cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Fear extinction learning modulates large-scale brain connectivity.

Abstract Exploring the neural circuits of the extinction of conditioned fear is critical to advance our understanding of fear- and anxiety-related disorders. The field has focused on examining the role of various regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, insular cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala in conditioned fear and its extinction. The contribution of this ‘fear network’ to the conscious awareness of fear has recently been questioned. And as such, there is a need to examine higher/multiple cortical systems that might contribute to the conscious feeling of fear and anxiety. Herein, we studied functional connectivity patterns across the entire brain to examine the contribution of multiple networks to the acquisition of fear extinction learning and its retrieval. We conducted trial-by-trial analyses on data from 137 healthy participants who underwent a two-day fear conditioning and extinction paradigm in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. We found that functional connectivity across a broad range of brain regions, many of which are part of the default mode, frontoparietal, and ventral attention networks, increased from early to late extinction learning only to a conditioned cue. The increased connectivity during extinction learning predicted the magnitude of extinction memory tested 24 h later. Together, these findings provide evidence supporting recent studies implicating distributed brain regions in learning, consolidation and expression of fear extinction memory in the human brain.
Model Checking FTA

Safety is increasingly important for software based, critical systems. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a safety technique from engineering, developed for analyzing and assessing system safety by uncovering safety flaws and weaknesses of the system. The main drawback of this analysis technique is, that it is based on informal grounds, so safety flaws may be overlooked. This is an issue, where formal proofs can help. They are a safety techniques from software engineering, which are based on precise system descriptions and allow to prove consistency and other (safety) properties.
Recurrent dilemmas of computer use in complex organizations

Computer technology is usually spoken of as a problem solving tool, 33 , 36 a helpful device used to ease the burdens and expand the flexibility of information processing. In this narrow sense, computer technologies have in fact increased the capabilities of people and organizations to carry out complex calculations, manipulate large sets of data and access data from geographically remote locations.
Space Planning for Online Community.

Several years of consulting with online community hosts and managers have highlighted a variety of issues that recur across many online community development efforts. We summarize those issues in eight points that have functioned as useful guidelines to working with online communities, particularly within a corporate context. These recommendations focus on the location and purpose of the community, the monitoring of social activity within the space, the provision of feedback to participants and the organization and maintenance of the space. While this collection is particularly focused on issues relevant to community organizers closely involved in starting, maintaining or growing online communities, its principles are generally applicable for analyzing and understanding the dynamics within a variety of communities.
Structure of N,N′-bis[3-(aminocarbonyl)propyl]sulfamide

The title compound, C8H18N4O4S, possesses C2 symmetry, with the S atom lying on a twofold rotational axis in the unit cell. The sulfamide group of each molecule forms four identical hydrogen bonds with those of its four neighboring molecules, resulting in a rhombic two-dimensional hydrogen bonded network. This network assembles in the third dimension via hydrogen bonds between the primary amide groups of the substituents that extend from the 2D sulfamide sheets. The primary amide groups form a hydrogen-bonded eight-membered cyclic dimer around a two-fold rotational axis. These cyclic dimers are linked into a ribbon-like network via hydrogen bonding interaction between the trans-H and the carbonyl of the amide groups. The compound crystallizes in C2/ca with a = 8.6162(1), b = 57716(1), c = 24.8344(b) A, β = 96.298(1)°, D calc = 1.441 g cm−3, and Z = 4.
Photoaging: Manifestations, Prevention, and Treatment

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that many of the so-called attributes of aging skin are, instead, a reflection of environmental assault upon exposed areas of the body. Of special import are the deleterious effects of solar radiation on dermal connective tissue, leading to the visible manifestations of photoaging. Often termed "premature aging," the salient features of the process are distinctly different from those found in normal intrinsic aging. In general, chronically irradiated skin is metabolically hyperactive with epidermal hyperplasia and neoplasia, increased production of elastic fibers, GAGs, accelerated breakdown and synthesis of collagen, and enhanced inflammatory processes. In contrast, protected aged skin is usually characterized by a slow decline in many of these components. Experimental studies with animal models have confirmed the notion that the shorter, more energetic portion of the ultraviolet spectrum (UVB) is responsible for the dermal connective tissue destruction observed in photoaged skin. More recently, it has been shown that UVA and infrared radiation contribute significantly to photoaging, producing, among other changes, severe elastosis. Because the three broad wavebands are inseparably linked in terrestrial sunlight, all are of concern in the photoaging of human skin. Photoaged skin has been thought to be irreversibly damaged. However, our findings indicate that destruction and repair go on simultaneously under continued assault by actinic radiation. The balance is shifted toward repair when the radiation stress is relieved. Both epidermis and dermis are capable of moderate self-restoration when exogenous injury ceases, either by avoidance of sunlight or by the use of broad-spectrum, high-SPF sunscreens. Repair of the dermis, characterized by broad regions of new collagen deposited subepidermally, can be pharmacologically enhanced by topical application of retinoic acid. Although early protection from sunlight, before severe photodamage occurs, is most desirable, it is deemed advisable to counsel even older persons with photoaged skin to adopt protective measures, thereby allowing repair processes to occur.
Public Performance Rights in the Digital Age: Fixing the Licensing Problem

