cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Design and Fabrication of 1D CMUT Arrays for Dual-Mode Acoustic Angiography Applications - Preliminary Results

When microbubble contrast agents are excited at low frequencies (less than 5 MHz), they resonate and produce higher order harmonics due to their non-linear behavior. We propose a novel scheme with a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) array to receive high-frequency microbubble harmonics in collapse mode and to transmit a low-frequency high-pressure pulse by releasing the CMUT plate from collapse and pull it back to collapse again in the same transmit-receive cycle. By patterning and etching the substrate to create glass spacers in the device cavity we can operate the CMUT in collapse mode and receive high-frequency signals. Finite element model simulation results show that the fabricated devices can transmit at low frequency ( 15 MHz), which are verified by experimental results.
An Autocompensating Quantum Key Distribution System Using Polarization Splitting of Light

Quantum cryptographic key distribution (QKD) systems1 transmit cryptographic key data encoded in the quantum states of individual optical photons with security of the data guaranteed by the fundamental quantum properties of light, rather than by computational complexity or barriers to interception. Beamsplitter attacks are avoided by using single photons, while attempts to read and replace the photons with copies are thwarted by randomly switching between two non-orthogonal bases for the photon states. This so-called 4-state protocol1 forces an eavesdropper trying to read-and-replace photons to induce errors at a minimum rate of about 25%, which can be readily detected by the parties exchanging the key data. Several groups have performed QKD experiments that demonstrate its feasibility2.
Physicochemical basis of the digestion and absorption of triacylglycerol

Abstract: Dietary lipids and many lipophilic vitamins and drugs are transported in lymph by chylomicrons which are secreted by the small intestine. This chapter reviews our current understanding of the digestion, uptake, intracellular metabolism, and packaging of dietary lipids into chylomicrons. A number of digestive enzymes are involved in the digestion of triacylglycerol, phospholipids and cholesterol in the lumen. Unilamellar vesicles (liposomes) in the lumen and lipid transporters in the mucosal brush border membrane are both important carriers involved in the uptake of digested fatty acids, monoglycerol, and cholesterol. This chapter also provides detailed information regarding the roles which intracellular fatty acid transporters, cholesterol transporters, and sterol carrier proteins play in lipid metabolism in the small intestine. In addition, the present review illustrates the mechanism by which intracellular assembly and modification occur during the formation of chylomicrons and very low density lipoprotein. Furthermore, clinical disorders related to intestinal lipid transport are discussed. The authors’ basic and clinical insights into the processes of intestinal lipid absorption provide valuable information about effective, safe ways to prevent obesity and hyperlipidemia.
A Framework for Modelling Discrete Event Systems for Automated Manufacturing Processes

Publisher Summary This chapter describes a framework for modeling discrete event systems for automated manufacturing processes. A discrete event system can be formalized as finite-state automata in terms of input, output, and state spaces; a state transition function; and an output map. This line of approach does not lead to computationally attractive tools for state estimation or control because of the need for examining a large number of input sequence state-variable value pairs. By transforming a Boolean algebraic representation of discrete event system into a Boolean calculus framework and imposing suitable relations on the input, output, and state space, computational problems of a discrete event state estimation and control may be reduced. Given certain assumptions about the occurrence of exogenous events and the determinism of the system, resulting computational problems of state evolution are simplified.
A Modeling Language for Sets of Linked Models

Abstract A modeling language for solving sets of linked models, such as multi-region models, is described. This language, named LYNX, solves a set of linked models by an iterative method which is outlined in the first section. The syntax of LYNX is presented next. The individual models are specified, estimated and solved in a lower-level language, TROLL. LYNX must therefore be translated into statements of this lower-level language. Section III presents an interpreter from LYNX to TROLL.
Variational Consensus Monte Carlo

Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large datasets typical of modern machine learning. The recently proposed consensus Monte Carlo algorithm removes this limitation by partitioning the data and drawing samples conditional on each partition in parallel [22]. A fixed aggregation function then combines these samples, yielding approximate posterior samples. We introduce variational consensus Monte Carlo (VCMC), a variational Bayes algorithm that optimizes over aggregation functions to obtain samples from a distribution that better approximates the target. The resulting objective contains an intractable entropy term; we therefore derive a relaxation of the objective and show that the relaxed problem is blockwise concave under mild conditions. We illustrate the advantages of our algorithm on three inference tasks from the literature, demonstrating both the superior quality of the posterior approximation and the moderate overhead of the optimization step. Our algorithm achieves a relative error reduction (measured against serial MCMC) of up to 39% compared to consensus Monte Carlo on the task of estimating 300-dimensional probit regression parameter expectations; similarly, it achieves an error reduction of 92% on the task of estimating cluster comembership probabilities in a Gaussian mixture model with 8 components in 8 dimensions. Furthermore, these gains come at moderate cost compared to the runtime of serial MCMC—achieving near-ideal speedup in some instances.
Farmers’ Switchgrass Adoption Decision Under A Single-Procurer Market: An Agent Based Simulation Approach

