cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Uncertain Product Quality, Optimal Pricing and Product Development

A firm is developing a new product. However, the firm is uncertain as to how consumers will perceive the product's desirability or quality. Using a general model of product quality, conditions for an increase in uncertainty to increase the optimal price are derived. General conditions are derived under which the firm prefers the less risky project, the one with lower quality variability. However, if at the optimal price the firm only has positive demand for high quality realizations, then the firm prefers a more risky project. As the uncertainty exists in the consumers' preferences, welfare effects can be determined, unlike in previous work examining uncertainty.
Universal Access to E-Mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications

A study looking at the societal implications of e-mail technology and the diverging trends in access, based on income and education, that are widening the gap between an information elite and those at a disadvantage. Details the social benefits of on-line communities and implications for global democratization, and addresses the technical and econo
Application of Fuzzy Isodata Algorithms to Star Tracker Pointing Systems

Abstract A fuzzy ISODATA algorithm is applied to cluster analysis of starfield data presented by 51 bright stars near Polaris. The investigation is a preliminary effort to determine the feasibility of using star clusters for reference in star tracker pointing systems. Satisfactory clustering success is achieved through exploiting the features of fuzzy mathematics and introduction of a simplified clustering measure.
Advanced data transfer strategies for overset computational methods

Abstract A data transfer strategy applicable to overset grid configurations has been developed that improves interpolation and extrapolation accuracy and eliminates orphan points. Traditional trilinear mappings based on interpolation stencils are replaced with a “cloud”-based algorithm which retains no dependence on grid connectivity. A variable number of donor points was sourced from a single grid in the vicinity of a receptor point, permitting consistent treatment of orphan points in the data transfer method. This cloud-based interpolation methodology demonstrates the ability to preserve flow-field features for configurations both with and without adequate mesh overlap. The approach eliminates problems associated with orphan points and reduces transient conservation errors by an order of magnitude.
South Korea since 1980

This book examines the changes in politics, economics, society, and foreign policy in South Korea since 1980. Starting with a brief description of its history leading up to 1980, this book deals with South Korea's transition to democracy, the stunning economic development achieved since the 1960s, the 1997 financial crisis, and the economic reforms that followed and concludes with the North Korean nuclear crisis and foreign relations with regional powers. The theoretical framework of this book addresses how democratization affected all of these dimensions of South Korea. For instance, democratization allowed for the more frequent alternation of political elites from conservative to liberal and back to conservative. These elites initiated different policies for dealing with North Korea and held different views on South Korea's role in its alliance with the United States. Consequently, ideological divides in South Korean politics became more stark and the political process more combative.
An Introduction to Derivative Securities, Financial Markets, and Risk Management

Written by two of the most distinguished finance scholars in the industry, this introductory textbook on derivatives and risk management is highly accessible in terms of the concepts as well as the mathematics.With its economics perspective, this rewritten and streamlined second edition textbook, is closely connected to real markets, and:Beginning at a level that is comfortable to lower division college students, the book gradually develops the content so that its lessons can be profitably used by business majors, arts, science, and engineering graduates as well as MBAs who would work in the finance industry. Supplementary materials are available to instructors who adopt this textbook for their courses. These include:Solutions Manual with detailed solutions to nearly 500 end-of-chapter questions and problemsPowerPoint slides and a Test Bank for adoptersPRICED! In line with current teaching trends, we have woven spreadsheet applications throughout the text. Our aim is for students to achieve self-sufficiency so that they can generate all the models and graphs in this book via a spreadsheet software, Priced!
Chinese Urban Households’ Security Market Participation: Does Investment Knowledge and Having a Long-Term Plan Help?

Investment in the securities markets is vital to households’ wealth accumulation and financial security. Using data from the 2008 Survey of Chinese Consumer Finance and Investor Education, we found that self-assessed investment knowledge and having a long-term financial plan were positively associated with Chinese households’ participation in the securities markets. The findings provide insight into the long-term financial security of Chinese households. Given the growing middle class and the rapid development of the financial markets in China, the Chinese financial planning industry is likely to grow substantially in the coming years.
The Effect of Index Insurance on Returns to Farm Inputs: Exploring Alternatives to Zambia's Fertilizer Subsidy Program

