cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Weak sequential completeness in Banach \(C(K)\)-modules of finite multiplicity

A well known result of Lozanovsky states that a Banach lattice is weakly sequentially complete if and only if it does not contain a copy of \(c_{0}\). In the current paper we extend this result to the class of Banach \(C(K)\)-modules of finite multiplicity and, as a special case, to finitely generated Banach \(C(K)\)-modules. Moreover, we prove that such a module is weakly sequentially complete if and only if each cyclic subspace of the module is weakly sequentially complete.
Self similar solution of plasma equations

In this tutorial and review paper, we have summarized the technique of self-similar solution of partial differential equations and presented several examples where it has been applied to problems found in plasma physics.
Informal payments and moonlighting in Tajikistan's health sector

This paper studies the relationship between gender and corruption in the health sector. It uses data collected directly from health workers, during a recent public expenditure tracking survey in Tajikistan's health sector. Using informal payments as an indicator of corruption, women seem at first significantly less corrupt than men as consistently suggested by the literature. However, once power conferred by position is controlled for, women appear in fact equally likely to take advantage of corruption opportunities as men. Female-headed facilities also are not less likely to experience informal charging than facilities managed by men. However, women are significantly less aggressive in the amount they extract from patients. The paper provides evidence that workers are more likely to engage in informal charging the farther they fall short of their perceived fair-wage, adding weight to the fair wage-corruption hypothesis. Finally, there is some evidence that health workers who feel that health care should be provided for a fee are more likely to informally charge patients. Contrary to informal charging, moonlighting behavior displays strong gender differences. Women are significantly less likely to work outside the facility on average and across types of health workers.
Discovering texture regularity as a higher-order correspondence problem

Understanding texture regularity in real images is a challenging computer vision task. We propose a higher-order feature matching algorithm to discover the lattices of near-regular textures in real images. The underlying lattice of a near-regular texture identifies all of the texels as well as the global topology among the texels. A key contribution of this paper is to formulate lattice-finding as a correspondence problem. The algorithm finds a plausible lattice by iteratively proposing texels and assigning neighbors between the texels. Our matching algorithm seeks assignments that maximize both pair-wise visual similarity and higher-order geometric consistency. We approximate the optimal assignment using a recently developed spectral method. We successfully discover the lattices of a diverse set of unsegmented, real-world textures with significant geometric warping and large appearance variation among texels.
A Rational Theory of "Irrational Exuberance"

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities - e.g., internet commerce, emerging markets, novel financial instruments - is often associated with large, "exuberant," movements in asset prices and real investment. While irrational explanations of these phenomena abound, in this paper we show that the dispersion of information that is likely to surround these new, unfamiliar investment opportunities may help explain these phenomena within an otherwise canonical, fully rational, neoclassical model of the interaction of financial markets and the real economy. On the positive front, we identify a mechanism that amplifies the response of the economy to noise (correlated, but rational, errors in assessments of the fundamentals), while at the same time formalizing the idea that "inflated prices" and "exuberant investment" may feed one another during these episodes. This mechanism rest on the property that, when information is dispersed and only then, financial markets look at aggregate investment as a signal of the underlying fundamentals. On the normative front, we document that this amplification is a symptom of constrained inefficiency: there exist policy interventions that can improve welfare without requiring the government either to have superior information than the market or to centralize the information that is dispersed in the economy.
Growth and Competitiveness as Factors of Eurozone External Imbalances : Evidence and Policy Implications

The paper assesses the contribution of key factors associated with external imbalances in the Eurozone through the estimation of a panel-data vector autoregressive model over 1975-2011. Growth fluctuations, initially associated with demand booms triggered by unusually low interest rates and later with demand contractions resulting from the crisis and policy adjustments, have been key drivers of current account fluctuations. Changes in competitiveness, measured by real exchange rates or unit labor costs, have played a less important role. Demand shocks have contributed more to current account balance dynamics in the Eurozone periphery than in the core, whereas competitiveness has been a less prominent factor in the periphery but relatively more important in the core. Changes in competitiveness are positively associated with changes in growth. Preventing imbalances from building up in a context of growing financial integration and easy finance warrants enhanced mutual surveillance of fiscal imbalances, but also better regulation of credit markets to prevent excess leverage and concentration of lending in investments prone to speculative bubbles. Coordination of fiscal policy across the Eurozone would facilitate the management of external imbalances without placing an often unwarranted burden on fiscal tightening in countries with sound fiscal positions affected by credit booms. The policies of internal devaluation implemented in the periphery, aimed at promoting external competitiveness, may have had only limited effectiveness in restoring the external balance to equilibrium.
Time Consistency and the Duration of Government Debt: A Signalling Theory of Quantitative Easing

