The Consensus Problem in Polities of Agents with Dissimilar Cognitive Architectures

Agents interacting with their environments, machine or otherwise, arrive at decisions based on their incomplete access to data and their particular cognitive architecture, including data sampling frequency and memory storage limitations. In particular, the same data streams, sampled and stored differently, may cause agents to arrive at different conclusions and to take different actions. This phenomenon has a drastic impact on polities—populations of agents predicated on the sharing of information. We show that, even under ideal conditions, polities consisting of epistemic agents with heterogeneous cognitive architectures might not achieve consensus concerning what conclusions to draw from datastreams. Transfer entropy applied to a toy model of a polity is analyzed to showcase this effect when the dynamics of the environment is known. As an illustration where the dynamics is not known, we examine empirical data streams relevant to climate and show the consensus problem manifest.     

Aromatic Higher Alcohols in Wine: Implication on Aroma and Palate Attributes during Chardonnay Aging

The higher alcohols 2-phenylethanol, tryptophol, and tyrosol are a group of yeast-derived compounds that have been shown to affect the aroma and flavour of fermented beverages. Five variants of the industrial wine strain AWRI796, previously isolated due to their elevated production of the ‘rose-like aroma’ compound 2-phenylethanol, were characterised during pilot-scale fermentation of a Chardonnay juice. We show that these variants not only increase the concentration of 2-phenylethanol but also modulate the formation of the higher alcohols tryptophol, tyrosol, and methionol, as well as other volatile sulfur compounds derived from methionine, highlighting the connections between yeast nitrogen and sulfur metabolism during fermentation. We also investigate the development of these compounds during wine storage, focusing on the sulfonation of tryptophol. Finally, the sensory properties of wines produced using these strains were quantified at two time points, unravelling differences produced by biologically modulating higher alcohols and the dynamic changes in wine flavour over aging.     

Finiteness obstructions and cocompact actions onS m×ℝn

Partially supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number DMS88-03149.     

Polarisation characteristics of a 12 fibre coupler under femtosecond pulsed and continuous wave illumination

We report on the experimental investigation carried out in the polarisation characteristics of femtosecond pulsed and continuous wave beams propagating through a 1×2 fibre coupler. It is demonstrated that the polarisation states of pulsed and continuous wave illumination over the broad wavelength range can be preserved in a conventional fused fibre coupler. Furthermore, the fibre coupler acts as a low-pass spectral filter in the visible wavelength range with a splitting ratio between 99.6/0.4 and 99.7/0.3. The result is of importance for fibre-optic second harmonic generation microscopy which requires the polarisation preservation to extract molecular organization of a sample.     

How simple can a thermotropic mesogenic molecule be? Supramolecular layers through a network of hydrogen bonds

The supramolecular approach was applied to obtain a thermotropic liquid crystalline phase from the smallest possible molecules. Diaminobenzene derivatives are able to form smectic layers through a network of interconnected hydrogen bonded rings. The observed smectic A phase exhibits unusually small optical birefringence, comparable with that of lyotropic lamellar phases.     

FLUORESCENCE PROPERTIES OF C-PHYCOCYANIN ISOLATED FROM A THERMOPHILIC CYANOBACTERIUM

Abstract The fluorescence lifetime of purified C-phycocyanin from the thermophilic cyanobacterium, Phormidium laminosum (strain OH-1-p. Cl 1), was measured as 1.48 ± 0.06 ns using the technique of time-correlated single-photon counting under very weak excitation pulses. The natural radiative lifetime (∼6.1 ns) of the pigment was calculated by integrating the absorption spectrum using the Strickler–Berg equation. From these two lifetimes we calculate a fluorescence quantum yield of ∼0.24 which is very close to the value ∼0.22 which we measure relative to the known value of cresyl violet in methanol. Both the fluorescence lifetime and the quantum yield of the pigment from this organism are lower than most previous values reported in the literature. We conclude that our lower values are not due to high light intensity, pH, buffer, concentration, instrumentation artifacts, aggregation effects or the thermophilic nature of the organism. Instead, we suggest that the photophysical properties of C-phycocyanin are species dependent, perhaps due to the specific molecular environment of the tetrapyrrole.     

Biogenetic-type synthesis of vepridimerines A–D

A simple synthesis of vepridimerines A–D based on thermolysis of veprisine is presented. In addition, the structure of a novel synthetic veprisine dimer is reported. Since veprisine has been previously synthesized, this report constitutes the first total synthesis of the vepridimerines.     

Evodulone,a new tetranortriterpenoid from carapa procera

Hexane extraction of the ground seeds of $\text{Carapa procera}$ followed by chromatography afforded a new tetranortritepenoid for which the structure (II) is proposed on the basis of spectroscopic evidence.