A significant volume of research has investigated input subsidy programs in Africa, where government expenditures on such programs are non-trivial. This paper uses panel data from a sample of farm households in Zambia to compare how fertilizer use decisions change in the presence of a formal insurance market. If returns to fertilizer improve under an insurance regime, the use of index insurance can be an alternative to or complement of existing input subsidy programs in the country. After estimating the cost of a simple zero-one, actuarially fair index insurance product that is mandatory for farmers who purchase fertilizer, we run simulations to explore the effect of insurance on household investment in fertilizer. Results show that index insurance, by reducing the disposable wealth of households in years where no payouts occur, can dampen demand for fertilizer at the farm level.
Sharp Oracle Inequalities in Low Rank Estimation

This chapter deals with the problem of penalized empirical risk minimizationEmpirical risk minimization (ERM) over a convex set of linear functionals on the space of Hermitian matrices with convex loss and nuclear norm penalty. Such penalization is often used in low rank matrix recovery in the cases when the target function can be well approximated by a linear functional generated by a Hermitian matrix of relatively small rank (comparing it with the size of the matrix). Our goal is to prove sharp low rank oracle inequalities that involve the excess risk (the approximation error) with constant equal to 1 and the random error term with correct dependence on the rank of the oracle.
Partitioned Approach to Association Rule Mining over Multiple Databases

Database mining is the process of extracting interesting and previously unknown patterns and correlations from data stored in Data Base Management Systems (DBMSs). Association rule mining is the process of discovering items, which tend to occur together in transactions. If the data to be mined were stored as relations in multiple databases, instead of moving data from one database to another, a partitioned approach would be appropriate. This paper addresses the partitioned approach to association rule mining for data stored in multiple Relational DBMSs. This paper proposes an approach that is very effective for partitioned databases as compared to the main memory partitioned approach. Our approach uses SQL-based K-way join algorithm and its optimizations. A second alternative that trades accuracy for performance is also presented. Our results indicate that beyond a certain size of data sets, the accuracy is preserved in addition to improving performance. Extensive experiments have been performed and results are presented for the two partitioned approaches using IBM DB2/UDB and Oracle 8i.
A General Theory of Time Preferences

The main result of this paper is a representation theorem for time preferences (on the prize-time space) that cover a variety of time preference models considered in the experimental and theoretical literature on intertemporal choice. In particular, along with many models induced by similarity relations on time and outcomes, exponential, quasi-hyperbolic, hyperbolic, subadditive, and intransitive time preference models are special cases of this representation. One major advantage of this result is, therefore, to identify certain factors that are common to seemingly very different time preference structures, and provide a tractable mathematical format that allows for investigating certain economic environments without subscribing to a particular time preference model. To illustrate, we study the possibility of dynamically consistent decision making with the general class of time preferences we derive axiomatically here, and show that many economic problems (such as preemptive investment timing models and sequential bargaining games) can be analyzed in a unified manner with this class. JEL Classification: D11, D90
Organization Capital and Intrafirm Communication

We present a dynamic model of production in which a firm’s output increases when its managers share their information. Communication of ideas depends on the quality of the firm’s internal language. We prove that firms with richer languages (i.e., more organizational capital) will have higher market values. Organizational capital generates static complementarities among incumbents which implies that firms with richer languages will experience greater employee retention and higher wages. Dynamic complementarities between intertemporal investments in language generate long-run persistence in firm market-to-book and turnover ratios. We demonstrate that the optimal compensation of incumbents includes an earnings-insensitive component that is larger in firms with richer languages. In a simple model of mergers, we show that the most value-creating mergers are those between firms with highly disparate languages.
Cusps and Exotic Charmonia

A simple, causal and analytic model of final state rescattering is used to describe all available data on the exotic resonances Zc(3900) and Zc(4025). The model provides a compelling and accurate representation of experiment with no need for poles in the scattering matrix.
A First Course in Optimization Theory

This book, first published in 1996, introduces students to optimization theory and its use in economics and allied disciplines. The first of its three parts examines the existence of solutions to optimization problems in Rn, and how these solutions may be identified. The second part explores how solutions to optimization problems change with changes in the underlying parameters, and the last part provides an extensive description of the fundamental principles of finite- and infinite-horizon dynamic programming. Each chapter contains a number of detailed examples explaining both the theory and its applications for first-year master's and graduate students. 'Cookbook' procedures are accompanied by a discussion of when such methods are guaranteed to be successful, and, equally importantly, when they could fail. Each result in the main body of the text is also accompanied by a complete proof. A preliminary chapter and three appendices are designed to keep the book mathematically self-contained.
An extended Cencov-Campbell characterization of conditional information geometry

We formulate and prove an axiomatic characterization of conditional information geometry, for both the normalized and the non-normalized cases. This characterization extends the axiomatic derivation of the Fisher geometry by Cencov and Campbell to the cone of positive conditional models, and as a special case to the manifold of conditional distributions. Due to the close connection between the conditional I-divergence and the product Fisher information metric the characterization provides a new axiomatic interpretation of the primal problems underlying logistic regression and AdaBoost.
Double-Loop Feedback-Based Scheduling Approach for Distributed Real-Time Systems

The use of feedback control techniques has been gaining importance in real-time scheduling as a means to provide predictable performance in the face of uncertain workload. In this paper, we propose and analyze a feedback scheduling algorithm, called double-loop feedback scheduler, for distributed real-time systems, whose objective is to keep the deadline miss ratio near the desired value and achieve high CPU utilization. This objective is achieved by an integrated design of a local and a global feedback scheduler. We provide the stability analysis of the double-loop system. We also carry out extensive simulation studies to evaluate the performance and stability of the proposed double-loop scheduler. Our studies show that the proposed scheduler achieves high CPU utilization with low miss ratio and stays in steady state after a step change in workload, characterized by change in actual execution time of tasks.
The Weil-Petersson metric and volumes of 3-dimensional hyperbolic convex cores

We present a coarse interpretation of the Weil-Petersson distance dWP(X,Y ) between two finite area hyperbolic Riemann surfaces X and Y using a graph of pants decompositions introduced by Hatcher and Thurston. The combinatorics of the pants graph reveal a connection between Riemann surfaces and hyperbolic 3-manifolds conjectured by Thurston: the volume of the convex core of the quasi-Fuchsian manifold Q(X,Y ) with X and Y in its conformal boundary is comparable to the Weil-Petersson distance dWP(X,Y ). In applications, we relate the Weil-Petersson distance to the Hausdorff dimen- sion of the limit set and the lowest eigenvalue of the Laplacian for Q(X,Y ), and give a new finiteness criterion for geometric limits. Mathematics Department, University of Chicago, 5734 S. University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail address: brock@math.uchicago.edu
Probabilistic constraint satisfaction with non-Gaussian noise

We have previously reported a Bayesian algorithm for determining the coordinates of points in three-dimensional space from uncertain constraints. This method is useful in the determination of biological molecular structure. It is limited, however, by the requirement that the uncertainty in the constraints be normally distributed. In this paper, we present an extension of the original algorithm that allows constraint uncertainty to be represented as a mixture of Gaussians, and thereby allows arbitrary constraint distributions. We illustrate the performance of this algorithm on a problem drawn from the domain of molecular structure determination, in which a multicomponent constraint representation produces a much more accurate solution than the old single component mechanism. The new mechanism uses mixture distributions to decompose the problem into a set of independent problems with unimodal constraint uncertainty. The results of the unimodal subproblems are periodically recombined using Bayes' law, to avoid combinatorial explosion. The new algorithm is particularly suited for parallel implementation.
Electrical coupling between red and green cones in primate retina

Color vision in humans and other Old World primates depends on differences in the absorption properties of three spectral types of cone photoreceptors. Primate cones are linked by gap junctions, but it is not known to what extent the various cone types are electrically coupled through these junctions. Here we show, by using a combination of dye labeling and electrical recordings in the retina of macaque monkeys, that neighboring red and green cones are homologously and heterologously coupled by nonrectifying gap junctions. This indiscriminate coupling blurs the differences between red- and green-cone signals. The average junctional conductance is about 650 pS. Our calculations indicate that coupling between red and green cones may cause a modest decrease in human color discrimination with a comparable increase in luminance discrimination.
Are we ready for the service oriented architecture

This Industry Track Panel poses a strategic question, “Are We Ready for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)?” We discuss this issue from both vendor and adopter perspectives in the company of 5 IT Executives. In particular, we go beyond the discussion of SOA standards as such, and try to assess the importance of this approach from the point of view of related technologies, such as Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture, Configuration Management, Business Rules Systems, and Open Source Solutions.
Inequality, the Price of Nontradables, and the Real Exchange Rate : Theory and Cross-Country Evidence

