25,539 research outputs found
Is Twitter a Public Sphere for Online Conflicts? A Cross-Ideological and Cross-Hierarchical Look
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public
opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and
democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature.
Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, explain how social media can lead to
selective exposure and can be used as a disguise for those in power to
disseminate biased information. To investigate this debate empirically, we
evaluate Twitter as a public sphere using four metrics: equality, diversity,
reciprocity and quality. Using these measurements, we analyze the communication
patterns between individuals of different hierarchical levels and ideologies.
We do this within the context of three diverse conflicts: Israel-Palestine, US
Democrats-Republicans, and FC Barcelona-Real Madrid. In all cases, we collect
data around a central pair of Twitter accounts representing the two main
parties. Our results show in a quantitative manner that Twitter is not an ideal
public sphere for democratic conversations and that hierarchical effects are
part of the reason why it is not.Comment: To appear in the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics
(SocInfo 2014), Barcelon
Studies on the Spectra of Protoberberine Alkaloids. II. Absorption Spectrum of Jatrorrhizine
Measurements have been made on the visible and UV absorption
spectra of jatrorrhizine chloride in pure aqueous, methanol,
ethanol a nd propa nol solutions and in the p resence of various
concentrations of e ither hydrochloric acid or potass ium h ydroxid e.
In all the solutions, potassium hydroxide conside rably modifies
the absorption curves. The modifications b ecome manifest in the
disappearance of the absorption maximum and in the appearance
of new bathochromic shifted maxima. In these changes isobestic
points were noticed in the absorption curves. At very high potassium
hydroxide concentrations in ethanol and propanol solutions, the
absorption maximum disappears from the vis ible region of the
spectrum.
It has been suggested that the addition of potassium hydroxide
causes the formation of the quinonoidic form of jatrorrhizine. The
carbinolic form probably appears only in ethanol and propanol
solutions
FLASH: Randomized Algorithms Accelerated over CPU-GPU for Ultra-High Dimensional Similarity Search
We present FLASH (\textbf{F}ast \textbf{L}SH \textbf{A}lgorithm for
\textbf{S}imilarity search accelerated with \textbf{H}PC), a similarity search
system for ultra-high dimensional datasets on a single machine, that does not
require similarity computations and is tailored for high-performance computing
platforms. By leveraging a LSH style randomized indexing procedure and
combining it with several principled techniques, such as reservoir sampling,
recent advances in one-pass minwise hashing, and count based estimations, we
reduce the computational and parallelization costs of similarity search, while
retaining sound theoretical guarantees.
We evaluate FLASH on several real, high-dimensional datasets from different
domains, including text, malicious URL, click-through prediction, social
networks, etc. Our experiments shed new light on the difficulties associated
with datasets having several million dimensions. Current state-of-the-art
implementations either fail on the presented scale or are orders of magnitude
slower than FLASH. FLASH is capable of computing an approximate k-NN graph,
from scratch, over the full webspam dataset (1.3 billion nonzeros) in less than
10 seconds. Computing a full k-NN graph in less than 10 seconds on the webspam
dataset, using brute-force (), will require at least 20 teraflops. We
provide CPU and GPU implementations of FLASH for replicability of our results
Tumor im Dünndarm bei Peutz-Jeghers-Syndrom
Zusammenfassung: Epithelverschleppung ("epithelial misplacement") kommt in Peutz-Jeghers-Polypen des Jejunum und Ileum vor. Sie kann zur Fallstrickdiagnose eines invasiven Adenokarzinoms verleiten. Hilfreich ist der Nachweis der erhaltenen Lamina propria um die verlagerten Epithelkomplexe, die selten auch Dysplasien aufweisen können. Epithelverschleppungen sind häufig mit intramuralem Schleim assoziier
Highly Permeable Perfluorinated Sulfonic Acid Ionomers for Improved Electrochemical Devices: Insights into Structure-Property Relationships.