As individuals and business owners in the United States use devices to store, organize, and listen to music, they inevitably run up against the boundaries of U.S. copyright law. In general, these laws affect businesses more often than private individuals, who can listen to the latest hit single on their iPod or play music to a large audience in their home without running afoul of copyright law, presuming that the audience is composed of family members and social acquaintances. In contrast, as soon as a business plays music in a public space where strangers might listen, it risks infringing the public performance right granted to rightsholders by copyright law. This Essay examines how business practices attributable to the rise of digital music conflict with the public performance right that the Copyright Act grants to creators. This Essay begins by examining the ways in which many commercial businesses might violate public performance rights by using digital music players in their establishments, and discusses how the public performance right governs such use. For example, under the Copyright Act, businesses that broadcast a radio station and are relatively small in scale do not infringe the exclusive rights granted to rightsholders; however, a parallel exemption does not exist for music played from a digital music player. Next, the Essay builds on the work of scholars who propose a tax to compensate rightsholders for public performances, rather than using infringement suits or blanket licenses. Finally, this Essay concludes by discussing possible objections to a mandatory tax regime, how a mandatory tax regime might be implemented, and the likelihood of adopting such a regime.
Impact of Public Works on Household Occupational Choice: Evidence from NREGS in India

Analyzes the impact of India's public employment generation program (NREGS) on entrepreneurship.
Energy-efficient neuromorphic classifiers

Neuromorphic engineering combines the architectural and computational principles of systems neuroscience with semiconductor electronics, with the aim of building efficient and compact devices that mimic the synaptic and neural machinery of the brain. The energy consumptions promised by neuromorphic engineering are extremely low, comparable to those of the nervous system. Until now, however, the neuromorphic approach has been restricted to relatively simple circuits and specialized functions, thereby obfuscating a direct comparison of their energy consumption to that used by conventional von Neumann digital machines solving real-world tasks. Here we show that a recent technology developed by IBM can be leveraged to realize neuromorphic circuits that operate as classifiers of complex real-world stimuli. Specifically, we provide a set of general prescriptions to enable the practical implementation of neural architectures that compete with state-of-the-art classifiers. We also show that the energy consumption of these architectures, realized on the IBM chip, is typically two or more orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional digital machines implementing classifiers with comparable performance. Moreover, the spike-based dynamics display a trade-off between integration time and accuracy, which naturally translates into algorithms that can be flexibly deployed for either fast and approximate classifications, or more accurate classifications at the mere expense of longer running times and higher energy costs. This work finally proves that the neuromorphic approach can be efficiently used in real-world applications and has significant advantages over conventional digital devices when energy consumption is considered.
Dynamic Responses to Labor Demand Shocks: Evidence from the Financial Industry in Delaware

Abstract This paper analyzes an important shock to local labor demand in financial services: firm relocation to Delaware following a Supreme Court ruling and state legislation in the 1980s. Using synthetic controls and bordering states, I find large effects on employment, unemployment, and participation in the first decade. Wage effects, and in many cases employment spillovers to the nontradable sector, appear larger than estimates from shocks to the tradable sector. Effects persist for ten to twenty years after Delaware loses its original policy-induced advantage. The shift towards a low unemployment sector explains this persistence, rather than direct productivity effects or agglomeration.
An Inquiry-Based Laboratory Module to Promote Understanding of the Scientific Method and Bacterial Conjugation

Students are engaged and improve their critical thinking skills in laboratory courses when they have the opportunity to design and conduct inquiry-based experiments that generate novel results. A d...
L-collision Attacks against Randomized MACs

In order to avoid birthday attacks on message authentication schemes, it has been suggested that one add randomness to the scheme. One must be careful about how randomness is added, however. This paper shows that prefixing randomness to a message before running the message through an iterated MAC leads to an attack that takes only O (2(l+r)/3 + max{2l/2, 2r/2}) queries to break, where l is the size of the MAC iteration output and r is the size of the prefixed randomness.
An Analysis of Vegetable Farms' Direct Marketing Activities in New York State

