Digital Commons Network^™

Exceptional Sets And Antoine's Necklace, William Basener

Articles

We study Cantor sets which occur as minimal sets for homeomorphisms of R^n. The minimality is modelled on an infinite product of finite cyclic groups and on a generalized adding machine. An interesting example is a homeomorphisms on R^3 which has Antoine’s Necklace as a minimal set. We also discuss some open problems concerning homeomorphism that have a Cantor set as a minimal set (Refer to PDF file for exact formulas).

Second And Higher-Order Quasinormal Modes In Binary Black Hole Mergers, Kunihito Ioka, Hiroyuki Nakano

Articles

Black hole (BH) oscillations known as quasi-normal modes (QNMs) are one of the most important gravitational wave (GW) sources. We propose that higher perturbative order of QNMs, generated by nonlinear gravitational interaction near the BHs, are detectable and worth searching for in observations and simulations of binary BH mergers. We calculate the metric perturbations to second-order and explicitly regularize the master equation at the horizon and spatial infinity. We find that the second-order QNMs have frequencies twice the first-order ones and the GW amplitude is up to ∼ 10% that of the first-order one. The QNM frequency would also shift …

Reduced Atrial Tachyarrhythmia Susceptibility After Upgrade Of Conventional Implanted Pulse Generator To Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy In Patients With Heart Failure, Demetris Yannopoulos, Keith Lurie Md, Scott Sakaguchi, Simon Milstein Md

Articles

OBJECTIVES:

We sought to identify the impact of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) on atrial tachyarrhythmia (AT) susceptibility in patients with left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction in whom worsening heart failure (HF) resulted in upgrade from conventional dual-chamber pulse generator to cardiac resynchronization therapy-defibrillator (CRT-D).

BACKGROUND:

Cardiac resynchronization therapy with a defibrillator improves survival rates and symptoms in patients with LV systolic dysfunction but little is known about its effects on AT incidence in the same patient population.

METHODS:

Twenty-eight consecutive HF patients who underwent device upgrade to CRT-D were included. Patients had > or =2 device interrogations in the 1 year …

Wideband Printed Monopole Design Using A Genetic Algorithm, Matthias John, Max Ammann

Articles

A method for the design and optimisation of wide-band printed planar monopoles using a genetic algorithm is presented. This novel technique employs overlapping sub-patches which ensures electrical contact in such constellations where two sub-patches are touching only at the corner, hence re-ducing losses. The method was usd optimisation of wide-band printed planar monopoles using a genetic algorithm is presented. This novel technique employs overlapping sub-patches which ensures electrical contact in such constellations where two sub-patches are touching only at the corner, hence re-ducing losses. The method was used to design a wideband monopole antenna with application in higher cellular, WLAN …

Resolution Investigation Of A Ratiometric Wavelength Measurement System, Qian Wang, Ginu Rajan, Pengfei Wang, Gerald Farrell

Articles

Theoretical analysis and experimental investigations are presented on the resolution of a ratiometric wavelength measurement system. Theoretical modeling indicates that the resolution of a ratiometric wavelength measurement system is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio of the input signal and the noise of the photodetectors associated with optical-to-electronic conversion. For experimental verification, a ratiometric system employing a macrobending standard single-mode fiber is developed and corresponding results are in good agreement with the theoretical prediction.

The Contribution Of The Special Court For Sierra Leone To The Development Of International Law, Charles C. Jalloh

Articles

No abstract provided.

Deterrence, Retributivism, And The Law Of Evidence, Richard A. Bierschbach, Alex Stein

Articles

Legal scholarship has long treated substantive criminal law and evidence as two separate and distinct fields. The former largely concerns itself with evaluating substantive criminal law rules by reference to various animating theories-most prominently, those of deterrence and retributivism.' Scholars, students, and policymakers laud or condemn doctrines based on notions of "just deserts" or ideas about the incentives they create for those disposed to commit a crime. When it comes to the numerous evidentiary and other rules that determine the course of prosecutions and proof, however, the conversation is different. Here, questions of reliability, evidential worth, and accuracy in fact-finding …

Mediating Rules In Criminal Law, Richard A. Bierschbach, Alex Stein

Articles

This Article challenges the conventional divide between substantive criminal law theory, on the one hand, and evidence law, on the other, by exposing an important and unrecognized function of evidence rules in criminal law. Throughout the criminal law, special rules of evidence work to mediate conflicts between criminal law's deterrence and retributivist goals. They do this by skewing errors in the actual application of the substantive criminal law to favor whichever theory has been disfavored by the substantive rule itself The mediating potential of evidentiary rules is particularly strong in criminal law because the substantive law's dominant animating theories-deterrence and …

