Here we report the analysis of dual G-quadruplexes formed in the four repeats of the consensus sequence from the insulin-linked polymorphic region (ACAGGGGTGTGGGG; ILPR(n)(=4)). Mobilities of ILPR(n)(=4) in nondenaturing gel and circular dichroism (CD) studies confirmed the formation of two intramolecular G-quadruplexes in the sequence. Both CD and single molecule studies using optical tweezers...

Ethicists have commonly appealed to science to bolster their arguments for elevating the moral status of nonhuman animals. I describe a framework within which I take many ethicists to be making such appeals. I focus on an apparent gap in this framework between those properties of animals that are part of the scientific consensus, and those to which ethicists typically appeal in their arguments....

In this paper, a model of political consensus is introduced. Parties try to reach consensus in forming a government. A government is defined as a pair consisting of a winning coalition and a policy supported by this coalition, where a policy consists of policies on given issues. A party evaluates all governments the party belongs to with respect to some criteria. We allow the criteria to be of ...

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This paper overviews audiovisual performance systems that form the basis for my recent collaborations with improvising musicians. Simulations of natural processes, such as fluid dynamics and flocking, provide the foundations for “organic”looking movement and evolution of abstract visual components. In addition, visual components can morph between abstract non-referential configurations and pre-...

Computational dialectics are a powerful way to structure the communicative acts that are expressed during the process of argumentation. Many such systems have been proposed but there has been no consensus over what constitutes a good system, or on what basis such a consensus could be built. This paper introduces a testbed for computational dialectics that enables disparate systems to be easily ...

This brief presents a new distributed scheme to solve the consensus problem for a group of agents if neither their absolute states nor inter-agent relative states are available. The new scheme considers a random partition of agents into two subgroups at each step and then uses the relative group representative state as feedback information for the consensus purpose. It is then shown that almost...

tenth section: operative environment chairmen: javad parvizi md, frcs; thorsten gehrke, md

In this paper, we present a consensus model for multiperson decision making problems with different preference structures based on two consensus criteria: firstly, we define a consensus measure which indicates the agreement between experts’ opinions and, secondly, we define a measure of proximity to find out how far the individual solutions are from the collective solution. The first one is use...

Social choice theory deals with mutual compatibilities of various choice criteria or desiderata. It thus provides a natural angle to look at methods for finding consensus. We distinguish between three types of settings of consensus-reaching. Firstly, we may be looking for the correct decision. This is typically the setting where the participants have different degrees of expertise on an issue t...