A Proposal for Restructuring the Taxation of Wealth Transfers: Tax Reform Redux?

The Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA\u2786) provided for the most dramatic changes to the Internal Revenue Code since its inception over seventy years ago. The stated purposes of these reforms were to promote fairness, simplicity, and economic growth. The short-term success of these measures has yet to be ascertained. It is the position of this article that the long-term prospects for ultimate individual tax reform cannot be divorced from an eventual restructuring of the present federal wealth transfer taxation system, currently consisting of the estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes. Genuine tax reform will remain unfinished business until such time as these transfers are fully interwoven into a reconstituted individual taxation system. It is time for an integrated system which interpolates the best elements of the newly passed income tax reforms while at the same time jettisoning the cumbersome, complicated and inefficient elements of the present wealth transfer taxes. This proposal is offered in the hope of changing the direction of future research and discussion away from the patchwork repairs of the past towards a new integrated system of taxation

Income and transfer tax integration: Historic policy links for wealth transfer tax restructuring

The proposals listed herein are an outgrowth of recent study by this author and Ms. Sharon K. Brougham, M.T., C.P. A., who is a doctoral accounting student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The scope of this article does not allow for full elaboration so only key highlights of the study are listed. The overall intent is to update prior discussions on estate-income tax unification and to foster further debate as to the efficacy of retaining the present dual-track system of taxation on individuals. It is not, however, intended to be the finite blueprint of tax reform. The full study is scheduled to be published in the Akron Tax Law Journal along with the A.B.A. Report

Integrated scheme of rapid environmental assessment for shallow water acoustics

Predicting sound propagation in shallow or very shallow water environments requires that the frequency-dependent acoustic properties be assessed for all components of the waveguide, i.e., the water column, sea bottom and sea surface interface. During the Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment MREA?BP'07 sea trial in April-May 2007, south of Elba Island in the Mediterranean Sea, an integrated MREA scheme has been implemented to provide a full 4D (3D+T) environmental picture that is directly exploitable by acoustic propagation models. Based on a joint multi-disciplinary effort, several standard and advanced techniques of environmental characterization covering the fields of underwater acoustics, physical oceanography and geophysics have been combined within a coherent scheme of data acquisition, processing and assimilation. The paper presents the whole architecture of the implemented scheme. Based on a preliminary analysis of MREA?BP'07 data, advantages and drawbacks of the approach will be discussed. Ways ahead for further improvement and perspectives are finally drawn

Geoacoustic inversion in the frequency range 0.8-1.6 kHz with drifting sparse arrays during MREA/BP'07 experiment

In order to evaluate properly the acoustic propagation characteristics in shallow water environments, it is well established that appropriate knowledge of the acoustic properties of the seabottom is required. In the last decade, full-field geoacoustic inversion techniques have been demonstrated to provide adequate methodologies to assess those properties. However, several of the developed techniques may suffer a lack of adequacy to the design of low-frequency active sonar systems (LFAS) for which the assessment of seabottom characteristics are drawn. For instance most matched-field inversion techniques demonstrated so far use acoustical signals at much lower frequencies than those of the sonar. Furthermore, some of the techniques may be difficult to be handled in an "operationally relevant context" since they are based on relatively complex designed systems such as highly instrumented vertical line arrays spanning the whole water column. In this paper, we investigate the potential of medium-frequency acoustical signals (0.8-1.6 kHz) received at several ranges on a field of drifting sparse arrays, eventually reduced to a couple of hydrophones, for spatially-coherent geoacoustic inversion purposes. The experimental datasets of the Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment MREA/BP'07 sea trial south of Elba Island in the Mediterranean Sea are used to support this study

The Level-0 Muon Trigger for the LHCb Experiment

A very compact architecture has been developed for the first level Muon Trigger of the LHCb experiment that processes 40 millions of proton-proton collisions per second. For each collision, it receives 3.2 kBytes of data and it finds straight tracks within a 1.2 microseconds latency. The trigger implementation is massively parallel, pipelined and fully synchronous with the LHC clock. It relies on 248 high density Field Programable Gate arrays and on the massive use of multigigabit serial link transceivers embedded inside FPGAs.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figures, submitted to NIM