A Stolchastic Analysis Of The Holling Resilience Of An Orchard, Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, Seung Yoo

Articles

Recently, Batabyal and Yoo (2007) have proposed a new probabilistic approach to orchard management. In this approach, a manager minimizes an economic criterion function, namely, the long run expected net cost of orchard management subject to an ecological constraint which says that the probability that an orchard is not Holling resilient is at most as large as an exogenously given value. In this note, we continue this line of inquiry and shed additional light on an orchard’s Holling resilience. First, we model an orchard as a stochastic ecological-economic system. Second, we compute this orchard’s Holling resilience in a general way. …

Auf Der Suche Nach Einer Authentischen Architektur; Ein Gespräch Mit Glenn Murcutt Und Juhani Pallasmaa, Noel Brady

Articles

The article is a record of a conversation on architectural ethics between the author and Glenn Murcutt and Juhani Pallasmaa.

All In The Family As A Single Shareholder Of An S Corporation, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn, Terrence G. Perris

Articles

Subject to a few exceptions, a corporation that has elected to be taxed under subchapter S of chapter 1 of subtitle A of title 26 of the United States tax code is not taxed on its net income. Instead, the income, deductions, credits, and other tax items of an S corporation pass through to its shareholders on a pro rata basis. To qualify for subchapter S treatment, an electing corporation must satisfy the requirements that are set forth in section 1361, one of which is that the corporation can have no more than 100 shareholders. One aspect of that requirement …

Experimental Determination Of The Insulating Ability Of Corn By-Products, Anna Dowling, James A. Mathias

Articles

This article proposes and experimentally tests a way to better utilize renewable agricultural products that, if successful, will increase revenue for agricultural producers, decrease the amount and cost of disposal of non-renewable products, and decrease the amount of non-renewable products that need to be produced. In this article the insulating ability of ground corn cobs is compared, by experimental tests, to typical fiberglass, cellulose, and Rock Wool insulation. The study found that the insulating ability of ground corn cobs is not as great when compared to typical insulations, but using a greater thickness of insulation made from ground corn cobs …

Consumers’ Willingness-To-Pay (Wtp) Premium For Nongm Food And Willingness-To-Accept (Wta) Discount For Gm Food, Wanki Moon, Siva K. Balasubramanian, Arbindra Rimal

Articles

In a survey of UK consumers, we elicited their willingness to accept (WTA) a discount for GM foods and willingness to pay (WTP) a premium for non-GM foods in order to assess their valuation on the non-GM characteristic in food products. Mean WTA is found to exceed mean WTP, suggesting the valuation of the non-GM characteristic reflects an endowment effect, imperfect substitutability between GM and non-GM foods, or both. Regression results show that perceived risks (benefits) associated with GM foods significantly increase (decrease) WTA and WTP estimates. Additional regression models using the difference between WTA and WTP as the dependent …

Open Angle Glaucoma Effects On Preattentive Visual Search (Pavs) Efficiency For Flicker, Motion Displacement And Orientation Pop-Out Tasks, James Loughman, Peter Davison, Daniel Ian Flitcroft

Articles

Background/aim: Preattentive visual search (PAVS) describes rapid and efficient retinal and neural processing capable of immediate target detection in the visual field. Damage to the nerve fibre layer or visual pathway might reduce the efficiency with which the visual system performs such analysis. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that patients with glaucoma are impaired on parallel search tasks, and that this would serve to distinguish glaucoma in early cases. Methods: Three groups of observers (glaucoma patients, suspect and normal individuals) were examined, using computer-generated flicker, orientation, and vertical motion displacement targets to assess PAVS efficiency. …

Treating Water Contamination Using Ultraviolet Radiation To Control Cryptosporidium And E.Coli, Michael O'Hehir, David Kennedy, Thomas Dunphy

Articles

Concerns about the quality of drinking water in Ireland have come into sharp focus with the recent Cryptosporidium outbreak in Galway City. This article looks at how ultraviolet radiation can offer a potential solution in the control of Cryptosporidium contamination.