Recently, a number of pilot and demonstration scale advanced biofuel facilities have been established, but commercial scale facilities are yet to become operational. To make informed decisions about this emerging industry, potential biorefinery entrepreneurs and regional policy makers need analysis of how farmers are willing to adopt these feedstocks and how will they switch land into bio-feedstock use to ensure a stable feedstock supply. This paper develops an agent-based simulation model to study farmers’ switchgrass adoption decisions over time within a specific agricultural region. We explicitly examine the effect of various contractual terms across market scenarios and consider the potential for contractual hold-ups. Results show that a contract with a payment of $175/acre plus $50/ton could make both biorefinery and farmer profitable during the simulation period. It is also shown that alfalfa, but not annual crops will be the mostly affected crop (replaced) by the introduction of switchgrass in the region of North Michigan.
Leverage Risk, Financial Crisis, and Stock Returns: A Comparison among Islamic, Conventional, and Socially Responsible Stocks

According to the financial press, firms with low leverage have lower distress risk due to their reduced exposure to the credit market, especially during credit crises. Compared to their conventional and socially responsible (SRI) counterparts, sharia compliant (SC) stocks are low-leverage stocks. Our hypothesis is that SC firms would be less sensitive to leverage risk and thus would be ideal for wealth preservation during declining market environment. We find that the leverage risk factor performs consistently across various categories of firms and its impact is more pronounced during the recent financial crisis. However, we also find that compared to the conventional stocks, SC stocks are also quite sensitive to the leverage factor. In contrast, the SRI class of stocks has the least sensitivity to leverage risk factor, suggesting they can be attractive for wealth preservation during credit crises.
Narcotweets: Social Media in Wartime

This paper describes how people living in armed-conflict environments use social media as a participatory news platform in lieu of damaged state and media apparatuses. We investigate this by analyzing the microblogging practices of Mexican citizens whose everyday life is affected by the Drug War. We provide a descriptive analysis of the phenomenon, combining content and quantitative Twitter data analyses. We focus on three interrelated phenomena: general participation patterns of ordinary citizens, the emergence and role of information curators, and the tension between governmental regulation and drug cartel intimidation. This study reveals the complex tensions among citizens, media actors, and the government in light of large-scale organized crime.
Ontology-Guided Change Detection to the Semantic Web Data

The Semantic Web is envisioned as the next generation web in which data instances are enriched with metadata defined in ontologies to describe the meaning of its instances. In this paper, we present an approach that exploits ontologies in guiding the change detection to their data instances. Inference rules are identified based on the semantic relationships among concepts, properties and instances as well as their change behaviors. Starting with changes to some seed instances, a reasoning engine is designed to fire the pre-defined rule set and act on ontologies to project some semantically associated concepts as target concepts. Certain instances of these target concepts are further selected as target instances, which have a high likelihood of having changed. Our approach is specifically oriented toward the Semantic Web, thus it has intelligence to exploit the semantic associations among data instances and make smart decisions.
Fixed-Length Lossy Compression in the Finite Blocklength Regime

This paper studies the minimum achievable source coding rate as a function of blocklength n and probability ϵ that the distortion exceeds a given level d . Tight general achievability and converse bounds are derived that hold at arbitrary fixed blocklength. For stationary memoryless sources with separable distortion, the minimum rate achievable is shown to be closely approximated by R(d) + √V(d)/(n) Q-1(ϵ), where R(d) is the rate-distortion function, V(d) is the rate dispersion, a characteristic of the source which measures its stochastic variability, and Q-1(·) is the inverse of the standard Gaussian complementary cumulative distribution function.
The Geopolitical Constitution: Executive Expediency and Executive Agreements

