cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Decomposition of Linear Periodic Systems

In this section, we consider the linear periodic system (35.1) and the problem of the decomposition of the space C using the generalized eigenspaces of the characteristic multipliers of (33.1). The decomposition is given explicitly through a bilinear form similar to the one for the autonomous equation in Section 21. The results are easy consequences of the adjoint theory of Section 33.
Proton therapy for adult medulloblastoma: Acute toxicity and disease control outcomes

We report disease control, survival outcomes, and treatment-related toxicity among adult medulloblastoma patients who received proton craniospinal irradiation (CSI) as part of multimodality therapy. We reviewed 20 adults with medulloblastoma (≥ 22 years old) who received postoperative proton CSI ± chemotherapy between 2008 and 2020. Patient, disease, and treatment details and prospectively obtained patient-reported acute CSI toxicities were collected. Acute hematologic data were analyzed. Median age at diagnosis was 27 years; 45% of patients had high-risk disease; 75% received chemotherapy, most (65%) after CSI. Eight (40%) patients received concurrent vincristine with radiotherapy. Median CSI dose was 36GyE with a median tumor bed boost of 54GyE. Median duration of radiotherapy was 44 days. No acute ≥ grade 3 gastrointestinal or hematologic toxicities attributable to CSI occurred. Grade 2 nausea and vomiting affected 25% and 5% of patients, respectively, while 36% developed acute grade 2 hematologic toxicity (36% grade 2 leukopenia and 7% grade 2 neutropenia). Those receiving concurrent chemotherapy with CSI had a 38% rate of grade 2 hematologic toxicity compared to 33% among those not receiving concurrent chemotherapy. Among patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy (n = 13), 100% completed ≥ 4 cycles and 85% completed all planned cycles. With a median follow-up of 3.1 years, 4-year actuarial local control, disease-free survival, and overall survival rates were 90%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Proton CSI in adult medulloblastoma patients is very well tolerated and shows promising disease control and survival outcomes. These data support the standard use of proton CSI for adult medulloblastoma.
Impact of COPD exacerbations leading to hospitalization on general and disease-specific quality of life

Abstract Rationale Acute exacerbations negatively impact quality of life in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but the impact of hospitalized exacerbations on quality of life is not clear. We hypothesized that patients with hospitalized exacerbations would benefit from hospitalization and experience improvement in general and disease-specific quality of life (as measured by the St. George's respiratory questionnaire (SGRQ) and the medical outcomes study 36-item short form health survey (SF-36)) compared to those without exacerbations, or with non-hospitalized acute exacerbations. Methods 1219 COPD patients enrolled in either the simvastatin for the prevention of exacerbations in moderate-to severe COPD Trial (STATCOPE) or azithromycin for prevention of exacerbations of COPD trial (MACRO) were analyzed. Demographic information, spirometry, and symptom scores were noted at baseline. Exacerbation events and changes in quality of life scores were assessed over a mean of 538 days of follow-up. Results Of patients studied, 25.6% were hospitalized, 44.0% had at least one outpatient exacerbation, and 30.4% had no exacerbation. Baseline SGRQ and SF-36 scores were severely impaired in all groups studied. Over time, SF-36 scores did not change significantly between groups. SGRQ symptom domain scores improved in other groups but did not improve in those hospitalized for a COPD exacerbation. Conclusions At baseline, patients hospitalized for acute exacerbations of COPD had more impaired quality of life scores. Over time, SGRQ symptom domain scores improved in other groups but did not in those who were hospitalized. Other measurements of quality of life were not improved by hospitalization for COPD.
Structuring Research Rotations to Facilitate Surgery Residents' Academic Productivity.

Objective We sought to enhance opportunities for general surgery residents to conduct research during residency without having to take dedicated time out of clinical training. To this end, we created structured research rotations to facilitate and support resident research. Design Research blocks of four week's duration were introduced for categorical interns and post-graduate year (PGY) 4 residents. Interns had no clinical responsibilities during their research blocks while PGY 4 residents shadowed their mentor in the clinical setting. Research projects were developed and prepared in advance to maximize productivity during the research rotation. Setting General surgery residency program at an urban, academic, safety-net, tertiary care hospital Participants Categorical general surgery interns and PGY 4 general surgery residents Results The research rotations were first offered in the 2019 to 2020 academic year (AY). 10 interns and 11 PGY 4 residents have since completed the rotations; of the PGY 4 residents, 6 had not previously taken any time off for research activities. Research projects varied between residents and focused on basic science, clinical outcomes, quality improvement, and education. Conclusions Through establishment of dedicated research rotations, we were able to increase resident engagement in a variety of research activities. We provide a simple model for training programs seeking increased research engagement and productivity for their residents without extending training time.
A survey of methods for intermittent fault analysis

