cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
China's Role in World Livestock and Feed-Grain Markets

When we look back at trends that shaped u.s. agriculture in the 1990s, economic and dietary changes taking place in China may be among the most important. In the past two decades, China has been transformed from a country that did not meet all of the food needs of its people to one that should be able to provide meat, poultry, dairy products, and even alcohol to a majority of consumers within twenty years. It will have achieved this by allowing markets to work and, hopefully, by utilizing China's comparative advantage. To meet this potential, China will need to change many of the food and trade policies currently in place. If this occurs, the United States will experience a large and sustained growth in agricultural exports and U.S. farmers should temporarily benefit from strong prices. What type of policy changes might take place if China pursues a more open trade policy, and what might these changes mean to U.S. farmers?
Design of Fox Point Hurricane Barrier

Design problems of Fox Point, Providence, RI, hurricane barrier including establishing of hurricane tide levels and wave forces, provisions for passage of estuary flow under normal conditions and at flood periods, protection of nearby steam power plant from damaging effects during construction and subsequent thereto, and provisions necessitated by poor foundation conditions.
An investigation of corner separation within a thrust augmenter having Coanda jets

The development of separation in corners of thrust augmentor wings having Coanda jets was investigated using hot film surface sensors and pressure transducers. Separation on the test augmentor began at a corner very close to the augmentor exit and then rapidly proceeded upstream. Measurements of the pressure fields in the corner region indicated that a modified form of the Stratford criterion could be used to predict the onset of separation. Testing was conducted over a range of nozzle pressure ratios, aspect ratios, diffuser angles, and designs of the boundary layer and Coanda nozzles.
Induction of apoptosis in human myeloid leukemia cells by remote exposure of resistive barrier cold plasma

Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP), an ambient temperature ionized gas, is gaining extensive interest as a promising addition to anti-tumor therapy primarily due to the ability to generate and control delivery of electrons, ions, excited molecules, UV photons, and reactive species such as reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS) to a specific site. The heterogeneous composition of CAP offers the opportunity to mediate several signaling pathways that regulate tumor cells. Consequently, the array of CAP generated products has limited the identification of the mechanisms of action on tumor cells. The aim of this work is to assess the cell death response of human myeloid leukemia cells by remote exposure to CAP generated RNS by utilizing a novel resistive barrier discharge system that primarily produces RNS. The effect of variable treatments of CAP generated RNS was tested in THP-1 cell (human monocytic leukemia cell line), a model for hematological malignancy. The number of viable cells was evaluated with erythrosine-B staining, while apoptosis and necrosis was assessed by endonuclease cleavage observed by agarose gel electrophoresis and detection of cells with the exclusionary dye propidium iodide and fluorescently labeled annexin-V by flow cytometry and fluorescent microscopy. Our observations indicate that treatment dosage levels of 45 s of exposure to CAP emitted RNS-induced apoptotic cell death and for higher dosage conditions of ≥50 s of exposure to CAP induced necrosis. Overall the results suggest that CAP emitted RNS play a significant role in the anti-tumor potential of CAP.
The Ecological Fallacy Revisited: Aggregate-Versus-Individual-Level Findings on Economics and Elections, and Sociotropic Voting

Several aggregate-level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes, operating in intuitively plausible directions. More recent survey-based studies, however, have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual-voter level. This persistent discrepancy is puzzling. One recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or “sociotropic” fashion, responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare, rather than in terms of self-interested “pocketbook” considerations. It is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro- and micro level studies are a statistical artifact, arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components, a government-induced (and politically relevant) component, and an exogenous component caused by life-cycle and other politically irrelevant factors. It is shown that, because of this, individual level cross-sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest: they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign. An aggregate-level time-series analysis, on the other hand, will often yield reasonably good (if somewhat attenuated) estimates of the underlying individual-level effects of interest. Thus, in this case, individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate- rather than individual-level data. It is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual, in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self-interested, “pocketbook” voting.
Flexible Cash Rent Lease Examples

William Edwards extension ecnomist 641-294-6161 wedwards@iastate.edu Many tenants and land owners agree to set their cash rental rates based on actual prices, yields and/or production costs each year instead of fi xing a rate in advance. More information on fl exible cash leases can be found in Information File C2-21 Flexible Farm Lease Agreements. Respondents to a recent survey conducted by Iowa State University Extension were asked to report on fl exible cash rental agreements that they were using or with which they were familiar. The following list is a sample of the nearly 100 different types of agreements that were reported. Although no two agreements are exactly alike, most of them fall into a few general categories.
Is Japan Creating a Yen Bloc in East Asia and the Pacific

