Anthropology and Open Access

While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. On the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of OA debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. Using an interview format, we will offer a primer on OA practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. In doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for OA in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. We then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which Cultural Anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. Our field’s distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars

Effects of Quantized Scalar Fields in Cosmological Spacetimes with Big Rip Singularities

Effects of quantized free scalar fields in cosmological spacetimes with Big Rip singularities are investigated. The energy densities for these fields are computed at late times when the expansion is very rapid. For the massless minimally coupled field it is shown that an attractor state exists in the sense that, for a large class of states, the energy density of the field asymptotically approaches the energy density it would have if it was in the attractor state. Results of numerical computations of the energy density for the massless minimally coupled field and for massive fields with minimal and conformal coupling to the scalar curvature are presented. For the massive fields the energy density is seen to always asymptotically approach that of the corresponding massless field. The question of whether the energy densities of quantized fields can be large enough for backreaction effects to remove the Big Rip singularity is addressed.Comment: PRD version. References added. Several minor corrections and changes. 22 pages, 3 figure

Impact of the Ethanol Boom on Livestock and Dairy Industries: What Are They Going to Eat?

Increased demand for corn for ethanol production has helped push grain prices to record levels. This has increased livestock production costs, and producers have responded with changes to production systems. This paper explores the degree to which costs can be mitigated with alternative feeds, the effect this might have on physical performance, and the impact of alternative feeds on the competitive position of different species.cattle feeding, corn, cost of production, ethanol, Agribusiness, Farm Management, Livestock Production/Industries, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Q12, Q13,

Declining manufacturing employment in the New York-New Jersey region: 1969-99

Between 1969 and 1999, the New York-New Jersey region experienced a steeper drop in manufacturing employment than any other area of the United States. Much of the unusually sharp job decline can be attributed to the geographic dispersion of manufacturing_that is, the gradual movement of manufacturing activity from the more urbanized and industry-intensive states of the Northeast to the less industrially developed states of the South and West.Manufactures - New York (N.Y.) ; Manufactures - New Jersey ; Employment - New York (N.Y.) ; Employment - New Jersey ; Industrial location ; Federal Reserve District, 2nd

Generic Connectivity-Based CGRA Mapping via Integer Linear Programming

Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are programmable logic devices with large coarse-grained ALU-like logic blocks, and multi-bit datapath-style routing. CGRAs often have relatively restricted data routing networks, so they attract CAD mapping tools that use exact methods, such as Integer Linear Programming (ILP). However, tools that target general architectures must use large constraint systems to fully describe an architecture's flexibility, resulting in lengthy run-times. In this paper, we propose to derive connectivity information from an otherwise generic device model, and use this to create simpler ILPs, which we combine in an iterative schedule and retain most of the exactness of a fully-generic ILP approach. This new approach has a speed-up geometric mean of 5.88x when considering benchmarks that do not hit a time-limit of 7.5 hours on the fully-generic ILP, and 37.6x otherwise. This was measured using the set of benchmarks used to originally evaluate the fully-generic approach and several more benchmarks representing computation tasks, over three different CGRA architectures. All run-times of the new approach are less than 20 minutes, with 90th percentile time of 410 seconds. The proposed mapping techniques are integrated into, and evaluated using the open-source CGRA-ME architecture modelling and exploration framework.Comment: 8 pages of content; 8 figures; 3 tables; to appear in FCCM 2019; Uses the CGRA-ME framework at http://cgra-me.ece.utoronto.ca

Revisions to user costs for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis monetary services indices

This analysis discusses recent changes to the user cost figures that are computed as part of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis monetary services indices (MSI). The authors first introduce an alternative splicing procedure, robust to differences in scale between series, for those price subindices which, individually, have a time span shorter than the overall MSI but are spliced to span the entire period. They then correct an error in the calculation of user costs for money market mutual funds that caused these funds' user costs to be based, for a considerable period of time, on the last-reported value for one input data series. Finally, the authors also restore the yield-curve adjustment for composite assets, which they removed from published data during 2004 as they explored the unusual behavior of the user cost data for small-denomination time deposits.Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ; Monetary theory

Can Neuroscience Help Predict Future Antisocial Behavior?

Part I of this Article reviews the tools currently available to predict antisocial behavior. Part II discusses legal precedent regarding the use of, and challenges to, various prediction methods. Part III introduces recent neuroscience work in this area and reviews two studies that have successfully used neuroimaging techniques to predict recidivism. Part IV discusses some criticisms that are commonly levied against the various prediction methods and highlights the disparity between the attitudes of the scientific and legal communities toward risk assessment generally and neuroscience specifically. Lastly, Part V explains why neuroscience methods will likely continue to help inform and, ideally, improve the tools we use to help assess, understand, and predict human behavior

Realization of an all-dielectric zero-index optical metamaterial

Metamaterials offer unprecedented flexibility for manipulating the optical properties of matter, including the ability to access negative index, ultra-high index and chiral optical properties. Recently, metamaterials with near-zero refractive index have drawn much attention. Light inside such materials experiences no spatial phase change and extremely large phase velocity, properties that can be applied for realizing directional emission, tunneling waveguides, large area single mode devices, and electromagnetic cloaks. However, at optical frequencies previously demonstrated zero- or negative-refractive index metamaterials require the use of metallic inclusions, leading to large ohmic loss, a serious impediment to device applications. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an impedance matched zero-index metamaterial at optical frequencies based on purely dielectric constituents. Formed from stacked silicon rod unit cells, the metamaterial possesses a nearly isotropic low-index response leading to angular selectivity of transmission and directive emission from quantum dots placed within the material.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure