cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
The Policy of Risk Management

Agricultural and food production is fundamentally different than other forms of production in the economy, and the differences require alternate methods of risk management. This chapter reviews the primary tools available to producers for the management of price and quantity risk, including insurance, government programs, and market-based instruments. Each of these tools is explained in both historical context and for how it impacts on market function. Current controversies in policy and markets and marketing are then discussed, as are recent research findings and proposed solutions. Some of the controversies addressed are the impact of speculation, packer ownership of cattle, and planting restrictions for decoupled payments.
Organisms, Individuals, and Units of Selection

We often think of science—and of philosophy as well—as a process by which puzzlement is removed. This suggests that progress in a science is to be measured by the degree to which it eliminates problems rather than creating them. We sometimes say of an idea that “it raises more problems than it solves.” The fact that this remark is used to state a criticism perhaps indicates that we think of problems as if they were rashes on the skin of the body scientific. Scientific progress makes rashes go away.
OPTIMALITY AND TRANSITION SURFACES USING THE REPRISAL CONCEPT

One major difficulty in differential games is that the solution path of a pair of admissible strategies may not meet the terminal surfaces (or sets) [1]. One approach to this difficulty is to introduce the concept of “playable” strategies [2–5]. Although this has been a helpful approach, there are difficulties with it. First, (μ1,υ1) and (μ2,υ2) being playable does not necessarily imply that (μ1,υ2) and (μ2,υ1) are. Thus the value of the game may not be well-defined when there is more than one pair of optimal strategies. A second problem is that the playability requirement involves the implicit assumption of the presence of a third party or “umpire” who can rule pairs of strategies “admissible” or not. This is counter to the hypothesis (which prevails in most games) that each player should be free to select any strategy under his command independently of his opponent’s choice. A third problem is that in many games (such as pursuit-evasion), it may be to one player’s advantage to seek strategies which can prevent termination. Thus insisting that all pairs of strategies under consideration be playable may result in omitting crucial aspects of these games.
Some Measure Theory

We remind the reader of some terminology. Given a set X, the power set of X, denoted P(X), is the collection of all subsets of X.
War as Play, War as Slaughter, and the Laws of War

Johan Huizinga (1955) wrote a groundbreaking work on play and its relation to culture in 1938. This book, entitled Homo Ludens, makes a strong case for the more general claim that the play function in human culture is as important as the work function and human reasoning; in short, for Huizinga, our species is not only Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber (man the maker) but also Homo Ludens (man the player). Huizinga, in making his case, attempts to demonstrate the relation of the play motive to the development of language, to knowledge, to law, to art and poetry, to philosophy, and to war. It is this last function of play which I intend to further elaborate in this paper.
Legal Realism and International Law

This chapter presents the legal realist approach to international law. It is in five parts. Part 1 provides a brief background of the genesis and core attributes of legal realism, breaking down legal realism into three interrelated dimensions—behavioral, critical, and pragmatic—that explain law’s development and practice. Part 2 presents how American legal realism migrated into and influenced international legal theory, starting with the realism of Hans Morgenthau and policy science of Myres McDougal, then turning to the development of transnational legal theory with Philip Jessup and the rise of global administrative law with the proliferation and deepening of international institutions. Part 3 presents the two principal dimensions of new legal realism—empiricism and pragmatism. The new legal realist approach builds from significant developments in the social sciences and opportunities and demands for transnational problem-solving in light of increased transnational social connectedness and international institutionalization. The section defines new legal realism positively in terms of the interaction of such internal legal and external extra-legal factors as reason and power, legal craft and empirics, and legal tradition and demand for change, and negatively in terms of its foils—on the one hand, a new formalism that relies on rationalist presuppositions and, on the other hand, a postmodernism that eschews social science and pragmatist engagement. Part 4 assesses the strengths and challenges of legal realism. Its strengths are the opening of the black box of international lawmaking and practice, which frequently reveals structural tilts in favor of powerful actors, combined with a pragmatic drive for international law adaptation and reform. Its challenges, to which this section responds, are the risks of scientism and losing sight of what makes law distinctive—namely doctrine and legal normativity. Part 5 addresses the critical place of legal realism for understanding and responding to the purported crises of international law today.
The Development of Temporal Concepts: Linguistic Factors and Cognitive Processes

Temporal concepts are fundamental constructs of human cognition, but the trajectory of how these concepts emerge and develop is not clear. Evidence of children's temporal concept development comes from cognitive developmental and psycholinguistic studies. This paper reviews the linguistic factors (i.e., temporal language production and comprehension) and cognitive processes (i.e., temporal judgment and temporal reasoning) involved in children's temporal conceptualization. The relationship between children's ability to express time in language and the ability to reason about time, and the challenges and difficulties raised by the interaction between cognitive and linguistic components are discussed. Finally, we propose ways to reconcile controversies from different research perspectives and present several avenues for future research to better understand the development of temporal concepts.
Human Factors in Security