We present a signalling theory of Quantitative Easing (QE) at the zero lower bound on the short term nominal interest rate. QE is effective because it generates a credible signal of low future real interest rates in a time consistent equilibrium. We show these results in two models. One has coordinated monetary and fiscal policy. The other an independent central bank with balance sheet concerns. Numerical experiments show that the signalling effect can be substantial in both models.
Combinatorial Problems for Horn Clauses

Given a family of Horn clauses, what is the minimal number of Horn clauses implying all other clauses in the family? What is the maximal number of Horn clauses from the family without having resolvents of a certain kind? We consider various problems of this type, and give some sharp bounds. We also consider the probability that a random family of a given size implies all other clauses in the family, and we prove the existence of a sharp threshold.
Short-Run Needs and Long-Term Goals: A Dynamic Model of Thirst Management

Beverage consumption occurs many times a day in response to short-run needs that fluctuate. We develop a model in which consumers are heterogeneous in self-regulating consumption by balancing short-run needs e.g., hydration and mood with long-term goals e.g., health. The model has two novel features: 1 utility depends on the match between occasion-specific needs and product attributes, and 2 dynamics of consumption and stockpiling are at the level of product attributes. We estimate the model using unique intraday beverage consumption, activity, and psychological needs data. We find that only a third of individuals do not self-regulate. Of the two-thirds who self-regulate, over 40% self-regulate adaptively based on past choice, whereas 25% self-regulate both adaptively and anticipating future needs. Our attribute-need match model enables us to assess unmet demand for new products with attributes that match co-occurring occasion-specific needs. Specifically, we find that a product satisfying a combination of "health-hydrating" needs expands overall beverage consumption by as much as 5%. Our framework of modeling heterogeneity in self-regulation by balancing short-run needs with long-term goals is more broadly applicable in contexts where situational needs vary, and long-term effects are gradual and hard to discern e.g., nutrition, smoking, and preventive health care.
Spinors as automorphisms of the tangent bundle

We show that, on a 4-manifold M endowed with a spin C -structure induced by an almost-complex structure, a self-dual (positive) spinor field Φ E Γ(W + ) is the same as a bundle morphism Φ: T M → T M acting on the fiber by self-dual conformal transformations, such that the Clifford multiplication is just the evaluation of Φ on tangent vectors, and that the squaring map a: W + → Λ + acts by pulling-back the fundamental form of the almost-complex structure. We use this to detect Kahler and symplectic structures.
Minimizing average response time for scheduling stochastic workload in heterogeneous computational grids

Scheduling stochastic workloads is a difficult task. We analyze minimum average response time of computational grids composed of nodes with multiple processors when stochastic workloads are scheduled to the grids. We propose an algorithm to achieve minimum average response time of grids. We compare the minimum average response time of grids with the average response time of grids with load balancing scheduling in different cases. Specifically, we analyze the impact of differential processor speeds, the number of processors per node, and utilization rate of the grids on the difference between these two scheduling strategies. These analysis provide deeper understanding of average response time of grids, which will allow us to design more efficient algorithms for Grid workload scheduling.
Optimal ambiguity packing in context-free parsers with interleaved unification

Ambiguity packing is a well known technique for enhancing the efficiency of context-free parsers. However, in the case of unification-augmented context-free parsers where parsing is interleaved with feature unification, the propagation of feature structures imposes difficulties on the ability of the parser to effectively perform ambiguity packing. We demonstrate that a clever heuristic for prioritizing the execution order of grammar rules and parsing actions can achieve a high level of ambiguity packing that is provably optimal. We present empirical evaluations of the proposed technique, performed with both a Generalized LR parser and a chart parser, that demonstrate its effectiveness.
Governors and governing institutions: a comparative study of state-business relations in Russia's regions

The paper uses the latest 2011 round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey for the Russian Federation, which for the first time was designed to be representative of Russian regions. The paper takes a closer look at regional-level factors influencing the business environment in Russia and, more specifically, conditions that favor the emergence of symbiotic relations between regional authorities and regional businesses. Considering the argued significance of informal rules, norms, and agreements for the regional-level business environment in Russia, the paper uses proxy variables such as tenure and origin of regional governors to identify how these rules are being institutionalized. The findings reveal that, at least in case of Russia, juxtaposing the state and business actors as separate and opposed to each other may overstate the distinction between these two groups of actors and understate the fact that many localities in Russia have witnessed the emergence of mutually beneficial state-business arrangements. Defining whether these arrangements are beneficial or harmful to regional development is beyond the scope of this exploratory paper.
Numerical Solution of Problems with Different Time Scales II