As digital circuits grow in complexity, and as they are used in more and more critical applications, their reliability becomes an important consideration. This directs the attention of researchers involved in this field to two basic questions— first, how to design more reliable systems; second, how can something be said about the reliability of a particular system?
There are infinitely many Smarandache derivations, integrations and lucky numbers

A number is said to be a Smarandache Lucky Number (see [3, 1, 2]) if an incorrect calculation leads to a correct result. In general, a Smarandache Lucky Method or Algorithm is said to be any incorrect method or algorithm, which leads to a correct result. In this note we find an infinite sequence of distinct lucky fractions. We also define a lucky product differentiation and a lucky product integration. For a given function f, we find all other functions g, which renders the product lucky for differentiation/integration.
Autonomous Navigation and Control of a Mars Rover

Abstract A Mars Rover will nerd to be able to navigate autonomously kilometers at a time. This paper outlines the sensing, perception, planning, and execution monitoring systems that are currently being designed for the rover. The sensing system is based around sicreo vision. The interpretation of the images use a registration of the depth map with a global height map provided by an orbiting spacecraft. Safe, low energy paths are then planned through the map, and expectations of what the rover's articulation sensors should sense arc generated. These expectations are then used to ensure that the planned path is correctly being executed.
Public key locally decodable codes with short keys

This work considers locally decodable codes in the computationally bounded channel model. The computationally bounded channel model, introduced by Lipton in 1994, views the channel as an adversary which is restricted to polynomial-time computation. Assuming the existence of IND-CPA secure public-key encryption, we present a construction of public-key locally decodable codes, with constant codeword expansion, tolerating constant error rate, with locality O(λ), and negligible probability of decoding failure, for security parameter λ. Hemenway and Ostrovsky gave a construction of locally decodable codes in the public-key model with constant codeword expansion and locality O(λ2), but their construction had two major drawbacks. The keys in their scheme were proportional to n, the length of the message, and their schemes were based on the F-hiding assumption. Our keys are of length proportional to the security parameter instead of the message, and our construction relies only on the existence of IND-CPA secure encryption rather than on specific number-theoretic assumptions. Our scheme also decreases the locality from O(λ2) to O(λ). Our construction can be modified to give a generic transformation of any private-key locally decodable code to a public-key locally decodable code based only on the existence of an IND-CPA secure public-key encryption scheme.
Use of Polycarbonate Vacuum Vessels in High-Temperature Fusion-Plasma Research

Magnetic fusion energy (MFE) research requires ultrahigh-vacuum (UHV) conditions, primarily to reduce plasma contamination by impurities. For radiofrequency (RF)-heated plasmas, a great benefit may accrue from a non-conducting vacuum vessel, allowing external RF antennas which avoids the complications and cost of internal antennas and high-voltage high-current feedthroughs. In this paper we describe these and other criteria, e.g., safety, availability, design flexibility, structural integrity, access, outgassing, transparency, and fabrication techniques that led to the selection and use of 25.4-cm OD, 1.6-cm wall polycarbonate pipe as the main vacuum vessel for an MFE research device whose plasmas are expected to reach keV energies for durations exceeding 0.1 s
Improved Robustness for Dynamic Inversion Based Nonlinear Flight Control Laws

Abstract Using a simple analysis it is shown that modifications to the desired, linear, closed-loop dynamics of a nonlinear dynamic inversion control law can improve the performance in the presence of static uncertainties. The idea is validated by designing and simulating a control law for post stall flight of a high performance aircraft with substantial uncertainties in the aerodynamic database.
Circulant Binary Embedding

Binary embedding of high-dimensional data requires long codes to preserve the discriminative power of the input space. Traditional binary coding methods often suffer from very high computation and storage costs in such a scenario. To address this problem, we propose Circulant Binary Embedding (CBE) which generates binary codes by projecting the data with a circulant matrix. The circulant structure enables the use of Fast Fourier Transformation to speed up the computation. Compared to methods that use unstructured matrices, the proposed method improves the time complexity from O(d2) to O(d log d), and the space complexity from O(d2) to O(d) where d is the input dimensionality. We also propose a novel time-frequency alternating optimization to learn data-dependent circulant projections, which alternatively minimizes the objective in original and Fourier domains. We show by extensive experiments that the proposed approach gives much better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches for fixed time, and provides much faster computation with no performance degradation for fixed number of bits.
The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth

This comprehensive overview of the modern Chinese economy by a noted expert on China's economic development offers a quality and breadth of coverage not found in any other English-language text. In The Chinese Economy, Barry Naughton provides both an engaging, broadly focused introduction to China's economy since 1949 and original insights based on his own extensive research. The book will be an essential resource for students, teachers, scholars, business people, and policymakers. It is suitable for classroom use for undergraduate or graduate courses. After presenting background material on the pre-1949 economy and the industrialization, reform, and market transition that have taken place since, the book examines different aspects of the modern Chinese economy. It analyzes patterns of growth and development, including population growth and the one-child family policy; the rural economy, including agriculture and rural industrialization; industrial and technological development in urban areas; international trade and foreign investment; macroeconomic trends and cycles and the financial system; and the largely unaddressed problems of environmental quality and the sustainability of growth. The text is notable also for placing China's economy in interesting comparative contexts, discussing it in relation to other transitional or developing economies and to such advanced industrial countries as the United States and Japan. It provides both a broad historical and macro perspective as well as a focused examination of the actual workings of China's complex and dynamic economic development. Interest in the Chinese economy will only grow as China becomes an increasingly important player on the world's stage. This book will be the standard reference for understanding and teaching about the next economic superpower.
Organizing for prosperity : collective action, political parties and the political economy of development

The ability of citizens to act collectively plays a central role in major debates in the political economy of development, including the causes and consequences of democratization and clientelism. This essay uses two lines of research to underscore the importance of explicitly introducing the organization of collective action into these debates. Exhaustive research on the management of open access resources demonstrates that citizens' ability to act collectively depends on non-trivial organizational arrangements that allow leaders to sanction free-riding and allow members to replace leaders if they shirk. Other research demonstrates wide variability in the organization of political parties. In countries where political parties do not have these two organizational characteristics, public policies are less friendly to economic development. This evidence suggests that in future research on democracy, state-building and development, citizen organization should be a central object of analysis.
Abducens Nerve (Cranial Nerve VI)

The abducens nerve begins within the pons and takes a long course with important anatomic relationships on its way to the lateral rectus muscle. This nerve is the most commonly affected ocular motor nerve, and many important clinical syndromes present or include abducens palsies. This article outlines the anatomy, presentation, differential diagnosis, evaluation, and treatment options for abducens neuropathy.
Economic Measures of Soil Conservation Benefits: Regional Values for Policy Assessment

This report describes data and methodologies that the Economic Research Service has used to apply monetary values to changes in soil erosion. Values and methodology are clearly described so that analysts can apply the data to specific soil conservation projects. ERS has used the values to estimate soil conservation benefits of changes in farm programs and practices, but no analyses of farm programs or practices are provided here. The benefit values are regional dollar-per-ton measures of 14 different categories of soil conservation benefits. There are other soil conservation benefit categories beyond those reported here, so a full accounting of benefits is not possible. As a result, monetary values derived from applications of these data are likely to be lower-bound estimates of the benefits or costs of changes in soil erosion. The data are thought to be detailed enough for national and regional estimates, but lack precision for smaller scale estimates.
Optimum Design — Minimum Weight Versus Fully Stressed

The substitute problem of fully stressed design or simultaneous failure modes design is often solved in place of the minimum weight design. A method is presented which can be used to determine the validity of the substitute problem of fully stressed or simultaneous failure modes design. The equivalence of these two solutions can be demonstrated for a large class of discrete and continuous structures subjected to a single load condition. This equivalence can also be extended to a stress limited determinate truss subjected to several independent mechanical loads. However, it can also be shown that the simultaneous failure modes is not necessarily the minimum weight design for waffle plates subjected to a multiplicity of biaxial loads.
Managing Innovation: The Role of Collateral

Abstract Using exogenous variations in the market value of corporate real estate, this paper investigates whether appreciation of corporate collateral value facilitates innovation. My baseline finding shows that real estate appreciation leads to an increase in innovation quantity as measured by patent productions and in innovation quality as measured by citations per patent, especially when firms are credit constrained. To uncover the underlying channel, I show that real estate appreciation allows additional secured borrowing, which enables firms to increase their innovative investments including internal research and development (R&D), the acquisition of innovative target firms, and corporate venture capital (CVC). Moreover, following real estate appreciation, firms change the trajectory of innovation, as reflected in the patent-filing industries and in the characteristics of acquisitions and CVC investment deals. Finally, I provide evidence that firms that innovate more in response to real estate appreciation tend to have better future financial health and accounting profitability.
Trust Management in Strand Spaces: A Rely-Guarantee Method

