Hyperbolic regression analysis for kinetics, electrophoresis, ELISA, RIA, Bradford, Lowry, and other applications

Hyperbolic regression analysis is an effective method for fitting experimental data points obtained from a variety of experiments in molecular biology, including enzyme kinetics, agarose gel electrophoresis of DNA fragments, SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis of proteins, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA), radioimmunoassays (RIA), Bradford protein quantitation assays, Lowry protein assays, and other applications. Hyperbolic regression yields excellent fitted curves without the biases that are introduced by carrying out linear regression on double reciprocal coordinates, and it produces one simple equation, encompassing all the data points, that can be used easily in a pocket calculator to estimate the values of unknown samples from the known standards.     

Louis Kruh,Cryptologist, Editor,Activist

Abstract

The double transposition cipher was considered to be one of the most secure types of manual ciphers. It was extensively used in both World Wars and during the Cold War. In 1999, Otto Leiberich, the former head of the German federal office for information security, suggested that a double transposition challenge be published with specific parameters designed to ensure its security. Such a challenge was published by Klaus Schmeh in 2007. In November 2013, the authors solved the challenge using a ciphertext-only hill climbing attack. They also solved the challenge using a dictionary attack. In this article, they describe both methods, which are based on a “divide-and-conquer” approach. They additionally discuss the impact of their solutions with respect to the general security of the double transposition cipher.     

Electronic Markets, Hierarchies, Hubs, and Intermediaries

The impact of information technologies on organizations is difficult to predict, although critical for developing comprehensive organizational strategies. Much of the difficulty is traceable to the treatment of all information technologies as a single factor, when in fact different technologies may have drastically different impacts on the organization. Specifically, the distinction between two general classes of technologies, communication and information processing technologies, is studied. An analytical model is developed to show that these two classes of technologies have exactly the opposite impacts on the organization. Moreover, the impact also depends on the organization, and its existing structure. Communication intensive and processing intensive organizational structures are distinguished and they are shown to be impacted differently by information technologies. An analytical framework is developed to show a continuum of organizational structures, depending on their relative communication and processing intensity, and the effect of various technologies is shown to be to move the organization along that continuum. Communication and information processing technologies are shown to move the organization in opposing directions. Finally, the analytical framework is shown to be robust and valid under a wide variety of conditions, covering most real life organizations.     

Mandalas,screws, pears,and Klein bottles

The goal of this article is to present an informal introduction and tutorial on the production of aesthetically pleasing solid models. The article is intended for the nonmathematical reader interested in computer art. Simple generating formulas and recipes are included.     

Pointcuts, advice, refinements, and collaborations: similarities, differences, and synergies

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a novel programming paradigm that aims at modularizing complex software. It embraces several mechanisms including (1) pointcuts and advice as well as (2) refinements and collaborations. Though all these mechanisms deal with crosscutting concerns, i.e., a special class of design and implementation problems that challenge traditional programming paradigms, they do so in different ways. In this article we explore their relationship and their impact on modularity, which is an important prerequisite for reliable and maintainable software. Our exploration helps researchers and practitioners to understand their differences and exposes which mechanism is best used for which problem.     

Disjunctions, independence, refinements

An important question in constraint satisfaction is how to restrict the problem to ensure tractability (since the general problem is NP-hard). The use of disjunctions has proven to be a useful method for constructing tractable constraint classes from existing classes; the well-known ‘max-closed’ and ‘ORD-Horn’ constraints are examples of tractable classes that can be constructed this way. Three sufficient conditions (the guaranteed satisfaction property, 1-independence and 2-independence) that each ensure the tractability of constraints combined by disjunctions have been proposed in the literature. We show that these conditions are both necessary and sufficient for tractability in three different natural classes of disjunctive constraints. This suggests that deciding this kind of property is a very important task when dealing with disjunctive constraints. We provide a simple, automatic method for checking the 1-independence property—this method is applicable whenever the consistency of the constraints under consideration can be decided by path-consistency. Our method builds on a connection between independence and refinements (which is a way of reducing one constraint satisfaction problem to another.)     

Across disciplines: risk, design, method, process, and tools

In the search for solutions to make software development more predictable and controllable, one often looks for parallels in other disciplines such as architecture, bridge construction, and so on. The article looks at software development from the perspective of the electrical industry. Inspired by their management tradition, ATH techniek b.v. has learned to apply proven management techniques to software development. Simple and commonsense principles yield excellent results; for instance, developers reduced risk by estimating project effort using two different measures and by controlling execution. Comparing the software development processes with what goes on in the rest of the company or another application domain can be instructive     

结构应变的无线监测及融合技术

针对结构应变监测,设计了一类无线应变传感装置,并对该装置采集的数据进行了数据融合处理.,介绍了无线应变传感器的硬件集成;描述了基于算术平均值的无线应变传感器信息融合方法;结合应变的无线测试实验,应用数据融合技术对测量数据加以分析处理.研究表明:所集成的无线应变传感器,安装简单、携带方便;采用了数据融合处理的应变信号更加准确;基于数据融合的无线应变传感器适合在现场测试中应用.     