Even though real exchange rate has an important impact on sustainable export and economic growth for small open economies, its impact on income distribution and transmission mechanism was never investigated. The paper shows that improved income distribution, through its impact on the price of nontradables, is associated with real exchange rate devaluation. Min provides theoretical and empirical evidence of a negative association between income inequality and real exchange rates. First, he builds a theoretical model showing the transmission mechanism from inequality to real exchange rates. Second, using cross-country data, he demonstrates that the theoretical argument has empirical support. The association is large, significant, and robust to alternative specifications of the reduced form model and estimation methodologies. These findings provide empirical support for Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers, government strategies agreed on with the World Bank that hinge on four major objectives: accelerating equity-based growth, guaranteeing access to basic social services for the poor, expanding opportunities for employment and income-generating activities for the poor, and promoting good governance. The author's analysis indicates that "equity-based growth" and "export-driven growth" are compatible policy goals. But the negative relationship between inequality and real exchange rates does not imply that policies aimed at dramatic redistribution will automatically lead to real depreciation of the domestic currency, improve the external balance, and accelerate economic growth. This paper - a product of the Poverty Reduction Group, Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network - is part of a larger effort in the network to provide theoretical and empirical evidences for the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.
Conformal Slit Mapping and Its Applications to Brain Surface Parameterization

We propose a method that computes a conformal mapping from a multiply connected mesh to the so-called slit domain, which consists of a canonical rectangle or disk in which 3D curved landmarks on the original surfaces are mapped to concentric or parallel lines in the slit domain. In this paper, we studied its application to brain surface parameterization. After cutting along some landmark curve features on surface models of the cerebral cortex, we obtain multiple connected domains. By computing exact harmonic one-forms, closed harmonic one-forms, and holomorphic one-forms, we are able to build a circular slit mapping that conformally maps the surface to an annulus with some concentric arcs and a rectangle with some slits. The whole algorithm is based on solving linear systems so it is very stable. In the slit domain parameterization results, the feature curves are either mapped to straight lines or concentric arcs. This representation is convenient for anatomical visualization, and may assist statistical comparisons of anatomy, surface-based registration and signal processing. Preliminary experimental results parameterizing various brain anatomical surfaces are presented.
The Politics of Establishing an International Criminal Court

Any substantive evaluation of the plan for an international criminal court requires first an understanding of the political currents that underlie the competing proposals. This piece briefly explores the politics of creating a permanent international criminal court. In particular, this comment examines three related issues: (1) the need for an international criminal court, (2) the political obstacles involved in creating such an institution, and (3) the prospects for success in light of these obstacles.
Response Time Considerations for Optimal Warehouse Layout Design

We present a queueing theoretic model of a rectangular warehouse with multivehicle material handling system to study the effect of warehouse design on the response time. The response time of the material handling system is shown to decrease with districting of the warehouse into service zones. An iterative procedure is presented for districting and optimal locations of input/output points. The effect of the rate of arrival of calls on optimal door location is shown to be significant.
A universal parallel computer architecture

Advances in interconnection network performance and interprocessor interaction mechanisms enable the construction of fine-grain parallel computers in which the nodes are physically small and have a small amount of memory. This class of machines has a much higher ratio of processor to memory area and hence provides greater processor throughput and memory bandwidth per unit cost relative to conventional memory-dominated machines. This paper describes the technology and architecture trends motivating fine-grain architecture and the enabling technologies of high-performance interconnection networks and low-overhead interaction mechanisms. We conclude with a discussion of our experiences with the J-Machine, a prototype fine-grain concurrent computer.
Universities and Technology Transfer in Japan: Recent Reforms in Historical Perspective

The Japanese government has embarked on a series of reforms aimed at stimulating technology transfer from universities to industry. As a result, technology licensing offices are springing up at many national universities. Advocates hope that these reforms will increase the level of university patenting and licensing, which historically has not been a common mode of technology transfer in Japan. Their model is the technology licensing process in the United States, which acquired its present form after passage of the Bayh-Dole Technology Transfer Act of 1980. Such changes face serious historical and institutional barriers. Academic researchers, especially in engineering and physical science, have a long record of collaborative research with industry. Decisions about patenting, however, were usually left to the corporate partner; universities rarely filed for patents under their own name, nor have they, until recently, encouraged or assisted faculty researchers in doing so. Consequently, we believe that current reforms, by going against the grain of past practices, will take time to achieve the hoped for results.
Domain-specific modeling of power aware distributed real-time embedded systems