We show how to combine trust management theories with nonce-based cryptographic protocols. The strand space framework for protocol analysis is extended by associating formulas from a trust management logic with the transmit and receive actions of the protocol principals. The formula on a transmission is a guarantee; the sender must ensure that this formula is true before sending the message. The formula on a receive event is an assumption that the recipient may rely on in deducing future guarantee formulas. The strand space framework allows us to prove that a protocol is sound, in the sense that when a principal relies on a formula, another principal has previously guaranteed it. We explain the ideas in reference to a simple new electronic commerce protocol, in which a customer obtains a money order from a bank to pay a merchant to ship some goods.
Locally Most Powerful Tests

Locally most powerful tests, that is, tests that have maximum power against local alternatives are discussed. Keywords: most powerful tests; locally most powerful unbiased tests; locally most powerful invariant tests; locally most powerful rank tests; Wilcoxon–Mann–Whitney tests; censored data; monotone likelihood ratio
Deductive Verification of Advanced Out-of-Order Microprocessors

This paper demonstrates the modeling and deductive verification of out-of-order microprocessors of varying complexities using a logic of Counter Arithmetic with Lambda Expressions and Uninterpreted Functions (CLU). The microprocessors support combinations of out-of-order instruction execution, superscalar operation, branch prediction, execute and memory exceptions, and load-store buffering. We illustrate that the logic is expressive enough to model components found in modern processors. The paper describes the challenges in modeling and verification with the addition of different design features. The paper demonstrates the effective use of automatic decision procedure to reduce the amount of manual guidance required in discharging most proof obligations in the verification. Unlike previous methods, the verification scales well for superscalar processors with wide dispatch and retirement widths.
Exchange Rate Uncertainty and Optimal Participation in International Trade

Instead of just focusing on the effect of exchange rate levels (undervalued or overvalued exchange rates) on trade, this paper provides an analysis of the effects of exchange rate volatility levels on international trade. Intuitively, an increase in exchange rate volatility leads to uncertainty for agents participating in international trade, and such uncertainty might have a negative impact on international trade flows and participation, thereby reducing the advantages of world-wide specialization. This is especially crucial for countries where exchange rate derivatives markets are not yet well developed and the costs of hedging exchange rate risk are very high. The model here considers optimal decisions about participation in international trade under uncertainty about the exchange rate. The main conclusion is that a high level of exchange rate volatility can deter entrepreneurs from becoming exporters, even though exporting can be highly profitable. For those already participating in international trade, it is opposite: they may, optimally, choose not to leave the market even though staying in this market is highly unprofitable in the short run.
Do Computers Make Output Harder to Measure

In recent years, U.S. productivity growth accelerated sharply in manufacturing, but has remained sluggish in the most computer-intensive service industries. This paper explores the possibility that information technology is generating output that is increasingly hard to measure in non-manufacturing industries, which contributes to the divergence in industry productivity growth rates. Our results suggest that measurement error in 13 computer-intensive, non-manufacturing industries increased between 0.74 and 1.57 percentage points per year in the 1990s, which understates annual aggregate productivity growth by 0.10 to 0.20 percentage points in the 1990s. This adds to an estimated 0.22 to 0.30 percentage point error from the increasing share of aggregate output in these hard-to-measure industries. Thus, increasing measurement problems may understate aggregate productivity growth by an additional 0.32 to 0.50 percentage points per year in the 1990s and play an important role in understanding recent productivity trends at the industry level.
Efficient Büchi Automata from LTL Formulae

We present an algorithm to generate small Buchi automata for LTL formulae. We describe a heuristic approach consisting of three phases: rewriting of the formula, an optimized translation procedure, and simplification of the resulting automaton. We present a translation procedure that is optimal within a certain class of translation procedures. The simplification algorithm can be used for Buchi automata in general. It reduces the number of states and transitions, as well as the number and size of the accepting sets—possibly reducing the strength of the resulting automaton. This leads to more efficient model checking of linear-time logic formulae. We compare our method to previous work, and show that it is significantly more efficient for both random formulae, and formulae in common use and from the literature.
The effects of trade reforms on scale and technical efficiency

This paper shows how the industrial structure and performance changed after Chile's dramatic trade liberalization. A comparison of the 1967 and 1979 censuses shows little improvement in productivity overall, but these figures don't separate the effects of trade liberalization from the effects of recession, high interest rates, and real appreciation. To isolate the effects of trade liberalization, the authors compared industries in which protection was significantly reduced with industries in which it was not. It was found that of the industries for which protection was lifted, the smallest plants tended to expand output more. Cross-plant estimates of returns to scale dropped significantly. These findings are consistent with the view that exposure to foreign competition forces suboptimally small producers toward minimally efficient scale. Also, production levels became higher and more uniform across plants in those industries undergoing dramatic reductions in protection. Taken together, these results support the received wisdom that increased exposure to trade improves competition within an industry.
Quantifying Homology Classes

