Switching between molecular switch types by module rearrangement:Ca -enabled, H-driven 'off-on-off', H-driven YES and PASS 0 as well as H, Ca-driven AND logic operations

Several logic gates and switches can be accessed from two different combinations of a single set of fluorophore, receptor and spacer components.

Entanglement Replication in Driven Dissipative Many-Body systems

We study the dissipative dynamics of two independent arrays of many-body systems, locally driven by a common entangled field. We showthat in the steady state the entanglement of the driving field is reproduced in an arbitrarily large series of inter-array entangled pairs over all distances. Local nonclassical driving thus realizes a scale-free entanglement replication and long-distance entanglement distribution mechanism that has immediate bearing on the implementation of quantum communication networks. 

Evaluating Many Treatments and Biomarkers in Oncology: A New Design

There is a pressing need for more-efficient trial designs for biomarker-stratified clinical trials. We suggest a new approach to trial design that links novel treatment evaluation with the concurrent evaluation of a biomarker within a confirmatory phase II/III trial setting. We describe a new protocol using this approach in advanced colorectal cancer called FOCUS4. The protocol will ultimately answer three research questions for a number of treatments and biomarkers: (1) After a period of first-line chemotherapy, do targeted novel therapies provide signals of activity in different biomarker-defined populations? (2) If so, do these definitively improve outcomes? (3) Is evidence of activity restricted to the biomarker-defined groups? The protocol randomizes novel agents against placebo concurrently across a number of different biomarker-defined population-enriched cohorts: BRAF mutation; activated AKT pathway: PI3K mutation/absolute PTEN loss tumors; KRAS and NRAS mutations; and wild type at all the mentioned genes. Within each biomarker-defined population, the trial uses a multistaged approach with flexibility to adapt in response to planned interim analyses for lack of activity. FOCUS4 is the first test of a protocol that assigns all patients with metastatic colorectal cancer to one of a number of parallel population-enriched, biomarker-stratified randomized trials. Using this approach allows questions regarding efficacy and safety of multiple novel therapies to be answered in a relatively quick and efficient manner, while also allowing for the assessment of biomarkers to help target treatment.

Transgressing Contemporary Boundaries:The Narrator as True Custodian of Cultural Knowledge in Ulster Society

Historically in Gaelic culture, the bard was greatly valued and admired as an important and integral part of society. Travelled, schooled and specifically trained in their art, the bard helped ensure identity and reassurance for Gaelic families by grounding them both temporarily and spatially into their landscape. Entrusted with the duty and responsibility of recording place and event, the bards worked without writing and by transgressing man-made boundaries, travelled throughout the land weaving their histories into the very fabric of society.

Now no longer with us, we find ourselves without the distinguished chronicler to undertake this duty. Yet the responsibility of the Gaelic bard is one still shared by all artists today; to facilitate memory and identity, whether good or bad. Many Ulster writers, by happenstance and geography have found themselves located in a place of painful histories. An immediate difficulty for those local writers becomes manifest by being intrinsically implicated into those histories – whilst having first-hand knowledge and comprehension beyond that of the outsider, the local writer is automatically damned by association and relationship, thereby tarnishing their voice in comparison to the perceived impartiality of others.
Some writers however have successfully sought ways to escape this limitation and have worked in ways that can transgress the restrictions of prejudgement. John Hewitt, by purposely becoming a self-imposed tourist was able to distance himself to write impartially about the past, recognising that ’the place without its ghosts is a barren place.’1 In ‘The Colony’,2 tradition, peoples and mapping of the land are all narrated by Hewitt in a similar way to the Gaelic bardic topographic poems of Sean O'Dubhagain and Giolla Na Naomh O'Huidhrin3 in compiling a rich cultural atlas.

Similarly the Belfast poet and novelist Ciaran Carson also writes and records the city from an intermediary position; that of translator. Mediating between reader and aisling,4 Carson himself takes the reader on a journey into name, meaning, time and place, focusing primarily on the city of Belfast, familiar in name but impenetrable in depth to most.