Farm retail marketing or farmer-to-consumer direct marketing is an important outlet for many New York vegetable products. Marketing direct to consumers takes special skills and abilities on the part of marketers, and also requires a favorable location with respect to land resources and local markets. Since many farmers and direct market managers lack the resources and experience to compete with supermarkets, it is important for direct marketing operators to differentiate themselves from the mass marketers. The goal of this study was to analyze the effectiveness of direct marketing activities and marketing strategies used by New York vegetable farms. A survey designed to collect information on farm retail marketing practices from New York vegetable farms was conducted during the winter of 2000-20001. Results were analyzed based on business profiles of New York vegetable farms with direct marketing activities, marketing channels used, retail seasonality, product mix, importance of different direct marketing activities, effectiveness of different marketing and business management tools, and future plans for various marketing activities. The surveyed vegetable farms had average total farm sales of $274,311 and average retail sales of $123,612. Direct marketing to consumers was an important source of farm income for a majority of the surveyed New York vegetable farms with retail marketing activities. Sixty-nine percent of the respondents received more than half of their farm gross income from direct sales to consumers. However, vegetable farms with direct marketing activities generally did not rely on retail alone. Farms with higher gross sales utilized more marketing channels and depended more heavily on wholesale. May through October is the most important sales season for farmer-to-consumer direct marketing activities. The surveyed farms retailed more than just the items they produced. Purchased items for resale were an important avenue to expand product line and increase the volume of products available for retail. Three most commonly used direct marketing methods were roadside markets, farmers’ markets and pick-your-own. Among all the direct marketing components, fresh farm products – including fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat products - were rated as most important to the operation by most surveyed farms (83 percent). Ice cream stand had the second highest rating but was only rated by 3 percent of the surveyed farms. Ornamental plants and holiday crops were rated number three by 43 percent and 54 percent of farms, respectively. The most commonly used promotion tools were “word-of-mouth” and “newspapers”, and “labor related challenges” and “competition in the markets” were the two major concerns among survey respondents.
Ethics in Transition: Unrepresented Litigants and the Changing Judicial Role

* Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs, New England School of Law. I am grateful for the helpful feedback I received from Paula Galowitz, Neal Kravitz, Tracy Miller, and Richard Zorza. I am also indebted to Stephen Gillers for his collaboration on a memorandum related to this article. This work was supported by a stipend from the Board of Trustees of New England School of Law. 1. See, e.g., JONA GOLDSCHMIDT ET AL., MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF PRO SE LITIGATION: A REPORT AND GUIDEBOOK FOR JUDGES AND COURT MANAGERS (1998) (providing information on the challenges, legal and ethical issues, resources for management, and policy recommendations regarding pro se litigation); Russell Engler, And Justice for All—Including the Unrepresented Poor: Revisiting the Roles of the Judges, Mediators, and Clerks, 67 FORDHAM L. REV. 1987 (1999) (examining the roles of various actors of the legal system in working with unrepresented litigants). 2. Conferences addressing the issue of unrepresented litigants included the Eastern Regional Conference on Access to Justice for the Self-Represented Litigant (White Plains, NY, 2006); the New York State Unified Court System Access to Justice Conference (Albany, NY, 2001); the Massachusetts Statewide Conference on Unrepresented Litigants (Worcester, MA, 2001); The Changing Face of Legal Practice: A National Conference on Unbundled Legal Services (Baltimore, MD, 2000); and the National Conference on Self-Represented Litigants Appearing in Court (Scottsdale, AZ, 1999). 3. Publications include those by the American Judicature Society and State Justice Institute, such as JONA GOLDSCHMIDT & LISA MILORD, JUDICIAL SET-
Ownership and performance of Lithuanian enterprises

The author presents some evidence of improved corporate performance in Lithuania for the period 1995-97. His question: Were these improvements in any way caused by privatization and changes in the environment in which enterprises operate? He presents evidence of correlation between ownership and enterprise performance as measured by increased revenues, and improved export performance. Controlling for pre-selection bias increases the magnitude, and significance of private share ownership, which indicates negative selection bias at privatization. On the other hand, (expected) subsidies seem to contribute negatively to enterprise performance. However, the study finds no clear evidence of the effect of market competition on performance indicators in the short run. The author's is the first study to analyze the consequences of commercial (as opposed to mass) privatization in Central and Eastern European countries.
COTA: a robust multi-hop localization scheme in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, multi-hop localization schemes are very vulnerable to various attacks such as wormholes and range modification attacks. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-hop localization scheme, namely COTA, to mitigate various attacks in wireless sensor networks. In this scheme, each localized sensor generates a COnfidence TAg to quantify the quality of its estimated location and broadcasts both the confidence tag and the estimated location in reference messages. When receiving sufficient number of references, an unlocalized sensor filters out bad references and weighs the remaining ones according to their tags. Once location determination is done, the sensor generates its own confidence tag from the indicator of its localization error. By properly setting the filtering metrics and computing the confidence tags, COTA can prevent the proliferation of location errors and achieves accurate location estimations and high localized percentage for sensor networks. To our knowledge, ours is the first work to address the security-aware multi-hop localization problem. We finally present security analysis and simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of COTA.
Using importance flooding to identify interesting networks of criminal activity

