Two experiments explored how people create novel sentences referring to given entities presented either in line drawings or in nouns. The line drawings yielded more creative sentences than the words, both as rated by judges and objectively in Shannon’s measure of the amount of information that the sentences conveyed. A hypothesis about the cognitive processes of creation predicted this result: ...

We use an argument by Page to exhibit a paradox in the global description of the multiverse: the overwhelming majority of observers arise from quantum fluctuations and not by conventional evolution. Unless we are extremely atypical, this contradicts observation. The paradox does not arise in the local description of the multiverse, but similar arguments yield interesting constraints on the maxi...

Stochastic dominance constraints allow a decision-maker to manage risk in an optimization setting by requiring their decision to yield a random outcome which stochastically dominates a reference random outcome. We present new integer and linear programming formulations for optimization under first and second-order stochastic dominance constraints, respectively. These formulations are more compa...

We explore the physics of the general CP-conserving MSSM with Minimal Flavor Violation, the pMSSM. The 19 soft SUSY breaking parameters are chosen so to satisfy all existing experimental and theoretical constraints assuming that the WIMP is the lightest neutralino. We scan this parameter space twice using both flat and log priors and compare the results which yield similar conclusions. Constrai...

We present an extension to a mobile keyboard input decoder based on finite-state transducers that provides general transliteration support, and demonstrate its use for input of South Asian languages using a QWERTY keyboard. On-device keyboard decoders must operate under strict latency and memory constraints, and we present several transducer optimizations that allow for high accuracy decoding u...

Many real world Timetabling Problems (TTPs) are composed of organizational parts that need to timetable their staff in an independent way, while adhering to some global constraints. Later the departmental timetables are combined to yield a coherent, consistent solution. This last phase involves negotiations with the various agents and requests for changes in their own

This paper examines the use of arithmetic coding in conjunction with the error resilient entropy code (EREC). The constraints on the coding model are discussed and simulation results are presented and compared to those obtained using Huffman coding. These results show that without the EREC, arithmetic coding is less resilient than Huffman coding, while with the EREC both systems yield comparabl...

Protein sequences evolved to fold in cells, including cotranslational folding of nascent polypeptide chains during their synthesis by the ribosome. The vectorial (N- to C-terminal) nature of cotranslational folding constrains the conformations of the nascent polypeptide chain in a manner not experienced by full-length chains diluted out of denaturant. We are still discovering to what extent the...

The maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is, theoretically, the largest yield that can be taken from a single species’ stock over an indefinite period. Formulation of strategic MSY management goals is, however, complicated by the need to move beyond biological single-species considerations. Interactions among species necessitate multispecies (MMSY) definitions, incorporating ecological, economic and...

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of n tasks on m processors under precedence, communication, and global system energy constraints to minimize makespan. We extend existing scheduling models to account for energy usage and give convex programming algorithms that yield essentially the same results as existing algorithms that do not consider energy, while adhering to a strict energy bound.