A variational approach for geoacoustic inversion using adjoint modeling of a PE approximation model with non local impedance boundary conditions

The adjoint model method of control theory is known to give accurate and efficient data assimilation processes in oceanography and meteorology. However, it has rarely been applied in underwater acoustics for inversion purposes. Based on the back-propagation of the mismatch between observations and their predictions, the adjoint model can produce the corrections to the associated direct forward model input parameters. In this paper, the adjoint of a parabolic equation propagation model with non local impedance boundary conditions at the water sediment interface is used in order to determine an acoustically equivalent representation of the seabed. The bottom is represented by these boundary conditions that play the role of the control parameter

The effect of Mondia Whitei on the Histology of the brain of Wistar rat

This study was designed to investigate the effect of Mondia whitei on the histology of the brain. 20 adult male Wister rats were involved in the study.The animals were assigned into four groups: a control (group A) and three test groups (B, C and D). Animal weights were measured before and after acclimatization (2 weeks); and after three weeksof dosage administration. At the end of three weeks, the animals were sacrificed to harvest the brain for histological study. The results showed that while normal brain cells were presented in the control (group A), group B presented cellular pyknosis, necrosis, degenerative vacoulations, and mild infarction without gliosis. Group C showed cellular degeneration, pyknosis, gliosis/astrocytosis, vacoulation, while group D showed cellular degeneration,  pyknosis and parenchymal erosion. The observed histological changes were duration dependent and suggest that Mondia whitei is toxic to the brain and may induce neurotoxic damages in a duration dependent manner. Hence, there is a need for further research on the effects of Mondia whitei on other organs and system.Key words: brain, mondia whitei, neurotoxic effects, histolog

The PCIe-based readout system for the LHCb experiment

International audienceThe LHCb experiment is designed to study differences between particles and anti-particles as well as very rare decays in the beauty and charm sector at the LHC. The detector will be upgraded in 2019 in order to significantly increase its efficiency, by removing the first-level hardware trigger. The upgrade experiment will implement a trigger-less readout system in which all the data from every LHC bunch-crossing are transported to the computing farm over 12000 optical links without hardware filtering. The event building and event selection are carried out entirely in the farm. Another original feature of the system is that data transmitted through these fibres arrive directly to computers through a specially designed PCIe card called PCIe40. The same board handles the data acquisition flow and the distribution of fast and slow controls to the detector front-end electronics. It embeds one of the most powerful FPGAs currently available on the market with 1.2 million logic cells. The board has a bandwidth of 480 Gbits/s in both input and output over optical links and 100 Gbits/s over the PCI Express bus to the CPU. We will present how data circulate through the board and in the PC server for achieving the event building. We will focus on specific issues regarding the design of such a board with a very large FPGA, in particular in terms of power supply dimensioning and thermal simulations. The features of the board will be detailed and we will finally present the first performance measurement

InGaAs spin light emitting diodes measured in the Faraday and oblique Hanle geometries

InGaAs quantum well light emitting diodes (LED) with spin-injecting, epitaxial Fe contacts were fabricated using an in situ wafer transfer process where the semiconductor wafer was transferred under ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) conditions to a metals growth chamber to achieve a high quality interface between the two materials. The spin LED devices were measured optically with applied magnetic fields in either the Faraday or the oblique Hanle geometries in two experimental set-ups. Optical polarizations efficiencies of 4.5% in the Faraday geometry and 1.5% in the Hanle geometry are shown to be equivalent. The polarization efficiency of the electroluminescence is seen to decay as the temperature increases although the spin lifetime remains constant due to the influence of the D'yakonov–Perel' spin scattering mechanism in the quantum well.RM would like to acknowledge support from the EPSRC.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the Institute of Physics via https://doi.org/10.1088/0022-3727/49/16/16510