Let us assume that some businessmen wish to have a meeting. For this to happen, they usually have to meet somewhere. If they cannot meet physically, then they can take part in a video (or audio) conference to discuss whatever needs to be discussed. But what if their meeting is meant to be private? In this case they need a cryptographic protocol that allows them to exchange their ideas remotely,...

Reputation concerns can discipline agents to take costly effort and generate good outcomes. But what if outcomes are not always observed? We consider a model of reputation with shifting observability, and ask how this affects agents’ incentives. We identify a novel and intuitive mechanism by which infrequent observation or inattention can actually strengthen reputation incentives and encourage ...

Filled pauses (FP) are characteristic of spontaneous speech and present considerable problems for speech recognition by being often recognized as short words. Recognition of quasispontaneous speech (medical dictation) is subject to this problem as well. An um can be recognized as thumb or arm if the recognizer’s language model does not adequately represent FP’s. Representing FP’s in the trainin...

We theoretically study the topography of a biphasic surfactant monolayer in the vicinity of domain boundaries. The differing elastic properties of the two phases generally lead to a nonflat topography of "mesas," where domains of one phase are elevated with respect to the other phase. The mesas are steep but low, having heights of up to 10 nm. As the monolayer is laterally compressed, the mesas...

The study of measurable and integrable selections from a correspondence (set-valued function) has been of interest for some time [e.g., see Aumann (1965), Hildenbrand (1974), etc.]. Here we take up the study of distributions of such selections. The motivation for doing this comes from Mathematical Economics [see Kannai (1970, section 7); the reader interested in the economic applications is ref...

When a non-interactive story is reread, the experience may change, even though the text remains the same. But what if the text is potentially different in each reading session, as is the case in an interactive story – how does rereading change in the context of interactive stories? In our earlier empirical studies of rereading we found that, surprisingly, readers of interactive stories reported...

We analyzed the effects of dopamine signaling on the temporal organization of rest and activity in Drosophila melanogaster. Locomotor behaviors were recorded using a video-monitoring system, and the amounts of movements were quantified by using an image processing program. We, first, confirmed that rest bout durations followed long-tailed (i.e., power-law) distributions, whereas activity bout d...

In standard arithmetic, if we, e.g., accidentally added a wrong number y to the preliminary result x, we can undo this operation by subtracting y from the result x+ y. A similar possibility to invert (undo) addition holds for intervals. In this paper, we show that if we add a single non-interval set, we lose invertibility. Thus, invertibility requirement leads to a new characterization of the c...