This paper reaches seven conclusions regarding the Yen Bloc that Japan is reputed to be forming in Pacific Asia. (1) Gravity-model estimates of bilateral trade show that the level of trade in East Asia is biased intra-regionally, as it is within the European Community and within the Western Hemisphere, to a greater extent than can be explained naturally by distance. One might call these three regions 'super-natural' blocs, in contrast to Krugman's "natural" trade blocs. (2) There is no evidence of a special Japan effect. (3) Once one properly accounts for rapid growth in Asia, the statistics do not bear out a trend toward intra-regional bias of trade flows. (4) The world's strongest trade grouping is the one that includes the U.S. and Canada with the Asian/Pacific countries, i.e., APEC. (5) There is a bit more evidence of rising Japanese influence in East Asia's financial markets. Tokyo appears to have acquired significant influence over interest rates in a few Asian countries, though overall its influence is as yet no greater than that of New York. (6) Some of Japan's financial and monetary influence takes place through a growing role for the yen, at the expense of the dollar, The yen has become relatively more important in exchange rate policies and invoicing of trade and finance in the region. (7) But this trend is less the outcome of Japanese policy-makers' wishes, than of pressure from the U.S. government to internationalize the yen.
A Combinatorial Proof of Postnikov's Identity and a Generalized Enumeration of Labeled Trees

In this paper, we give a simple combinatorial explanation of a formula of A. Postnikov relating bicolored rooted trees to bicolored binary trees. We also present generalized formulas for the number of labeled k-ary trees, rooted labeled trees, and labeled plane trees.
THE NATURE OF MOTIVATION (AND WHY IT MATTERS LESS TO ETHICS THAN ONE MIGHT THINK)

Etude du debat sur le role des croyances et des desirs dans la motivation. Distinguant trois theories de la motivation: le contativisme radical, le cognitivisme et le conativisme modere, d'une part, et examinant le concept d'akrasia motivationnelle, d'autre part, l'A. montre que la nature de la motivation humaine a des consequences d'ordre psychologique et metaethique sur la validite de la these du realisme moral internaliste
Changing Nutritional Content of Food

This chapter provides an overview of the changes in nutrient content of the food supply in the United States and other countries. Core concepts used in assessment of the adequacy of (or excess in) diets and factors that affect nutrient availability in the food supply, including technology and fortification, are described and discussed in terms of implications for health. Finally, the contribution of economics is considered as it provides an understanding of the factors that affect demand for foods and related nutrients.
Revisiting the Efficiency of Malicious Two-Party Computation

In a recent paper Mohassel and Franklin study the efficiency of secure two-party computation in the presence of malicious behavior. Their aim is to make classical solutions to this problem, such as zero-knowledge compilation, more efficient. The authors provide several schemes which are the most efficient to date. We propose a modification to their main scheme using expanders. Our modification asymptotically improves at least one measure of efficiency of all known schemes. We also point out an error, and improve the analysis of one of their schemes.
Non-interactive verifiable computing: outsourcing computation to untrusted workers

We introduce and formalize the notion of Verifiable Computation, which enables a computationally weak client to "outsource" the computation of a function F on various dynamically-chosen inputs x1, ...,xk to one or more workers. The workers return the result of the function evaluation, e.g., yi = F(xi), as well as a proof that the computation of F was carried out correctly on the given value xi. The primary constraint is that the verification of the proof should require substantially less computational effort than computing F(i) from scratch. We present a protocol that allows the worker to return a computationally-sound, non-interactive proof that can be verified in O(mċpoly(λ)) time, where m is the bit-length of the output of F, and λ is a security parameter. The protocol requires a one-time pre-processing stage by the client which takes O(|C|ċpoly(λ)) time, where C is the smallest known Boolean circuit computing F. Unlike previous work in this area, our scheme also provides (at no additional cost) input and output privacy for the client, meaning that the workers do not learn any information about the xi or yi values.
Lead Paint, Toxic Torts, and the Housing Stock: A Case Study in Risk Assessment

Numerous policymakers have accepted claims in the public health literature that the United States is in the middle of a serious epidemic of childhood lead poisoning, due primarily to lead paint in the housing stock. This article analyzes some of the most influential lead paint epidemiological studies from an economics perspective and finds evidence that the claimed effects of lead on intelligence, school success, and other outcomes may be grossly exaggerated. In addition, the main cost-benefit analysis used by policymakers to advocate lead paint abatement of the entire U.S. housing stock contains serious mathematical errors and strikingly implausible economic assumptions. A corrected model shows that the proposed national abatement policy is likely to yield no net benefit.
Improved memory-bounded dynamic programming for decentralized POMDPs

Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming (MBDP) has proved extremely effective in solving decentralized POMDPs with large horizons. We generalize the algorithm and improve its scalability by reducing the complexity with respect to the number of observations from exponential to polynomial. We derive error bounds on solution quality with respect to this new approximation and analyze the convergence behavior. To evaluate the effectiveness of the improvements, we introduce a new, larger benchmark problem. Experimental results show that despite the high complexity of decentralized POMDPs, scalable solution techniques such as MBDP perform surprisingly well.
MITATE: Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation

This paper introduces a Mobile Internet Testbed for Application Traffic Experimentation (MITATE). MITATE is the first programmable testbed to support the prototyping of application communications between mobiles and cloud datacenters. We describe novel solutions to device security and resource sharing behind MITATE. Finally, we show how MITATE can answer network performance questions crucial to mobile application design.
Integrated tracking and recognition of human activities in shape space

Activity recognition consists of two fundamental tasks: tracking the features/objects of interest, and recognizing the activities. In this paper, we show that these two tasks can be integrated within the framework of a dynamical feedback system. In our proposed method, the recognized activity is continuously adapted based on the output of the tracking algorithm, which in turn is driven by the identity of the recognized activity. A non-linear, non-stationary stochastic dynamical model on the “shape” of the objects participating in the activities is used to represent their motion, and forms the basis of the tracking algorithm. The tracked observations are used to recognize the activities by comparing against a prior database. Measures designed to evaluate the performance of the tracking algorithm serve as a feedback signal. The method is able to automatically detect changes and switch between activities happening one after another, which is akin to segmenting a long sequence into homogeneous parts. The entire process of tracking, recognition, change detection and model switching happens recursively as new video frames become available. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on real-life video and analyze its performance based on such metrics as detection delay and false alarm.
A Dynamic Structural Model of Labor Supply and Educational Attainment

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic structural model of labor supply and schooling to investigate the process by which a cohort of males from the NLSY79 accumulate human capital via formal education and labor market participation. The theoretical model provides a detailed treatment of the economic costs, benefits and u ncertainties associated with the schooling and labor supply alternatives faced by indiv iduals. In particular, the model explicitly accounts for the simultaneous choice of enrolling in sc hool and working. It also allows for endogenous leisure choices, intertemporal nonseparabilities in preferences, aggregate skill specific productivity shocks, aggre gate consumption price effects, and individual heterogeneity. Times spent on schooling, working, and leisure are treated as continuous choice variables. The estimates from the model are then used to conduct simulation exercises to evaluate policies that are aimed at affecting working while enrolled in school and equating school quality across races. The results indicate that these policies may have significantly different effects on different r acial groups.
Light Gluinos and Jet Production in $\bar p p$ Collisions

Abstract The impact of a light, long lived gluino on jet production cross sections in p p collisions is estimated. The effect is found to be relatively modest, particularly when gluinos are incorporated into the parton densities of the proton. Although a light gluino does enhance the production of jets at high ET, the effect is insufficient, by itself, to explain the high ET excess observed by CDF.
Firm Organization and Retail Industry Dynamics

This paper investigates the spatial organization and dynamics of retail markets using establishment level data on entry, exit, and location choice in the retail alcoholic beverage industry. Establishments are classified into two groups based on firm affiliation: chain vs. stand-alone stores. Stand-alone stores are further broken down into two categories according to product lines offered: diversified vs. specialized stores. The organization and dynamics of the various groups differ markedly. The number of chain stores per capita declines significantly with market size, and these stores exhibit lower entry and exit rates in larger markets. This behavior cannot be readily reconciled with the competitive industry theory. In contrast, both the number per capita and the turnover rates of stand-alone stores are invariant to market size, a behavior consistent with that of a competitive industry. These findings suggest a dominant firms-competitive fringe organization as one potential characterization of retail markets.
Multiplicative Invariants and Semigroup Algebras

Let G be a finite group acting by automorphism on a lattice A, and hence on the group algebra S=k[A]. The algebra of G-invariants in S is called an algebra of multiplicative invariants. We present an explicit version of a result of Farkas stating that multiplicative invariants of finite reflection groups are semigroup algebras.
Imposing Curvature Restrictions on a Translog Cost Function using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation Approach

Using Kansas Farm data from 1973 to 1998, curvature restrictions are imposed on a translog cost function. Using uninformative priors with indicator functions representing distribution and inequality constraints, a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation method is used to estimate parameters and check curvature at each point. Comparison is made to the Cholesky factorization method commonly used with the normalized quadratic functional form.
Microscopic Analysis of Clausius–Duhem Processes

