cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Chiral phases of superfluid 3 He in an anisotropic medium

Recent advances in the fabrication and characterization of anisotropic silica aerogels with exceptional homogeneity provide new insight into the nature of unconventional pairing in disordered anisotropic media. I report theoretical analysis and predictions for the equilibrium phases of superfluid ${}^{3}$He infused into a low-density, homogeneous uniaxial aerogel. Ginzburg-Landau (GL) theory for a class of equal-spin-pairing (ESP) states in a medium with uniaxial anisotropy is developed and used to analyze recent experiments on uniaxially strained aerogels. For ${}^{3}$He in an axially ``stretched'' aerogel, GL theory predicts a transition from normal liquid into a chiral Anderson-Morel phase at ${T}_{{c}_{1}}$ in which the chirality axis $\stackrel{\ifmmode \hat{}\else \^{}\fi{}}{\mathbf{l}}$ is aligned along the strain axis. This orbitally aligned state is protected from random fluctuations in the anisotropy direction, has a positive nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) frequency shift, a sharp NMR resonance line, and is identified with the high-temperature ESP-1 phase of superfluid ${}^{3}$He in axially stretched aerogel. A second transition into a biaxial phase is predicted to onset at a slightly lower temperature ${T}_{{c}_{2}}l{T}_{{c}_{1}}$. This phase is an ESP state, breaks time-reversal symmetry, and is defined by an orbital order parameter that spontaneously breaks axial rotation symmetry. This transition is driven by the coupling of an axially aligned one-dimensional ``polar'' order parameter to the two time-reversed two-dimensional axial Anderson-Brinkman-Morel states. The biaxial phase has a continuous degeneracy associated with the projection of its chiral axis in the plane normal to the anisotropy axis. Theoretical predictions for the NMR frequency shifts of the biaxial phase provide an identification of the ESP-2 as the biaxial state, partially disordered by random anisotropy (Larkin-Imry-Ma effect). The ``width'' of the jump in the NMR frequency shift at ${T}_{{c}_{2}}$ provides an estimate of the orbital domain size ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{\mathrm{LIM}}\ensuremath{\simeq}5\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\text{m}$ at $18\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\text{bar}$. I show that the random anisotropy results from mesoscopic structures in silica aerogels. This model for the random anisotropy field is coarse grained on the atomic scale, and is formulated in terms of local anisotropy in the scattering of quasiparticles in an aerogel with orientational correlations. Long-range order of locally anisotropic scattering centers is related to the splitting of the two ESP phases.
A note on unconditional fixed-h stability of linear multistep formulae

For a linear multistep method applied with a fixed integration steph tox=λx, λ constant, a concept ofAD-stability is defined relative to any domain of the complexq=λh plane. The image of the unit circle, under the mapq=q(z) induced by the characteristic equation, determines a “maximal” stability domainD, even ifq (z) is not univalued or if the image of the unit circle is unbounded. This is proved via degree theory of analytic maps onRiemann surfaces. For a special class of formulae, easy-to-check, sufficient conditions are given forq to belong toD.
New Approximation for Minimum-Weight Routing Backbone in Wireless Sensor Network

Our problem formulation is as follows. Given a weighted disk graph Gwhere the weight of edge represents the transmission energy consumption, we wish to determine a dominating tree Tof Gsuch that the total weight of edges in Tis minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this problem have not been addressed in the literature. Solving the dominating tree problem can yield a routing backbone for broadcast protocols since: (1) each node does not have to construct their own broadcast tree, (2) utilize the virtual backbone to reduce the message overhead, and (3) the weight of backbone is minimized. Our contributions to this problem is multi-fold: First, the paper is the first to study this problem, prove the hardness of this problem and propose an approximation framework. Second, we present a heuristic to approximate the solution with low time complexity. Third, a distributed algorithm is provided for practical implementation. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of our proposal through simulation.
Post-AGB Stars in Globular Clusters and Galactic Halos

We discuss three aspects of post-AGB (PAGB) stars in old populations. (1) HST photometry of the nucleus of the planetary nebula (PN) K 648 in the globular cluster (GC) M15 implies a mass of 0.60 M ⊙, in contrast to the mean masses of white dwarfs in GCs of ~0.5 M ⊙. This suggests that K 648 is descended from a merged binary, and we infer that single Pop II stars do not produce visible PNe. (2) Yellow PAGB stars are the visually brightest stars in old populations (Mv ⋍ −3.3) and are easily recognizable because of their large Balmer jumps; thus they show great promise as a Pop II standard candle. Two yellow PAGB stars in the GC NGC 5986 have the same V magnitudes to within ±0.05 mag, supporting an expected narrow luminosity function. (3) Using CCD photometry and a u filter lying below the Balmer jump, we have detected yellow PAGB stars in the halo of M31 and in its dwarf elliptical companion NGC 205. With the Milky Way zero point, we reproduce the Cepheid distance to M31, and find that NGC 205 is ~100 kpc further away than M31. The star counts imply a yellow PAGB lifetime of about 25,000 yr. and their luminosities imply masses near 0.53 M ⊙.
Carcinoma in situ of the cervix; a clinical review of 842 cases.

