cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Input Sourcing and Multinational Production

A large portion of world trade happens within firms’ boundaries. This paper proposes a new general equilibrium framework where firms decide whether to outsource to unaffiliated suppliers or to integrate input manufacturing. Multinational corporations and intrafirm trade arise endogenously when firms integrate production in foreign countries. Outsourcing allows to benefit from suppliers’ good technologies, but entails the cost of a mark-up price. Intrafirm sourcing allows to save on mark-ups and to match a firm’s productivity with possibly lower foreign wages. The pricing implications of the theory unveil a positive relationship between the intrafirm share of imports and the degree of differentiation across inputs in a sector, for which I find strong support in the data. Moreover, imperfect competition establishes a link between FDI liberalization and optimal pricing: suppliers find optimal to reduce their prices in response to the possibility of insourced production (the “pro-competition effect” of multinationals). The model is calibrated to match aggregate U.S. trade data, and used to quantify the gains arising from vertical multinational production and intrafirm trade. The computed gains are currently about 1% of consumption per capita, and the model shows that further liberalization can increase them substantially.
A model for late Quaternary methane ice core signals: Wetlands versus a shallow marine source

[1] A three-reservoir model with first order kinetics for methane records in the Vostok (Antarctica) and GISP2 (Greenland) ice cores reproduces the sawtooth pattern and the maximum and minimum concentrations. The model also returns an atmospheric methane relaxation time of ∼10 years for both cores, which is the same as current estimates. The characteristics of the source reservoirs are long relaxation times (33.3 and 100 ky) and high initial methane concentrations (2500 and 7000 ppm) for GISP2 and Vostok, respectively. These characteristics are consistent with gas hydrate sources in shallow marine sediments, but not with wetland sources which have insufficient storage capacity and low source strength.
Bayesian Auctions with Friends and Foes

We study auctions whose bidders are embedded in a social or economic network. As a result, even bidders who do not win the auction themselves might derive utility from the auction, namely, when a friend wins. On the other hand, when an enemy or competitor wins, a bidder might derive negative utility. Such spite and altruism will alter the bidding strategies. A simple and natural model for bidders' utilities in these settings posits that the utility of a losing bidder i as a result of bidder j winning is a constant (positive or negative) fraction of bidder j 's utility. We study such auctions under a Bayesian model in which all valuations are distributed independently according to a known distribution, but the actual valuations are private. We describe and analyze Nash Equilibrium bidding strategies in two broad classes: regular friendship networks with arbitrary valuation distributions, and arbitrary friendship networks with identical uniform valuation distributions.
Nonnegative wealth, absence of arbitrage, and feasible consumption plans

A restriction to nonnegative wealth is sufficient to preclude all arbitrage opportunities in financial models that have risk neutral probabilities that are valid for all simple strategies. Imposing nonnegative wealth does not constrain agents from making the choice they would make under the standard integrability condition. This conclusion does not depend on whether the markets are complete. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
An integrated approach to parallel scheduling using gang-scheduling, backfilling, and migration

Effective scheduling strategies to improve response times, throughput, and utilization are an important consideration in large supercomputing environments. Parallel machines in these environments have traditionally used space-sharing strategies to accommodate multiple jobs at the same time by dedicating the nodes to a single job until it completes. This approach, however, can result in low system utilization and large job wait times. This paper discusses three techniques that can be used beyond simple space-sharing to improve the performance of large parallel systems. The first technique we analyze is backfilling, the second is gang-scheduling, and the third is migration. The main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the effects of combining the above techniques. Using extensive simulations based on detailed models of realistic workloads, the benefits of combining the various techniques are shown over a spectrum of performance criteria.
The Marriage of Human Factors and Safety in Industry

Social concern and governmental legislation have placed great emphasis on the need for safe workplaces and environments in industry. The safety and human factors department at Eli Lilly & Co. applies techniques to help achieve this purpose. Areas of application are (1) enhancement of design principles to prevent error-provocative features of systems; (2) work physiology studies for compatible work load specifications and job design; and (3) electromyographical studies for use in studying optimal tool design and evaluation of work methods.
ReStore: Symptom-Based Soft Error Detection in Microprocessors

