Conjoining Speeds up Information Diffusion in Overlaying Social-Physical Networks

We study the diffusion of information in an overlaying social-physical network. Specifically, we consider the following set-up: There is a physical information network where information spreads amongst people through conventional communication media (e.g., face-to-face communication, phone calls), and conjoint to this physical network, there are online social networks where information spreads via web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, etc. We quantify the size and the critical threshold of information epidemics in this conjoint social-physical network by assuming that information diffuses according to the SIR epidemic model. One interesting finding is that even if there is no percolation in the individual networks, percolation (i.e., information epidemics) can take place in the conjoint social-physical network. We also show, both analytically and experimentally, that the fraction of individuals who receive an item of information (started from an arbitrary node) is significantly larger in the conjoint social-physical network case, as compared to the case where the networks are disjoint. These findings reveal that conjoining the physical network with online social networks can have a dramatic impact on the speed and scale of information diffusion.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Contaminated Confessions Revisited

A second wave of false confessions is cresting. In the first twenty-one years of post-conviction DNA testing, 250 innocent people were exonerated, forty of which had falsely confessed. Those false confessions attracted sustained public attention from judges, law enforcement, policymakers, and the media. Those exonerations not only showed that false confessions can happen, but did more by shedding light on the problem of confession contamination, in which details of the crime are disclosed to suspects during the interrogation process. As a result, false confessions can appear deceptively rich, detailed, and accurate. In just the last five years, there has been a new surge in false confessions — a set of twenty-six more false confessions among DNA exonerations. All but two of these most recent confessions included crime scene details corroborated by crime scene information. Illustrating the power of contaminated false confessions, in nine of the cases, defendants were convicted despite DNA tests that excluded them at the time. As a result, this second wave of false confessions should cause even more alarm than the first. In the vast majority of cases there is no evidence to test using DNA. Unless a scientific framework is adopted to regulate interrogations, including by requiring recording of entire interrogations, overhauling interrogation methods, providing for judicial review of reliability at trial, and informing jurors with expert testimony, the insidious problems of confession contamination will persist

Attentional Bias on Different Emotional Valence Information: Among College Students With Different Implicit Aggression

The study is a preliminary exploration on attentional bias among college students of different implicit aggression, by using different emotional valence pictures as experimental materials and dot-probe paradigm, as well as employing The Single Category Implicit Association Test which results was found being positively related to the self-reports of participants and also being consistent with the behavior of them. The experimental results show that attentional bias of college students in different implicit aggression do not be changed with the pictures of different emotional valence. But it is found that there is the significant difference between the Stimulus Onset Asynchrony and the participants of different implicit aggression during the experiments as well

Coherent heteronuclear spin dynamics in an ultracold spin-1 mixture

We report the observation of coherent heteronuclear spin dynamics driven by inter-species spin-spin interaction in an ultracold spinor mixture, which manifests as periodical and well correlated spin oscillations between two atomic species. In particular, we investigate the magnetic field dependence of the oscillations and find a resonance behavior which depends on {\em both} the linear and quadratic Zeeman effects and the spin-dependent interaction. We also demonstrate a unique knob for controlling the spin dynamics in the spinor mixture with species-dependent vector light shifts. Our finds are in agreement with theoretical simulations without any fitting parameters.Comment: 13 pages including the supplementary materia

Optimal Allocation of Interconnecting Links in Cyber-Physical Systems: Interdependence, Cascading Failures and Robustness

We consider a cyber-physical system consisting of two interacting networks, i.e., a cyber-network overlaying a physical-network. It is envisioned that these systems are more vulnerable to attacks since node failures in one network may result in (due to the interdependence) failures in the other network, causing a cascade of failures that would potentially lead to the collapse of the entire infrastructure. The robustness of interdependent systems against this sort of catastrophic failure hinges heavily on the allocation of the (interconnecting) links that connect nodes in one network to nodes in the other network. In this paper, we characterize the optimum inter-link allocation strategy against random attacks in the case where the topology of each individual network is unknown. In particular, we analyze the "regular" allocation strategy that allots exactly the same number of bi-directional inter-network links to all nodes in the system. We show, both analytically and experimentally, that this strategy yields better performance (from a network resilience perspective) compared to all possible strategies, including strategies using random allocation, unidirectional inter-links, etc.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. To appear in the Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems on Cyber-Physical Systems, 201

Decelerating Airy pulse propagation in highly non-instantaneous cubic media

The propagation of decelerating Airy pulses in non-instantaneous cubic medium is investigated both theoretically and numerically. In a Debye model, at variance with the case of accelerating Airy and Gaussian pulses, a decelerating Airy pulse evolves into a single soliton for weak and general non- instantaneous response. Airy pulses can hence be used to control soliton generation by temporal shaping. The effect is critically dependent on the response time, and could be used as a way to measure the Debye type response function. For highly non- instantaneous response, we theoretically find a decelerating Airy pulse is still transformed into Airy wave packet with deceleration. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations

Development of Questionnaire on Emotional Labor among Primary and Secondary School Teachers

In this study, based on the analysis of existing definitions of emotional labor, operational definition of teachers' emotional labor is given and questionnaire on emotional labor among primary and secondary school teachers is developed. Research results: exploratory factor analysis shows that teacher’s emotional labor involves three dimensions including surface acting, active deep acting and passive deep acting; the questionnaire has good reliability and validity; confirmatory factor analysis shows that emotional labor questionnaire involving three factors is established, which further verifies the validity of scale on emotional labor among primary and secondary school teachers

Self-assembly of Nanometer-scale Magnetic Dots with Narrow Size Distributions on an Insulating Substrate

The self-assembly of iron dots on the insulating surface of NaCl(001) is investigated experimentally and theoretically. Under proper growth conditions, nanometer-scale magnetic iron dots with remarkably narrow size distributions can be achieved in the absence of a wetting layer Furthermore, both the vertical and lateral sizes of the dots can be tuned with the iron dosage without introducing apparent size broadening, even though the clustering is clearly in the strong coarsening regime. These observations are interpreted using a phenomenological mean-field theory, in which a coverage-dependent optimal dot size is selected by strain-mediated dot-dot interactions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure