1,795 research outputs found
Intangible Capital and Economic Growth
Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as 3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.
Detection and isolation of exotic Newcastle disease virus from field-collected flies.
Flies were collected by sweep net from the vicinity of two small groups of "backyard" poultry (10-20 chickens per group) that had been identified as infected with exotic Newcastle disease virus (family Paramyxoviridae, genus avulavirus, ENDV) in Los Angeles County, CA, during the 2002-2003 END outbreak. Collected flies were subdivided into pools and homogenized in brain-heart infusion broth with antibiotics. The separated supernatant was tested for the presence of ENDV by inoculation into embryonated chicken eggs. Exotic Newcastle disease virus was isolated from pools of Phaenicia cuprina (Wiedemann), Fannia canicularis (L.), and Musca domestica L., and it was identified by hemagglutination inhibition with Newcastle disease virus antiserum. Viral concentration in positive pools was low (<1 egg infectious dose50 per fly). Isolated virus demonstrated identical monoclonal antibody binding profiles as well as 99% sequence homology in the 635-bp fusion gene sequence compared with ENDV recovered from infected commercial egg layer poultry during the 2002 outbreak
Self-Weighing in Weight Management Interventions: A Systematic Review of Literature
Background
Self-weighing increases a person's self-awareness of current weight and weight patterns. Increased self-weighing frequency can help an individual prevent weight gain. Literature, however, is limited in describing variability in self-weighing strategies and how the variability is associated with weight management outcomes.
Aim
This review analyzed self-weighing in weight management interventions and the effects of self-weighing on weight and other outcomes.
Methods
Twenty-two articles from PubMed, CINAHL, Medline, PsychInfo, and Academic Search Premier were extracted for review.
Results
These 22 articles reported findings from 19 intervention trials, mostly on weight loss or weight gain prevention. The majority of the reviewed articles reported interventions that combined self-weighing with other self-monitoring strategies (64%), adopted daily self-weighing frequency (84%), and implemented interventions up to six months (59%). One-half of the articles mentioned that technology-enhanced or regular weight scales were given to study participants. Of the articles that provided efficacy data, 75% of self-weighing-only interventions and 67% of combined interventions demonstrated improved weight outcomes. No negative psychological effects were found.
Conclusions
Self-weighing is likely to improve weight outcomes, particularly when performed daily or weekly, without causing untoward adverse effects. Weight management interventions could consider including this strategy
Serum posaconazole levels among haematological cancer patients taking extended release tablets is affected by body weight and diarrhoea: single centre retrospective analysis
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111982/1/myc12339.pd
Enabling GPU Accelerated Computing in the SUNDIALS Time Integration Library
As part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a recent focus of
development efforts for the SUite of Nonlinear and DIfferential/ALgebraic
equation Solvers (SUNDIALS) has been to enable GPU-accelerated time integration
in scientific applications at extreme scales. This effort has resulted in
several new GPU-enabled implementations of core SUNDIALS data structures,
support for programming paradigms which are aware of the heterogeneous
architectures, and the introduction of utilities to provide new points of
flexibility. In this paper, we discuss our considerations, both internal and
external, when designing these new features and present the features
themselves. We also present performance results for several of the features on
the Summit supercomputer and early access hardware for the Frontier
supercomputer, which demonstrate negligible performance overhead resulting from
the additional infrastructure and significant speedups when using both NVIDIA
and AMD GPUs
Reducing Petroleum Consumption from Transportation
http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/workingpapers.htmlThe United States consumed more petroleum-based liquid fuel per capita than any other OECD- high-income country- 30 percent more than the second-highest country (Canada) and 40 percent more than the third-highest (Luxemburg). This paper examines the main channels through which reductions in U.S. oil consumption might take place: (a) increased fuel economy of existing vehicles, (b) increased use of non-petroleum-based low-carbon fuels, (c) alternatives to the internal combustion engine, and (d) reduced vehicles miles travelled. I then discuss how the policies for reducing petroleum consumption used in the US compare with the standard economics prescription for using a Pigouvian tax to deal with externalities. Taking into account that energy taxes are a political hot button in the United States, and also considering some evidence that consumers may not correctly value fuel economy, I offer some thoughts about the margins on which policy aimed at reducing petroleum consumption might usefully proceed
Parachute Compartment Drop Test Vehicle for Testing the Crew Exploration Vehicle's Parachute Assembly System
Though getting astronauts safely into orbit and beyond has long been one of NASA?s chief goals, their safe return has always been equally as important. The Crew Exploration Vehicle?s (CEV) Parachute Assembly System (CPAS) is designed to safely return astronauts to Earth on the next-generation manned spacecraft Orion. As one means for validating this system?s requirements and testing its functionality, a test article known as the Parachute Compartment Drop Test Vehicle (PC-DTV) will carry a fully-loaded yet truncated CPAS Parachute Compartment (PC) in a series of drop tests. Two aerodynamic profiles for the PC-DTV currently exist, though both share the same interior structure, and both have an Orion-representative weight of 20,800 lbf. Two extraction methods have been developed as well. The first (Cradle Monorail System 2 - CMS2) uses a sliding rail technique to release the PC-DTV midair, and the second (Modified DTV Sled; MDS) features a much less constrained separation method though slightly more complex. The decision as to which aerodynamic profile and extraction method to use is still not finalized. Additional CFD and stress analysis must be undertaken in order to determine the more desirable options, though at present the "boat tail" profile and the CMS2 extraction method seem to be the favored options in their respective categories. Fabrication of the PC-DTV and the selected extraction sled is set to begin in early October 2010 with an anticipated first drop test in mid-March 2011
Performance of explicit and IMEX MRI multirate methods on complex reactive flow problems within modern parallel adaptive structured grid frameworks
Large-scale multiphysics simulations are computationally challenging due to
the coupling of multiple processes with widely disparate time scales. The
advent of exascale computing systems exacerbates these challenges, since these
enable ever increasing size and complexity. Recently, there has been renewed
interest in developing multirate methods as a means to handle the large range
of time scales, as these methods may afford greater accuracy and efficiency
than more traditional approaches of using IMEX and low-order operator splitting
schemes. However, there have been few performance studies that compare
different classes of multirate integrators on complex application problems. We
study the performance of several newly developed multirate infinitesimal (MRI)
methods, implemented in the SUNDIALS solver package, on two reacting flow model
problems built on structured mesh frameworks. The first model revisits the work
of Emmet et al. (2014) on a compressible reacting flow problem with complex
chemistry that is implemented using BoxLib but where we now include comparisons
between a new explicit MRI scheme with the multirate spectral deferred
correction (SDC) methods in the original paper. The second problem uses the
same complex chemistry as the first problem, combined with a simplified flow
model, but run at a large spatial scale where explicit methods become
infeasible due to stability constraints. Two recently developed
implicit-explicit MRI multirate methods are tested. These methods rely on
advanced features of the AMReX framework on which the model is built, such as
multilevel grids and multilevel preconditioners. The results from these two
problems show that MRI multirate methods can offer significant performance
benefits on complex multiphysics application problems and that these methods
may be combined with advanced spatial discretization to compound the advantages
of both
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