Consider the initial value problem for a system of differential equations $$\begin{gathered} {u_{t}}{\text{ = }}{\varepsilon ^{{ - 1}}}{\text{ }}Au{\text{ + }}Bu{\text{ + }}F,{\text{ }}t \geqslant {\text{ 0,}} \hfill \\ u\left( 0 \right) = {u_{0}}. \hfill \\ \end{gathered}$$ (1.1)
Crystal Structure of Tetrabasic Lead Sulfate ( 4PbO ⋅ PbSO4 ) An Intermediate Phase in the Production of Lead‐Acid Batteries

Demand for improved battery systems for electric vehicles and power sources in general suggests the need for more accurate descriptions of the solid-state and electrochemical reactions which may affect active-material usage. Tetrabasic lead sulfate (4PbO.PbS0 4 ) is an intermediate phase commonly formed during production of lead-acid batteries and, with tribasic lead sulfate, determines some battery characteristics. Single-crystal X-ray data have been used to determine its structure to a final weighted R of 0.024 (a = 7.297, b = 11.698, and c = 11.498 A, = 90.93°, P2 1 /c). Its structure is closely related to that of tetragonal PbO, except that one of six Pb sites is occupied by SO 4 . This sulfate group shows either dynamic (librations) or static disorder, but there is no evidence in our crystal for Pb-S disorder as proposed by other X-ray studies. This determination and that for tribasic lead sulfate complete structural determinations of the major phases formed during production of lead-acid batteries. These structural models allow Rietveld studies using either X-ray or neutron-diffraction data to evaluate properties such as crystallinity, atomic ordering, and reactions during curing and cycling. The structures of tetrabasic and tribasic lead sulfate, as well as tetragonal and orthorhombic PbO, have basic features in common. These similarities suggest that there may be structural control during some reactions whereby heterogeneous nucleation influences the products in concert with external variables such as temperature, humidity, and pH.
Bubble Dynamics and Cavitation Inception Theory

This paper reports some new beginnings in the authors' efforts to apply the Rayleigh-Plesset theory of cavitation bubble dynamics to the prediction of cavitation inception on submerged bodies in flowing water at ordinary temperatures. For the initiation of cavitation under these conditions, it is presumed that the events leading to inception are sufficiently infrequent so that one can model the dynamics of cavitation bubble growth as though each bubble were a small isolated isothermal spherical bubble containing a mixture of air and water vapor. For simplicity, the presence of neighboring walls and adjacent bubbles is neglected. Following the paper's introduction, a theoretical background is presented. The next section discusses cavitation cutoff, covering basic ideas, the approximate forcing function and cutoff calculations. A section on theory refinement follows, dealing with the flaccid bubble and initial conditions, forcing functions, the initial-value problem and multiple scales representation. The final section is on the zero- order solution and is followed by the conclusions.
Issues Related to Designing and Conducting School Health Education Research.

Abstract Investigators interested in conducting school health research face many important challenges. First, an appropriate research course for school health must be charted so the most important research issues are addressed in a systematic way. Second, there is a continuing need to develop scientifically sound research methods that can be used in the school setting. Third, there is the immediate need to identify ways of overcoming the usual problems encountered in the conduct of school health research. This paper focuses on the third challenge, via an analysis of the research design and measurement issues that most frequently confront school health researchers. The research design issues addressed include randomization of experimental units to treatments and selection of the appropriate statistical unit of analysis. The measurement issues addressed included use of existing versus newly developed instruments, use of norm-referenced versus criterion-referenced instruments, use of self-report techniques, ...
Direct and indirect pathways to lamina I in the medulla oblongata and spinal cord of the cat.

The pathways to lamina I in the medulla oblongata and spinal cord of the cat were traced using horse-radish-peroxidase (HRP) and autoradiographic techniques. The HRP results indicated that several neuronal cell groups in the brain stem and hypothalamus project to the spinal cord throughout its total length. The autoradiographic tracing results demonstrated that the strongest projections to lamina I are derived from the following four areas: the caudal nucleus raphe magnus (NRM), the ventral part of the caudal pontine and NRM, the contralaterally projecting lateral pontine or paralemniscal tegmentum, and the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus. In addition, a limited, especially at lumbosacral levels, distinct projection to lamina I was found to originate in the most caudal part of the medullary tegmentum.
Secondary 18O isotope effects as a tool for studying reactions of phosphate mono-, di-, and triesters.

