cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Mechanisms through Which an Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality traits from an experimental evaluation of the influential Perry Preschool program to analyze the channels through which the program boosted both male and female participant outcomes. Experimentally induced changes in personality traits explain a sizable portion of adult treatment effects.
Varieties of Prison Voyeurism An Analytic/Interpretive Framework

The public learns, experiences, and knows about jails, prisons, and the people who live and work there through a variety of mediums and/or methods. Not all situations are equal in terms of the cost to the individual, the reality of the experience, and the effect it may have on the participant. In an effort to better contextualize this process, this article develops a typology to better understand these methods of participation. Ten methods by which people can experience correctional facilities include, on one end of the spectrum, the highly personal experience of incarceration, and on the other end, attempts by individuals to understand and/or experience corrections without intimately engaging with the subject matter. This latter method, termed prison voyeurism, fails to contextualize the myths, misrepresentations, and stereotypes of prison life rather than clarifying or explaining them. The author develops a framework to interpret the jail and prison experience. Examples are drawn primarily from the Amer...
Blast Effects Resulting from Fragmentation of an Atlas Missile

Physical and biological blast effects resulting from explosive fragmentation of a gaseous nitrogen flight-pressurized Atlas missile without propellants are thoroughly reviewed with respect to personnel and equipment protection at Atlas launch sites. Results indicated that a human would be reasonably safe at 90 ft in a partially enclosed shelter. Resource data involving human tolerances to blast effects, theoretical blast predictions, and fragmentation criteria for Atlas cylindrical pressure-stabilized tank skins are presented. Primary attention is given to an Atlas destruct experiment. Empirical blast pressure, acceleration, fragmentation, and biomedical data are discussed and evaluated. Primary, secondary, and tertiary biological blast injuries to humans are determined from empirical data and guinea pigs exposed to the air blast. Ground overpressure levels experienced at 30 ft were appreciably below the threshold of vital organ damage. Propelled elements were observed as far as 400 ft. Acceleration effects on a man at 90 ft were insufficient to cause injury.
Two Step CCA: A new spectral method for estimating vector models of words

Unlabeled data is often used to learn representations which can be used to supplement baseline features in a supervised learner. For example, for text applications where the words lie in a very high dimensional space (the size of the vocabulary), one can learn a low rank "dictionary" by an eigendecomposition of the word co-occurrence matrix (e.g. using PCA or CCA). In this paper, we present a new spectral method based on CCA to learn an eigenword dictionary. Our improved procedure computes two set of CCAs, the first one between the left and right contexts of the given word and the second one between the projections resulting from this CCA and the word itself. We prove theoretically that this two-step procedure has lower sample complexity than the simple single step procedure and also illustrate the empirical efficacy of our approach and the richness of representations learned by our Two Step CCA (TSCCA) procedure on the tasks of POS tagging and sentiment classification.
Automatic grasp planning in the presence of uncertainty

This paper presents an algorithm for automatic planning of robot grasping motions that are insensitive to bounded uncer tainties in the object's location. The algorithm plans parallel- jaw grasping motions for arbitrary two-dimensional polygo nal objects, which need not be of uniform density. Grasping motions are viewed as parameterized operations, where the parameter values that describe an individual operation define an operation space of all possible operations. By combining an analysis of object geometry and the physics of friction, the planning algorithm divides the operation space into regions, where all operations within a given region produce the same final grasping configuration. Task uncertainties are then included by shrinking these regions by the amount of uncer tainty present. The smaller regions that remain after shrink ing indicate all those operations that will successfully result in a given grasping configuration, even if the worst-case combination of errors occurs.Moreover, the grasping ...
Experimental comparisons among various models for the reverse annealing of the effective concentration of ionized space charges (N/sub eff/) of neutron irradiated silicon detectors

Experimental data of the reverse annealing of the effective concentration of ionized space charges (N/sub eff/, also called effective doping or impurity concentration) of neutron irradiated high resistivity silicon detectors has been compared with various models. The models include the compensation model (first order), the cluster model of the first order, the neutral to acceptor model (first order), and the cluster model of the second order. Detectors irradiated to various neutron fluences have been annealed at 80/spl deg/C for up to 17 hours to reach the saturation of the first apparent stage of the N/sub eff/ reverse anneal, which is equivalent of about one year of room temperature (RT) anneal. The annealing time constant, defined as the time at half saturation /spl tau//sub 1/2/, has been found to be virtually a constant (/spl sim/140 minutes/spl plusmn/l4%) for detectors irradiated to fluences ranging from 8.2/spl times/10/sup 12/ n/cm/sup 2/ to 3.2/spl times/10/sup 13/ n/cm/sup 2/, which is the distinguishing characteristic of the first order process. The least square fit of the data to the first order models has shown a time constant of 221.7 minutes with a 14% error and that to the second order model has shown a k constant of 7.3/spl times/10/sup -5/ s/sup -1/ with a 37% error. The best fit, however, is a first order fit with two time constants: a short one (/spl sim/44 minutes/spl plusmn/25%) with a small amplitude and a longer one (/spl sim/290 minutes/spl plusmn/l2%) with an almost five times larger amplitude, suggesting that even for the apparent first stage of the N/sub eff/ reverse anneal, there may be two stages. There is also evidence that even after the apparent first stage anneal, there is at least another stage which shows up in higher temperature annealing (150/spl deg/C). >
Change or More of The Same? Evaluating Racial Attitudes in the Obama Era

