The dollar dilemma : the falling dollar has made American goods more attractive to consumers abroad, but not everyone is happy about the currency's slide

Dollar, American ; Exports ; Federal Reserve District, 5th

A note on the extended superconformal algebras associated with manifolds of exceptional holonomy

It was observed some time ago by Shatashvili and Vafa that superstring compactification on manifolds of exceptional holonomy gives rise to superconformal field theories with extended chiral algebras. In their paper, free field realisations are given of these extended superconformal algebras inspired by Joyce's constructions of such manifolds as desingularised toroidal orbifolds. The purpose of this note is to give another realisation of these algebras starting not from free fields, but from the superconformal algebras associated to Calabi--Yau manifolds. These superconformal algebras, originally studied by Odake, are extensions of the N=2 Virasoro algebra. For the case of G_2 holonomy, our realisation is inspired in the conjectured construction of such manifolds as a desingularisation of (K x S^1)/Z_2, where K is a Calabi--Yau 3-fold admitting an antiholomorphic involution. Similarly, for the case of Spin(7) holonomy our realisation suggests a construction of such manifolds as desingularisations of K'/Z_2, where K' is a Calabi-Yau 4-fold admitting an antiholomorphic involution.Comment: LaTeX 2e (needs elsart.cls + amstex.sty), 11 pages. Added two references, a footnote, and corrected a typ

Performance Practice and Overview of Selected Piano Works of Barbara Kolb

Barbara Kolb (b. 1939), one of the many lesser-known American avant-gardes, composed several unique works that symbolize what we consider American Art Music of late 1970s. Kolb survived with short periods of college institutional teaching and sustained her musical life mostly with commissions, scholarships, and award recognitions for her tremendous compositional output. The biographical information in this study gives several perspectives of Kolb\u27s personal life: her persistence to pursue a career in music and also to maintain a private life. To serve as a reference for piano instructors or performers, this work journals performance challenges, options, and technical concerns with pre-recorded accompaniment in Solitaire (1971). Focused on the performance practice of other keyboard works Appello (1976), and Antoine\u27s Tango (2001), this study serves as an overview of selected keyboard works

Physiological and genetic description of dissimilatory perchlorate reduction by the novel marine bacterium Arcobacter sp. strain CAB.

A novel dissimilatory perchlorate-reducing bacterium (DPRB), Arcobacter sp. strain CAB, was isolated from a marina in Berkeley, CA. Phylogenetically, this halophile was most closely related to Arcobacter defluvii strain SW30-2 and Arcobacter ellisii. With acetate as the electron donor, strain CAB completely reduced perchlorate (ClO4(-)) or chlorate (ClO3(-)) [collectively designated (per)chlorate] to innocuous chloride (Cl(-)), likely using the perchlorate reductase (Pcr) and chlorite dismutase (Cld) enzymes. When grown with perchlorate, optimum growth was observed at 25 to 30°C, pH 7, and 3% NaCl. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) preparations were dominated by free-swimming straight rods with 1 to 2 polar flagella per cell. Strain CAB utilized a variety of organic acids, fructose, and hydrogen as electron donors coupled to (per)chlorate reduction. Further, under anoxic growth conditions strain CAB utilized the biogenic oxygen produced as a result of chlorite dismutation to oxidize catechol via the meta-cleavage pathway of aerobic catechol degradation and the catechol 2,3-dioxygenase enzyme. In addition to (per)chlorate, oxygen and nitrate were alternatively used as electron acceptors. The 3.48-Mb draft genome encoded a distinct perchlorate reduction island (PRI) containing several transposases. The genome lacks the pcrC gene, which was previously thought to be essential for (per)chlorate reduction, and appears to use an unrelated Arcobacter c-type cytochrome to perform the same function. IMPORTANCE The study of dissimilatory perchlorate-reducing bacteria (DPRB) has largely focused on freshwater, mesophilic, neutral-pH environments. This study identifies a novel marine DPRB in the genus Arcobacter that represents the first description of a DPRB associated with the Campylobacteraceae. Strain CAB is currently the only epsilonproteobacterial DPRB in pure culture. The genome of strain CAB lacks the pcrC gene found in all other DPRB tested, demonstrating a new variation on the (per)chlorate reduction pathway. The ability of strain CAB to oxidize catechol via the oxygenase-dependent meta-cleavage pathway in the absence of external oxygen by using the biogenic oxygen produced from the dismutation of chlorite provides a valuable model for understanding the anaerobic degradation of a broad diversity of xenobiotics which are recalcitrant to anaerobic metabolism but labile to oxygenase-dependent mechanisms

