Strong coprimality and strong irreducibility of Alexander polynomials

A polynomial f(t) with rational coefficients is strongly irreducible if f(t^k) is irreducible for all positive integers k. Likewise, two polynomials f and g are strongly coprime if f(t^k) and g(t^l) are relatively prime for all positive integers k and l. We provide some sufficient conditions for strong irreducibility and prove that the Alexander polynomials of twist knots are pairwise strongly coprime and that most of them are strongly irreducible. We apply these results to describe the structure of the subgroup of the rational knot concordance group generated by the twist knots and to provide an explicit set of knots which represent linearly independent elements deep in the solvable filtration of the knot concordance group.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Dosimetric Tranferability of a Medical Linear Accelerator Mounted Mini-Beam Collimator

The goal of this study was the dosimetric characterization of a mini-beam collimator on three clinically beam matched Varian iX linear accelerators. Measurements of the beam quality (%DD(10)), peak-to-valley dose ratio (PVDR), collimator factor (CF), and relative output factor (OF) were carried out for 2 cm x 2 cm, 3 cm x 3 cm, 4 cm x 4 cm, and 5 cm x 5 cm mini-beam collimated 6 MV fields on each linear accelerator. As well, Monte Carlo simulation of the mini-beam collimated fields were used to link the measurement results to a validated linear accelerator model. The quality of the mini-beam collimated field was clinically equivalent to that of the open field. Changes in the mini-beam collimated field in response to changes in both field size and collimator inclination were consistent across all three linear accelerators. However, PVDR, collimator factors, and relative output factors varied in excess of the measurement uncertainty, revealing a difference in the mini-beam collimated fields of each linear accelerator. The change in PVDR was proportional to that of the collimator factor and relative output factor. The Monte Carlo simulations showed that variation in the full-width half-maximum of the linear accelerators’ electron beam incident on the Bremsstrahlung target correlated to the variation in collimator factor and PVDR across the accelerators. These results demonstrate that while the mini-beam collimated field varies across linear accelerators, the effect can be accounted for in the linear accelerator model, allowing the planning and delivery of mini-beam collimated fields using medical linear accelerators

Building Capacity in Your Library for Research Data Management Support (Or What We Learned From Offering to Review DMPs)

In our evolving effort to build infrastructure and support around research data management needs, we found traction in launching a data management plan review service. In doing so, we have been able to achieve multiple goals: 1) support the research process; 2) create active learning situations for subject liaisons to engage in and learn how to support data management planning; 3) find resonance with campus‐sponsored research officers; 4) collaborate with other campus research support groups including campus IT, the institutional review board, and statistical consulting; 5) and participate in the national dialogue about the tensions of data management

Where Do We Go From Here: Choosing a Framework for Assessing Research Data Services and Training

Research data management has become a critical issue for campus researchers, funding agencies, and libraries, who have made substantial investments of time, energy, and resources into support for managing and sharing data. As data management programs proliferate, however, assessment of research data services has become a notorious challenge for libraries. How can we know—and demonstrate—that our efforts are having an impact, and how can we learn to make them even more effective? In this session, we will present a survey of several frameworks for assessing research data management services. We will lead a discussion about the application of different frameworks for assessing or auditing existing skill sets, external facing services, and capacity to support an array of research data services. This discussion will be grounded in a demonstration of how we applied one framework to audit the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries’s “training ground” model, which serves the dual purpose of developing competencies within our librarians and supporting researchers in their needs to manage, preserve, and share research assets. Through an active discussion of our efforts, and the efforts of libraries around the world, we can chart a course for effective research data management that can help guide libraries already deep into the process as well as those just getting their feet wet. Note: This presentation and conference paper is derived in part from the following publication: Davis, H. M., & Cross, W. M. (2015).Using a data management plan review service as a training ground for librarians. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(2), eP1243

Weaving Entities into Relations: From Page Retrieval to Relation Mining on the Web

With its sheer amount of information, the Web is clearly an important frontier for data mining. While Web mining must start with content on the Web, there is no effective ``search-based'' mechanism to help sifting through the information on the Web. Our goal is to provide a such online search-based facility for supporting query primitives, upon which Web mining applications can be built. As a first step, this paper aims at entity-relation discovery, or E-R discovery, as a useful function-- to weave scattered entities on the Web into coherent relations. To begin with, as our proposal, we formalize the concept of E-R discovery. Further, to realize E-R discovery, as our main thesis, we abstract tuple ranking-- the essential challenge of E-R discovery-- as pattern-based cooccurrence analysis. Finally, as our key insight, we observe that such relation mining shares the same core functions as traditional page-retrieval systems, which enables us to build the new E-R discovery upon today's search engines, almost for free. We report our system prototype and testbed, WISDM-ER, with real Web corpus. Our case studies have demonstrated a high promise, achieving 83%-91% accuracy for real benchmark queries-- and thus the real possibilities of enabling ad-hoc Web mining tasks with online E-R discovery