This paper provides two contributions to the research on applying domain-specific modeling languages to distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems. First, we present the Alderis platform-independent visual language for component-based system development. Second, we demonstrate the use of the Alderis language on a helicopter autopilot DRE design. The Alderis language is based on the concept of platform-based design, and explicitly captures asynchronous event-driven component interactions as well as the underlying platform for the computation. Unlike most modeling languages, Alderis has formally defined semantics providing a way for the formal verification of dense real-time properties and energy consumption.
Threshold RSA for dynamic and ad-hoc groups

We consider the use of threshold signatures in ad-hoc and dynamic groups such as MANETs ("mobile ad-hoc networks"). While the known threshold RSA signature schemes have several properties that make them good candidates for deployment in these scenarios, none of these schemes seems practical enough for realistic use in these highly-constrained environments. In particular, this is the case of the most efficient of these threshold RSA schemes, namely, the one due to Shoup. Our contribution is in presenting variants of Shoup's protocol that overcome the limitations that make the original protocol unsuitable for dynamic groups. The resultant schemes provide the efficiency and flexibility needed in ad-hoc groups, and add the capability of incorporating new members (share-holders) to the group of potential signers without relying on central authorities. Namely, any threshold of existing members can cooperate to add a new member. The schemes are efficient, fully non-interactive and do not assume broadcast.
Products of Farey Fractions

ABSTRACTThe Farey fractions of order n consist of all fractions in lowest terms lying in the closed unit interval and having denominator at most n. This article considers the products Fn of all nonzero Farey fractions of order n. It studies their size, given by log(Fn), and their divisibility properties by powers of a fixed prime, given by ordp(Fn), as a function of n. It presents evidence suggesting that information related to the Riemann hypothesis may be encoded in functions related to ordp(Fn) for a single fixed prime p. This encoding makes use of a relation of these products to the products Gn of all reduced and unreduced Farey fractions of order n, which are connected by Mobius inversion. It introduces new arithmetic functions which mix the Mobius function with functions of radix expansions to a fixed prime base p.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Multimodal Person Identification System in the CLEAR 2007 Evaluation

A description of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory system used in the person identification task of the recent CLEAR 2007 Evaluation is documented in this paper. This task is broken into audio, visual, and multimodal subtasks. The audio identification system utilizes both a GMM and a SVM subsystem, while the visual (face) identification system utilizes an appearance-based [Kernel] approach for identification. The audio channels, originating from a microphone array, were preprocessed with beamforming and noise preprocessing.
Assumptions in the 1985 RCA: A Review

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the basic assumptions that have been made or need to be made before the solutions for the 1985 RCA, At the last Project Advisory Committee (PAC) meeting a paper put together by USDA's Basic Assumption Work Group (BAWG) was presented (APPENDIX A). This paper, written by BAWG, examines population levels, gross national product, disposable personal income, institutional and technical change, energy cost, and capital availability. A second paper handed out at the last meeting outlined some of the programming models' assumptions. Many of the points listed in this outline will be examined more completely in this working paper. This paper will state the regions to be used in the programming model, the assumptions used in the creation of the crop sector, the land base, and input costs. It will examine technology and demands.
Model-free sure screening via maximum correlation

For screening features in an ultrahigh-dimensional setting, we develop a maximum correlation-based sure independence screening (MC-SIS) procedure, and show that MC-SIS possesses the sure screen property without imposing model or distributional assumptions on the response and predictor variables. MC-SIS is a model-free method in contrast with some other existing model-based sure independence screening methods in the literature. Simulation examples and a real data application are used to demonstrate the performance of MC-SIS and to compare MC-SIS with other existing sure screening methods. The results show that MC-SIS can outperform those methods when their model assumptions are violated, and remain competitive when the model assumptions are satisfied.
Cases Relating to Chapter 7 – Relevancy and Materiality

Publisher Summary This chapter presents several case studies related to relevancy and materiality. These cases include the case of Commonwealth versus Prashaw and Jackson versus United States. In the first case, the defendant challenges the admission in evidence of photographs depicting her naked in various sexually provocative positions. Balancing the minimal probative value of the pictures with respect to the nonsex-related offenses being tried against the marked prejudice, we conclude that this is one of those exceptional cases where the bounds of the usual grant of wide discretion to a trial judge concerning the admission of photographic evidence were exceeded. In the second case, the appellant and his co-defendant were selling music compact discs (“CDs”) from a table they had set up on the sidewalk near Union Station. The CDs were “counterfeit;” that is, they were manufactured without the authorization of the copyright owner. Appellant was convicted at a bench trial of attempted deceptive labeling of a sound recording,
Replacing Mark Bits with Randomness in Fibonacci Heaps