Physical security systems (PSS) and humans are inescapably tied in the current physical security paradigm. Yet, physical security system evaluations often end at the console that displays information to the human. That is, these evaluations do not account for human-in-the-loop factors that can greatly impact performance of the security system, even though methods for doing so are well-established. This paper highlights two examples of methods for evaluating the human component of the current physical security system. One of these methods is qualitative, focusing on the information the human needs to adequately monitor alarms on a physical site. The other of these methods objectively measures the impact of false alarm rates on threat detection. These types of human-centric evaluations are often treated as unnecessary or not cost effective under the belief that human cognition is straightforward and errors can be either trained away or mitigated with technology. These assumptions are not always correct, are often surprising, and can often only be identified with objective assessments of human-system performance. Thus, taking the time to perform human element evaluations can identify unintuitive human-system weaknesses and can provide significant cost savings in the form of mitigating vulnerabilities and reducing costly system patches or retrofits to correct an issue after the system has been deployed.
SAFETY PROFILES OF LEADLESS PACEMAKERS (MICRA) DEVICES: AN ANALYSIS OF THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION MANUFACTURER AND USER FACILITY DEVICE EXPERIENCE (MAUDE) DATABASE

The Micra Transcatheter Pacing System (TPS) (Medtronic Inc, Minneapolis) is the first and only leadless pacemaker approved for use in the U.S. We ought to assess post marketing adverse events related to the Micra devices using the manufacturer and user facility device experience (MAUDE) database.
Human Smuggling Under Risk: Evidence From the Mediterranean

Since 2007, the number of refugees fleeing conflict and violence has doubled to about 25 million. Mass migration has destabilized the European Union, lead to broad changes in national immigration policies, and triggered the resurgence of far right, xenophobic political parties. Yet little is known about how illicit human smuggling institutions may be driving migration and the subsequent political changes. We leverage granular data on migrant flows across the Mediterranean, coupled with information about sea routes, riots at port cities, and wave conditions, to conduct two studies. We find substantial evidence that migrant flows respond to political and environmental risks as well as a government-led counter-smuggling intervention. These findings clarify drivers of migration and suggest actions that can be taken to mitigate human smuggling.
Types of Substance Use and Punitive Parenting: A Preliminary Exploration

Very little is known about how type of substance use is comparatively related to a range of parenting behaviors. We conduct a preliminary examination to ascertain effects of substance type on physical abuse compared with other child discipline tactics with data from a telephone survey in 2009 of 3,023 parents in 50 cities in California. Kruskal-Wallis tests and hierarchical generalized linear models are conducted to determine the relationship between substance type and frequency of nonviolent discipline, corporal punishment, and child physical abuse. Type of drug used is differentially related to use of discipline strategies in multivariate models. Nonviolent discipline and corporal punishment show a dose-response relationship when a parent who reported using more substances also reported using both types of discipline more frequently. We suggest that addiction professionals should consider partnering with a specialist in child development or child welfare to conduct in-depth assessments of parenting strategies among the highest-risk groups, such as those with past-year alcohol use or a history of polysubstance use or methamphetamine use.
Highly Accurate Cancer Phenotype Prediction with AKLIMATE, a Stacked Kernel Learner Integrating Multimodal Genomic Data and Pathway Knowledge

Advancements in sequencing have led to the proliferation of multi-omic profiles of human cells under different conditions and perturbations. In addition, several databases have amassed information about pathways and gene "signatures" -- patterns of gene expression associated with specific cellular and phenotypic contexts. An important current challenge in systems biology is to leverage such knowledge about gene coordination to maximize the predictive power and generalization of models applied to high-throughput datasets. However, few such integrative approaches exist that also provide interpretable results quantifying the importance of individual genes and pathways to model accuracy. We introduce AKLIMATE, a first kernel-based stacked learner that seamlessly incorporates multi-omics feature data with prior information in the form of pathways for either regression or classification tasks. AKLIMATE uses a novel multiple-kernel learning framework where individual kernels capture the prediction propensities recorded in random forests, each built from a specific pathway gene set that integrates all omics data for its member genes. AKLIMATE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on diverse phenotype learning tasks, including predicting microsatellite instability in endometrial and colorectal cancer, survival in breast cancer, and cell line response to gene knockdowns. We show how AKLIMATE is able to connect feature data across data platforms through their common pathways to identify examples of several known and novel contributors of cancer and synthetic lethality.
Combining high temporal resolution whale distribution and vessel tracking data improves estimates of ship strike risk

Abstract When assessing harmful human-wildlife interactions, researchers often attempt to calculate the risk that an interaction will occur. However, these analyses often quantify risk based on temporally static or spatially coarse measures of species distributions and human activity. As a result, risk estimates often do not reflect the dynamic nature of animal movement and anthropogenic uses of the environment. To illustrate the impacts of various temporal resolutions of data, we present a case study of blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) ship strike risk in the U.S. Southern California Bight by combining predicted daily whale distributions with continuous vessel movement data. This represents the first effort to characterize blue whale ship strike risk by including the most recent high-resolution estimates of eastern Pacific blue whale distribution. We used these data to compare the ship strike risk models at varying temporal resolutions to address the effect of using coarser resolution input data. Our results show that it is critical to account for both dynamic patterns of human activity and species occurrences when assessing the risk of human-wildlife conflict. Analysis based on higher resolutions of potential interactions show greater variability in risk. Coarser resolution data mask variability in risk that may result from patchy conditions of blue whale habitat and/or variations in vessel traffic. We also demonstrate that coarser temporal resolutions lead to overestimations of risk. For highly mobile species subject to human-wildlife interactions such as blue whales, long-term environmental solutions depend on matching ecological data to human activity data at the most appropriate scale.
Association Between Health Care Utilization and Immigration Enforcement Events in San Francisco.

This cohort study explores whether an inclusive, local health care system could serve as a buffer against adverse effects on access to health care due to actions related to immigration status in patients who are likely undocumented.
Incidence (2008-2015) of post-traumatic headaches in United States military personnel

Objective: To conduct a descriptive transversal study to evaluate the incidence and demographic characteristics of post-traumatic headache using data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database....
Right Ventricular Response to Exercise in LVAD-Supported Patients vs. Heart Failure and Normal Subjects

Purpose Knowledge of right ventricular (RV) responses to exercise in LVAD-supported patients is limited. RV reserve might be impaired in LVAD patients. We sought to determine RV reserve during exercise in LVAD patients vs. HF and control subjects. Methods In 2016-20, 25 LVAD patients underwent upright ergometer CPET with first-pass radionuclide imaging (n=20), with (n=13) or without (n=12) invasive hemodynamic monitoring. LVAD patients were compared to HFrEF (EF Results Median RVEF was 41% (LVAD), 40% (HFrEF), 47% (HFpEF), 51% (normal) (p Conclusion At peak upright exercise, LVAD patients had poorer RV reserve than HF and normal subjects (lower RVSWI, higher RAP/PAWP ratio). Research aimed at RV optimization is needed to improve exercise tolerance in LVAD patients.
A paclitaxel-induced variant of hand-foot syndrome affecting dorsal surfaces.

Hand-foot syndrome (HFS), also known as palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia (PPE), is a localized cutaneous adverse event (CAE) associated with a variety of chemotherapeutic agents, such as doxorubicin, fluorouracil, cytarabine, and docetaxel. HFS is characterized by painful erythema, edema, and desquamation of the skin, most prominently involving the hands and soles of the feet. However, HFS primarily affecting the dorsal hands and feet (also called periarticular thenar erythema and onycholysis or PATEO) is known to occur as a class-based effect with the taxane chemotherapeutic drug class. A 58-year-old African American female with breast cancer began to develop a pruritic bilateral dorsal hand eruption four weeks into a weekly regimen of paclitaxel. On exam, desquamative erythematous and violaceous plaques on the dorsal hands were noted, which were debilitatingly painful and necessitated treatment interruption. Histopathologic sections showed a focal interface dermatitis with keratinocyte apoptosis, dyskeratosis, and atypical mitoses with abnormal maturation. Clinicopathologic correlation strongly supported a diagnosis of taxane-induced HFS. Increased awareness of this HFS variant that preferentially affects dorsal acral sites may improve early identification and/or prevention of this cutaneous adverse reaction. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Bridge Design between AXI Lite and AHB Bus Protocol

Architecture of bridge model between AXI Lite and AHB for this paper were simulated using Synopsys VCS and DC in Verilog HDL. Bridge structure mainly comprises of arbitration techniques, control signals, multiplexing techniques for writing data signals and Decoder for reading data section. In this work, bridge model between AHB and AXI lite was simulated and characterized. The proposed model of bridge design provides efficient communication between on chip bus protocols like AXI and AHB on chip in the era of deep sub-micron technology where channel side is reduced as much as 5 nm.
Food Insecurity and Vision Impairment among Adults Age 50 and Older in the United States.