From the Founding through the Second World War well established understandings constrained executive power over foreign relations. Since the Cold War the executive has enlarged its foreign relations power. Courts and commentators justified and defended the growth of executive power in relation to two geopolitical phenomenon. First, the executive was better positioned to command the United States' wider global responsibilities. Second, the threat posed by Soviet expansionism and nuclear missile technology did not afford time for congressional deliberation. While scholars have debated whether the Cold War actually justified the extent of executive power, they have generally accepted as a self-evident proposition that the president's authority should expand in response to geopolitical circumstances. Professor Paul characterizes the proposition that presidential power expands relative to geopolitical exigencies as a "discourse of executive expediency." Paul traces the origin of this discourse to the domestic debates over the Bricker Amendment, McCarthysm and the War in Indochina and shows how courts used this justificatory rhetoric to construct a new method for interpreting the president's constitutional powers. Focusing particularly on the use of executive agreements, Paul argues that even in the absence of any external threat, courts willingly suspended critical judgments and embraced expediency discourse. In Paul's view, the expansion of the president's foreign relations power obstructed public accountability, facilitated interventionism, and corrupted the policy-making process. Paul challenges the continued reliance on Cold War discourse and offers an alternative approach to adjudicating questions on the reach of executive foreign relations power.
Rio Blanco: nuclear operations and chimney reentry

Rio Blanco was the third experiment in the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Plowshare Program to develop technology to stimulate gas production from geologic formations not conducive to production by conventional means. The project was sponsored by CER Geonuclear Corporation, with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory providing the explosives and several technical programs, such as spall measurement. Three nuclear explosives specifically designed for this application were detonated simultaneously in a minimum-diameter emplacement well using many commercially available but established-reliability components. The explosive system performed properly under extreme temperature and pressure conditions. Emplacement and stemming operations were designed with the aim of simplifying both the emplacement and reentry and fully containing the detonation products. An integrated command and control system was used with communication to all three explosives through a single coaxial cable. Reentry and the initial production testing are completed. To date 98 million standard ft$sup 3$ of chimney gas have been produced. (auth)
Approximate inference algorithms for Hybrid Bayesian Networks with discrete constraints

In this paper, we consider Hybrid Mixed Networks (HMN) which are Hybrid Bayesian Networks that allow discrete deterministic information to be modeled explicitly in the form of constraints. We present two approximate inference algorithms for HMNs that integrate and adjust well known algorithmic principles such as Generalized Belief Propagation, Rao-Blackwellised Importance Sampling and Constraint Propagation to address the complexity of modeling and reasoning in HMNs. We demonstrate the performance of our approximate inference algorithms on randomly generated HMNs.
A general model for online analytical processing of complex data

It has been well recognized that online analytical processing (OLAP) can provide important insights into huge archives of data. While the conventional OLAP model is capable of analyzing relational business data, it often cannot fit many kinds of complex data in emerging applications, such as bio-medical data, time series and semi-structured data.
Gas Phase Processes Affecting Galactic Evolution

Gas processes affecting star formation are reviewed with an emphasis on gravitational and magnetic instabilities as a source of turbulence. Gravitational instabilities are pervasive in a multi-phase medium, even for sub-threshold column densities, suggesting that only an ISM with a pure-warm phase can stop star formation. The instabilities generate turbulence, and this turbulence influences the structure and timing of star formation through its effect on the gas distribution and density. The final trigger for star formation is usually direct compression by another star or cluster. The star formation rate is apparently independent of the detailed mechanisms for star formation, and determined primarily by the total mass of gas in a dense form. If the density distribution function is a log-normal, as suggested by turbulence simulations, then this dense gas mass can be calculated and the star formation rate determined from first principles. The results suggest that only 10−4 of the ISM mass actively participates in the star formation process and that this fraction does so because its density is larger than 105 cm−3, at which point several key processes affecting dynamical equilibrium begin to break down.
High Temperature Turbine Design Considerations

THE effect of higher turbine inlet temperature on the performance of an aircraft gas turbine engine can be quite dramatic. It can be used to increase the exhaust velocity of a dry turbojet to providea higher specific thrust; to increase the bypass ratio of a turbofan engine to improve its propulsive efficiency; to optimize the thermodynamic cycle at a higher pressure ratio to improve its specific fuel consumption; to reduce the amount of afterburner fuel flow in an augmented turbojet to improve its specific fuel consumption, or to increase the work output of a turboshaft engine. If the thrust or power of the engine is held constant, a size, cost and/or weight reduction can result. If the size of the engine is held constant growth capability can be provided.
Exploring alternatives for representing and accessing design knowledge about enterprise integration

Enterprise integration refers to solutions that facilitate meaningful interactions among heterogeneous legacy applications. The scale, complexity and specificity of most enterprise integration efforts mean that design knowledge for enterprise integration has resisted codification. Important exceptions to this include: use of Business Process Models (BPM) to understand integration requirements; and Enterprise Integration Patterns (EIP), which present designers with abstract descriptions of recurring design tactics for integrating applications. The two, however, can be at odds. BPM encourages the control flow perspective; whereas EIP codifies an operational perspective. Mapping between the two to develop coherent solutions, therefore, tends to be problematic. To bridge the gap, we suggest an approach that builds on the theory of speech acts. We develop essential components of such an approach, including a re-representation of EIP as structures of speech acts, a characterization of tasks in BPM with action types, and a mapping between speech acts and action types. These components are accompanied by inference rules that produce a mapping between sets of tasks in a business process and structures of speech acts to allow reasoning on identification of appropriate EIPs for given set of tasks. We demonstrate usefulness of the proposed approach by application to industry cases.
Testimony of Burton C. English before the House Fossil and Synthetic Fuels subcommittee in Cedar Rapids on May 16, 1983