In spite of policy concerns and high costs, the law enforcement community is investing heavily in data sharing initiatives. Cross-jurisdictional criminal justice information (e.g., open warrants and convictions) is important, but different data sets are needed for investigational activities where requirements are not as clear and policy concerns abound. The community needs sharing models that employ obtainable data sets and support real-world investigational tasks. This work presents a methodology for sharing and analyzing investigation-relevant data. Our importance flooding application extracts interesting networks of relationships from large law enforcement data sets using user-controlled investigation heuristics and spreading activation. Our technique implements path-based interestingness rules to help identify promising associations to support creation of investigational link charts. In our experiments, the importance flooding approach outperformed relationship-weight-only models in matching expert-selected associations. This methodology is potentially useful for large cross-jurisdictional data sets and investigations.
Modeling strategic beliefs with outsmarting belief systems

We propose a model that formalizes the beliefs of agents in strategic environments and restricts their possible behaviors, without the typical epistemic assumptions used in game theory. We formalize the beliefs of an agent using outsmarting belief systems (OBS) and then propose the notion of belief stability to explain why some OBSs, in particular some that should occur in equilibrium, are more sensitive to perturbations than others. Also, we propose the concept of belief complexity as a criteria to restrict the possible OBSs. This allows us to formalize the notion of strategic communication as belief engineering, in which agents act in order to have other agents believe some low-complexity OBS. These concepts provide a new approach to understand why some equilibrium and non-equilibrium strategies are seen in practice, with applications to the centipede game.
A Review of Two-Phase Flow-Induced Vibration

Two-phase flow exists in many shell-and-tube heat exchangers and power generation components. The flowing fluid is a source of energy that can induce small-amplitude subcritical oscillations and large-amplitude dynamic instabilities. In fact, many practical system components have experienced excessive flow-induced vibrations. To prevent unacceptable flow-induced vibration, we must understand excitation mechanisms, develop analytical and experimental techniques, and provide reliable design guidelines. Thus, we are conducting a comprehensive program to study structural vibration in components subjected to two-phase flow. This report reviews the current understanding of vibration of circular cylinders in quiescent fluid, cross-flow, and axial flow, with emphasis on excitation mechanisms, mathematical models, and available experimental data. A unified theory is presented for cylinders oscillating under different flow conditions. Based on the theory, future research needs are outlined.
Estimation of the Distribution of Usual Intakes for Selected Dietary Components

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been responsible for conducting periodic surveys to estimate food consumption patterns of households and/or individuals in the United States for over 50 years. Data from these surveys have had a significant impact on the formulation of food-assistance programs, on consumer education and on food regulatory activities. In recent years, there has been interest in estimating the proportion of the population that has insufficient intake or excessive intake of certain dietary components. Different approaches have been suggested for the estimation of this proportion. In all approaches, it is necessary to analyze data on dietary intakes for a sample of individuals. Also, all approaches recognize that an individual who has a low intake of a given dietary component on one day is not necessarily deficient (or at risk of being deficient) so far as that dietary component is concerned. It is low intake over a sufficiently long period of time that produces a dietary deficiency. A dietary deficiency exists when the "usual" (i.e., normal or long-run average) intake of the dietary component is less than the appropriate dietary standard.
Near-infrared spectroscopy of McNeil's Nebula Object

We present 0.8-5.2 μm spectroscopy of the compact source at the base of a variable nebula (McNeil's Nebula Object) in the Lynds 1630 dark cloud that went into outburst in late 2003. The spectrum of this object reveals an extremely red continuum, CO bands at 2.3-2.5 μm in emission, a deep 3.1 μm ice absorption feature, and a solid-state CO absorption feature at 4.7 μm. In addition, emission lines of H, Ca II, Mg I, and Na I are present. The Paschen lines exhibit P Cygni profiles, as do two lines of He I, although the emission features are very weak in the latter. The Brackett lines, however, are seen to be purely in emission. The P Cygni profiles clearly indicate that mass outflow is occurring in a wind with a velocity of ~400 km s-1. The H line ratios do not yield consistent estimates of the reddening, nor do they agree with the extinction estimated from the ice feature (AV ~ 11). We propose that these lines are optically thick and are produced in a dense, ionized wind. The near-infrared spectrum does not appear similar to any known FUor or EXor object. However, all evidence suggests that McNeil's Nebula Object is a heavily embedded low-mass Class I protostar, surrounded by a disk, whose brightening is due to a recent accretion event.
Optimized Conformal Parameterization of Cortical Surfaces Using Shape Based Matching of Landmark Curves