Secondary 18O isotope effects have been developed as a tool for determining transition state structures in enzymatic and nonenzymatic phosphoryl transfer reactions. 18O substitution in the nonbridge oxygens of a phosphoryl group makes the reaction go faster when the bond order is higher to these oxygens in the transition state than in the reactant, whereas the reaction goes slower if the bond order is less. The isotope effects are measured by the remote label method, using an isotope ratio mass spectrometer for analysis. The bond order to p-nitrophenolate ion when it is the leaving group is indicated by the secondary 15N isotope effect in the nitro group, with a value of 1.0028 representing nearly complete bond cleavage. It appears that the transition states for phosphoryl transfer have no more than one negative charge on the nonbridge oxygens, so that reactions of monoesters are dissociative, reactions of triesters are associative, and reactions of diesters are SN2 with half bond order to entering and le...
Temperature Increase of Highly-Polarized Fermi Liquids in Spin-Echo Experiments

We show that there are restrictions on the maximum tipping angle that can be used without significantly raising the temperature of the 3He distribution in high B/T spin-echo experiments with pure liquid 3He and 3He-4He solutions. The temperature increase occurs during the diffusion process as quasiparticles in mixed-spin states are scattered and converted into thermal excitations at the spin-up and spin-down Fermi surfaces. This temperature increase can mimic the effects of zero temperature attenuation, leading to a higher values of the measured anisotropy temperature Ta. We analyze the dependence of the increase on polarization, initial temperature, 3He concentration, and tip angle, and estimate the size of the effect in recent experiments.
Pose Induction for Novel Object Categories

We address the task of predicting pose for objects of unannotated object categories from a small seed set of annotated object classes. We present a generalized classifier that can reliably induce pose given a single instance of a novel category. In case of availability of a large collection of novel instances, our approach then jointly reasons over all instances to improve the initial estimates. We empirically validate the various components of our algorithm and quantitatively show that our method produces reliable pose estimates. We also show qualitative results on a diverse set of classes and further demonstrate the applicability of our system for learning shape models of novel object classes.
Potential for alcohol and prescription drug interactions in older people

Objectives: To examine the patterns and prevalence of concomitant alcohol and alcohol-interactive (AI) drug use in older people. Design: Cross-sectional analysis of survey and prescription claims data. Setting: The Pennsylvania Pharmaceutical Assistance Contract for the Elderly (PA-PACE) program, a state-funded program providing prescription benefits to older people with low to moderate incomes. Participants: A total of 83,321 PA-PACE cardholders (age range 65–106) who were using any prescription medications at the time of survey completion. Measurements: All AI drugs were identified using a database of medication warning labels obtained from First DataBank. Prescription drug claims were used to characterize AI drug exposure according to therapeutic class of prescription drug use. A mail survey of PA-PACE cardholders was used to examine alcohol use, as well as sociodemographic and health factors associated with concomitant use of alcohol and AI drugs. Results: Seventy-seven percent of all prescription drug users were exposed to AI medications, with significant variation in exposure and concomitant alcohol use according to therapeutic class. Overall, 19% of AI drug users reported concomitant alcohol use, compared with 26% of non-AI drug users (P<.001). Multinomial logistic regression analyses showed that certain groups of older people, including younger older people, men, and those with higher educational levels, were at greater risk for concomitant exposure to alcohol and AI drugs. Conclusion: Many older people use alcohol in combination with AI prescription drugs. Clinicians should warn every patient who is prescribed an AI drug about alcohol–drug interactions, especially those at high risk for concomitant exposure.
A constraint - propagation approach to probabilistic reasoning

The paper demonstrates that strict adherence to probability theory does not preclude the use of concurrent, self-activated constraint-propagation mechanisms for managing uncertainty. Maintaining local records of sources-of-belief allows both predictive and diagnostic inferences to be activated simultanously and propagate harmoniously towards a stable equillibrium.
Norms as a Function of p Are Linearly Independent in Finite Dimensions

AbstractWe show that there are no non-trivial linear dependencies among p-norms of vectors in finite dimensions that hold for all p. The proof is by complex analytic continuation.
On the asymptotics of dimers on tori

We study asymptotics of the dimer model on large toric graphs. Let $${\mathbb {L}}$$ be a weighted $$\mathbb {Z}^2$$ -periodic planar graph, and let $$\mathbb {Z}^2 E$$ be a large-index sublattice of $$\mathbb {Z}^2$$ . For $${\mathbb {L}}$$ bipartite we show that the dimer partition function $${{\textsf {\textit{Z}}}}_E$$ on the quotient $${\mathbb {L}}/(\mathbb {Z}^2 E)$$ has the asymptotic expansion $$\begin{aligned} {{\textsf {\textit{Z}}}}=\exp \{A\,\mathbf {f}_0+{\textsf {fsc}}+o(1)\} \end{aligned}$$ where A is the area of $${\mathbb {L}}/(\mathbb {Z}^2 E)$$ , $$\mathbf {f}_0$$ is the free energy density in the bulk, and $${\textsf {fsc}}$$ is a finite-size correction term depending only on the conformal shape of the domain together with some parity-type information. Assuming a conjectural condition on the zero locus of the dimer characteristic polynomial, we show that an analogous expansion holds for $${\mathbb {L}}$$ non-bipartite. The functional form of the finite-size correction differs between the two classes, but is universal within each class. Our calculations yield new information concerning the distribution of the number of loops winding around the torus in the associated double-dimer models.
Exceptional subclasses in qualitative probability