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Burton C. English. I am a staff economist with the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. My area of expertise is in agricultural economics and policy. I wish to thank Congressmen Tom Tauke and Billy Tauzin for inviting me here. My testimony here today will focus on how agriculture is affected by changes in natural gas prices. In addition, the testimony will focus on supply disruptions such as those that took place in the 1970s and their potential impacts on the nation's agricultural sector. First, however, I will discuss how natural gas is used in the production of crops and livestock.
Demand estimation for public goods: Distortionary taxation and other sources of bias

Abstract Sources of error in the estimation of demand for public goods are reviewed and summarized, and a new type of bias is identified and analyzed. This new bias arises when public goods are financed by distortionary taxation, instead of by distortionless taxes as is usually assumed. It is shown that failure to take account of tax distortions leads to a misspecification of the effective price of public goods, which biases the estimates of the price and income elasticities of demand. Sample calculations are presented in order to illustrate the potential magnitude of the errors involved.
Investigating the Potential Economic Impacts of Local Foods for Southeast Iowa

This research study investigated the economic impacts of local foods production for the southeast Iowa region of Davis, Jefferson, Keokuk, Mahaska, Van Buren, and Wapello Counties. Local educators and community leaders in the region selected a set of eight fruits and vegetables and a set of meat products that could be locally produced. This analysis contrasts the regional income potential of eight locally produced items with an expanded list of 22 items that might be considered.
Comparing the performance of natural, semi-natural, and non-natural locomotion techniques in virtual reality

One of the goals of much virtual reality (VR) research is to increase realism. In particular, many techniques for locomotion in VR attempt to approximate real-world walking. However, it is not yet fully understood how the design of more realistic locomotion techniques affects user task performance. We performed an experiment to compare a semi-natural locomotion technique (based on the Virtusphere device) with a traditional, non-natural technique (based on a game controller) and a fully natural technique (real walking). We found that the Virtusphere technique was significantly slower and less accurate than both of the other techniques. Based on this result and others in the literature, we speculate that locomotion techniques with moderate interaction fidelity will often have performance inferior to both high-fidelity techniques and well-designed low-fidelity techniques. We argue that our experimental results are an effect of interaction fidelity, and perform an analysis of the fidelity of the three locomotion techniques to support this argument.
Affine extractors over large fields with exponential error

We describe a construction of explicit affine extractors over large finite fields with exponentially small error and linear output length. Our construction relies on a deep theorem of Deligne giving tight estimates for exponential sums over smooth varieties in high dimensions.
Modeling of turbulent free shear flows

Abstract The modeling of turbulent free shear flows is crucial to the simulation of many aerospace applications, yet often receives less attention than the modeling of wall boundary layers. Thus, while turbulence model development in general has proceeded very slowly in the past twenty years, progress for free shear flows has been even more so. This paper highlights some of the fundamental issues in modeling free shear flows for propulsion applications, presents a review of past modeling efforts, and identifies areas where further research is needed. Among the topics discussed are differences between planar and axisymmetric flows, development versus self-similar regions, the effect of compressibility and the evolution of compressibility corrections, the effect of temperature on jets, and the significance of turbulent Prandtl and Schmidt numbers for reacting shear flows. Large-eddy simulation greatly reduces the amount of empiricism in the physical modeling, but is sensitive to a number of numerical issues. This paper includes an overview of the importance of numerical scheme, mesh resolution, boundary treatment, sub-grid modeling, and filtering in conducting a successful simulation.
Active Target defense differential game with a fast Defender

This paper addresses the active target defense differential game where an Attacker missile pursues a Target aircraft. A Defender missile is fired by the Target's wingman in order to intercept the Attacker before it reaches the aircraft. Thus, a team is formed by the Target and the Defender which cooperate to maximize the distance between the Target aircraft and the point where the Attacker missile is intercepted by the Defender missile, while the Attacker tries to minimize said distance. The results shown here extend previous work. We consider here the case where the Defender is faster than the Attacker. The solution to this differential game provides optimal heading angles for the Target and the Defender team to maximize the terminal separation between Target and Attacker and it also provides the optimal heading angle for the Attacker to minimize the said distance.
Is there a discrepancy between geological and geodetic slip rates along the San Andreas Fault System