In this work, we find meaningfulparameterizations of cortical surfaces utilizing prior anatomical information in the form of anatomical landmarks (sulci curves) on the surfaces. Specifically we generate close to conformal parametrizations that also give a shape-basedcorrespondence between the landmark curves. We propose a variational energy that measures the harmonic energy of the parameterization maps, and the shape dissimilarity between mapped points on the landmark curves. The novelty is that the computed maps are guaranteed to give a shape-baseddiffeomorphism between the landmark curves. We achieve this by intrinsically modelling our search space of maps as flows of smooth vector fields that do not flow across the landmark curves, and by using the local surface geometry on the curves to define a shape measure. Such parameterizations ensure consistent correspondence between anatomical features, ensuring correct averaging and comparison of data across subjects. The utility of our model is demonstrated in experiments on cortical surfaces with landmarks delineated, which show that our computed maps give a shape-based alignment of the sulcal curves without significantly impairing conformality.
Games and Discrimination Lessons From The Weakest Link

Empirically determining whether wage differentials arise because of discrimination is extremely difficult, and distinguishing between different theories of discrimination is harder still. This paper exploits a number of unique features of a high-stakes television game show to determine which contestants discriminate and why. In the show, contestants take turns answering a series of trivia questions, and, at the end of each round of questions, one contestant is voted off by the other players in the round. Our results suggest no evidence of discriminatory voting patterns by males against females or by whites against blacks. However, somewhat surprisingly, we find that in the early rounds of the game women appear to discriminate against men. We test three competing theories for the voting behavior of women: preference-based discrimination, statistical discrimination and strategic discrimination. In doing so, we highlight the types of experimental designs that could be used to distinguish between these theories. Only preference-based discrimination is consistent with the voting patterns.
Non-clairvoyant Scheduling for Minimizing Mean Slowdown

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs online nonclairvoyantly, that is, when job sizes are not known. Our focus is on minimizing mean slowdown, defined as the ratio of flow time to the size of the job. We use resource augmentation in terms of allowing a faster processor to the online algorithm to make up for its lack of knowledge of job sizes.Our main result is an O(1)-speed O(log2 B)-competitive algorithm for minimizing mean slowdown non-clairvoyantly, when B is the ratio between the largest and smallest job sizes. On the other hand, we show that any O(1)-speed algorithm, deterministic or randomized, is at least ?(logB) competitive.The motivation for bounded job sizes is supported by an ?(n) lower bound for arbitrary job sizes, where n is the number of jobs. Furthermore, a lower bound of ?(B) justifies the need for resource augmentation even with bounded job sizes. For the static case, i.e. when all jobs arrive at time 0, we give an O(logB) competitive algorithm which does not use resource augmentation and a matching ?(logB) lower bound on the competitiveness.
Efficient identification of overlapping communities

In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for finding overlapping communities in social networks. Our algorithm does not rely on the contents of the messages and uses the communication graph only. The knowledge of the structure of the communities is important for the analysis of social behavior and evolution of the society as a whole, as well as its individual members. This knowledge can be helpful in discovering groups of actors that hide their communications, possibly for malicious reasons. Although the idea of using communication graphs for identifying clusters of actors is not new, most of the traditional approaches, with the exception of the work by Baumes et al, produce disjoint clusters of actors, de facto postulating that an actor is allowed to belong to at most one cluster. Our algorithm is significantly more efficient than the previous algorithm by Baumes et al; it also produces clusters of a comparable or better quality.
Quarkonium Production at STAR

range 4 5 GeV/c) is found to be consistent with unity in peripheral collisions, while a significant suppression of low-pT J/ψ and Υ is observed in central collisions. The elliptic flow of J/ψ is reported for 20-60% central Au+Au
Medical Privacy and Research

Abstract Medical records are increasingly kept in electronic form. The existence of large medical databases raises new questions about privacy and control over that information. When records exist in a form that can easily be shared with others, there are legitimate privacy concerns. This paper argues that this fear is not properly a privacy issue, but rather concerns the viability of social norms that govern the doctor‐patient relationship and the use of medical information that is obtained within that relationship. When medical information is used for research purposes, the information is transformed into data elements and is no longer about the individuals. Information obtained either in the ordinary course of providing medical care or in the course of conducting research studies for which individuals have given their informed consent does not require further consent to be used as data in research files as long as it is not individually identifiable.
Resolving hyporheic and groundwater components of streambed water flux using heat as a tracer

[1] Hyporheic and groundwater fluxes typically occur together in permeable sediments beneath flowing stream water. However, streambed water fluxes quantified using the thermal method are usually interpreted as representing either groundwater or hyporheic fluxes. Our purpose was to improve understanding of co-occurring groundwater and hyporheic fluxes using streambed temperature measurements and analysis of one-dimensional heat transport in shallow streambeds. First, we examined how changes in hyporheic and groundwater fluxes affect their relative magnitudes by reevaluating previously published simulations. These indicated that flux magnitudes are largely independent until a threshold is crossed, past which hyporheic fluxes are diminished by much larger (1000-fold) groundwater fluxes. We tested accurate quantification of co-occurring fluxes using one-dimensional approaches that are appropriate for analyzing streambed temperature data collected at field sites. The thermal analytical method, which uses an analytical solution to the one-dimensional heat transport equation, was used to analyze results from a numerical heat transport model, in which hyporheic flow was represented as increased thermal dispersion at shallow depths. We found that co-occurring groundwater and hyporheic fluxes can be quantified in streambeds, although not always accurately. For example, using a temperature time series collected in a sandy streambed, we found that hyporheic and groundwater flow could both be detected when thermal dispersion due to hyporheic flow was significant compared to thermal conduction. We provide guidance for when thermal data can be used to quantify both hyporheic and groundwater fluxes, and we show that neglecting thermal dispersion may affect accuracy and interpretation of estimated streambed water fluxes.
An Experimentally Validated Model for Microchannel Heat Exchanger Incorporating Lubricant Effect

Abstract This paper presents the further development of Li and Hrnjak's (2013) microchannel heat exchanger model which includes the thermodynamic and transport properties of refrigerant–oil mixture. Effect of lubricant is accounted in boiling heat transfer, pressure drop and refrigerant distribution. A newly proposed infrared thermography based method is implemented in the model to describe the liquid refrigerant distribution in the inlet header of the microchannel heat exchanger. The new model is validated against experimental results (R134a-PAG 46 oil) at various oil circulation ratios (0.1%–8.3%). Simulation results also indicate that lubricant addition improves refrigerant distribution which is in agreement with experiments and the infrared thermography based method enables the model capture lubricant effect on capacity more comprehensively.
Targeting the Foreign Born by Race and Nationality: Counter-Productive in the War on Terrorism

The terrorist attacks of September 11, perpetrated by Islamic extremists from foreign lands, have branded American consciousness perhaps even more deeply than any other tragedy to befall the nation. The first foreign attack on the mainland United States in nearly 200 years, September 11 has been burned into the body politic and represents a visible threat to our security and to our way of life. Americans naturally have demanded immediate measures to apprehend those responsible and to insure that similar attacks may not happen again. Governmental officials responded frenetically to September 11. Among other things, federal authorities immediately questioned and detained hundreds of immigrants from Islamic countries, and Congress rushed to pass the Patriot Act in such a short time that not only did our representatives little debate the bill, but few had time to read the “complex, far reaching anti-terrorism [and anti-immigrant] legislation” in its entirety. Following the aftermath of September 11, policies and practices against the foreign born have continued. Aside from President Bush’s authorizing military tribunals to try only foreigners, not American citizens; both the state and federal governments, often with the help of private citizens, have engaged in unprecedented racial profiling of innocent South Asians, Arabs and Muslims living in this country. Although understandable given the authors of September 11 and the awesome magnitude of the attacks, the government’s policy of racial profiling Arabs and Muslims is likely to contribute to anti-American attitudes both here and abroad, to discourage Arabs and Muslims from cooperating with the United States police and military officials, and to weaken moderate elements of Arab and Muslim societies while strengthening the extremist elements both domestically and internationally. Additionally, racial profiling is morally wrong. Racial profiling generally constitutes discrimination — using a person’s race or religion as a substitute for evidence of wrongdoing. We are more true to ourselves and can better protect our society by adopting more measured investigative approaches and by doing the hard but time tested methods of investigation, with the aid of the Muslim and Arab communities and in cooperation with our allies throughout the world.
An Econometric Evaluation of Competing Explanations for the Midterm Gap

This paper provides a unified theoretical and empirical analysis of three long-standing explanations for the consistent loss of support for the president's party in midterm Congressional elections: (1) a presidential penalty, defined as a preference for supporting the opposition during midterm years, (2) a surge and decline in voter turnout, and (3) a reversion to the mean in voter partisanship. To quantify the contribution of each of these factors, an econometric model is developed in which voters jointly choose whether or not to participate and which party to support in both house and presidential elections. Estimated using ANES data from both presidential and midterm years, the model can fully explain the observed midterm gaps, and counterfactual simulations demonstrate that each factor makes a sizable contribution towards the midterm gap, with the presidential penalty playing the largest role.
Simulating Fatigue Cracks in Healthy Beam Models for Improved Identification

