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To be or not to be an auctioneer: Some thoughts on the legal nature of online eBay auctions and the protection of consumers
This paper discusses the legal classification of online “eBay” auctions. The discussion has key implications on the scope of consumer protection law as sale by auctions are, for example, excluded from the scope of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. The paper uncovers that online “eBay” auctions cannot always be considered as traditional auctions and that eBay, as an intermediary, is not to be considered as an auctioneer. This creates difficulties associated with a distributive application of consumer protection laws such as the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. Another set of difficulties is associated with a lenient legal regime applicable to the liability of eBay under the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 . The paper concludes that there is an urgent need to clarify the legal classification of online auctions and to rethink the liability of online auction sites to better protect consumers
Monitoring the CMS strip tracker readout system
The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker at the LHC comprises a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and 10 million readout channels. Its data acquisition system is based around a custom analogue front-end chip. Both the control and the readout of the front-end electronics are performed by off-detector VME boards in the counting room, which digitise the raw event data and perform zero-suppression and formatting. The data acquisition system uses the CMS online software framework to configure, control and monitor the hardware components and steer the data acquisition. The first data analysis is performed online within the official CMS reconstruction framework, which provides many services, such as distributed analysis, access to geometry and conditions data, and a Data Quality Monitoring tool based on the online physics reconstruction. The data acquisition monitoring of the Strip Tracker uses both the data acquisition and the reconstruction software frameworks in order to provide real-time feedback to shifters on the operational state of the detector, archiving for later analysis and possibly trigger automatic recovery actions in case of errors. Here we review the proposed architecture of the monitoring system and we describe its software components, which are already in place, the various monitoring streams available, and our experiences of operating and monitoring a large-scale system
Data acquisition software for the CMS strip tracker
The CMS silicon strip tracker, providing a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and comprising 10 million readout channels, has recently been completed at the tracker integration facility at CERN. The strip tracker community is currently working to develop and integrate the online and offline software frameworks, known as XDAQ and CMSSW respectively, for the purposes of data acquisition and detector commissioning and monitoring. Recent developments have seen the integration of many new services and tools within the online data acquisition system, such as event building, online distributed analysis, an online monitoring framework, and data storage management. We review the various software components that comprise the strip tracker data acquisition system, the software architectures used for stand-alone and global data-taking modes. Our experiences in commissioning and operating one of the largest ever silicon micro-strip tracking systems are also reviewed
‘Video Replay: Families, films and fantasy’ as a transformational text: Commentary on Valerie Walkerdine's ‘Video Replay’.
In this commentary I explore the significance of Valerie Walkerdine's paper ‘Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy’. I review its impact in 1986 and then discuss how some of its ideas about subjectivity and popular culture – specifically film - can be developed in the contemporary context. A recurring fantasy of Rocky II and its reception is that of social and psychological transformation. I address this theme by drawing on the work of Christopher Bollas to argue that Walkerdine's psychosocial analysis continues to facilitate, across a range of contexts, some of the transformational processes described in her article
The CMS Tracker Readout Front End Driver
The Front End Driver, FED, is a 9U 400mm VME64x card designed for reading out
the Compact Muon Solenoid, CMS, silicon tracker signals transmitted by the
APV25 analogue pipeline Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The FED
receives the signals via 96 optical fibers at a total input rate of 3.4 GB/sec.
The signals are digitized and processed by applying algorithms for pedestal and
common mode noise subtraction. Algorithms that search for clusters of hits are
used to further reduce the input rate. Only the cluster data along with trigger
information of the event are transmitted to the CMS data acquisition system
using the S-LINK64 protocol at a maximum rate of 400 MB/sec. All data
processing algorithms on the FED are executed in large on-board Field
Programmable Gate Arrays. Results on the design, performance, testing and
quality control of the FED are presented and discussed
Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world
We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer
online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow
them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade,
establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We
measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and
received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately
after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified
by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence
in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative
(bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals.
Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated
by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the
world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of
repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral
sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study
their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word
ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100,
and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple
redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further
underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On
the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can
be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Attention and automation: New perspectives on mental underload and performance
There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely recognized that mental underload is detrimental to performance, there are very few attempts to explain why this may be the case. It is argued in this paper that, until the need for a human operator is completely eliminated, automation has psychological implications relevant in both theoretical and applied domains. The present paper reviews theories of attention, as well as the literature on mental workload and automation, to synthesize a new explanation for the effects of mental underload on performance. Malleable attentional resources theory proposes that attentional capacity shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload, and that this shrinkage is responsible for the underload effect. The theory is discussed with respect to the applied implications for ergonomics research
Quantification of the severity of hypoxic-ischemic brain injury in a neonatal preclinical model using measurements of cytochrome-c-oxidase from a miniature broadband-near-infrared spectroscopy system
We describe the development of a miniaturized broadband near-infrared spectroscopy system (bNIRS), which measures changes in cerebral tissue oxyhemoglobin ( [ HbO₂ ] ) and deoxyhemoglobin ([HHb]) plus tissue metabolism via changes in the oxidation state of cytochrome-c-oxidase ([oxCCO]). The system is based on a small light source and a customized mini-spectrometer. We assessed the instrument in a preclinical study in 27 newborn piglets undergoing transient cerebral hypoxia-ischemia (HI). We aimed to quantify the recovery of the HI insult and estimate the severity of the injury. The recovery in brain oxygenation (Δ [ HbDiff ] = Δ [ HbO₂ ] − Δ [ HHb ] ), blood volume (Δ [ HbT ] = Δ [ HbO₂ ] + Δ [ HHb ] ), and metabolism (Δ [ oxCCO ] ) for up to 30 min after the end of HI were quantified in percentages using the recovery fraction (RF) algorithm, which quantifies the recovery of a signal with respect to baseline. The receiver operating characteristic analysis was performed on bNIRS-RF measurements compared to proton (H1) magnetic resonance spectroscopic (MRS)-derived thalamic lactate/N-acetylaspartate (Lac/NAA) measured at 24-h post HI insult; Lac/NAA peak area ratio is an accurate surrogate marker of neurodevelopmental outcome in babies with neonatal HI encephalopathy. The Δ [ oxCCO ] -RF cut-off threshold of 79% within 30 min of HI predicted injury severity based on Lac/NAA with high sensitivity (100%) and specificity (93%). A significant difference in thalamic Lac/NAA was noticed (p < 0.0001) between the two groups based on this cut-off threshold of 79% Δ [ oxCCO ] -RF. The severe injury group (n = 13) had ∼30 % smaller recovery in Δ [ HbDiff ] -RF (p = 0.0001) and no significant difference was observed in Δ [ HbT ] -RF between groups. At 48 h post HI, significantly higher P31-MRS-measured inorganic phosphate/exchangeable phosphate pool (epp) (p = 0.01) and reduced phosphocreatine/epp (p = 0.003) were observed in the severe injury group indicating persistent cerebral energy depletion. Based on these results, the bNIRS measurement of the oxCCO recovery fraction offers a noninvasive real-time biomarker of brain injury severity within 30 min following HI insult
Square-tiled cyclic covers
A cyclic cover of the complex projective line branched at four appropriate
points has a natural structure of a square-tiled surface. We describe the
combinatorics of such a square-tiled surface, the geometry of the corresponding
Teichm\"uller curve, and compute the Lyapunov exponents of the determinant
bundle over the Teichm\"uller curve with respect to the geodesic flow. This
paper includes a new example (announced by G. Forni and C. Matheus in
\cite{Forni:Matheus}) of a Teichm\"uller curve of a square-tiled cyclic cover
in a stratum of Abelian differentials in genus four with a maximally degenerate
Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum (the only known example found previously by Forni
in genus three also corresponds to a square-tiled cyclic cover
\cite{ForniSurvey}).
We present several new examples of Teichm\"uller curves in strata of
holomorphic and meromorphic quadratic differentials with maximally degenerate
Kontsevich--Zorich spectrum. Presumably, these examples cover all possible
Teichm\"uller curves with maximally degenerate spectrum. We prove that this is
indeed the case within the class of square-tiled cyclic covers.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures. Final version incorporating referees comments.
In particular, a gap in the previous version was corrected. This file uses
the journal's class file (jmd.cls), so that it is very similar to published
versio
Searching for New Physics Through AMO Precision Measurements
We briefly review recent experiments in atomic, molecular, and optical
physics using precision measurements to search for physics beyond the Standard
Model. We consider three main categories of experiments: searches for changes
in fundamental constants, measurements of the anomalous magnetic moment of the
electron, and searches for an electric dipole moment of the electron.Comment: Prepared for Comments on AMO Physics at Physica Script
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