We develop a method for measuring homology classes. This involves three problems. First, we define the size of a homology class, using ideas from relative homology. Second, we define an optimal basis of a homology group to be the basis whose elements' size have the minimal sum. We provide a greedy algorithm to compute the optimal basis and measure classes in it. The algorithm runs in $O(\beta^4 n^3 log^2 n)$ time, where $n$ is the size of the simplicial complex and $\beta$ is the Betti number of the homology group. Third, we discuss different ways of localizing homology classes and prove some hardness results.
Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media

In the massive online worlds of social media, users frequently rely on organizing themselves around specific topics of interest to find and engage with like-minded people. However, navigating these massive worlds and finding topics of specific interest often proves difficult because the worlds are mostly organized haphazardly, leaving users to find relevant interests by word of mouth or using a basic search feature. Here, we report on a method using the backbone of a network to create a map of the primary topics of interest in any social network. To demonstrate the method, we build an interest map for the social news web site reddit and show how such a map could be used to navigate a social media world. Moreover, we analyze the network properties of the reddit social network and find that it has a scale-free, small-world, and modular community structure, much like other online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We suggest that the integration of interest maps into popular social media platforms will assist users in organizing themselves into more specific interest groups, which will help alleviate the overcrowding effect often observed in large online communities.
The Renminbi's Dollar Peg at the Crossroads

In the face of huge balance of payments surpluses and internal inflationary pressures, China has been in a classic conflict between internal and external balance under its dollar currency peg. Over the longer term, China’s large, modernizing, and diverse economy will need exchange rate flexibility and, eventually, convertibility with open capital markets. A feasible and attractive exit strategy from the essentially fixed RMB exchange rate would be a two-stage approach, consistent with the steps already taken since July 2005, but going beyond them. First, establish a limited trading band for the RMB relative to a basket of major trading partner currencies. Set the band so that it allows some initial revaluation of the RMB against the dollar, manage the basket rate within the band if necessary, and widen the band over time as domestic foreign exchange markets develop. Second, put on hold ad hoc measures of financial account liberalization. They will be less helpful for relieving exchange rate pressures once the RMB/basket rate is allowed to move flexibly within a band, and they are best postponed until domestic foreign exchange markets develop further, the exchange rate is fully flexible, and the domestic financial system has been strengthened and placed on a market-oriented basis.
Formation of methyl mercury by bacteria.

Twenty-three Hg2+ resistant cultures were isolated from sediment of the Savannah River in Georgia; of these, 14 were gram-negative short rods belonging to the genera Escherichia and Enterobacter, six were gram-positive cocci (three Staphylococcus sp. and three Streptococcus sp.) and three were Bacillus sp. All the Escherichia, Enterobacter, and the Bacillus strain were more resistant to Hg2+ than the strains of staphylococci and streptococci. Adaptation using serial dilutions and concentration gradient agar plate techniques showed that it was possible to select a Hg2+-resistant strain from a parent culture identified as Enterobacter aerogenes. This culture resisted 1,200 μg of Hg2+ per ml of medium and produced methyl mercury from HgCl2, but was unable to convert Hg2+ to volatile elemental mercury (Hg0). Under constant aeration (i.e., submerged culture), slightly more methyl mercury was formed than in the absence of aeration. Production of methyl mercury was cyclic in nature and slightly decreased if DL-homocysteine was present in media, but increased with methyl-cobalamine. It is concluded that the bacterial production of methyl mercury may be a means of resistance and detoxification against mercurials in which inorganic Hg2+ is converted to organic form and secreted into the environment.
The Optimistic Readers Transformation

Monitors, such as Java classes with synchronized methods, are a convenient and safe abstraction for designing and reasoning about multithreaded object-oriented programs. However, the straightforward implementation of monitors can be inefficient, particularly in programs in which the majority of calls are to read-only methods. We introduce the optimistic readers program transformation, which may be implemented either as a compiler optimization, or as a "design pattern." This transformation produces an implementation whose observable behavior is equivalent to that of a monitor, but in which read-only methods do not acquire locks or perform any shared writes. As a result, programmers can reason about their programs as if each shared object were implemented using mutual exclusion, while achieving the performance benefits of unsynchronized reads. We present the program transformation using the platform-independent abstraction CRF. We then demonstrate the performance of this transformation as applied to benchmarks derived from the core module of a practical system - a Java-based publish-subscribe router. We compare the performance of the optimistic readers transformation to unoptimized synchronized methods and to reader and writer locks.
Human performance in virtual environments