Abstract Purpose : To test the hypothesis that food insecurity is associated with greater prevalence of vision impairment (VI). Design : Cross-sectional, nationally representative survey of US adults. Methods : Adults age ≥50 years were included. Food security category (full, marginal, low, or very low) was assessed by the US Household Food Security Survey Module. Objective presenting VI (PVI) and self-reported VI (SRVI) were assessed by examination and survey, respectively. Separate logistic regression models were constructed with food insecurity category as a predictor of PVI or SRVI. Models were adjusted for age, gender, race, education, income, cigarette use, alcohol use, BMI, and physical activity. Age stratified analyses (age 50-64 vs ≥65 years) were also conducted. Results : Participants (N=10078) had a mean age of 63.4 years. 89.9% were fully food secure, 7.2% had PVI, and 20.1% had SRVI. Compared to full food security, adjusting for sociodemographic confounders, those with marginal (aOR: 1.31; CI: 0.97-1.76), low (aOR: 1.61; CI: 1.17-2.23), and very low (aOR: 2.71; CI: 1.75, 4.20) food security had higher odds of PVI. Compared to full food security, those with marginal (aOR: 1.58; CI: 1.23-2.02), low (aOR: 1.46; CI: 1.11-1.92), and very low (aOR: 1.85; CI: 1.41-2.41) food security had higher odds of SRVI. The associations between food insecurity and PVI were greater in magnitude in those age ≥65 years, compared to those age 50-64 years. Conclusions : In this nationally representative sample of US adults age ≥50 years, increasingly severe food insecurity was associated with greater prevalence of VI in a dose response manner.
Thank You Walter for All You Have Taught Us

How many physicists do you know whose late-night reading includes 16th century French literature in the original? I know one; Walter Kohn! It was early in 1981, and my wife Ann and I had come to Santa Barbara, whereWalter had kindly permitted me to occupy a desk during my sabbatical at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB. I had been doing administrative work as a dean at Michigan State University, and I very much wanted to do physics again and learn what were the interesting research problems that people were studying. Walter and Mara were most hospitable, and when Walter learned that Ann taught medieval and post-medieval French literature at MSU their conversation turned to Montaigne and his work. As it happened, Ann had a second copy of Montaigne’s ESSAIS, and was quite happy to present the volumes to Walter as a gift. And we know that he read them in the weeks that followed.
Two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoretic fractionation.

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoretic fractionation technique. The development of a high-resolution, two-dimensional electrophoresis system provides a technique suitable for the analysis of the complex group of chromosomal proteins. The technique combines isoelectric focusing in the first dimension and sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) slab-gel electrophoresis in the second dimension. This chapter describes the two-dimensional electrophoresis procedure and some problems that are encountered with samples prepared from chromatin. The conditions for labeling cell protein to a high specific activity with radioactive methionine and the conditions for preparation of radioactive cell extracts are described. The limitation of the technique and difficulties in interpretation include (1) loss of basic proteins, (2) requirement for isotopically labeled proteins for high-sensitivity analysis, and (3) definition of a chromosomal protein.
Mining paraphrases from self-anchored web sentence fragments

Near-synonyms or paraphrases are beneficial in a variety of natural language and information retrieval applications, but so far their acquisition has been confined to clean, trustworthy collections of documents with explicit external attributes. When such attributes are available, such as similar time stamps associated to a pair of news articles, previous approaches rely on them as signals of potentially high content overlap between the articles, often embodied in sentences that are only slight, paraphrase-based variations of each other. This paper introduces a new unsupervised method for extracting paraphrases from an information source of completely different nature and scale, namely unstructured text across arbitrary Web textual documents. In this case, no useful external attributes are consistently available for all documents. Instead, the paper introduces linguistically-motivated text anchors, which are identified automatically within the documents. The anchors are instrumental in the derivation of paraphrases through lightweight pairwise alignment of Web sentence fragments. A large set of categorized names, acquired separately from Web documents, serves as a filtering mechanism for improving the quality of the paraphrases. A set of paraphrases extracted from about a billion Web documents is evaluated both manually and through its impact on a natural-language Web search application.
Welfare reform transitions : The effects of emotional well-being on job status in current TANF recipients

SUMMARY The research surrounding welfare-to-work programs suggests a number of potential factors that mediate welfare dependency including a person's emotional well-being. This study explored how emotional well-being measures of TANF recipients are related to current job type. Findings indicate perceived control self-efficacy and self-esteem were significantly correlated with jobs that paid more than minimum wage. This may suggest feelings of mastery and competence may be precursors to better paying jobs. Many other emotional well-being variables including depression, happiness, life satisfaction, and optmism were not associated with earning levels from employment. Policy recommendations are offered based on current and previous findings.
Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

A People, a race, a tribe, and a nation. With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina's Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship. Lowery argues that 'Indian' is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of 'Indian blood' and sometimes on the absence of 'black blood'. Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that knit together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation. However, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities.
MAGNETOAERODYNAMIC BOUNDARY LAYER FLOW WITH PRESSURE GRADIENT AND SEPARATION.