A number of political commentators and social scientists have speculated about the implications of the election of Barack Obama for race relations. Some of the more optimistic have suggested that the 2008 election demonstrated that Whites' racial attitudes have undergone a fundamental transformation. In this article, I seek to determine whether the putative transformation of Whites' racial attitudes has extended to levels of support for policies designed to alleviate racial inequality, the role of racial prejudice in shaping these policy preferences and whether or not prejudice influenced the presidential vote choice in 2008. Much of the analyses in this article rely upon comparisons between the 1988 election, the last time an African American candidate achieved some success in the Democratic presidential primaries, and the 2008 election utilizing survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES). In general, I find scant evidence of a decline in the racial divide. Blacks and Whites remain as far apart on racial policy matters in 2008 as in 1988. Second, younger cohorts of Whites are no more racially liberal in 2008 than they were in 1988. Third, the racial divide is only partially mitigated among Obama supporters. Fourth, in analysis of Whites' racial policy preferences in 2008, I find that anti-Black stereotypes and indifference to Black suffering are among the strongest correlates of these opinions. Finally, I find that these same factors also contribute substantially to opposition to Obama in the 2008 election.
Lithium catalyzed hetero Diels-Alder reactions cyclocondensation of N-protected α-amino aldehydes with 1-methoxy-3-tert-butyldimethylsilyloxybutadiene in the presence of lithium perchlorate

Abstract Lithium perchlorate in diethyl ether catalyzes the cyclocondensation of N-BOC protected α-amino aldehydes with 1-methoxy-3- tert -butyldimethylsilyloxybutadiene providing, after exposure to acid, dihydropyrones possessing the threo configuration.
Statistical bin limits: an approach to wafer dispositioning in IC fabrication

The methodology of selecting and implementing statistical bin limits (SBLs) for wafer-level testing is discussed. Improvements in the manufacturing flow are discussed. It is found that SBLs can detect process shifts, reject misprocessed material, aid in the streamlining of packaged units, and increase the cost effectiveness of these units. It is shown that the methodology does not add to the complexity of the sort flow. Implementation and maintenance are straightforward and simple. >
Eisenstein deformation rings

We prove $R = {\mathbf T}$ theorems for certain reducible residual Galois representations. We answer in the positive a question of Gross and Lubin on whether certain Hecke algebras ${\mathbf T}$ are discrete valuation rings. In order to prove these results we determine (using the theory of Breuil modules) when two finite flat group schemes ${\mathscr G}$ and ${\mathscr H}$ of order p over an arbitrarily tamely ramified discrete valuation ring admit an extension not killed by p .
High-frequency solid-state electronic devices

Starting with exploratory work in the 1930s and development work in the 1940s a variety of two-terminal and three-terminal solid-state device structures have been proposed, fabricated, and developed. This work parallels the development effort on vacuum electronic devices, and the two technologies share many applications. The solid-state and vacuum electronic devices work in tandem to enable numerous commercial and military systems. Solid-state device development is closely linked to semiconductor materials growth and processing technology, and advances such as the introduction of heterojunction growth technology, permit complex multiple layer device structures to be fabricated and optimized for maximized device performance. This work has been very successful and a variety of high-performance diodes and transistors are now available for use from UHF into the millimeter-wave spectrum, approaching terahertz frequencies. The development, operating principles, and state-of-the-art of various diode and transistor structures are reviewed.
Asymmetric epoxidation of cis-β-methylstyrenes catalyzed by N-aryl substituted oxazolidinone-containing ketones. A beneficial substituent effect

Asymmetric epoxidation of substituted cis-β-methylstyrenes using N-aryl substituted oxazolidinone-containing ketones as catalysts shows that substituents on the phenyl group of the olefin have significant positive effects on the enantioselectivity of the epoxidation, indicating a beneficial interaction between the phenyl group of the olefin and the phenyl group of the ketone catalyst.
Colloidal synthesis of non-equilibrium wurtzite-type MnSe

