Institutions and Practices for Restoring and Maintaining Public Order

The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and punished for illegal file sharing. This paper investigates the impact of the reform on illegal file sharing and music sales using a difference-in-differences approach with Norway and Finland as control groups. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 16% and increased music sales by 36% during the first six months. Pirated music therefore seems to be a strong substitute to legal music. However, the reform effects disappeared almost completely after six months, likely because of the weak enforcement of the law

Piracy, Music and Movies: A Natural Experiment

This paper investigates the effects of illegal file sharing (piracy) on music and movie sales. The Swedish implementation of the European Union directive IPRED on April 1, 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and prosecuted for file sharing. We investigate the subsequent drop in piracy as approximated by the drop in Swedish Internet traffic and the effects on music and movie sales in Sweden. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 18 percent during the subsequent six months. It also increased sales of physical music by 27 percent and digital music by 48 percent. Furthermore, it had no significant effects on the sales of theater tickets or DVD movies. The results indicate that pirated music is a strong substitute for legal music whereas the substitutability is less for movies.Copyright protection; Piracy; File sharing; Music; Movies; IPRED; Natural experiment

Geometry of generalised spaces of persistence diagrams and optimal partial transport for metric pairs

In this thesis, we study the geometry of two families of metric spaces that can be defined over a metric pair. We first focus on generalised spaces of persistence diagrams over metric pairs. We prove that the construction of these metric spaces is functorial and preserves certain geometric properties of the underlying space, namely completeness, separability, geodesicity, and non-negative curvature in the sense of Alexandrov. We also study the continuity of these constructions with respect to Gromov--Hausdorff convergence. We then move on to spaces of Radon measures endowed with the optimal partial transport metrics introduced by Figalli and Gigli. We adapt results from Figalli and Gigli’s work to the class of proper metric pairs. Furthermore, we prove that when endowed with the $L^2$-optimal partial transport distance, the resulting space of Radon measures is a non-negatively curved Alexandrov space, whenever the underlying space has the same property. This result is new, even in the Euclidean setting considered by Figalli and Gigli. Finally, in an appendix, we study basic properties of Gromov–Hausdorff convergence for metric pairs. We prove that this convergence is metrisable in the context of proper metric pairs, and present versions of the classical embedding, completeness, and precompactness theorems

Non-profits Organizations and Donors’ Volunteerism: Perceptions on Facebook Values for Relationship Building

In spite of the fact that social media tool such as Facebook continues to grow in popularity and regarded as innovative communication tool that have played a significant role in organizational settings particularly in transforming the business’ and company’s values very limited attention has been given to its exploration for the enhancement of non-profit organizations. Therefore, this research explores how strength of trust and relationship as fostered by the use of Facebook influences attitudes of donors and public in Libya toward volunteering for and making charitable gifts to support non-profit organizations. Thematic data analysis technique was used to analyze interviews data.  However, qualitative computer data analysis software (NVIVO 10) was used to analyze the data to facilitate the process of storing, sorting, coding, analyzing and emergence of representation of the data. Based on the findings from the study, it is been recommended that non-profit organizations in Libya pay more attention to the needs of donors in the area of adequate information, accountability and personalization through Facebook. This is important because, many donors have claimed to be highly interested in these as determinants of future donations. Keywords: Relationship building, non-profit organization, Facebook, donors, Liby

Impacts of Facebook Usage on Non-Profits and Donors Relationship Building and Maintenance

Social media especially Facebook which has been identified as an effective means of interaction between non-profit organizations and the donors has not been examined along building trust and maintaining relationship. Whereas, this is more expedient because it is increasingly becoming difficult for non-profit organizations to maintain strong connections with the totality of the regular and potential donors and volunteers. In response to the challenges, this paper explores the perceptions of the managers and donors of non-profit organizations on how Facebook can take care of the difficulties of building trust and maintaining relationship which are the bedrock of fundraising and donation. Qualitative method with in-depth interview approach through a purposive sampling was adopted to probe into the impact of building and maintaining relationship. The data was analyzed thematically using NVIVO. The findings revealed that Facebook is mostly used by non-profit organizations to build and maintain good relationship with donors and the public. Similarly, the general perceptions shown that public trust is one of the most valuable commodities that any non-profit organization can have, and the degree to which donors trust these organizations have a huge impact on how they donate. Keywords: Facebook, non-profit organization, donor, volunteer, social medi

Perceptions on motives for adoption and use of Facebook for non-profit organizations in Libya

Due to very limited attention that has been given to the examination of the adoption of social media tools by non-profit organizations especially in Libya, this paper has explored how non-profit organizations have adopted and used Facebook to achieve their goals.Therefore, through the perceptions of 24 Informants, the study discovered that environmental factors and Facebook dynamism motivated the adoption and use of Facebook to drive non-profit organizations.The analysis covered both the perceptions of managers of the organizations as well as the donors.In order to achieve clearer understanding of these perspectives, the study adequately supported each of the theme, sub-theme and sub sub-theme with model generated by NVivo 10.The findings provide more understanding for nonprofits organizations, donors and companies serving the non-profit sector concerning the most significant behaviour and trends that revolve around Facebook as part of non-profits’ organizations marketing, communications, fundraising, and advocacy works. Finally, it is been recommended that non-profit organizations in Libya pay more attention to the needs of donors in the area of multimedia benefits and personalization of Facebook