Device scaling and large-scale integration have led to growing concerns about soft errors in microprocessors. To date, in all but the most demanding applications, implementing parity and ECC for caches and other large, regular SRAM structures have been sufficient to stem the growing soft error tide. This will not be the case for long and questions remain as to the best way to detect and recover from soft errors in the remainder of the processor - in particular, the less structured execution core. In this work, we propose the ReStore architecture, which leverages existing performance enhancing checkpointing hardware to recover from soft error events in a low cost fashion. Error detection in the ReStore architecture is novel: symptoms that hint at the presence of soft errors trigger restoration of a previous checkpoint. Example symptoms include exceptions, control flow misspeculations, and cache or translation look-aside buffer misses. Compared to conventional soft error detection via full replication, the ReStore framework incurs little overhead, but sacrifices some amount of error coverage. These attributes make it an ideal means to provide very cost effective error coverage for processor applications that can tolerate a nonzero, but small, soft error failure rate. Our evaluation of an example ReStore implementation exhibits a 2times increase in MTBF (mean time between failures) over a standard pipeline with minimal hardware and performance overheads. The MTBF increases by 20times if ReStore is coupled with protection for certain particularly vulnerable pipeline structures
Do Telecommunications Affect Passenger Travel or Vice Versa? Structural Equation Models of Aggregate U.S. Time Series Data Using Composite Indexes

This study explores the aggregate causal relationships between telecommunications and travel in a comprehensive framework, considering their demand, supply, and costs, together with land use, economic activity, and sociodemographic variables. On the basis of a hypothesized conceptual model, composite indexes were developed for endogenous variable categories (telecommunications and travel demand, supply, costs, land use, and economic activity) by confirmatory factor analysis, with the use of national time series data (1950–2000) in the United States. Then, single-equation and structural equation models for telecommunications (telephone calls and mobile phone subscribers, separately) and travel were estimated, with the composite indexes and sociodemographic measures used as explanatory variables. Overall, the model results suggest that the aggregate relationship between actual amounts of travel and telecommunications is complementarity, not substitution. That is, as telecommunications demand increases, travel demand increases, and vice versa. In addition, it was found that the causal effects of travel demand on telecommunications demand were larger than those in the reverse direction. Note: Reprinted with permission of the Transportation Research Board. None of this material may be presented to imply endorsement by TRB of a product, method, practice, or policy.
Against taking linguistic diversity at “face value”

Evans & Levinson (E&L) advocate taking linguistic diversity at “face value.” Their argument consists of a list of diverse phenomena and the assertion that no non-vacuous theory could possibly uncover a meaningful unity underlying them. I argue, with evidence from Tlingit and Warlpiri, that E&L's list itself should not be taken at face value – and that the actual research record already demonstrates unity amidst diversity.
Analyzing urban poverty: a summary of methods and approached

In recent years an extensive body of literature has emerged on the definition, measurement and analysis of poverty. Much of this literature focuses on analyzing poverty at the national level, or spatial disaggregation by general categories of urban or rural areas with adjustments made for regional price differentials. Yet for an individual city attempting to tackle the problems of urban poverty, this level of aggregation is not sufficient for answering specific questions such as where the poor are located in the city, whether there are differences between poor areas, if access to services varies by subgroup, whether specific programs are reaching the poorest, and how to design effective poverty reduction programs and policies. Answering these questions is critical, particularly for large, sprawling cities with highly diverse populations and growing problems of urban poverty. Understanding urban poverty presents a set of issues distinct from general poverty analysis and thus may require additional tools and techniques. This paper summarizes the main issues in conducting urban poverty analysis, with a focus on presenting a sample of case studies from urban areas that were implemented by a number of different agencies using a range of analytical approaches for studying urban poverty. Specific conclusions regarding design and analysis, data, timing, cost, and implementation issues are discussed.
Square root of ‘not’: a major difference between fuzzy and quantum logics

Many authors have mentioned the similarity between quantum logic and fuzzy logic. In this paper, we show that, in spite of this similarity, these logics are not identical. Specifically, we emphasize that, while quantum logic has a special ‘square root of not’ operation, which is very useful in quantum computing, fuzzy logic lacks such an operation.
Radical addition approach to asymmetric amine synthesis: design, implementation, and comparison of chiral N-acylhydrazones.

Intermolecular radical addition to CN bonds with acyclic stereocontrol offers excellent potential as a mild, nonbasic carbon−carbon bond construction approach to chiral amines. Here, complete details of the first radical additions to chiral N-acylhydrazones as an approach to asymmetric amine synthesis are disclosed. Novel N-acylhydrazones were designed as chiral CN radical acceptors with Lewis acid activation, restriction of conformational mobility, and commercial availability of precursors. Amination of 4-alkyl-2-oxazolidinones with O-(mesitylenesulfonyl)hydroxylamine or O-(p-nitrobenzoyl)hydroxylamine afforded N-aminooxazolidinones which were condensed with aldehydes to afford N-acylhydrazones 3−8. Three synthetic methods were developed, implementing these N-acylhydrazones in Lewis acid-promoted intermolecular radical additions to CN bonds. First, additions of various secondary and tertiary alkyl iodides to propionaldehyde and benzaldehyde hydrazones (3 and 7) under tin hydride radical chain conditions ...
MicroRNAs: the primary cause or a determinant of progression in leukemia?

Leukemia is a complex disease with many different types and subtypes caused by a huge diversity of genetic and epigenetic aberrations. Until recently, alterations of protein-coding genes were thought to be the sole cause of tumorigenesis. With the recent discovery of multiple types of non-coding RNAs, it has become evident that mutations in these also contribute to the development of cancer. Among the non-coding RNAs, microRNAs play a crucial role in cancer owing to their involvement in fundamental processes such as apoptosis, differentiation and proliferation [1,2]. MicroRNAs are small noncoding RNAs (approximately 19–25 nucleotides in length) that bind to and downregulate multiple mRNA targets; in mammals, the production of over a third of all proteins is regulated by microRNAs [3]. Several studies demonstrated that microRNAs are involved in leukemia progression but their role as the primary cause or a determinant of progression in leukemia has been unclear. Some have been identified as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, which suggests that they are playing a central role in tumorigenesis, while others appear to be associated with a specific stage in disease progression. Deciphering the exact role of microRNAs in oncogenesis is important in order to improve the diagnosis and treatment of leukemia patients.
Recovery of Coherent Data via Low-Rank Dictionary Pursuit

The recently established RPCA [4] method provides a convenient way to restore low-rank matrices from grossly corrupted observations. While elegant in theory and powerful in reality, RPCA is not an ultimate solution to the low-rank matrix recovery problem. Indeed, its performance may not be perfect even when data are strictly low-rank. This is because RPCA ignores clustering structures of the data which are ubiquitous in applications. As the number of cluster grows, the coherence of data keeps increasing, and accordingly, the recovery performance of RPCA degrades. We show that the challenges raised by coherent data (i.e., data with high coherence) could be alleviated by Low-Rank Representation (LRR) [13], provided that the dictionary in LRR is configured appropriately. More precisely, we mathematically prove that if the dictionary itself is low-rank then LRR is immune to the coherence parameter which increases with the underlying cluster number. This provides an elementary principle for dealing with coherent data and naturally leads to a practical algorithm for obtaining proper dictionaries in unsupervised environments. Experiments on randomly generated matrices and real motion sequences verify our claims. See the full paper at arXiv:1404.4032.
Copper-Catalyzed Arylation of β-Amino Alcohols

Methods for synthesizing N-aryl β-amino alcohols and O-aryl β-amino alcohols are described. The presence of a neighboring hydroxyl or amino group, respectively, is thought to activate β-amino alcohols toward these transformations. These protocols significantly increase access to a variety of arylated β-amino alcohols.
Carborane acids. New “strong yet gentle” acids for organic and inorganic chemistry

Icosahedral carborane anions such as CHB11Cl11− are amongst the least coordinating, most chemically inert anions known. They are also amongst the least basic, so their conjugate acids, H(carborane), are superacids (i.e. stronger than 100% H2SO4). Acidity scale measurements indicate that H(CHB11Cl11) is the strongest pure Bronsted acid presently known, surpassing triflic and fluorosulfuric acid. Nevertheless, it is also an extremely gentle acid—because its conjugate base engages in so little chemistry. Carborane acids separate protic acidity from anion nucleophilicity and destructive oxidative capacity in the conjugate base, to a degree not previously achieved. As a result, many long-sought, highly acidic, reactive cations such as protonated benzene (C6H7+), protonated C60 (HC60+), tertiary carbocations (R3C+), vinyl cations (R2CC+–R), silylium ions (R3Si+) and discrete hydronium ions (H3O+, H5O2+etc.) can be readily isolated as carborane salts and characterized at room temperature by X-ray crystallography.
In situ multinuclear NMR spectroscopic studies of the thermal decomposition of ammonia borane in solution

The development of condensed phase hydrogen storage materials for fuel cell powered vehicles capable of meeting the 2015 system target goals of >82 g H2 L-1 volumetric density and >90 g H2 kg-1 gravimetric density has attracted recent interest. The details of the mechanisms for hydrogen release from AB are not completely understood; however, significant progress has been made in furthering our understanding of these mechanisms. This work was funded by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Chemical Hydrogen Storage Center and carried out at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (operated by Battelle for DOE).
An efficient direct-sequence signal detector based on Dempster-Shafer theory

The detection of direct-sequence spread-spectrum signals is studied. Consideration is given to the environment of broadband noise jamming with the assumption that jammer state information is unknown. It is shown how the Dempster-Shafer theory can be applied to this problem; in particular, the authors treat the unknown jammer state information as uncertain and use the concept of 'confidence discount' and Dempster's combining rule to derive a heuristic detector for the problem. They show that the resulting detector has a better performance than the hard-decision detector and the soft-decision detector when the jammer is significant. The degradation relative to the soft-decision detector is smaller than the hard-decision detector when the jammer is low. >
The Welfare Effects of Environmental Taxation

Recent literature has investigated whether the welfare gains from environmental taxation are larger or smaller in a second-best setting than in a first-best setting. This question has mainly been addressed indirectly, by asking whether the second-best optimal environmental tax is higher or lower than the first-best Pigouvian rate. Even this indirect question has itself been approached indirectly, comparing the second-best optimal environmental tax to a proxy for its first-best value, marginal social damage (MSD). On closer examination, however, MSD becomes ambiguously defined and variable in a second-best setting making it an unreliable proxy for the Pigouvian rate. Given these observations, the current analysis reevaluates these welfare questions and finds that when compared directly to its first-best value, the second-best optimal environmental tax generally rises with increased revenue requirements. Even in cases where the second-best environmental tax is lower than its first-best value, the welfare gains may be greater than in a first-best setting. These results suggest that the marginal fiscal benefit (revenue recycling effect) exceeds the marginal fiscal cost (tax base effect) over a range of environmental tax rates that, for benchmark models, extends above the first-best Pigouvian rate. These findings reinforce the intuition that environmental policy complements rather than competes with the provision of other public goods.
As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution

From the Publisher: "How can we best understand the impact of revolutionary technologies on the business cycle, the economy, and society? Why is economics meaningless without history and without an understanding of institutional and technical change? Does the 'new economy' mean the 'end of history'?" "These are some of the questions addressed in this authoritative analysis of economic growth from the Industrial Revolution of the 'new economy' of today. Chris Freeman has been one of the foremost researchers on innovation for a long time and his colleague Francisco Louca is an outstanding historian of economic theory and an analyst of econometric models and methods. Together they chart the history of five technological revolutions: water-powered mechanization, steam-powered mechanization, electrification, motorization, and computerization. They demonstrate the necessity to take account of politics, culture, organizational change, and entrepreneurship, as well as science and technology in the analysis of economic growth." "This is a well-informed, highly topical, and persuasive study of interest across all the social sciences."--BOOK JACKET.
Final Exam Scores in Introductory Economics Courses: Effect of Course Delivery Method and Proctoring

Student performances on the final exam in introductory economics courses taught online and in the classroom were compared to consider the effect of proctoring the final exam. Students who took a course in the classroom did better on a proctored final exam than those taking the course online. Students in an online class taking a nonproctored final exam online scored more than one full letter grade higher than those taking a proctored final.
Normalization of plasma 25-hydroxy vitamin D is associated with reduced risk of surgery in Crohn's disease.

Introduction Vitamin D may have an immunological role in Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Retrospective studies suggested a weak association between vitamin D status and disease activity but have significant limitations.
A solution to the cyclic aldol problem

A protocol for achieving stereoselective aldol reactions with cyclic ketones is presented. In terms of yield, the process is particularly effective when a quaternary center at the α-carbon of the β-hydroxy ketone product is created. The stereochemical outcome, anti or syn, is achieved by the Lewis acid-mediated ring expansion of stereochemically homogeneous epoxides in a reaction related to the pinacol rearrangement.
The stability of matter

A fundamental paradox of classical physics is why matter, which is held together by Coulomb forces, does not collapse. The resolution is given here in three steps. First, the stability of atom is demonstrated, in the framework of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. Next the Pauli principle, together with some facts about Thomas-Fermi theory, is shown, to account for the stability (i.e., saturation) of bulk matter. Thomas-Fermi theory is developed in some detail because, as is also pointed out, it is the asymptotically correct picture of heavy atoms and molecules (in the Z→∞ limit). Finally, a rigorous version of screening is introduced to account for thermodynamic stability.
A statistical analysis of RNA folding algorithms through thermodynamic parameter perturbation

Computational RNA secondary structure prediction is rather well established. However, such prediction algorithms always depend on a large number of experimentally measured parameters. Here, we study how sensitive structure prediction algorithms are to changes in these parameters. We found already that for changes corresponding to the actual experimental error to which these parameters have been determined, 30% of the structure are falsely predicted whereas the ground state structure is preserved under parameter perturbation in only 5% of all the cases. We establish that base-pairing probabilities calculated in a thermal ensemble are viable although not a perfect measure for the reliability of the prediction of individual structure elements. Here, a new measure of stability using parameter perturbation is proposed, and its limitations are discussed.
The Linear Instability of Astrophysical Flames in Magnetic Fields

Supernovae of Type Ia are used as standard candles for cosmological observations despite the as yet incomplete understanding of their explosion mechanism. In one model, these events are thought to result from subsonic burning in the core of an accreting carbon/oxygen white dwarf that is accelerated through flame wrinkling and flame instabilities. Many such white dwarfs have significant magnetic fields. Here we derive the linear effects of such magnetic fields on one flame instability, the well-known Landau-Darrieus instability. When the magnetic field is strong enough that the flame is everywhere sub-Alfvenic, the instability can be greatly suppressed. Super-Alfvenic flames are much less affected by the field, with flames propagating parallel to the field somewhat destabilized and flames propagating perpendicular to the field somewhat stabilized. Trans-Alfvenic parallel flames, however, like trans-Alfvenic parallel shocks, are seen to be nonevolutionary; understanding the behavior of these flames will require careful numerical simulation.
Laguerre functions on symmetric cones and recursion relations in the real case

In this article we derive differential recursion relations for the Laguerre functions on the cone Ω of positive definite real matrices. The highest weight representations of the group Sp(n, R) play a fundamental role. Each such representation acts on a Hilbert space of holomorphic functions on the tube domain Ω + iSym(n, R). We then use the Laplace transform to carry the Lie algebra action over to L2(Ω, dµv). The differential recursion relations result by restricting to a distinguished three-dimensional subalgebra, which is isomorphic to s|(2, R).
On-the-fly Estimation of Antenna Induced Biases in SFAP Based GNSS Antenna Arrays

A method for on-the-fly estimation of antenna induced biases in Space-Frequency Adaptive Processing (SFAP) based antenna arrays employed in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers is presented. The method uses real time SFAP weights along with stored antenna array gain and phase data over the frequency band of the incident signals to efficiently estimate the antenna induced biases in GNSS receiver measurements. Using computer simulations, it is shown that the estimated biases are in good agreement with the true antenna induced biases. The same is true in the absence of all interfering signals as well as in the presence of multiple narrowband and wideband interfering signals. As expected, the antenna induced biases vary with the interference environment. Copyright © 2014 Institute of Navigation.
Corporate board dynamics: Directors voting for directors

Abstract I propose a model in which corporate directors perform firm tasks (such as monitoring management) and elect new directors. Elections introduce a dynamic element – the incumbent board's willingness to hire a candidate depends on how the candidate will vote in future hiring rounds. Lack of a commitment mechanism means directors do not always choose board compositions that maximize shareholder value. I use the model to analytically and numerically investigate the effects of stock exchange rules governing board composition and director elections. I find that the regulations benefit shareholders in a dynamic environment, but not in a static environment.
Secondary school use of the time-shared computer at Dartmouth College

Soon after the first Dartmouth Time-Sharing System began operation in May of 1964, the local high school installed a teletype. Within two and one-half years, eight high schools had tied into the Dartmouth System. The effects were startling. Hundreds of students were taught the BASIC language. Some of them produced highly sophisticated programs. Teachers were using computer applications in mathematics and science courses. These effects convinced Dartmouth of the high value of computing in secondary education. However, the results were not sufficiently examined. There was no documentation on recommended procedures nor written units of classroom applications. Therefore, in the spring of 1967, Dartmouth College proposed that the National Science Foundation support work in developing, expanding, sharing, documenting, and publishing the results of computing experience in secondary schools.
Neural Networks in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Neural networks have been and will continue to be major research areas in artificial intelligence. Such models show promise in achieving human-like performance, particularly in areas such as speech and pattern recognition. Recently, neural networks have begun to find their way out of the research labs and into the realm of practical applications. Unfortunately, however, the study of such networks has been largely overlooked in the computer science undergraduate curriculum. Tomorrow's marketplace demands that computer science students be familiar with neural networks and with their problem solving abilities. This paper presents a proposal for a neural network module to be integrated into an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course. Such a module proved to be a very popular and successful part of such a course given by the author. Sample projects assigned in the course will be presented. In a number of these projects, students either used microcomputer application software which simulates several neural network models or programmed their own simulations on microcomputers.
Proximal Newton-type methods for convex optimization

We seek to solve convex optimization problems in composite form: minimizex∈ℝn f (x) := g(x) + h(x), where g is convex and continuously differentiable and h : ℝn → ℝ is a convex but not necessarily differentiable function whose proximal mapping can be evaluated efficiently. We derive a generalization of Newton-type methods to handle such convex but nonsmooth objective functions. We prove such methods are globally convergent and achieve superlinear rates of convergence in the vicinity of an optimal solution. We also demonstrate the performance of these methods using problems of relevance in machine learning and statistics.
Systematics of Gamow-Teller strengths in mid-fp-shell nuclei

Abstract We show that the presently available data on the Gamow-Teller (GT) strength in mid- fp -shell nuclei are proportional to the product of the numbers of valence protons and neutron holes in the full fp -shell. This observation leads to important insights into the mechanism for GT quenching and to a simple parametrization of the Gamow-Teller strengths important for electron capture by fp -shell nuclei in the early stage of supernovae.
Time-domain non-Monte Carlo noise simulation for nonlinear dynamic circuits with arbitrary excitations

A time-domain, non-Monte Carlo method for computer simulation of electrical noise in nonlinear dynamic circuits with arbitrary excitations and arbitrary large-signal waveforms is presented. This time-domain noise simulation method is based on results from the theory of stochastic differential equations. The noise simulation method is general in the following sense. Any nonlinear dynamic circuit with any kind of excitation, which can be simulated by the transient analysis routine in a circuit simulator, can be simulated by our noise simulator in time-domain to produce the noise variances and covariances of circuit variables as a function of time, provided that noise models for the devices in the circuit are available. Noise correlations between circuit variables at different time points can also be calculated. Previous work on computer simulation of noise in electronic circuits is reviewed with comparisons to our method. Shot, thermal, and flicker noise models for integrated-circuit devices, in the context of our time-domain noise simulation method, are discussed. The implementation of this noise simulation method in a circuit simulator (SPICE) is described. Two examples of noise simulation (a CMOS inverter and a BJT active mixer) are given.
The Economics of Attribute-Based Regulation: Theory and Evidence from Fuel Economy Standards

In many countries, fuel-economy standards mandate that vehicles meet a certain fuel economy, but heavier or larger vehicles are allowed to meet a lower standard. This has the perverse implication of allowing automakers to meet standards either by improving fuel economy or by increasing weight, which lowers fuel economy and increases externalities related to accidents. This is but one example of an attribute-based regulation, in which the regulation imposed on a product depends on both the externality it creates and some other attribute. Attribute-basing potentially motivates rms and individuals to strategically alter the attribute, thereby endogenously altering the stringency of the regulation. This paper develops a theory of attribute-basing to demonstrate the costs and benets of its use. The paper then empirically examines the consequences of attribute-based fuel-economy standards in Japan, where fuel-economy standards are a notched attribute-based function of vehicle weight. We use cross-sectional and panel techniques to demonstrate that attribute-based regulation has signicantly altered the distribution of vehicle weight in Japan, where 10% of vehicles bunch at weight notches. For cars whose weight is altered in response to the policy, we estimate that the alteration generates a welfare loss from the exacerbation of weight-related externalities of $1,500 per unit sold, which translates into a $700 million annual loss across the Japanese auto market.
New brane solutions from Killing spinor equations

Abstract In a recent paper, we have pointed out a relation between the Killing spinor and Einstein equations. Using this relation, new brane solutions of D =11 and D =10 type IIB supergravity theories are constructed. It is shown that in a brane solution, the flat world-volume directions, the smeared transverse directions and the sphere located at a fixed radial distance can be replaced with any Lorentzian Ricci flat, Euclidean Ricci flat and Einstein manifolds, respectively. The solution obtained in this fashion is supersymmetric when the Ricci flat and Einstein manifolds have Killing spinors. We generalize intersecting brane solutions, in which M5-, M2- and D3-branes also wrap over the cycles determined by the Kahler forms of Ricci flat Kahler manifolds. New, singular, Ricci flat manifolds as (generalized) cones over the U(1) bundles over Ricci flat Kahler spaces are constructed. These manifolds have covariantly constant spinors and give rise to new, supersymmetric, Ricci flat compactifications of non-gauged supergravity theories. We find M2- and D3-brane solutions, which asymptotically approach these singular vacua.
Environment and Obesity in the National Children's Study

We describe the approach taken by the National Children's Study (NCS) to understanding the role of environmental factors in the development of obesity. We review the literature with regard to the two core hypotheses in the NCS that relate to environmental origins of obesity and describe strategies that will be used to test each hypothesis. Although it is clear that obesity in an individual results from an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure, control of the obesity epidemic will require understanding of factors in the modern built environment and chemical exposures that may have the capacity to disrupt the link between energy intake and expenditure. Through its embrace of the life-course approach to epidemiology, the NCS will be able to study the origins of obesity from preconception through late adolescence, including factors ranging from genetic inheritance to individual behaviors to the social, built, and natural environment and chemical exposures. It will have sufficient statistical power to examine interactions among these multiple influences, including geneenvironment and geneobesity interactions. A major secondary benefit will derive from the banking of specimens for future analysis.
Epibatidine analogues as selective ligands for the αxβ2-containing subtypes of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors

Abstract A series of epibatidine analogues was synthesized and characterized in vitro. These compounds are high affinity ligands for the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChR). They display binding selectivity for the α x β 2 subtypes of nAChRs over the α x β 4 subtypes, and especially for the α 4 β 2 and α 2 β 2 subtypes. Furthermore, most of these new nicotinic compounds display little, if any, agonist activities at α 3 β 4 nAChR. As a result they might become lead structures for the design and synthesis of highly selective ligands for nAChR subtypes containing the β 2 subunit.
ROUTES TO THE FUTURE OF URBAN PUBLIC TRANSIT

This article discusses some of the managerial and technical changes needed to assure that the transit services needed in cities of the future will be available. There include diversification of the types of services provided, reductions in the scale of both service delivery and management bureaucracies, enhancement of the role of private providers, improvement of service efficiency, more productive negotiation with organized labour, service pricing in recognition of costs, and systematic management of travel demand. Factors limiting the potential role of new transit technology are discussed. Finally, the need for transit operating and management institutions to change, to become more responsive to markets, and to invite other, lower-cost providers to enter those markets is suggested. (Author/TRRL)
Hedging Cash Flows from Commodity Processing

Agribusinesses make long-term plant-investment decisions based on discounted cash flow. It is therefore incongruous for an agribusiness firm to use cash flow as a plant-investment criterion and then to completely discard cash flow in favor of batch profits as an operating objective. This paper assumes that cash flow and its stability is important to commodity processors and examines methods for hedging cash flows under continuous processing. Its objectives are (a) to determine how standard hedging models should be modified to hedge cash flows, (b) to outline the differences between cash flow hedging and profit hedging, and (c) to determine the effectiveness of hedging in reducing cash flow variability. A cash flow hedging methodology is developed. This methodology is similar to that used for batch profit hedging. This methodology balances the daily cash flow destabilizing effect of futures positions against the periodic cash flow destabilizing effect of cash price changes. The resulting cash flow hedges are simulated for soybean processors. These hedges are less effective than batch profit hedging. The reduction in cash flow variance achieved through hedging, though small, is nonetheless statistically significant.
European Union Environmental Policies and Imports of Agricultural Products from the United States

The EU is the third largest regional export market for US agricultural products, with over $6 billion in annual sales. In principle, EU environmental policies designed to control domestic externalities could alter US agricultural exports to the EU. This paper develops a range of theoretically consistent and empirically relevant sectoral models that can be used to estimate the impact of environmental regulations on EU imports of US agricultural products. Section 2 reviews EU environmental policies to discuss how they may directly and indirectly affect EU demand for US agricultural imports. Section 3 develops models for size cases. Cases 1-3 are developed for homogeneous products. Case 1 assumes prices are fixed and the EU policy is a process regulation imposed on domestic producers. Case 2 extends Case 1 to include equilibrium price adjustments. Case 3 extends Case 2 to the situation where the EU policy is a product standard that affects both EU and US producers, although not necessarily in the same way. Cases 4-6 are developed for differentiated products. Case 4 focuses on EU process regulations with equilibrium price adjustments, and Case 5 extends the model to allow for eco-label policies that might shift EU consumer demands for both domestic and imported items. Case 6 extends Case 5 to allow for product standard policies in markets for differentiated products with eco-labels. Section 4 concludes.
Some experiments in directory organization: a simulation study

Using a simulation model, experiments were conducted on various directory organization schemes and their performance implications. In particular we tested the effects of a multiprogrammed environment on system throughput for retrieval operations. Analysis of the results shows that different factors are relevant to performance for the various systems, and that under some circumstances ISAM and nasn-coding may lose the advantages they possess over B-trees in a stand-alone environment when multiprogramming is used. Some results of sharing data among simultaneous users are also presented.
Final Adult Height in Children with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia Treated with Growth Hormone

We examine the final adult height of patients with CAH treated with growth hormone; results indicate that GH alone or combined with LHRH improves final adult height.
Evaluation of a chiral aryl auxiliary design for sulfur: construction of auxiliary-modified reagents and stereoselection in sulfoxide formation

Compounds possessing thiol, sulfide, and sulfoxide functionality attached to chiral auxiliary fragment 1 can be synthesized from halogenated aromatics 2 and 3. In the sulfoxides,auxiliary 1 can define the sulfinyl configuration in either relative sense depending on whether sulfinyl configuration is established under kinetic or thermodynamic control.
What are the shapes of response time distributions in visual search

Many visual search experiments measure response time (RT) as their primary dependent variable. Analyses typically focus on mean (or median) RT. However, given enough data, the RT distribution can be a rich source of information. For this paper, we collected about 500 trials per cell per observer for both target-present and target-absent displays in each of three classic search tasks: feature search, with the target defined by color; conjunction search, with the target defined by both color and orientation; and spatial configuration search for a 2 among distractor 5s. This large data set allows us to characterize the RT distributions in detail. We present the raw RT distributions and fit several psychologically motivated functions (ex-Gaussian, ex-Wald, Gamma, and Weibull) to the data. We analyze and interpret parameter trends from these four functions within the context of theories of visual search.
Fuzzy throttle and brake control for platoons of smart cars

Abstract Additive fuzzy systems can control the velocity and the gap between cars in single-lane platoons. The overall system consists of throttle and brake controllers. We first designed and tested a throttle-only fuzzy system on a validated car model and then with a real car on highway 1–15 in California. We used this controller to drive the “smart” car on the highway in a two-car platoon. Then we designed a throttle and brake controller. The combined system controls the platoon on downhill parts of the freeway and as it decelerates to slower speeds. We modeled the brake controller using the real test data from the brake system. A logic switch for throttle and brake decides which system to use. The gap controller uses data only from its own sensors and there is no communication among cars. The simulation results show that follower cars with a combined brake/throttle controller can maintain a constant gap when the platoon goes downhill and slows. An adaptive throttle controller uses neural systems to learn the fuzzy rules for different vehicle types.
Micro-fluidic-based optical detection platform for characterizing fluorescing objects with integrated wavelength detection

This presentation will give a brief overview on on-the-flow analyte detection based on native fluorescence spectroscopy. This is a very promising approach that does not require specific binding or tagging of the analyte. However, the variety of cells is large compared to the number of basic molecular building blocks. Therefore, the fluorescence spectra of different species are often very similar, and sophisticated detection methods are required to reveal differences. The specificity of this approach can be further improved by implementing high spectral resolution and using multiple excitation wavelengths. In order to test class identification based on multi-color native fluorescence we have measured, with a conventional laboratory set-up, the laser-induced fluorescence spectra of various biological building blocks and recorded fluorescence spectra for representative analyte simulants.
Bank Runs as Coordination Failures: An Experimental Study *

We use experimental methods to investigate what factors contribute to breakdowns in coordination among a bank’s depositors. Subjects in our experiment decide whether to leave their money deposited in a bank or withdraw it early; a bank run occurs when there are too many early withdrawals. We explore the effects of adding uncertainty about fundamental withdrawal demand and of changing the number of opportunities subjects have to withdraw. Our results show that (i) bank runs are rare when fundamental withdrawal demand is known but occur frequently when it is stochastic, and (ii) subjects are more likely to withdraw when given multiple opportunities to do so than when presented with a single decision. For the multiple-opportunity case, we evaluate individual withdrawal decisions according to a set of simple cutoff rules. We find that the cutoff rule corresponding to the payoff-dominant equilibrium of the game, which involves Bayesian updating of probabilities, explains subject behavior better than other rules.
Diffraction of 0.5 keV electrons from free-standing transmission gratings

A nanostructured grating was used to diffract a low-energy (500 eV) electron beam, and the current transmitted into the zeroth diffraction order was greater than 5% of the incident beam current. This diffraction efficiency indicates that the 55-nm-wide grating bars absorb electrons but the 45-nm-wide slots between bars transmit electron de Broglie waves coherently. The diffraction patterns can be asymmetric, and can be explained by a model that incorporates an electrostatic potential energy for electrons within 20 nm of the grating structure calculated by the method of images.
Making sense of the evolution of a scientific domain: a visual analytic study of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey research

We introduce a new visual analytic approach to the study of scientific discoveries and knowledge diffusion. Our approach enhances contemporary co-citation network analysis by enabling analysts to identify co-citation clusters of cited references intuitively, synthesize thematic contexts in which these clusters are cited, and trace how research focus evolves over time. The new approach integrates and streamlines a few previously isolated techniques such as spectral clustering and feature selection algorithms. The integrative procedure is expected to empower and strengthen analytical and sense making capabilities of scientists, learners, and researchers to understand the dynamics of the evolution of scientific domains in a wide range of scientific fields, science studies, and science policy evaluation and planning. We demonstrate the potential of our approach through a visual analysis of the evolution of astronomical research associated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) using bibliographic data between 1994 and 2008. In addition, we also demonstrate that the approach can be consistently applied to a set of heterogeneous data sources such as e-prints on arXiv, publications on ADS, and NSF awards related to the same topic of SDSS.