cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Enforcement of vintage differentiated regulations: the case of New Source Review

This paper analyzes the eects of the New Source Review (NSR) environmental regulations on coal-red electric power plants. Regulations that grew out of the Clean Air Act of 1970 required new electric generating plants to install costly pollution control equipment but exempted existing plants with a grandfathering clause. Existing plants lost their grandfathering status if they made \major modications" to their plants. We examine whether this caused rms to invest less in their old plants, possibly leading to lower eciency and higher emissions. We nd some evidence that the risk of NSR enforcement reduced capital expenditures at plants. However, we nd no discernable eect
Partial Identification of Local Average Treatment Effects With an Invalid Instrument

We derive nonparametric bounds for local average treatment effects (LATE) without imposing the exclusion restriction assumption or requiring an outcome with bounded support. Instead, we employ assumptions requiring weak monotonicity of mean potential and counterfactual outcomes within or across subpopulations defined by the values of the potential treatment status under each value of the instrument. The key element in our derivation is a result relating LATE to a causal mediation effect, which allows us to exploit partial identification results from the causal mediation analysis literature. The bounds are employed to analyze the effect of attaining a GED, high school, or vocational degree on future labor market outcomes using randomization into a training program as an invalid instrument. The resulting bounds are informative, indicating that the local effect when assigned to training for those whose degree attainment is affected by the instrument is at most 12.7 percentage points on employment and $64.4 o...
Team decision theory and information structures in optimal control problems--Part II

General dynamic team decision problems with linear information structures and quadratic payoff functions are studied. The primitive random variables are jointly Gaussian. No constraints on the information structures are imposed except causality. Equivalence relations in information and in control functions among different systems are developed. These equivalence relations aid in the solving of many general problems by relating their solutions to those of the systems with "perfect memory." The latter can be obtained by the method derived in Part I. A condition is found which enables each decision maker to infer the information available to his precedents, while at the same time the controls which will affect the information assessed can be proven optimal. When this condition fails, upper and lower bounds of the payoff function can still be obtained systematically, and suboptimal controls can be obtained.
Directional Solidification of a Binary Alloy into a Cellular Convective Flow: Localized Morphologies

A steady, two-dimensional cellular convection modifies the morphological instability of a binary alloy that undergoes directional solidification. When the convection wavelength is far longer than that of the morphological cells, the behaviour of the moving front is described by a slow, spatial–temporal dynamics obtained through a multiple-scale analysis. The resulting system has a parametric-excitation structure in space, with complex parameters characterizing the interactions between flow, solute diffusion, and rejection. The convection in general stabilizes two-dimensional disturbances, but destabilizes three-dimensional disturbances. When the flow is weak, the morphological instability is incommensurate with the flow wavelength, but as the flow gets stronger, the instability becomes quantized and forced to fit into the flow box. At large flow strength the instability is localized, confined in narrow envelopes. In this case the solutions are discrete eigenstates in an unbounded space. Their stability boundaries and asymptotics are obtained by a WKB analysis. The weakly nonlinear interaction is delivered through the Lyapunov–Schmidt method.
Weak and Strong Limit Values

The classical results about the boundary values of holomorphic or harmonic functions on a domain D state that under additional integrability assumptions these functions have limits along specific sets approaching boundary. The proofs of these results are based on properties of smooth boundaries used to define the approach regions and on estimates of representing kernels along these regions.
Approximate confidence interval for standard deviation of nonnormal distributions

The exact confidence interval for @s is hypersensitive to minor violations of the normality assumption and its performance does not improve with increasing sample size. An approximate confidence interval for @s is proposed and is shown to be nearly exact under normality with excellent small-sample properties under moderate nonnormality. The small-sample performance of the proposed interval may be further improved using prior kurtosis information. A sample size planning formula is given.
Noninvasive Classification of Ventricular Preexcitation with Unshielded Magnetocardiography and Transesophageal Atrial Pacing and Follow‐Up

Background: Ventricular preexcitation (VPx) is usually localized noninvasively by means of electrocardiogram (ECG) algorithms, which vary in their concordance levels. Contactless magnetocardiography (MCG) has been used as an alternate 3-dimensional (3D) method of accessory pathways (AP) localization. The sensitivity of MCG can be increased for preoperative evaluations and planning of ablation procedures by combining it with transesophageal pacing (TEP) and electrophysiological (EP) studies. This study compared the accuracy of VPx localization with MCG with ECG algorithms, and examined the increment in diagnostic accuracy achievable with TEP. Methods: Multisite mapping from the anterior chest wall was performed with a 36-channel MCG system. TEP allowed the evaluation of anterograde conduction properties and inducibility of arrhythmias. The reproducibility of the test and follow-up was examined in 88 patients with Wolff–Parkinson–White (WPW) syndrome. The accuracy of MCG localization was reevaluated during pacing-induced maximal VPx in 36 patients in whom, during MCG, the degree of VPx was highest during TEP. The gold standard for validation was effective ablation of the AP. Results: The MCG classification of VPx was accurate in 94% of AP, versus 64% and 67% with ECG, during sinus rhythm and during pacing-induced maximal VPx, respectively. In 4.5% of cases with unclear ECG localization, MCG suggested a complex septal VPx. In all patients with successful ablations, the 3D MCG localization of the AP corresponded to the ablation site. Conclusions: MCG was more accurate than ECG for the classification of VPx and provided additional information in the non-invasive EP assessment of patients with WPW syndrome.
BANACH SPACE VALUED CAUCHY–RIEMANN EQUATIONS WITH TOTALLY REAL BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

The main purpose of this paper is to give a general regularity result for Cauchy–Riemann equations in complex Banach spaces with totally real boundary conditions. The usual elliptic Lp-regularity results hold true under one crucial assumption: The Banach space is isomorphic to a closed subspace of an Lp-space. (Equivalently, the totally real submanifold is modelled on a closed subspace of an Lp-space.) Secondly, we describe a class of examples of such totally real submanifolds, namely gauge invariant Lagrangian submanifolds in the space of connections over a Riemann surface. These pose natural boundary conditions for the anti-self-duality equation on 4-manifolds with a boundary space-time splitting, leading towards the definition of a Floer homology for 3-manifolds with boundary, which is the first step in a program by Salamon for the proof of the Atiyah–Floer conjecture. The principal part of such a boundary value problem is an example of a Banach space valued Cauchy–Riemann equation with totally real boundary condition.
Protein backbone engineering as a strategy to advance foldamers toward the frontier of protein-like tertiary structure

A variety of non-biological structural motifs have been incorporated into the backbone of natural protein sequences. In parallel work, diverse unnatural oligomers of de novo design (termed “foldamers”) have been developed that fold in defined ways. In this Perspective article, we survey foundational studies on protein backbone engineering, with a focus on alterations made in the context of complex tertiary folds. We go on to summarize recent work illustrating the potential promise of these methods to provide a general framework for the construction of foldamer mimics of protein tertiary structures.
Simple stochastic model for resonant activation

We present three variants of an extremely simple stochastic model, one of which does not display a ``resonant phenomenon'' discussed recently [Ch. Doering and C. Gadoua, Phys. Rev. Lett. 69, 2318 (1992)], while the other two variants do.
Two polymorphs of Ba3Sn2P4 : Single crystal and electronic structures

Abstract Two polymorphs (I and II) of Ba3Sn2P4 have been found in the same preparative batch. Both compounds crystallize in the centrosymmetric monoclinic space group P21/c (#14, a = 7.8669(2) A, b = 19.2378(5) A, c = 7.8472(2) A, β = 112.77(1)°, V = 1095.06(5) A3, Z = 4, and R/ w R = 0.0303/0.0710 for I; a = 7.8771(3) A, b = 19.4099(7) A, c = 7.7040(3) A, β = 112.44(1)°, V = 1088.67(7) A3, Z = 4, and R/ w R = 0.0224/0.0415 for II). Both structures consist of one-dimensional [ S n 2 P 4 ] 6 − ∞ 1 chains separated by Ba2+ cations. The isolated [ S n 2 P 4 ] 6 − ∞ 1 chain consists of condensed ethane-like [Sn2P6] units. In polymorphs I and II, the condensation and connectivity of the [Sn2P6] units are quite different. While [Sn2P6] units form four- and six-membered rings in I, they form the five-membered rings in II. The electronic structure calculations indicate that semiconducting behavior is expected for both compounds.
ROPAS: Cross-Layer Cognitive Architecture for Mobile UWB Networks