Abstract The past 10 years have witnessed an important advance in the attempt to control cancer of the cervix. This is the acceptance of the fact, first recognized more than 30 years ago, that neoplasia of cervical epithelium can be detected microscopically before its potential invasiveness is manifested. The recent literature reflects increasing agreement on this once controversial point of view but indicates that divergent opinions remain concerning proper methods of diagnosis and treatment. The experience of the Mayo Clinic in the management of carcinoma in situ of the cervix dates from 1932 when the diagnosis was made in one patient and the lesion was controlled by the application of radium. Since that time diverse methods of treatment have been used in an ever-increasing number of cases. This study was undertaken to evaluate the appropriateness and adequacy of treatment as well as to delineate certain features of the disease which may be of clinical or pathologic interest.
Not-So-Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking

ABSTRACTBased on a growing body of experimental and other studies, two recent economics survey articles claim to find “strong evidence” that women are “fundamental[ly]” more risk-averse than men. Yet, much of the literature fails to clearly distinguish between differences that hold at the individual level (categorical differences between men and women) and patterns that appear only at the aggregate level (statistically detectable differences in men's and women's distributions, such as different means). There is a resulting problem of possible misinterpretation, as well as a dearth of appropriate attention to substantive significance. Additionally, one of the two surveys suffers from problems of statistical validity, possibly due to confirmation bias. Applying appropriate, expanded statistical techniques to the same data, this study finds substantial similarity and overlap between the distributions of men and women in risk taking, and a difference in means that is not substantively large.
Heterogeneity in Income Tax Incidence: Are the Wages of Dangerous Jobs More Responsive to Tax Changes than the Wages of Safe Jobs?

This paper recognizes that compensating differentials are a function of the income tax rate, using this observation to introduce a methodology for estimating compensating differentials with a specific application to the value of a statistical life (VSL). When taxes change, the pre-tax wages of risky jobs should shift relative to the pre-tax wages of safe jobs in a manner proportional to the VSL. This approach controls for fixed effects without using industry-specific changes in risk as a source of identification. The strategy yields VSL estimates between $50 million and $75 million, an order of magnitude higher than the previous literature.
Self-taught object localization with deep networks

This paper introduces self-taught object localization, a novel approach that leverages deep convolutional networks trained for whole-image recognition to localize objects in images without additional human supervision, i.e., without using any ground-truth bounding boxes for training. The key idea is to analyze the change in the recognition scores when artificially masking out different regions of the image. The masking out of a region that includes the object typically causes a significant drop in recognition score. This idea is embedded into an agglomerative clustering technique that generates self-taught localization hypotheses. Our object localization scheme outperforms existing proposal methods in both precision and recall for small number of subwindow proposals (e.g., on ILSVRC-2012 it produces a relative gain of 23.4% over the state-of-the-art for top-1 hypothesis). Furthermore, our experiments show that the annotations automatically-generated by our method can be used to train object detectors yielding recognition results remarkably close to those obtained by training on manually-annotated bounding boxes.
Enhancing solid-liquid interface thermal transport using self-assembled monolayers

The thermal conductance across solid-liquid interfaces is of interest for many applications. Using time-domain thermoreflectance, we measure the thermal conductance across self-assembled monolayers, grown on Au, to ethanol. We systematically study the effect of different functional groups and the alkyl chain length on the thermal conductance. The results show that adding this extra molecular layer can enhance the thermal transport across the solid-liquid interface. While the enhancement is up to 5 times from hexanedithiol, the enhancement from hexanethiol, undecanethiol, and hexadecanethiol is approximately a factor of 2.
Trade and Financial Sector Reforms : Interactions and Spillovers

The allocation of production across firms is a potentially important explanation of the productivity gap between rich and poor economies. Reforms to trade policy and the domestic financial sector are often both key elements of policy packages aimed at reducing productive distortions. However, the impact of each reform in reallocating production within an economy is usually analyzed independently. This paper asks how do such general equilibrium effects of trade and domestic financial sector reforms interact in terms of their effects on productivity, wages and utility. Motivated by recent firm-level studies, I add two-way linkages between firms production and exporting decisions and their financial constraints to a general equilibrium heterogeneous firm trade model. The interaction effects between reforms appear qualitatively important. Trade and domestic financial sector reforms have complementary effects on the average productivity and size of domestic producers. However, if much reallocative work has already been done through a well-functioning financial sector, the marginal benefits of trade liberalisation for wages and household utility are reduced. Improvements in the ability to use exports as pledgeable collateral enhance both the wage and productivity effects of trade reforms. The model also highlights the potential for financial sector reforms in one economy to be exported via the trade channel, affecting decisions to produce or export in the foreign economy and putting downward pressure on foreign real wages.
Domain knowledge uncertainty and probabilistic parameter constraints

Incorporating domain knowledge into the modeling process is an effective way to improve learning accuracy. However, as it is provided by humans, domain knowledge can only be specified with some degree of uncertainty. We propose to explicitly model such uncertainty through probabilistic constraints over the parameter space. In contrast to hard parameter constraints, our approach is effective also when the domain knowledge is inaccurate and generally results in superior modeling accuracy. We focus on generative and conditional modeling where the parameters are assigned a Dirichlet or Gaussian prior and demonstrate the framework with experiments on both synthetic and real-world data.
Improved precision and accuracy for microarrays using updated probe set definitions

Microarrays enable high throughput detection of transcript expression levels. Different investigators have recently introduced updated probe set definitions to more accurately map probes to our current knowledge of genes and transcripts. We demonstrate that updated probe set definitions provide both better precision and accuracy in probe set estimates compared to the original Affymetrix definitions. We show that the improved precision mainly depends on the increased number of probes that are integrated into each probe set, but we also demonstrate an improvement when the same number of probes is used. Updated probe set definitions does not only offer expression levels that are more accurately associated to genes and transcripts but also improvements in the estimated transcript expression levels. These results give support for the use of updated probe set definitions for analysis and meta-analysis of microarray data.
Mathematica: A System for Doing Mathematics by Computer

This book will be released simultaneously with Release 2.0 of Mathematica and will cover all the new features of Release 2.0. This new edition maintains the format of the original book and is the single most important user guide and reference for Mathematica--all users of Mathematica will need this edition. Includes 16 pages of full-color graphics.
On quadratic programming with a ratio objective

Quadratic Programming (QP) is the well-studied problem of maximizing over {−1,1} values the quadratic form ∑i≠jaijxixj. QP captures many known combinatorial optimization problems, and assuming the Unique Games conjecture, Semidefinite Programming (SDP) techniques give optimal approximation algorithms. We extend this body of work by initiating the study of Quadratic Programming problems where the variables take values in the domain {−1,0,1}. The specific problem we study is $$\begin{aligned} \textsf{QP-Ratio} &: \mbox{\ \ } \max_{\{-1,0,1\}^n} \frac{\sum_{i \not = j} a_{ij} x_i x_j}{\sum x_i^2} \end{aligned}$$ This is a natural relative of several well studied problems (in fact Trevisan introduced a normalized variant as a stepping stone towards a spectral algorithm for Max Cut Gain). Quadratic ratio problems are good testbeds for both algorithms and complexity because the techniques used for quadratic problems for the {−1,1} and {0,1} domains do not seem to carry over to the {−1,0,1} domain. We give approximation algorithms and evidence for the hardness of approximating these problems. We consider an SDP relaxation obtained by adding constraints to the natural eigenvalue (or SDP) relaxation for this problem. Using this, we obtain an $\tilde{O}(n^{1/3})$ approximation algorithm for QP-ratio. We also give a $\tilde{O}(n^{1/4})$ approximation for bipartite graphs, and better algorithms for special cases. As with other problems with ratio objectives (e.g. uniform sparsest cut), it seems difficult to obtain inapproximability results based on P ≠ NP . We give two results that indicate that QP-Ratio is hard to approximate to within any constant factor: one is based on the assumption that random instances of Max k-AND are hard to approximate, and the other makes a connection to a ratio version of Unique Games. We also give a natural distribution on instances of QP-Ratio for which an ne approximation (for e roughly 1/10) seems out of reach of current techniques.
Near-Linear-Time Deterministic Plane Steiner Spanners and TSP Approximation for Well-Spaced Point Sets

We describe an algorithm that takes as input n points in the plane and a parameter , and produces as output an embedded planar graph having the given points as a subset of its vertices in which the graph distances are a (1 + )-approximation to the geometric distances between the given points. For point sets in which the Delaunay triangulation has bounded sharpest angle, our algorithm’s output has O(n) vertices, its weight is O(1) times the minimum spanning tree weight, and the algorithm’s running time is bounded byO(n p log logn). We use this result in a similarly fast deterministic approximation scheme for the traveling salesperson problem.
Rational competitive analysis

Much work in computer science has adopted competitive analysis as a tool for decision making under uncertainty. In this work we extend competitive analysis to the context of multi-agent systems. Unlike classical competitive analysis where the behavior of an agent's environment is taken to be arbitrary, we consider the case where an agent's environment consists of other agents. These agents will usually obey some (minimal) rationality constraints. This leads to the definition of rational competitive analysis. We introduce the concept of rational competitive analysis, and initiate the study of competitive analysis for multi-agent systems. We also discuss the application of rational competitive analysis to the context of bidding games, as well as to the classical oneway trading problem.
Extension theorems for reductive group schemes