Tuneable peptide cross-linked nanogels for enzyme-triggered protein delivery

Many diseases are associated with the dysregulated activity of enzymes, such as matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs). This dysregulation can be leveraged in drug delivery to achieve disease- or site-specific cargo release. Self-assembled polymeric nanoparticles are versatile drug carrier materials due to the accessible diversity of polymer chemistry. However, efficient loading of sensitive cargo, such as proteins, and introducing functional enzyme-responsive behaviour remain challenging. Herein, peptide-crosslinked, temperature-sensitive nanogels for protein delivery were designed to respond to MMP-7, which is overexpressed in many pathologies including cancer and inflammatory diseases. The incorporation of N-cyclopropylacrylamide (NCPAM) into N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM)-based copolymers enabled us to tune the polymer lower critical solution temperature from 33 to 44 °C, allowing the encapsulation of protein cargo and nanogel-crosslinking at slightly elevated temperatures. This approach resulted in nanogels that were held together by MMP-sensitive peptides for enzyme-specific protein delivery. We employed a combination of cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM), dynamic light scattering (DLS), small angle neutron scattering (SANS), and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to precisely decipher the morphology, self-assembly mechanism, enzyme-responsiveness, and model protein loading/release properties of our nanogel platform. Simple variation of the peptide linker sequence and combining multiple different crosslinkers will enable us to adjust our platform to target specific diseases in the future

Low-Rate Overuse Flow Tracer (LOFT): An Efficient and Scalable Algorithm for Detecting Overuse Flows

Current probabilistic flow-size monitoring can only detect heavy hitters (e.g., flows utilizing 10 times their permitted bandwidth), but cannot detect smaller overuse (e.g., flows utilizing 50-100% more than their permitted bandwidth). Thus, these systems lack accuracy in the challenging environment of high-throughput packet processing, where fast-memory resources are scarce. Nevertheless, many applications rely on accurate flow-size estimation, e.g. for network monitoring, anomaly detection and Quality of Service. We design, analyze, implement, and evaluate LOFT, a new approach for efficiently detecting overuse flows that achieves dramatically better properties than prior work. LOFT can detect 1.5x overuse flows in one second, whereas prior approaches fail to detect 2x overuse flows within a timeout of 300 seconds. We demonstrate LOFT's suitability for high-speed packet processing with implementations in the DPDK framework and on an FPGA

Instrumental performance and results from testing of the BLAST-TNG receiver, submillimeter optics, and MKID arrays

Polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust grains can be used to map magnetic fields in star forming molecular clouds and the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM). The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) flew from Antarctica in 2010 and 2012 and produced degree-scale polarization maps of several nearby molecular clouds with arcminute resolution. The success of BLASTPol has motivated a next-generation instrument, BLAST-TNG, which will use more than 3000 linear polarization sensitive microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) combined with a 2.5m diameter carbon fiber primary mirror to make diffraction-limited observations at 250, 350, and 500 $\mu$m. With 16 times the mapping speed of BLASTPol, sub-arcminute resolution, and a longer flight time, BLAST-TNG will be able to examine nearby molecular clouds and the diffuse galactic dust polarization spectrum in unprecedented detail. The 250 $\mu$m detector array has been integrated into the new cryogenic receiver, and is undergoing testing to establish the optical and polarization characteristics of the instrument. BLAST-TNG will demonstrate the effectiveness of kilo-pixel MKID arrays for applications in submillimeter astronomy. BLAST-TNG is scheduled to fly from Antarctica in December 2017 for 28 days and will be the first balloon-borne telescope to offer a quarter of the flight for "shared risk" observing by the community.Comment: Presented at SPIE Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VIII, June 29th, 201

DNA Methylation and Histone Modifications Regulate De Novo Shoot Regeneration in Arabidopsis by Modulating WUSCHEL Expression and Auxin Signaling

Plants have a profound capacity to regenerate organs from differentiated somatic tissues, based on which propagating plants in vitro was made possible. Beside its use in biotechnology, in vitro shoot regeneration is also an important system to study de novo organogenesis. Phytohormones and transcription factor WUSCHEL (WUS) play critical roles in this process but whether and how epigenetic modifications are involved is unknown. Here, we report that epigenetic marks of DNA methylation and histone modifications regulate de novo shoot regeneration of Arabidopsis through modulating WUS expression and auxin signaling. First, functional loss of key epigenetic genes—including METHYLTRANSFERASE1 (MET1) encoding for DNA methyltransferase, KRYPTONITE (KYP) for the histone 3 lysine 9 (H3K9) methyltransferase, JMJ14 for the histone 3 lysine 4 (H3K4) demethylase, and HAC1 for the histone acetyltransferase—resulted in altered WUS expression and developmental rates of regenerated shoots in vitro. Second, we showed that regulatory regions of WUS were developmentally regulated by both DNA methylation and histone modifications through bisulfite sequencing and chromatin immunoprecipitation. Third, DNA methylation in the regulatory regions of WUS was lost in the met1 mutant, thus leading to increased WUS expression and its localization. Fourth, we did a genome-wide transcriptional analysis and found out that some of differentially expressed genes between wild type and met1 were involved in signal transduction of the phytohormone auxin. We verified that the increased expression of AUXIN RESPONSE FACTOR3 (ARF3) in met1 indeed was due to DNA demethylation, suggesting DNA methylation regulates de novo shoot regeneration by modulating auxin signaling. We propose that DNA methylation and histone modifications regulate de novo shoot regeneration by modulating WUS expression and auxin signaling. The study demonstrates that, although molecular components involved in organogenesis are divergently evolved in plants and animals, epigenetic modifications play an evolutionarily convergent role in this process