The allocation of bandwidth to unlicensed users, without significantly increasing the interference on the existing licensed users, is a challenge for Ultra Wideband (UWB) networks. Our research work presents a novel Rake Optimization and Power Aware Scheduling (ROPAS) architecture for UWB networks. Since UWB communication is rich in multipath effects, a Rake receiver is used for path diversity. Our idea of developing an optimized Rake receiver in our ROPAS architecture stems from the intention of reducing the computation complexity in terms of the number of multiplications and additions needed for the weight derivation attached to each finger of the Rake receiver. Our proposed work uses the Cognitive Radio (CR) for dynamic channel allocation among the requesting users while limiting the average power transmitted in each sub-band. In our proposed novel ROPAS architecture, dynamic channel allocation is achieved by a CR-based cross-layer design between the PHY and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers. Additionally, the maximum number of parallel transmissions within a frame interval is formulated as an optimization problem. This optimal decision is based on the distance parameter between a transmitter-receiver pair, bit error rate and frequency of request by a particular application. Moreover, the optimization problem improvises a differentiation technique among the requesting applications by incorporating priority levels among user applications. This provides fairness and higher throughput among services with varying power constraint and data rates required for a UWB network.
Production of High-Q Ions by Laser Bombardment Method

The expanding plasma produced when an intense pulse of laser radiation is focused in vacuum onto a solid target has been used as a source of highly stripped ions for collision cross-section measurements. Usable fluxes of carbon nuclei at energies of a few hundred eV/charge have been obtained by irradiation of graphite with pulses of CO2 laser radiation at a focused power density of 3 × 1010 W/cm2. Bombardment of aluminum and iron targets at comparable power levels have yielded ions of maximum charges of 9 and 16 respectively. A time-of-flight apparatus has been constructed to utilize the laser source for measurement of electron capture cross sections for highly stripped ions in gases at energies in the few hundred eV/charge range. Apertures collimate an ion beam from the plasma blowoff, and an electrostatic analyzer selects ions from the expanding plasma which have the same energy per charge. The beam is directed through a gas target cell, charge analyzed once more by deceleration, and detected by a channel plate electron multiplier used in a current amplification mode. Electron capture cross sections have been measured for C+q ions, q = 3, 4, 5 in H2 at energies ranging from 150-1160 eV/charge. Preliminary data have been obtained for carbon ions in atomic hydrogen, and similar measurements are planned for O+q and Fe+q ions.
Crystal growth of Ba2MOsO6 (M=Li, Na) from reactive hydroxide fluxes

Abstract Single crystals of Ba2LiOsO6 and Ba2NaOsO6 were grown from molten hydroxide fluxes. The oxides form in the double perovskite structure and contain heptavalent osmium. The structures crystallize in space group Fm 3 m with lattice parameters of 8.1046(2) A and 8.2870(3) A for the lithium and sodium containing compounds, respectively. Magnetic susceptibility measurements show evidence of antiferromagnetic correlations below 8 K for Ba2LiOsO6 and ferromagnetic-like ordering below 8 K for Ba2NaOsO6. The measured magnetic moment is unusually small for both materials, μeff=0.733 BM and μeff=0.677 BM for the lithium and sodium containing compounds, respectively.
Compensation between Model Feedbacks and Curtailment of Climate Sensitivity

The spread in climate sensitivity obtained from 12 general circulation model runs used in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates a 95% confidence interval of 2.18‐5.58C, but this reflects compensation between model feedbacks. In particular, cloud feedback strength negatively covaries with the albedo feedback as well as with the combined water vapor plus lapse rate feedback. If the compensation between feedbacks is removed, the 95% confidence interval for climate sensitivity expands to 1.98‐8.08C. Neither of the quoted 95% intervals adequately reflects the understanding of climate sensitivity, but their differences illustrate that model interdependencies must be understood before model spread can be correctly interpreted. The degree of negative covariance between feedbacks is unlikely to result from chance alone. It may, however, result from the method by which the feedbacks were estimated, physical relationships represented in the models, or from conditioning the models upon some combination of observations and expectations. This compensation between model feedbacks—when taken together with indications that variations in radiative forcing and the rate of ocean heat uptake play a similar compensatory role in models—suggests that conditioning of the models acts to curtail the intermodel spread in climate sensitivity. Observations used to condition the models ought to be explicitly stated, or there is the risk of doubly calling on data for purposes of both calibration and evaluation. Conditioning the models upon individual expectation (e.g., anchoring to the Charney range of 3 86 1.58C), to the extent that it exists, greatly complicates statistical interpretation of the intermodel spread.
Monetary Equilibrium with Decentralized Trade and Learning

We consider an environment where trade is decentralized and agents only obtain information about the state of the economy (the amount of money in circulation) through their personal experiences in the market. We describe the individual agent decision as a two-armed bandit problem and characterize the dynamics of the market under dierent regimes. We study how the bank’s (the agent in charge of money creation) incentives to choose a regime depend on the degree of information transmission in the economy. The main result is that, under rapid dissemination of information, society’s ability to monitor the level of money in circulation puts a strong constraint on the bank’s willingness to issue too much money. We also study the intertemporal consistency of the bank’s behavior and find that a patient bank must not only be concerned with building a good reputation, but also with continuously behaving so as to separate itself from impatient banks in order to maintain its good reputation.
Application of Richardson extrapolation to the numerical solution of partial differential equations

