertainties in the modeling of soft pp inelastic interactions at the LHC energy scale are discussed. Triggers used to select inelastic interactions at ATLAS and CMS are described and compared. A summary of some of the ongoing minimum bias and underlying event analyses by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations is given.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, Proceedings for the XLIVth Rencontres de Moriond session devoted to QCD and High Energy Interactions, 14-21 March 2009, La Thuile, Ital

Minimum Bias and Underlying Event Measurements with ATLAS

A summary of some of the recent minimum bias and underlying event measurements by the ATLAS collaboration is given. The results of several analyses using low-luminosity proton-proton collision data from the LHC taken at center-of-mass energies of sqrt(s) = 0.9, 2.36 and 7 TeV are presented. Data are compared to predictions by several different Monte Carlo event generators. The measurements expose limitations of the phenomenological models in properly describing the measured observables in all regions of phase space.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table; Proceedings for the 3rd Workshop on Multiple-Partonic Interactions at the LHC, Hamburg, Germany, November 201

Development of methods for capillary isoelectric focusing of dairy proteins : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Chemistry at Massey University

Capillary Isoelectric Focusing (CIEF) is a high-resolution technique which can be applied to the separation and characterisation of complex biological mixtures such as dairy proteins. Although dairy proteins are commonly analysed by traditional gel electrophoresis techniques including 2-Dimensional PAGE, CIEF offers the advantages of reduced analysis times, the ability to handle smaller sample volumes and increased sensitivity with improved separation efficiencies. Several methods for capillary isoelectric focusing of dairy proteins have been developed herein. For the analysis of soluble whey proteins methods that can be used with either UV or mass spectrometry (MS) detection have been set up. For MS detection a coaxial sheath flow interface in conjunction with electrospray ionisation has been utilised. For analysis of the inherently insoluble casein proteins with UV detection denaturing and reducing agents have been introduced into the system. Results have shown very close similarities to those obtained by IEF gels

Polynomial-time Computation of Exact Correlated Equilibrium in Compact Games

In a landmark paper, Papadimitriou and Roughgarden described a polynomial-time algorithm ("Ellipsoid Against Hope") for computing sample correlated equilibria of concisely-represented games. Recently, Stein, Parrilo and Ozdaglar showed that this algorithm can fail to find an exact correlated equilibrium, but can be easily modified to efficiently compute approximate correlated equilibria. Currently, it remains unresolved whether the algorithm can be modified to compute an exact correlated equilibrium. We show that it can, presenting a variant of the Ellipsoid Against Hope algorithm that guarantees the polynomial-time identification of exact correlated equilibrium. Our new algorithm differs from the original primarily in its use of a separation oracle that produces cuts corresponding to pure-strategy profiles. As a result, we no longer face the numerical precision issues encountered by the original approach, and both the resulting algorithm and its analysis are considerably simplified. Our new separation oracle can be understood as a derandomization of Papadimitriou and Roughgarden's original separation oracle via the method of conditional probabilities. Also, the equilibria returned by our algorithm are distributions with polynomial-sized supports, which are simpler (in the sense of being representable in fewer bits) than the mixtures of product distributions produced previously; no tractable algorithm has previously been proposed for identifying such equilibria.Comment: 15 page

A Formal Separation Between Strategic and Nonstrategic Behavior

It is common in multiagent systems to make a distinction between "strategic" behavior and other forms of intentional but "nonstrategic" behavior: typically, that strategic agents model other agents while nonstrategic agents do not. However, a crisp boundary between these concepts has proven elusive. This problem is pervasive throughout the game theoretic literature on bounded rationality and particularly critical in parts of the behavioral game theory literature that make an explicit distinction between the behavior of "nonstrategic" level-0 agents and "strategic" higher-level agents (e.g., the level-k and cognitive hierarchy models). Overall, work discussing bounded rationality rarely gives clear guidance on how the rationality of nonstrategic agents must be bounded, instead typically just singling out specific decision rules and informally asserting them to be nonstrategic (e.g., truthfully revealing private information; randomizing uniformly). In this work, we propose a new, formal characterization of nonstrategic behavior. Our main contribution is to show that it satisfies two properties: (1) it is general enough to capture all purportedly "nonstrategic" decision rules of which we are aware in the behavioral game theory literature; (2) behavior that obeys our characterization is distinct from strategic behavior in a precise sense