This study considers the large interaction parameter magnetoaerodynamic boundary layer associated with the free stream flow of a conducting fluid over an infinitely long circular insulator cylinder with the applied magnetic field normal to the distant free stream flow. The investigation is conducted in two parts; a theoretical solution of the associated boundary layer equations and a qualitative experimental investigation to allow visualization of flow separation caused by the magnetic field. The general integral formulation of Galerkin-Kantorovich-Dorodnitsyn is used to determine the boundary layer thickness, momentum thickness, displacement thickness, approximate separation point, and velocity profiles.
Head Motion Modeling for Human Behavior Analysis in Dyadic Interaction

This paper presents a computational study of head motion in human interaction, notably of its role in conveying interlocutors’ behavioral characteristics. Head motion is physically complex and carries rich information; current modeling approaches based on visual signals, however , are still limited in their ability to adequately capture these important properties. Guided by the methodology of kinesics , we propose a data-driven approach to identify typical head motion patterns. The approach follows the steps of first segmenting motion events, then parametrically representing the motion by linear predictive features, and finally generalizing the motion types using Gaussian mixture models. The proposed approach is experimentally validated using video recordings of communication sessions from real couples involved in a couples therapy study. In particular we use the head motion model to classify binarized expert judgments of the interactants’ specific behavioral characteristics where entrainment in head motion is hypothesized to play a role: Acceptance, Blame, Positive, and Negative behavior. We achieve accuracies in the range of 60% to 70% for the various experimental settings and conditions. In addition, we describe a measure of motion similarity between the interaction partners based on the proposed model. We show that the relative change of head motion similarity during the interaction significantly correlates with the expert judgments of the interactants’ behavioral characteristics. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed head motion model, and underscore the promise of analyzing human behavioral characteristics through signal processing methods.
Behavioural Equivalence Relations Induced by Programming Logics

In this paper we compare the descriptive power of three programming logics by studying the elementary equivalence relations which the logics induce on nondeterministic state-transition systems. In addition, we compare these relations with other natural state-equivalence relations for nondeterministic systems. We find that the notions of bisimilarity (Park [P], Ogden [O]) and observation equivalence (Milner [M]) are very strong equivalences compared with those induced by the logics. These three comprise regular trace logic (RTL), propositional dynamic logic (PDL), and Hennessy-Milner logic (HML). Regular trace logic is a new logic which can be used to give behavioural specifications for concurrent systems (e.g. Wolper [W], but with significant differences). It is a way of formalising those properties of programs which have been given informally in terms of path expressions [CH]. The model theory and axiomatics of this logic are interesting in their own right. Propositional dynamic logic is well-known; our treatment differs from the standard one only in that we regard the modalities as specifying intended behaviour instead of being programs. Hennessy-Milner logic is a simplified modal logic which those authors used as a characterisation of their notion of observation equivalence, which we call weak observation equivalence in this paper. We also include a brief treatment in this context of two other natural equivalences for nondeterministic systems: failure equivalence [HBR] and trace equivalence [H], both of which are weaker than the relations induced by the logics but can be characterised using appropriate logical subsets.
Using Joint Utilities of the Times to Response and Toxicity to Adaptively Optimize Schedule–Dose Regimes

Summary. A Bayesian two-stage phase I–II design is proposed for optimizing administration schedule and dose of an experimental agent based on the times to response and toxicity in the case where schedules are non-nested and qualitatively different. Sequentially adaptive decisions are based on the joint utility of the two event times. A utility function is constructed by partitioning the two-dimensional positive real quadrant of possible event time pairs into rectangles, eliciting a numerical utility for each rectangle, and fitting a smooth parametric function to the elicited values. We assume that each event time follows a gamma distribution with shape and scale parameters both modeled as functions of schedule and dose. A copula is assumed to obtain a bivariate distribution. To ensure an ethical trial, adaptive safety and efficacy acceptability conditions are imposed on the (schedule, dose) regimes. In stage 1 of the design, patients are randomized fairly among schedules and, within each schedule, a dose is chosen using a hybrid algorithm that either maximizes posterior mean utility or randomizes among acceptable doses. In stage 2, fair randomization among schedules is replaced by the hybrid algorithm. A modified version of this algorithm is used for nested schedules. Extensions of the model and utility function to accommodate death or discontinuation of follow up are described. The method is illustrated by an autologous stem cell transplantation trial in multiple myeloma, including a simulation study.
Genome‐Scale Mapping of DNase I Hypersensitivity

DNaseI-seq is a global and high-resolution method that uses the non-specific endonuclease DNaseI to map chromatin accessibility. These accessible regions, designated as DNaseI hypersensitive sites (DHSs), define the regulatory features, (eg. promoters, enhancers, insulators, locus control regions) of complex genomes. In this unit, we will describe systematic methods for nuclei isolation, digestion of nuclei with limiting concentrations of DNaseI and the biochemical fractionation of DNaseI hypersensitive sites in preparation for high-throughput sequencing. DNaseI-seq is an unbiased and robust method that is not predicated on an a priori understanding of regulatory patterns or chromatin features.
Absorptive capacity and strategic alliance in the supply chain context