Richardson extrapolation is a methodology for improving the order of accuracy of numerical solutions that involve the use of a discretization size h. By combining the results from numerical solutions using a sequence of related discretization sizes, the leading order error terms can be methodically removed, resulting in higher order accurate results. Richardson extrapolation is commonly used within the numerical approximation of partial dierential equations to improve certain predictive quantities such as the drag or lift of an airfoil, once these quantities are calculated on a sequence of meshes, but it is not widely used to determine the numerical solution of partial dierential equations. Within this paper, Richardson extrapolation is applied directly to the solution algorithm used within existing numerical solvers of partial dierential equations to increase the order of accuracy of the numerical result without referring to the details of the methodology or its implementation within the numerical code. Only the order of accuracy of the existing solver and certain interpolations required to pass information between the mesh levels are needed to improve the order of accuracy and the overall solution accuracy. With the proposed methodology, Richardson extrapolation is used to increase the order of accuracy of numerical solutions of Laplace’s equation, the wave equation, the shallow water equations, and the compressible Euler equations in two-dimensions.
Comparing hard and soft prior bounds in geophysical inverse problems

In linear inversion of a finite-dimensional data vector y to estimate a finite-dimensional prediction vector z, prior information about X sub E is essential if y is to supply useful limits for z. The one exception occurs when all the prediction functionals are linear combinations of the data functionals. Two forms of prior information are compared: a soft bound on X sub E is a probability distribution p sub x on X which describeds the observer's opinion about where X sub E is likely to be in X; a hard bound on X sub E is an inequality Q sub x(X sub E, X sub E) is equal to or less than 1, where Q sub x is a positive definite quadratic form on X. A hard bound Q sub x can be softened to many different probability distributions p sub x, but all these p sub x's carry much new information about X sub E which is absent from Q sub x, and some information which contradicts Q sub x. Both stochastic inversion (SI) and Bayesian inference (BI) estimate z from y and a soft prior bound p sub x. If that probability distribution was obtained by softening a hard prior bound Q sub x, rather than by objective statistical inference independent of y, then p sub x contains so much unsupported new information absent from Q sub x that conclusions about z obtained with SI or BI would seen to be suspect.
How different are their experiences and outcomes? Comparing aged out and other child welfare involved youth

This paper adds to the growing body of research examining the experiences of youth aging out of the child welfare system. Through a comparison of youth aging out with two other groups of child welfare-involved youth—those whose families received child welfare services but were never placed out of home and those who were in out-of-home placement but did not age out—it presents a profile of their care careers and other system involvement (e.g., mental health, justice system). Analyses indicate that young people aging out of care have experienced significant amounts of time in out-of-home placement, a great deal of placement instability, and high levels of other system involvement. In general, their involvement is more extensive than that of the two comparison groups. However, the justice system involvement of youth who experienced out-of-home placement but did not age out is just as high as that of youth who have aged out. This finding highlights the importance of devoting resources not only to youth aging out of care but also to similarly-aged young people with prior child welfare involvement.
Effect of dose on the nasal absorption of epinephrine during cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Abstract Delay in epinephrine administration during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) due to technical difficulties in obtaining an access site may be detrimental. To avoid this potential delay, we have previously shown that intranasal administration of phentolamine and epinephrine is a rapidly obtainable and feasible route of administration during CPR. The objective of this study was to determine the optimal dose of phentolamine and epinephrine to be administered during CPR. A randomized blinded dose ranging study was performed in a controlled laboratory environment. Thirty-six mongrel dogs were randomized to one of the following dosage regimens: phentolamine, 0.25 or 2.5 mg/kg/nostril; epinephrine, 0.075, 0.75, or 7.5 mg/kg/nostril. Phentolamine was administered intranasally 1 minute before the intranasal administration of epinephrine to improve absorption. Each dog underwent 3 minutes of ventricular fibrillation followed by 7 minutes of closed chest CPR. Epinephrine was administered at 3 minutes of CPR. Data from 26 dogs were included for analysis. Treatment B (0.25 and 7.5 mg/kg/nostril of phentolamine and epinephrine, respectively) produced the greatest elevation in coronary perfusion pressure (17 ± 11 vs 4 ± 3 mm Hg for the next highest group, P 5 5 ) versus 0% to 50% for the other groups (P
An efficient one-pot synthesis of pyrrolines and tetrahydropyridines from their chloro-precursors via in situ aza-Wittig reaction