A Fibonacci heap is a deterministic data structure implementing a priority queue with optimal amortized operation costs. An unfortunate aspect of Fibonacci heaps is that they must maintain a “mark bit” which serves only to ensure efficiency of heap operations, not correctness. Karger proposed a simple randomized variant of Fibonacci heaps in which mark bits are replaced by coin flips. This variant still has expected amortized cost O(1) for insert, decrease-key, and merge. Karger conjectured that this data structure has expected amortized cost \(O(\log s)\) for delete-min, where s is the number of heap operations.
Does corruption relieve foreign investors of the burden of taxes and capital controls

Other things being equal, countries with higher tax rates, more corruption, or more restrictions on capital account transactions attract less foreign investment. Taxes and capital controls hinder foreign investment, and bureaucratic corruption adds to those burdens rather than reducing them. In a sample of 14 source countries making bilateral investments in 45 host countries, Wei finds that taxes, capital controls, and corruption all have large, statistically significant negative effects on foreign investment. Moreover, there is no robust support in the data for the efficient grease hypothesis - that corruption helps attract foreign investment by reducing firms' tax burden and the irritant of capital controls. This paper - a product of Public Economics, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to study effective anticorruption strategies. It will appear as a chapter in a book on taxation and foreign direct investment edited by James Hines Jr. and to be published by the University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
WebVigiL: user profile-based change detection for HTML/XML documents

With the exponential increase of information on the web, the emphasis has shifted from mere viewing of information to efficient retrieval and notification of selective information. Currently, users have to poll the pages manually to check for changes of interest, resulting in waste of resources and associated high cost. Hence, an efficient and effective change detection and notification mechanism is needed. WebVigiL, a general-purpose, active capability-based information monitoring and notification system, handles specification, management, and propagation of customized changes as requested by a user. The emphasis of change detection in WebVigiL is to detect customized changes on the document, based on user intent. In this paper, we propose two different algorithms to handle change detection to contents of semi-structured and unstructured documents. Though the approach taken is general, we will explain the change detection in the context of HTML (unstructured) and XML (semistructured) documents. We also provide a simple change presentation scheme to display the changes computed. We highlight the change detection in the context of WebVigiL and briefly describe the rest of the system.
SDSS-III/APOGEE: Detailed Abundances of Galactic Star Clusters

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III/Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (SDSS-III/APOGEE) is a large-scale spectroscopic survey of Galactic stars and star clusters. The SDSS-III/APOGEE survey is designed to produce high-S∕N, R=27,500–31,000 spectra that cover a wavelength range of 1.51–1.68μm. By utilizing APOGEE’s excellent kinematics (error≤0.5kms−1) and abundances (errors=0.1 dex), we will be able to study star cluster kinematics and chemical properties in detail. Over the course of the 3-year survey beginning in 2011, APOGEE will target 25–30 key open and globular clusters. In addition, the large area coverage of the SDSS focal plane will also allow us to target stars in 100–200 additional star clusters during the main survey observations. We present the strength of APOGEE for both open and globular star cluster studies and the methods of identifying probable clusters members utilizing 2MASS and IRAC/WISE data.
Animal experimentation and the First Amendment.

The thesis of this Article is that there is nothing special about science or animal experimentation that provides either with a dis­tinctive place in First Amendment jurisprudence; therefore, the law may regulate animal experimentation.free from First Amendment concerns. Neither history, court decision, nor the nature of science itself justifies unique treatment of scientific experimentation under the First Amendment.
The Role of Incentives for Opening Monopoly Markets: Comparing GTE and BOC Cooperation with Local Entrants

While the 1996 Telecommunications Act requires all incumbent local telephone companies to cooperate with local entrants, section 271 of the Act provides the Bell companies but not GTE additional incentives to cooperate. Using an original data set, I compare the negotiations of AT&T, as a local entrant, with GTE and with the Bell companies in states where both operate. My results suggest that the differential incentives matter: The Bells accommodate entry more than does GTE, as evidenced in quicker agreements, less litigation, and more favorable prices offered for network access. Consistent with this, there is more entry into Bell territories.
The Similarity between Stochastic Kronecker and Chung-Lu Graph Models

