The CMS Integration Grid Testbed

The CMS Integration Grid Testbed (IGT) comprises USCMS Tier-1 and Tier-2 hardware at the following sites: the California Institute of Technology, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Florida at Gainesville. The IGT runs jobs using the Globus Toolkit with a DAGMan and Condor-G front end. The virtual organization (VO) is managed using VO management scripts from the European Data Grid (EDG). Gridwide monitoring is accomplished using local tools such as Ganglia interfaced into the Globus Metadata Directory Service (MDS) and the agent based Mona Lisa. Domain specific software is packaged and installed using the Distrib ution After Release (DAR) tool of CMS, while middleware under the auspices of the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT) is distributed using Pacman. During a continuo us two month span in Fall of 2002, over 1 million official CMS GEANT based Monte Carlo events were generated and returned to CERN for analysis while being demonstrated at SC2002. In this paper, we describe the process that led to one of the world's first continuously available, functioning grids.Comment: CHEP 2003 MOCT01

Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law

Gindis, David, Ernst Freund as Precursor of the Rational Study of Corporate Law (October 27, 2017). Journal of Institutional Economics, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2905547, doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2905547The rise of large business corporations in the late 19th century compelled many American observers to admit that the nature of the corporation had yet to be understood. Published in this context, Ernst Freund's little-known The Legal Nature of Corporations (1897) was an original attempt to come to terms with a new legal and economic reality. But it can also be described, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, as the earliest example of the rational study of corporate law. The paper shows that Freund had the intuitions of an institutional economist, and engaged in what today would be called comparative institutional analysis. Remarkably, his argument that the corporate form secures property against insider defection and against outsiders anticipated recent work on entity shielding and capital lock-in, and can be read as an early contribution to what today would be called the theory of the firm.Peer reviewe

Random walk with barriers: Diffusion restricted by permeable membranes

Restrictions to molecular motion by barriers (membranes) are ubiquitous in biological tissues, porous media and composite materials. A major challenge is to characterize the microstructure of a material or an organism nondestructively using a bulk transport measurement. Here we demonstrate how the long-range structural correlations introduced by permeable membranes give rise to distinct features of transport. We consider Brownian motion restricted by randomly placed and oriented permeable membranes and focus on the disorder-averaged diffusion propagator using a scattering approach. The renormalization group solution reveals a scaling behavior of the diffusion coefficient for large times, with a characteristically slow inverse square root time dependence. The predicted time dependence of the diffusion coefficient agrees well with Monte Carlo simulations in two dimensions. Our results can be used to identify permeable membranes as restrictions to transport in disordered materials and in biological tissues, and to quantify their permeability and surface area.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; origin of dispersion clarified, refs adde

Landscape science: a Russian geographical tradition

The Russian geographical tradition of landscape science (landshaftovedenie) is analyzed with particular reference to its initiator, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876-1950). The differences between prevailing Russian and Western concepts of landscape in geography are discussed, and their common origins in German geographical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are delineated. It is argued that the principal differences are accounted for by a number of factors, of which Russia's own distinctive tradition in environmental science deriving from the work of V. V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903), the activities of certain key individuals (such as Berg and C. O. Sauer), and the very different social and political circumstances in different parts of the world appear to be the most significant. At the same time it is noted that neither in Russia nor in the West have geographers succeeded in specifying an agreed and unproblematic understanding of landscape, or more broadly in promoting a common geographical conception of human-environment relationships. In light of such uncertainties, the latter part of the article argues for closer international links between the variant landscape traditions in geography as an important contribution to the quest for sustainability

Eocene extension in Idaho generated massive sediment floods into the Franciscan trench and into the Tyee, Great Valley, and Green River basins

The Franciscan Complex accretionary prism was assembled during an similar to 165-m.y.-long period of subduction of Pacific Ocean plates beneath the western margin of the North American plate. In such fossil subduction complexes, it is generally difficult to reconstruct details of the accretion of continent-derived sediments and to evaluate the factors that controlled accretion. New detrital zircon U-Pb ages indicate that much of the major Coastal belt subunit of the Franciscan Complex represents a massive, relatively brief, surge of near-trench deposition and accretion during Eocene time (ca. 53-49 Ma). Sediments were sourced mainly from the distant Idaho Batholith region rather than the nearby Sierra Nevada. Idaho detritus also fed the Great Valley forearc basin of California (ca. 53-37 Ma), the Tyee forearc basin of coastal Oregon (49 to ca. 36 Ma), and the greater Green River lake basin of Wyoming (50-47 Ma). Plutonism in the Idaho Batholith spanned 98-53 Ma in a contractional setting; it was abruptly superseded by major extension in the Bitterroot, Anaconda, Clearwater, and Priest River metamorphic core complexes (53-40 Ma) and by major volcanism in the Challis volcanic field (51-43 Ma). This extensional tectonism apparently deformed and uplifted a broad region, shedding voluminous sediments toward depocenters to the west and southeast. In the Franciscan Coastal belt, the major increase in sediment input apparently triggered a pulse of massive accretion, a pulse ultimately controlled by continental tectonism far within the interior of the North American plate, rather than by some tectonic event along the plate boundary itself.Keywords: Northern California, Oregon Coast Range, Subduction, Cordillera, Evolution, Erosion, Mountains, Provenance, Batholith, Constraint

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies from the CHARGE consortium identifies common variants associated with carotid intima media thickness and plaque

Carotid intima media thickness (cIMT) and plaque determined by ultrasonography are established measures of subclinical atherosclerosis that each predicts future cardiovascular disease events. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association data in 31,211 participants of European ancestry from nine large studies in the setting of the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) Consortium. We then sought additional evidence to support our findings among 11,273 individuals using data from seven additional studies. In the combined meta-analysis, we identified three genomic regions associated with common carotid intima media thickness and two different regions associated with the presence of carotid plaque (P < 5 × 10 -8). The associated SNPs mapped in or near genes related to cellular signaling, lipid metabolism and blood pressure homeostasis, and two of the regions were associated with coronary artery disease (P < 0.006) in the Coronary Artery Disease Genome-Wide Replication and Meta-Analysis (CARDIoGRAM) consortium. Our findings may provide new insight into pathways leading to subclinical atherosclerosis and subsequent cardiovascular events

Asia-Pacific working group consensus on non-variceal upper gastrointestinal bleeding: An update 2018

Non-variceal upper gastrointestinal bleeding remains an important emergency condition, leading to significant morbidity and mortality. As endoscopic therapy is the 'gold standard' of management, treatment of these patients can be considered in three stages: pre-endoscopic treatment, endoscopic haemostasis and post-endoscopic management. Since publication of the Asia-Pacific consensus on non-variceal upper gastrointestinal bleeding (NVUGIB) 7 years ago, there have been significant advancements in the clinical management of patients in all three stages. These include pre-endoscopy risk stratification scores, blood and platelet transfusion, use of proton pump inhibitors; during endoscopy new haemostasis techniques (haemostatic powder spray and over-the-scope clips); and post-endoscopy management by second-look endoscopy and medication strategies. Emerging techniques, including capsule endoscopy and Doppler endoscopic probe in assessing adequacy of endoscopic therapy, and the pre-emptive use of angiographic embolisation, are attracting new attention. An emerging problem is the increasing use of dual antiplatelet agents and direct oral anticoagulants in patients with cardiac and cerebrovascular diseases. Guidelines on the discontinuation and then resumption of these agents in patients presenting with NVUGIB are very much needed. The Asia-Pacific Working Group examined recent evidence and recommends practical management guidelines in this updated consensus statement