We study a general task allocation problem, involving multiple agents that collaboratively accomplish tasks and where agents may fail to successfully complete the tasks assigned to them (known as execution uncertainty). The goal is to choose an allocation that maximises social welfare while taking their execution uncertainty into account. We show that this can be achieved by using the post-exec...

In this article, I use Albert Hirschman's consumer-based 'exit' and 'voice' concepts in order to set out the political ecology of voice (PEV), an innovative theoretical framework that aims to examine the causes of environmental pollution from a new angle. I begin by providing a brief overview of political ecology, and why it provides such a useful framework from which to position Hirschman's id...

SUMMARY Position-effect variegation (PEV) describes the stochastic transcriptional silencing of a gene positioned adjacent to heterochromatin. Using FISH, we have tested whether variegated expression of the eye-color gene brown in Drosophila is influenced by its nuclear localization. In embryonic nuclei, a heterochromatic insertion at the brown locus is always spatially isolated from other hete...

In the speech synthesis systems, the phoneme identity feature indicated as the pronunciation unit is influenced by external contexts like the neighboring words and phonemes. This paper proposes to encode such relatedness and parameterize the pronunciation of the phoneme identity feature as a continuous real-valued vector. The vector, composed by a phoneme embedded vector (PEV) and a word embedd...

We have already reported the first result on the all-particle spectrum around the knee region based on data from 2000 November to 2001 October observed by the Tibet-III air-shower array. In this paper, we present an updated result using data set collected in the period from 2000 November through 2004 October in a wide range over 3 decades between 1014 eV and 1017 eV, in which the position of th...

Alpha-synuclein oligomerization is one of the early events on pathway to Lewy body formation. Therefore, interfering with this process holds tremendous potential for developing therapies that block ?-Syn pathology formation and toxicity. The development robust reliable cellular models alpha-synuclein important step toward achieving goal. Unlike fibrils, which can be detected labeled using multi...

Adenosine A2A and dopamine D2 receptors (A2A and D2) associate in homoand heteromeric complexes in the striatum, providing a structural basis for their mutual antagonism. At the cellular level, the portion of receptors engaging in homoand heteromers, as well as the effect of persistent receptor activation or antagonism on the cell oligomer repertoire, are largely unknown. We have used bimolecul...