cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Disproportionality Fills in the Gaps: Connections between Achievement, Discipline and Special Education in the School-to-Prison Pipeline

The focus on the achievement gap has overshadowed ways in which school systems constrain student achievement through trends of racial disproportionality in areas such as school discipline, special education assignment, and juvenile justice. Using Critical Race Theory, we reframe these racial disparities as issues of institutionalized racism. First, we examine specific education policies and laws that contribute to racialized populations becoming part of this Pipeline. Second, using a state-level case study in Colorado, we illustrate through Critical Race Spatial Analysis the increasing overrepresentation of students of color as they move through the School-to-Prison Pipeline from public schools to the juvenile justice system. Finally, we discuss suggestions for improving racial equity and reducing the flow of the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
Economic Consequences of Operating Lease Recognition

The Financial Accounting Standard Board’s Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-02 generated considerable debate between managers and standard setters. The purpose of our study is to understand the reporting effects of ASU 2016-02 and how its issuance and implementation affected managers’ operational behavior and the reported performance of the firm. We find evidence that after issuance, managers changed their operational behavior by decreasing their use of long-term operating leases, and this decrease relates to reporting incentives. However, we find no evidence that investors perceived loss of firm value or that firms suffered a decrease in performance. Thus, our evidence is not consistent with negative views expressed by managers. Our study adds to an interesting literature on the impact of changes in accounting standards on managers’ operating decisions and economic consequences for firms.
Outcomes and Utility of Intracranial Free Tissue Transfer.

Objective:Complications associated with intracranial vault compromise can be neurologically and systemically devastating. Primary and secondary repair of these deficits require an air and watertigh...
In search of the individual embedded in context: Applications of the Specificity Principle

Abstract The Specificity Principle provides a framework for understanding the diversity of human experience in ways that are essential to forwarding developmental science. This special issue exemplifies just some of the ways in which the Specificity Principle can be applied to improve our theory, method, measurement, and application of developmental science to improve human lives. This commentary situates the Specificity Principle within the philosophy of science as it relates to developmental science. Applying the Specificity Principle and embracing the diversity of human experience and individual developmental pathways require that the field of developmental science conduct large scale normative, longitudinal, developmental studies on diverse populations, including ethnic minority subpopulations and those residing in the Global South. Furthermore, with the emerging opportunities for individualized prevention and intervention programs, it is essential that developmental science move away from means and averages and describe human development in all of its specificity.
Knowledge Is Power: Benefits, Risks, Hopes, and Decision-Making Reported by Parents Consenting to Next-Generation Sequencing for Children and Adolescents with Cancer.

Abstract Objectives To qualitatively describe parent perspectives of next-generation genomic sequencing (NGS) for their children with cancer, including perceived benefits, risks, hopes/expectations, and decision-making process when consenting or not consenting to NGS and prior to result disclosure. Data Sources Qualitative interviews were used. Conclusion Altruism is an important factor in parents consenting to NGS testing, as well as making sense of their child's cancer and legacy building. Parents described realistic hopes and expectations associated with NGS participation. Although parents endorsed the likelihood of no medical benefit, those consenting to NGS felt there was no reason not to participate. Parents declining participation expressed avoidance of worry and parent guilt if a germline variant were to be disclosed. Implications for Nursing Practice As NGS evolves into a component of the routine diagnostic workup for pediatric cancer patients, genetic nurses play a role in conducting informed consent conversations and ensuring that patients and families have realistic hopes and expectations associated with NGS.
Equivalence of polynomial conjectures in additive combinatorics

We study two conjectures in additive combinatorics. The first is the polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture, which relates to the structure of sets with small doubling. The second is the inverse Gowers conjecture for U 3, which relates to functions which locally look like quadratics. In both cases a weak form, with exponential decay of parameters is known, and a strong form with only a polynomial loss of parameters is conjectured. Our main result is that the two conjectures are in fact equivalent.
INTERACTION OF OCEAN WAVES WITH FLOATING PLATE

The plate is anchored to the ocean floor by taut cables. The excitation is due to either regular waves or random waves generated by high winds. The formulation is that of boundary value problems in which the structure and the ocean are treated as an integral system and the effects of wave diffractions and wave-structure interaction are properly considered. The response analysis is performed in the frequency domain. It consists of analytical solutions for the wave fields, a finite frequency domain. It consists of analytical solutions for the wave fields, a finite difference solution of integral equations resulting from the transition conditions at the plate boundary, and an approximate solution of the plate equation by Galerkin's method. Numerical examples are given. It is found that the motion of a large plate in shallow water causes a very high added mass and radiation damping. The effect of two-dimensional diffraction is important except in the very low frequency range.
Photon and dilepton production in high energy heavy ion collisions