Vertical Orientation in a New Gobioid Fish from New Britain

While visiting Rabaul, New Britain, during Cruise 6 of the Stanford University vessel "Te Vega" we observed and collected specimens of a small gobioid fish that swam and hovered vertically, with its head up, in midwater close to pockets in the wall of an underwater cliff at depths below 30 feet. Many kinds of fishes, for example scorpaenids and cottoids, are known to orient vertically in contact with a substrate. There are fewer examples of vertically oriented fishes in midwater; among the best known are the seahorses and centriscids. Observations have also been made on vertically oriented mesopelagic fishes. Barham (1966) has seen myctophids hovering vertically, as well as swimming upward and downward. Paralepidids are also known to be vertical swimmers (Peres, 1958; Bernard, 1958; Cohen, personal observations). We have found, however, no previous record of this habit in gobioid fishes and our observations are presented herewith. We have been unable to identify the fish with any known form, and we describe it as a ne

THE ECONOMIC THRESHOLD FOR GRASSHOPPER CONTROL ON PUBLIC RANGELANDS

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is responsible for controlling grasshopper populations on public rangelands. Under current guidelines, control of grasshoppers on rangeland should occur if grasshopper densities are at least eight per square yard. This article evaluates the concept of an economic threshold relative to the value of forage saved from destruction during a grasshopper outbreak. It is shown that financial justification for treating grasshopper outbreaks depends upon grasshopper density, rangeland productivity, climate factors, livestock cost and return relationships, and the efficacy of treatment options.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

Striking the Right Balance When Users are Good at IT Too!: Partnering for Enterprise System Success

Enterprise-level information system (IS) implementations are risky endeavors that require the active engagement of diverse parties from within the organization to meet the technical and functional requirements of the implementation, and mitigate possible resistance to the implemented system. Past research on IS implementation has traditionally pointed to the IT department as the sole source of technical competence, and confined the potential contribution of the user base to functional expertise. Furthermore, this line of research consistently identifies the IT department as the leaders of such projects, further confining the user base to sideline consulting roles during these initiatives. However, today’s business professionals increasingly possess IT competence and capability of contributing to the technical side of IS implementations. This study focuses on the balance of IT competence within the multi-functional enterprise-level IS implementation team, brought on by a more technically competent user base, and examines its impact on project success

The United States Chiropractic Workforce: An alternative or complement to primary care?

UnlabelledBackgroundIn the United States (US) a shortage of primary care physicians has become evident. Other health care providers such as chiropractors might help address some of the nation's primary care needs simply by being located in areas of lesser primary care resources. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the distribution of the chiropractic workforce across the country and compare it to that of primary care physicians.MethodsWe used nationally representative data to estimate the per 100,000 capita supply of chiropractors and primary care physicians according to the 306 predefined Hospital Referral Regions. Multiple variable Poisson regression was used to examine the influence of population characteristics on the supply of both practitioner-types.ResultsAccording to these data, there are 74,623 US chiropractors and the per capita supply of chiropractors varies more than 10-fold across the nation. Chiropractors practice in areas with greater supply of primary care physicians (Pearson's correlation 0.17, p-value < 0.001) and appear to be more responsive to market conditions (i.e. more heavily influenced by population characteristics) in regards to practice location than primary care physicians.ConclusionThese findings suggest that chiropractors practice in areas of greater primary care physician supply. Therefore chiropractors may be functioning in more complementary roles to primary care as opposed to an alternative point of access

Support When It Counts: Library Roles in Public Access to Federally Funded Research

In November 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would begin enforcing its April 2008 mandate of public access to NIH-funded research by delaying processing of investigators’ grants reporting noncompliant publications. In response, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries offered to assist the University’s sponsored research administration in supporting NCSU researchers who had publications stemming from NIH funding and had not achieved compliance. Since the 2008 NIH mandate, over 1,000 articles based on NIH-funding have been published by NCSU across research areas including veterinary medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, textiles, design, math, and statistics. Many were published in journals which did not automatically deposit papers to meet NIH requirements. Although familiar with biomedical literature, author agreements, and open access, we did not fully grasp the complex web of investigator, author, publisher, institution, and funder relations involved in this mandate until we were deeply engaged in the process and gained access to the compliance monitoring data. In this paper, we discuss the costs and benefits of library support for authors needing to attain compliance with an eye toward how this support may be scaled up if other federal funding agencies follow suit. We share practical strategies for supporting compliance efforts for individual researchers and at the campuswide level, as well as training newly funded researchers to facilitate future compliance. We discuss the advantages of leveraging existing relationships with publishers to help their researchers, strategies for getting involved in compliance support, and insights on how to skill-up and scale-up when engaging in this part of the research process