The analysis of massive graphs is now becoming a very important part of science and industrial research. This has led to the construction of a large variety of graph models, each with their own advantages. The Stochastic Kronecker Graph (SKG) model has been chosen by the Graph500 steering committee to create supercomputer benchmarks for graph algorithms. The major reasons for this are its easy parallelization and ability to mirror real data. Although SKG is easy to implement, there is little understanding of the properties and behavior of this model. We show that the parallel variant of the edgeconfiguration model given by Chung and Lu (referred to as CL) is notably similar to the SKG model. The graph properties of an SKG are extremely close to those of a CL graph generated with the appropriate parameters. Indeed, the final probability matrix used by SKG is almost identical to that of a CL model. This implies that the graph distribution represented by SKG is almost the same as that given by a CL model. We also show that when it comes to fitting real data, CL performs as well as SKG based on empirical studies of graph properties. CL has the added benefit of a trivially simple fitting procedure and exactly matching the degree distribution. Our results suggest that users of the SKG model should consider the CL model because of its similar properties, simpler structure, and ability to fit a wider range of degree distributions. At the very least, CL is a good control model to compare against. ∗This work was funded by the applied mathematics program at the United States Department of Energy and performed at Sandia National Laboratories, a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the United States Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. †Sandia National Laboratories, CA, apinar@sandia.gov ‡Sandia National Laboratories, CA, scomand@sandia.gov §Sandia National Laboratories, CA, tgkolda@sandia.gov
Measuring financial protection in health

Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households, especially poor ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it makes the difference between a household being above and below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents empirical work in the area of financial protection in health, including the impacts of government policy. The paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to measure financial protection.
Response of thick, notched laminates subjected to tension-compression cyclic loads

The fatigue response of a (0/24/90/-45)s4 T300-5208 graphite-epoxy laminate with a drilled centerhole subjected to fully reversed tension-compression (R=-1, T-C) constant amplitude loading was investigated. Damage evaluation techniques such as stiffness monitoring, penetrant-enhanced X-ray radiography, C-scan, laminate deply and residual strength were used to establish the mechanisms of damage development as well as the relations between this damage and the stiffness, strength and life of the laminate. Damage initiated at the hole as matrix cracking parallel to the fibers in all plies. Matrix cracks had a significant effect on delamination initiation and growth. Delaminations initiated near the surface in the densely cracked region at the hole and grew along major matrix cracks. Compressive properties degraded more rapidly than tensile properties. At the stress levels used, residual tensile strength increased early in the fatigue life and remained approximately constant to near the end of life, when failure was precipitated by excessive laminate instability during the compressive portion of the loading.
Reforming the posts : abandoning the monopoly-supported postal universal service obligation in developing countries

The monopoly-supported universal service obligation (USO) is usually defended on the grounds that the monopoly allows for cross-subsidy in letter services that in turn allows universal access to a service of great importance to all. The author argues that letter delivery (as opposed to other services that may be provided by post offices) is not in universal demand in poor countries, that the size of the market in developing countries is such that USOs could not be met under the monopoly model, and that the monopoly carries heavy costs for sector development and consumer welfare. He proposes in the place of the postal USO a competitive approach involving universal access to a range of services that poor people have a need to access. Regarding reform of the incumbent, the author takes a preliminary first cut at examining the statistical relationship between postal performance (as measured by letters per capita allowing for income per capita), trust in the postal service, and postal efficiency, and finds a significant link between the three. The results suggest that reforms that improve postal efficiency and trust in the postal network will improve the performance of the postal network. The author suggests that there may be better uses of cross-subsidy from within the sector and government subsidy from without than supporting the inefficient delivery of a service rarely used by poor people.
SPATIAL PRODUCTION CONCENTRATION, DEMAND UNCERTAINTY, AND MULTIPLE MARKETS

The geographic concentration of production of main field crops in several growing regions is a distinctive feature of U.S. agriculture. Among many possible reasons for spatial concentration, I study here the effects of the distribution of end users and terminal markets on acreage allocation. The presence of multiple terminal markets in a growing area may allow for a more flexible marketing plan, along with introducing more idiosyncratic demand uncertainty associated with each consumption point. To take better advantage of future marketing opportunities, growers, depending on their location relative to terminal markets, may adjust the crop mix produced on the farm. I characterize the types of environments that lead to a spatial production concentration of a commodity in a growing area. I also analyze the equilibrium effects of an increase in transportation costs and a shift in acreage available for planting on spatial acreage allocation.
Steps towards programs that manage uncertainty