The recent results on direct photons and dileptons in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, obtained particularly at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are reviewed. The results are new not only in terms of the probes, but also in terms of the precision. We shall discuss the physics learned from the results.
An efficient and unified approach to correlating, hypothesizing, and predicting intrusion alerts

To defend against a multi-step network intrusion, its progress needs to be monitored and predicted in real-time. For this purpose, isolated alerts must be correlated into attack scenarios as soon as the alerts arrive. Such efficient correlation of alerts demands an in-memory index to be built on received alerts. However, the finite memory implies that only a limited number of alerts inside a sliding window can be considered for correlation. Knowing this fact, an attacker can prevent two attack steps from both falling into the sliding window by either passively delaying the second step or actively invoking bogus alerts between the two steps. In either case, the correlation effort is defeated. In this paper, we first address the above issue with a novel queue graph (QG) approach. Instead of explicitly correlating a new alert to all the old ones that prepare for it, the approach only correlates the new alert to the latest copy of each type of alerts. The correlation with other alerts is kept implicit using the temporal order between alerts. Consequently, the approach has a quadratic (in the number of alert types) memory requirement, and it can correlate two alerts that are arbitrarily far away (namely, an infinitely large sliding window with a quadratic memory requirement). Our second contribution is a unified method based on the QG approach that can correlate received alerts, hypothesize missing alerts, and predict future alerts all at the same time. Empirical results show that our method can fulfill those tasks faster than an IDS can report alerts. The method is thus a promising solution for administrators to monitor and predict the progress of an intrusion, and thus to take appropriate countermeasures in a timely manner.
Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women's Presence Within and Beyond Community Forestry

PART 1: THE POTENTIAL OF PRESENCE 1. Presence and Representation 2. Gendered Interests and the Environment 3. From Absence to Negotiated Presence PART 2: THE IMPACT OF PRESENCE 4. Fieldsites and Field Profile 5. From Exclusion to Empowered Engagement 6. Rules and Rulemakers 7. Violations and Penalties 8. Conservation and Regeneration 9. Shortages Amidst Growing Plenty PART 3: BEYOND PRESENCE 10. Connecting with Civil Society: Weaving a Web of Strategic Alliances 11. Engaging with Government: Extending the Web
Bilateral Accidents with Intrinsically Interdependent Costs of Precaution

Abstract The standard economic model of bilateral precaution postulates that the care that is taken by injurers and victims affects only expected accident loss. This paper considers situations in which each party’s precaution also directly affects the other party’s cost of taking precaution. When this additional externality is introduced into a model of unilateral harm, none of the standard tort liability rule induce socially optimal behavior by both parties. Moreover, under a contributory negligence rule, the only equilibrium is in mixed strategies; this gives rise to the possibility of litigation in equilibrium. “Tortlike” liability rules that can induce socially optimal care by both parties are characterized. The model is then extended to consider the case of bilateral harm, in which all negligence‐based tort rules lead to socially optimal care by both parties, as long as each can sue to recover its full accident losses.
Observations of Rotationally Resolved C3 in Translucent Sight Lines

The rotationally resolved spectrum of the A^1Π_u ← X^1Σ^+_g 000-000 transition of C_3, centered at 4051.6 A, has been observed along 10 translucent lines of sight. To interpret these spectra, a new method for the determination of column densities and analysis of excitation profiles involving the simulation and fitting of observed spectra has been developed. The populations of lower rotational levels (J ≤ 14) in C_3 are best fitted by thermal distributions that are consistent with the kinetic temperatures determined from the excitation profile of C_2. Just as in the case of C_2, higher rotational levels (J > 14) of C_3 show increased nonthermal population distributions in clouds that have been determined to have total gas densities below ~500 cm^(-3).
Staggered chiral perturbation theory in the two-flavor case

I study two-flavor staggered chiral perturbation theory in the light pseudoscalar sector. The pion mass and decay constant are calculated through next-to-leading order in the partially-quenched case. In the limit where the strange quark mass is large compared to the light quark masses and the taste splittings, I show that the SU(2) staggered chiral theory emerges from the SU(3) staggered chiral theory, as expected. Explicit relations between SU(2) and SU(3) low energy constants and taste-violating parameters are given. The results are useful for SU(2) chiral fits to asqtad data and allow one to incorporate effects from varying strange quark masses.
Covariant derivatives and vision