Previous inversions for slip rate along the San Andreas Fault System (SAFS), based on elastic half-space models, show a discrepancy between the geologic and geodetic slip rates along a few major fault segments. In this study, we use an earthquake cycle model representing an elastic plate over a viscoelastic half-space to demonstrate that there is no significant discrepancy between long-term geologic and geodetic slip rates. The California statewide model includes 41 major fault segments having steady slip from the base of the locked zone to the base of the elastic plate and episodic shallow slip based on known historical ruptures and geologic recurrence intervals. The slip rates are constrained by 1981 secular velocity measurements from GPS and L-band intereferometric synthetic aperture radar. A model with a thick elastic layer (60 km) and half-space viscosity of 1019Pa s is preferred because it produces the smallest misfit to both the geologic and the geodetic data. We find that the geodetic slip rates from the thick plate model agrees to within the bounds of the geologic slip rates, while the rates from the elastic half-space model disagree on specific important fault segments such as the Mojave and the North Coast segment of the San Andreas Fault. The viscoelastic earthquake cycle models have generally higher slip rates than the half-space model because most of the faults along the SAFS are late in the earthquake cycle, so today they are moving slower than the long-term cycle-averaged velocity as governed by the viscoelastic relaxation process.
Inverse Probability Weighting in Survival Analysis

Survival studies usually incorporate high-dimensional covariate data, but interest may focus on low-dimensional characteristics of the survival distribution. Inverse probability weighted augmented estimation (AIPW) provides a robust approach, largely insensitive to model misspecification. The method was originally introduced to deal with coarsened (incompletely observed) data, and is discussed here with and without the assumption of random coarsening. Keywords: coarsening; missing data; dimensionality; Cox proportional hazards model; marginal survival function; competing risks; robustness; model misspecification
Population growth, factor accumulation, and productivity

In research on how population growth affects economic performance, some researchers stress that population growth reduces the natural resources and capital (physical and human) per worker while other researchers stress how greater population size and density affect productivity. Despite these differing theoretical predictions, the empirical literature hs focused mainly on the relationship between population growth and output per person (or crude proxies for factor accumulation). It has not decomposed the effect of population through factor accumulation and the effect through productivity. The author uses newly created cross-country, time-series data on physical capital stocks and the educational stock of the labor force to establish six findings: There is no correlation between the growth of capital per worker and population growth. The common practice of using investment rates as a proxy for capital stock growth rates is completely unjustified, as the two are uncorrelated across countries. There is either no correlation, or a weak positive correlation, between the growth of years of schooling per worker and the population growth rate. Enrollment rates are even worse as a crude proxy for the expansion of the educational capital stock, as the two are negatively correlated. There is no correlation, or a weak negative correlation, between measures of total factory productivity growth and population growth. Nearly all of the weak correlation between the growth of output per person and population growth is the result of shifts in participation in the labor force, not of changes in output per worker.
Industry/University Licensing: Characteristics, Concerns and Issues from the Perspective of the Buyer

The authors previously explored invention licensing from the university's perspective. In this paper we focus on the process from the perspective of firms activity engaged in licensing technology. A survey of industry licensing professionals addresses why some firms license technologies from universities and why others do not. The paper then considers the stage of development of university technologies, the characteristics of their licensing contracts, and sources of information about university technologies, all to better understand how the process works and what advantages and disadvantages it offers to all participants.
Chapter 8 – Hypothesis Testing

Publisher Summary This chapter introduces the statistical hypothesis testing, which is concerned with using data to test the plausibility of a specified hypothesis. Such test might reject the hypothesis that fewer than 44 percent of Midwestern lakes are afflicted by acid rain. The chapter introduces the concept of the p-value, which measures the degree of plausibility of the hypothesis after the data have been observed. A variety of hypothesis tests concerning the parameters of both one and two normal populations are considered. Hypothesis tests concerning Bernoulli and Poisson parameters are also presented. A statistical hypothesis is usually a statement about a set of parameters of a population distribution. It is called a hypothesis because it is not known whether or not it is true. A primary problem is to develop a procedure for determining whether or not the values of a random sample from this population are consistent with the hypothesis.
Representative Surface Profile Power Spectra from Capsules Used in Nova and Omega Implosion Experiments

Typical surface profile power spectra of capsules used in Nova and Omega implosion experiments are presented. All Nova capsules are essentially identical in size and composition; their differences reflect small shell-to-shell variations. Differences among the Omega capsule power spectra can be attributed to changes in material properties with doping and (very importantly) differences in processing experience. These capsule power spectra accurately reflect past and current production, but are only a starting point for future capabilities.
Multiple Listing Service Subsidies and Economic Efficiency