System Z+ [Goldszmidt and Pearl, 1991, Goldszmidt, 1992] is a formalism for reasoning with normality defaults of the form "typically if ϕ then ψ (with strength δ)" where δ is a positive integer. The system has a critical shortcoming in that it does not sanction inheritance across exceptional subclasses. In this paper we propose an extension to System Z+ that rectifies this shortcoming by extracting additional conditions between worlds from the defaults database. We show that the additional constraints do not change the notion of the consistency of a database. We also make comparisons with competing default reasoning systems.
CHANGES IN CHINA'S WAGE STRUCTURE

Using a national sample of Urban Household Surveys, we document several profound changes in China's wage structure during a period of rapid economic growth. Between 1992 and 2007, the average real wage increased by 202%, accompanied by a sharp rise in wage inequality. Decomposition analysis reveals 80% of this wage growth to be attributable to higher pay for basic labor, rising returns to human capital, and increases in the state-sector wage premium. By employing an aggregate production function framework, we account for the sources of wage growth and wage inequality amid fast economic growth and transition. We find capital accumulation, skill-biased technological change, and rural–urban migration to be the major forces behind the evolving wage structure in urban China.
Geography and Exporting Behavior : Evidence from India

This paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also focuses on the effect of the business environment and that of institutions at the spatial unit of districts in India. The study disentangles the within-industry effect from the within-firm effect. A simple logit specification is used to model the probability of entry. The analysis is based on a panel of manufacturing firms in India, which allows for the introduction of firm-specific controls and a battery of fixed effects. The findings suggest that exporter-specific clustering, general economic agglomeration, and institutional factors affect firms' export behavior.
Static Cone to Compute Static Settlement over Sand

At least two methods for using static cone data to predict settlement exist and have received extensive use—those of Terzaghi-Peck-Meyerhof and Buisman-DeBeer. Another method is presented in this paper. All three methods are then applied to 16 test cases involving either actual foundations, or plate load tests, with measured settlements. The proposed method simplifies calculations without sacrificing conservatism, yet appears most accurate over the full scope of the available test cases. These involve foundation widths of 2 ft to 184 ft. The key feature of the new method is that a single distribution of a strain influence factor is assumed for all cases. This method eliminates the need to compute the intermediate parameter of change in vertical stress with depth below a shallow footing. Also presented is a new correlation between static cone-bearing capacity and sand compressibility. Compressibility was measured in-situ by a special screw-plate form of plate-bearing load test. New data are included for the correlation between the static cone-bearing capacity and SPT blow count values in sands.
Anomalies, renormalization group flows, and the a-theorem in six-dimensional (1, 0) theories

We establish a linear relation between the a-type Weyl anomaly and the ’t Hooft anomaly coefficients for the R-symmetry and gravitational anomalies in six-dimensional (1, 0) superconformal field theories. For RG flows onto the tensor branch, where conformal symmetry is spontaneously broken, supersymmetry relates the anomaly mismatch Δa to the square of a four-derivative interaction for the dilaton. This establishes the a-theorem for all such flows. The four-derivative dilaton interaction is in turn related to the Green-Schwarz-like terms that are needed to match the ’t Hooft anomalies on the tensor branch, thus fixing their relation to Δa. We use our formula to obtain exact expressions for the a-anomaly of N small E 8 instantons, as well as N M5-branes probing an orbifold singularity, and verify the a-theorem for RG flows onto their Higgs branches. We also discuss aspects of supersymmetric RG flows that terminate in scale but not conformally invariant theories with massless gauge fields.
Local chiral fermions

Borici’s construction of minimally doubled chiral fermion s builds on a linear combination of two unitarily related naive fermion actions. Being strictl y local, extremely efficient numerical implementation should be possible. The resulting system is symmetric under the subgroup of the hypercubic group that preserves a major hypercube diagonal. The symmetry includes both parity even and odd transformations, but allows for an anisotropy to appear at finite lattice spacing.
What invariant one-particle multiplicity distributions and two-particle correlations are telling us about relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Many of you are vigorously searching for the quark-gluon plasma—a predicted new phase of nuclear matter where quarks roam almost freely throughout the medium instead of being confined to individual nucleons.1, 2 Such a plasma is believed to have existed in the first 10 μs of the universe during the big bang and could be produced in the laboratory during the little bang of a relativistic heavy-ion collision.
Advances in Nonlinear Optical Materials and Devices

The recent progress in the application of nonlinear techniques to extend the frequency of laser sources has come from the joint progress in laser sources and in nonlinear materials. A brief summary of the progress in diode pumped solid state lasers is followed by an overview of progress in nonlinear frequency extension by harmonic generation and parametric processes. Improved nonlinear materials including bulk crystals, quasiphasematched interactions, guided wave devices, and quantum well intersubband studies are discussed with the idea of identifying areas of future progress in nonlinear materials and devices.
Accretion and jet power