Furthermore, this once-forgotten tradition to chronicle is now being continued by the new breed of Irish crime writers where the likes of Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty can, by way of the crime novel, accurately record contemporary society. Thus, ghost estates, listed buildings, archaeological digs, street and city have all provided setting and subject matter for recent novels. Moreover by choosing the ‘outsider from within’ as their chief protagonist, whether detective or criminal, each author is able to transgress the boundaries of prejudice and preconception that hinder genuine understanding and knowledge.

Looking in turn at the Gaelic bard, the twentieth century Ulster poet and the new breed of Irish crime writer, the authors will outline the real value of the narrator, by being able to act as cultural transgressor beyond the seeming and alleged as the true chronicler in society, and then with specific reference to city and countryside in Ireland, as a valuable custodian of knowledge in architecture and place.

Keywords
Architecture, Crime Fiction, Cultural Atlas, Place, Poetry.

1 From ‘The Bloody Brae’, a one act play written by John Hewitt in the 1930’s.
2 Hewitt, J. (1968) published in Collected Poems 1932-67. London:McGibbon & Kee.
3 Lengthy and detailed medieval Gaelic poems composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first edited by John O'Donovan in 1862 for the Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society in Dublin.
4 The aisling is the Irish song or poem genre when the poet is visited by their muse in a daydream or dream-vision state.

Tailoring Plasmonic Metamaterials for DNA Molecular Logic Gates

Structural and functional information encoded in DNA combined with unique properties of nanomaterials could be of use for the construction of novel biocomputational circuits and intelligent biomedical nanodevices. However, at present their practical applications are still limited by either low reproducibility of fabrication, modest sensitivity, or complicated handling procedures. Here, we demonstrate the construction of label-free and switchable molecular logic gates that use specific conformation modulation of a guanine- and thymine- rich DNA, while the optical readout is enabled by the tunable alphabetical metamaterials, which serve as a substrate for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (MetaSERS). By computational and experimental investigations, we present a comprehensive solution to tailor the plasmonic responses of MetaSERS with respect to the metamaterial geometry, excitation energy, and polarization. Our tunable MetaSERS-based DNA logic is simple to operate, highly reproducible, and can be stimulated by ultra-low concentration of the external inputs, enabling an extremely sensitive detection of mercury ions.

Ancestors of Governmentality: Accounting and Pastoral Power in the 15th Century

Foucault identified the roots of governmentality in religious beliefs and religious history with its genealogical core the equivalent of pastoral power, the art of governing people by relying on a dualistic logic; individualization and totalization. This technology of power arose and matured within the Roman Catholic Church and provided a model for many states in the achievement and exercise of power. Informed by the work of Foucault on pastoral power the present work examines the genealogical core of governmentality in the context of the Roman Catholic Church at a time of great crisis in the 15th century when the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing reform instituted by Pope Eugenius IV (1431-1447). The contributions of accounting to pastoral power are shown in this study to have been pivotal in restoring the Church’s standing and influence. Accounting was one of the technologies that allowed the bishops to control both the diocese as a whole and each priest, to subjugate the priests to the bishops’ authority and, thereby, to govern the diocese through a never-ending extraction of truth.

Assessing the Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics in a Quenched Quantum Many-Body System via Single Projective Measurements

We analyze the nature of the statistics of the work done on or by a quantum many-body system brought out of equilibrium. We show that, for the sudden quench and for an initial state that commutes with the initial Hamiltonian, it is possible to retrieve the whole nonequilibrium thermodynamics via single projective measurements of observables. We highlight, in a physically clear way, the qualitative implications for the statistics of work coming from considering processes described by operators that either commute or do not commute with the unperturbed Hamiltonian of a given system. We consider a quantum many-body system and derive an expression that allows us to give a physical interpretation, for a thermal initial state, to all of the cumulants of the work in the case of quenched operators commuting with the unperturbed Hamiltonian. In the commuting case, the observables that we need to measure have an intuitive physical meaning. Conversely, in the noncommuting case, we show that, although it is possible to operate fully within the single-measurement framework irrespectively of the size of the quench, some difficulties are faced in providing a clear-cut physical interpretation to the cumulants. This circumstance makes the study of the physics of the system nontrivial and highlights the nonintuitive phenomenology of the emergence of thermodynamics from the fully quantum microscopic description. We illustrate our ideas with the example of the Ising model in a transverse field showing the interesting behavior of the high-order statistical moments of the work distribution for a generic thermal state and linking them to the critical nature of the model itself.

