THE INDUSTRY HAS CHANGED, HAVE YOU? THE AGCO STORY

AGCO Corporation is a success story in the agricultural machinery sector. Utilizing marketing strategies of out-sourcing, cross-over selling, and a full line of products, AGCO markets its own way. In 7 years, AGCO has 18 brands sold through 7,000 dealerships in 140 countries. Acquisition and consolidation powered the growth of AGCO using nontraditional buyout financing. Herein lies its real success.Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Arsenic in Glycerol. 1

n/

Volumetric Apparatus. 1

n/

Clinical trials with endothelin receptor antagonists: What went wrong and where can we improve?

In the early 1990s, within three years of cloning of endothelin receptors, orally active endothelin receptor antagonists (ERAs) were tested in humans and the first clinical trial of ERA therapy in humans was published in 1995. ERAs were subsequently tested in clinical trials involving heart failure, pulmonary arterial hypertension, resistant arterial hypertension, stroke/subarachnoid hemorrhage and various forms of cancer. The results of most of these trials – except those for pulmonary arterial hypertension and scleroderma-related digital ulcers – were either negative or neutral. Problems with study design, patient selection, drug toxicity, and drug dosing have been used to explain or excuse failures. Currently, a number of pharmaceutical companies who had developed ERAs as drug candidates have discontinued clinical trials or further drug development. Given the problems with using ERAs in clinical medicine, at the Twelfth International Conference on Endothelin in Cambridge, UK, a panel discussion was held by clinicians actively involved in clinical development of ERA therapy in renal disease, systemic and pulmonary arterial hypertension, heart failure, and cancer. This article provides summaries from the panel discussion as well as personal perspectives of the panelists on how to proceed with further clinical testing of ERAs and guidance for researchers and decision makers in clinical drug development on where future research efforts might best be focused

Casimir-Polder forces, boundary conditions and fluctuations

We review different aspects of the atom-atom and atom-wall Casimir-Polder forces. We first discuss the role of a boundary condition on the interatomic Casimir-Polder potential between two ground-state atoms, and give a physically transparent interpretation of the results in terms of vacuum fluctuations and image atomic dipoles. We then discuss the known atom-wall Casimir-Polder force for ground- and excited-state atoms, using a different method which is also suited for extension to time-dependent situations. Finally, we consider the fluctuation of the Casimir-Polder force between a ground-state atom and a conducting wall, and discuss possible observation of this force fluctuation.Comment: 5 page

Surface plasmon modes and the Casimir energy

We show the influence of surface plasmons on the Casimir effect between two plane parallel metallic mirrors at arbitrary distances. Using the plasma model to describe the optical response of the metal, we express the Casimir energy as a sum of contributions associated with evanescent surface plasmon modes and propagative cavity modes. In contrast to naive expectations, the plasmonic modes contribution is essential at all distances in order to ensure the correct result for the Casimir energy. One of the two plasmonic modes gives rise to a repulsive contribution, balancing out the attractive contributions from propagating cavity modes, while both contributions taken separately are much larger than the actual value of the Casimir energy. This also suggests possibilities to tailor the sign of the Casimir force via surface plasmons.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, revtex

Stress Tensor Correlators in the Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism

We express stress tensor correlators using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. The absence of off-diagonal counterterms in this formalism ensures that the +- and -+ correlators are free of primitive divergences. We use dimensional regularization in position space to explicitly check this at one loop order for a massless scalar on a flat space background. We use the same procedure to show that the ++ correlator contains the divergences first computed by `t Hooft and Veltman for the scalar contribution to the graviton self-energy.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX 2epsilon, no figures, revised for publicatio

`Operational' Energy Conditions

I show that a quantized Klein-Gordon field in Minkowski space obeys an `operational' weak energy condition: the energy of an isolated device constructed to measure or trap the energy in a region, plus the energy it measures or traps, cannot be negative. There are good reasons for thinking that similar results hold locally for linear quantum fields in curved space-times. A thought experiment to measure energy density is analyzed in some detail, and the operational positivity is clearly manifested. If operational energy conditions do hold for quantum fields, then the negative energy densities predicted by theory have a will-o'-the-wisp character: any local attempt to verify a total negative energy density will be self-defeating on account of quantum measurement difficulties. Similarly, attempts to drive exotic effects (wormholes, violations of the second law, etc.) by such densities may be defeated by quantum measurement problems. As an example, I show that certain attempts to violate the Cosmic Censorship principle by negative energy densities are defeated. These quantum measurement limitations are investigated in some detail, and are shown to indicate that space-time cannot be adequately modeled classically in negative energy density regimes.Comment: 18 pages, plain Tex, IOP macros. Expanded treatment of measurement problems for space-time, with implications for Cosmic Censorship as an example. Accepted by Classical and Quantum Gravit

Phase diagram of a generalized ABC model on the interval

We study the equilibrium phase diagram of a generalized ABC model on an interval of the one-dimensional lattice: each site $i=1,...,N$ is occupied by a particle of type \a=A,B,C, with the average density of each particle species N_\a/N=r_\a fixed. These particles interact via a mean field non-reflection-symmetric pair interaction. The interaction need not be invariant under cyclic permutation of the particle species as in the standard ABC model studied earlier. We prove in some cases and conjecture in others that the scaled infinite system N\rw\infty, i/N\rw x\in[0,1] has a unique density profile \p_\a(x) except for some special values of the r_\a for which the system undergoes a second order phase transition from a uniform to a nonuniform periodic profile at a critical temperature $T_c=3\sqrt{r_A r_B r_C}/2\pi$.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

Unitarity and the color confinement

We discuss how confinement property of QCD results in the rational unitarization scheme and how unitarity saturation leads to appearance of a hadron liquid phase at very high temperatures.Comment: 10 pages, no figire