In an earlier article in this journal, Sefton and Yavas (1995) concluded that subsidizing a monopoly multiple listing service (MLS) can be efficient when the curvature of the representative consumer's demand function leads to overshifting. This paper extends their analysis to a multiple-consumer demand model. It shows that, for the generalized demand configuration considered here, in general, there is no Pareto superior MLS subsidy supportable by nondiscriminatory MLS consumer taxes when the Pareto ranking is imposed without the Hicks–Kaldor compensation principle.
Prevalence And Predictors Of Depression Among Participants With Glaucoma In A Nationally Representative Population Sample

Purpose To investigate the prevalence of and risk factors for depression among participants with glaucoma and the predictive value of glaucoma for depression. Design Cross-sectional study. Methods This study included 6760 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 2005 and 2008, aged ≥40 years, who reported a presence or absence of glaucoma. Demographic and disease-related information was obtained by interview. Self-reported measures of vision were ascertained via items from the Visual Function Questionnaire (VFQ-25). Participants underwent visual acuity examination, fundus photography, and visual field testing with screening frequency-doubling technology (FDT N-30-5). The main outcome was presence of depression, as determined by a score ≥10 on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Results Prevalence of depression among participants with and without glaucoma was 10.9% (SEM 2.2%) and 6.9% (SEM 0.62%), respectively. While the presence of glaucoma was significantly associated with depression after adjustment for demographic factors (OR 1.80, 95% CI 1.16–2.79), this association was not significant after adjustment for self-reported general health condition (OR 1.35, 95% CI 0.822–2.23). Among participants with glaucoma, objective measures of glaucoma severity were not significant predictors for depression. However, several self-reported measures of visual function were significantly associated with depression. Conclusions Glaucoma is a significant predictor of depression after adjustment for demographic factors and multiple comorbidities, but not after adjustment for self-reported general health condition. Among participants with glaucoma, self-reported measures of vision were significant risk factors for depression, whereas objective measures of vision were not.
The impact of EU accession on human capital formation : can migration fuel a brain gain ?

Can a brain drain be good for development? Many studies have established the theoretical possibility of such a brain gain. Yet it is only recently that the relaxation of data constraints has allowed for sound empirical assessments. In utilizing the dramatic policy change that accompanied European Union accession as a natural experiment, this paper is able to assuage fears of reverse causality between migration and human capital formation. The results highlight a significant impact of European Union accession on human capital formation indicating that the prospect of migration can indeed fuel skill formation even in the context of middle-income economies. And, if accompanied by policies to promote return migration, as well as a functioning credit market to enable private investment, international labor mobility could represent a powerful tool for growth.
Magnetic measurement, fiducialization and alignment of large dipoles for the MIT-Bates SHR

The South Hall Ring (SHR) lattice uses sixteen large dipoles originally designed for the Princeton-Pennsylvania Accelerator. These 3.6 m long, 30 ton dipoles have bend radii of over 9 meters and gaps of only 7.6 cm. The requirement that the four dipoles be powered in series, as well as other restrictions, resulted in magnetic and mechanical alignment tolerances which are very demanding for magnets of this size and shape. Two independent methods were used for measurement of the field integral along the design orbit. Field integrals were measured on all dipoles using a long coil excited by ramping the field. On four dipoles, the integrals were also measured using Hall probes moving along the design orbit. The techniques and results will be presented. The fiducialization of these dipoles was accomplished using precision-machined fixtures and the SLAC computer-aided Industrial Measurement System. Position corrections due to different measured effective lengths of these magnets will be discussed, and details of fiducialization and alignment will be presented. >
Two SVDs Suffice: Spectral decompositions for probabilistic topic modeling and latent Dirichlet allocation

The problem of topic modeling can be seen as a generalization of the clustering problem, in that it posits that observations are generated due to multiple latent factors (e.g., the words in each document are generated as a mixture of several active topics, as opposed to just one). This increased representational power comes at the cost of a more challenging unsupervised learning problem of estimating the topic probability vectors (the distributions over words for each topic), when only the words are observed and the corresponding topics are hidden. We provide a simple and efficient learning procedure that is guaranteed to recover the parameters for a wide class of mixture models, including the popular latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model. For LDA, the procedure correctly recovers both the topic probability vectors and the prior over the topics, using only trigram statistics (i.e., third order moments, which may be estimated with documents containing just three words). The method, termed Excess Correlation Analysis (ECA), is based on a spectral decomposition of low order moments (third and fourth order) via two singular value decompositions (SVDs). Moreover, the algorithm is scalable since the SVD operations are carried out on $k\times k$ matrices, where $k$ is the number of latent factors (e.g. the number of topics), rather than in the $d$-dimensional observed space (typically $d \gg k$).
Anti-coordination Games and Stable Graph Colorings

