Illinois Government Research no. 55 1982: Regulating Hospital Facilities Construction: The Illinois Experience 1975-1979

In the present political climate, reform or elimination of the certificate of need program is a distinct possibility. At the national level, the deregulatory movement has led to attacks on the program by officials in the Reagan administration, who claim it is ineffective in containing capital spending and impedes competition in the industry. In the 1980-81 session of the Illinois General Assembly, legislation was introduced that would have abolished the program. Although unsuccessful, the proposed bill reflects the controversy surrounding the program within the state. As the debate continues, at both the national and state level, it is a good time to examine the experience of the Illinois program. This article does that by analyzing the decisions made by the certificate of need program on hospital proposals from 1975 through 1979 and by examining some evidence of the program's impact. In the first section, we present an overall summary of the program's approval rate in terms of the number and percent of projects approved, withdrawn, denied, and modified; in the next section, we describe the types of projects which the program favors; and in the final section, we discuss some evidence of the program's impact on hospital bed supplies. The complex process by which CON decisions are reached in the state is not addressed in this paper so that we may focus on the results of the process and its possible impacts.published or submitted for publicatio

Managers’ Incentives to Manipulate Earnings in Management Buyout Contests: An Examination of How Corporate Governance and Market Mechanisms Mitigate Earnings Management

In an MBO contest, managers offer to buy the firm from public shareholders at a premium to the current market price and thus have incentives to buy the firm “cheap.” Prior studies have found evidence that managers, on average, manipulate earnings downward prior to an MBO offer in an attempt to convince shareholders that their offer is fair. We extend this finding by attempting to explain the substantial cross sectional variation in the degree of manipulation across firms reported in these earlier studies. We find that boards with more independent directors and higher levels of incentive based compensation for the CEO act to discourage such manipulation. Additionally, our results show that some shareholders, minority and preexisting large outside blockholders, appear to be misled by the manipulation. However, new blockholders that acquire large shareholdings in the year before the offer are not. We also discover that managers are more likely to revise their bid upwards when the manipulation is most severe and that these new blockholders put pressure on managers to make these revisions. Finally, we investigate whether the manipulation has an impact on the final buyout contest outcome. We find that downward manipulation does not prevent managers from retaining control of the firm; however, they pay a higher premium

The role of RNA Polymerase II-dependent transcription elongation in the cross-talk between mRNA synthesis and decay.

The main molecule in gene expression is messenger RNA (mRNA) which transfers the information contained in genes in the nucleus to the cytoplasm where it is translated into proteins that carry out cellular functions. mRNA levels are determined through its synthesis, by the RNA polymerase II, and degradation, which involves the Ccr4-Not complex and Xrn1. It has become increasingly apparent that the mRNA concentration in a cell is maintained at a particular level even through stressful situations. The way the cell is able to do this is by a cross-talk between the machinery responsible for its transcription and that responsible for its degradation. In this work we have attempted to unravel the mechanisms by which this cross-talk occurs. For this complex task, we first studied how transcription and degradation was affected after deleting a single gene known to be involved in either one of these mechanisms. This study confirmed the existence of a strong feedback between mRNA synthesis and decay, and also helped us uncover some of the elements important for this cross-talk. The most interesting finding was the correlation between transcription elongation and mRNA degradation, suggesting that it is directly relevant for cross-talk. Second, we mathematically modelled and computationally simulated this coupling between transcription and mRNA decay. Thanks to in silico experimentation, we found that two proteins involved in degradation (Ccr4-Not and Xrn1) were most likely also involved in transcription, and therefore the feedback mechanism. This result complements that of the first study and places both Ccr4-Not and Xrn1 as important proteins for cross-talk. Finally, we analysed the exonuclease Xrn1 in depth through genome-wide experiments. This study allowed us to conclude that Xrn1 is directly involved in transcription and influence both early and late RNA polymerase II-dependent transcription elongation. The results of this thesis have enabled us to come up with a model for how the cross-talk could work in yeast cells and allowed us to envision new hypotheses to explain the novel results.Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado U

Cost-effective HPC clustering for computer vision applications

We will present a cost-effective and flexible realization of high performance computing (HPC) clustering and its potential in solving computationally intensive problems in computer vision. The featured software foundation to support the parallel programming is the GNU parallel Knoppix package with message passing interface (MPI) based Octave, Python and C interface capabilities. The implementation is especially of interest in applications where the main objective is to reuse the existing hardware infrastructure and to maintain the overall budget cost. We will present the benchmark results and compare and contrast the performances of Octave and MATLAB

Confirmation of the Dietary Background of Beef from its Stable Isotope Signature

End of project reportConsumers are increasingly demanding information on the authenticity and source of the food they purchase. Molecular DNA-based technology allows animal identification, but without certification or a “paper-trail” but does not provide information about feed history or the production system under which the animal was reared. The stable isotopes of chemical elements (e.g.13C/12C, 15N/14N) are naturally present in animal tissue and reflect the isotopic composition of the diet. The overall aim of this project was to determine the feasibility of using the stable isotopic composition as an intrinsic, biochemical marker to gain information about feed components used in the production of beef. Factors likely to affect the isotopic signature such as source of tissue, duration of feeding and production systems were examined. It is expected that this highly innovative and original technique will permit the identification of country of origin and dietary history of beef and so greatly assist efforts to market Irish beef, particularly in lucrative European markets. Sequential sampling and stable isotope analysis of bovine tail hair and hoof revealed that the two tissues can provide a detailed and continuous record of animal dietary history. Because hair can be sampled repeatedly and noninvasively, we anticipate that this approach will also prove useful for the investigation of short-term wildlife movements and changes in dietary preferences

Introduction: Volumes

This special issue of the JIWS seeks to examine the topic of gendered constructions of space(s). How does space structure our understanding of gender? How does it participate in cultural constructions of race, class, and sexuality? What are the political and economic dimensions of the spaces that we construct and that construct us? In this issue we wanted to explore the role(s) that space plays in shaping and maintaining identities and power relations. Far from being neutral or self-evident, we take space to be a site and a means of cultural power, informed by a set of historically and culturally specific notions that are loaded in gender and class terms

On short time existence for Lagrangian mean curvature flow

We consider a short time existence problem motivated by a conjecture of Joyce (Conjectures on Bridgeland stability for Fukaya categories of Calabi–Yau manifolds, special Lagrangians, and Lagrangian mean curvature flow. arXiv:1401.4949, 2014). Specifically we prove that given any compact Lagrangian L⊂CnL⊂Cn with a finite number of singularities, each asymptotic to a pair of non-area-minimising, transversally intersecting Lagrangian planes, there is a smooth Lagrangian mean curvature flow existing for some positive time, that attains L as t↘0t↘0 as varifolds, and smoothly locally away from the singularities