A simple and efficient method for synthesizing pyrrolines and tetrahydropyridines via an intramolecular aza-Wittig reaction has been achieved by microwave irradiation of the corresponding chloro-alkane derivatives in the presence of tertiary phosphite and sodium azide. The in situ formation of the alkyl azides makes this a facile and safe method for aza-Wittig reactions.
A new finite‐volume approach with adaptive upwind convection

A new finite-volume approach is developed and applied to the two-dimensional continuity and convective-diffusive energy equations. The variation of the field variables is approximated by bi-quadratic interpolation formulae over the space occupied by the finite volume and the region surrounding it. These are used in the integral conservation laws for energy and mass. The convective transport is modelled using a new upstream-weighting approach which uses volume averages for the energy transported across the boundaries of the finite volume. The weighting is dependent on the skewness of the velocity field to the surfaces of the finite volume as well as its strength. It is adaptive to local flow conditions. Two test cases are treated which have exact solutions. The first is not new and involves a rotating shaft. The errors are less than 0.06 per cent for this case. The second case is new and involves convection past a source and sink. In contrast to the first case, the global Peclet number is a strong parameter, and cell Peclet numbers (Peh) range from 0 to 20. The maximum error is 2.3 per cent for Peh = 4, and there is no evidence of numerical diffusion for even the largest value of Peh. For both test cases, the maximum error occurs at moderate values of Peh and diminishes at the extreme low and high values.
Cylindrical cloaking at oblique incidence with optimized finite multilayer parameters

We propose multilayer cylindrical invisibility cloaks that are optimized for oblique incidences through a combination of analytic formalism of scattering and genetic optimization. We show that by using only four layers of homogeneous and anisotropic metamaterials without large values of constitutive parameters, the scattering for oblique incidences can be reduced by 2 orders. Although the optimization is done at a single incident angle, the cloak provides reduced scattering over a large range of incident angles.
Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification

This paper focuses on avoidable moral hazard and offers one explanation for limited insurance markets, for closely held firms, and for seemingly simple as opposed to contingent forms of debt. Agents have random endowments of a consumption good which are such that there are gains to trading contingent claims. But any realization of an endowment is known only by its owner unless a verification cost is borne. Contracts in such a setting are said to be consistent if agents submit to verification and honor claims in accordance with prior agreements. The Pareto optimal consistent contracts which emerge are shown to have familiar characteristics.
Application-aware adaptation for mobile computing

This paper identifies application-aware adaptation as an essential capability of mobile clients, and provides an overview of Odyssey, an architecture that supports this capability. Functionality that has hitherto been implemented monolithically must now be split between the operating system and individual applications. The role of the operating system is to sense external events, and to monitor and allocate scarce resources. In contrast, the role of individual applications is to adapt to changing conditions by using the information and resources provided by the operating system.
Estimation from pairwise comparisons: sharp minimax bounds with topology dependence

Data in the form of pairwise comparisons arises in many domains, including preference elicitation, sporting competitions, and peer grading among others. We consider parametric ordinal models for such pairwise comparison data involving a latent vector w* e Rd that represents the "qualities" of the d items being compared; this class of models includes the two most widely used parametric models|the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) and the Thurstone models. Working within a standard minimax framework, we provide tight upper and lower bounds on the optimal error in estimating the quality score vector w* under this class of models. The bounds depend on the topology of the comparison graph induced by the subset of pairs being compared, via the spectrum of the Laplacian of the comparison graph. Thus, in settings where the subset of pairs may be chosen, our results provide principled guidelines for making this choice. Finally, we compare these error rates to those under cardinal measurement models and show that the error rates in the ordinal and cardinal settings have identical scalings apart from constant pre-factors.
A Loan Modification Approach to the Housing Crisis

The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with negative equity to walk away from their houses. We advocate a legal reform that would allow homeowners to reduce principal while giving mortgage holders an equity interest. Such a plan would give homeowners an incentive to keep or resell their homes, thus reducing the market value loss of homes while protecting the effective value of creditors’ interests. Two further elements of the plan are that it uses prices based on the average house price in a particular ZIP code; and it is automated.
The impact of CSI and power allocation on relay channel capacity and cooperation strategies

Capacity gains from transmitter and receiver cooperation are compared in a relay network where the cooperating nodes are close together. Under quasi-static phase fading, when all nodes have equal average transmit power along with full channel state information (CSI), it is shown that transmitter cooperation outperforms receiver cooperation, whereas the opposite is true when power is optimally allocated among the cooperating nodes but only CSI at the receiver (CSIR) is available. When the nodes have equal power with CSIR only, cooperative schemes are shown to offer no capacity improvement over non-cooperation under the same network power constraint. When the system is under optimal power allocation with full CSI, the decode-and- forward transmitter cooperation rate is close to its cut-set capacity upper bound, and outperforms compress-and-forward receiver cooperation. Under fast Rayleigh fading in the high SNR regime, similar conclusions follow. Cooperative systems provide resilience to fading in channel magnitudes; however, capacity becomes more sensitive to power allocation, and the cooperating nodes need to be closer together for the decode-and-forward scheme to be capacity-achieving. Moreover, to realize capacity improvement, full CSI is necessary in transmitter cooperation, while in receiver cooperation optimal power allocation is essential.
Learning Your Earning: Are Labor Income Shocks Really Very Persistent? ∗

In this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market. The current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component. We argue two points. First, the estimates of persistence from income data appear to be upward biased due to the omission of heterogeneity in income pro…les across the population that would be implied, for example, by a human capital model with heterogeneity. When we allow for dierences in pro…les, the estimated persistence falls from 0.99 to about 0.8. Moreover, the main evidence against pro…le heterogeneity in the existing literature— that the autocorrelations of income changes are small and typically negative— is also replicated by the pro…le heterogeneity model we estimate, casting doubt on the previous interpretation of this evidence. Second, we embed this process in a life-cycle model to examine how it alters individuals'consumption-saving decision. We assume that— as seems plausible— individuals do not know their pro…les exactly at the beginning of life, but learn in a Bayesian way with successive income observations. We …nd that learning is very slow and aects consumption decision throughout the life-cycle. The model generates substantial rise in consumption inequality over the life-cycle, which matches empirical observations (Deaton and Paxson 1994). Moreover, the shape of the age-inequality pro…le is non-concave as in the data, but unlike in a model with very persistent shocks. Finally, the consumption pro…les of college graduates are steeper than those of high-school graduates in the model consistent with the data because they face a wider dispersion of, and hence uncertainty about, income growth rates. Overall this evidence indicates that income shocks may be signi…cantly less persistent than what is currently assumed.
Gaussian networks for direct adaptive control

A direct adaptive tracking control architecture is proposed and evaluated for a class of continuous-time nonlinear dynamic systems for which an explicit linear parameterization of the uncertainty in the dynamics is either unknown or impossible. The architecture uses a network of Gaussian radial basis functions to adaptively compensate for the plant nonlinearities. Under mild assumptions about the degree of smoothness exhibit by the nonlinear functions, the algorithm is proven to be globally stable, with tracking errors converging to a neighborhood of zero. A constructive procedure is detailed, which directly translates the assumed smoothness properties of the nonlinearities involved into a specification of the network required to represent the plant to a chosen degree of accuracy. A stable weight adjustment mechanism is determined using Lyapunov theory. The network construction and performance of the resulting controller are illustrated through simulations with example systems. >
Variational calculations on the hydrogen molecular ion

We present high-precision non-relativistic variational calculations of bound vibrational—rotational state energies for the H+ 2 and D+ 2 molecular ions in each of the lowest electronic states of Σ g , Σ u , and Π u symmetry. The calculations are carried out including coupling between Σ and Π states but without using the Born—Oppenheimer or any adiabatic approximation. Convergence studies are presented which indicate that the resulting energies for low-lying levels are accurate to about 10−13. Our procedure accounts naturally for the lambda-doubling of the Π u state.
Shell thickness variations and the long-wavelength topography of Titan

The long-wavelength topography of Titan has an amplitude larger than that expected from tidal and rotational distortions at its current distance from Saturn. This topography is associated with small gravity anomalies, indicating a high degree of compensation. Both observations can be explained if Titan has a floating, isostatically-compensated ice shell with a spatially-varying thickness. The spatial variations arise because of laterally-variable tidal heating within the ice shell. Models incorporating shell thickness variations result in an improved fit to the observations and a degree-two tidal Love number h2t consistent with expectations, without requiring Titan to have moved away from Saturn. Our preferred models have a mean shell thickness of � 100 km in agreement with the observed gravity anomalies, and a heat flux appropriate to a chondritic Titan. Shell thickness variations are eliminated by convection; we therefore conclude that Titan’s ice shell is not convecting at the present day.
Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.
A few remarks about symplectic filling

