Digital Commons Network^™

Beyond The Plaza: Barcelona’S Okupa Squatters At Work In The Wake Of La Crisis, Justin Helepololei

Justin AK Helepololei

As ongoing, financial crisis has kept millions in precarity - and over 40% of Spain's youth unemployed - mass mobilizations of the country's indignados have continued to fill the country's streets and plazas. Nearly one year after the original 15M demonstrations, city-wide occupations have triggered a profusion of more localized and issue-based assemblies. Beyond the plazas, squatter-activists of Barcelona's decades-old “okupa movement” have helped to facilitate the continuation of these dialogues by offering space within dozens of pre-existing squats and even opening new sites to host such interactions. Leveraging decades of experience and skill in re-appropriating spaces, squatters create room …

On Hilbert Modular Threefolds Of Discriminant 49, Lev A. Borisov, Paul E. Gunnells

Paul Gunnells

Let K be the totally real cubic field of discriminant 49 , let \fancyscriptO be its ring of integers, and let p⊂\fancyscriptO be the prime over 7 . Let Γ(p)⊂Γ=SL2(\fancyscriptO) be the principal congruence subgroup of level p . This paper investigates the geometry of the Hilbert modular threefold attached to Γ(p) and some related varieties. In particular, we discover an octic in P3 with 84 isolated singular points of type A2 .

Interaction Of Sleep And Emotional Content On The Production Of False Memories, Shannon Mckeon, Edward F. Pace-Schott, Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Sleep benefits veridical memories, resulting in superior recall relative to off-line intervals spent awake. Sleep also increases false memory recall in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Given the suggestion that emotional veridical memories are prioritized for consolidation over sleep, here we examined whether emotion modulates sleep’s effect on false memory formation. Participants listened to semantically related word lists lacking a critical lure representing each list’s ‘‘gist.’’ Free recall was tested after 12 hours containing sleep or wake. The Sleep group recalled more studied words than the Wake group but only for emotionally neutral lists. False memories of both negative and neutral …

Modular Forms And Elliptic Curves Over The Cubic Field Of Discriminant - 23, Paul E. Gunnells, Dan Yasaki

Paul Gunnells

Let F be the cubic field of discriminant –23 and let O Ϲ F be its ring of integers. By explicitly computing cohomology of congruence subgroups of 〖GL〗_2(O) , we computationally investigate modularity of elliptic curves over F.

Vortex–Bright-Soliton Dipoles: Bifurcations, Symmetry Breaking, And Soliton Tunneling In A Vortex-Induced Double Well, M. Pola, J. Stockhofe, P. Schmelcher, Panos Kevrekidis

Panos Kevrekidis

The emergence of vortex-bright soliton dipoles in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates through bifurcations from suitable eigenstates of the underlying linear system is examined. These dipoles can have their bright solitary structures be in phase (symmetric) or out of phase (anti-symmetric). The dynamical robustness of each of these two possibilities is considered and the out-of-phase case is found to exhibit an intriguing symmetry-breaking instability that can in turn lead to tunneling of the brightwave function between the two vortex “wells.” We interpret this phenomenon by virtue of a vortex-induced double-well system, whose spontaneous symmetry breaking leads to asymmetric vortex-bright dipoles, in addition …

Nanomanufacturing Of Biomaterials, Yoni Engel, Jessica D. Schiffman, Julie M. Goddard, Vincent M. Rotello

Jessica D. Schiffman

In this review, we present a few of the many important objectives in the area of biomedical engineering that could open new pathways for nextgeneration biomaterials. We also provide examples of how materials for these goals can be created in an economically viable means through recent advances in high throughput production. These strategies highlight the potential for nanomanufacturing in a variety of areas of importance for human health and safety.

Improved Cathode Materials For Microbial Electrosynthesis, Tian Zhang, Huarong Nie, Timothy S. Bain, Haiyun Lu, Mengmeng Cui, Oona L. Snoeyenbos-West, Ashley E. Franks, Kelly P. Nevin, Thomas P. Russell, Derek Lovley

Derek Lovley

Microbial electrosynthesis is a promising strategy for the microbial conversion of carbon dioxide to transportation fuels and other organic commodities, but optimization of this process is required for commercialization. Cathodes which enhance electrode–microbe electron transfer might improve rates of product formation. To evaluate this possibility, biofilms of Sporomusa ovata, which are effective in acetate electrosynthesis, were grown on a range of cathode materials and acetate production was monitored over time. Modifications of carbon cloth that resulted in a positive-charge enhanced microbial electrosynthesis. Functionalization with chitosan or cyanuric chloride increased acetate production rates 6–7 fold and modification with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane gave rates …