Given a thermodynamic process which carries a system from one equilibrium state to another, we construct a quantity whose average, over an ensemble of microscopic realizations of the process, depends only on these end states, even if at intermediate times the system is out of equilibrium. This result (1) can be used to express the entropy difference between two equilibrium states in terms of an irreversible process connecting them, (2) leads to two statistical statements of the Clausius–Duhem inequality, and (3) can be generalized to situations in which the system begins and/or ends in nonequilibrium states.
Was Gauss smart

Sitting at my desk at Bridgewater State College with a few hours to go before my first class of the new semes ter, I was surfing the web for material like this when I stumbled on the reposi tory at Johns Hopkins University known as the Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music. Looking for Hymns or Sacred Mu sic, I was disappointed not to find any such category. Instead I found links to boxes of sheet music whose contents were
Why did Colombian private savings decline in the early 1990s

The sharp drop in private savings in the 1990s in Colombia can be attributed to a decline in private disposable income and, to a lesser extent, to growth in consumption. The permanent decline in private disposable income in Colombia between 1950 and 990 is closely linked to tax increases. This trend was accentuated in the early 1990s by a reduction in corporations' gross operating surplus. Contrary to the usual hypothesis, the author shows that in the 1990s private consumption had a relatively minor effect on national savings. He highlights two findings. First, private consumption's recent behavior can hardly be called a boom. It declined throughout the second half of the 1980s before finally showing an upturn equivalent to 2 percent of gross national product. Second, consumption of durable goods after trade reform cannot be blamed for the decline in private savings. In fact, savings began falling in 1988 and, until 1993, trade reform did not cause a stock adjustment of durable goods.
USING FUTURES PRICES TO FORECAST THE SEASON-AVERAGE U.S. CORN PRICES

A model is developed using basis values (cash prices less futures), marketing weights, and a composite of monthly futures and cash prices to forecast the season-average U.S. corn farm price. Forecast accuracy measures include the absolute percentage error, mean absolute percentage error, squared error, and mean squared error. The futures model forecasts are compared to USDA's WASDE projections. No statistically significance difference was found between the futures model forecasts and the season-average price projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Futures model forecasts are reliable, and timely.
Economic Integration, Factor Mobility, and Wage Convergence

This paper studies the effect of economic integrationof two regions on the mobility of skilled and unskilled workersacross regions and on the resulting location of industrial activity.In particular, we study what happens when wages in both regionsare set by the unions of the ‘West’—the region with agreater initial relative stock of human capital. We show thatunder some circumstances, it is the interest of the West's unionsto set up a speed of wage convergence greater than equilibrium,thus generating unemployment in the East. This slows the migrationof human capital toward the East, but quickens the migrationof raw labor toward the West. A greater share of economic activityis eventually located in the Western region. Unions in the Westwill benefit from this provided human capital has low migrationcosts relative to raw labor.
Entanglement in massive coupled oscillators

This article investigates entanglement of the motional states of massive coupled oscillators.The specific realization of an idealized diatomic molecule in one-dimension isconsidered, but the techniques developed apply to any massive particles with two degreesof freedom and a quadratic Hamiltonian. We present two methods, one analyticand one approximate, to calculate the interatomic entanglement for Gaussian and non-Gaussian pure states as measured by the purity of the reduced density matrix. Thecases of free and trapped molecules and hetero- and homonuclear molecules are treated.In general, when the trap frequency and the molecular frequency are very different, andwhen the atomic masses are equal, the atoms are highly-entangled for molecular coherentstates and number states. Surprisingly, while the interatomic entanglement can be quitelarge even for molecular coherent states, the covariance of atomic position and momentumobservables can be entirely explained by a classical model with appropriately chosenstatistical uncertainty.
Conditional Value-at-Risk and Average Value-at-Risk: Estimation and Asymptotics

We discuss linear regression approaches to the estimation of law-invariant conditional risk measures. Two estimation procedures are considered and compared; one is based on residual analysis of the standard least-squares method, and the other is in the spirit of the M-estimation approach used in robust statistics. In particular, value-at-risk and average value-at-risk measures are discussed in detail. Large sample statistical inference of the estimators is derived. Furthermore, finite sample properties of the proposed estimators are investigated and compared with theoretical derivations in an extensive Monte Carlo study. Empirical results on the real data (different financial asset classes) are also provided to illustrate the performance of the estimators.
INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION REACTOR SYSTEMS

