Use of Cryptographic Ideas to Interpret Biological Phenomena (and Vice Versa)

The RNA-Crypto System (shortly RCS) is a symmetric key algorithm to cipher data. This algorithm, as shown below, has the peculiarity to expand the message to be encrypted hiding the ciphered message itself within a set of garbage and control information. The idea for this new algorithm starts from the observation of nature. In particular from the observation of RNA behavior and some of its properties. In particular the RNA sequences has some sections called Introns. Introns, derived from the term "intragenic regions", are non-coding sections of precursor mRNA (pre-mRNA) or other RNAs, that are removed (spliced out of the RNA) before the mature RNA is formed. Once the introns have been spliced out of a pre-mRNA, the resulting mRNA sequence is ready to be translated into a protein. The corresponding parts of a gene are known as introns as well. The nature and the role of Introns in the pre-mRNA is not clear and it is under ponderous researches by Biologists but, in our case, we will use the presence of Introns, in the RNA-Crypto System output, as a strong method to add only apparently chaotic and non coding information with an unnecessary behavior in the access to the secret key to code the messages. In the RNA-Crypto System algorithm the introns are sections of the ciphered message with non{coding information as well as in the precursor mRNA. But the term "non-coding" does not necessarily mean "junk data". In this text a new cryptographic algorithm is described starting from a mathematical point of view

Non-Locality and Quantum Theory: New Experimental Evidence

Starting from the late 60’s many experiments have been performed to verify the violation Bell’s inequality by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) type correlations. The idea of these experiments being that: (i) Bell’s inequality is a consequence of locality, hence its experimental violation is an indication of non locality; (ii) this violation is a typical quantum phenomenon because any classical system making local choices (either deterministic or random) will produce correlations satisfying this inequality. Both statements (i) and (ii) have been criticized by quantum probability on theoretical grounds (not discussed in the present paper) and the experiment discussed below has been devised to support these theoretical arguments. We emphasize that the goal of our experiment is not to reproduce classically the EPR correlations but to prove that there exist perfectly local classical dynamical systems violating Bell’s inequality. The conclusions of the present experiment are: (I) no contradiction between quantum theory and locality can be deduced from the violation of Bell’s inequality. (II) The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory becomes quite reasonable and not metaphyisic if interpreted at the light of the chameleon effect. (III) One can realize quantum entanglement by classical computers. In section (7) we prove that our experiment also provides a classical analogue of the type of logical (i.e. independent of statistics) incompatibilities pointed out by Greenberger, Home and Zeilinger

Quantum probability and the non-locality issue in quantum theory

Three computers, with local independent choices, genereate the EPR correlations hence violating Bell's inequality

An introduction to the EPR-Chameleon experiment

On September 27 (2001), as a side activity to the "Japan-Italy Joint workshop on: Quantum open systems and quantum measurement", the first; public demonstration of the dynamical EPR-chameleon experiment was performed at Waseda University in order to give an experimental answer to a long standing question in the foundations of quantum theory: do there exist classical macroscopic systems which, by local independent choices, produce sequences of data which reproduce the singlet correlations, hence violating Bell's inequality? The EPR-chameleon experiment gives an affirmative answer to this question by concretely producing an example of such systems in the form of three personal computers which realize a local deterministic dynamical evolution whose mathematical structure is very simple and transparent. In the experiment performed on September 27 the local dynamics used was not a reversible one because the interaction with the degrees of freedom of the apparatus was integrated out giving rise to an effective Markovian dynamics which, although mapping probability measures into probability measures, did not preserve the +/- 1-values of the spin (or polarization) observables. This feature was criticized by some of the partecipants and the following two questions arose: i) is it possible to prove that the Markovian evolution, used in the experiment, is indeed the reduced evolution of a bona fide reversible evolution? ii) if the answer to question (i) is affirmative, is it possible to reproduce the EPR correlations by simply considering empirical averages of +/- 1-values, as one does in usual EPR type experiments? An affirmative answer to these questions was given in the paper [AcImRe01] and it is briefly reviewed in what follows

School climate and academic performance of Italian students: the role of disciplinary behaviour and parental involvement

Educational researchers have increasingly recognised the importance of school climate as a malleable factor for improving academic performance. In this perspective, we exploit the data collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI) to assess the effect of some school climate related factors on academic performance of tenth-grade Italian students. A Multilevel Bayesian Structural Equation Model (MBSEM) is adopted to highlight the effect of some relevant dimensions of school climate (students’ disciplinary behaviour and parents’ involvement) on academic performance and their role on the relationships between student socioeconomic status and achievement. The main findings show that disciplinary behaviour, on the one hand, directly influences the level of competence of the students, and, on the other hand, it partly mediates the effect of socioeconomic background whereas parents’ involvement does not appear to exert any significant effect on students’ performance

Controlled Tactile Exploration and Haptic Object Recognition

In this paper we propose a novel method for in-hand object recognition. The method is composed of a grasp stabilization controller and two exploratory behaviours to capture the shape and the softness of an object. Grasp stabilization plays an important role in recognizing objects. First, it prevents the object from slipping and facilitates the exploration of the object. Second, reaching a stable and repeatable position adds robustness to the learning algorithm and increases invariance with respect to the way in which the robot grasps the object. The stable poses are estimated using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). We present experimental results showing that using our method the classifier can successfully distinguish 30 objects.We also compare our method with a benchmark experiment, in which the grasp stabilization is disabled. We show, with statistical significance, that our method outperforms the benchmark method

Classical statistical distributions can violate Bell-type inequalities

We investigate two-particle phase-space distributions in classical mechanics characterized by a well-defined value of the total angular momentum. We construct phase-space averages of observables related to the projection of the particles' angular momenta along axes with different orientations. It is shown that for certain observables, the correlation function violates Bell's inequality. The key to the violation resides in choosing observables impeding the realization of the counterfactual event that plays a prominent role in the derivation of the inequalities. This situation can have statistical (detection related) or dynamical (interaction related) underpinnings, but non-locality does not play any role.Comment: v3: Extended version. To be published in J. Phys.