We describe a new theoretical approach to Image Processing and Vision. Expressed in mathemetical terminology, in our formalism image space is a fibre bundle, and the image itself is the graph of a section on it. This mathematical model has advantages to the conventional view of the image as a function on the plane: Based on the new method we are able to do image processing of the image as viewed by the human visual system, which includes adaptation and perceptual correctness of the results. Our formalism is invariant to relighting and handles seamlessly illumination change. It also explains simultaneous contrast visual illusions, which are intrinsically related to the new covariant approach. Examples include Poisson image editing, Inpainting, gradient domain HDR compression, and others.
Pro-Competitive Effects of Trade Reform: Results from a CGE Model of Cameroon

Abstract How likely is trade liberalization to produce efficiency gains in the presence of imperfect competition, scale economies and higher than average wages in the modern sectors — all common features in developing economies? These features create a potential conflict to the extent that traditional notions of comparative advantage lead us to expect that the modern sectors will be squeezed with liberalization. In this paper we investigate this issue by using an applied general equilibrium model calibrated to Cameroonian data. Under perfect competition, we find that the welfare effect is a wash since the beneficial consequence of expanded imports is offset by the reduction in employment in the modern, high-wage sectors. Under imperfect competition, by contrast, trade liberalization produces welfare gains of the order of 1 to 2 percent of income. The key is the pro-competitive effect of liberalization: Domestic firms in the modern sectors now perceive themselves as facing a higher elasticity of demand, which spurs them to increase production.
Consumers' Sunspots, Animal Spirits, and Economic Fluctuations

Multiple-equilibria macroeconomic models suggest that consumers' and investors' perceptions about the state of the economy may be an important independent factor for business cycles. In this paper, we verify empirically the interrelations between waves of optimism and pessimism and subsequent economic fluctuations. We focus on the nonlinear behavior of non-fundamental movements in consumer sentiment, as a proxy for consumer's sunspots, and in business formation, representing animal spirits, around economic turning points. We find that bearish consumers and entrepreneurs are present before the onset of some U.S. economic downturns, even when the fundamentals are all very strong. In particular, our analysis suggests that waves of pessimism may have played a nontrivial role for the 1969-70 recession and slowdown, the 1981-82 recession, and the 1984-87 slowdown. The results are robust to a range of alternative linear and nonlinear specifications. Our evidence provides empirical support for the role of sunspots in multiple-equilibria macroeconomic models.
On the Convergence of MDL Density Estimation

We present a general information exponential inequality that measures the statistical complexity of some deterministic and randomized density estimators. Using this inequality, we are able to improve classical results concerning the convergence of two-part code MDL in [1]. Moreover, we are able to derive clean finite-sample convergence bounds that are not obtainable using previous approaches.
Flood peak distributions for the eastern United States

[1] Annual maximum peak discharge time series from 572 stations with a record of at least 75 years in the eastern United States are used to examine flood peak distributions from a regional perspective. The central issues of this study are (1) "mixtures" of flood peak distributions, (2) upper tail properties of flood peaks, (3) scaling properties of flood peaks, (4) spatial heterogeneities of flood peak distributions, and (5) temporal nonstationarities of annual flood peaks. Landfalling tropical cyclones are an important element of flood peak distributions throughout the eastern United States, but their relative importance in the "mixture" of annual flood peaks varies widely, and abruptly, in space over the region. Winter-spring extratropical systems and warm season thunderstorm systems also introduce distinct flood peak populations, with spatially varying control of flood frequency distributions over the eastern United States. We examine abrupt changes in the mean and variance of flood peak distributions through change point analyses and temporal trends in the flood peak records through nonparametric tests. Abrupt changes, rather than slowly varying trends, are typically responsible for nonstationarities in annual flood peak records in the eastern United States, and detected change points are often linked to regulation of river basins. Trend analyses for the 572 eastern United States gaging stations provide little evidence at this point (2009) for increasing flood peak distributions associated with human-induced climate change. Estimates of the location, scale, and shape parameters of the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution provide a framework for examining scaling properties of flood peaks and upper tail properties of flood distributions. It is shown that anomalously large values of the GEV shape parameter estimates are linked to the role of tropical cyclones in controlling the upper tail of flood distributions. Scaling analyses of flood peaks highlight the heterogeneities in flood magnitudes over the region with maxima in scaled flood magnitudes in the high-elevation Appalachian Mountains and minima in the low-gradient Coastal Plain.
Differential equation for spectral flows of Hermitean Wilson-Dirac operator

Abstract Establishing an exact relation for the derivative we show that the eigenvalue flows of the hermitean Wilson–Dirac operator obey a differential equation. We obtain a complete overview of the characteristic features of its solutions. The underlying mathematical aspects are fully clarified.
The Art and Technology of Teaching