Petri nets, algebras, morphisms, and compositionality

It is shown how a category of Petri nets can be viewed as a subcategory of two sorted algebras over multisets. This casts Petri nets in a familiar framework and provides a useful idea of morphism on nets different from the conventional definition—the morphisms here respect the behaviour of nets. The categorical constructions which result provide a useful way to synthesise nets and reason about nets in terms of their components; for example, various forms of parallel composition of Petri nets arise naturally from the product in the category. This abstract setting makes plain a useful functor from the category of Petri nets to a category of spaces of invariants and provides insight into the generalisations of the basic definition of Petri nets—for instance, the coloured and higher level nets of Kurt Jensen arise through a simple modification of the sorts of the algebras underlying nets. Further, it provides a smooth formal relation with other models of concurrency such as Milner's calculus of communicating systems (CCS) and Hoare's communicating sequential processes (CSP), though this is only indicated in this paper.     

Plagiarism, originality, assemblage

Although students work and live in a remix culture, composition pedagogy does not always value the discursive practices of that culture, especially when it comes to producing written work for academic contexts. The reasons for these views are historically determined and tied, at least in part, to relatively traditional notions of authorship and creativity. But “writers” in other contexts, both disciplinary and popular, have developed interesting and useful remix approaches that can aid invention, leverage intellectual and physical resources, and dramatize the social dimensions of composing in this day and age. These approaches, however, ask teachers to reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions about plagiarism and originality.     

Texture,contour, shape,and motion

Intrinsic magic calculation exploits constraints arising from physical and imaging processes to derive physical scene parameters from input images. After a brief review of a paradigmatic intrinsic image calculation we turn to a recent result in shape from texture and then to a new result that derives shape and motion from a sequence of patterned inputs. Experimental results are demonstrated for synthetic and natural images.     

Slope Intervals,Generalized Gradients,Semigradients, Slant Derivatives,and Csets

Many practical optimization problems are nonsmooth, and derivative-type methods cannot be applied. To overcome this difficulty, there are different concepts to replace the derivative of a function f : : interval slopes, semigradients, generalized gradients, and slant derivatives are some examples. These approaches generalize the success of convex analysis, and are effective in optimization. However, with the exception of interval slopes, it is not clear how to automatically compute these; having a general analogue to the chain rule, interval slopes can be computed with automatic differentiation techniques. In this paper we study the relationships among these approaches for nonsmooth Lipschitz optimization problems in finite dimensional Euclidean spaces. Inclusion theorems concerning the equivalence of these concepts when there exist one sided derivatives in one dimension and in multidimensional cases are proved separately. Valid enclosures are produced. Under containment set (cset) theory, for instance, the cset of the gradient of a locally Lipschitz function f near x is included in its generalized gradient.     

ALIENATION,EARLY SOCIALISM,PERESTROIKA, AND LIBERTY

The essential contradiction of the process of perestroika is that between alienation and liberty. Current Soviet society is a historically preliminary form of socialist society. The essence of early socialism is a rise in new quasi-socialist forms of alienation. Seven strata of alienation have appeared in the Soviet Union—alienation from participation in government, from the results of work, from the organization of work, from human needs, from self-consciousness, from personal safety, and from laws. The theoretical basis of liberty is that it is the antipole of alienation.     

The New About News: How Print,Online, Free,and Mobile Coconstruct New Audiences in Italy,France, Spain,the UK,and Germany

This paper presents cross‐national research on news readership diversification. We compare written news (print and free newspapers, online and mobile news services) audiences in the 5 most populous and industrialized European countries (Italy, France, Spain, the UK and Germany). Outlining a sociodemographic portrait of these different news users is important in order to understand the changes undergone inside the world of written news. We draw on a telephone survey carried out in 2009, using a representative population sample (N=7,255). The survey considers sociodemographic variables, including a range of social activities and attitudinal variables, television, computer, and mobile phone ownership, and Internet access and use. Findings show a rich, but volatile relationship between written news, audience behaviors, and community participation.     

Definability,decidability, complexity

We survey how the definability problem in first-order logic was born and the relations between this problem and the question of decidability of logical theories. We also show present connections between definability and the important theoretical problems of computational complexity.     

Phrenology, astrology, risk, and product quality

Engineering is the act of making intelligent tradeoffs and compromises among conflicting and sometimes mutually exclusive goals. To improve product performance, the die size might need to increase, which diminishes the chip's economic attractiveness. Assessing risk and product quality is not an exact science. Nevertheless, the computing industry's future rests as much on our success in achieving product quality as it does in continuing to innovate in circuits and microarchitectures