Solution-dispersible nanoparticles of γ-MnSe are prepared from MnCl2, Se powder, and a 1:1 mixture of oleic acid and tetraethylene glycol (Ar, 235 °C, 4 h).
Online Discrete Optimization in Social Networks in the Presence of Knightian Uncertainty

We study a model of collective real-time decision making (or learning) in a social network operating in an uncertain environment, for which no a priori probabilistic model is available. Instead, the environment’s impact on the agents in the network is seen through a sequence of cost functions, revealed to the agents in a causal manner only after all the relevant actions are taken. There are two kinds of costs: individual costs incurred by each agent and local-interaction costs incurred by each agent and its neighbors in the social network. Moreover, agents have inertia: each agent has a default mixed strategy that stays fixed regardless of the state of the environment, and must expend effort to deviate from this strategy in order to respond to cost signals coming from the environment. We construct a decentralized strategy, wherein each agent selects its action based only on the costs directly affecting it and on the decisions made by its neighbors in the network. In this setting, we quantify social learni...
An elegant algorithm for the construction of suffix arrays

The suffix array is a data structure that finds numerous applications in string processing problems for both linguistic texts and biological data. It has been introduced as a memory efficient alternative for suffix trees. The suffix array consists of the sorted suffixes of a string. There are several linear time suffix array construction algorithms (SACAs) known in the literature. However, one of the fastest algorithms in practice has a worst case run time of O(n^2). The problem of designing practically and theoretically efficient techniques remains open. In this paper we present an elegant algorithm for suffix array construction which takes linear time with high probability; the probability is on the space of all possible inputs. Our algorithm is one of the simplest of the known SACAs and it opens up a new dimension of suffix array construction that has not been explored until now. Our algorithm is easily parallelizable. We offer parallel implementations on various parallel models of computing. We prove a lemma on the @?-mers of a random string which might find independent applications. We also present another algorithm that utilizes the above algorithm. This algorithm is called RadixSA and has a worst case run time of O(nlogn). RadixSA introduces an idea that may find independent applications as a speedup technique for other SACAs. An empirical comparison of RadixSA with other algorithms on various datasets reveals that our algorithm is one of the fastest algorithms to date. The C++ source code is freely available at http://www.engr.uconn.edu/~man09004/radixSA.zip.
Effective Schools: Teacher Hiring, Assignment, Development, and Retention.

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article the authors use value added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and retention of its teachers. The results reveal four key findings. First, more effective schools are able to attract and hire more effective teachers from other schools when vacancies arise. Second, more effective schools assign novice teachers to students in a more equitable fashion. Third, teacher's who work in schools that were more effective at raising achievement in a prior period improve more rapidly in a subsequent period than do those in less effective schools. Finally, more effective schools are better able to retain higher-quality teachers. The results point to the importance of personnel and, perhaps, school personnel practices for improving student outcomes.
Railroads and the Brazilian Economy Before 1914

Although the railroad was the most celebrated technological innovation of the nineteenth century, its impact varied considerably depending on the setting into which it was introduced. For Brazil, historians often claim that railroad development intensified dependence on foreign product and capital markets in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to this scenario, railroad enterprises, intended mainly to carry plantation crops to port, benefited foreign investors and export agriculture at the expense of the economy as a whole. Based on an extensive array of new evidence and cliometric methods, this study's findings are sharply at odds with standing conclusions about the impact of nineteenth-century railroad development in Brazil. It examines modern Brazil's first wave of transport improvements, which began with the earliest construction of railroads in the 1850s and continued until motor vehicles began to supplant steam locomotion after 1900. The railroad held profound consequences for the economy, but not those heretofore stressed in the historiography. Relying heavily on risk-reducing subsidies, foreign capital, and government regulation, Brazil captured substantial gains from the iron horse. Indeed, the railroad proved indispensable to Brazil's emergence around 1900 as one of the fastest growing economies in the Western world. This study addresses three main questions. First, what direct effects did the railroad have on the economy? Second, what difference did it make that railroads were often owned by foreigners and regulated by the government? And third, what broader set of outcomes might be attributed to the course of railroad development in Brazil? In posing answers to these questions I drew on a variety of sources, including the operating and financial reports of railroad compames archived in London and throughout Brazil, the contemporary commercial press, and railroad censuses and studies of Brazilian government ministries from the 1850s through 1913. These materials permitted the construction of original data sets on pre-rail transport costs, government
What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint

The flag is now a common mechanism for reporting offensive content to an online platform, and is used widely across most popular social media sites. It serves both as a solution to the problem of curating massive collections of user-generated content and as a rhetorical justification for platform owners when they decide to remove content. Flags are becoming a ubiquitous mechanism of governance—yet their meaning is anything but straightforward. In practice, the interactions between users, flags, algorithms, content moderators, and platforms are complex and highly strategic. Significantly, flags are asked to bear a great deal of weight, arbitrating both the relationship between users and platforms, and the negotiation around contentious public issues. In this essay, we unpack the working of the flag, consider alternatives that give greater emphasis to public deliberation, and consider the implications for online public discourse of this now commonplace yet rarely studied sociotechnical mechanism.
Aqueous RAFT polymerization: recent developments in synthesis of functional water-soluble (co)polymers with controlled structures.