There is need for an automated Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system capable of fatigue crack detection in bladed disks as current methods are slow, costly and imperfect. Prerequisite for such a system is a fast method for producing the necessary data libraries. In an effort to develop such a method for simulating nonlinear structural response, fatigue cracks in beams have been modeled by modifying the inputs to the structure rather than the structure model itself to produce a closed-form solution for the total response. Although the time savings are enormous, and the method has proven capable of correctly identifying fatigue cracks over an effective region in data generated by a more traditional bilinear model, additional refinement is needed. The method for calibrating the signature profiles used to identify fatigue cracks between methods is revisited and successfully improved. Existing signature profiles for the bilinear model are reproduced with higher resolution, and new features are observed. Different boundary conditions are evaluated with the new method and compared to published results. Although similar, there are still discrepancies that remain and will need to be investigated. Overall, the proposed method for modeling and identifying fatigue cracks in beams has been improved, but will require validation against physical experiments before being used on more complicated structures such as bladed disks.
What Happened to Kobe? A Reassessment of the Impact of the 1995 Earthquake in Japan

AbstractThe conventional wisdom that the devastation wrought by the 1995 Kobe (Great Hanshin-Awaji) earthquake did not have any long-term impact on the Japanese economy, or much impact on Kobe itself, is wrong. We reevaluate the evidence using a new methodology, synthetic control, and find a persistent and still continuing adverse impact of the quake on the economy of Kobe more than a decade after the event. Using the methodology developed by Abadie et al. (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2010), we construct counterfactual dynamics for the Kobe economy. We identify a decline in per capita GDP that is attributable to the quake and is persistent, long-term, and clearly observable even 13 years after the quake. GDP per capita for 2008 was ¥400,000 per person lower (12% decrease) than it would have been had the earthquake not occurred. Importantly, this adverse long-term impact is identified in a wealthy region of a high-income country and with the backing of a deep-pocketed fiscal authority.
Optimizing pilot length for a Go/No-Go decision in two-state block fading channels with feedback

We propose an approach where each user independently seeks to minimize the amount of time that they occupy the channel. Essentially, we seek to minimize the number of transmitted symbols required to communicate a packet assuming variable-length coding with feedback. Users send a pilot sequence to estimate the channel quality and decide whether to proceed with a transmission or wait for the next opportunity. Thus a user may choose to leave the channel even though it has already gained access, in order to increase the network throughput and also save its own energy resources. This paper optimizes the number of pilots and the channel identification threshold to minimize the total number of transmitted symbols (including pilots) required to communicate the packet. We prove a sufficient condition for the optimal pilot length and the channel identification threshold. This optimal parameter pair is solved numerically and the reduction in channel occupancy is shown for various channel settings.
Structure of Magnetocentrifugal Disk-Winds: From the Launching Surface to Large Distances

Protostellar jets and winds are probably driven magnetocentrifugally from the surface of accretion disks close to the central stellar objects. The exact launching conditions on the disk, such as the distributions of magnetic flux and mass ejection rate, are poorly unknown. They could be constrained from observations at large distances, provided that a robust model is available to link the observable properties of the jets and winds at the large distances to the conditions at the base of the flow. We discuss the difficulties in constructing such large-scale wind models, and describe a novel technique which enables us to numerically follow the acceleration and propagation of the wind from the disk surface to arbitrarily large distances and the collimation of part of the wind into a dense, narrow “jet” around the rotation axis. Special attention is paid to the shape of the jet and its mass flux relative to that of the whole wind. The mass flux ratio is a measure of the jet formation efficiency.
Optimal signaling of MISO full-duplex two-way wireless channel

We model the self-interference in a multiple input single output (MISO) full-duplex two-way channel and evaluate the achievable rate region. We formulate the boundary of the achievable rate region termed as the Pareto boundary by a family of coupled, non-convex optimization problems. Our main contribution is decoupling and reformulating the original non-convex optimization problems to a family of convex semidefinite programming problems. For a MISO full-duplex two-way channel, we prove that beamforming is an optimal transmission strategy which can achieve any point on the Pareto boundary. Furthermore, we present a closed-form expression for the optimal beamforming weights. In our numerical examples we quantify gains in the achievable rates of the proposed beamforming over the zero-forcing beamforming.
Novel Adjuvants for Targeting Pesticide Delivery

Water repellent adjuvants increase the surface tension in contrast to surfactants that decrease surface tension of spray solutions. Increasing the surface tension spray droplets could potentially bounce through the plant foliage and canopy to target sites below. In this study organosilicone water repellents were applied with the herbicide, flumioxazin, and the insecticides, permethrin and carbaryl in greenhouse trials. Foliar retention was determined with the addition of Chicago sky blue dye which could be measured spectrophotometrically. Only the inclusion of DC1-6184 consistently reduced foliar retention of the various spray solutions on the spectrum of test plants.
Relative Frequency and Probability in the Everett Interpretation of Heisenberg-Picture Quantum Mechanics

The existence of probability in the sense of the frequency interpretation, i.e., probability as “long term relative frequency,” is shown to follow from the dynamics and the interpretational rules of Everett quantum mechanics in the Heisenberg picture. This proof is free of the difficulties encountered in applying to the Everett interpretation previous results regarding relative frequency and probability in quantum mechanics. The ontology of the Everett interpretation in the Heisenberg picture is also discussed.
Kynurenine Inhibits Fibroblast Growth Factor-2 Mediated Expression of Crystallins and MIP26 in Lens Epithelial Cells

Abstract Fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF2)-mediated signaling plays an important role in fiber cell differentiation in eye lens. We had previously shown that kynurenine (KYN) produced from the overexpression of indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) causes defects in the differentiation of fiber cells, induces fiber cell apoptosis and cataract formation in the mouse lens, and leads to cell cycle arrest in cultured mouse lens epithelial cells (mLEC). In this study, we demonstrate that exogenous KYN reduces FGF2-mediated expression of α-, β-, and γ-crystallin and MIP26 in mLEC. We show that endogenously produced KYN in mLEC of IDO transgenic animals causes similar defects in FGF2-induced protein expression and that a competitive inhibitor of IDO prevents such defects. Our data also show that KYN inhibits FGF2-induced Akt and ERK1/2 phosphorylation in mLEC, which are required for crystallin and MIP26 expression in the lens. KYN does not inhibit FGF2 binding to cells but inhibit phosphorylation of FGFR1in mLEC. Together our data suggest that KYN might inhibit FGF2-mediated fiber cell differentiation by preventing expression of crystallins and MIP26. Our studies provide a novel mechanism by which KYN can exert deleterious effects in cells.
Persistent Currents Versus Phase Breaking in Mesoscopic Metallic Samples

Persistent currents in mesoscopic normal metal rings represent, even a decade after their first experimental observation, a challenge to both, theorists and experimentalists. After giving a brief review of the existing - experimental and theoretical - results, we concentrate on the (propsed) relationship of the size of the persistent current to the phase breaking rate. In particular, we consider effects induced by noise, scattering at two-level systems, and magnetic impurities.
Multivariate T-Distributions and Their Applications

Almost all the results available in the literature on multivariate t-distributions published in the last 50 years are now collected together in this comprehensive reference. Because these distributions are becoming more prominent in many applications, this book is a must for any serious researcher or consultant working in multivariate analysis and statistical distributions. Much of this material has never before appeared in book form. The first part of the book emphasizes theoretical results of a probabilistic nature. In the second part of the book, these are supplemented by a variety of statistical aspects. Various generalizations and applications are dealt with in the final chapters. The material on estimation and regression models is of special value for practitioners in statistics and economics. A comprehensive bibliography of over 350 references is included.
Market Work, Home Work, and Taxes: A Cross‐Country Analysis

This paper uses a simple model of labor supply extended to allow for home production to understand the extent to which differences in taxes can account for differences in time allocations between the US and Europe. Once home production is included, the elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure is almost irrelevant in determining the response of market hours to higher taxes. But to account for observed differences in leisure and time spent in home production, one still requires a relatively large elasticity of substitution between consumption and leisure, combined with a relatively small elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production.
Subband coding for image data archiving

The use of subband coding on image data is discussed. An overview of subband coding is given. Advantages of subbanding for browsing and progressive resolution are presented. Implementations for lossless and lossy coding are discussed. Algorithm considerations and simple implementations of subband are given.
Trade union participation in the PRSP process

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach offers an opportunity for civil society organizations, to join governments in the development, and implementation of poverty reduction strategies. Trade unions have been encouraged to participate. This report notes that most unions have been invited to the discussions leading to formulation of the PRSPs, but none has been included in the drafting, implementation, monitoring, or evaluation. Based on findings from 23 PRSP countries, the study identifies a number of weaknesses, and shortcomings which have limited the effective participation of trade unions, mainly capacity issues, time constraints, and lack of structured participatory processes. Lack of consensus on contentious issues like privatization, pensions reforms, and labor code reform, have been worrisome to some unions. The paper calls for, among other things, more dialogue between the labor movement, and the International Financing Institutions (IFIs), strengthening trade unions, building union capacity, and more analytical work on labor market policies, and core labor standards.