Heavy Quark Physics From Lattice QCD

We review the application of lattice QCD to the phenomenology of b- and c-quarks. After a short discussion of the lattice techniques used to evaluate hadronic matrix elements and the corresponding systematic uncertainties, we summarise results for leptonic decay constants, B--Bbar mixing, semileptonic and rare radiative decays. A discussion of the determination of heavy quark effective theory parameters is followed by an explanation of the difficulty in applying lattice methods to exclusive nonleptonic decays.Comment: 52 pages LaTeX with 10 eps files. Requires: hfsprocl.sty (included) plus axodraw.sty, rotating.sty and array.sty. To appear in Heavy Flavours (2nd edition) edited by A J Buras and M Lindner (World Scientific, Singapore). Revised version corrects typo in axis labelling of Fig 1

On the problems of measuring transient temperature in cryogenic fluids

Cryogenic sensor errors in measuring transient temperature in cryogenic fluid

The Railroad’s Impact on Land Values in the Upper Great Plains at the Closing of the Frontier

We show that the impact of transportation improvements on land values is complex with a direct, positive relationship on the price of land and also a positive relationship with the ratio of improved acres to total acres, another important influence on the per acre price of land. We construct a two step estimation that removes the impact of transportation outlets on the ratio of improved to total acres before including the transportation variables and the adjusted ratio variable as independent variables in a regression on price per acre. This estimation gives us the expected positive impact of railroads on land price. We also use Box-Cox regressions to show the semi-log form, a common model specification, may be inappropriate for our data and possibly then for other land price research.Box-Cox, Railroads, Great Plains

Teaching Bank Runs Through Films

The author advocates the use of films to supplement textbook treatments of bank runs and panics in money and banking or general banking classes.  Modern students, particularly those in developed countries, tend to be unfamiliar with potential fragilities of financial systems such as a lack of deposit insurance or other safety net mechanisms.  Films provide a dramatic example of the panic and uncertainty experienced by depositors and banks during bank runs.  Students learn the value of deposit insurance and the types of informational asymmetries safety net mechanisms overcome.  The author provides examples of assignments given in the past and possible extensions.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? Post-Grant Review and PTAB Interpretation of § 101 Subject Matter after \u3cem\u3eMyriad\u3c/em\u3e

Post-grant review is a new review procedure for granted patents in the United States. The procedure, instituted as a mechanism to get rid of bad patents, allows any outside party, within nine months of the patent grant date, to challenge the validity of a granted patent on any ground under the patent law, including patentable subject matter, provided that the petitioner can demonstrate that it is more likely than not that at least one of the claims challenged in the petition is unpatentable, or if there is a showing that the petition raises a novel or unsettled legal question that is important to other patents. This review and decision on novel or unsettled legal questions is done by a trial-like proceeding before the newly-created Patent Trial and Appeal Board, whose decisions are appealable to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This note uses a model developed by positive political theory to argue that (1) the new post-grant review proceeding gives the PTO a considerable amount of power to determine what constitutes patentable subject matter; (2) the PTO\u27s power to determine what constitutes patentable subject matter may not create long-term security in what patentable subject matter is; and (3) that the best way to create security for long-term investment in patent protection may be for the Court of Appeals to take a more active, policymaking role in its review of PTAB decisions

Water Treatment Systems for Long Spaceflights

Space exploration will require new life support systems to support the crew on journeys lasting from a few days to several weeks, or longer. These systems should also be designed to reduce the mass required to keep humans alive in space. Water accounts for about 80 percent of the daily mass intake required to keep a person alive. As a result, recycling water offers a high return on investment for space life support. Water recycling can also increase mission safety by providing an emergency supply of drinking water, where another supply is exhausted or contaminated. These technologies also increase safety by providing a lightweight backup to stored supplies, and they allow astronauts to meet daily drinking water requirements by recycling the water contained in their own urine. They also convert urine into concentrated brine that is biologically stable and nonthreatening, and can be safely stored onboard. This approach eliminates the need to have a dedicated vent to dump urine overboard. These needs are met by a system that provides a contaminant treatment pouch, referred to as a urine cell or contaminant cell, that converts urine or another liquid containing contaminants into a fortified drink, engineered to meet human hydration, electrolyte, and caloric requirements, using a variant of forward osmosis (FO) to draw water from a urine container into the concentrated fortified drink as part of a recycling stage. An activated carbon pretreatment removes most organic molecules. Salinity of the initial liquid mix (urine plus other) is synergistically used to enhance the precipitation of organic molecules so that activated carbon can remove most of the organics. A functional osmotic bag is then used to remove inorganic contaminants. If a contaminant is processed for which the saline content is different than optimal for precipitating organic molecules, the saline content of the liquid should be adjusted toward the optimal value for that contaminant. A first urine treatment method converts urine into a fortified sports drink, resembling Gatorade, using a first urine cell

The Digital Flynn Effect: Complexity of Posts on Social Media Increases over Time

Parents and teachers often express concern about the extensive use of social media by youngsters. Some of them see emoticons, undecipherable initialisms and loose grammar typical for social media as evidence of language degradation. In this paper, we use a simple measure of text complexity to investigate how the complexity of public posts on a popular social networking site changes over time. We analyze a unique dataset that contains texts posted by 942, 336 users from a large European city across nine years. We show that the chosen complexity measure is correlated with the academic performance of users: users from high-performing schools produce more complex texts than users from low-performing schools. We also find that complexity of posts increases with age. Finally, we demonstrate that overall language complexity of posts on the social networking site is constantly increasing. We call this phenomenon the digital Flynn effect. Our results may suggest that the worries about language degradation are not warranted