We calculate the part of the order αs correction to the semileptonic heavy quark decay rate proportional to the number of light quark flavors, and use our result to set the scale for evaluating the strong coupling in the order αs term according to the scheme of Brodsky, Lepage and Mackenzie. Expressing the decay rate in terms of the heavy quark pole mass mQ, we find the scale for the MS strong ...

In (online) learning theory the concepts of sparsity, variance and curvature are well-understood and are routinely used to obtain refined regret and generalization bounds. In this paper we further our understanding of these concepts in the more challenging limited feedback scenario. We consider the adversarial multi-armed bandit and linear bandit settings and solve several open problems pertain...

Kearton observed that mutation can change the concordance class of a knot. A close examination of his example reveals that it is of 4–genus 1 and has a mutant of 4–genus 0. The first goal of this paper is to construct examples to show that for any pair of nonnegative integers m and n there is a knot of 4–genus m with a mutant of 4–genus n. A second result of this paper is a crossing change form...

User attitudes towards a hospital virtual nurse agent are described, as evaluated in a randomized clinical trial involving 764 hospital patients. Patients talked to the agent for an average of 29 minutes while in their hospital beds, receiving their customized hospital discharge instructions from the agent and a printed booklet. Patients reported very high levels of satisfaction with and trust ...

In 1984 Scarsini introduced a set of axioms for measures of concordance of ordered pairs of continuous random variables. We exhibit an extension of these axioms to ordered n-tuples of continuous random variables, n ≥ 2. We derive simple properties of such measures, give examples, and discuss the relation of the extended axioms to multivariate measures of concordance previously discussed in the ...

Davis showed that the topological concordance class of a link in the 3-sphere is uniquely determined by its Alexander polynomial for 2-component links with Alexander polynomial one. A similar result for knots with Alexander polynomial one was shown earlier by Freedman. We prove that these two cases are the only exceptional cases, by showing that the link concordance class is not determined by t...

We give necessary conditions of a surface-knot to be ribbon concordant to another, by introducing a new variant of the cocycle invariant of surface-knots in addition to using the invariant already known. We demonstrate that twist-spins of some torus knots are not ribbon concordant to their orientation reversed images.

We study the eta-invariants of links and show that in many cases they form link concordance invariants, in particular that many eta-invariants vanish for slice links. This result contains and generalizes previous invariants by Smolinsky and Cha–Ko. We give a formula for the eta-invariant for boundary links. In several intersting cases this allows us to show that a given link is not slice. We sh...

Preference reversals occur when different (but formally equivalent) elicitation methods reveal conflicting preferences over two alternatives. This paper shows that when people have fuzzy preferences i.e. when they choose in a probabilistic manner, their observed decisions can generate systematic preference reversals. A simple model of probabilistic choice and valuation can account for a higher ...