Improved Cathode Materials For Microbial Electrosynthesis, Tian Zhang, Huarong Nie, Timothy S. Bain, Haiyun Lu, Mengmeng Cui, Oona L. Snoeyenbos-West, Ashley E. Franks, Kelly Nevin, Thomas P. Russell, Derek R. Lovley

Kelly Nevin

Microbial electrosynthesis is a promising strategy for the microbial conversion of carbon dioxide to transportation fuels and other organic commodities, but optimization of this process is required for commercialization. Cathodes which enhance electrode–microbe electron transfer might improve rates of product formation. To evaluate this possibility, biofilms of Sporomusa ovata, which are effective in acetate electrosynthesis, were grown on a range of cathode materials and acetate production was monitored over time. Modifications of carbon cloth that resulted in a positive-charge enhanced microbial electrosynthesis. Functionalization with chitosan or cyanuric chloride increased acetate production rates 6–7 fold and modification with 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane gave rates …

Buying Time: Gendered Patterns In Union Contracts, Dan Clawson, Jillian Crocker

Dan Clawson

As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupations—nurses and firefighters—use collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses’ concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters’ concern with bread winning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. …

Systemic Bias In Wikipedia : What It Looks Like, And How To Deal With It, Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

No abstract provided.

Evidence Of Non-Mean-Field-Like Low-Temperature Behavior In The Edwards-Anderson Spin-Glass Model, B. Yucesoy, Helmut G. Katzgraber, Jonathan Machta

Jonathan Machta

The three-dimensional Edwards-Anderson and mean-field Sherrington-Kirkpatrick Ising spin glasses are studied via large-scale Monte Carlo simulations at low temperatures, deep within the spin-glass phase. Performing a careful statistical analysis of several thousand independent disorder realizations and using an observable that detects peaks in the overlap distribution, we show that the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick and Edwards-Anderson models have a distinctly different low-temperature behavior. The structure of the spin-glass overlap distribution for the Edwards-Anderson model suggests that its low-temperature phase has only a single pair of pure states.

Nonlinear Pt-Symmetric Plaquettes, Kai Li, Panos Kevrekidis, Boris A. Malomed, Uwe Günther

Panos Kevrekidis

We introduce four basic two-dimensional (2D) plaquette configurations with onsite cubic nonlinearities, which may be used as building blocks for 2D PT -symmetric lattices. For each configuration, we develop a dynamical model and examine its PT symmetry. The corresponding nonlinear modes are analyzed starting from the Hamiltonian limit, with zero value of the gain-loss coefficient, . Once the relevant waveforms have been identified (chiefly, in an analytical form), their stability is examined by means of linearization in the vicinity of stationary points. This reveals diverse and, occasionally, fairly complex bifurcations. The evolution of unstable modes is explored by means of …

Copyright And Fair Use : An Introduction For Faculty, Laura Quilter

Laura Quilter

In this overview of copyright issues for faculty and researchers, we will discuss how copyright affects you: how to protect and get credit for your work, share what you want to share, and use others' work. Special attention will be given to both questions and problems with using other people's work -- relying on fair use, and asking for permission if it's not a fair use -- and the best ways to manage your own copyrights and licenses. Plenty of time for discussion and questions!

Borexino Calibrations: Hardware, Methods, And Results, H. Back, G. Bellini, J. Benziger, D. Bick, G. Bonfini, D. Bravo, M. Buizza Avanzini, B. Caccianiga, L. Cadonati, F. Calaprice, C. Carraro, P. Cavalcante, A. Chavarria, D. D'Angelo, S. Davini, A. Derbin, A. Etenko, F. Von Feilitzsch, G. Fernandes, K. Fomenko, D. Franco, C. Galbiati, S. Gazzana, C. Ghiano, M. Giammarchi, M. Goeger-Neff, A. Goretti, L. Grandi, E. Guardincerri, S. Hardy, Aldo Ianni, Andrea Ianni, A. Kayunov, S. Kidner, V. Kobychev, D. Korablev, G. Korga, Y. Koshio, D. Kryn, M. Laubenstein, T. Lewke, E. Litvinovich, B. Loer, F. Lombardi, P. Lombardi, L. Ludhova, I. Machulin, S. Manecki, W. Maneschg, G. Manuzio, Q. Meindl, E. Meroni, L. Miramonti, M. Misiaszek, D. Montanari, P. Mosteiro, V. Muratova, L. Oberauer, M. Obolensky, F. Ortica, K. Otis, M. Pallavicini, L. Papp, L. Perasso, S. Perasso, Andrea Pocar, R. S. Raghavan, G. Ranucci, A. Razeto, A. Re, A. Romani, N. Rossi, D. Rountree, A. Sabelnikov, R. Saldanha, C. Salvo, S. Schönert, H. Simgen, M. Skorokhvatov, O. Smirnov, A. Sotnikov, S. Sukhotin, Y. Suvorov, R. Tartaglia, G. Testera, D. Vignaud, R. B. Vogelaar, J. Winter, M. Wojcik, A. Wright, M. Wurm, J. Xu, O. Zaimidoroga, S. Zavatarelli, G. Zuzel