We show that any compact symplectic manifold (W;!) with boundary embeds as a domain into a closed symplectic manifold, provided that there exists a contact plane on @W which is weakly compatible with ! , i.e. the restriction !j does not vanish and the contact orientation of @W and its orientation as the boundary of the symplectic manifold W coincide. This result provides a useful tool for new applications by Ozsv ath{Szab o of Seiberg{Witten Floer homology theories in three-dimensional topology and has helped complete the Kronheimer{Mrowka proof of Property P for knots. AMS Classication numbers Primary: 53C15 Secondary: 57M50
Fuel Cells for Extraterrestrial and Terrestrial Applications

The fuel cell is a nineteenth century invention and a twentieth century technology development. Due to the high power and energy density, high efficiency, reliability, and production of pure water, hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell systems have no competition as auxiliary power sources for space vehicles. The alkaline fuel cell system is a well developed and proven technology for this application. The solid polymer electrolyte system may be its future competitor. The energy crisis of 1973 stimulated research, development and demonstration of the phosphoric acid, molten carbonate, solid oxide and solid polymer electrolyte fuel cell systems using natural gas, petroleum or coal derived hydrogen (and carbon monoxide for the high temperature systems) for terrestrial applications. The direct methanol-air fuel cell is still an electrochemist's dream. Though considerable technological advances have been made, the present price of crude oil, and the high capital costs and limited lifetime of fuel cell systems impede their terrestrial applications in the developed countries. Conversely, the potential for lower capital costs of labor intensive manufacturing processes and the relatively higher fossil fuel prices make these systems more attractive for such applications in the developing countries. 11 refs.
Applications of Light-Front QCD

Light-front Fock state wavefunctions encode the bound state properties of hadrons in terms of their quark and gluon degrees of freedom at the amplitude level. The freedom to choose the light-like quantization four-vector provides an explicitly covariant formulation of light-front quantization and can be used to determine the analytic structure of light-front wave functions. The AdS/CFT correspondence of large NC supergravity theory in higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space with supersymmetric QCD in 4-dimensional space-time has interesting implications for hadron phenomenology in the conformal limit, including an all-orders demonstration of counting rules for exclusive processes. String/gauge duality also predicts the QCD power-law behavior of light-front Fock-state hadronic wavefunctions with arbitrary orbital angular momentum at high momentum transfer. The form of these near-conformal wavefunctions can be used as an initial ansatz for a variational treatment of the light-front QCD Hamiltonian. I also briefly review recent work which shows that some leadingtwist phenomena such as the diffractive component of deep inelastic scattering, single spin asymmetries, nuclear shadowing and antishadowing cannot be computed from the LFWFs of hadrons in isolation.
Realizability of Conversation Protocols with Message Contents

A promising way to model the global behavior of a Web Service composition is to characterize the set of conversations among the participating Web Services. A conversation protocol specifies the desired global behaviors of a Web Service composition. The realizability problem is to decide whether, given a conversation protocol, a Web Service composition can be synthesized that generates exactly the same set of conversations specified by the protocol. This is a key problem in the top-down specification of the Web Service compositions. In our earlier work, we developed sufficient conditions for realizability of conversation protocols based on a model that abstracts the contents of the messages. The present paper extends our earlier work by allowing message contents to be used in the realizability analysis. We show that taking the message contents into account yields more accurate analysis. To overcome the state-space explosion caused by the message contents, we propose symbolic analysis techniques for the realizability conditions. In addition, we show that the analysis of one of the realizability conditions â€” the autonomy condition â€” can be done using an iterative refinement approach.
Mutual admittance between slots in cylinders of arbitrary shape

A numerical formulation involving the Fourier transform and the combined-field integral equation is presented to calculate the mutual admittance between axial slots or circumferential slots in arbitrarily shaped cylinders. Two cases are considered: coupling between two circumferential slots and coupling between two axial slots. The slots are assumed to be waveguide-fed apertures excited with the TE/sub 10/ waveguide mode, with no higher-order modes included in the model. The combined field-integral equation (CFIE) formulation was used in conjunction with the magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) to solve the resulting two-dimensional integral equation. Formulations for the axial slot case are discussed. Results concerning the discretization and truncation of the spectrum, as well as the accuracy of the procedure, are presented for both axial and circumferential cases. The accuracy of the procedure is demonstrated by comparison with eigenfunction data for circular cylinders. >
SMaSH: a benchmarking toolkit for human genome variant calling

