The Return of Business Creation

Freshly released government data show that new business formation rebounded in 2011, after four years of decline, from the depths of the Great Recession. This is a welcome development -- new businesses are the engine of job creation in the United States economy and an important source of innovation and productivity. Perhaps most importantly, the rise in new business formation between 2010 and 2011 was geographically dispersed throughout the United States.While the rise of new business creation in 2011 is a significant development -- it is the first annual gain in five years and the largest percentage annual increase in nearly a decade -- the bulk of this paper examines two classes of new businesses that most closely resemble entrepreneurship: companies less than one year old with one to four employees and those with fine to nine. This analysis finds that the smallest of these new firms represent most of the increase in firm formation in 2011:* New companies with one to four employees comprise the vast majority of new businesses formed each year, accounting for, on average, 86 percent of new firms since the late 1970s in the BDS data. * Job creation at new businesses of all sizes increased by 4.3 percent, and rose by 5.4 percent in new companies with one to four employees, reversing four consecutive years of decline for those smallest companies. * Companies less than one year old with one tofour employees have created, on average, more than 1 million jobs per year over the past three decades; those with five to nine employees have added, on average, half a million jobs per year. * With a promise of more detailed analysis infuture reports, this paper presents maps that illustrate the increased share of new business formation in most states and metro areas across the nation

Analyzing the Language of Food on Social Media

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have most predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps, semantics-preserving wordclouds and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in IEEE Big Data 201

Influence of solvent polarity on the structure of drop-cast electroactive tetra(aniline)-surfactant thin films

The structure of drop-cast thin films of an electroactive oligomer–surfactant complex can be tuned through variation of solvent polarity.</p

Exploring redox states, doping and ordering of electroactive star-shaped oligo(aniline)s

We have prepared a simple star‐shaped oligo(aniline) (TDPB) and characterised it in detail by MALDI‐TOF MS, UV/Vis/NIR spectroscopy, time‐dependent DFT, cyclic voltammetry and EPR spectroscopy. TDPB is part of an underdeveloped class of π‐conjugated molecules with great potential for organic electronics, display and sensor applications. It is redox active and reacts with acids to form radical cations. Acid‐doped TDPB shows behaviour similar to discotic liquid crystals, with X‐ray scattering investigations revealing columnar self‐assembled arrays. The combination of unpaired electrons and supramolecular stacking suggests that star‐shaped oligo(aniline)s like TDPB have the potential to form conducting nanowires and organic magnetic materials

Pre-Conceptual Design of a Fluoride-Salt-Cooled Small Modular Advanced High Temperature Reactor (SmAHTR)

This document presents the results of a study conducted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory during 2010 to explore the feasibility of small modular fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactors (FHRs). A preliminary reactor system concept, SmATHR (for Small modular Advanced High Temperature Reactor) is described, along with an integrated high-temperature thermal energy storage or salt vault system. The SmAHTR is a 125 MWt, integral primary, liquid salt cooled, coated particle-graphite fueled, low-pressure system operating at 700 C. The system employs passive decay heat removal and two-out-of-three , 50% capacity, subsystem redundancy for critical functions. The reactor vessel is sufficiently small to be transportable on standard commercial tractor-trailer transport vehicles. Initial transient analyses indicated the transition from normal reactor operations to passive decay heat removal is accomplished in a manner that preserves robust safety margins at all times during the transient. Numerous trade studies and trade-space considerations are discussed, along with the resultant initial system concept. The current concept is not optimized. Work remains to more completely define the overall system with particular emphasis on refining the final fuel/core configuration, salt vault configuration, and integrated system dynamics and safety behavior

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