The Spread of Anti-Trafficking Policies - Evidence from a New Index

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking policies. We develop a new index measuring governments’ overall anti-trafficking policies for 177 countries over the 2000-2009 period. We also assess a country’s level of compliance in the three main constituent dimensions of anti-trafficking policies – prosecution, protection and prevention. Employing a spatial autoregressive model, we find that, with the exception of victim protection measures, anti-trafficking policies diffuse across contiguous countries and main trading partners due to externality effects. We find evidence for learning or emulation effects in all policy domains, with countries looking toward peers with similar political views or cultural values. Surprisingly, major destination countries do not seem to exert pressure on relevant main countries of origin or transit to ratchet up their policies.human trafficking, human rights, spatial dependence of policies

The Spread of Anti-Trafficking Policies - Evidence from a New Index

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking policies. We develop a new index measuring governments' overall anti-trafficking policies for 177 countries over the 2000-2009 period. We also assess a country's level of compliance in the three main constituent dimensions of anti-trafficking policies - prosecution, protection and prevention. Employing a spatial autoregressive model, we find that, with the exception of victim protection measures, anti-trafficking policies diffuse across contiguous countries and main trading partners due to externality effects. We find evidence for learning or emulation effects in all policy domains, with countries looking toward peers with similar political views or cultural values. Surprisingly, major destination countries do not seem to exert pressure on relevant main countries of origin or transit to ratchet up their policies. --human trafficking,human rights,spatial dependence of policies

Next-to-leading Order Calculation of the Color-Octet 3S1 Gluon Fragmentation Function for Heavy Quarkonium

The short-distance coefficients for the color-octet 3S1 term in the fragmentation function for a gluon to split into heavy quarkonium states is calculated to order alpha_s^2. The gauge-invariant definition of the fragmentation function by Collins and Soper is employed. Ultraviolet divergences are removed using the MS-bar renormalization procedure. The longitudinal term in the fragmentation function agrees with a previous calculation by Beneke and Rothstein. The next-to-leading order correction to the transverse term disagrees with a previous calculation.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Charmonium Production in High Energy Collisions

In recent years, there have been significant developments in heavy quarkonium production, both in theory and in experiment. These developments may have important implications for the use of charmonium as a probe in heavy-ion collisions. A summary of these developments is presented below. Those interested in more details are referred to a recent review article by Braaten, Fleming, and Yuan.Comment: 7 pages, 1 Postscript figure, uses epsfig.sty and espcrc1.sty, invited talk presented at Quark Matter 9

9,9-Dioctyl-2,7-bis­(4,4,5,5-tetra­methyl-1,3,2-dioxaborolan-2-yl)-9H-fluorene

In the title mol­ecule, C41H64B2O4, the fluorene unit is essentially planar and the two octyl chains attached to the central C atom inhibit the mol­ecule from engaging in inter­molecular aromatic inter­actions. One of the octyl chains adopts a fully extended conformation, whereas the second incorporates a single gauche conformation. Of the two pinacolatoboronate groups attached at the 2,7-positions, one is partly disordered; one ring C atom and all four methyl groups are disordered equally over two positions

Quarkonium Wave Functions at the Origin

We tabulate values of the radial Schr\"{o}dinger wave function or its first nonvanishing derivative at zero quark-antiquark separation, for $c\bar{c}$, $c\bar{b}$, and $b\bar{b}$ levels that lie below, or just above, flavor threshold. These quantities are essential inputs for evaluating production cross sections for quarkonium states.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX, no figure

Color and Spin in Quarkonium Production

I describe the NRQCD factorization approach to the inclusive production of heavy quarkonium, contrasting it with the color-singlet and color evaporation models. These approaches differ dramatically in their assumptions about the roles played by color and spin in the production process. They also differ dramatically in their predictions for the production of charmonium at large transverse momentum.Comment: 17 pages, LATEX with style file sprocl.st

Readaptation of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex Relieves the Mal De Debarquement Syndrome

The Mal de Debarquement Syndrome (MdDS), a continuous feeling of swaying, rocking and/or bobbing, generally follows travel on the sea. The associated symptoms cause considerable distress. The underlying neural mechanisms are unknown, and to date there have been no effective treatments for this condition. Results in monkeys and humans suggested that MdDS was caused by maladaptation of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) to roll of the head during rotation. We studied twenty-four subjects with persistent MdDS (3 males, 21 females; 19.1 ± 33 months). Physical findings included body oscillation at 0.2Hz, oscillating vertical nystagmus when the head was rolled from side-to-side in darkness, and unilateral rotation during the Fukuda stepping test. We posited that the maladapted rocking and the physical symptoms could be diminished or extinguished by readapting the VOR. Subjects were treated by rolling the head from side-to-side while watching a rotating full-field visual stimulus. Seventeen of the twenty-four subjects had a complete or substantial recovery on average for approximately one year. Six were initially better, but the symptoms recurred. One subject did not respond to treatment. Thus, readaptation of the VOR has led to a cure or substantial improvement in 70% of the subjects with MdDS. We conclude that the adaptive processes associated with roll-while-rotating are responsible for producing MdDS, and that the symptoms can be reduced or resolved by readapting the VOR

Breast density classification with deep convolutional neural networks

Breast density classification is an essential part of breast cancer screening. Although a lot of prior work considered this problem as a task for learning algorithms, to our knowledge, all of them used small and not clinically realistic data both for training and evaluation of their models. In this work, we explore the limits of this task with a data set coming from over 200,000 breast cancer screening exams. We use this data to train and evaluate a strong convolutional neural network classifier. In a reader study, we find that our model can perform this task comparably to a human expert