Motivation: Computational methods are essential to extract actionable information from raw sequencing data, and to thus fulfill the promise of next-generation sequencing technology. Unfortunately, computational tools developed to call variants from human sequencing data disagree on many of their predictions, and current methods to evaluate accuracy and computational performance are ad hoc and incomplete. Agreement on benchmarking variant calling methods would stimulate development of genomic processing tools and facilitate communication among researchers. Results: We propose SMaSH, a benchmarking methodology for evaluating germline variant calling algorithms. We generate synthetic datasets, organize and interpret a wide range of existing benchmarking data for real genomes and propose a set of accuracy and computational performance metrics for evaluating variant calling methods on these benchmarking data. Moreover, we illustrate the utility of SMaSH to evaluate the performance of some leading single-nucleotide polymorphism, indel and structural variant calling algorithms. Availability and implementation: We provide free and open access online to the SMaSH tool kit, along with detailed documentation, at smash.cs.berkeley.edu Contact: ude.yelekreb.sc@teema or ude.yelekreb.sc@nsrttap Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Capital Structure, Staggered Boards, and Firm Value

Grounded in agency theory, this study investigates whether staggered boards (in which only a portion of directors are elected at one time) influence capital structure choices. Leverage has been argued and shown to alleviate agency costs. Because staggered boards can entrench inefficient managers, they may motivate managers to adopt a lower level of debt, thereby avoiding the disciplinary mechanisms associated with leverage. The empirical evidence supports this hypothesis, showing that firms with a staggered board are significantly less leveraged than those with unitary boards (in which all board members are elected at one time). The impact of staggered boards on capital structure choices exists both in industrial and regulated firms although it seems to vanish after enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. The results show that staggered boards are likely to bring about, and do not merely reflect, lower leverage. Finally, the results demonstrate no significant adverse impact on firm value as a result ...
Experience with an Easily Computed Metric for Ranking Alternative Parses

This brief paper, which is itself an extended abstract for a forthcoming paper, describes a metric that can be easily computed during either bottom-up or top-down construction of a parse tree for ranking the desirability of alternative parses. In its simplest form, the metric tends to prefer trees in which constituents are pushed as far down as possible, but by appropriate modification of a constant in the formula other behavior can be obtained also. This paper includes in introduction to the EPISTLE system being developed at IBM Research and a discussion of the results of using this metric with that system.
Holomorphic discs and sutured manifolds

In this paper we construct a Floer-homology invariant for a natural and wide class of sutured manifolds that we call balanced. This generalizes the Heegaard Floer hat theory of closed three-manifolds and links. Our invariant is unchanged under product decompositions and is zero for nontaut sutured manifolds. As an application, an invariant of Seifert surfaces is given and is computed in a few interesting cases.
Drift and Adjustment in Organizational Rule Compliance: Explaining the Regulatory Pendulum in Financial Markets

This article integrates research on rule development, compliance, and organizational change to model rule development and compliance in organizations, using causal-loop modeling from system dynamics to articulate explicitly a few key underlying processes. We focus on financial markets as a case area, suggesting that recurring regulatory problems in financial markets in the United States over the past 60 years, although differing in specifics, are structurally similar. At the heart of the model is the tension between production goals that focus on short-term, certain, salient benefits and required adherence to production-constraining rules that attempt to mitigate long-term, uncertain, nonsalient risks. It describes systemically how organizations attend to rules depending on the nature of the benefits of production compared with those of rule compliance. The model captures the operative mechanisms responsible for the development of pressures for production and for rule compliance in organizations, providing a structural explanation both for problem-prone organizations characterized by erosion of standards and increased violations and for organizations following rules more reliably. Drawing on studies of institutional work, we conclude by suggesting research on how agency, through strategic and tactical choice, potentially modifies structure in rule compliance.
Formulae for growth factors in expanding universes containing matter and a cosmological constant

Formulae are presented for the linear growth factor D/a and its logarithmic derivative dln D=dln a in expanding Friedmann±Robertson±Walker universes with arbitrary matter and vacuum densities. The formulae permit rapid and stable numerical evaluation. A fortran program is available at http://casa.colorado.edu/,ajsh/growl/.
Gas-phase structure determination of dihydroxycarbene, one of the smallest stable singlet carbenes.

Carbenes are reactive molecules of the form R1CR2 that play a role in topics ranging from organic synthesis to gas-phase oxidation chemistry. We report the first experimental structure determination of dihydroxycarbene (HOCOH), one of the smallest stable singlet carbenes, using a combination of microwave rotational spectroscopy and high-level coupled-cluster calculations. The semi-experimental equilibrium structure derived from five isotopic variants of HOCOH contains two very short CO single bonds (ca. 1.32 A). Detection of HOCOH in the gas phase firmly establishes that it is stable to isomerization, yet it has been underrepresented in discussions of the CH2O2 chemical system and its atmospherically relevant isomers: formic acid and the Criegee intermediate CH2OO.