A variety of reactor cavity concepts, drivers, and energy conversion mechanisms are being considered to realize commercial applications of ICF. Presented in this paper are: (1) a review of reactor concepts with estimates of practically achievable pulse repetition rates, (2) a survey of drivers with estimates of the requirements on reactor conditions imposed by beam propagation characteristics, and (3) an assessment of compatible driver-reactor combinations.
The role of convective plumes and vortices on the global aerosol budget

[1] Atmospheric aerosols produce both a direct radiative forcing by scattering and absorbing solar and infrared radiation, and an indirect radiative forcing by altering cloud processes. Therefore, it is essential to understand the physical processes that contribute to the global aerosol budget. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that mineral dust contributes to ∼1/3 of all primary particle emissions to the atmosphere. The significance of mineral dust aerosol becomes evident when one considers the large surface area of arid and semi-arid regions on most continents. It is evident from observations in the U.S. Southwest that convective plumes and vortices lift large quantities of desert dust. Here, we use a combination of observational data and theory to determine the role of convective plumes and vortices on the global aerosol budget. We show that convective plumes and vortices contribute to about 35% of the global budget of mineral dust.
Square Functions and the A_\infty Property of Elliptic Measures

In this paper, we provide a new means of establishing solvability of the Dirichlet problem on Lipschitz domains, with measurable data, for second order elliptic, nonsymmetric divergence form operators. We will show that a certain optimal Carleson measure estimate for bounded solutions of such operators implies a regularity result for the associated elliptic measure.
A Competitive Analysis for Balanced Transactional Memory Workloads

We consider transactional memory contention management in the context of balanced workloads, where if a transaction is writing, the number of write operations it performs is a constant fraction of its total reads and writes. We explore the theoretical performance boundaries of contention management in balanced workloads from the worst-case perspective by presenting and analyzing two new polynomial time contention management algorithms. We analyze the performance of a contention management algorithm by comparison with an optimal offline contention management algorithm to provide a competitive ratio. The first algorithm Clairvoyant is $O(\sqrt{s})$ -competitive, where s is the number of shared resources. This algorithm depends on explicitly knowing the conflict graph at each time step of execution. The second algorithm Non-Clairvoyant is $O(\sqrt{s} \cdot \log n)$ -competitive, with high probability, which is only a O(log n) factor worse, but does not require knowledge of the conflict graph, where n is the number of transactions. Both of these algorithms are greedy. We also prove that the performance of Clairvoyant is close to optimal, since there is no polynomial time contention management algorithm for the balanced transaction scheduling problem that is better than $O((\sqrt{s})^{1-\varepsilon})$ -competitive for any constant e>0, unless NP⊆ZPP. To our knowledge, these results are significant improvements over the best previously known O(s) competitive ratio bound.
Composable Semantic Models for Actor Theories

We define three semantic models for actor computation starting with a generalization to open systems of Clinger's event diagram model, and forming two abstractions: interaction diagrams and interaction paths. An algebra is defined on each semantic domain with operations for parallel composition, hiding of internal actors, and renaming. We use these models to provide semantics for descriptions of actor components based on actor theories and show that the semantics is a component algebra homomorphism.
Effects of Noise on Galaxy Isophotes

The study of shapes of the images of objects is an important issue not only because it reveals its dynamical state but also it helps to understand the object’s evolutionary history. We discuss a new technique in cosmological image analysis which is based on a set of non-parametric shape descriptors known as the Minkowski Functionals (MFs). These functionals are extremely versatile and under some conditions give a complete description of the geometrical properties of objects. We believe that MFs could be a useful tool to extract information about the shapes of galaxies, galaxy-clusters and superclusters. The information revealed by MFs can be utilized along with the knowledge obtained from currently popular methods and thus could improve our understanding of the true shapes of cosmological objects.
Projected subgradient methods for learning sparse Gaussians

Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) are useful in a broad range of applications. In this paper we tackle the problem of learning a sparse GMRF in a high-dimensional space. Our approach uses the l1-norm as a regularization on the inverse covariance matrix. We utilize a novel projected gradient method, which is faster than previous methods in practice and equal to the best performing of these in asymptotic complexity. We also extend the l1-regularized objective to the problem of sparsifying entire blocks within the inverse covariance matrix. Our methods generalize fairly easily to this case, while other methods do not. We demonstrate that our extensions give better generalization performance on two real domains—biological network analysis and a 2D-shape modeling image task.
Investor Reactions to Contrasts Between the Earnings Preannouncements of Peer Firms