The goal of teaching is ultimately the learning achieved by the student. Active learning has proven to be extremely effective in inciting students to learn. Techniques to engage students in their learning and utilizing technologies that are inherently more natural to learning synergistically combine to enhance the learning experience. The workshop leaders share their own successes, as well as not so successful experiences, at Purdue University and engage attendees to share their experiences. Each session is highly interactive, with plenty of time to discuss issues and ideas as they arise. The approach is to raise questions, facilitate discussion, share experiences, and then to propose potential solutions that arise while applying the art and technology of teaching. Based upon attendee input, this workshop will present selected modules of those listed in this paper
WHEN DOES IT PAY TO GET INFORMED

A repeated principal–agent problem where both sides start out symmetrically uninformed about a productivity-related parameter and where the principal has the option to costlessly learn this parameter is analyzed. Typically, the principal delays the acquisition of information to avoid costly signaling. If the learning decision of the principal is observable by the agent, the expected delay is longer than if it is unobservable. The discrepancy is due to the ability of the principal to avoid costly signaling when he is known to be uninformed.
Policy Reform in the Tobacco Industry: Producers Adapt to a Changing Market

The Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004 eliminated tobacco quotas and tobacco price supports and allowed producers to plant any amount or type of tobacco regardless of geographic location. The authors found that flue-cured tobacco producers made greater adjustments to their operations after the buyout than did burley tobacco producers. Flue-cured tobacco producers were more likely to increase tobacco acres per farm, pushing up the tobacco acreage per farm at a faster rate compared with burley tobacco producers. Flue-cured producers also were more likely to invest in their tobacco enterprises and invested more per farm after 2004. As a result of increased acreage, tobacco operations became more sensitive to changes in labor costs. With over 75 percent of tobacco farms using hired or contract labor in 2008, the availability and cost of workers have become increasingly important to tobacco producers. This report is based on data collected from the tobacco version of the 2008 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS), which focused on U.S. producers of burley and flue-cured tobacco in 2008 and how their tobacco operations have changed since 2000 and 2004.
De Rham Cohomology

In Chapter 14, we defined closed and exact differential forms, and showed that every exact form is closed. In this chapter, we explore the converse question: Is every closed form exact? The answer is locally yes, but globally no. The question of which closed forms are exact depends on subtle topological properties of the manifold, connected with the existence of “holes” of various dimensions. Making this dependence quantitative leads to a new set of invariants of smooth manifolds, called the de Rham cohomology groups, which are the subject of this chapter. They are easily shown to be diffeomorphism invariants, but surprisingly they turn out also to be topological invariants. We prove a general theorem, called the Mayer–Vietoris theorem, that expresses the de Rham groups of a manifold in terms of those of its open subsets. Using it, we compute the de Rham groups of spheres and the top-degree groups of compact manifolds, and give a brief introduction to degree theory for maps between compact manifolds of the same dimension.
Strengthening China's technological capability

China is increasing its outlay on research and development and seeking to build an innovation system that will deliver quick results not just in absorbing technology but also in pushing the technological envelope. China's spending on R&D rose from 1.1 percent of GDP in 2000 to 1.3 percent of GDP in 2005. On a purchasing power parity basis, China's research outlay was among the world's highest, far greater than that of Brazil, India, or Mexico. Chinese firms are active in the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, alternative energy sources, and nanotechnology. This surge in spending has been parallel by a sharp increase in patent applications in China, with the bulk of the patents registered in the areas of electronics, information technology, and telecoms. However, of the almost 50,000 patents granted in China, nearly two-thirds were to nonresidents. This paper considers two questions that are especially important for China. First, how might China go about accelerating technology development? Second, what measures could most cost-effectively deliver the desired outcomes? It concludes that although the level of financing for R&D is certainly important, technological advance is closely keyed to absorptive capacity which is a function of the volume and quality of talent and the depth as well as the heterogeneity of research experience. It is also a function of how companies maximize the commercial benefits of research and development, and the coordination of research with production and marketing.
Tourism as an agent of change: A Spanish basque case

Abstract Beginning with a brief general discussion of mass tourism in historical and social scientific perspective, this article reviews the history and effects of international tourism in the Spanish Basque municipality of Fuenterrabia. Paying particular attention to the effects of tourism on the local people, the article details the process by which tourism first benefited them, only later to come to be controlled by outside developers who have captured most of the major economic rewards. It also discusses changes in local social stratification and political structure wrought by tourism development. The need for a systematic, broadly conceived appraisal of the costs and benefits of tourism as an agent of economic development is stressed.
STABILITY AND REACTIVITY OF N2O IN SUPERCRITICAL WATER