Motivated by understanding non-strict and strict pure strategy equilibria in network anti-coordination games, we define notions of stable and, respectively, strictly stable colorings in graphs. We characterize the cases when such colorings exist and when the decision problem is NP-hard. These correspond to finding pure strategy equilibria in the anti-coordination games, whose price of anarchy we also analyze. We further consider the directed case, a generalization that captures both coordination and anti-coordination. We prove the decision problem for non-strict equilibria in directed graphs is NP-hard. Our notions also have multiple connections to other combinatorial questions, and our results resolve some open problems in these areas, most notably the complexity of the strictly unfriendly partition problem.
AND/OR Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams (AOMDDs) for weighted graphical models

Compiling graphical models has recently been under intense investigation, especially for probabilistic modeling and processing. We present here a novel data structure for compiling weighted graphical models (in particular, probabilistic models), called AND/OR Multi-Valued Decision Diagram (AOMDD). This is a generalization of our previous work on constraint networks, to weighted models. The AOMDD is based on the frameworks of AND/OR search spaces for graphical models, and Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDD). The AOMDD is a canonical representation of a graphical model, and its size and compilation time are bounded exponentially by the treewidth of the graph, rather than pathwidth as is known for OBDDs. We discuss a Variable Elimination schedule for compilation, and present the general APPLY algorithm that combines two weighted AOMDDs, and also present a search based method for compilation method. The preliminary experimental evaluation is quite encouraging, showing the potential of the AOMDD data structure.
4/spl times/4/spl times/2 neural network design using modular neural chips with on-chip learning

Describes a feedforward artificial neural network with learning capability in a modular design. The design uses a modified error backpropagation continuous-time learning rule. The modular design is implemented onto (identical) tiny chips where each chip implements a 4-input, 2-output modular network. The modular chips can then be cascaded in order to realize a large network by adding modular chips vertically and horizontally. The authors report on test results that demonstrate the successful operation of the chip and a constructed 4/spl times/4/spl times/2 neural network using three module chips. >
The cAMP Transduction Cascade Mediates the Prostaglandin E2 Enhancement of the Capsaicin-Elicited Current in Rat Sensory Neurons: Whole-Cell and Single-Channel Studies

Treatment with proinflammatory prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) produced a transient sensitization of whole-cell currents elicited by the vanilloid capsaicin. The intracellular signaling pathways that mediate the initiation of this PGE2-induced sensitization of the capsaicin-elicited current in rat sensory neurons are not well established. Treatment with either forskolin (100 nM to 10 microM) or membrane-permeant analogs of cAMP, 8-bromo-cAMP (8-Br-cAMP) and chlorphenylthio-cAMP (10 microM to 1 mM), transiently sensitized neuronal responses elicited by capsaicin in a manner analogous to that produced by PGE2. The duration of sensitization was lengthened with increasing concentrations of forskolin; however, higher concentrations of 8-Br-cAMP or chlorphenylthio-cAMP led to a shortening of sensitization. The inactive analog of forskolin, dideoxy-forskolin, had no effect on capsaicin responses. Inclusion of the inhibitor of protein kinase A in the recording pipette completely suppressed the sensitization produced by PGE2 or forskolin. In recordings from membrane patches in the cell-attached configuration, the bath application of capsaicin evoked single-channel currents in which the level of channel activity was concentration-dependent and had an EC50 of 1.4 microM. These single-channel currents evoked by capsaicin exhibited an apparent reversal potential of +4 mV and were blocked by the capsaicin antagonist capsazepine. Exposure of the sensory neuron to either PGE2 or forskolin produced a large and transient increase in the mean channel activity (NPo) elicited by capsaicin, although the unitary conductance remained unaltered. Taken together, these observations suggest that modulation of the capsaicin-gated channel by the cAMP-protein kinase A signaling pathway enhanced the gating of these channels and consequently resulted in the sensitization of the whole-cell currents.
Milk Pricing Problems and Solutions: An Essay on the Need for New State Level Milk Price Regulation in the Northeast, with Special Attention to Connecticut Substitute Bill No. 5642