We prove several basic extension theorems for reductive group schemes that have meaningful crystalline applications to the existence of good integral models of Shimura varieties of Hodge type. We also prove that each Lie algebra with a perfect Killing form over a commutative Z-algebra, is the Lie algebra of an adjoint group scheme.
An upper bound on the threshold quantum decoherence rate

Let η0 be the supremum of those η for which every poly-size quantum circuit can be simulated by another poly-size quantum circuit with gates of fan-in ≤ 2 that tolorates random noise independently occurring on all wires at the constant rate η. Recent fundamental results showing the principal fact η0 > 0 give estimates like η0 ≥ 10-6 - 10-4, whereas the only upper bound known before is η0 ≤ 0.74. In this note we improve the latter bound to η0 ≤ 1/2, under the assumption QP ⊆ QNC1. More generally, we show that if the decohereace rate η is greater than 1/2, then we can not even store a single qubit for more than logarithmic time. Our bound also generalizes to the simulating circuits allowing gates of any (constant) fan-in k, in which case we have η0 ≤ 1 - 1/k.
Removing the Shadow of Suspicion: The Effects of Apology Versus Denial for Repairing Competence- Versus Integrity-Based Trust Violations

Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of an apology versus a denial for repairing trust after an alleged violation. Results reveal that trust was repaired more successfully when mistrusted parties (a) apologized for violations concerning matters of competence but denied culpability for violations concerning matters of integrity, and (b) had apologized for violations when there was subsequent evidence of guilt but had denied culpability for violations when there was subsequent evidence of innocence. Supplementary analyses also revealed that the interactive effects of violation type and violation response on participants' trusting intentions were mediated by their trusting beliefs. Combined, these findings provide needed insight and supporting evidence concerning how trust might be repaired in the aftermath of a violation.
Does India's Employment Guarantee Scheme Guarantee Employment?

In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the stipulated minimum wage rate. The aim is to dramatically reduce poverty by providing extra earnings for poor families, as well as empowerment and insurance. If the program worked in practice the way it is designed, then anyone who wanted work on the scheme would get it. However, analysis of data from India's National Sample Survey for 2009/10 reveals considerable un-met demand for work in all states. The authors confirm expectations that poorer families tend to have more demand for work on the scheme, and that (despite the un-met demand) the self-targeting mechanism allows it to reach relatively poor families and backward castes. The extent of the un-met demand is greater in the poorest states -- ironically where the scheme is needed most. Labor-market responses to the scheme are likely to be weak. The scheme is attracting poor women into the workforce, although the local-level rationing processes favor men.
A constraint on extensible quadrature rules

Here we consider integration methods with error bounded below by $$mn^{-\alpha }$$mn-? for a constant $$m>0$$m>0 and rate $$\alpha >1$$?>1. Suppose that simple averages along an extensible sequence have error at most $$Mn^{-\alpha }$$Mn-? for all $$n$$n in an infinite sequence of sample sizes $$n_1
Self-stabilization of circular arrays of automata

[Gacs, Kurdiumov, Levin, 78] proposed simple one-dimensional cellular automata with 2 states. In an infinite array they are self-stabilizing: if all but a finite minority of automata are in the same state, the minority states disappear. Implicit in the paper was a stronger result that a sufficiently small minority of states vanish even in a finite circular array. The following note makes this strengthening explicit.
Schur-Positivity in a Square

Determining if a symmetric function is Schur-positive is a prevalent and, in general, a notoriously difficult problem. In this paper we study the Schur-positivity of a family of symmetric functions. Given a partition $\nu$, we denote by $\nu^c$ its complement in a square partition $(m^m)$. We conjecture a Schur-positivity criterion for symmetric functions of the form $s_{\mu'}s_{\mu^c}-s_{\nu'}s_{\nu^c}$, where $\nu$ is a partition of weight $|\mu|-1$ contained in $\mu$ and the complement of $\mu$ is taken in the same square partition as the complement of $\nu$. We prove the conjecture in many cases.
Intramolecular Friedel–Crafts Acylation Reaction Promoted by 1,1,1,3,3,3-Hexafluoro-2-propanol

Simple dissolution of an arylalkyl acid chloride in 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexafluoro-2-propanol promotes an intramolecular Friedel–Crafts acylation without additional catalysts or reagents. This reaction is operationally trivial in both execution and product isolation (only requiring concentration followed by purification) and accommodates a broad range of substrates. Preliminary studies that bear upon potential reaction mechanisms are reported.
Sample Selection Bias Correction Theory

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of sample selection bias correction. The sample bias correction technique commonly used in machine learning consists of reweighting the cost of an error on each training point of a biased sample to more closely reflect the unbiased distribution. This relies on weights derived by various estimation techniques based on finite samples. We analyze the effect of an error in that estimation on the accuracy of the hypothesis returned by the learning algorithm for two estimation techniques: a cluster-based estimation technique and kernel mean matching. We also report the results of sample bias correction experiments with several data sets using these techniques. Our analysis is based on the novel concept of distributional stabilitywhich generalizes the existing concept of point-based stability. Much of our work and proof techniques can be used to analyze other importance weighting techniques and their effect on accuracy when using a distributionally stable algorithm.
Chemical biology: Protein modification in a trice.