Tools for Finding Inconsistencies in Real-world Logic-based Systems

Currently there is extensive theoretical work on inconsistencies in logic-based systems. Recently, algorithms for identifying inconsistent clauses in a single conjunctive formula have demonstrated that practical application of this work is possible. However, these algorithms have not been extended for full knowledge base systems and have not been applied to real-world knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a new algorithm for finding the inconsistencies in a knowledge base using existing algorithms for finding inconsistent clauses in a formula. An implementation of this algorithm is then presented as an automated tool for finding inconsistencies in a knowledge base and measuring the inconsistency of formulae. Finally, we look at a case study of a network security rule set for exploit detection (QRadar) and suggest how these automated tools can be applied.

Hybrid address spaces: A methodology for implementing scalable high-level programming models on non-coherent many-core architectures

This paper introduces hybrid address spaces as a fundamental design methodology for implementing scalable runtime systems on many-core architectures without hardware support for cache coherence. We use hybrid address spaces for an implementation of MapReduce, a programming model for large-scale data processing, and the implementation of a remote memory access (RMA) model. Both implementations are available on the Intel SCC and are portable to similar architectures. We present the design and implementation of HyMR, a MapReduce runtime system whereby different stages and the synchronization operations between them alternate between a distributed memory address space and a shared memory address space, to improve performance and scalability. We compare HyMR to a reference implementation and we find that HyMR improves performance by a factor of 1.71× over a set of representative MapReduce benchmarks. We also compare HyMR with Phoenix++, a state-of-art implementation for systems with hardware-managed cache coherence in terms of scalability and sustained to peak data processing bandwidth, where HyMR demon- strates improvements of a factor of 3.1× and 3.2× respectively. We further evaluate our hybrid remote memory access (HyRMA) programming model and assess its performance to be superior of that of message passing.

Logic and Memory Design Based on Unequal Error Protection for Voltage-scalable, Robust and Adaptive DSP Systems

In this paper, we propose a system level design approach considering voltage over-scaling (VOS) that achieves error resiliency using unequal error protection of different computation elements, while incurring minor quality degradation. Depending on user specifications and severity of process variations/channel noise, the degree of VOS in each block of the system is adaptively tuned to ensure minimum system power while providing "just-the-right" amount of quality and robustness. This is achieved, by taking into consideration block level interactions and ensuring that under any change of operating conditions, only the "less-crucial" computations, that contribute less to block/system output quality, are affected. The proposed approach applies unequal error protection to various blocks of a system-logic and memory-and spans multiple layers of design hierarchy-algorithm, architecture and circuit. The design methodology when applied to a multimedia subsystem shows large power benefits ( up to 69% improvement in power consumption) at reasonable image quality while tolerating errors introduced due to VOS, process variations, and channel noise.

A computational intelligent approach to multi-factor analysis of violent crime information systems

Various scientific studies have explored the causes of violent behaviour from different perspectives, with psychological tests, in particular, applied to the analysis of crime factors. The relationship between bi-factors has also been extensively studied including the link between age and crime. In reality, many factors interact to contribute to criminal behaviour and as such there is a need to have a greater level of insight into its complex nature. In this article we analyse violent crime information systems containing data on psychological, environmental and genetic factors. Our approach combines elements of rough set theory with fuzzy logic and particle swarm optimisation to yield an algorithm and methodology that can effectively extract multi-knowledge from information systems. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms alternative genetic algorithm and dynamic reduct-based techniques for reduct identification and has the added advantage of identifying multiple reducts and hence multi-knowledge (rules). Identified rules are consistent with classical statistical analysis of violent crime data and also reveal new insights into the interaction between several factors. As such, the results are helpful in improving our understanding of the factors contributing to violent crime and in highlighting the existence of hidden and intangible relationships between crime factors.