In the first of a series of three lectures we discuss ways of measuring the power available to feed the jets in powerful FR II radio sources. For unobscured radio-loud QSOs we present evidence that this power is directly related to the UV-optical luminosity, or probably more accurately, to the power radiated through processes of accretion in a strong gravitational potential. It has been suggested on theoretical grounds that powerful radio jets are a necessary component of the central engine. It then follows, from the similarity of the optical-UV power output, spectral energy distribution, and emission-line spectra of radio-loud and radio-quiet QSOs, that radio-quiet QSOs have the same power available to feed jets as do radioloud QSOs. This then leaves us with the puzzle of why we do not see the powerful jets in radio-quiet QSOs.
Validation test of advanced technology for IPV nickel-hydrogen flight cells: Update

Individual pressure vessel (IPV) nickel-hydrogen technology was advanced at NASA Lewis and under Lewis contracts with the intention of improving cycle life and performance. One advancement was to use 26 percent potassium hydroxide (KOH) electrolyte to improve cycle life. Another advancement was to modify the state-of-the-art cell design to eliminate identified failure modes. The modified design is referred to as the advanced design. A breakthrough in the LEO cycle life of IPV nickel-hydrogen cells has been previously reported. The cycle life of boiler plate cells containing 26 percent KOH electrolyte was about 40,000 LEO cycles compared to 3,500 cycles for cells containing 31 percent KOH. The boiler plate test results are in the process of being validated using flight hardware and real time LEO testing. The primary function of the advanced cell is to store and deliver energy for long-term, LEO spacecraft missions. The new features of this design are: (1) use of 26 percent rather than 31 percent KOH electrolyte; (2) use of a patented catalyzed wall wick; (3) use of serrated-edge separators to facilitate gaseous oxygen and hydrogen flow within the cell, while still maintaining physical contact with the wall wick for electrolyte management; and (4) use of a floating rather than a fixed stack (state-of-the-art) to accommodate nickel electrode expansion due to charge/discharge cycling. The significant improvements resulting from these innovations are: extended cycle life; enhanced thermal, electrolyte, and oxygen management; and accommodation of nickel electrode expansion.
Education and earnings inequality in Mexico

Education attainment levels increased dramatically for Mexico's labor force in the 1980s and early 1990s. In parallel, the country experienced a pronounced increase in earnings inequality from 1984-94, reflected in a higher dispersion of wages and an absolute decline in the real incomes of less educated, poorer Mexicans. This increased wage dispersion presents policymakers with a tradeoff between efficiency considerations (favoring increased spending on higher education) and equity considerations (favoring a more equal distribution of per student spending) in the allocation of fiscal resources to education. The author concludes that the best way to deal with this equity-efficiency tradeoff is to encourage greater private participation in higher education. His main findings are that: a) The accumulation of human capital during 1984-94, as proxied by education attainment, was accompanied by a more equal distribution of education attainment levels over that period and, thus, exerted an equalizing effect on the distribution of incomes. The increased income inequality observed over that period appears to be caused by an increased rate of skill-based technological change, whose transmission to Mexico and other developing countries may have been facilitated by the increased openness of their economies. b) The greater dispersion of wager observed in Mexico during the past decade raised the rates of return on investing in higher education, reversing the traditional pattern where primary education exhibits the highest rates of return. c) The social rates of return across levels of schooling were more uniform in 1994 than in 1984, suggesting a more efficient assignment of education spending. At the same time, the distribution of spending on education became more egalitarian, as per student spending in higher education declined markedly compared with per student spending at the primary level. This surprising coincidence in the pattern of spending on education was only possible because Mexico started out with a very distorted resource allocation in education that was both highly inequitable and inefficient. As Mexico's policymakers are on the way to correcting these distortions, the opportunities for avoiding the equity-efficiency tradeoff within Mexico's centralized education framework will become progressively exhausted. d) There is little reason to expect the pace of technological change, which appears mainly responsible for raising wage dispersion and the relative returns on higher education, to abate. Efficiency considerations dictate that Mexico should respond by devoting more resources to higher education. However, the federal budget, which traditionally has financed the lion's share of higher education costs in Mexico, is unable to accommodate additional spending on higher education, while spending cuts elsewhere in the education sector are bound to raise serious equity questions. Thus, to avoid falling behind in terms of human capital accumulation, greater private sector participation is necessary, at least, in terms of cost recovery from the main beneficiaries of higher education.
The ICSI-SRI spring 2006 meeting recognition system