Organometallic reagents have been developed that chemically modify proteins and peptides specifically at cysteine amino-acid residues — potentially offering a general route to making therapeutically useful compounds. See Letter p.687 These authors demonstrate that palladium(II) complexes can be used in efficient and highly selective cysteine conjugation reactions that are rapid and robust, and the resulting aryl bioconjugates are stable towards acids, bases, oxidants and external thiol nucleophiles. The broad utility of the new bioconjugation platform was further corroborated by the synthesis of new classes of stapled peptides and antibody–drug conjugates. Previously the use of transition-metal based reactions to modify complex biomolecules has proved problematic due mainly to the need for stringent reaction conditions and the presence of multiple reactive functional groups in peptides.
Impossibility of independence amplification in Kolmogorov complexity theory

The paper studies randomness extraction from sources with bounded independence and the issue of independence amplification of sources, using the framework of Kolmogorov complexity. The dependency of strings x and y is dep(x, y) = max{C(x) - C(x | y), C(y) - C(y | x)}, where C(ċ) denotes the Kolmogorov complexity. It is shown that there exists a computable Kolmogorov extractor f such that, for any two n-bit strings with complexity s(n) and dependency α(n), it outputs a string of length s(n) with complexity s(n) - α(n) conditioned by any one of the input strings. It is proven that the above are the optimal parameters a Kolmogorov extractor can achieve. It is shown that independence amplification cannot be effectively realized. Specifically, if (after excluding a trivial case) there exist computable functions f1 and f2 such that dep(f1(x, y), f2(x, y)) ≤ β(n) for all n-bit strings x and y with dep(x, y) ≤ α(n), then β(n) ≥ α(n) - O(log n).
Acoustic Detection of Monopoles

Physicists have long been interested in the existence (or non-existence) of magnetic monopoles. Historical interest stems from the symmetry between electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell’s equations, and from the lack of abundant free magnetic charges compared to electric charges.
Partitioned linear programming approximations for MDPs

Approximate linear programming (ALP) is an efficient approach to solving large factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). The main idea of the method is to approximate the optimal value function by a set of basis functions and optimize their weights by linear programming (LP). This paper proposes a new ALP approximation. Comparing to the standard ALP formulation, we decompose the constraint space into a set of low-dimensional spaces. This structure allows for solving the new LP efficiently. In particular, the constraints of the LP can be satisfied in a compact form without an exponential dependence on the treewidth of ALP constraints. We study both practical and theoretical aspects of the proposed approach. Moreover, we demonstrate its scale-up potential on an MDP with more than 2100 states.
Simple treatments of the photon noise and the pixelation effect in weak lensing

We propose easy ways of correcting for the systematic errors caused by the photon noise and the pixelation effect in cosmic shear measurements. Our treatment of noise can reliably remove the noise contamination to the cosmic shear even when the flux density of the noise is comparable with those of the sources. For pixelated images, we find that one can accurately reconstruct their corresponding continuous images by interpolating the logarithms of the pixel readouts with either the Bicubic or the Bicubic Spline method as long as the pixel size is about less than the scale size of the point spread function (PSF; including the pixel response function), a condition which is almost always satisfied in practice. Our methodology is well defined regardless of the morphologies of the galaxies and the PSF. Despite that our discussion is based on the shear measurement method of Zhang, our way of treating the noise can in principle be considered in other methods, and the interpolation method that we introduce for reconstructing continuous images from pixelated ones is generally useful for digital image processing of all purposes.
Elevated diet-induced thermogenesis and lipid oxidation rate in Crohn disease

Background: Although malnutrition is frequently observed in Crohn disease (CD), its cause is not clear. Regulation of energy metabolism and diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT) have not been adequately studied in CD. Objective: The aim was to study DIT and substrate oxidation in patients with inactive ileal CD. Design: After a test meal providing 50.2 kJ/kg body wt, DIT was assessed by indirect calorimetry performed over 360 min in 18 CD patients and 12 healthy volunteers matched for age, sex, weight, and height. Body composition was evaluated with the labeled-water-bolus injection technique. Results: Fat-free mass did not differ significantly between groups, but CD patients had markedly lower fat mass than control subjects (13.8 ± 5.63 compared with 19.0 ± 3.49 kg; P < 0.001). Nonprotein respiratory quotient was lower in CD patients than control subjects (0.80 ± 0.04 compared with 0.86 ± 0.03; P <0.001). Average respiratory quotient between 75 and 150 min after the test meal was 0.85 ± 0.03 in CD patients and 0.91 ± 0.02 in control subjects (P < 0.001). Lipid oxidation rate was higher in CD patients than in control subjects (2.26 ± 1.13 compared with 1.50 ± 0.75 kJ/min: P < 0.05). DIT was higher in CD patients than in control subjects (9.89 ± 1.93% compared with 5.67 ± 0.91% of energy intake; P < (1.001). Conclusions: Patients with inactive ileal CD had significantly higher DIT and lipid oxidation rate than do healthy volunteers. These results may explain why CD patients have difficulty maintaining adequate nutritional status, and the findings also suggest that a diet relatively rich in fat may attain better energy balance.
Photovoltaic Degradation Rates—an Analytical Review

