Do you sincerely want to be cited? Or: read before you cite

Do you sincerely want to be cited? Prestige depends on the number of times your academic paper gets cited. But that need not be a measure of how good it is, nor even of how many times it is actually read. Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury explain their theory of the unread citation.     

The writer as the people's therapist: Der Nister's last decade, 1939–49

ABSTRACT

World War II and the Holocaust caused profound changes in the style and themes of Der Nister's writing. He reevaluated his symbolist legacy and emerged as one of the most powerful and tragic voices in Soviet Yiddish literature. His transformation from a respected but marginal literary figure into a self-styled national leader became complete with his adventurous journey to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in the Soviet Far East, which he envisioned as a site of new Jewish revival. His illusions were crushed by his arrest in 1949.     

A fast greedy sequential heuristic for the vertex colouring problem based on bitwise operations

In this paper a fast greedy sequential heuristic for the vertex colouring problem is presented. The suggested algorithm builds the same colouring of the graph as the well-known greedy sequential heuristic in which on every step the current vertex is coloured in the minimum possible colour. Our main contributions include introduction of a special matrix of forbidden colours and application of efficient bitwise operations on bit representations of the adjacency and forbidden colours matrices. Computational experiments show that in comparison with the classical greedy heuristic the average speedup of the developed approach is 2.6 times on DIMACS instances.     

Bayesian mixture models for complex high dimensional count data in phage display experiments

Summary.  Phage display is a biological process that is used to screen random peptide libraries for ligands that bind to a target of interest with high affinity. On the basis of a count data set from an innovative multistage phage display experiment, we propose a class of Bayesian mixture models to cluster peptide counts into three groups that exhibit different display patterns across stages. Among the three groups, the investigators are particularly interested in that with an ascending display pattern in the counts, which implies that the peptides are likely to bind to the target with strong affinity. We apply a Bayesian false discovery rate approach to identify the peptides with the strongest affinity within the group. A list of peptides is obtained, among which important ones with meaningful functions are further validated by biologists. To examine the performance of the Bayesian model, we conduct a simulation study and obtain desirable results.     

Interval scalability of rank-dependent utility

Luce and Narens (Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 29:1–72, 1985) showed that rank-dependent utility (RDU) is the most general interval scale utility model for binary lotteries. It can be easily established that this result cannot be generalized to lotteries with more than two outcomes. This article suggests several additional conditions to ensure RDU as the only utility model with the desired property of interval scalability in the general case. The related axiomatizations of some special cases of RDU of independent interest (the quantile utility, expected utility, and Yaari’s dual expected utility) are also given.