This paper advances the understanding of absorptive capacity for supply chain participants that are focused symbiotically on acquisition and assimilation of external resources. The fundamental shared belief in the industry is that strategic alliances help firms improve their performance by providing those same firms with new capabilities used to compete and sustain themselves in the marketplace. Firms build absorptive capacity through investing in strategic partnerships, which extend their base of prior knowledge and allow them to identify, extract, exploit external sources of knowledge and apply them to commercial ends. This ability becomes important for the sustenance of competitive advantage. Thus, absorptive capacity moderates the effects of environmental changes on firms' competitive advantage thereby building superior market success. Subsequently, we reveal the effect of firm's absorptive capacity on supply chain alliances.
Chapter 2 Structure and Physical Properties of the Lipid Membrane

Publisher Summary The chapter discusses the information on the structure and the physical properties of the lipid membrane. A lipid bilayer consists of two apposed lipid monolayers with the hydrophilic lipid head groups facing the surrounding fluid spaces on each side of the bilayer and the hydrophobic lipid hydrocarbon chains localized in the bilayer center. Such an arrangement of lipid molecules represents an ideal functional and structural boundary for cells. The ion gradients across membranes, produced by membrane-embedded ion pumps, are critical to cell functions, including the production of ATP, nerve conduction, and muscle contraction. Moreover, the bilayer is a suitable environment for a variety of membrane-bound enzymes and recognition molecules. Biological membranes of eukaryotic cells contain three main types of lipids: phospholipids, glycolipids, and cholesterol. The zwitterionic phospholipids phosphatidylcholine (PC) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) are the most common membrane phospholipids, but the charged lipids phosphatidylglycerol (PG), phosphatidylserine (PS), and phosphatidylinositol (PI) are also present, and the charged phospholipid cardiolipin is a major phospholipid in the inner mitochondrial membrane. Because of the importance of the lipid bilayer as the structural core of biological membranes, there has been sustained effort to understand the structure and physical properties of phospholipid bilayers.
Biopsychosocial Approaches to Mental Disorders in the Elderly

The elderly population is increasing rapidly in all developed countries (WHO, 1992). In the United States the elderly population is about 30 million or 12% of the total population and should increase to over 60 million or 20% of the total population by 2030. Indeed the very old (age 85+) are increasing rapidly and by 2050 should constitute 5% of Americans. Not surprisingly, older Americans have more chronic medical problems with twice the hospitalization rate and use of prescription medications compared to younger individuals. The elderly utilize a disproportionate amount of the health care dollar and are a significant proportion of the patients seen in primary care clinics as well as in the hospitals. The elderly account for one third of health care dollars (US Senate 1987; Fogel et al. 1990).
A comparative study of proximal hindlimb flexion in horses: 5 versus 60 seconds

Summary Reasons for performing study: The flexion test is routinely used in lameness and prepurchase examinations. There is no accepted standard for duration of flexion or evidence that interpretation of results would differ with different durations of flexion. Hypothesis: There will be no difference in interpretation of proximal hindlimb flexion for 5 or 60 s. Methods: Video recordings of lameness examinations of 34 client-owned horses were performed that included: baseline lameness, proximal hindlimb flexion for 60 s, and flexion of the same limb for 5 s. Videos were edited to blind reviewers to the hypothesis being tested. The baseline lameness video from each horse was paired with each flexion to make 2 pairs of videos for each case. Twenty video pairs were repeated to assess intraobserver repeatability. Fifteen experienced equine clinicians were asked to review the baseline lameness video followed by the flexion test and grade the response to flexion as either positive or negative. Potential associations between the duration of flexion and the likelihood of a positive flexion test were evaluated using generalised linear mixed models. A kappa value was calculated to assess the degree of intraobserver agreement on the repeated videos. Significance level was set at P<0.05. Results: Proximal hindlimb flexion of 60 s was more likely to be called positive than flexion of 5 s (P<0.0001), with the likelihood of the same interpretation 74% of the time. The first flexion performed was more likely to be called positive than subsequent flexions (P = 0.029). Intra-assessor agreement averaged 75% with κ= 0.49. Conclusions: Proximal hindlimb flexion of a limb for 5 s does not yield the same result as flexing a limb for 60 s. Potential relevance: Shorter durations of flexion may be useful for clinicians that have good agreement with flexions of 5 and 60 s.
Characterizing Disk Failures with Quantified Disk Degradation Signatures: An Early Experience