There are significant advances in virtual world technologies that permit collaboration in a distributed, virtual environment. In the real world environment, distributed teams collaborate via face-to-face communication, using social interactions, such as eye contact and gestures, which provide critical feedback to the human decision maker. The virtual world affords the system designer the ability to evaluate an operator's ability to respond to information (e.g., events, goals, objectives, etc.) in a complex, distributed team environment. The question is, how do we evaluate human performance and cognitive processes of decision makers within the virtual environment? We expect that virtual environments should facilitate sharing ideas, information and strategies among team members to achieve situation awareness and effective decisionmaking. This paper will discuss ways to evaluate performance in virtual environments and the critical role that immersive 3D environments will play in future ship designs.
A pattern-based approach for modeling and analyzing error recovery

Several approaches exist for modeling recovery of fault-tolerant systems during the requirements analysis phase. Most of these approaches are based on design techniques for recovery. Such design-based analysis methods unnecessarily constrain an analyst when specifying recovery requirements. To remedy such restrictions, we present an object analysis pattern, called the corrector pattern, that provides a generic reusable strategy for modeling error recovery requirements for embedded systems. In addition to templates for constructing structural and behavioral models of recovery requirements, the corrector pattern also contains templates for specifying properties that can be formally verified to ensure the consistency between recovery and functional requirements. Additional property templates can be instantiated and verified to ensure the fault-tolerance of the system to which the corrector pattern has been applied. We validate our analysis method in terms of UML diagrams, where we (1) use the corrector pattern to model recovery in UML behavioral models, (2) generate and model check formal models of the resulting UML models, and (3) visualize the model checking results in terms of the UML diagrams to facilitate model refinement. We demonstrate our analysis method in the context of an industrial automotive application.
Sr2P7X (X = Cl, Br, and I): Synthesis, Crystal and Electronic Structures of Double Zintl Salts Containing Heptaphosphanortricyclane, P73–

Three new strontium phosphide-halides, Sr2P7X (X = Cl, Br, and I) were synthesized and structurally characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. In the crystal structure of all three compounds, strontium cations and halogen anions are present together with heptaphosphanortricyclane, P73–, clusters. Sr2P7Br and Sr2P7I are isostructural and crystallize in a new structure type in the chiral cubic space group P213 (No. 198). Sr2P7Cl crystallizes in a new structure type in the centrosymmetric monoclinic space group C2/c (No. 15). According to the Zintl concept, quantum-mechanical calculations, and UV/Vis spectroscopy, Sr2P7X compounds are all electron-balanced wide-bandgap semiconductors. The bonding in the P73– clusters was analyzed by means of electron localization function.
Acoustic sensor pad for physiological monitoring

The Army Research Laboratory has developed an acoustic sensor pad technology that is useful for combat casualty care and soldier performance monitoring. Heartbeats, breaths, motion, and other physiological sounds relating to injured and uninjured soldiers can be detected, transmitted, and analyzed for diagnostic purposes. The acoustic sensor pad is a fluid-filled bladder with a hydrophone that couples well to the soldier's torso. Since the human body is mostly water, the pad acts as a fluid extension of the body to form an acoustical conduit to a sensitive hydrophone within the pad that detects body sounds. The sensing pad can be a hand-held version for the field medic or doctor, or a torso-sized pad incorporated into casualty transport hardware such as litters or gurneys. Acoustic analysis of the sensor-pad output can provide amplitude, phase, frequency, duration, rate, and correlative information that may be useful for medical diagnosis, patient care, and research. Data collected with prototype devices show excellent signal-to-noise ratios for heart and breath sounds; such devices could be used in the field to detect conditions such as irregular heartbeats, cardiac distress, obstructed airways, sucking chest wounds, fluid in the lungs, or other respiratory and circulatory emergencies. Joint time-frequency Fourier analysis of sensor output shows that human cardiopulmonary function contains infrasonic (sounds below 20 Hz) signals, which cannot be beard with human ears, but may be useful for medical diagnostics. If soldiers were equipped with small monitoring sensor pads with transmit capability to carry in contact with the torso, squad performance level could be assessed, or those missing in action could be medically interrogated from a remote location for heart and breathing sounds. The technology can also be used to monitor operators of vehicles or aircraft, and initiate appropriate safety actions in the event of sudden incapacitation resulting from weapons fire, heart attack, or blackout.
Agricultural mechanization: adoption patterns and economic impact

