A Preliminary Investigation of Laser Action Assisted by Oxidized Hydrocarbons

Apparatus for generation of infrared and far infrared new laser line

Harmonic Love wave devices for biosensing applications

Simultaneous operation of a Love wave biosensor at the fundamental frequency and third harmonic, including the optimisation of IDT metallisation thickness, has been investigated. Data is presented showing a sequence of deposition and removal of a model mass layer of palmitoyl-oleoyl-sn-glycerophosphocholine (POPC) vesicles while frequency hopping between 110 and 330 MH

Cultivating Responsive Systems for the Care of Acutely and Critically Ill Older Adults

This article examines the importance of creating acute care systems that are responsive to the needs of acutely and critically ill and injured older adults. Four attributes of the responsive system are examined: elasticity, enabling, ease, and equanimity. An analytic literature review provides the basis for recommended practices by responsive professionals in responsive systems. Implications for practice, research, education, and policy are provided

Fraudulent Tax Refunds: The Notorious Career of Harriette Walters

Harriette Walters embezzled more than $48 million from the District of Columbia by processing fraudulent real estate tax refunds. This paper describes the Walters scheme and discusses, from the perspective of the COSO framework, internal control weaknesses that enabled the fraud to go undetected for more than 20 years. While this analysis of the Walters fraud should be of interest to both accounting academics and audit professionals, it should be particularly helpful to students, fi nancial managers, and inexperienced auditors in understanding the importance of effective internal controls for preventing and detecting fraud in a wide variety of organizational settings

Outcome From Serious Injury in Older Adults

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1996 and 2005 that examine factors affecting the physical outcomes of older adults after serious traumatic injury. Organizing Construct: 27 primary research studies published in the last 10 years describe in-hospital and long-term outcomes of serious injury among older adults. Research specific to isolated hip injury, traumatic brain injury and burn trauma was excluded. Methods: An integrative review of research published between January 1996 and January 2005 was carried out to examine the relationship between older age and outcome from severe injury. MEDLINE, BIOSIS previews, CINAHL and PsycINFO databases were searched using the MeSH terms: injury, serious injury, trauma and multiple trauma, and crossed with type, severity, medical/surgical management, complication, outcome, mortality, morbidity, survival, disability, quality of life, functional status, functional recovery, function, and placement. Findings: Older adults experience higher short and long-term mortality when compared to younger adults. The relationship between older age and poorer outcome persists when adjusting for injury severity, number of injuries, comorbidities, and complications. At the same time, injury severity, number of injuries, complications, and gender each independently correlate to increased mortality among older adults. The body of research is limited by over-reliance on retrospective data and heterogeneity in definitional criteria for the older adult population. Conclusions: Additional research is needed to clarify the contributory effect of variables such as psychosocial sequelae and physiologic resilience on injury outcome. The field of geriatric trauma would benefit from further population-based prospective investigation of the determinants of injury outcome in older adults in order to guide interventions and acute care treatment

Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-Trade Proposals

The MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis model is applied to synthetic policies that match key attributes of a set of cap-and-trade proposals being considered by the U.S. Congress in spring 2007. The bills fall into two groups: one specifies emissions reductions of 50% to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050; the other establishes a tightening target for emissions intensity and stipulates a time-path for a "safety valve" limit on the emission price that approximately stabilizes U.S. emissions at the 2008 level. Initial period prices are estimated between $7 and$50 per ton CO2-e with these prices rising by a factor of four by 2050. Welfare costs vary from near zero to less than 0.5% at the start, rising in the most stringent case to near 2% in 2050. If allowances were auctioned these proposals could produce revenue between $100 billion and$500 billion per year depending on the case. Outcomes from U.S. policies depend on mitigation effort abroads, and simulations are provided to illuminate terms-of-trade effects that influence the emissions prices and welfare effects, and even the environmental effectiveness, of U.S. actions. Sensitivity tests also are provided of several of key design features. Finally, the U.S. proposals, and the assumptions about effort elsewhere, are extended to 2100 to allow exploration of the potential role of these bills in the longer-term challenge of reducing climate change risk. Simulations show that the 50% to 80% targets are consistent with global goals of atmospheric stabilization at 450 to 550 ppmv CO2 but only if other nations, including the developing countries, follow suit.

Cross-cultural mood perception in pop songs and its alignment with mood detection algorithms

Do people from different cultural backgrounds perceive the mood in music the same way? How closely do human ratings across different cultures approximate automatic mood detection algorithms that are often trained on corpora of predominantly Western popular music? Analyzing 166 participants responses from Brazil, South Korea, and the US, we examined the similarity between the ratings of nine categories of perceived moods in music and estimated their alignment with four popular mood detection algorithms. We created a dataset of 360 recent pop songs drawn from major music charts of the countries and constructed semantically identical mood descriptors across English, Korean, and Portuguese languages. Multiple participants from the three countries rated their familiarity, preference, and perceived moods for a given song. Ratings were highly similar within and across cultures for basic mood attributes such as sad, cheerful, and energetic. However, we found significant cross-cultural differences for more complex characteristics such as dreamy and love. To our surprise, the results of mood detection algorithms were uniformly correlated across human ratings from all three countries and did not show a detectable bias towards any particular culture. Our study thus suggests that the mood detection algorithms can be considered as an objective measure at least within the popular music context