The use of overly intrusive conditionality in Greece is threatening the European project

With pressure growing on Greece ahead of a scheduled IMF debt repayment, there is still no agreement between the country and its creditors on the release of further financial assistance. Harald Sander writes that one of the key problems in Greece has been the attempt by creditor states to impose an overly intrusive form of conditionality in exchange for support. He argues that the real aim of the conditions attached to assistance should be to ensure debts are repaid, not to insist on the details of reforms, and that the use of policy conditionality of the kind experienced in Greece poses a threat not just to the euro, but to the European project as a whole

Specific-to-General Learning for Temporal Events with Application to Learning Event Definitions from Video

We develop, analyze, and evaluate a novel, supervised, specific-to-general learner for a simple temporal logic and use the resulting algorithm to learn visual event definitions from video sequences. First, we introduce a simple, propositional, temporal, event-description language called AMA that is sufficiently expressive to represent many events yet sufficiently restrictive to support learning. We then give algorithms, along with lower and upper complexity bounds, for the subsumption and generalization problems for AMA formulas. We present a positive-examples--only specific-to-general learning method based on these algorithms. We also present a polynomial-time--computable ``syntactic'' subsumption test that implies semantic subsumption without being equivalent to it. A generalization algorithm based on syntactic subsumption can be used in place of semantic generalization to improve the asymptotic complexity of the resulting learning algorithm. Finally, we apply this algorithm to the task of learning relational event definitions from video and show that it yields definitions that are competitive with hand-coded ones

Failed "nonaccelerating" models of prokaryote gene regulatory networks

Much current network analysis is predicated on the assumption that important biological networks will either possess scale free or exponential statistics which are independent of network size allowing unconstrained network growth over time. In this paper, we demonstrate that such network growth models are unable to explain recent comparative genomics results on the growth of prokaryote regulatory gene networks as a function of gene number. This failure largely results as prokaryote regulatory gene networks are "accelerating" and have total link numbers growing faster than linearly with network size and so can exhibit transitions from stationary to nonstationary statistics and from random to scale-free to regular statistics at particular critical network sizes. In the limit, these networks can undergo transitions so marked as to constrain network sizes to be below some critical value. This is of interest as the regulatory gene networks of single celled prokaryotes are indeed characterized by an accelerating quadratic growth with gene count and are size constrained to be less than about 10,000 genes encoded in DNA sequence of less than about 10 megabases. We develop two "nonaccelerating" network models of prokaryote regulatory gene networks in an endeavor to match observation and demonstrate that these approaches fail to reproduce observed statistics.Comment: Corrected error in biological input parameter: 13 pages, 9 figure

Observation of PT phase transition in a simple mechanical system

If a Hamiltonian is PT symmetric, there are two possibilities: Either the eigenvalues are entirely real, in which case the Hamiltonian is said to be in an unbroken-PT-symmetric phase, or else the eigenvalues are partly real and partly complex, in which case the Hamiltonian is said to be in a broken-PT-symmetric phase. As one varies the parameters of the Hamiltonian, one can pass through the phase transition that separates the unbroken and broken phases. This transition has recently been observed in a variety of laboratory experiments. This paper explains the phase transition in a simple and intuitive fashion and then describes an extremely elementary experiment in which the phase transition is easily observed.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Technology inspired design for pervasive healthcare

Pervasive healthcare technologies are increasingly using novel sensory devices that are able to measure phenomena that could not be measured before. To develop novel healthcare applications that use these largely untested technologies, it is important to have a design process that allows proper exploration of the capabilities of the novel technologies. We focus on the technology-inspired design process that was used in the development of a system to support posture and provide guidance by nudging people, and how this has lead us to explore pervasive healthcare applications

MENCIUS\u27 JUN-ZI, ARISTOTLE\u27S MEGALOPSUCHOS, & MORAL DEMANDS TO HELP THE GLOBAL POOR

It is commonly believed that impartial utilitarian moral theories have significant demands that we help the global poor, and that the partial virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle do not. This ethical partiality found in these virtue ethicists has been criticized, and some have suggested that the partialistic virtue ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are parochial (i.e., overly narrow in their scope of concern). I believe, however, that the ethics of Mencius and Aristotle are both more cosmopolitan than many presume and also are very demanding. In this paper, I argue that the ethical requirements to help the poor and starving are very demanding for the quintessentially virtuous person in Mencius and Aristotle. The ethical demands to help even the global poor are demanding for Mencius jun-zi (君子chön-tzu / junzi) and Aristotle\u27s megalopsuchos. I argue that both the jun-zi and megalopsuchos have a wide scope of concern for the suffering of poor people. I argue that the relevant virtues of the jun-zi and megalopsuchos are also achievable for many people. The moral views of Mencius and Aristotle come with strong demands for many of us to work harder to alleviate global poverty

To Attach or Not To Attach: The Continued Confusion Regarding Search Warrants and the Incorporation of Supporting Documents

The Fourth Amendment mandates that a search warrant particularly describe what is to be searched or seized. Courts have allowed officers to use supporting documentation, such as affidavits and other attachments, to define, but not expand, the limits of a search. However, the use of these supporting documents creates a problem when the document is referenced in the warrant but is not physically attached to the warrant. This Note argues that the protection of the Fourth Amendment is not the warrant itself, but the guarantee that a warrant, fully detailing the search to be undertaken, has been approved by a neutral magistrate

EPI Update, May 29, 2009

Weekly newsletter for Center For Acute Disease Epidemiology of Iowa Department of Public Health

Impact testing machine Patent

Impact testing machine for imparting large impact forces on high velocity package