Andrea Pocar

Borexino was the first experiment to detect solar neutrinos in real-time in the sub-MeV region. In order to achieve high precision in the determination of neutrino rates, the detector design includes an internal and an external calibration system. This paper describes both calibration systems and the calibration campaigns that were carried out in the period between 2008 and 2011. We discuss some of the results and show that the calibration procedures preserved the radiopurity of the scintillator. The calibrations provided a detailed understanding of the detector response and led to a significant reduction of the systematic uncertainties in the Borexino …

Capital Flight From Sub-Saharan African Countries: Updated Estimates, 1970 - 2010, James K. Boyce, Léonce Ndikumana

James K. Boyce

The performance of Sub-Saharan African economies over the past decade has inspired optimism on the region’s prospects. But the region still faces major development challenges, and it is now clear that the majority of its countries will not achieve key millennium development goals.

A key constraint to SSA’s growth and development is the shortage of financing. At the same time, the sub-region is a source of large-scale capital flight, which escalated during last decade even as the region experienced growth acceleration. The group of 33 SSA countries covered by this report has lost a total of $814 billion dollars from …

Multiple Imputation And Higher Education Research, Catherine A. Manly, Ryan S. Wells

Ryan S. Wells

Higher education researchers using survey data often face decisions about handling missing data. Multiple imputation (MI) is considered by many statisticians to be the most appropriate technique for addressing missing data in many circumstances. However, our content analysis of a decade of higher education research literature reveals that the field has yet to make substantial use of this technique despite common employment of quantitative analysis, and that many recommended MI reporting practices are not being followed. We conclude that additional information about the technique and recommended reporting practices may help improve the quality of the research involving missing data. In …

Comment On Khan, Li And Weisbrot (Thomas Weisskopf Festschrift Conference Paper), James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Boyce comments on Shahrukh Khan's " The Military and Economic Development in Pakistan, Minqi Li's "Socialism: The 20th Century and the 21st Century" and Mark Weisbrot's "Economic Growth: The Great Slowdown (1980-2000) and Recovery (2000-2010)." He adds his own thoughts on the theme running through these papers: the need to take the role of the state, both in terms of state control over the means of production and resource allocation, but also about the core issue of control over the state itself. This means engaging, as Khan, Li and Weisbrot do, with the historic struggle to build and sustain real …

Gene Number Determination And Genetic Polymorphism Of The Gamma Delta T Cell Co-Receptor Wc1 Genes, Chuang Chen, Carolyn Ta Herzig, Leeson J. Alexander, John W. Keele, Tara G. Mcdaneld, Janice C. Telfer, Cynthia Baldwin

Cynthia Baldwin

Background WC1 co-receptors belong to the scavenger receptor cysteine-rich (SRCR) superfamily and are encoded by a multi-gene family. Expression of particular WC1 genes defines functional subpopulations of WC1+ γδ T cells. We have previously identified partial or complete genomic sequences for thirteen different WC1 genes through annotation of the bovine genome Btau_3.1 build. We also identified two WC1 cDNA sequences from other cattle that did not correspond to sequences in the Btau_3.1 build. Their absence in the Btau_3.1 build may have reflected gaps in the genome assembly or polymorphisms among animals. Since the response of γδ T cells to bacterial …

Opportunities As Chances: Maximising The Probability That Everybody Succeeds, Marco Mariotti, Roberto Veneziani

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Opportunities in society are commonly interpreted as ‘chances of success’. Within this interpretation, should opportunities be equalised? We show that a liberal principle of justice and a limited principle of social rationality imply that opportunity pro…les should be evaluated by means of a ‘Nash’criterion. The interpretation is new: the social objective should be to maximise the chance that everybody in society succeeds. In particular, the failure of even only one individual must be considered maximally detrimental. We also study a re…nement of this criterion and its extension to problems of intergenerational justice.