Over the past half a century developing regions, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, have seen labor-saving technologies adopted at unprecedented levels. Intensification of production systems created power bottlenecks around the land preparation, harvesting and threshing operations. Alleviating the power bottlenecks with the adoption of mechanical technologies helped enhance agricultural productivity and lowered the unit cost of crop production even in the densely populated countries of Asia. Economic growth and the commercialization of agricultural systems is leading to further mechanization of agricultural systems in Asia and Latin America. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have very low levels of mechanization and available data indicate declining rather than increasing levels of adoption, even among the countries that were the early trendsetters, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. This chapter documents the trends and sequential patterns in the adoption of mechanical technology, assesses the evidence on the productivity and equity impact of mechanization, and discusses the implication for mechanization policy.
Temporal-difference networks for dynamical systems with continuous observations and actions

Temporal-difference (TD) networks are a class of predictive state representations that use well-established TD methods to learn models of partially observable dynamical systems. Previous research with TD networks has dealt only with dynamical systems with finite sets of observations and actions. We present an algorithm for learning TD network representations of dynamical systems with continuous observations and actions. Our results show that the algorithm is capable of learning accurate and robust models of several noisy continuous dynamical systems. The algorithm presented here is the first fully incremental method for learning a predictive representation of a continuous dynamical system.
The Open Mind

a few weeks ago the president of a college in the prairie states came to see me. Clearly, when he tried to look into the future, he did not like what he saw: the grim prospects for the maintenance of peace, for the preservation of freedom, for the flourishing and growth of the humane values of our civilization. He seemed to have in mind that it might be well for people, even in his small college, to try to take some part in turning these prospects to a happier end; but what he said came as rather a shock. He said, “I wonder if you can help me. I have a very peculiar problem. You see, out there, most of the students, and the teachers too, come from the farm. They are used to planting seed, and then waiting for it to grow, and then harvesting it. They believe in time and in nature. It is rather hard to get them to take things into their own hands.” Perhaps, as much as anything, my theme will have to do with enlisting time and nature in the conduct of our international affairs: in the quest for peace and a freer world. This is not meant mystically, for the nature which we must enlist is that of man; and if there is hope in it, that lies not in man’s reason. What elements are there in the conduct of foreign affairs which may be conducive to the exercise of that reason, which may provide a climate for the growth of new experience, new insight and new understanding? How can we recognize such growth, and be sensitive to its hopeful meaning, while there is yet time, through action based on understanding, to direct the outcome?
Biofuels in Africa: Opportunities, Prospects, and Challenges

Biofuels offer new opportunities for African countries. They can contribute to economic growth, employment, and rural incomes. They can become an important export for some countries and provide low-cost fuel for others. There is also a potentially large demand for biofuels to meet the rapidly growing need for local fuel. Abundant natural resources and low-cost labor make producing biofuel feedstock's a viable alternative to traditional crops; and the preferential access available to most African countries to protected markets in industrial countries provides unique export opportunities. Biofuels also bring challenges and risks, including potential land-use conflicts, environmental risks, and heightened concerns about food security. This book examines the potential of African countries to produce biofuels for export or domestic consumption and looks at the policy framework needed. It is part of the effort by the World Bank's Africa region to examine critical issues that affect the region and to recommend policies that effectively address these issues while providing an enabling environment for the private sector. The book is intended to inform policy makers and the larger development community of the global and domestic market opportunities facing biofuel producers, as well as the challenges of producing biofuels, in the Africa region.
The 2‐norbornyl cation: a retrospective

Decades of research on the structure of the 2-norbornyl cation afford a new understanding of bonding in carbon compounds and of the electron-donor capacity of carbon–carbon σ bonds. The bridged or “nonclassical” structure of the 2-norbornyl cation, which features 3-center, 2-electron bonding, is supported by (inter alia) X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, calculations, thermochemical studies, and copious mechanistic evidence. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Sources of Welfare Disparities Across and Within Regions of Brazil : Evidence from the 2002-03 Household Budget Survey

Brazil's inequalities in welfare and poverty across and within regions can be accounted for by differences in household attributes and returns to those attributes. This paper uses Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions at the mean as well as at different quantiles of welfare distributions on regionally representative household survey data (2002-03 Household Budget Survey). The analysis finds that household attributes account for most of the welfare differences between urban and rural areas within regions. However, comparing the lagging Northeast region with the leading Southeast region, differences in returns to attributes account for a large part of the welfare disparities, in particular in metropolitan areas, supporting the presence of agglomeration effects in booming areas.
Distinguishing barriers to insurance in Thai villages

In both developing and developed countries, consumption insurance is incomplete: consumption co-moves with income. Models with limited commitment, moral hazard, and hidden income have been proposed to explain this lack of full insurance. Limited commitment and moral hazard have generally been found to fit the data better than full insurance or permanent income models, but these models have not been tested against the alternative of hidden income. I show that the way history matters in forecasting consumption can be used to distinguish the hidden income model from other models of incomplete insurance. I also argue that accounting for measurement error in consumption is important in identifying barriers to insurance. In a ten-year panel from rural Thailand, neither limited commitment or moral hazard can fully explain the relationship between income and consumption--the need to give households incentives to truthfully reveal their income appears to play a role in constraining insurance.
Self-Organizing Production and Exchange