Pparα Is A Key Regulator Of Hepatic Fgf21, Thomas Lundasen, Mary Hunt, Lisa-Marie Nilsson, Sabysashi Sanyal, Bo Angelin, Stefan Alexson, Mats Rudling

Articles

The metabolic regulator fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) has antidiabetic properties in animal models of diabetes and obesity. Using quantitative RT-PCR, we here show that the hepatic gene expression of FGF21 is regulated by the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARalpha). Fasting or treatment of mice with the PPARalpha agonist Wy-14,643 induced FGF21 mRNA by 10-fold and 8-fold, respectively. In contrast, FGF21 mRNA was low in PPARalpha deficient mice, and fasting or treatment with Wy-14,643 did not induce FGF21. Obese ob/ob mice, known to have increased PPARalpha levels, displayed 12-fold increased hepatic FGF21 mRNA levels. The potential importance of PPARalpha for …

Impact Of Astrophysical Processes On The Gamma-Ray Background From Dark Matter Annihilations, Eun-Joo Ahn, Gianfranco Bertone, David Merritt, Pengjie Zhang

Articles

We study the impact of astrophysical processes on the gamma-ray background produced by the annihilation of dark matter particles in cosmological halos, with particular attention to the consequences of the formation of supermassive black holes. In scenarios where these objects form adiabatically from the accretion of matter on small seeds, dark matter is first compressed into very dense “spikes”, then its density progressively decreases due to annihilations and scattering off of stellar cusps. With respect to previous analyses, based on non-evolving halos, the predicted annihilation signal is higher and significantly distorted at low energies, reflecting the large contribution to the …

Finding Time: How It Is Made Visual Artists Newsletter, Brian Fay

Articles

FINDING TIME

Brian Fay outlines the processes and concepts underpinning his practice

A Review Of Fiscal Measures To Benefit Heritage Conservation, Tracy Pickerill, Rob Pickard

Articles

This research paper explores to use of fiscal incentives for heritage conservation in a range of countries in Western Europe (Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom) and North America (Canada and USA), to see how they are used and how effective they are.

The main incentives are:

• Income tax deductions and credits for costs incurred in heritage conservation activity;
• Income tax credits for the provision of social housing in heritage buildings;
• Property tax exemption, abatement or freeze for heritage buildings;
• Value added (sales) tax concessions or rebates relating to heritage conservation activity;
• Use of …

I'M A New Librarian! ... Now What?, Elizabeth J. Cox

Articles

A brief, annotated bibliography geared towards new librarians, covering general resources, professional development, documentation, resume/C.V., research, and leadership.

The Cash Nexus, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Courts and legislatures have labored for decades to protect patients' choice of medical treatments, even though patients seize that gift less eagerly than lawmakers expect. Yet while courts have rushed to build the whited sepulchre of informed consent, they have fled from a related problem that patients actually yearn to solve and that actually can be ameliorated the plight of patients who perforce agree to a treatment before they know its costs and who receive a bill both unrelated to the treatment's value and several times what an insured patient would pay. Increasingly, patients must be consumers in the medical …

That’S A Fine Chablis You’Re Not Drinking: The Proper Place For Geographical Indications In Trademark Law, Justin Hughes, Lynne Beresford, Annette Kur, Kenneth Plevan, Susan Scafidi

Articles

No abstract provided.

Performance Analysis Of Direct N-Body Algorithms On Special-Purpose Supercomputers, Stefan Harfst, Alessia Gualandris, David Merritt, Rainer Spurzem, Simon Portegies Zwart, Peter Berczik

Articles

Direct-summation N-body algorithms compute the gravitational interaction between stars in an exact way and have a computational complexity of O(N^2). Performance can be greatly enhanced via the use of special-purpose accelerator boards like the GRAPE-6A. However the memory of the GRAPE boards is limited. Here, we present a performance analysis of direct N-body codes on two parallel supercomputers that incorporate special-purpose boards, allowing as many as four million particles to be integrated. Both computers employ high-speed, Infiniband interconnects to minimize communication overhead, which can otherwise become significant due to the small number of "active" particles at each time step. We …

Open Angle Glaucoma Effects On Preattentive Visual Search (Pavs) Efficiency For Flicker, Motion Displacement And Orientation Pop-Out Tasks, James Loughman, Peter Davison, Ian Flitchcroft