This study investigates how investors’ reactions to one firm’s earnings preannouncements are affected by the preannouncements of a peer firm. Our experimental results suggest that when two peer firms sequentially preannounce positive earnings news, investors’ assessments of the target firm’s one-year-ahead earnings per share (EPS) are affected by the peer firm’s preannouncing behaviors. We find that in such environments, preannouncing 50 percent of the positive news is not the best strategy for maximizing investors’ earnings predictions. Instead, we find that when differences exist in the two firms’ earnings preannouncements, contrast effects dominate investors’ predictions such that the greater the portion of the positive surprise preannounced by the target relative to the peer firm, the greater is the one-year-ahead EPS prediction for the target firm. However, when no differences exist between the surprises preannounced by the two firms, investors provide the highest one-year-ahead EPS forecast for the target firm when it follows the strategy of preannouncing 50 percent of the total earnings surprise. These findings suggest that investors’ reactions to earnings preannouncements are a complex function of the contrasts between the target’s preannouncements and those of its peers. Thus, they imply that the role of a target firm’s preannouncements on investors’ EPS predictions cannot be determined in isolation. Instead, the extent and nature of the preannouncements of peer firms must be considered in any such analyses. These findings have important implications for managers who make preannouncement decisions and academics examining market reactions to voluntary management disclosures.
Extracranial-intracranial bypass to reduce the risk of ischemic stroke

Extracranial-intracranial (EC-IC) bypass surgery is an operative procedure in which the superficial temporal artery is anastomosed to the middle cerebral artery. The operation, first described in 1969, was employed to circumvent otherwise surgically inaccessible atherosclerotic lesions high in the internal carotid system or in the middle cerebral artery. This assessment compares the findings from 13 surgical series of EC-IC bypass (1464 patients) with those reported in the only prospective, randomized, cooperative trial of this procedure (1377 patients). Analysis of the outcomes in the 1464 patients included in the surgical series produced insufficient evidence to support a conclusion that post-EC-IC bypass stroke rates were lower than the rates of either the medically or surgically treated groups in the controlled clinical trial. In the absence of reliable, objective evidence of the existence of a group of patients in whom surgical intervention is superior to medical treatment in reducing the frequency of stroke, the results of the single controlled clinical trial, which demonstrated no benefit of bypass, must be accepted as the best evidence currently available.
Distribution-free tests for sparse heterogeneous mixtures

We consider the problem of detecting sparse heterogeneous mixtures from a nonparametric perspective. Specifically, we assume that the null distribution is symmetric about zero, while the true effects have positive median. We then suggest two new tests for this purpose. The main one is a form of Anderson–Darling test for symmetry and is closely related to the higher criticism. It is shown to achieve the detection boundary for the normal mixture model and, more generally, for asymptotically generalized Gaussian mixture models, in all sparsity regimes. The other test is a form of longest run test and specifically designed for the very sparse situation.
Delivering Services in Multicultural Societies

The last two decades have witnessed a growing recognition of the importance of taking cultural and ethnic diversity into consideration when designing and implementing development programs. As societies around the world have become more culturally diverse, and the role culture plays in the formation of identity has become better understood, governments are beginning to pay greater attention to the management of cultural diversity and are becoming more sensitive to issues of cultural exclusion. This book explores how taking cultural diversity into account can affect the delivery of services both positively and negatively, and how local governments can respond to the challenge of programming for and around diversity. The following chapter presents the current debate on the role of governments, at all levels, in managing cultural diversity. Chapter three takes a more in-depth look at specific areas in which the demand for recognition of cultural practices in the delivery of services is strongest. Chapter four examines policies pertaining to basic service delivery that can address and support cultural diversity. Finally, chapter five summarizes the lessons learned from the design of culturally sensitive policies for delivering services to a diverse population.
Is Submodularity Testable

We initiate the study of property testing of submodularity on the boolean hypercube. Submodular functions come up in a variety of applications in combinatorial optimization. For a vast range of algorithms, the existence of an oracle to a submodular function is assumed. But how does one check if this oracle indeed represents a submodular function?
Napoleon in isolation