Consider autonomous agents endowed with two goods and the capability of producing each. Regularly each agent can produce one (only) of the goods or trade with other agents. Each good yields utility according to a utility function. This paper studies how utility-maximizing agents optimize in these circumstances, examines the aggregate characteristics of the resulting economy, and investigates the internal organization of production and exchange.
POISSON COUNT MODELS TO EXPLAIN THE ADOPTION OF AGRICULTURAL AND NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES BY SMALL FARMERS IN CENTRAL AMERICAN COUNTRIES

Evaluations of the factors influencing the adoption of agricultural and natural resource management technologies among small farmers in developing countries have been mostly limited to qualitative discussions or simple descriptive statistics resulting in superficial anti inconclusive findings. This study introduces the use of Poisson Count Regressions as a statistically appropriate procedure to analyze certain common types of adoption data, It uses them to assess the impact of key socio-economic, bio-physical, and institutional factors on the adoption of integrated pest management, agroforestry, and soil conservation technologies among small farmers in three Central American countries: Costa Rica, Panama and El Salvador.
Numerical modelling of the classical nova outburst

A mechanism is described that promises to explain how nova outbursts take place on white dwarf of 1 solar mass or less and for accretion rates of 4 x 10 to the -10 solar mass/yr or greater.
A framework for analyzing and comparing privacy states

This article develops a framework for analyzing and comparing privacy and privacy protections across (inter alia) time, place, and polity and for examining factors that affect privacy and privacy protection. This framework provides a method to describe precisely aspects of privacy and context and a flexible vocabulary and notation for such descriptions and comparisons. Moreover, it links philosophical and conceptual work on privacy to social science and policy work and accommodates different conceptions of the nature and value of privacy. The article begins with an outline of the framework. It then refines the view by describing a hypothetical application. Finally, it applies the framework to a real-world privacy issue—campaign finance disclosure laws in the United States and France. The article concludes with an argument that the framework offers important advantages to privacy scholarship and for privacy policy makers.
Bcc 4He as a Coherent Quantum Solid: “Super-Solid”?

In this work we investigate the quantum nature of bcc 4 He. We show that it is a solid phase with an Off-Diagonal Long Range Order of coherently oscillating local electric dipole moments. These dipoles arise from the correlated zero-point motion of the atoms in the crystal potential, which oscillate in synchrony so that the dipolar interaction energy is minimized. This coherent state has a three-component complex order parameter. The condensation energy of these dipoles in the bcc phase further stabilizes it over the hcp phase at finite temperatures. This condensation of the dipoles is not a ‘super-solid’. We further show that there can be fermionic excitations of this ground-state and predict that they form an optic-like branch in the (110) direction.
NRC-Canada: Building the State-of-the-Art in Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

In this paper, we describe how we created two state-of-the-art SVM classifiers, one to detect the sentiment of messages such as tweets and SMS (message-level task) and one to detect the sentiment of a term within a message (term-level task). Among submissions from 44 teams in a competition, our submissions stood first in both tasks on tweets, obtaining an F-score of 69.02 in the message-level task and 88.93 in the term-level task. We implemented a variety of surface-form, semantic, and sentiment features. We also generated two large word‐sentiment association lexicons, one from tweets with sentiment-word hashtags, and one from tweets with emoticons. In the message-level task, the lexicon-based features provided a gain of 5 F-score points over all others. Both of our systems can be replicated using freely available resources. 1
GFP: Lighting Up Life

The great American baseball player Yogi Berra once said: “You can observe a lot by watching.” Unfortunately, before the early 1990s observations in the biological sciences were usually done on dead specimens that were specially prepared and permeabilized to allow entry of reagents to stain cell components. These methods allowed a glimpse of what cells were doing, but they gave a necessarily static view of life, just snapshots in time. GFP and other fluorescent proteins revolutionized the biological sciences because these proteins allowed scientists to look at the inner workings of living cells. GFP can be used to tell where genes are turned on, where proteins are located within tissues, and how cell activities change over time. Once a cell can be seen, it can be studied and manipulated. The story of the discovery and development of GFP also provides a very nice example of how scientific progress is often made: through accidental discoveries, the willingness to ignore previous assumptions and take chances, and the combined efforts of many people. The story of GFP also shows the importance of basic research on non-traditional organisms.