Capital Flight From North African Countries, Léonce Ndikumana, James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce

Ndikumana and Boyce demonstrate that, while the countries of North Africa have achieved high levels of development relative to their sister nations south of the Sahara, they too have suffered from financial hemorrhages through capital flight. The burden on their economies is substantial in terms of lost investment and foregone government revenue, with adverse effects on economic growth and social service delivery. The authors provide estimates of the total amount of capital flight from four North African countries: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, from 1970 to 2010.

Angular Tension Of Black Holes, David Kastor, Jennie Traschen

David Kastor

Angular tension is an Arnowitt-Deser-Misner charge that contributes a work term to the first law of black hole mechanics when the range of an angular coordinate is varied and leads to a new Smarr formula for stationary black holes. A phase diagram for singly spinning D=5 black holes shows that angular tension resolves the degeneracies between spherical black holes and (dipole) black rings and captures the physics of the black ring balance condition. Angular tension depends on the behavior of the metric at rotational axes and we speculate on its relation to rod/domain structure characterizations of higher-dimensional black holes and …

2012 – A Performance Review For Restaurant Firms, Atul Sheel

Journal of Hospitality Financial Management

No abstract provided.

Umass Amherst Friends Of The Library Newsletter - Fall/Winter 2012 (No. 44), Jay Schafer

Library News for the Friends of the UMass Amherst Libraries

The Story of the $60 Gift

On the following pages, you will see and read about the transformative renovations in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library and the Science & Engineering Library that were completed over the summer. An important part of the story that the photos don’t tell is how these projects have been funded. Unlike major infrastructure improvement projects (including the new elevators and the electrical upgrades), the renovation of interior library space is not directly funded by the state or the campus. The success of the Procrastination Station café over the past several years encouraged our Campus Auxiliary …

Prelude To A Master Plan: Ware, Massachusetts, Belen Alfaro, Bruno Carneiro, Margaret Engesser, Kathryn E. Fox, Evadne R. Friedman, Timothy Inacio, Anita Lockesmith, Christina Mills, Stephanie Molden, Meagen Mulherin, Russell Pandres, Vinicius Pereira, Brian Reid, Pedro Soto, Jennifer Stromsten

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Prelude to a Master Plan offers ideas, recommendations, and a toolkit to help the town chart its own path towards that future. While the teams and individual students worked to ‘drill down’ into specific topic areas, the Studio defined three basic areas in order to think about how the various assets, challenges and ideas undermine or reinforce one another. The report is loosely organized in those terms: addressing the outlying rural areas and issues specific to these places, considering one of the key growth areas that has extended from town and the conflicts that arise from the many uses occurring …

Volume 21, Number 4

SHARP News

No abstract provided.

Genome-Based Modeling And Design Of Metabolic Interactions In Microbial Communities, Radhakrishnan Mahadevan, Michael A. Henson

Michael A Henson

Biotechnology research is traditionally focused on individual microbial strains that are perceived to have the necessary metabolic functions, or the capability to have these functions introduced, to achieve a particular task. For many important applications, the development of such omnipotent microbes is an extremely challenging if not impossible task. By contrast, nature employs a radically different strategy based on synergistic combinations of different microbial species that collectively achieve the desired task. These natural communities have evolved to exploit the native metabolic capabilities of each species and are highly adaptive to changes in their environments. However, microbial communities have proven difficult …

Hierarchical Fractional-Step Approximations And Parallel Kinetic Monte Carlo Algorithms, Giorgos Arampatzis, Markos Katsoulakis, Petr Plechac, Michela Taufer, Lifan Xu

Markos Katsoulakis

We present a mathematical framework for constructing and analyzing parallel algorithms for lattice kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations. The resulting algorithms have the capacity to simulate a wide range of spatio-temporal scales in spatially distributed, non-equilibrium physiochemical processes with complex chemistry and transport micro-mechanisms. Rather than focusing on constructing exactly the stochastic trajectories, our approach relies on approximating the evolution of observables, such as density, coverage, correlations and so on. More specifically, we develop a spatial domain decomposition of the Markov operator (generator) that describes the evolution of all observables according to the kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm. This domain decomposition …

Crystallization And Polymerization, Otto Vogl, Frank T. Traceski, Eric G. Vogl

Otto Vogl

No abstract provided.

Nelig Meeting - September 28, 2012, New England Library Instruction Group

New England Library Instruction Group

NELIG quarterly meeting.

Slack Dynamics On An Unfurling String, J. A. Hanna, Christian Santangelo

Christian Santangelo

An arch will grow on a rapidly deployed thin string in contact with a rigid plane. We present a qualitative model for the growing structure involving the amplification, rectification, and advection of slack in the presence of a steady stress field, validate our assumptions with numerical experiments, and pose new questions about the spatially developing motions of thin objects.