Reasoning under uncertainty in AI has come to mean assessing the credibility of hypotheses inferred from evidence. But techniques for assessing credibility do not tell a problem solver what to do when it is uncertain. This is the focus of our current research. We have developed a medical expert system called MUM, for Managing Uncertainty in Medicine, that plans diagnostic sequences of questions, tests, and treatments. This paper describes the kinds of problems that MUM was designed to solve and gives a brief description of its architecture. More recently, we have built an empty version of MUM called MU, and used it to reimplement MUM and a small diagnostic system for plant pathology. The latter part of the paper describes the features of MU that make it appropriate for building expert systems that manage uncertainty.
On the Combinatorics of Smoothing

Many invariants of knots rely upon smoothing the knot at its crossings. To compute them, it is necessary to know how to count the number of connected components the knot diagram is broken into after the smoothing. In this paper, it is shown how to use a modification of a theorem of Zulli together with a modification of the spectral theory of graphs to approach such problems systematically. We give an application to counting subdiagrams of pretzel knots which have one component after oriented and unoriented smoothings.
Variability of surface soil moisture at the watershed scale

[1] Data from the Washita '92 experiment illustrate the spatial and temporal variability of surface soil moisture. Statistical moments revealed that there is no significant skewness or kurtosis in the distribution. Over the drying period the variance decreased with time; however, the coefficient of variation did not significantly change, indicating that scaled variability remains roughly constant. Regression analysis showed that soil texture, vegetation density, and time since precipitation accounted for approximately 55% of the variability of surface soil moisture. There are also strong indications of persistence in the spatial structure representing perhaps topography and solar exposure, which was maintained and explained 31% of the total variability. The methodology proposed herein should be generally applicable in the analysis of any spatially variable land surface data set as it evolves with time.
RF characteristics of the APS storage ring isolation valve

The RF impedance of the isolation valve of the APS storage ring system was measured by the wire method with a synthetic pulse technique. The coupling impedance as well as the energy loss of the sector valve with and without an RF liner or screen, and the flange gap of the various sizes was measured. There appear to be resonances at certain frequencies without an RF liner that might cause an unacceptably large coupling impedance. Data with various sizes of the flange gap show that good RF contact around any flange is necessary. The impedance due to intrusions into the beam chamber was also measured. The results are compared with the computer simulation from MAFIA. >
Amino Acids from the Moon: Notes on Meteorites

Our understanding of cosmochemistry and the origin of life is profitably discussed in the two stages represented by that phrase. Our surest information on cosmochemical products relates to sets of amino acids that originated from the simplest forms of matter in the cosmos. This study is necessarily one of analytical chemistry. The second stage is the evolution to living cells from those amino acids (Fox, 1972; Kvenvolden, 1974). Amino acids are seen as having been chemical precursors successively to protein and to the ubiquitous biological cells whose structure and function depend mainly upon protein. In obtaining this kind of information, a constructionistic approach has been uniquely informative (Fox, 1977). This approach consists of experiments in assembly followed by selection from the products; constructionism is in the style of evolution itself. Analytical studies alone are inadequate (Fox, 1981).
Relativistic Fluids and Gravitational Collapse

A new model of gravitational collapse is introduced. This model has two phases, a soft phase corresponding to degenerate matter below nuclear densities and a hard phase corresponding to matter at supranuclear densities. The model contains a rich variety of features, such as interfaces across which the entropy jumps, stable static solutions corresponding to neutron stars, as well as black holes and singularities. We study the global dynamics of this model in the spherically symmetric case, in the hope of providing insight into the dynamics of real astrophysical situations.
Multipole analysis of kicks in collision of spinning binary black holes

Thorne and Kidder give expressions which allow for analytical estimates of the “kick”, i.e. the recoil, produced from asymmetrical gravitational radiation during the interaction of black holes, or in fact any gravitating compact bodies. (The Thorne-Kidder formula uses momentum flux calculations based on the linearized General Relativity of gravitational radiation). We specifically treat kicks arising in the binary interaction of equal mass black holes, when at least one of the black holes has significant spin, a. Such configurations can produce very large kicks in computational simulations. We consider both fly-by and quasicircular orbits. For fly-by orbits we find substantial kicks from those Thorne-Kidder terms which are linear in a. For the quasi-circular case, we consider in addition the nonlinear contribution (O(a2)) to the kicks, and provide a dynamical explanation for such terms discovered and displayed by [2]. However, in the cases of maximal kick velocities, the dependence on spin is largely linear (reproduced in numerical results [6]).