ABSTRACT The results of experiments examining the thermal decomposition of N2O and its reactivity with methane in supercritical water at approximately 500°C and 30 MPa are presented. The rate of thermal decomposition is observed to be close to the rate predicted by extrapolating an Arrhenius expression from the literature that has been shown to be valid at 750°C and 1.0 MPa. The observed first-order rate constant at 500°C is 9.4 × 10−6 s−1. There is no significant effect on N2O stability due to the presence of supercritical water relative to ambient pressure. Measurements exploring the conversion rate of methane in the presence of N2O reveal that simple oxidation chemistry competes with polymerization. The data suggest that much of the carbon in the system is converted to (CH2)n oligomers that separates from the supercritical phase. A detailed kinetic mechanism is used to explore characteristics of these competing processes.
Integrating learning from examples into the search for diagnostic policies

This paper studies the problem of learning diagnostic policies from training examples. A diagnostic policy is a complete description of the decision-making actions of a diagnostician (i.e., tests followed by a diagnostic decision) for all possible combinations of test results. An optimal diagnostic policy is one that minimizes the expected total cost, which is the sum of measurement costs and misdiagnosis costs. In most diagnostic settings, there is a tradeoff between these two kinds of costs. This paper formalizes diagnostic decision making as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). The paper introduces a new family of systematic search algorithms based on the AO* algorithm to solve this MDP. To make AO* efficient, the paper describes an admissible heuristic that enables AO* to prune large parts of the search space. The paper also introduces several greedy algorithms including some improvements over previously-published methods. The paper then addresses the question of learning diagnostic policies from examples. When the probabilities of diseases and test results are computed from training data, there is a great danger of overfitting. To reduce overfitting, regularizers are integrated into the search algorithms. Finally, the paper compares the proposed methods on five benchmark diagnostic data sets. The studies show that in most cases the systematic search methods produce better diagnostic policies than the greedy methods. In addition, the studies show that for training sets of realistic size, the systematic search algorithms are practical on today's desktop computers.
On the detection of conflicts in diagnostic Bayesian networks using abstraction

An important issue in the use of expert systems is the so-called brittleness problem. Expert systems model only a limited part of the world. While the explicit management of uncertainty in expert systems mitigates the brittleness problem, it is still possible for a system to be used, unwittingly, in ways that the system is not prepared to address. Such a situation may be detected by the method of straw models, first presented by Jensen et al. [1990] and later generalized and justified by Laskey [1991]. We describe an algorithm, which we have implemented, that takes as input an annotated diagnostic Bayesian network (the base model) and constructs, without assistance, a bipartite network to be used as a straw model. We show that in some cases this straw model is better that the independent straw model of Jensen et al., the only other straw model for which a construction algorithm has been designed and implemented.
Design and evaluation of distributed smart disk architecture for I/O-intensive workloads

Smart disks, a type of processor-embedded active I/O devices, with their on-disk memory and network interface controller, can be viewed as processing elements with attached storage. The growing size and access patterns of today's large I/O-intensive applications require architectures whose processing power scales with the storage capacity. We evaluate a distributed smart disk architecture with representative I/O-intensive workloads including TPC-H queries, association rule mining, data clustering, and 2-D fast Fourier transform applications to study the proposed architecture.
Inflation, exchange rates, and stabilization

The essay is an extended version of the Frank D. Graham Lecture presented at Princeton University in May 1985. It discusses the interaction of inflation and exchange rate policy in a variety of contexts. Four different settings are used to highlight that role: the experiments with exchange rate overvaluation in the Southern Cone; the place of exchange depreciation in the transition from high to even higher inflation discussed in the context of Brazil; exchange rate fixing and real appreciation during stabilization in the 1920s; and finally the U.S. real appreciation of 1980-85. The common thread of the argument is that exchange rate policy can make an important contribution to stabilization, but that it can also be lead to persistent deviations from PPP, with devastatingly adverse effects.The essay investigates through what channels these PPP deviatiins arise and how they influence inflation, trade and capital flight.
Solution‐Focused Therapy

In solution-focused therapy (SFT) it is assumed that clients possess the necessary strengths and capacities to solve their own problems. Thus, in collaboration with their clients, SFT practitioners aim to identify clients' strengths and amplify them so that clients can apply these “solutions” to their problems. To this end, practitioners assist clients in eliciting “exceptions,” or times when the problem is either not a problem or is lessened in terms of its duration, severity, frequency, or intensity. Further details of SFT, including the phases of its helping process and its research basis, are provided in the entry. Keywords: problem solving; psychotherapies; solution-focused therapy; strengths; therapy
My life with Fisher

This is based on the after-dinner talk given at the 70th Birthday Conference for Michael Fisher at Rutgers in December, 2001. It is longer than the talk, incorporating additional text from the after-dinner talk I gave at Fisher's 60th Birthday Conference at the National Academy in Washington D.C. in 1991.
Is a Democratic Collective Agriculture Possible? Theoretical Considerations and Evidence From Tanzania