We describe the development of the ICSI-SRI speech recognition system for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Spring 2006 Meeting Rich Transcription (RT-06S) evaluation, highlighting improvements made since last year, including improvements to the delay-and-sum algorithm, the nearfield segmenter, language models, posterior-based features, HMM adaptation methods, and adapting to a small amount of new lecture data. Results are reported on RT-05S and RT-06S meeting data. Compared to the RT-05S conference system, we achieved an overall improvement of 4% relative in the MDM and SDM conditions, and 11% relative in the IHM condition. On lecture data, we achieved an overall improvement of 8% relative in the SDM condition, 12% on MDM, 14% on ADM, and 15% on IHM.
On left-orderability and cyclic branched coverings

In a recent paper, Y. Hu has given a sufficient condition for the fundamental group of the $r$-th cyclic branched covering of $S^3$ along a prime knot to be left-orderable in terms of representations of the knot group. Applying her criterion to a large class of two-bridge knots, we determine a range of integers $r > 1$ for which the $r$-th cyclic branched covering of $S^3$ along the knot is left-orderable.
The public corporation as an intermediary between "Main Street" and "Wall Street"

Abstract In the perfect markets corporate finance theory (Modigliani–Miller), public corporations (firms) have no economic function. Their existence therefore cannot be justified. An unsettling implication is that the extant corporate finance theory applies to an economy in which firms are irrelevant. This research precludes this implication by identifying an economic function for firms in perfect markets. Specifically, I show that firms exist to intermediate between “Main Street” (the real sector that supplies non-financial inputs) and “Wall Street” (the financial sector that supplies cash), and that this intermediation maximizes an investment's operating cash flows by minimizing the cost of the non-financial inputs. Key implications of this rationale for the firm include: i) an investment's NPV depends on the firm's cash holdings; working capital policy is an integral part of investment policy, ii) operating characteristics determine the firm's minimum size (equity capitalization) and “boundaries,” and iii) cash on corporate balance sheets is a “fundamental” for stock-pricing.
Charmless b-Hadron Decays at CDF

Measurements from the upgraded Collider Detector at the Fermilab Tevatron (CDF II) are becoming increasingly competitive with B-factories results on B 0 decays into charged final states, and complementary to them in corresponding B s 0 and baryon modes [1]. In addition, the reached sensitivity to flavor-changing neutral current (FCNC) b-meson decays could reveal new physics before the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [2].
Would Ross Perot have won the 1992 presidential election under approval voting

The answer to the question we pose in the title is by no means obvious. That it might be affirmative is suggested by the facts that Ross Perot:• ran ahead of the major-party presidential candidates in several presidential preference polls at the height of his popularity in June 1992; and• on election day in November received a higher proportion of the popular vote (19.0%) than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (27.4%), who came in second to Woodrow Wilson that year.More significant than Perot's relatively large percentage, however, is that he appealed to many Republicans because of his conservative economic policies, especially with respect to reducing the budget deficit, and to many Democrats because of his liberal social views on issues like abortion.It is precisely this kind of wide-ranging appeal that favors candidates under approval voting (AV), whereby voters can vote for as many candidates as they like or consider acceptable in a multicandi-date election. (In a three-candidate race like the 1992 presidential election, this means voting either for one's top or one's top two choices.) Yet despite extensive research on AV (Brams and Fishburn 1983), comparisons of it that have been made with other voting systems (Nurmi 1987; Merrill 1988), and empirical studies of its actual use (reviewed in Brams and Fishburn 1992), it is no easy task to establish how candidates would fare under AV in a specific election.
GERV: a statistical method for generative evaluation of regulatory variants for transcription factor binding

Motivation: The majority of disease-associated variants identified in genome-wide association studies reside in noncoding regions of the genome with regulatory roles. Thus being able to interpret the functional consequence of a variant is essential for identifying causal variants in the analysis of genome-wide association studies. Results: We present GERV (generative evaluation of regulatory variants), a novel computational method for predicting regulatory variants that affect transcription factor binding. GERV learns a k-mer-based generative model of transcription factor binding from ChIP-seq and DNase-seq data, and scores variants by computing the change of predicted ChIP-seq reads between the reference and alternate allele. The k-mers learned by GERV capture more sequence determinants of transcription factor binding than a motif-based approach alone, including both a transcription factor’s canonical motif and associated co-factor motifs. We show that GERV outperforms existing methods in predicting single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with allele-specific binding. GERV correctly predicts a validated causal variant among linked single-nucleotide polymorphisms and prioritizes the variants previously reported to modulate the binding of FOXA1 in breast cancer cell lines. Thus, GERV provides a powerful approach for functionally annotating and prioritizing causal variants for experimental follow-up analysis. Availability and implementation: The implementation of GERV and related data are available at http://gerv.csail.mit.edu/. Contact: gifford@mit.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Technological Networks and the Spread of Computer Viruses