As photovoltaic penetration of the power grid increases, accurate predictions of return on investment require accurate prediction of decreased power output over time. Degradation rates must be known in order to predict power delivery. This article reviews degradation rates of flat-plate terrestrial modules and systems reported in published literature from field testing throughout the last 40 years. Nearly 2000 degradation rates, measured on individual modules or entire systems, have been assembled from the literature, showing a median value of 0·5%/year. The review consists of three parts: a brief historical outline, an analytical summary of degradation rates, and a detailed bibliography partitioned by technology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Functionalization of 2-bromo-N-benzyl indole via lithium–bromide exchange

Abstract The carbofunctionalization of 2-bromo-N-benzyl indole via lithium–bromide exchange is presented. The reaction scope is demonstrated by providing a variety of substrate examples that deliver carbofunctionalized products in good-to-excellent yields. The competition between nucleophilic addition and proton transfer is discussed.
AvatarSim: A multi-agent system for emergency evacuation simulation

Computer simulations are powerful tools for virtual experiments as compared to real time evacuation drills that are difficult to implement as they are costly and some times dangerous. Simulation is an important tool for emergency response and is used for assessing the vulnerability of a space as well as for training, planning, and decision making. This paper presents AvatarSim, which is a multi-agent system, for simulating emergency evacuation scenarios. It models human behavioral parameters such as stress, anger, and panic which brings a sense of reality during emergency evacuations. It is created in Java and can be displayed on a web browser. The graphical user interface provides agent oriented support for modeling and simulating the behavior of agents in a multi-agent environment.
Aortic Valve Involvement in Behcet`s Disease. A Clinical Study of 9 Patients

Objectives To assess the clinical features, pathologic findings, postoperative results and the effects of immunosuppressive therapy in patients with Behcet's disease (BD). Methods We reviewed the postoperative course of the 9 BD patients who underwent a total of 17 aortic valve replacement procedures with prosthetic valves. Results Histological examination of the aortic valve commonly revealed diffuse myxoid degeneration (75 percent). Of 17 valve replacement surgeries, 13 surgeries resulted in complications, such as detachment of the prosthetic valve with perivalvular leakage and dehiscence of the sternotomy wound, within an average of 5 months (range from 1 month to 14 months). The rate of prosthetic valve detachment was 76 percent (13 of 17 surgeries). Four of the 9 patients (44 percent) who underwent aortic valve replacement procedures died of heart failure or infection associated with the detachment of the prosthetic valve, and perivalvular leakage within an average of 9 months. Aortic insufficiency associated with dehiscence of the prosthetic valve developed in 11 of 12 surgical cases (92 percent) with a mechanical valve and 2 of 5 surgical cases (40 percent) with tissue valves. Thirteen of 15 surgeries (87 percent) which were not given postoperative immunosuppressive therapy developed complications, while none of 2 surgeries that used postoperative immunosuppressive therapy with prednisolone (1 mg/kg/day) and azathioprine (100 mg/day) had these complications. Conclusion The rates of prosthetic valve detachment in BD involving aortic valve were higher than those of other diseases. Aortic valve involvement was also one of the poor prognostic factors in BD. Intensive postoperative immunosuppressive therapy and surgical methods may be important factors for postoperative results.
Riemannian Drums, Anisotropic Curve Evolution, and Segmentation

The method of curve evolution is a popular method for recovering shape boundaries. However, isotropic metrics have always been used to induce the flow of the curve and potential steady states tend to be difficult to determine numerically, especially in noisy or low-contrast situations. Initial curves shrink past the steady state and soon vanish. In this paper, anisotropic metrics are considered to remedy the situation by taking the orientation of the feature gradient into account. The problem of shape recovery or segmentation is formulated as the problem of finding minimum cuts of a Riemannian manifold. Approximate methods, namely anisotropic geodesic flows and the solution of an eigenvalue problem, are discussed.
Cyclization in deiodinative fluorination

Abstract Alkyl iodides 1–5 react with xenon difluoride with loss of iodide and incorporation of fluorine. A carbocationic intermediate undergoes cyclization with and intermal olefinic function.
Novel, nonpeptidic cyanamides as potent and reversible inhibitors of human cathepsins K and L.

