Cell-cell adhesion is mediated by interaction of a number of protein complexes residing on the cell plasma membranes. Disruption of these complexes affects structural and functional integrity of tissues. It has been hypothesized that a membrane protein tetraspanin CD82, a known metastasis suppressor, may play a role in regulating cell adhesion. Two proteins of interest (PG and Dsg2) have been f...

This paper describes a theory of the representation and use of linguistic knowledge in a natural language understanding system. The representation system draws much of its insight from the linguistic theory of Fillmore el al. (1988). This models knowledge of language as a large collection of grammatical constructions, each a description of a linguistic regularity. I describe a representation la...

Among the many reasons that may limit the adoption of promising reform ideas, policy capacity is the least recognized. The concept itself is not widely understood. Although policy capacity is concerned with the gathering of information and the formulation of options for public action in the initial phases of policy consultation and development, it also touches on all stages of the policy proces...

User Financial Incentives (UFIs) have emerged as a powerful tool for health promotion. Strong evidence suggests that large enough incentives paid to individuals, conditional on behaviour they can control, encourages more of the desired behaviour. However, such interventions can have unintended consequences for non-targeted behaviours. Implementation difficulties that result in individuals not u...

Using an overlapping generations model, this paper investigates the implications of status-seeking behavior, induced by preferences for relative income, for the evolution of income inequality. When average income rises, an individual’s marginal utility of their own income may increase (keeping up with the Joneses, or KUJ), or decrease (running away from the Joneses, or RAJ). It is shown that in...

Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories has been designing, developing, testing, and evaluating spoken language understanding systems in several unique operational environments over the past five years. Through these experiences we have encountered numerous challenges in making each system become an integral part of a user’s operations. In this paper, we discuss these challenges and ...