Losing the World's Best and Brightest

Presents findings from a survey of Indian, Chinese, and European students at U.S. colleges and universities on their decisions to stay or return home after graduation and the factors behind the decisions, such as where they see the best opportunities

Intellectual Property, the Immigration Backlog, and a Reverse Brain-Drain

Finds an increase in the contributions of foreign nationals to U.S. intellectual property and the nation's overall economic competitiveness, and seeks to explain this increase through an analysis of the immigrant-visa backlog for skilled workers

Can Successful Founders Hold on to Their Seats after Going Public? The Impact of Venture Capitalists on Founder Turnover

In this study, we explore the impact of venture capitalist involvement on the relationship between a new venture's pre-IPO performance and the subsequent likelihood of founder turnover. Using new venture perspectives, and the life cycle and agency theories of the firm, we argue that owner-venture capitalists act as effective governance mechanisms to induce changes in new ventures from founder management to professional management. We argue that in the absence of venture capitalist involvement, founder turnovers occur only when the firm underperforms at the pre-IPO stage, whereas when venture capitalists are involved, the relationship between pre-IPO performance and turnover becomes U-shaped. In the presence of venture capitalist involvement, founders may be encouraged to step down even when the firm is performing well. We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature in two ways. First, we investigate how the involvement of venture capitalists changes the dynamics of founder-CEO turnover and performance in entrepreneurial firms. Secondly, we explore the role played by venture capitalists in the evolution of a firm beyond the earliest stage of its life cycle, particularly when the firm is about to transition from a private to a public entity. From the practitioner's point of view this study provides insights for the founding team, their incentives, and choices about their role in the firm they created after it goes public. In particular, if the propositions are empirically tested and confirmed, one can conclude that bringing in VCs guarantees departure for founder-CEOs

Bulk Viscosity of Magnetized Neutron Star Matter

We study the effect of magnetic field on the bulk viscosity of nuclear matter in neutron stars. We employ the framework of relativistic mean field theory to observe the dense nuclear matter in neutron stars. The effects are first studied for the case when the magnetic field does not exceed the critical value to confine the electrons to the lowest Landau levels. We then consider the case of intense magnetic field to evaluate viscosity for the URCA processes and show that the inequality $p_{F}(e)+p_{F}(p)\geq p_{F}(n)$ is no longer required to be satisfied for the URCA processes to proceed.Comment: Latex 2e file with four postscripts figure

Toric Calabi-Yau supermanifolds and mirror symmetry

We study mirror symmetry of supermanifolds constructed as fermionic extensions of compact toric varieties. We mainly discuss the case where the linear sigma A-model contains as many fermionic fields as there are U(1) factors in the gauge group. In the mirror super-Landau-Ginzburg B-model, focus is on the bosonic structure obtained after integrating out all the fermions. Our key observation is that there is a relation between the super-Calabi-Yau conditions of the A-model and quasi-homogeneity of the B-model, and that the degree of the associated superpotential in the B-model is given in terms of the determinant of the fermion charge matrix of the A-model.Comment: 20 pages, v2: references adde

Following the banking cycle of umbilical cord blood in India: the disparity between prebanking persuasion and post-banking utilization

To address critique of the rare uptake of umbilical cord blood (UCB) in private banks, hybrid-banking models would combine the advantages of ‘public UCB banking’ and private UCB banking by responding to both market forces and public needs. We question both by following the cycle of UCB banking in India: the circulation and stagnation of UCB as waste, gift, biological insurance, enclaved good, source of saving lives, and commodity through various practices of public, private and hybrid UCB banking. Making the journey from ‘recruitment’, ‘collection’ and ‘banking’ to ‘research’ and ‘therapy’ allowed us to identify concerns about the transparency of this cycle. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork interviews with different stakeholders in UCB banks in India, this article shows how private/hybrid cord blood banks are competing for their market share and its implication for the circulation of UCB: speculation, stagnation and opacity

On Local Calabi-Yau Supermanifolds and Their Mirrors

We use local mirror symmetry to study a class of local Calabi-Yau super-manifolds with bosonic sub-variety V_b having a vanishing first Chern class. Solving the usual super- CY condition, requiring the equality of the total U(1) gauge charges of bosons \Phi_{b} and the ghost like fields \Psi_{f} one \sum_{b}q_{b}=\sum_{f}Q_{f}, as \sum_{b}q_{b}=0 and \sum_{f}Q_{f}=0, several examples are studied and explicit results are given for local A_{r} super-geometries. A comment on purely fermionic super-CY manifolds corresponding to the special case where q_{b}=0, \forall b and \sum_{f}Q_{f}=0 is also made.\bigskipComment: 17 page

A non-invasive subtle pulse rate extraction method based on Eulerian video magnification

Measuring pulse rate by means of video recording of the wrist area is a non-invasive approach. Eulerian Video Linear Magnification (EVLM) is used in this paper to magnify, and make visible, subtle pulse-induced wrist motions. A series of experiments are conducted to investigate the performance of ELVM under various conditions, such as light intensity, background colour and a set of video recording parameters. The results show that a light intensity of around 224 to 229 lx is optimal; excess or inadequate light significantly impairs the success of amplifying the skin movement resulting from the pulse. It is demonstrated that a white background colour enables both the radial and ulnar areas to be clearly visible in the recorded video, thus improving pulse measurement. In addition, it is shown that a female’s pulse strength is approximately 40 % weaker than that of a male averaged over the participants