Napoleon's theorem in elementary geometry describes how certain linear operations on plane polygons of arbitrary shape always produce regular polygons. More generally, certain triangulations of a polygon that tiles R 2 admit deformations which keep fixed the symmetry group of the tiling. This gives rise to isolation phenomena in cusped hyperbolic 3-manifolds, where hyperbolic Dehn surgeries on some collection of cusps leave the geometric structure at some other collection of cusps unchanged. 1. GEOMETRIC ISOLATION 1.1. Definition. Let M be a complete, finite volume hyperbolic 3-manifold with n torus cusps, which we denote c1, . . , cn. The following definition is found in [7]: Definition 1.1. A collection of cusps Cjj . ... ) Cjm is geometrically isolated from a collection cil, .. , cin if any hyperbolic Dehn surgery on any collection of the Cik leaves the geometric structure on all the cj1 invariant. Note that this definition is not symmetric in the collections cik and cj,, and in fact there are examples which show that a symmetrized definition is strictly stronger (see [7]). More generally, we can ask for some prescribed set of fillings on the Cik which leave the cj, invariant. Generalized (non-integral) hyperbolic surgeries on a cusp are a holomorphic parameter for the space of all (not necessarily complete) hyperbolic structures on M with a particular kind of allowable singularities (i.e. generalized cone structures) in a neighborhood of the complete structure. Moreover, the complex dimension of the space of geometric shapes on a complete cusp is 1. Consequently, for dimension reasons whenever n > m there will be families of generalized surgeries leaving the geometric structures on the cjl invariant. There is no particular reason to expect, however, that any of these points will correspond to an integral surgery on the Cik. When there is a 1 complex dimensional holomorphic family of isolated generalized surgeries which contains infinitely many integral surgeries, we say that we have an example of an isolation phenomenon. Neumann and Reid describe other qualities of isolation in [7] including the following: Definition 1.2. A collection of cusps cjl .... , Cjm is strongly isolated from a collection cil . .. . Cim if after any hyperbolic Dehn surgeries on ally collection of the cjl, Received by the editors June 15, 1999 and, in revised form, March 6, 2000. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 57M50, 57M25. (?)2001 American Mathematical Society
Theoretical overview of the large area plasma processing system (LAPPS)

Summary form only given. An initial theoretical study of LAPPS has focused on plasma and free radical production, ion fluxes to substrates, uniformity of the plasma and flux for insulating and conducting substrates, as well as DC and RF sheaths. This theoretical work has been used to analyze several initial experiments on isotropic etching, ion fluxes to conducting substrates, and measurements of electron temperature.
A Large Scale Energy Source for Feeding ISM Turbulence in Spiral Galaxies

One of the important consequences of a newly discovered secular dynamical evolution process of spiral galaxies (Zhang, 1996, 1998, 1999) is that the orbiting disk matter receives energy injection each time it crosses the spiral density wave crest. This energy injection has been shown to be able to quantitatively explain the observed age-velocity-dispersion relation of the solar neighborhood stars. We demostrate in this paper that similar energy injection into the interstellar medium could serve as the large-scale energy source to continuously power the observed interstellar turbulence and to offset its downward cascade tendency.
Regulated proteolysis of a transcription factor complex is critical to cell cycle progression in Caulobacter crescentus.

Summary Cell cycle transitions are often triggered by the proteolysis of key regulatory proteins. In Caulobacter crescentus, the G1-S transition involves the degradation of an essential DNA-binding response regulator, CtrA, by the ClpXP protease. Here, we show that another critical cell cycle regulator, SciP, is also degraded during the G1-S transition, but by the Lon protease. SciP is a small protein that binds directly to CtrA and prevents it from activating target genes during G1. We demonstrate that SciP must be degraded during the G1-S transition so that cells can properly activate CtrA-dependent genes following DNA replication initiation and the reaccumulation of CtrA. These results indicate that like CtrA, SciP levels are tightly regulated during the Caulobacter cell cycle. In addition, we show that formation of a complex between CtrA and SciP at target promoters protects both proteins from their respective proteases. Degradation of either protein thus helps trigger the destruction of the other, facilitating a cooperative disassembly of the complex. Collectively, our results indicate that ClpXP and Lon each degrade an important cell cycle regulator, helping to trigger the onset of S phase and prepare cells for the subsequent programmes of gene expression critical to polar morphogenesis and cell division.
Spatial-Temporal cross-correlation analysis: a new measure and a case study in infectious disease informatics

This paper aims to develop a new statistical measure to identify significant correlations among multiple events with spatial and temporal components. This new measure, K(r,t), is defined by adding the temporal dimension to Ripley’s K(r) function. Empirical studies show that the use of K(r,t) can lead to a more discriminating and flexible spatial-temporal data analysis framework. This measure also helps identify the causal events whose occurrences induce those of other events.
Scientific computing meets big data technology: An astronomy use case

Scientific analyses commonly compose multiple single-process programs into a dataflow. An end-to-end dataflow of single-process programs is known as a many-task application. Typically, tools from the HPC software stack are used to parallelize these analyses. In this work, we investigate an alternate approach that uses Apache Spark — a modern big data platform — to parallelize many-task applications. We present Kira, a flexible and distributed astronomy image processing toolkit using Apache Spark. We then use the Kira toolkit to implement a Source Extractor application for astronomy images, called Kira SE. With Kira SE as the use case, we study the programming flexibility, dataflow richness, scheduling capacity and performance of Apache Spark running on the EC2 cloud. By exploiting data locality, Kira SE achieves a 3.7 χ speedup over an equivalent C program when analyzing a 1TB dataset using 512 cores on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Furthermore, we show that by leveraging software originally designed for big data infrastructure, Kira SE achieves competitive performance to the C implementation running on the NERSC Edison supercomputer. Our experience with Kira indicates that emerging Big Data platforms such as Apache Spark are a performant alternative for many-task scientific applications.
Building a clean machine : anti-corruption coalitions and sustainable reform

