Open Access/Open Research/Open Government: The Full Cycle of Access to Government Information

Stephanie Braunstein, Head Government Documents Librarian at Louisiana State University, and Maggie Kauffman, Senior Librarian and Housing Resource Coordinator at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, will describe the who, what, why, and how of current initiatives that promote the sharing of government-funded research--at both the federal and state levels. Emphasis will be placed on recent legislative efforts (such as the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act [FASTR]) and on the recommendations of various professional library organizations that support academic research (such as the Association of Research Libraries [ARL]). While much of the current discussion surrounding this issue takes place at the federal level, open access to information at the state level is vital in order to insure an educated and informed local population. After the informational portion of the presentation, the presenters will open up the floor for discussion with the intention of sharing a variety of perspectives on the government\u27s funding of research and how best to provide fair and equitable access to it

A rigorous analysis of the cavity equations for the minimum spanning tree

We analyze a new general representation for the Minimum Weight Steiner Tree (MST) problem which translates the topological connectivity constraint into a set of local conditions which can be analyzed by the so called cavity equations techniques. For the limit case of the Spanning tree we prove that the fixed point of the algorithm arising from the cavity equations leads to the global optimum.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Statics and dynamics of selfish interactions in distributed service systems

We study a class of games which model the competition among agents to access some service provided by distributed service units and which exhibit congestion and frustration phenomena when service units have limited capacity. We propose a technique, based on the cavity method of statistical physics, to characterize the full spectrum of Nash equilibria of the game. The analysis reveals a large variety of equilibria, with very different statistical properties. Natural selfish dynamics, such as best-response, usually tend to large-utility equilibria, even though those of smaller utility are exponentially more numerous. Interestingly, the latter actually can be reached by selecting the initial conditions of the best-response dynamics close to the saturation limit of the service unit capacities. We also study a more realistic stochastic variant of the game by means of a simple and effective approximation of the average over the random parameters, showing that the properties of the average-case Nash equilibria are qualitatively similar to the deterministic ones.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

Growing interfaces in quenched disordered media

We present the microscopic equation of growing interface with quenched noise for the Tang and Leschhorn model [{\em Phys. Rev.} {\bf A 45}, R8309 (1992)]. The evolution equations for the mean heigth and the roughness are reached in a simple way. Also, an equation for the interface activity density (i.e. interface density of free sites) as function of time is obtained. The microscopic equation allows us to express these equations in two contributions: the diffusion and the substratum one. All the equation shows the strong interplay between both contributions in the dynamics. A macroscopic evolution equation for the roughness is presented for this model for the critical pressure $p=0.461$. The dynamical exponent $\beta=0.629$ is analitically obtained in a simple way. Theoretical results are in excellent agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: 6 pages and 3 figures. Conference on Percolation and disordered systems: theory and applications, Giessen, Germany, (July, 1998

Shape-resonance-induced non-Franck–Condon effects in (2+1) resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization of the C 3Πg state of O2

We show that strong non-Franck–Condon effects observed in (2+1) resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization of the C 3Pig state of O2 are due to the ksigmau shape resonance previously observed in single-photon studies of diatomic molecules. Calculated vibrational branching ratios for the v=2,3 levels of the C 3Πg state are in reasonable agreement with experiment. Certain discrepancies remain in comparing theoretical results with the measured spectra, and possible electron-correlation effects which underly this are discussed

Gene-network inference by message passing

The inference of gene-regulatory processes from gene-expression data belongs to the major challenges of computational systems biology. Here we address the problem from a statistical-physics perspective and develop a message-passing algorithm which is able to infer sparse, directed and combinatorial regulatory mechanisms. Using the replica technique, the algorithmic performance can be characterized analytically for artificially generated data. The algorithm is applied to genome-wide expression data of baker's yeast under various environmental conditions. We find clear cases of combinatorial control, and enrichment in common functional annotations of regulated genes and their regulators.Comment: Proc. of International Workshop on Statistical-Mechanical Informatics 2007, Kyot

Squeezing as an irreducible resource

We show that squeezing is an irreducible resource which remains invariant under transformations by linear optical elements. In particular, we give a decomposition of any optical circuit with linear input-output relations into a linear multiport interferometer followed by a unique set of single mode squeezers and then another multiport interferometer. Using this decomposition we derive a no-go theorem for superpositions of macroscopically distinct states from single-photon detection. Further, we demonstrate the equivalence between several schemes for randomly creating polarization-entangled states. Finally, we derive minimal quantum optical circuits for ideal quantum non-demolition coupling of quadrature-phase amplitudes.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, new title, removed the fat

Clustering with shallow trees

We propose a new method for hierarchical clustering based on the optimisation of a cost function over trees of limited depth, and we derive a message--passing method that allows to solve it efficiently. The method and algorithm can be interpreted as a natural interpolation between two well-known approaches, namely single linkage and the recently presented Affinity Propagation. We analyze with this general scheme three biological/medical structured datasets (human population based on genetic information, proteins based on sequences and verbal autopsies) and show that the interpolation technique provides new insight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Encoding for the Blackwell Channel with Reinforced Belief Propagation

A key idea in coding for the broadcast channel (BC) is binning, in which the transmitter encode information by selecting a codeword from an appropriate bin (the messages are thus the bin indexes). This selection is normally done by solving an appropriate (possibly difficult) combinatorial problem. Recently it has been shown that binning for the Blackwell channel --a particular BC-- can be done by iterative schemes based on Survey Propagation (SP). This method uses decimation for SP and suffers a complexity of O(n^2). In this paper we propose a new variation of the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm, named Reinforced BP algorithm, that turns BP into a solver. Our simulations show that this new algorithm has complexity O(n log n). Using this new algorithm together with a non-linear coding scheme, we can efficiently achieve rates close to the border of the capacity region of the Blackwell channel.Comment: 5 pages, 8 figures, submitted to ISIT 200