Information Landscape and Flux, Mutual Information Rate Decomposition and Entropy Production

We explore the dynamics of information systems. We show that the driving force for information dynamics is determined by both the information landscape and information flux which determines the equilibrium time reversible and the nonequilibrium time-irreversible behaviours of the system respectively. We further demonstrate that the mutual information rate between the two subsystems can be decomposed into the time-reversible and time-irreversible parts respectively, analogous to the information landscape-flux decomposition for dynamics. Finally, we uncover the intimate relation between the nonequilibrium thermodynamics in terms of the entropy production rates and the time-irreversible part of the mutual information rate. We demonstrate the above features by the dynamics of a bivariate Markov chain.Comment: 16 page

“One Country, Two Systems,” Three Law Families, and Four Legal Regions: The Emerging Inter-Regional Conflicts of Law in China

With accumulation of sovereign debt in many large OECD countries it seems that attention is heightened on how to manage public resources more effectively. High levels of sovereign debt are partly related to the aftermath of the latest financial crisis, where resolution for many big economies was to intervene and use public resources to put an end to the expansion of the crisis. Public real estate is one of those resources, which’s efficient management has high importance on general public sector efficacy. It seems that governments around the world have a way to go toward efficiency in public real estate management. There seem to be rather wide differences in management practices and quality. This thesis is an attempt to quantify some choices Estonian government could take in terms of its public real estate management. Four different scenarios are compared and Monte Carlo Simulation tool is used for that purpose. Two of the scenarios are related to private sector involvement and two are not. Privatization of public assets does not only mean cashing out for the government. It has wider consequences by introducing market forces where they weren’t before. One of the most important points of interest in this thesis is what effect can market forces and change in incentives have on public real estate management. There can be both, positive and negative effects, but which ones would prevail? The model built during the process of the thesis tries to measure those effects with aggregate net present value and its volatility by looking at 30 years ahead. Simulation analyses is used to vary input variables in the range that seems to be supported by the observations made in the literature and in some cases, where data is not available, also according to more subjective view that of the author’s. As input and their characteristics are different for scenarios, it is of interest to document how do the main outputs, mean NPV and its volatility, vary along with inputs

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe dissertation presents biophysical studies of duplex DNA during unzipping in a protein ion channel and its application in the fast readout of enzyme activity. Chapter 1 reviews a variety of approaches to enhance the resolution of nucleotide characterization using nanopore methodology, providing insights into future experimental design. This chapter also overviews the work carried out at University of Utah concerning the characterization of DNA damage using nanopore methods. Chapter 2 examines the unzipping kinetics of lesion-containing duplexes in the protein channel a-hemolysin (a-HL). The voltage-driven unzipping of individual duplex DNA molecules was investigated by pulling the tail of duplex into the a-HL and monitoring the temporal blockage to the ion flow through the channel. The unzipping occurs as a first-order reaction or sequential first-order reactions as determined from the time duration histograms of the blockages. Chapter 3 extends the unzipping studies of duplex to a larger pool of lesions. As a more destabilizing lesion is introduced into the duplex, the process of strand dissociation grows faster and evolves from a first-order reaction to two sequential first-order reactions. The kinetic stability of duplexes was interpreted in terms of the lesion-induced distortion of duplex backbone as the major factor and the number of hydrogen bonds in the modified base pair as the minor factor. Chapter 4 provides an application of duplex unzipping in the measurement of enzyme activity. Specifically, the conversion of uracil to an abasic site by uracil DNA glycosylase (UDG) was monitored using ion-channel recordings based on the difference in blockage current. The single-nucleotide discrimination during UDG digestion was performed in the duplex context at the latch region of the a-HL. The data suggest that the protein latch is a new sensing zone in a-HL, specifically useful for duplex analysis