Are systematic reviews up-to-date at the time of publication?

BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews provide a synthesis of evidence for practitioners, for clinical practice guideline developers, and for those designing and justifying primary research. Having an up-to-date and comprehensive review is therefore important. Our main objective was to determine the recency of systematic reviews at the time of their publication, as measured by the time from last search date to publication. We also wanted to study the time from search date to acceptance, and from acceptance to publication, and measure the proportion of systematic reviews with recorded information on search dates and information sources in the abstract and full text of the review. METHODS: A descriptive analysis of published systematic reviews indexed in Medline in 2009, 2010 and 2011 by three reviewers, independently extracting data. RESULTS: Of the 300 systematic reviews included, 271 (90%) provided the date of search in the full-text article, but only 141 (47%) stated this in the abstract. The median (standard error; minimum to maximum) survival time from last search to acceptance was 5.1 (0.58; 0 to 43.8) months (95% confidence interval = 3.9 to 6.2) and from last search to first publication time was 8.0 (0.35; 0 to 46.7) months (95% confidence interval = 7.3 to 8.7), respectively. Of the 300 reviews, 295 (98%) stated which databases had been searched, but only 181 (60%) stated the databases in the abstract. Most researchers searched three (35%) or four (21%) databases. The top-three most used databases were MEDLINE (79%), Cochrane library (76%), and EMBASE (64%). CONCLUSIONS: Being able to identify comprehensive, up-to-date reviews is important to clinicians, guideline groups, and those designing clinical trials. This study demonstrates that some reviews have a considerable delay between search and publication, but only 47% of systematic review abstracts stated the last search date and 60% stated the databases that had been searched. Improvements in the quality of abstracts of systematic reviews and ways to shorten the review and revision processes to make review publication more rapid are needed

Killing spinor equations in dimension 7 and geometry of integrable G_2-manifolds

We compute the scalar curvature of 7-dimensional ${G}_2$-manifolds admitting a connection with totally skew-symmetric torsion. We prove the formula for the general solution of the Killing spinor equation and express the Riemannian scalar curvature of the solution in terms of the dilation function and the NS 3-form field. In dimension n=7 the dilation function involved in the second fermionic string equation has an interpretation as a conformal change of the underlying integrable ${G}_2$-structure into a cocalibrated one of pure type $W_3$.Comment: Latex2e, 9 page

Reducing sensor complexity for monitoring wind turbine performance using principal component analysis

Availability and reliability are among the priority concerns for deployment of distributed generation (DG) systems, particularly when operating in a harsh environment. Condition monitoring (CM) can meet the requirement but has been challenged by large amounts of data needing to be processed in real time due to the large number of sensors being deployed. This paper proposes an optimal sensor selection method based on principal component analysis (PCA) for condition monitoring of a DG system oriented to wind turbines. The research was motivated by the fact that salient patterns in multivariable datasets can be extracted by PCA in order to identify monitoring parameters that contribute the most to the system variation. The proposed method is able to correlate the particular principal component to the corresponding monitoring variable, and hence facilitate the right sensor selection for the first time for the condition monitoring of wind turbines. The algorithms are examined with simulation data from PSCAD/EMTDC and SCADA data from an operational wind farm in the time, frequency, and instantaneous frequency domains. The results have shown that the proposed technique can reduce the number of monitoring variables whilst still maintaining sufficient information to detect the faults and hence assess the system’s conditions