Malicious computer software in the form of viruses and worms continues to plague modern information networks. What strategies are on the horizon for controlling the digital pestilence? In their Perspective, [ Balthrop et al .][1] survey the structure of computer networks and analyze their epidemiological characteristics. The most effective strategy may turn out to be a form of speed limit in which the rate of new network connections is controlled. A throttling mechanism of this sort would slow the spread of computer infections while leaving normal network traffic unhampered. [1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5670/527
Recent advances in engineering yeast for pharmaceutical protein production

Recombinant pharmaceutical proteins account for a significant portion of the multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. Among various potential cell factories, yeast has attracted great attention in pharmaceutical protein synthesis due to its unicellular and eukaryotic properties, easy genetic manipulation, fast growth, as well as capability of post-translational modifications. In this review, recent advances in glycoengineering of yeast and secretory mechanisms in yeast for the production of biopharmaceutical proteins with appropriate pharmacokinetic properties are overviewed. To further improve these two aspects of yeast engineering, strain and pathway engineering studies are necessary to unveil engineered yeast cell factories providing humanized glycosylation with appropriate homogeneity and high secretory therapeutic production with high yield. In addition, current systems and synthetic biology tools and omics technologies to enhance the production of pharmaceutical proteins are briefly discussed. Integration of comprehensive systems biology models with omics technologies will open new doors to better understanding of yeast glycosylation and secretory mechanism, which will help obtain valuable information for strain and pathway engineering approaches. On the other hand, the applications of currently available synthetic biology tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs in yeast engineering will further help researchers manipulate yeast strains for high secretory recombinant therapeutic protein production with desired features. All in all, currently available systems and synthetic biology tools can be applied to yeast engineering for improved biopharmaceutical protein production.
Measuring active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations with neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering

Light sterile neutrinos have been introduced as an explanation for a number of oscillation signals at $\ensuremath{\Delta}{m}^{2}\ensuremath{\sim}1\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$. Neutrino oscillations at relatively short baselines provide a probe of these possible new states. This paper describes an accelerator-based experiment using neutral current coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering to strictly search for active-to-sterile neutrino oscillations. This experiment could, thus, definitively establish the existence of sterile neutrinos and provide constraints on their mixing parameters. A cyclotron-based proton beam can be directed to multiple targets, producing a low-energy pion and muon decay-at-rest neutrino source with variable distance to a single detector. Two types of detectors are considered: a germanium-based detector inspired by the SuperCDMS design and a liquid argon detector inspired by the proposed CLEAR experiment.
Cysteine-Mediated Redox Regulation of Cell Signaling in Chondrocytes Stimulated With Fibronectin Fragments.

Objective Oxidative posttranslational modifications of intracellular proteins can potentially regulate signaling pathways relevant to cartilage destruction in arthritis. In this study, oxidation of cysteine residues to form sulfenic acid (S-sulfenylation) was examined in osteoarthritic (OA) chondrocytes and investigated in normal chondrocytes as a mechanism by which fragments of fibronectin (FN-f) stimulate chondrocyte catabolic signaling. Methods Chondrocytes isolated from OA and normal human articular cartilage were analyzed using analogs of dimedone that specifically and irreversibly react with protein S-sulfenylated cysteines. Global S-sulfenylation was measured in cell lysates with and without FN-f stimulation by immunoblotting and in fixed cells by confocal microscopy. S-sulfenylation in specific proteins was identified by mass spectroscopy and confirmed by immunoblotting. Src activity was measured in live cells using a fluorescence resonance energy transfer biosensor. Results Proteins in chondrocytes isolated from OA cartilage were found to have elevated basal levels of S-sulfenylation relative to those of chondrocytes from normal cartilage. Treatment of normal chondrocytes with FN-f induced increased levels of S-sulfenylation in multiple proteins, including the tyrosine kinase Src. FN-f treatment also increased the levels of Src activity. Pretreatment with dimedone to alter S-sulfenylation function or with Src kinase inhibitors inhibited FN-f–induced production of matrix metalloproteinase 13. Conclusion These results demonstrate for the first time the presence of oxidative posttranslational modification of proteins in human articular chondrocytes by S-sulfenylation. Due to the ability to regulate the activity of a number of cell signaling pathways, including catabolic mediators induced by fibronectin fragments, S-sulfenylation may contribute to cartilage destruction in OA and warrants further investigation.
Celeste: Variational inference for a generative model of astronomical images

We present a new, fully generative model of optical telescope image sets, along with a variational procedure for inference. Each pixel intensity is treated as a Poisson random variable, with a rate parameter dependent on latent properties of stars and galaxies. Key latent properties are themselves random, with scientific prior distributions constructed from large ancillary data sets. We check our approach on synthetic images. We also run it on images from a major sky survey, where it exceeds the performance of the current state-of-the-art method for locating celestial bodies and measuring their colors.