Reversible addition−fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) polymerization has been the focus of intensive research over the past few years since this methodology allows the synthetic tailoring of macromolecules with complex architectures including block, graft, comb, and star structures with predetermined molecular weight, terminal functionality, and narrow molecular weight distribution. In this paper we recount significant milestones in achieving controlled free radical homopolymerization and block copolymerization of water-soluble and amphiphilic monomers including nonionic, cationic, anionic, and zwitterionic species. It is shown that under aqueous conditions, control of homopolymerization and further blocking to extend the molecular weight or to produce precisely structured block copolymers require not only careful selection of reagents (initiator, chain transfer agent, and monomer) but also regulation or elimination of hydrolysis of the ω-terminal thiocarbonylthio functionality. The technological potent...
“The Motherhood Wage Gap for Women in the United States: The Importance of College and Fertility Delay”

One of the stylized facts from the past 30 years has been the declining rate of first births before age 30 for all women and the increase rate of first births after age 30 among women with four-year college degrees (Steven P. Martin, Demography, 37(4), 523–533, 2000). What are some of the factors behind women’s decision to postpone their childbearing? We hypothesize that the wage difference often observed between like-educated mothers and non-mothers (Jane Waldfogel, Journal of Labor Economics, 16, 505–545, 1998a; Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(1) 137–156, 1998b) may be affected by the postponement of childbearing until after careers are fully established. Hence, we focus on college-educated women because they are typically more career-oriented than their non-college educated counterparts and also the group most often observed postponing maternity. We use individual-level data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) in order to control for individual-level unobserved heterogeneity as well as human capital characteristics, such as actual work experience, in our empirical analysis. We estimate wage equations, first producing base-line results to compare to the existing literature. Then, we expand the basic wage equation model to address fundamental econometric issues and the education/fertility issue at hand. Our empirical findings are two-fold. First, we find that college-educated mothers do not experience a motherhood wage penalty at all. In fact, they enjoy a wage boost when compared to college-educated childless women. Second, fertility delay enhances this wage boost even further. Our results provide an explanation for the observed postponement of maternity for educated women. We argue that the wage boost experienced by college-educated mothers may be the result of their search for family–friendly work environments, which, in turn, yields job matches with more female-friendly firms offering greater opportunities for advancement.
Microreboot — A technique for cheap recovery

A significant fraction of software failures in large-scale Internet systems are cured by rebooting, even when the exact failure causes are unknown. However, rebooting can be expensive, causing nontrivial service disruption or downtime even when clusters and failover are employed. In this work we use separation of process recovery from data recovery to enable microrebooting - a fine-grain technique for surgically recovering faulty application components, without disturbing the rest of the application. We evaluate microrebooting in an Internet auction system running on an application server. Microreboots recover most of the same failures as full reboots, but do so an order of magnitude faster and result in an order of magnitude savings in lost work. This cheap form of recovery engenders a new approach to high availability: microreboots can be employed at the slightest hint of failure, prior to node failover in multi-node clusters, even when mistakes in failure detection are likely; failure and recovery can be masked from end users through transparent call-level retries; and systems can be rejuvenated by parts, without ever being shut down.
Immigration and Occupational Crowding in the United States

The 1990 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is utilized to explore the effects that the occupational crowding of immigrants has on the real wages of indigenous and non-U.S. citizen workers already in the United States. Findings include adverse wage effects as a result of the crowding of immigrants on the following worker categories: (1) indigenous unskilled white or black workers and (2) non-U.S. citizen skilled or unskilled black workers. Foreign-born skilled and white workers already in the U.S. realize a positive effect on their real wages as a result of having a large relative number of non-U.S. citizens in their occupations. (EXCERPT)
Conservatism as an Ideology

Does conservative political thought have a place in America today? The answer to this question depends upon the general nature of conservatism as an ideology: its distinguishing characteristics, its substance, and the conditions under which it arises. By ideology I mean a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group. Interpretations of the role and relevance of conservative thought on the contemporary scene vary greatly. Underlying the debate, however, are three broad and conflicting conceptions of the nature of conservatism as an ideology. This essay deals with the relative merits of these concepts.
Effects of physical properties and geometry on shapes and stability of polarizable drops in external fields

