Communication: Furanoside C-Glycosides from an O-Methyl Pyranoside: An Unexpected ß-Hydroxy-1,3-Dithiane Rearrangement

In the course of our investigations on the synthesis of enantiomerically pure anthracycline antibiotics by incorporation of chiral building blocks we prepared the O-methyl 3-deoxy-2-C-ethylribopyranoside 1.¹ The further synthetic plan required the conversion of 1 to the dithioacetal 2 followed by glycol cleavage to a partially protected 1,4-dialdehyde for coupling experiments to leucoquinizarine in a Marschalk reaction. However, the reaction sequence failed¹ and optically active rhodomycinone had to be synthezised in a different way.² A reinvestigation of the synthesis revealed that the thioacetalization of 1 using the acidic conditions recommended by Corey et al.³ did not yield the usual open chain dithioacetal 2 but rather three new unexpected products. The less polar fraction was identified by ¹H and ¹³C NMR as tetrahydrofuran derivative 3a with the dithiane ring in a ß-orientation. The solid polar fraction (12%) consisted of a nonseparable 1:2.2 mixture of the epimeric deoxygenation products 4/5.     

Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

The spread of ideas is a fundamental concern of today’s news ecology. Understanding the dynamics of the spread of information and its co-option by interested parties is of critical importance. Research on this topic has shown that individuals tend to cluster in echo-chambers and are driven by confirmation bias. In this paper, we leverage the active inference framework to provide an in silico model of confirmation bias and its effect on echo-chamber formation. We build a model based on active inference, where agents tend to sample information in order to justify their own view of reality, which eventually leads to them to have a high degree of certainty about their own beliefs. We show that, once agents have reached a certain level of certainty about their beliefs, it becomes very difficult to get them to change their views. This system of self-confirming beliefs is upheld and reinforced by the evolving relationship between an agent’s beliefs and observations, which over time will continue to provide evidence for their ingrained ideas about the world. The epistemic communities that are consolidated by these shared beliefs, in turn, tend to produce perceptions of reality that reinforce those shared beliefs. We provide an active inference account of this community formation mechanism. We postulate that agents are driven by the epistemic value that they obtain from sampling or observing the behaviours of other agents. Inspired by digital social networks like Twitter, we build a generative model in which agents generate observable social claims or posts (e.g., ‘tweets’) while reading the socially observable claims of other agents that lend support to one of two mutually exclusive abstract topics. Agents can choose which other agent they pay attention to at each timestep, and crucially who they attend to and what they choose to read influences their beliefs about the world. Agents also assess their local network’s perspective, influencing which kinds of posts they expect to see other agents making. The model was built and simulated using the freely available Python package pymdp. The proposed active inference model can reproduce the formation of echo-chambers over social networks, and gives us insight into the cognitive processes that lead to this phenomenon.     

An experimental study of a new multi-bunch damping mechanism in PETRA

A new damping mechanism of multi-bunch oscillations in a storage ring with help of a narrow-band feedback system has been experimentally tested in PETRA. The oscillations of a multi-bunch filling were sucessfully damped. The bandwidth of the active loop was 1.5 kHz instead of 5 MHz needed for standard damper systems.     

The Sommerfeld half-plane problem revisited,V: The bifurcated guide with mixed boundary conditions on the septum

We discuss the solution of the boundary value problem in a duct with a centered septum [9]. On the lower wall of the duct a Neumann condition is applied while on the upper wall a Dirichlet condition is applied. On the septum we apply a Dirichlet condition on the lower side and a Neumann condition on the upper one. This problem is formulated as a pair of integral equations of the Wiener–Hopf type for which we supply solutions for two modes of excitation as well as real and complex wave number. A critical examination is made of the construction, which reduces the problem to one in complex analysis. For real wave number, the physical parameters are provided in very simple forms.     

A Boundary Problem Concerning Inner Functions

Results in Mathematics -     

On the scattering of waves by a disk

Zusammenfassung Es wird gezeigt, dass das Problem, die Beugung einer ebenen Welle an einer kreisförmigen Öffnung oder Scheibe zu bestimmen, auf die Lösung von regulären Fredholmschen Integralgleichungen zweiter Art zurückgeführt werden kann. Die Lösungen dieser Integralgleichungen liefern uns für die Scheibe im Falle der Neumannschen Bedingung die radiale Variation der Unstetigkeiten der Wellenfunktion und im Dirichletschen Falle die Unstetigkeiten ihrer normalen Ableitung. Ist das Produkt von Öffnungsradius und Wellenzahl klein, so können die Integralgleichungen gelöst werden. Für die Ableitung der Integralgleichungen verwenden wir einerseits die Poissonsche Darstellung für die Wellenfunktion und andererseits die Fortsetzung der Helmholtzschen Darstellung in die komplexe Ebene.