With the advent of cloud computing and online services, large enterprises rely heavily on their data centers to serve end users. Among different server components, hard disk drives are known to contribute significantly to server failures. Disk failures as well as their impact on the performance of storage systems and operating costs are becoming an increasingly important concern for data center designers and operators. However, there is very little understanding on the characteristics of disk failures in data centers. Effective disk failure management and data recovery also requires a deep understanding of the nature of disk failures. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to provide a holistic and insightful view of disk failures. We study a large-scale storage system from a production data center. We categorize disk failures based on their distinctive manifestations and properties. Then we characterize the degradation of disk errors to failures by deriving the degradation signatures for each failure category. The influence of disk health attributes on failure degradation is also quantified. We discuss leveraging the derived degradation signatures to forecast disk failures even in their early stages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that shows how to discover the categories of disk failures and characterize their degradation processes on a production data center.
Image Normalization by Complex Moments

The role of moments in image normalization and invariant pattern recognition is addressed. The classical idea of the principal axes is analyzed and extended to a more general definition. The relationship between moment-based normalization, moment invariants, and circular harmonics is established. Invariance properties of moments, as opposed to their recognition properties, are identified using a new class of normalization procedures. The application of moment-based normalization in pattern recognition is demonstrated by experiment.
Improvement of the thermoelectric power factor through anisotropic growth of nanostructured PbSe thin films

Nanostructured PbSe films with different (200)/(111) grain size ratios were prepared by anisotropic growth on glass substrates. Although face centered cubic bulk PbSe is an isotropic material, the thermopower (S), electrical conductivity (σ) and hole mobility of the prepared nanostructured PbSe films show an obvious dependence on the anisotropic parameter, (200)/(111) grain size ratio. The thermoelectric power factor (S2σ) of the nanostructured films is improved with higher (200)/(111) grain size ratio. Temperature-dependent transport measurements suggest that grain boundary scattering dominates in these nanostructured films. Subtle changes in the microstructure are discussed in the light of the effect on grain boundary activation energy (barrier height). A 20% enhancement of the room temperature thermopower (S) at given carrier concentrations is demonstrated for the CBD-grown nanostructured PbSe films compared to single crystal bulk PbSe.
Surface segmentation of laser range images for automated facility mapping

A method for modeling a hazardous environment automatically, for real time task planning, using laser range images of multiple partial views of a single work space scene, is presented. Viewpoint invariant properties of differential- geometric shape descriptors like the mean curvature and the Gaussian curvature are utilized to classify a pre-smoothed laser range image into one of eight basic surface types. Connected components of these classified pixels, that satisfy specific planarity constraints, are clustered into planar regions. Selected image processing techniques are applied to the planar regions in order to extract their critical features, and to synthesize those polygons, with normals approximately orthogonal to the sensor view-axis. Detailed shape of the objects in the scene develop through view integration of multiple partial views of the objects in the scene.
PBW deformations of quantum symmetric algebras and their group extensions

We examine PBW deformations of finite group extensions of quantum symmetric algebras, in particular the quantum Drinfeld orbifold algebras defined by the first author. We give a homological interpretation, in terms of Gerstenhaber brackets, of the necessary and sufficient conditions on parameter functions to define a quantum Drinfeld orbifold algebra, thus clarifying the conditions. In case the acting group is trivial, we determine conditions under which such a PBW deformation is a generalized enveloping algebra of a color Lie algebra; our PBW deformations include these algebras as a special case.
Carbocyclic[g]indole Inhibitors of Human Nonpancreatic s-PLA2

A vinyl azide cyclization method was used to synthesize three different carbocyclic[g]indole scaffolds as inhibitors of human nonpancreatic secretory phospholipase A2. Each scaffold demonstrated potent enzyme activity in a chromogenic assay system, with select examples also demonstrating potent activity in a secondary DOC/PC assay. Compound 11, representative of the cyclopent[g]indole series, gave an IC50 of 10 nM for the inhibition of hnps-PLA2 in the chromogenic assay.
Mechanics of bilayer membranes

Abstract The general mechanics of elastic deformations in bilayer membranes is developed, resulting in three elastic constants characterizing a bilayer surface. The theoretical analysis is applied to bilayer systems containing organic solvents (referred to as “solvent bilayers”) and to planar bilayer membranes free of solvent (referred to as “nonsolvent bilayers”). The relationship between a normal surface traction (e.g. electrocompression resulting from transmembrane potential difference) and change in membrane thickness is investigated for the two types of bilayers.
NBTI in n-Type SOI Access FinFETs in SRAMs and Its Impact on Cell Stability and Performance