Abstract Equilibrium shapes and stability of linearly and nonlinearly polarizable drops floating freely between the two faces of a parallel-plate capacitor and subjected to an electric or magnetic field are found by solving the Young-Laplace equation for surface shape and the Maxwell equations for field distribution. Accounting for nonlinear polarization at last brings theory and experiment into accord. Finite plate separation—as in any real experiment—is also found to play a big role.
Using the Annotated Bibliography as a Resource for Indicative Summarization

We report on a language resource consisting of 2000 annotated bibliography entries, which is being analyzed as part of our research on indicative document summarization. We show how annotated bibliographies cover certain aspects of summarization that have not been well-covered by other summary corpora, and motivate why they constitute an important form to study for information retrieval. We detail our methodology for collecting the corpus, and overview our document feature markup that we introduced to facilitate summary analysis. We present the characteristics of the corpus, methods of collection, and show its use in finding the distribution of types of information included in indicative summaries and their relative ordering within the summaries. Automatic text summarization has largely been synonymous with domain-independent, sentence extraction techniques (for an overview, see Paice (1990)). These approaches have used a battery of indicators such as cue phrases, term frequency, and sentence position to choose sentences to extract and form into a summary. An alternative approach is to collect sample summaries and apply machine learning techniques to identify what types of information are included in a summary, and identify their stylistic, grammatical, and lexical choice characteristics and to generate or regenerate a summary based on these characteristics. In this paper, we examine the first step towards this goal: the collection of an appropriate summary corpus. We focus on annotated bibliography entries, because they are written without reliance on sentence extraction. Futhermore, these entries contain both informative (i.e., details and topics of the resource) as well as indicative (e.g., metadata such as author or purpose) information. We believe that summary texts similar in form to annotated bibliography entries, such as the one shown in Figure 1, can better serve users and replace standard -top sentence or query word in context summaries commonly found in current generation search engines. Our corpus of summaries consists of 2000 annotated bibliography entries collected from various Internet websites using search engines. We first review aspects and dimensions of text summaries, and detail reasons for collecting a corpus of annotated bibliography entries. We follow with details on the collection methodology and a description of our annotation of the entries. We conclude with some current applications of the corpus to automatic text summarization research.
Homological stability for the mapping class groups of non-orientable surfaces

We prove that the homology of the mapping class groups of non-orientable surfaces stabilizes with the genus of the surface. Combining our result with recent work of Madsen and Weiss, we obtain that the classifying space of the stable mapping class group of non-orientable surfaces, up to homology isomorphism, is the infinite loop space of a Thom spectrum built from the canonical bundle over the Grassmannians of 2-planes in ℝ n+2. In particular, we show that the stable rational cohomology is a polynomial algebra on generators in degrees 4i – this is the non-oriented analogue of the Mumford conjecture.
Preschool teachers’ insights about web-based self-coaching versus on-site expert coaching

Implementation science defines training and coaching as two important competency components to support fidelity of implementation of evidence-based practices. The present study explores the perspectives of 21 preschool teachers, located in the United States, about the professional development (PD) they received, which included training and coaching. The PD was designed to support their planning, implementation and evaluation of embedded instruction practices for young children with disabilities. The PD involved: 16.5 hours of workshops distributed across four to six weeks; the provision of job-aids; and 16 weeks of on-site coaching or 16 weeks of prompts to engage in self-coaching using a project-developed website. An interpretivist theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism using grounded theory methods was adopted to guide the analysis of focus group data obtained from teachers following their participation in the PD. We describe the components of the PD that teachers characterized as effectivel...
Increase in the period of waves traveling over large distances: With applications to tsunamis, swell, and seismic surface waves

An expression is derived from very general assumptions for the increase in wave period during long-distance propagation. To illustrate the general nature of the solution, application is made to three different geophysical phenomena: First, to the tsunami from the Aleutian earthquake of April 1, 1946; second, to the long forerunners of the swell recorded at the wave station in Pendeen, England; and finally to the seismic surface waves from the Montana earthquake of June 28, 1925, and a smaller Mexican shock in 1943. In the case of the tsunami and the swell, observations and theory are in good agreement. For the seismic surface waves the theory gives at least the right order of magnitude. Application of the theory to the period increase of swell seems furthermore to provide a simple, rational basis for locating and tracking storms at sea by means of swell observations, and may therefore be of interest in weather forecasting.
Damage-Mitigating Control With Overload Injection: Experimental Validation of the Concept

