4,214 research outputs found
T. E. Harris' contributions to interacting particle systems and percolation
Interacting particle systems and percolation have been among the most active
areas of probability theory over the past half century. Ted Harris played an
important role in the early development of both fields. This paper is a bird's
eye view of his work in these fields, and of its impact on later research in
probability theory and mathematical physics.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOP593 the Annals of
Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Metagenomic Analysis of the Structure and Function of the Human Gut Microbiota in Crohn's Disease
Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease, are chronic, immunologically mediated disorders that have severe medical consequences. The current hypothesis is that these diseases are due to an overly aggressive immune response to a subset of commensal enteric bacteria. Studies to date on IBD have suggested that the disorder may be caused by a combination of bacteria and host susceptibility; however the etiologies of these diseases remain an enigma. In this application, we propose to develop and demonstrate the ability to profile Crohn’s disease at an unprecedented molecular level by elucidation of specific biomarkers (bacterial strains, genes, or proteins) that correlate to disease symptoms. To achieve this goal, we will employ a multidisciplinary approach based on metagenomic and metaproteomic molecular tools to elucidate the composition of the commensal microbiota in monozygotic twins that are either healthy or exhibit Crohn’s disease (for concordant, both are diseased; for discordant, one is healthy and one is diseased). The central hypotheses of this proposal are (1) that specific members and/or functional activities of the gastrointestinal (GI) microbiota differ in patients with Crohn’s disease as compared to healthy individuals, and (2) that it will be possible to elucidate microbial signatures which correlate with the occurrence and progression of this disease by integration of data obtained from 16S rRNA based molecular fingerprinting, metagenomics, and metaproteomics approaches. To address these hypotheses, three specific aims are proposed: 1) Obtain data on community gene content (metagenome) in a subset of healthy twins and twins with Crohn’s Disease to assess potential differences in the metabolic capabilities of the gut microbiota associated with CD, 2) Obtain data on community protein content (metaproteome) in a subset of healthy twins and twins with Crohn’s Disease to assess the state of expressed proteins associated with CD, 3) Apply various statistical clustering and classification methods to correlate/associate microbial community composition, gene and protein content with patient metadata, including metabolite profiles and clinical phenotype. The ultimate goal of these efforts is to identify novel biomarkers for non-invasive diagnostics of CD and to eventually identify drug targets (i.e. bacterial strains) for cure or suppression of disease symptoms
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The Highway Capacity Manual’s Method for Calculating Bicycle and Pedestrian Levels of Service: the Ultimate White Paper
A reconnaissance space sensing investigation of crustal structure for a strip from the eastern Sierra Nevada to the Colorado Plateau
The author has identified the following significant results. Research progress in an investigation using ERTS-1 MSS imagery to study regional tectonics and related natural resources is summarized. Field reconnaissance guided by analysis of ERTS-1 imagery has resulted in development of a tectonic model relating strike-slip faulting to crustal extension in the southern Basin Range Province. The tectonics of the northern Death Valley-Furnace Creek Fault Zone and spacially associated volcanism and mercury mineralization were also investigated. Field work in the southern Sierra Nevada has confirmed the existence of faults and diabase dike swarms aligned along several major lineaments first recognized in ERTS-1 imagery. Various image enhancement and analysis techniques employed in the study of ERTS-1 data are summarized
Dispersion processes
We study a synchronous dispersion process in which particles are
initially placed at a distinguished origin vertex of a graph . At each time
step, at each vertex occupied by more than one particle at the beginning of
this step, each of these particles moves to a neighbour of chosen
independently and uniformly at random. The dispersion process ends once the
particles have all stopped moving, i.e. at the first step at which each vertex
is occupied by at most one particle.
For the complete graph and star graph , we show that for any
constant , with high probability, if , then the
process finishes in steps, whereas if , then
the process needs steps to complete (if ever). We also show
that an analogous lazy variant of the process exhibits the same behaviour but
for higher thresholds, allowing faster dispersion of more particles.
For paths, trees, grids, hypercubes and Cayley graphs of large enough sizes
(in terms of ) we give bounds on the time to finish and the maximum distance
traveled from the origin as a function of the number of particles
Exclusion processes in higher dimensions: Stationary measures and convergence
There has been significant progress recently in our understanding of the
stationary measures of the exclusion process on . The corresponding
situation in higher dimensions remains largely a mystery. In this paper we give
necessary and sufficient conditions for a product measure to be stationary for
the exclusion process on an arbitrary set, and apply this result to find
examples on and on homogeneous trees in which product measures are
stationary even when they are neither homogeneous nor reversible. We then begin
the task of narrowing down the possibilities for existence of other stationary
measures for the process on . In particular, we study stationary measures
that are invariant under translations in all directions orthogonal to a fixed
nonzero vector. We then prove a number of convergence results as
for the measure of the exclusion process. Under appropriate initial conditions,
we show convergence of such measures to the above stationary measures. We also
employ hydrodynamics to provide further examples of convergence.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117905000000341 in the
Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Stochastic domination: the contact process, Ising models and FKG measures
We prove for the contact process on , and many other graphs, that the
upper invariant measure dominates a homogeneous product measure with large
density if the infection rate is sufficiently large. As a
consequence, this measure percolates if the corresponding product measure
percolates. We raise the question of whether domination holds in the symmetric
case for all infinite graphs of bounded degree. We study some asymmetric
examples which we feel shed some light on this question. We next obtain
necessary and sufficient conditions for domination of a product measure for
``downward'' FKG measures. As a consequence of this general result, we show
that the plus and minus states for the Ising model on dominate the same
set of product measures. We show that this latter fact fails completely on the
homogenous 3-ary tree. We also provide a different distinction between
and the homogenous 3-ary tree concerning stochastic domination and Ising
models; while it is known that the plus states for different temperatures on
are never stochastically ordered, on the homogenous 3-ary tree, almost
the complete opposite is the case. Next, we show that on , the set of
product measures which the plus state for the Ising model dominates is strictly
increasing in the temperature. Finally, we obtain a necessary and sufficient
condition for a finite number of variables, which are both FKG and
exchangeable, to dominate a given product measure.Comment: 27 page
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