Romania and the Widening Gyre

The widening gyre: reflections on September 11.

Gyre and gimble in the proteasome.

Large, multisubunit machines carry out many fundamental biochemical processes in eukaryotic cells. Examples include the spliceosomes that remove introns from mRNA precursors, ribosomes that synthesize proteins, and proteasomes that degrade intracellular proteins. Most such machines use ordered conformational changes to coordinate the different reaction steps catalyzed. Structural information on...

Widening the Evaluation Net

Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate, particularly due to the subjectivity involved. From the various efforts to develop standard evaluation schemes for IVA systems the scheme proposed by Isbister & Doyle, which evaluates systems across five categories, seems particularly appropriate. To examine how these categories are being used, the evaluations presen...

The Widening Cultural Divide

The notion that economic integration will bring cultural integration in its train is only partly valid. As I describe in this article, economic development does make societies less nationalistic and more tolerant, trusting, and democratic. But the broad cultural heritage of a society— Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Confucian, or Communist—leaves a lasting imprint on values that endures d...

Localizing Widening and Narrowing

We show two strategies which may be easily applied to standard abstract interpretation-based static analyzers. They consist in 1) restricting the scope of widening, and 2) intertwining the computation of ascending and descending chains. Using these optimizations it is possible to improve the precision of the analysis, without any change to the abstract domains.