Compounds containing a 1-cyanopyrrolidinyl ring were identified as potent and reversible inhibitors of cathepsins K and L. The original lead compound 1 inhibits cathepsins K and L with IC50 values of 0.37 and 0.45 μM, respectively. Modification of compound 1 by replacement of the quinoline moiety led to the synthesis of N-(1-cyano-3-pyrrolidinyl)benzenesulfonamide (2). Compound 2 was found to be a potent inhibitor of cathepsins K and L with a Ki value of 50 nM for cathepsin K. Replacement of the 1-cyanopyrrolidine of compound 2 by a 1-cyanoazetidine increased the potency of the inhibitor by 10-fold. This increase in potency is probably due to an enhanced chemical reactivity of the compound toward the thiolate of the active site of the enzyme. This is demonstrated when the assay is performed in the presence of glutathione at pH 7.0 which favors the formation of a GSH thiolate anion. Under these assay conditions, there is a loss of potency in the 1-cyanoazetidine series due to the formation of an inactive c...
Stochastic master fields

Abstract We treat the stochastic equation for large N master fields proposed by Greensite and Halpern using a construction of master fields modelled after work of Voiculescu, and show that it contains the same information as the usual factorized Schwinger-Dyson equations. We comment on the relation to earlier work of Haan and of Cvitanovic, Lauwers and Scharbach.
Half-metallic zigzag carbon nanotube dots.

A comprehensive first-principles theoretical study of the electronic properties and half-metallic nature of finite zigzag carbon nanotubes is presented. Unlike previous reports, we find that all nanotubes studied present a spin-polarized ground state, where opposite spins are localized at the two zigzag edges in a long-range antiferromagnetic-type configuration. Relative stability analysis of the different spin states indicates that, for the shorter segments, spin-ordering should be present even at room temperature. The energy gap between the highest occupied and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals of the finite systems is found to be inversely proportional to the nanotube’s segment lengths, suggesting a route to control their electronic properties. Similar to the case of zigzag graphene nanoribbons, half-metallic behavior is obtained under the influence of an external axial electric field.
Solving the Coagulation Equation by the Moments Method

We demonstrate an approach to solving the coagulation equation that involves using a finite number of moments of the particle size distribution. This approach is particularly useful when only general properties of the distribution, and their time evolution, are needed. The numerical solution to the integrodifferential Smoluchowski coagulation equation at every time step, for every particle size, and at every spatial location is computationally expensive and serves as the primary bottleneck in running evolutionary models over long periods of time. The advantage of using the moments method comes in the computational time savings gained from only tracking the time rate of change of the moments, as opposed to tracking the entire mass histogram which can contain hundreds or thousands of bins depending on the desired accuracy. The collision kernels of the coagulation equation contain all the necessary information about particle relative velocities, cross sections, and sticking coefficients. We show how arbitrary collision kernels may be treated. We discuss particle relative velocities in both turbulent and nonturbulent regimes. We present examples of this approach that utilize different collision kernels and find good agreement between the moment solutions and the moments as calculated from direct integration of the coagulation equation. As practical applications, we demonstrate how the moments method can be used to track the evolving opacity and also indicate how one may incorporate porous particles.
Symbiosis in scale out networking and data management

This talk highlights the symbiotic relationship between data management and networking through a study of two seemingly independent trends in the traditionally separate communities: large-scale data processing and software defined networking. First, data processing at scale increasingly runs across hundreds or thousands of servers. We show that balancing network performance with computation and storage is a prerequisite to both efficient and scalable data processing. We illustrate the need for scale out networking in support of data management through a case study of TritonSort, currently the record holder for several sorting benchmarks, including GraySort and JouleSort. Our TritonSort experience shows that disk-bound workloads require 10 Gb/s provisioned bandwidth to keep up with modern processors while emerging flash workloads require 40 Gb/s fabrics at scale.We next argue for the need to apply data management techniques to enable Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Scale Out Networking. SDN promises the abstraction of a single logical network fabric rather than a collection of thousands of individual boxes. In turn, scale out networking allows network capacity (ports, bandwidth) to be expanded incrementally, rather than by wholesale fabric replacement. However, SDN requires an extensible model of both static and dynamic network properties and the ability to deliver dynamic updates to a range of network applications in a fault tolerant and low latency manner. Doing so in networking environments where updates are typically performed by timer-based broadcasts and models are specified as comma-separated text files processed by one-off scripts presents interesting challenges. For example, consider an environment where applications from routing to traffic engineering to monitoring to intrusion/anomaly detection all essentially boil down to inserting, triggering and retrieving updates to/from a shared, extensible data store.
New synthetic triterpenoids: potent agents for prevention and treatment of tissue injury caused by inflammatory and oxidative stress.