Abstract The possibility of gradual transition to collective agriculture on the basis of peasant self-interest is examined theoretically and with reference to the Tanzanian experience. After discussing relevant aspects of Tanzania's recent agricultural history and development policies, the author summarizes the findings of a theoretical investigation of individual and collective choice in two-sector, democratic villages. The result of research conducted in several Tanzanian villages to test the theoretical framework and investigate the principal factors influencing adoption of collective production are then reported and evaluated.
The Uruguay Round and South Asia : an overview of the impact and opportunities

The author examines the impact of the Uruguay Round on four South Asian countries with similar trade structures: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These countries are major exporters of textiles and clothing and some agriculture. Their manufacturing sectors - especially textiles and clothing - would seem to be the main beneficiaries of the Round. The impact on agriculture should be modest. The Round improves market security for both exporters and importers, but these countries must do much more to adjust their domestic policies to the realities of the post-Round global environment. There must be further liberalization and more integration with both the region and the world. The trade regimes of the four countries are a mixed bag. All have launched major trade reform away from an inward orientation. They have liberalized trade by removing quantitative restrictions and reducing tariffs, but the degree of liberalization varies. India has done a lot to open up its economy but has not moved forcefully enough to remove restrictions on most imports of consumer goods. Pakistan retains heavy restrictions on many imports but is reducing tariff rates and their dispersion. Quantitative restrictions on imported inputs impede efficiency in Bangladesh textile and pharmaceutical industries. Sri Lanka's trade regime is the most liberal in the region, but anomalies still exist in incentives. Binding tariffs in the four countries must be greatly reduced before these countries can benefit from the Round's disciplines in agriculture. The dismantling of the Multifiber Agreement will increase South Asia's output of textiles by 17 percent, and their exports of textiles by 26 percent. Output on clothing will increase ninefold, and exports more than twentyfold. The region may also benefit from the more liberalized post-Round markets for semi-manufacturing exports. In general, negotiations about new issues - trade in services, trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, and trade-related investment measures - will affect South Asia in different ways. The impact on the movement of labor, in which the region has a comparative advantage, seems to be more effective than in other areas. More disciplined rules to protect intellectual property rights and more transparency about investment and competition policies will benefit the region in the longer run.
Threshold Effects Beyond the Standard Model

In this contribution to the Festschrift celebrating Gabriele Veneziano on his 65th birthday, I discuss the threshold effects of extra dimensions and their applications to physics beyond the standard model, focusing on superstring theory.
Plate motions are steady

Recent studies of the motion of the Pacific and North American plates show that plate tectonic motion averaged over several years equals that averaged over several million years, suggesting that the motion of tectonic plates is steady. Until recently, the only method of measuring the speed of one plate relative to another was through analysis of the magnetic anomalies above mid-ocean ridges. As two plates move apart over millions of years, the direction of the geomagnetic field is frozen into the new crust formed by cooling magma that fills the gap opened between the diverging plates. The geomagnetic field occasionally reverses polarity, and these reversals are frozen into the crust, causing highs and lows in the magnetic field sensed above the young seafloor at mid-ocean ridges. Rates of motion are deduced from the spacing between dated magnetic highs and lows.
The diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of the MIMO Z interference channel

The fundamental diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the quasi-static fading, MIMO Z interference channel (ZIC), with M 1 and M 2 antennas at the transmitters and N 1 and N 2 antennas at the corresponding receivers, respectively, is derived. Channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT) and a short-term average power constraint is assumed. The achievability of the DMT is proved by showing that a simple Gaussian superposition coding scheme can achieve a rate region which is within a constant (independent of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)) number of bits from an upper bound to the capacity region of the ZIC. We also characterize an achievable DMT of the ZIC with No-CSIT and show that in a small region of multiplexing gains (MG), the full CSIT DMT of the ZIC can be achieved with no CSIT at all. The size of this MG region depends on the system parameters such as the number of antennas at the four nodes (referred to hereafter as “antenna configuration”), SNRs and interference-to-noise ratio (INR) of the direct and cross links. Interestingly, for some antenna configurations this MG region covers the entire MG region of the ZIC. Thus, under these circumstances, the optimal DMT of the MIMO ZIC with F-CSIT is same as that of a corresponding ZIC with No-CSIT and availability of CSIT can not further improve the DMT. Finally, we identify a class of ZICs with M 1 = M 2 = M ≤ N 1 over 2, N 1 ≤ N 2 and SNR ≤ INR where the achievable DMT with No-CSIT coincides with the optimal DMT with F-CSIT.
Adaptation of Subjective Responses to Alcohol is Affected by an Interaction of GABRA2 Genotype and Recent Drinking