Rapid improvements in polymer-electrolyte fuel-cell (PEFC) performance have been driven by the development of commercially available ion-conducting polymers (ionomers) that are employed as membranes and catalyst binders in membrane-electrode assemblies. Commercially available ionomers are based on a perfluorinated chemistry comprised of a polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) matrix that imparts low gas permeability and high mechanical strength but introduces significant mass-transport losses in the electrodes. These transport losses currently limit PEFC performance, especially for low Pt loadings. In this study, we present a novel ionomer incorporating a glassy amorphous matrix based on a perfluoro(2-methylene-4-methyl-1,3-dioxolane) (PFMMD) backbone. The novel backbone chemistry induces structural changes in the ionomer, restricting ionomer domain swelling under hydration while disrupting matrix crystallinity. These structural changes slightly reduce proton conductivity while significantly improving gas permeability. The performance implications of this trade-off are assessed, which reveal the potential for substantial performance improvement by incorporation of highly permeable ionomers as the functional catalyst binder. These results underscore the significance of tailoring material chemistry to specific device requirements, where ionomer chemistry should be rationally designed to match the local transport requirements of the device architecture
Meter-scale spark X-ray spectrumstatistics
X-ray emission by sparks implies bremsstrahlung from a population of
energetic electrons, but the details of this process remain a mystery. We
present detailed statistical analysis of X-ray spectra detected by multiple
detectors during sparks produced by 1 MV negative high-voltage pulses with 1
s risetime. With over 900 shots, we statistically analyze the signals,
assuming that the distribution of spark X-ray fluence behaves as a power law
and that the energy spectrum of X-rays detectable after traversing 2 m of
air and a thin aluminum shield is exponential. We then determine the parameters
of those distributions by fitting cumulative distribution functions to the
observations. The fit results match the observations very well if the mean of
the exponential X-ray energy distribution is 86 7 keV and the spark X-ray
fluence power law distribution has index -1.29 0.04 and spans at least 3
orders of magnitude in fluence
LDA+Gutzwiller Method for Correlated Electron Systems
Combining the density functional theory (DFT) and the Gutzwiller variational
approach, a LDA+Gutzwiller method is developed to treat the correlated electron
systems from {\it ab-initio}. All variational parameters are self-consistently
determined from total energy minimization. The method is computationally
cheaper, yet the quasi-particle spectrum is well described through kinetic
energy renormalization. It can be applied equally to the systems from weakly
correlated metals to strongly correlated insulators. The calculated results for
SrVO, Fe, Ni and NiO, show dramatic improvement over LDA and LDA+U.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
On a Pioneering Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell Model
"Polymer Electrolyte Fuel Cell Model" is a seminal work that continues to form the basis for modern modeling efforts, especially models concerning the membrane and its behavior at the continuum level. The paper is complete with experimental data, modeling equations, model validation, and optimization scenarios. While the treatment of the underlying phenomena is limited to isothermal, single-phase conditions, and one-dimensional flow, it represents the key interactions within the membrane at the center of the PEFC. It focuses on analyzing the water balance within the cell and clearly demonstrates the complex interactions of water diffusion and electro-osmotic flux. Cell-level and system-level water balance are key to the development of efficient PEFCs going forward, particularly as researchers address the need to simplify humidification and recycle configurations while increasing the operating temperature of the stack to minimize radiator requirements
Analysis of aggregated tick returns: evidence for anomalous diffusion
In order to investigate the origin of large price fluctuations, we analyze
stock price changes of ten frequently traded NASDAQ stocks in the year 2002.
Though the influence of the trading frequency on the aggregate return in a
certain time interval is important, it cannot alone explain the heavy tailed
distribution of stock price changes. For this reason, we analyze intervals with
a fixed number of trades in order to eliminate the influence of the trading
frequency and investigate the relevance of other factors for the aggregate
return. We show that in tick time the price follows a discrete diffusion
process with a variable step width while the difference between the number of
steps in positive and negative direction in an interval is Gaussian
distributed. The step width is given by the return due to a single trade and is
long-term correlated in tick time. Hence, its mean value can well characterize
an interval of many trades and turns out to be an important determinant for
large aggregate returns. We also present a statistical model reproducing the
cumulative distribution of aggregate returns. For an accurate agreement with
the empirical distribution, we also take into account asymmetries of the step
widths in different directions together with crosscorrelations between these
asymmetries and the mean step width as well as the signs of the steps.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, typos correcte
Active tag recommendation for interactive entity search : Interaction effectiveness and retrieval performance
We introduce active tag recommendation for interactive entity search, an approach that actively learns to suggest tags from preceding user interactions with the recommended tags. The approach utilizes an online reinforcement learning model and observes user interactions on the recommended tags to reward or penalize the model. Active tag recommendation is implemented as part of a realistic search engine indexing a large collection of movie data. The approach is evaluated in task-based user experiments comparing a complete search system enhanced with active tag recommendation to a control system in which active tag recommendation is not available. In the experiment, participants (N = 45) performed search tasks on the movie domain and the corresponding search interactions, information selections, and entity rankings were logged and analyzed. The results show that active tag recommendation (1) improves the ranking of entities compared to written-query interaction, (2) increases the amount of interaction and effectiveness of interactions to rank entities that end up being selected in a task, and (3) reduces, but does not substitute, the need for written-query interaction (4) without compromising task execution time. The results imply that active learning for search support can help users to interact with entity search systems by reducing the need for writing queries and improve search outcomes without compromising the time used for searching.Peer reviewe
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