The goal of damage-mitigating control is to enhance structural durability of mechanical systems (e.g., advanced aircraft, spacecraft, and power plants) while retaining high performance. So far the reported work in damage-mitigating control has focused on reduction of peak stresses to increase structural durability. This paper presents a novel concept that takes advantage of the physical phenomenon of fatigue crack retardation. Overload pulses are intermittently injected into the plant as a feedforward signal through the actuator(s) in addition to robust feedback control. A feedforward sequence of limited overload pulses and a robust feedback control law are designed based on state-space models of fatigue-crack damage and plant dynamics. A series of experiments have been conducted on a laboratory test apparatus to demonstrate feasibility of the overload injection concept for robust damage-mitigating control.
Frontiers of nuclear structure

Abstract Current developments in nuclear structure at the “limits” are discussed. The studies of nuclear behavior at extreme conditions provide us with invaluable information about the nature of the nuclear interaction and nucleonic correlations at various energy-distance scales. In this talk, frontiers of nuclear structure are briefly reviewed from a theoretical perspective, mainly concentrating on medium-mass and heavy nuclei.
Noncommutative Inspired Black Holes in Extra Dimensions

In a recent string theory motivated paper, Nicolini, Smailagic and Spallucci (NSS) presented an interesting model for a noncommutative inspired, Schwarzschild-like black hole solution in 4-dimensions. The essential effect of having noncommutative co-ordinates in this approach is to smear out matter distributions on a scale associated with the turn-on of noncommutativity which was taken to be near the 4-d Planck mass. In particular, NSS assumed that this smearing was essentially Gaussian. This energy scale is sufficiently large that in 4-d such effects may remain invisible indefinitely. Extra dimensional models which attempt to address the gauge hierarchy problem, however, allow for the possibility that the effective fundamental scale may not be far from {approx} 1 TeV, an energy regime that will soon be probed by experiments at both the LHC and ILC. In this paper we generalize the NSS model to the case where flat, toroidally compactified extra dimensions are accessible at the TeV-scale and examine the resulting modifications in black hole properties due to the existence of noncommutativity. We show that while many of the noncommutativity-induced black hole features found in 4-d by NSS persist, in some cases there can be significant modifications due the presence of extra dimensions. Wemore » also demonstrate that the essential features of this approach are not particularly sensitive to the Gaussian nature of the smearing assumed by NSS.« less
Radical hysterectomy in the elderly patient: analysis of morbidity.

Summary OBJECTIVE : This study compares the perioperative morbidity and mortality following radical hysterectomyof patients older than 65 years with a younger age group who underwent radical hysterectomy and pelvic lymphadenectomy for cervical carcinoma stage IB or IIA. STUDY DESIGN : A retrospective analysis of morbidity and mortality for the first 60 postoperative dayswas conducted. The study population of 45 women >65 years of age with cervical cancer treated by radical hysterectomy was compared with a control population of 90 women RESULTS : In the elderly group, 31 of 45 and 12 of 15 were American Society of AnesthesologistsPhysical Status II and III respectively; 68/90 and 19/90 were American Society of Anesthesiologists status I and II in the younger age group ( p = 0.001). Transfusions of >2 units were required in 14% of the elderly and 35% of younger patients ( p = 0.02). No statistical differences were observed between groups for other parameters examined. CONCLUSION : Age alone should not be a contraindication for radical hysterectomy in the elderly patientwith American Society of Anesthesiologists Physical Status I to III
THE BROADBAND INFRARED EMISSION SPECTRUM OF THE EXOPLANET TrES-3

We use the Spitzer Space Telescope to estimate the dayside thermal emission of the exoplanet TrES-3 integrated in the 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 μm bandpasses of the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) instrument. We observe two secondary eclipses and find relative eclipse depths of 0.00346 ± 0.00035, 0.00372 ± 0.00054, 0.00449 ± 0.00097, and 0.00475 ± 0.00046, respectively, in the four IRAC bandpasses. We combine our results with the earlier K-band measurement of De Mooij et al., and compare them with models of the planetary emission. We find that the planet does not require the presence of an inversion layer in the high atmosphere. This is the first very strongly irradiated planet that does not have a temperature inversion, which indicates that stellar or planetary characteristics other than temperature have an important impact on temperature inversion. De Mooij & Snellen also detected a possible slight offset in the timing of the secondary eclipse in the K band. However, based on our four Spitzer channels, we place a 3σ upper limit of |ecos(ω)| < 0.0056, where e is the planet's orbital eccentricity and ω is the longitude of the periastron. This result strongly indicates that the orbit is circular, as expected from tidal circularization theory.
High aspect ratio polymer micro/nano-structure manufacturing using nanoembossing, nanomolding and directed self-assembly