Many societies have limited corruption through the broad-based mobilization of a diverse range of interests willing and able to defend themselves by making meaningful demands for accountability of, and limits upon, official power, and for an end to illicit advantages enjoyed by others. Historically such a process has taken place gradually, as political development has proceeded and the base of participation broadens. But today's high corruption societies cannot wait for several generations to see such developments take place. The authors argue that social action coalitions, linking public and private actors, are a way to mobilize these sorts of participation and advocacy. Such coalitions are neither a new idea nor a guarantee of successful reforms; indeed, in many instances they win out by default as an anti-corruption strategy. But the authors contend that if sustained by a careful planning and a diverse set of incentives, they can reinforce political will and enhance the strength of civil society. Coalition-building efforts are underway in many societies. But too often, they have focused only on anti-corruption tactics and pursuing their own growth, rather than looking at the coalition-building process in more general terms. In Part I, the authors employ Wilson's (1973) analysis of the incentives that motivate and reward participation in organizations. Using this approach the authors identify ways in which the anticorruption goals can be augmented by other kinds of appeals, even when material incentives are scarce. The authors also identify four stages of the coalition-building process- formation, credibility, expansion, and transformation-in which differing combinations of incentives will be necessary to address the group's most important problems and opportunities. In Part II the authors examine two important coalition-building efforts -Ghana's Anti-Corruption Coalition, and the Bangalore Agenda Task Force in Bangalore, Karnataka State, India. In Part III the authors link those cases to a broader analysis, suggesting that while purposive incentives are common in the early phases of all coalitions, other varieties must be added to the mix.
Guiding the Way to Gamma-Ray Sources: X-Ray Studies of Supernova Remnants

Supernova remnants have long been suggested as a class of potential counterparts to unidentified -y-ray sources. The mechanisms by which such -y-rays can arise may include emission from a pulsar associated with a remnant, or a variety of processes associated with energetic particles accelerated by the SNR shock. Imaging and spectral observations in the X-ray band can be used to identify properties of the remnants that lead to -y-ray emission, including the presence of pulsar-driven nebulae, nonthermal X-ray emission from the SNR shells, and the interaction of SNRs with dense surrounding material.
Constitutional Limitations on Borrowing: An Analysis of State Bonded Indebtedness

State and local governments have long had constitutional limits on the issuance of full faith and credit debt. Our analyses find that levels of such debt depend upon the type of restriction in place. States that either prohibit guaranteed debt or require referendum approval to issue it have less guaranteed debt than those that require a supermajority of the legislature to issue debt or those that have revenue-based limitations. Although the issuance of state nonguaranteed debt does not appear to be generally motivated by the aim of circumventing constitutional limitations on guaranteed debt, restrictive provisions at the state level do result in the devolution of debt issuance to governments at the local level. Our findings suggest that current proposals for constitutional limitations on borrowing at the federal level would have much less impact on total government borrowing than their proponents anticipate.
La emancipación de América

Este ensayo compara y contrasta los proce­sos de independencia de Estados Unidos, Haiti y la America espanola. La America britanica , ayudada por Espana y Francia, lo­gro su independencia como consecuencia de una guerra internacional y por medio de un acuerdo internacional , el Tratado de Paris de 1783 . En Haiti, la reaccion de los residentes blancos a la revolucion francesa provoco una rebelion y una revolucion en­cabezadas por los esclavos, ambas culmi­naron con exito y transformaron totalmen­te a la colonia. La invasion napoleonica de Espana en 1808 puso en marcha una revo­lucion politica que establecio un gobierno representativo liberal en el mundo hispanico, destruido por las luchas de indepen­dencia. Ni Espana ni los paises de la America espanola pudieron recuperarse lo sufi­ciente para desarrollarse como naciones fuenes duranre el siglo XIX.
Strong completeness and faithfulness in Bayesian networks

A completeness result for d-separation applied to discrete Bayesian networks is presented and it is shown that in a strong measure-theoretic sense almost all discrete distributions for a given network structure are faithful; i.e. the independence facts true of the distribution are all and only those entailed by the network structure