Fake news. A continuation or rejection of the traditional news paradigm?

In the article, I analysed the problem of fake news in the context of the traditional paradigm of a news story. The traditional paradigm posits that, most of all, a piece of information is true. However in contemporary media, there exist pieces of information which are fabricated and untrue. It is not a new phenomenon, yet it has intensified in recent years. News stories are fabricated for entertainment, political, or commercial purposes. They are carriers of propaganda and profit. The essence of fake news is the intentional misleading of the receiver for achieving the above gains. It is difficult to verify their veracity, and identify fake news items due to their similarity to real pieces of news. That is why they are becoming a part of the media landscape in which we will probably have to exist

Pion Production Measurement in NA61/SHINE Experiment for High Precision Neutrino Oscillation Experiments

One of physics goals of the NA61/SHINE experiment is a measurement of hadron production cross sections from proton-Carbon interactions at 31GeV/c for the T2K experiment at J-PARC. A precise knowledge of differential cross sections for pion and kaon production is of importance for improving the accuracy of neutrino flux simulations. The NA61 detector has a large angular acceptance, full coverage of the T2K phase space region, and good particle identification. In this work the analyses of negatively charged pion production are presented. Two different methods of negative pion selection and corrections for detector effects are discussed. Finally, preliminary dn/dp distributions of negatively charged pion in p+C interactions at 31 GeV/c are presented.Comment: Proccedings from poster presented at the 2009 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, 16-22 July 2009 Krakow, Polan

Growth-optimal portfolios under transaction costs

This paper studies a portfolio optimization problem in a discrete-time Markovian model of a financial market, in which asset price dynamics depend on an external process of economic factors. There are transaction costs with a structure that covers, in particular, the case of fixed plus proportional costs. We prove that there exists a self-financing trading strategy maximizing the average growth rate of the portfolio wealth. We show that this strategy has a Markovian form. Our result is obtained by large deviations estimates on empirical measures of the price process and by a generalization of the vanishing discount method to discontinuous transition operators.Comment: 32 page

Impulse control maximising average cost per unit time: a non-uniformly ergodic case

This paper studies maximisation of an average-cost-per-unit-time ergodic functional over impulse strategies controlling a Feller-Markov process. The uncontrolled process is assumed to be ergodic but, unlike the extant literature, the convergence to invariant measure does not have to be uniformly geometric in total variation norm; in particular, we allow for non-uniform geometric or polynomial convergence. Cost of an impulse may be unbounded, e.g., proportional to the distance the process is shifted. We show that the optimal value does not depend on the initial state and provide optimal or \ve-optimal strategies.Comment: 25 pages; This is an updated version after spinning off two sections of the paper as a basis for arxiv:1607.0601

Tissue- and Species-Specific Patterns of RNA metabolism in Post-Mortem Mammalian Retina and Retinal Pigment Epithelium.

Accurate analysis of gene expression in human tissues using RNA sequencing is dependent on the quality of source material. One major source of variation in mRNA quality is post-mortem time. While it is known that individual transcripts show differential post-mortem stability, few studies have directly and comprehensively analyzed mRNA stability following death, and in particular the extent to which tissue- and species-specific factors influence post-mortem mRNA stability are poorly understood. This knowledge is particularly important for ocular tissues studies, where tissues obtained post-mortem are frequently used for research or therapeutic applications. To directly investigate this question, we profiled mRNA levels in both neuroretina and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) from mouse and baboon over a series of post-mortem intervals. We found substantial changes in gene expression as early as 15 minutes in the mouse and as early as three hours in the baboon eye tissues. Importantly, our findings demonstrate both tissue- and species- specific patterns of RNA metabolism, by identifying a set of genes that are either rapidly degraded or very stable in both species and/or tissues. Taken together, the data from this study lay the foundation for understanding RNA regulation post-mortem and provide novel insights into RNA metabolism in the tissues of the mammalian eye