BACKGROUND: Subjective perceptions of alcohol intoxication are associated with altered risk for alcohol abuse and dependence. Acute adaptation of these perceptions may influence such risk and may involve genes associated with pleasant perceptions or the relief of anxiety. This study assessed the effect of variation in the GABAA receptor genes GABRG1 and GABRA2 and recent drinking history on the acute adaptation of subjective responses to alcohol. METHODS: One hundred and thirty-two nondependent moderate to heavy drinkers, aged 21 to 27, participated in 2 single-blind, counterbalanced sessions, approximately 1 week apart. One session was an intravenous alcohol "clamp," during which breath alcohol concentration was held steady at 60 mg/dl (60 mg%) for 3 hours, and the other an identical session using saline infusion. Subjective perceptions of Intoxication, Enjoyment, Stimulation, Relaxation, Anxiety, Tiredness, and Estimated Number of Drinks were acquired before (baseline), and during the first and final 45 minutes of the clamp. A placebo-adjusted index of the subject's acute adaptation to alcohol was calculated for each of the 7 subjective measures and used in a principal component analysis to create a single aggregate estimate for each subject's adaptive response to alcohol. Analysis of covariance tested whether GABRA2 and GABRG1 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes, gender, placebo session, family history of alcoholism, recent drinking history, and the genotype × recent drinking history interaction significantly predicted the adaptive response. RESULTS: Recent drinking history (p = 0.01), and recent drinking history × genotype interaction (p = 0.01) were significantly associated with acute adaptation of the subjective responses to alcohol for the GABRA2 SNP rs279858. CONCLUSIONS: Higher recent drinking was found to be associated with reduced acute tolerance to positive, stimulating effects of alcohol in carriers of the rs279858 risk allele. We postulate that the GABRA2 effect on alcohol dependence may, in part, be due to its effect on subjective responses to alcohol. Language: en
Solving POMDPs by searching the space of finite policies

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPS) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from a restricted set of policies, represented as finite state automata of a given size. This problem is also intractable, but we show that the complexity can be greatly reduced when the POMDP andlor policy are further constrained. We demonstrate good empirical results with a branch-and-bound method for finding globally optimal deterministic policies, and a gradient-ascent method for finding locally optimal stochastic policies.
Probabilistic disjunctive logic programming

In this paper we propose a framework for combining Disjunctive Logic Programming and Poole's Probabilistic Horn Abduction. We use the concept of hypothesis to specify the probability structure. We consider the case in which probabilistic information is not available. Instead of using probability intervals, we allow for the specification of the probabilities of disjunctions. Because minimal models are used as characteristic models in disjunctive logic programming, we apply the principle of indifference on the set of minimal models to derive default probability values. We define the concepts of explanation and partial explanation of a formula, and use them to determine the default probability distribution(s) induced by a program. An algorithm for calculating the default probability of a goal is presented.
Automata-Theoretic Model Checking Revisited

In automata-theoretic model checking we compose the design under verification with a Buchi automaton that accepts traces violating the specification. We then use graph algorithms to search for a counterexample trace. The theory of this approach originated in the 1980s, and the basic algorithms were developed during the 1990s. Both explicit and symbolic implementations, such as SPIN and SMV, are widely used.
Staffing a Low-Performing School: Behavioral Responses to Selective Teacher Transfer Incentives

AbstractWe examine behavioral responses to an incentive program that offers high-performing teachers in ten school districts across the country $20,000 to transfer into the district's hardest-to-staff schools. We discuss behavioral responses to the program on high-performing teachers’ willingness to transfer (supply) and the effect of the transfer offer on the internal dynamics of the receiving schools (demand). We found low take-up rates among the 1,514 high-performing teachers who were offered the incentive, with minimal sorting on observable characteristics. Within the new schools, transfer teachers were less likely than their counterparts in a randomized control group to require mentoring and more likely to provide mentoring themselves. No significant differences occurred in school climate, collegiality, or the way in which students were assigned to teachers, but evidence indicates that principals may have strategically assigned existing teachers to grades in both treatment and control schools in resp...
Universal and Overlap Cycles for Posets, Words, and Juggling Patterns

We discuss results dealing with universal cycles (ucycles) and s-overlap cycles, and contribute to the body of those results by proving existence of universal cycles of naturally labeled posets (NL posets), s-overlap cycles of words of weight k, and juggling patterns. The result on posets is, to the best of our knowledge, the first demonstration of the existence of a ucycle whose length is unknown.
Efficient Inverse Maintenance and Faster Algorithms for Linear Programming

