Three reflections

Professor Cranfield contributes three short biblical reflections: considering points of contact between the parable of the Good Samaritan and an incident recorded in 2 Chronicles; some points of issue with Francis Watson’s Paul and the Hermeneutics of Faith; and thoughts on ‘the works of the law’ in Romans 3:20, and on Romans, rather than Galatians, being the best way into a study of Paul’s theology

Pesticides and health: A review of evidence on health effects, valuation of risks, and benefit‐cost analysis

In this paper, we provide reviews of recent scientific findings on health effects and preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, and the role of benefit‐cost analysis in policies related to pesticides. Our reviews reveal that whereas the focus of the health literature has been on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, e.g. farmers, the literature on preference elicitation has focused on those with indirect exposure, e.g. consumers. Our discussion of pesticides policies emphasizes the need to clarify the rationale for regulation and the role of risk perceptions in benefit‐cost analysis, and stress the importance of inter‐disciplinary research in this area

Ecological drivers of helminth infection patterns in the Virunga Massif mountain gorilla population

The Virunga Massif mountain gorilla population has been periodically monitored since the early 1970s, with gradually increasing effort. The population declined drastically in the 1970s, but the numbers stabilized in the 1980s. Since then, the population has been steadily increasing within their limited habitat fragment that is surrounded by a dense human population. We examined fecal samples collected during the Virunga 2015–2016 surveys in monitored and unmonitored gorilla groups and quantified strongylid and tapeworm infections using egg counts per gram to determine environmental and host factors that shape these helminth infections. We showed that higher strongylid infections were present in gorilla groups with smaller size of the 500-m buffered minimum-convex polygon (MCP) of detected nest sites per gorilla group, but in higher gorilla densities and inhabiting vegetation types occurring at higher elevations with higher precipitation and lower temperatures. On the contrary, the impact of monitoring (habituation) was minor, detected in tapeworms and only when in the interaction with environmental variables and MCP area. Our results suggest that the Virunga mountain gorilla population may be partially regulated by strongylid nematodes at higher gorilla densities. New health challenges are probably emerging among mountain gorillas because of the success of conservation efforts, as manifested by significant increases in gorilla numbers in recent decades, but few possibilities for the population expansion due to limited amounts of habitat

The ATLAS Data Acquisition and High-Level Trigger: Concept, Design and Status

The Trigger and Data Acquisition system (TDAQ) of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider is based on a multi-level selection process and a hierarchical acquisition tree. The system, consisting of a combination of custom electronics and commercial products from the computing and telecommunication industry, is required to provide an online selection power of 105 and a total throughput in the range of Terabit/sec. This paper introduces the basic system requirements and concepts, describes the architecture of the system, discusses the basic measurements supporting the validity of the design and reports on the actual status of construction and installation

The ATLAS Trigger/DAQ Authorlist, version 1.0

This is a reference document giving the ATLAS Trigger/DAQ author list, version 1.0 of 20 Nov 2008

The ATLAS trigger - high-level trigger commissioning and operation during early data taking

The ATLAS experiment is one of the two general-purpose experiments due to start operation soon at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC will collide protons at a centre of mass energy of 14~TeV, with a bunch-crossing rate of 40~MHz. The ATLAS three-level trigger will reduce this input rate to match the foreseen offline storage capability of 100-200~Hz. This paper gives an overview of the ATLAS High Level Trigger focusing on the system design and its innovative features. We then present the ATLAS trigger strategy for the initial phase of LHC exploitation. Finally, we report on the valuable experience acquired through in-situ commissioning of the system where simulated events were used to exercise the trigger chain. In particular we show critical quantities such as event processing times, measured in a large-scale HLT farm using a complex trigger menu

EXECUTIVE PAY AND PERFORMANCE IN PORTUGUESE LISTED COMPANIES

This essay analyses the relationship between corporate governance practices and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) wages from a sample of Portuguese listed companies over the period from 2002-2011. The relationship between CEO total compensation and shareholders return, firm characteristics, CEO characteristics, board of directors and shareholders characteristics is analysed. It is found that firm specific factors accounts for the majority of the variance in total CEO pay, while firm performance accounts for less than 5%. It is also found that the CEO characteristics, board of directors’ structures, and shareholders features are related with the CEO pay. The policy implications of these results are then derived

Performance of the final Event Builder for the ATLAS Experiment

Event data from proton-proton collisions at the LHC will be selected by the ATLAS experiment in a three level trigger system, which reduces the initial bunch crossing rate of 40 MHz at its first two trigger levels (LVL1+LVL2) to ~3 kHz. At this rate the Event-Builder collects the data from all Read-Out system PCs (ROSs) and provides fully assembled events to the the Event-Filter (EF), which is the third level trigger, to achieve a further rate reduction to ~200 Hz for permanent storage. The Event-Builder is based on a farm of O(100) PCs, interconnected via Gigabit Ethernet to O(150) ROSs. These PCs run Linux and multi-threaded software applications implemented in C++. All the ROSs and one third of the Event-Builder PCs are already installed and commissioned. We report on performance tests on this initial system, which show promising results to reach the final data throughput required for the ATLAS experiment