Scientists have long known that variation in animal color patterns carry far more than cosmetic signifi cance. Darwin fi rst connected pigmentation with adaptive advantage, noting that male fi nches with bright red plumage enjoyed greater reproductive success than their drab competitors. Explaining why coloration confers such advantages, however, has proved somewhat easier than showing how it a...

We calculate the 1-loop renormalization of the fermion self-energy, all local fermion bilinears, as well as a set of extended bilinears which form a basis corresponding to moments of the parton distribution functions. We use the overlap action for fermions and Symanzik improved action for gluons. Our results are presented as a function of the overlap parameter ρ and the parameters entering the ...

Many realistic planning problems (such as those in manufacturing) place a high premium on plan efficiency. However, classical planning theory does not offer much insight into ways of obtaining efficient plans. The objective of this paper is to present a model of planning for plan efficiency that has been drawn from a case study in the machining domain. Some of the important features of this dom...

The finite field Kakeya problem deals with the way lines in different directions can overlap in a vector space over a finite field. This problem came up in the study of certain Euclidean problems and, independently, in the search for explicit randomness extractors. We survey recent progress on this problem and describe several of its applications.

How do speakers cope with a competing talker? This study investigated the possibility that speakers are able to retime their contributions to take advantages of temporal fluctuations in the background, reducing any adverse effects for an interlocutor. Speech was produced in quiet, competing talker, modulated noise and stationary backgrounds, with and without a communicative task. An analysis of...

In this paper we investigate weak contact relations C on a lattice L, in particular, the relation between various axioms for contact, and their connection to the algebraic structure of the lattice. Furthermore, we will study a notion of orthogonality which is motivated by a weak contact relation in an inner product space. Although this is clearly a spatial application, we will show that, in cas...

Our research aims to improve online discussion forums. The authors identify typical problems in online discussion that create difficulties for learners and describe a pedagogical approach emphasizing the importance of moderating in dealing with these problems. The usual design of discussion forums in learning management systems is not helpful but can be improved by specific add-ons. The authors...

We show that quasi-alternating links arise naturally when considering surgery on a strongly invertible L-space knot (that is, a knot that yields an L-space for some Dehn surgery). In particular, we show that for many known classes of L-space knots, every sufficiently large surgery may be realized as the two-fold branched cover of a quasi-alternating link. Consequently, there is considerable ove...

This report describes a minimalistic set of methods engineered to anchor clinical events onto a temporal space. Specifically, we describe methods to extract clinical events (e.g., Problems, Treatments and Tests), temporal expressions (i.e., time, date, duration, and frequency), and temporal links (e.g., Before, After, Overlap) between events and temporal entities. These methods are developed an...