Wolfgang Wagner

Bio: Wolfgang Wagner is an academic researcher from Vienna University of Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Large Hadron Collider & Top quark. The author has an hindex of 156, co-authored 2342 publications receiving 123391 citations. Previous affiliations of Wolfgang Wagner include University of Pennsylvania & University of Amsterdam.

Between Military Efficiency and Democratic Legitimacy: Mapping Parliamentary War Powers in Contemporary Democracies, 1989–2004

Abstract: Parliamentary approval can be of crucial importance to ensure the democratic legitimacy of military operations as it can establish public consent to the executives use of force. But involving parliament in decisions to deploy military forces may have negative repercussions on the efficiency of operations, e.g. by slowing down decision-making. As the military activity of democracies has been on the rise since the end of the Cold War, democracies around the world have been increasingly pressed to deal with this trade-off between legitimacy and efficiency in sending troops abroad. This paper surveys the deployment provisions of 49 contemporary democracies to establish whether and how parliaments are actually involved in deployment decisions. It demonstrates that the rules for parliamentary participation mark a continuum that ranges from complete exclusion to a comprehensive veto position of parliament over all potential deployments. In between these two extremes, democracies have found a wide variety of solutions to cope with the legitimacy-efficiency problem. Despite the growing prevalence of military deployments, there is no discernible trend towards parliamentarisation, however. Rather the trend towards internationalisation of security policies contributed to a weakening of parliamentary powers in some countries.

A report to the European Commission's Directorate-General for Research

Abstract: Summary of key findings 3 1. Introduction 8 2. Technological optimism & pessimism 10 2.1 Trends in optimism 11 3. Evaluating applications of biotechnology 15 3.1 Gene therapy, pharmacogenetics, GM food and nanotechnology 15 3.2 Reasons for buying or not buying GM food 22 3.3 Industrial (white) biotechnology 24 4. Stem cell research 29 4.1 Opinions on stem cell research 29 4.2 What information do people want about stem cell research? 37

Search for direct top squark pair production in final states with two tau leptons in pp collisions at √s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Abstract: A search for direct pair production of the supersymmetric partner of the top quark, decaying via a scalar tau to a nearly massless gravitino, has been performed using 20 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data at root s = 8 TeV. The data were collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2012. Top squark candidates are searched for in events with either two hadronically decaying tau leptons, one hadronically decaying tau and one light lepton, or two light leptons. No significant excess over the Standard Model expectation is found. Exclusion limits at 95 % confidence level are set as a function of the top squark and scalar tau masses. Depending on the scalar tau mass, ranging from the 87 GeV LEP limit to the top squark mass, lower limits between 490 and 650 GeV are placed on the top squark mass within the model considered.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

Fast parallel algorithms for short-range molecular dynamics

Abstract: Three parallel algorithms for classical molecular dynamics are presented. The first assigns each processor a fixed subset of atoms; the second assigns each a fixed subset of inter-atomic forces to compute; the third assigns each a fixed spatial region. The algorithms are suitable for molecular dynamics models which can be difficult to parallelize efficiently—those with short-range forces where the neighbors of each atom change rapidly. They can be implemented on any distributed-memory parallel machine which allows for message-passing of data between independently executing processors. The algorithms are tested on a standard Lennard-Jones benchmark problem for system sizes ranging from 500 to 100,000,000 atoms on several parallel supercomputers--the nCUBE 2, Intel iPSC/860 and Paragon, and Cray T3D. Comparing the results to the fastest reported vectorized Cray Y-MP and C90 algorithm shows that the current generation of parallel machines is competitive with conventional vector supercomputers even for small problems. For large problems, the spatial algorithm achieves parallel efficiencies of 90% and a 1840-node Intel Paragon performs up to 165 faster than a single Cray C9O processor. Trade-offs between the three algorithms and guidelines for adapting them to more complex molecular dynamics simulations are also discussed.

疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]／Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Abstract: 抗原变异可使得多种致病微生物易于逃避宿主免疫应答。表达在感染红细胞表面的恶性疟原虫红细胞表面蛋白1（PfPMP1）与感染红细胞、内皮细胞、树突状细胞以及胎盘的单个或多个受体作用，在黏附及免疫逃避中起关键的作用。每个单倍体基因组var基因家族编码约60种成员，通过启动转录不同的var基因变异体为抗原变异提供了分子基础。