We review the original rationale for the development and the chemistry of a series of new synthetic oleanane triterpenoids (SO), based on oleanolic acid (1) as a starting material. Many of the new compounds that have been made, such as 2-cyano-3,12-dioxooleana-1,9(11)-dien-28-oic acid (“CDDO”, 8), are highly potent (activities found at levels below 1 nM) anti-inflammatory agents, as measured by their ability to block the cellular synthesis of the enzyme inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) in activated macrophages. Details of the organic synthesis of new SO and their chemical mechanisms of biological activity are reviewed, as is formation of biotin conjugates for investigation of protein targets. Finally, we give a brief summary of important biological activities of SO in many organ systems in numerous animal models. Clinical investigation of a new SO (methyl 2-cyano-3,12-dioxooleana-1,9(11)dien-28-oate, “CDDO-Me”, bardoxolone methyl, 13) is currently in progress.
Racemic and asymmetric Diels-Alder reactions of 1-(2-oxazolidinon-3-yl)-3-siloxy-1,3-butadienes.

Achiral and chiral 1-(2-oxazolidinon-3-yl)-3-siloxy-1,3-butadienes were prepared from readily available starting materials. Although more stable than the parent 1-amino-3-siloxy dienes, the 1-(2-ox...
Bounded-Reorder Packet Scheduling in Optical Cut-Through Switch

The recently proposed optical cut-through (OpCut) switch holds a great potential in achieving high energy efficiency, as it allows optical packets to cut through the switch in optical domain whenever possible, which avoids power-hungry O/E/O conversion. In the OpCut switch, to ensure in-order transmission, only optical Head-of-Line (HOL) packet of a switch flow, i.e., the stream of packets sharing the same input and output port, is allowed to cut-through the switch, and optical HOL packets are always prioritized over buffered HOL packets to achieve high cut-through ratio, which is measured by the portion of packets cutting through the switch optically. However, under such priority rule, switch flows with buffered packets are at the risk of starvation, and the OpCut switch fails to achieve 100 percent throughput for all admissible i.i.d. traffics due to the unfairness in packet scheduling. To address this two issues, in this paper we propose a delay threshold rule for packet scheduling, in which buffered packets with delays exceeding a preset delay threshold are prioritized over optical packets. In the meanwhile, the cut-through ratio is very low under heavily congested traffic due to maintaining packet order, whereas the Internet is designed to accommodate a certain degree of packet reorder, which is very common in practice due to path multiplicity. In this paper, we design a bounded-reorder packet scheduling algorithm that significantly increases the cut-through ratio of the OpCut switch while allowing a small degree of out-of-order transmission. Our extensive simulation results show that the energy efficiency of OpCut switch can be significantly improved with only a very small degree of packet reordering, which has little adverse impact on the network application performance.
The sound manifesto

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to graphics. We need coordinated research in several disciplines to improve the use of sound as an interactive information channel. Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel. We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven by the cooperative development of auditory perception and physical sound production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a characterization than typography is sufficient for characterization of visual information. To develop this new conceptual topic of sonic information structure, we need to integrate insights from a number of different disciplines that deal with sound. In particular, we need to coordinate central and foundational studies of the representational models of sound with specific applications that illuminate the good and bad qualities of these models. Each natural or artificial process that generates informative sound, and each perceptual mechanism that derives information from sound, will teach us something about the right structure to attribute to the sound itself. The new Sound topic will combine the work of computer scientists with that of numerical mathematicians studying sonification, psychologists, linguists, bioacousticians, and musicians to illuminate the structure of sound from different angles. Each of these disciplines deals with the use of sound to carry a different sort of information, under different requirements and constraints. By combining their insights, we can learn to understand of the structure of sound in general.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Molecular Tagging Velocimetry Measurements in Supersonic Microjets

The application of acetone-based molecular tagging velocimetry (MTV) is demonstrated in sonic and supersonic jets produced by a 1-mm-exit-diameter nozzle. Measurements are performed in the static pressure range 1.3-53 mbar, with spatial resolution of approximately 10 μm. The statistical uncertainty (2σ) in velocity is found to be of order 6-10 m/s, approximately independent of flowfield pressure. Acetone laser-induced fluorescence temporal decay curves were also obtained, with 1/e lifetime found to range from 200 ns at 1.3 mbar to less than 50 ns at 24 mbar. These relatively short lifetimes were nonetheless sufficient to obtain MTV data over the entire pressure range
The tensor Goldstone multiplet for partially broken supersymmetry

Abstract We show that the tensor gauge multiplet of N = 1 supersymmetry can serve as the Goldstone multiplet for partially broken rigid N = 2 supersymmetry. We exploit a remarkable analogy with the Goldstone-Maxwell multiplet of [1] to find its nonlinear transformation law and its invariant Goldstone action. We demonstrate that the tensor multiplet has two dualities. The first transforms it into the chiral Goldstone multiplet; the other leaves it invariant.