In this paper, we consider the following inverse maintenance problem: given A a#x03B5; R{n×d} and a number of rounds r, at round k, we receive a n×n diagonal matrix D(k) and we wish to maintain an efficient linear system solver for AT D(k) A under the assumption D(k) does not change too rapidly. This inverse maintenance problem is the computational bottleneck in solving multiple optimization problems. We show how to solve this problem with O(nnz(A)+da#x03A9) preprocessing time and amortized O(nnz(A)+d2) time per round, improving upon previous running times. Consequently, we obtain the fastest known running times for solving multiple problems including, linear programming, computing a rounding of a polytope, and sampling a point in a polytope. In particular given a feasible point in a linear program with n variables, d constraints, and constraint matrix A a#x03B5; R{d×n}, we show how to solve the linear program in time O((nnz(A)+d2)a#x221A;d log(a#x03B5; -- 1)). We achieve our results through a novel combination of classic numerical techniques of low rank update, preconditioning, and fast matrix multiplication as well as recent work on subspace embeddings and spectral sparsification that we hope will be of independent interest.
A hybrid partial sum computation unit architecture for list decoders of polar codes

Although the successive cancelation (SC) algorithm works well for very long polar codes, its error performance for shorter polar codes is much worse. Several SC based list decoding algorithms have been proposed to improve the error performances of both long and short polar codes. A significant step of SC based list decoding algorithms is the updating of partial sums for all decoding paths. In this paper, we first proposed a lazy copy partial sum computation algorithm for SC based list decoding algorithms. Instead of copying partial sums directly, our lazy copy algorithm copies indices of partial sums. Based on our lazy copy algorithm, we propose a hybrid partial sum computation unit architecture, which employs both registers and memories so that the overall area efficiency is improved. Compared with a recent partial sum computation unit for list decoders, when the list size L = 4, our partial sum computation unit achieves an area saving of 23% and 63% for block length 213 and 215, respectively.
Online Prediction of the Running Time of Tasks

We describe and evaluate the Running Time Advisor (RTA), a system that can predict the running time of a compute-bound task on a typical shared, unreserved commodity host. The prediction is computed from linear time series predictions of host load and takes the form of a confidence interval that neatly expresses the error associated with the measurement and prediction processes – error that must be captured to make statistically valid decisions based on the predictions. Adaptive applications make such decisions in pursuit of consistent high performance, choosing, for example, the host where a task is most likely to meet its deadline. We begin by describing the system and summarizing the results of our previously published work on host load prediction. We then describe our algorithm for computing predictions of running time from host load predictions. We next evaluate the system using over 100,000 randomized testcases run on 39 different hosts, finding that is indeed capable of computing correct and useful confidence intervals. Finally, we report on our experience with using the RTA in application-oriented real-time scheduling in distributed systems.
QUANTUM ERGODICITY OF C* DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

We define a notion of quantum or non-commutative, ergodicity for a class ofC *-dynamical systems (A, G, α) which we callquantized GNS systems. Such a system possesses a natural classical limit state ω, which induces a classical limit system by the GNS construction. The criterion for quantum ergodicity is that the time average 〈A〉 of an observable A ∈A equals the “space average” ω(A)I plus an errorK which is negligible in the classical limit. We prove that ergodicity of ω is a sufficient condition for quantum ergodicity of (A, G, α) if the classical limit system is abelian, give a conditional converse, and discuss a number of applications.
Speedup of Micromagnetic Simulations with C++ AMP on Graphics Processing Units

A finite-difference micromagnetic solver called Grace uses C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP). The high-speed performance of a single GPU is compared against a typical CPU-based solver. The speedup of GPU to CPU is shown to be two orders of magnitude for problems with larger sizes. This solver can run on GPUs from various hardware vendors, such as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, regardless of whether it is a dedicated or integrated graphics processor. The Web extra for this article includes appendices of code from the author's original work.
Catch Us If You Can: Election Monitoring and International Norm Diffusion

Why has the decision to invite foreign election observers become an international norm? More generally, how do international norms develop in the absence of incentives for cooperation or activism by norm entrepreneurs? Motivated by the case of election observation, I argue that international norms can be generated through a diffusely motivated signaling process. Responding to increased benefits associated with being democratic, international election observation was initiated by democratizing governments as a signal of a government's commitment to democracy. Increased democracy-contingent benefits gave other “true-democrats” the incentive to invite observers, resulting in a widespread belief that all true-democrats invite election monitors. Consequently, not inviting observers became an unambiguous signal that a government was not democratizing, giving even pseudo-democrats reason to invite observers and risk a negative report. I evaluate this theory with an original global dataset on elections and election observation, 1960–2006.