We identify the possibility of negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) in n-type silicon-on-insulator (SOI) FinFETs used as access transistors in SRAMs. We discuss that in the hold state of the SRAM cell, one of the access transistors may operate in the accumulation region and experience NBTI degradation. We compare NBTI in p- and n-type SOI FinFETs and show that NBTI in n-FinFETs affects only a part of the channel due to the presence of n+ source/drain regions. Worst case analysis of the joint effect of NBTI in access and pull-up FinFETs on cell stability and performance of 6T SRAMs is carried out and compared with the conventional approach of considering NBTI in pull-up FinFETs only.
On a Problem of Stochastic Differential Games

The process of bargaining between management and union during a strike is modelled by a nonlinear stochastic differential game. It is assumed that the two sides bargain in the mood of a cooperative game. A pair of Pareto-optimal strategies is obtained.
Fluoroquinolone-induced suicidal ideation

Fluoroquinolones are commonly prescribed antibiotics used to treat a variety of infections including respiratory infections, sexually transmitted diseases, urinary tract infections, and skin and soft tissue infections. A wide range of fluoroquinolone-induced CNS side-effects are reported in the literature [1,2]. In comparison with other systemic antibiotics, adverse CNS events were significantly higher with fluroquinolone use [2]. Studies of fluoroquinolones have noted CNS toxicity occur in approximately 1.0–4.4% of patients [3], but with serious side-effects occurring in b0.5% of patients [3–5]. Common side-effects are noted to be headache, dizziness and insomnia. Rare but more serious side-effects reported in the product literature include tremors, restlessness, anxiety, lightheadedness, confusion, hallucinations, paranoia, depression, nightmares, insomnia and suicidal thoughts or acts [6]. Case reports have documented fluoroquinoloneinduced psychosis [7–10], catatonia [11], seizures [12] and delirium [13]. Some differences have been noted within the safety profiles of individual fluoroquinolones, with rufloxacin and ofloxacin being more frequently associated with psychiatric symptoms [2,14]. Among the fluoroquinolones, levofloxacin has been considered to be a safe medication, with the overall incidence of drug-related CNS side-effects found in clinical trials to be b1% [15], and no reports in the literature of suicidal ideation. We present a case of a man with no past psychiatric history who presented with severe depression and suicidal ideation after taking levofloxacin, which then quickly remitted after discontinuing the medication.
Generalized Nash equilibrium problems for lower semi-continuous strategy maps

We consider a class of generalized Ky Fan inequalities (quasi-variational inequalities) in which the involved multi-valued mapping is lower semi-continuous. We present a relaxed version of the generalized Nash equilibrium problem involving strategy maps, which are only lower semi-continuous. This relaxed version may have no exact Nash equilibrium, but we prove that it has an e-Nash equilibrium for every e > 0. Easy examples of such problems show no existence of exact solutions, but existence of e-solutions for every e > 0. We give positive answers to two questions (in the compact case) raised in a recent paper of Cubiotti and Yao.
Desulfurispirillum indicum sp. nov., a selenate- and selenite-respiring bacterium isolated from an estuarine canal

Strain S5T, a novel bacterium that was isolated for its capability to respire selenate to elemental selenium, is described. In addition to selenate respiration, it was also capable of dissimilatory selenite, arsenate and nitrate reduction with short-chain organic acids such as pyruvate, lactate and acetate as the carbon sources and electron donors. The isolate was unable to grow fermentatively. Strain S5T was isolated from sediment of an estuarine canal in Chennai, India. Phylogenetic analysis of the 16S rRNA gene of this novel isolate revealed that it belonged to the family Chrysiogenaceae with sequence similarities of 92 and 98 %, respectively, with the type strains of Chrysiogenes arsenatis and Desulfurispirillum alkaliphilum, its closest known relatives. Strain S5T and D. alkaliphilum were closely related in terms of their 16S rRNA gene phylogeny; however, they varied greatly in their genomic DNA G+C content (56 mol% versus 45 mol%) and cellular fatty acid compositions, as well as in many metabolic capabilities. Strain S5T represents a novel species for which the name Desulfurispirillum indicum sp. nov. is proposed; the type strain is S5T (=DSM 22839T =ATCC BAA-1389T).
Separation of proteins on a polymeric fluorocarbon high-performance liquid chromatography column packing

Abstract A rigid, inert fluorocarbon resin has been evaluated as an high-performance liquid chromatography packing for the separation of proteins and peptides. Samples are separated with gradient elution of the mobile phase from aqueous buffer to acetonitrile. The selectivity and retention of the fluorocarbon resin packing for proteins are similar to that of alipathic hydrocarbon-bonded silica packings.
Simple And Combined Inventory Policies, Production to Stock or to Order?

In an inventory model three strategies can be applied, where two of the strategies are simple and one is a combination of the simple strategies. Conditions for preferences between the strategies are discussed. The problem in planning inventories and production is, to decide between production to stock, production to order and production partly to stock and partly to order.