Noun Incorporation in Frisian

Noun incorporation in Frisian (Dyk 1997) is unusual because it shows certain restrictions that are not seen in other languages with noun incorporation, such as Mohawk and Chukchi. In addition, while others argue that noun incorporation is indeed possible in Germanic (see Booij 2009 for Dutch, Barrie and Spreng 2009 for German), Frisian is unusual even with respect to Germanic in allowing noun incorporation in finite clauses. In this paper, I show that noun incorporation in Frisian should be analyzed as synthetic compounding, with the compound licensed by a null verbal head. It is the presence of this head that accounts for the unusual restrictions. Not only does this head explain the distribution of noun incorporation, it also explains the distribution of detransitivization. I show that there are parallels between noun incorporation and synthetic compounding in English with –ing. An important consequence of this analysis is that it allows us to treat this phenomenon in Frisian as a more typologically appropriate instance of compounding rather than as canonical noun incorporation found in polysynthetic languages

The evolution of knowledge spaces: innovation, indicators and drivers

This dissertation contributes on assessing how knowledge spaces change over time and on which are the factors driving their development. Technologies in innovation literature are regarded as a collection of combined components. These components are represented in the network form through knowledge spaces. Technologies follow an evolutionary process but the role of technological spaces and their evolution are still aspects not sufficiently developed in literature. The thesis focuses in Chapter 2 on the categorisation of innovation activities. Once the main features of different types of innovations responsible for changes in technological paradigms and therefore in technological spaces have been analysed, the dissertation provides newly crafted indicators to assess their evolution in Chapter 3. The reshaping and evolution of technological spaces is also influenced by some drivers, the focus is on two possible drivers that could influence the evolution of technological spaces. The first external regional driver analysed is cluster policies and the second internal regional driver is the ability of organizations in knowledge recombination activities. In Chapter 4 we measured both short term impacts and long term ones of cluster policies on the evolution of knowledge spaces. The results show that the program contributed both to increase the importance of specific technological fields in winning regions. Chapter 5 recognises the factors that influence the propensity of organizations to combine knowledge differently from others. We found that the orientation towards applied or basic research and the embeddedness in the regional innovation network matter for the way in which technologies are combined. Different empirical methods have been used to produce results spacing from Difference in Difference to Quantitative Text Analysis to Social Network Analysis. Moreover, as main data sources both patents and publications have been used

Outer crust of a cold non-accreting magnetar

The outer crust structure and composition of a cold, non-accreting magnetar is studied. We model the outer crust to be made of fully equilibrated matter where ionized nuclei form a Coulomb crystal embedded in an electron gas. The main effects of the strong magnetic field are those of quantizing the electron motion in Landau levels and of modifying the nuclear single particle levels producing, on average, an increased binding of nucleons in nuclei present in the Coulomb lattice. The effect of an homogeneous and constant magnetic field on nuclear masses has been predicted by using a covariant density functional, in which induced currents and axial deformation due to the presence of a magnetic field that breaks time-reversal symmetry have been included self-consistently in the nucleon and meson equations of motion. Although not yet observed, for $B\gtrsim 10^{16}$G both effects contribute to produce different compositions and to enlarge the range of pressures typically present in common neutron stars. Specifically, in such a regime, the magnetic field effects on nuclei favor the appearance of heavier nuclei at low pressures. As $B$ increases, such heavier nuclei are also preferred up to larger pressures. In the most extreme case, the whole outer crust is almost made of ${}_{40}^{92}$Zr$_{52}$.Comment: Published versio

Automated Abstractions for Patrolling Security Games

Recently, there has been a significant interest in studying security games to provide tools for addressing resource allocation problems in security applications. Patrolling security games (PSGs) constitute a special class of security games wherein the resources are mobile. One of the most relevant open problems in security games is the design of scalable algorithms to tackle realistic scenarios. While the literature mainly focuses on heuristics and decomposition techniques (e.g., double oracle), in this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first study on the use of abstractions in security games (specifically for PSGs) to design scalable algorithms. We define some classes of abstractions and we provide parametric algorithms to automatically generate abstractions. We show that abstractions allow one to relax the constraint of patrolling strategies' Markovianity (customary in PSGs) and to solve large game instances. We additionally pose the problem to search for the optimal abstraction and we develop an anytime algorithm to find it

Antiplasmodial activity of p-substituted benzyl thiazinoquinone derivatives and their potential against parasitic infections

Malaria is a life-threatening disease and, what is more, the resistance to available antimalarial drugs is a recurring problem. The resistance of Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites to previous generations of medicines has undermined malaria control efforts and reversed gains in child survival. This paper describes a continuation of our ongoing efforts to investigate the effects against Plasmodium falciparum strains and human microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC-1) of a series of methoxy p-benzyl-substituted thiazinoquinones designed starting from a pointed antimalarial lead candidate. The data obtained from the newly tested compounds expanded the structure-activity relationships (SARs) of the thiazinoquinone scaffold, indicating that antiplasmodial activity is not affected by the inductive effect but rather by the resonance effect of the introduced group at the para position of the benzyl substituent. Indeed, the current survey was based on the evaluation of antiparasitic usefulness as well as the selectivity on mammalian cells of the tested p-benzyl-substituted thiazinoquinones, upgrading the knowledge about the active thiazinoquinone scaffold

COMET: A Recipe for Learning and Using Large Ensembles on Massive Data

COMET is a single-pass MapReduce algorithm for learning on large-scale data. It builds multiple random forest ensembles on distributed blocks of data and merges them into a mega-ensemble. This approach is appropriate when learning from massive-scale data that is too large to fit on a single machine. To get the best accuracy, IVoting should be used instead of bagging to generate the training subset for each decision tree in the random forest. Experiments with two large datasets (5GB and 50GB compressed) show that COMET compares favorably (in both accuracy and training time) to learning on a subsample of data using a serial algorithm. Finally, we propose a new Gaussian approach for lazy ensemble evaluation which dynamically decides how many ensemble members to evaluate per data point; this can reduce evaluation cost by 100X or more