This paper proposes three methods to fabricate synthetic gecko foot-hair high aspect ratio polymer micro/nano-structures. In the first method, nano-robotically indented templates are molded with liquid polymers, and the cured polymer is peeled off or etched away. Atomic force microscope and scanning tunneling microscope probe tips are used to emboss/indent flat wax surfaces, and silicone rubber micro/nano-bump structures are demonstrated. The second one uses a self-organized polycarbonate nano-pore membrane as the molding template. PDMS is molded into these micro/nano-pores under vacuum, and 1:2 and 1:9 aspect ratio pillar structures with 5 micron and 0.6 micron diameters are manufactured successfully. Finally, a directed self-assembly technique is proposed to grow regularly spaced and oriented micro/nano-pillars. Here, instability of a liquid polymer thin-film under a DC electric field is used to grow nano-pillars, and stretching and shearing of the grown hairs enable high aspect ratio and oriented hair structures. These hair structures will be utilized as novel biomimetic dry adhesives in future miniature space and surgical robot feet.
Topologically-aware overlay construction and server selection

A number of large-scale distributed Internet applications could potentially benefit from some level of knowledge about the relative proximity between its participating host nodes. For example, the performance of large overlay networks could be improved if the application-level connectivity between the nodes in these networks is congruent with the underlying IP-level topology. Similarly, in the case of replicated Web content, client nodes could use topological information in selecting one of multiple available servers. For such applications, one need not find the optimal solution in order to achieve significant practical benefits. Thus, these applications, and presumably others like them, do not require exact topological information and can instead use sufficiently informative hints about the relative positions of Internet hosts. In this paper, we present a binning scheme whereby nodes partition themselves into bins such that nodes that fall within a given bin are relatively close to one another in terms of network latency. Our binning strategy is simple (requiring minimal support from any measurement infrastructure), scalable (requiring no form of global knowledge, each node only needs knowledge of a small number of well-known landmark nodes) and completely distributed (requiring no communication or cooperation between the nodes being binned). We apply this binning strategy to the two applications mentioned above: overlay network construction and server selection. We test our binning strategy and its application using simulation and Internet measurement traces. Our results indicate that the performance of these applications can be significantly improved by even the rather coarse-grained knowledge of topology offered by our binning scheme.
A Stochastic Model of Persuasive Communication

A source repeatedly communicates a message through a channel so as to persuade a decision-maker to take a favorable action. The decision-maker observes the environment, the message and his cumulative learning experience and stochastically goes through a sequence of information processing states before taking an action. The transient and the steady state components of this information processing behavior are modeled in the semi-Markov process framework. Given such behavior, the problem of optimal communication system design is considered, using different measures of effectiveness of the persuasion process. Applications to advertising, decentralized planning and organizational decision-making are indicated.
Vapor‐Phase‐Deposited Diamond—Problems and Potential

Considerable progress has been made toward the goal of diamond synthesis by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). This progress consists of improved methods for synthesis and understanding how diamond is formed. The field has rapidly expanded with industrial consortia, international joint ventures, specialized journals, novel methods for synthesis and processing, and the introduction of new products. Despite this expansion, many issues remain unresolved, generating considerable debate within the research community. Among these debates is the question of how diamond is formed. Both thermodynamics and kinetics are frequently debated at the many world-wide meetings on this technology. The resolution of these issues awaits further progress and, with improved understanding, may have implications for the synthesis of other ceramic materials. The diamond research community includes not only ceramists and other materials scientists, but specialists in subjects that range from chemistry and chemical engineering to solid-state physics and electrical engineering. Crystals are grown using methods that range from the use of high-power plasmas and the combustion of acetylene in oxygen to the thermal decomposition of fluorocarbons and various hydrocarbons in the presence of fluorine. Although some evidence exists for diamond heteroepitaxy, the goal of large-area heteroepitaxial diamond has proved elusive. Thick (> 100 μm), free-standing, polycrystalline diamond layers are being grown, and their properties rival those of natural crystals. Methods have been developed for the cutting, polishing, and brazing of diamond, and products are being tested in the marketplace. Engineering of the diamond–substrate interface for acceptable adhesion and reliability has progressed, although much work remains to be done. The central issues for commercialization are less the question of whether diamond can be grown in sufficient amounts or with sufficiently attractive properties, but rather whether the fabrication methods can be made sufficiently cost-effective for the markets envisioned.
Option pricing when underlying stock returns are discontinuous