Before one can talk about solutions to the “milk pricing problem” one needs to identify its many dimensions and then target solutions to specific aspects of the problem. Is the problem one of supply outpacing demand on the national level? Is it the importation of milk components and products from other countries? Is it the importation of dairy replacement heifers from Canada? For the Northeast is it the loss of the class 1 fluid differential relative to the upper Midwest in the federal milk market orders? Does pooling of milk from distant producers on the Northeast market order lower Northeast farm –gate prices? Does depooling in other market orders, when manufacturing milk prices rapidly increase, disadvantage the Northeast? Is the problem an increasing imbalance of power between Northeast dairy farmers who bargain via their cooperatives with processors and retailers in milk marketing channels? Specifically, is it an increase in market pricing power by retailers that results in higher consumer prices and lower price premiums for farmers?
Audio-visual speech enhancement with AVCDCN (audio-visual codebook dependent cepstral normalization)

We introduce a non-linear enhancement technique called audio-visual codebook dependent cepstral normalization (AVCDCN) and we consider its use with both audio-only and audio-visual speech recognition. AVCDCN is inspired from CDCN, an audio-only enhancement technique that approximates the nonlinear effect of noise on speech with a piecewise constant function. Our experiments show that the use of visual information in AVCDCN allows significant performance gains over CDCN.
Sinai Billiards, Ruelle Zeta-functions and Ruelle Resonances: Microwave Experiments

We discuss the impact of recent developments in the theory of chaotic dynamical systems, particularly the results of Sinai and Ruelle, on microwave experiments designed to study quantum chaos. The properties of closed Sinai billiard microwave cavities are discussed in terms of universal predictions from random matrix theory, as well as periodic orbit contributions which manifest as “scars” in eigenfunctions. The semiclassical and classical Ruelle zeta-functions lead to quantum and classical resonances, both of which are observed in microwave experiments on n-disk hyperbolic billiards.
Games with Incomplete Awareness

A new game form termed games with incomplete awareness is defined. This game form captures unawareness as to other players' actions, as well as unawareness of the existence of some players. It also captures interactive unawareness: the awareness of players as to what other players are aware of, and so on. An extended Nash equilibrium solution is defined and studied in these games.
Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising

Casual empiricism suggests that deceptive advertising about product quality is prevalent, and several classes of theories explore its causes and consequences. We provide unusually sharp empirical evidence on its extent, mechanics, and dynamics. Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall than comparable government sources. The difference is more pronounced on weekends, despite third-party evidence that snowfall is uniform throughout the week—as one would expect given plausibly greater returns to exaggeration on weekends. Exaggeration is greater for resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from it: those with expert terrain and those not offering money back guarantees. (JEL D83, L15, L83, M37, Z31)
Living With Lambda

The cosmological constant is an energy associated with the vacuum, that is, with 'empty space'. The possibility of a nonzero cosmological constant Λ has been entertained several times in the past for theoretical and observational reasons (early work includes e.g. Einstein 1917; Petrosian, Salpeter and Szekeres, 1967; Gunn and Tinsley, 1975; a popularized description of the history is found in Goldsmith, 1997). Recent supernovae results (Perlmutter et al., 1998; Ries et al., 1998) have made a strong case for a nonzero and possibly quite large cosmological constant. Their results have encouraged increased interest in the properties of a universe with nonzero cosmological constant. Several other observations of various cosmological phenomena are also planned or underway which will further constrain the range of allowed values for the cosmological constant. Given the expected quality and quantity of upcoming data, there is reason to believe that we will know soon whether or not we need to learn to 'live with lambda'. The purpose of this review is to provide a short pedagogical introduction to the consequences of a nonzero cosmological constant. Basic terms are defined in Section 1, where the equations for the time evolution of the scale factor of the universe (defined below) are given. Section 2 indicates the current theoretically expected values of the cosmological constant, introducing the theoretical 'cosmological constant problem'. Some suggestions to explain a cosmological constant consistent with current measurements are listed. In Section 3, the time evolution of the scale factor of the universe (from Section 1) is used to show how the age of the universe, the path length travelled by light, and other properties depending on the spacetime geometry vary when the cosmological constant is present. Section 4 outlines some effects of a nonzero cosmological constant on structure formation. Section 5 summarizes how some recent and upcoming measurements may constrain Λ. Several observations (including those of the supernovae) are described which have provided constraints or show promise for the future. The quality of those observations are improving rapidly. However, the current theoretical explanations for a nonzero cosmological constant consistent with the data, some of which are listed in Section 2, are not compelling. Section 6 briefly describes some suggested theoretical alternatives to a nonzero cosmological constant. Section 7 contains a description of the future of the universe if the cosmological constant is nonzero and then provides a summary. Earlier reviews, in particular the one by Carroll, Press and Turner (1992, hereafter denoted by CPT) are highly recommended for some of the in depth results and more references, as well as the books by Kolb and Turner (1990), Peebles (1993) and Padmanabhan (1993) for the basic cosmology. The referencing is indicative rather than comprehensive. For more extensive referencing consult the more in depth reviews, textbooks and articles cited.