Start-Up Costs in American Research Universities

Our report briefly summarizes findings from the 2002 Cornell Higher Education Research Institute survey of start-up costs at the over 220 universities classified as Research and Doctoral universities by the Carnegie Foundation in 1994. It reports the mean start-up cost packages across institutions for new assistant professors and senior faculty, broken down by institutional type (public/private), Carnegie classification and field (biology, chemistry, engineering, physics and astronomy) and also discuses the sources of funding for start-up costs

Development of a best practice statement on the use of ankle-foot orthoses following stroke in Scotland

A National Health Service Quality Improvement Scotland (NHS QIS) scoping exercise in 2007 identified the use of ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs) following stroke as a clinical improvement priority, leading to the development of a best practice statement (BPS) on AFO use after stroke. This paper outlines the development process of the BPS which is available from NHS QIS. The authors were involved in the development of the BPS as part of a working group that included practitioners from the fields of orthotics, physiotherapy, stroke nursing and bioengineering, and staff of NHS QIS and a patient representative. In consultation with an NHS QIS health services researcher, the authors undertook a systematic literature review to evidence where possible the recommendations made in the BPS. Where evidence was unavailable, consensus was reached by the expert working group. As the BPS was designed for the non-specialist and non-orthotic practitioner the authors also developed educational resources which were included within the BPS to aid the understanding of the principles underpinning orthotic design and prescription. The BPS has been widely distributed throughout the health service in Scotland and is available electronically at no cost via the NHS QIS website. At part of an ongoing evaluation of the impact of the BPS on the quality of orthotic provision, NHS QIS has invited feedback regarding successes and challenges to implementation

Information Inertia

We show that aversion to risk and ambiguity leads to information inertia when investors process public news about future asset values. Optimal portfolios do not always depend on news that is worse than expected; hence, the equilibrium stock price does not reflect this news. This informational inefficiency is more severe when there is more risk and ambiguity, but disappears when investors are risk neutral or the news is about idiosyncratic risk. Information inertia leads to time-series momentum and is consistent with low trading activity of households. An ex-ante ambiguity premium helps explain the macro and earnings announcement premium

Information Inertia

We study how information about an asset affects optimal portfolios and equilibrium asset prices when investors are not sure about the model that predicts future asset values and thus treat the information as ambiguous. We show that this ambiguity leads to optimal portfolios that are insensitive to news even though there are no information processing costs or other market frictions. In equilibrium, we show that stock prices may not react to public information that is worse than expected and this mispricing of bad news leads to profitable trading strategies based on public information

Personalising Twitter communication : an evaluation of ‘rotation-curation’ for enhancing social media engagement within higher education

Social media content generated by learning communities within universities is serving both pedagogical and marketing purposes. There is currently a dearth of literature related to social media use at the departmental level within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This study explores the multi-voiced interactions of a UK Psychology department’s ‘rotation curation’ approach to using Twitter. An in-depth analysis of a corpus of 4342 tweets by 58 curators (14 staff, 41 students, and 3 guest curators) was carried out using a combination of computer-assisted and manual techniques to generate a quantitative content analysis. The interactions received (e.g. retweets and favorites) and type of content posted (e.g. original tweets, retweets and replies) varied by curator type. Student curators were more likely to gain interactions from other students in comparison to staff. This paper discusses the benefits and potential limitations of a multi-voiced ‘rotation curation’ approach to social media management

Geodynamics and Rate of Volcanism on Massive Earth-like Planets

We provide estimates of volcanism versus time for planets with Earth-like composition and masses from 0.25 to 25 times Earth, as a step toward predicting atmospheric mass on extrasolar rocky planets. Volcanism requires melting of the silicate mantle. We use a thermal evolution model, calibrated against Earth, in combination with standard melting models, to explore the dependence of convection-driven decompression mantle melting on planet mass. Here we show that (1) volcanism is likely to proceed on massive planets with plate tectonics over the main-sequence lifetime of the parent star; (2) crustal thickness (and melting rate normalized to planet mass) is weakly dependent on planet mass; (3) stagnant lid planets live fast (they have higher rates of melting than their plate tectonic counterparts early in their thermal evolution) but die young (melting shuts down after a few Gyr); (4) plate tectonics may not operate on high mass planets because of the production of buoyant crust which is difficult to subduct; and (5) melting is necessary but insufficient for efficient volcanic degassing - volatiles partition into the earliest, deepest melts, which may be denser than the residue and sink to the base of the mantle on young, massive planets. Magma must also crystallize at or near the surface, and the pressure of overlying volatiles must be fairly low, if volatiles are to reach the surface. If volcanism is detected in the Tau Ceti system, and tidal forcing can be shown to be weak, this would be evidence for plate tectonics.Comment: Revised version, accepted by Astrophysical Journa

Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time

In today's databases, previous query answers rarely benefit answering future queries. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we change this paradigm in an approximate query processing (AQP) context. We make the following observation: the answer to each query reveals some degree of knowledge about the answer to another query because their answers stem from the same underlying distribution that has produced the entire dataset. Exploiting and refining this knowledge should allow us to answer queries more analytically, rather than by reading enormous amounts of raw data. Also, processing more queries should continuously enhance our knowledge of the underlying distribution, and hence lead to increasingly faster response times for future queries. We call this novel idea---learning from past query answers---Database Learning. We exploit the principle of maximum entropy to produce answers, which are in expectation guaranteed to be more accurate than existing sample-based approximations. Empowered by this idea, we build a query engine on top of Spark SQL, called Verdict. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world query traces from a large customer of a major database vendor. Our results demonstrate that Verdict supports 73.7% of these queries, speeding them up by up to 23.0x for the same accuracy level compared to existing AQP systems.Comment: This manuscript is an extended report of the work published in ACM SIGMOD conference 201

Unprecedented Alexandrium blooms in a previously low biotoxin risk area of Tasmania, Australia.

During October 2012, a shipment of blue mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) from the poorly monitored east coast of Tasmania, Australia, was tested by Japanese import authorities and found to be contaminated with unacceptable levels of Paralytic Shellfish Toxins (PSTs; 10 mg/kg). Subsequently local oysters, scallops, clams, the viscera of abalone and rock lobsters were also found to be contaminated. This led to a global product recall and loss to the local economy of AUD 23M. Following low toxicity during 2013 and 2014 and implementation of minimal shellfish farm closures, a more severe bloom event occurred during July-November 2015 and again June-September 2016 (up to 300,000 Alexandrium cells/L; 24 mg/kg PST in mussels, 6 mg/kg in Crassostrea gigas oysters), also causing 4 human illnesses resulting in hospitalization after consumption of wild shellfish. While Alexandrium tamarense had been detected in low concentrations in southeastern Australia since 1987, all cultured strains belonged to the mostly non-toxic group 5 (now designated A. australiense; detected since 1987) and weakly toxic group 4 (A. pacificum; detected in 1997). In contrast, the 2012 to 2016 outbreaks were dominated by highly toxic group 1 (A. fundyense) never detected previously in the Australian region. Molecular analyses suggest that A. fundyense may have been a cryptic ribotype previously present in Tasmania, but newly stimulated by altered water column stratification conditions driven by changing rainfall and temperature patterns. Increased seafood and plankton monitoring of the area now include the implementation of Alexandrium qPCR, routine Neogen™ immunological and HPLC PST tests, but ultimately may also drive change in harvesting strategies and aquaculture species selection by the local seafood industry

VerdictDB: Universalizing Approximate Query Processing

Despite 25 years of research in academia, approximate query processing (AQP) has had little industrial adoption. One of the major causes of this slow adoption is the reluctance of traditional vendors to make radical changes to their legacy codebases, and the preoccupation of newer vendors (e.g., SQL-on-Hadoop products) with implementing standard features. Additionally, the few AQP engines that are available are each tied to a specific platform and require users to completely abandon their existing databases---an unrealistic expectation given the infancy of the AQP technology. Therefore, we argue that a universal solution is needed: a database-agnostic approximation engine that will widen the reach of this emerging technology across various platforms. Our proposal, called VerdictDB, uses a middleware architecture that requires no changes to the backend database, and thus, can work with all off-the-shelf engines. Operating at the driver-level, VerdictDB intercepts analytical queries issued to the database and rewrites them into another query that, if executed by any standard relational engine, will yield sufficient information for computing an approximate answer. VerdictDB uses the returned result set to compute an approximate answer and error estimates, which are then passed on to the user or application. However, lack of access to the query execution layer introduces significant challenges in terms of generality, correctness, and efficiency. This paper shows how VerdictDB overcomes these challenges and delivers up to 171$\times$ speedup (18.45$\times$ on average) for a variety of existing engines, such as Impala, Spark SQL, and Amazon Redshift, while incurring less than 2.6% relative error. VerdictDB is open-sourced under Apache License.Comment: Extended technical report of the paper that appeared in Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Management of Data, pp. 1461-1476. ACM, 201