Articles

Background/aim: Preattentive visual search (PAVS) describes rapid and efficient retinal and neural processing capable of immediate target detection in the visual field. Damage to the nerve fibre layer or visual pathway might reduce the efficiency with which the visual system performs such analysis. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that patients with glaucoma are impaired on parallel search tasks, and that this would serve to distinguish glaucoma in early cases. Methods: Three groups of observers (glaucoma patients, suspect and normal individuals) were examined, using computer-generated flicker, orientation, and vertical motion displacement targets to assess PAVS efficiency. …

Extending And Measuring The Quality Of Fresh-Cut Fruit And Vegetables: A Review, Catherine Barry-Ryan, Ana Belen Martin-Diana, Daniel Rico, J. Barat

Articles

The market sales of ready-to-use fresh vegetables have grown rapidly in recent decades as a result of changes in consumer attitudes, especially consumption of fresh-cut lettuce and carrot due to their use in prepared salads. Chlorine solutions have been widely used to sanitise fruit and vegetables in the fresh-cut industry. However, the association of chlorine with the possible formation of carcinogenic chlorinated compounds in water has called into question the use of chlorine in food processing. There is a real need to find alternatives for preservation of fresh-cut fruit and vegetables in order to improve the efficacy of washing treatments. …

How Special Are Brightest Cluster Galaxies? The Impact Of Near-Infrared Luminosities On Scaling Relations For Bcgs, Dan Batcheldor, Alessandro Marconi, David Merritt

Articles

Using the extended J, H and K magnitudes provided by the 2MASS data archive, we consider the position of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) in the observed relations between inferred supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass and the host galaxy properties, as well as their position in the stellar velocity dispersion and luminosity ( ∗ − L) relation, compared to E and S0 galaxies. We find that SMBH masses (M•) derived from near-infrared (NIR) magnitudes do not exceed 3×109M⊙ and that these masses agree well with the predictions made from ∗. In the NIR, there is no evidence that BCGs leave the …

Consequences Of Triaxiality For Gravitational Wave Recoil Of Black Holes, Alessandro Vicari, Roberto Capuzzo-Dolcetta, David Merritt

Articles

Coalescing binary black holes experience a “kick” due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves with an amplitude as great as ∼ 200 km s−1. We examine the orbital evolution of black holes that have been kicked from the centers of triaxial galaxies. Time scales for orbital decay are generally longer in triaxial galaxies than in equivalent spherical galaxies, since a kicked black hole does not return directly through the dense center where the dynamical friction force is highest. We evaluate this effect by constructing self-consistent triaxial models and integrating the trajectories of massive particles after they are ejected from the …

On The Nature Of Optical Nuclei In Fr I Radio-Galaxies From Acs/Hst Imaging Polarimetry, Alessandro Capetti, David J. Axon, Marco Chiaberge, W. B. Sparks, F. Duccio Macchetto, M. Carcraft, A. Celotti

Articles

We obtained optical imaging polarimetry with the ACS/HRC aboard the HST of the 9 closest radiogalaxies in the 3C catalogue with an FR I morphology. The nuclear sources seen in direct HST images in these galaxies are found to be highly polarized with levels in the range 2 - 11 % with a median value of 7 %.We discuss the different mechanisms that produce polarized emission and conclude that the only viable interpretation is a synchrotron origin for the optical nuclei. This idea is strengthened by the analogy with the polarization properties of BL Lac objects, providing also further support …

Maximum Gravitational Recoil, Manuela Campanelli, Carlos O. Lousto, Yosef Zlochower, David Merritt

Articles

Recent calculations of gravitational radiation recoil generated during black-hole binary mergers have reopened the possibility that a merged binary can be ejected even from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy. Here we report the first systematic study of gravitational recoil of equal-mass binaries with equal, but counter-aligned, spins parallel to the orbital plane. Such an orientation of the spins is expected to maximize the recoil. We find that recoil velocity (which is perpendicular to the orbital plane) varies sinusoidally with the angle that the initial spin directions make with the initial linear momenta of each hole and scales up …

Key Skills Framework: Enhancing Employability Within A Lifelong Learning Paradigm, Aidan Kenny, Ray English, Dave Kilmartin

Articles

Employability has become an area of interest among the general public and policy makers alike, with an increasing number of reports in the general media regarding the need for workers in certain sectors to up-skill due to the possible threat of job ‘displacement’. In addition, there has been an increase in education and training policy documents emphasising that citizens should pursue Lifelong Learning /Life Wide Learning to address the increased job-related uncertainty attributed to the globalisation process and the concomitant competitive threats. Academics such as Barnett (2005) claim that we are living in an era of ‘super complexity' and rapid …