Abstract The validity of the classic Black-Scholes option pricing formula depends on the capability of investors to follow a dynamic portfolio strategy in the stock that replicates the payoff structure to the option. The critical assumption required for such a strategy to be feasible, is that the underlying stock return dynamics can be described by a stochastic process with a continuous sample path. In this paper, an option pricing formula is derived for the more-general case when the underlying stock returns are generated by a mixture of both continuous and jump processes. The derived formula has most of the attractive features of the original Black-Scholes formula in that it does not depend on investor preferences or knowledge of the expected return on the underlying stock. Moreover, the same analysis applied to the options can be extended to the pricing of corporate liabilities.
The strategic formation of project networks: A relational practice perspective

This article develops a relational practice perspective on the strategic formation of project networks as organizational forms, based on structuration theory and an in-depth case study of a European researcher and his project network. Project networks are defined as strategically coordinated sets of longer-term, project-based relationships. As project entrepreneurs advance in their careers from project partners to coordinators, they learn to apply and combine certain practices through which they gradually transform part of their emerging professional networks into project networks with increased coordination capacity. These practices include: making and renewing project-based contacts, pooling potential project partners, and maintaining core project partnerships. This study advances our understanding of the institutional embeddedness of network agency and the micro-foundations of networks as organizational forms in project businesses and beyond.
Extreme Kuiper Belt Object 2001 QG298 and the Fraction of Contact Binaries

Extensive time-resolved observations of Kuiper belt object 2001 QG298 show a light curve with a peak-to-peak variation of 1.14 ± 0.04 mag and single-peaked period of 6.8872 ± 0.0002 hr. The mean absolute magnitude is 6.85 mag, which corresponds to a mean effective radius of 122 (77) km if an albedo of 0.04 (0.10) is assumed. This is the first known Kuiper belt object and only the third minor planet with a radius greater than 25 km to display a light curve with a range in excess of 1 mag. We find the colors to be typical for a Kuiper belt object (B-V = 1.00 ± 0.04, V-R = 0.60 ± 0.02), with no variation in color between minimum and maximum light. The large light variation, relatively long double-peaked period, and absence of rotational color change argue against explanations due to albedo markings or elongation due to high angular momentum. Instead, we suggest that 2001 QG298 may be a very close or contact binary, similar in structure to what has been independently proposed for the Trojan asteroid 624 Hektor. If so, its rotational period would be twice the light-curve period, or 13.7744 ± 0.0004 hr. By correcting for the effects of projection, we estimate that the fraction of similar objects in the Kuiper belt is at least ~10% to 20%, with the true fraction probably much higher. A high abundance of close and contact binaries is expected in some scenarios for the evolution of binary Kuiper belt objects.
Amino protection using triazones

Abstract Primary amines protected by incorporation into a “triazone” derivative (3) are stable to various reduction, oxidation, organometallic, and basic hydrolysis conditions, and may be regenerated by treatment with aqueous ammonium chloride at 70 °. An application to polyamine synthesis is described.
On adaptive friction compensation

A method of compensating for friction in control systems is presented. The method entails the use of an observer to estimate the friction which is modeled as a constant times the sign of the velocity. The purpose of the observer is to estimate this constant. The observer model is selected to ensure that the error in estimation of the friction constant converges asymptotically to zero. Simulation results verify the theory and show that the method can significantly improve the performance of a control system in which it is used. Although based on the assumption of a constant friction magnitude, the observer displays the ability to 'track' friction whose magnitude depends on velocity. >
mTOR: from growth signal integration to cancer, diabetes and ageing

In all eukaryotes, the target of rapamycin (TOR) signalling pathway couples energy and nutrient abundance to the execution of cell growth and division, owing to the ability of TOR protein kinase to simultaneously sense energy, nutrients and stress and, in metazoans, growth factors. Mammalian TOR complex 1 (mTORC1) and mTORC2 exert their actions by regulating other important kinases, such as S6 kinase (S6K) and Akt. In the past few years, a significant advance in our understanding of the regulation and functions of mTOR has revealed the crucial involvement of this signalling pathway in the onset and progression of diabetes, cancer and ageing.
THE SPHERICAL SHELL NUCLEAR MODEL

It is found that the spherical shell nuclear model has new energy levels due to the interaction of the vibrations and the rotation. Each vibration level has a series of equally spaced levels belonging to it. The levels of aluminium 28 and silicon 28 are compared with the values predicted by the theory and good agreement is found.
Social Identities, Ethnic Diversity, and Tax Morale

This article investigates the impact of individuals’ social identities on their tax attitudes and how these effects on the micro level are translated to the impact of a country’s ethnic heterogeneity on the public’s overall tax morale. The author finds that both ethnic and national identities play important roles shaping tax morale, and these effects depend on the country’s population heterogeneity. Overall, ethnically fractionalized countries have poorer tax morale than homogeneous ones, suggesting a higher cost of tax collection for the former. This is consistent with previous findings that suggest detrimental impact of ethnic fractionalization on public sector performance.