Directing store flyers to the appropriate audience

Grocery shoppers were questioned about the frequency of purchasing items that were featured in the store's flyers. This measure was used as the dependent variable in a multinomial logit model with the independent variables being various aspects of shopping behaviour, usage of store flyers, age and employment status. Since only one threshold parameter was significant, the four-level dependent variable was then collapsed and a binary model was estimated. This study evidenced that less than half of the respondents looked forward to receiving unsolicited flyers. Most shoppers read the flyers only to be informed of price specials that the store has to offer. The odds ratio of responding to store flyer deals among those who look forward to sales flyers is more than double the odds ratio of those who do not await the flyers, across every category of shopping frequency. Retailers could employ direct marketing to target specific audiences who look forward to receiving store flyers.\u

Investor Behavior in the October 1987 Stock Market Crash: The Case of Japan

In a questionnaire survey we asked Japanese institutional investors to recall what they thought and did during the worldwide stock market crash in October, 1987. The results confirm that the drop in U. S. stock prices was the primary factor on their minds, and other news stories in the United States dominated Japanese news stories. A comparison with an earlier survey of U. 5. institutional investors at the time of the crash (Shiller [1987])shows a remarkable similarity between Japanese and U. S. institutional investors in a number of attitudinal and behavioral dimensions. The results suggest that events in the United States were the proximate cause of the crash in Japan, but that the transmission mechanism of the crash was very similar in both countries.

Spacing of explosive charges

It is generally believed that the spacing of simultaneously initiated collar primed multiple charges is not dependent on the charge length. The stresses generated by explosive charges have been assumed to propagate through a material in a cylindrical manner. this assumption implied that the stress generated in any plane along the charge diameter would have been uniform in magnitude and direction. A finite explosive velocity along with a conical stress wave causes the stresses near the collar to differ from those farther down the column. for this reason, the spacing of charges would be dependent on charge length. An experimental technique using models was employed to investigate charge length and other spacing parameters. materials with different properties were selected as models for the purpose of determinating to what extent material\u27s properties influenced the spacing. This investigation showed that charge length was of extreme importance in the spacing of instantaneously initiated charges of short length. This could be attributed to decreased stress intensities in the collar region caused by noncoherent wave fronts in this region --Abstract, page ii

The use of shaped explosive charges to investigate permeability, penetration, and fracture formation in coal, dolomite and plexiglas

The concentration of methane gas which exists in the exhaust air from a coal mine is critical. It can be controlled by dilution of the gas with fresh air or by the regulation of the rate of methane emission into the mine workings. Degasification techniques which control the emission rate are currently being developed. The use of shaped charges to initiate fractures in coal and increase the gas flow rate was the object of this research. The three areas of investigation were: 1) permeability changes in coal models after fracturing with shaped charge jets, 2) fracture formation in coal and other brittle materials, and 3) jet penetration capabilities of charges loaded with permissible explosives. The first order penetration law, the Allison-Vitali equations, and their modification by DiPersio to account for continuous and broken jets have been used in attempts to predict jet penetration depth in metallic targets. Correction factors for the effects of material properties are used in these equations, but the specific properties which control the penetration rate were undefined and were investigated in this study. The results of this research indicate that the permeability of coal can be increased for degasification purposes by the use of shaped charge jets. The fracture formation which resulted from the jet penetration was studied with radiographs and highspeed photography and indicated that longitudinal wave velocity, Young\u27s modulus, and tensile strength are related to penetration depth --Abstract, page ii

Advocacy through Appearance: An Exploration of Professional Identity, Self-Sufficiency, and the Clothing-Related Non-Profit

Non-profit organizations are often established to address economic and social disparities by providing resources to those in need, with the goal of improving society. The following qualitative study looks to examine the role of the clothing-related non-profit in helping clients develop a professional identity through donated dress. In order to look beyond the short-term goal of getting a job, in-depth interviews were administered to 36 participants. Utilizing the enclothed cognition framework, an understanding of how donated clothing can also be used to foster the skills necessary to build a long-term career was developed. Thus, with the help of the clothing-related non-profit, it is possible that professional dress can be used as a conduit for achieving economic independence. To address this possibility, the study will also explore how developing a professional identity through donated dress can help clients of clothing-related non-profits achieve broader goals of personal and professional self-sufficiency

The NorduGrid architecture and tools

The NorduGrid project designed a Grid architecture with the primary goal to meet the requirements of production tasks of the LHC experiments. While it is meant to be a rather generic Grid system, it puts emphasis on batch processing suitable for problems encountered in High Energy Physics. The NorduGrid architecture implementation uses the \globus{} as the foundation for various components, developed by the project. While introducing new services, the NorduGrid does not modify the Globus tools, such that the two can eventually co-exist. The NorduGrid topology is decentralized, avoiding a single point of failure. The NorduGrid architecture is thus a light-weight, non-invasive and dynamic one, while robust and scalable, capable of meeting most challenging tasks of High Energy Physics.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 9 pages,LaTeX, 4 figures. PSN MOAT00

Atlas Data-Challenge 1 on NorduGrid

The first LHC application ever to be executed in a computational Grid environment is the so-called ATLAS Data-Challenge 1, more specifically, the part assigned to the Scandinavian members of the ATLAS Collaboration. Taking advantage of the NorduGrid testbed and tools, physicists from Denmark, Norway and Sweden were able to participate in the overall exercise starting in July 2002 and continuing through the rest of 2002 and the first part of 2003 using solely the NorduGrid environment. This allowed to distribute input data over a wide area, and rely on the NorduGrid resource discovery mechanism to find an optimal cluster for job submission. During the whole Data-Challenge 1, more than 2 TB of input data was processed and more than 2.5 TB of output data was produced by more than 4750 Grid jobs.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 7 pages, 3 ps figure

Amperometric determination of cholesterol using cholesterol oxidase immobilized on Pt,Ru-C nanocomposite and an ionic liquid-modified carbon paste electrode

Cholesterol as very important biomolecule is the precursor of many biologically significant compounds which give strength and flexibility to the biological membranes. It is also a crucial component in lipoproteins, and has an important role to transport hydrophobic molecules in hydrophilic media such as blood [1, 2]. The analytical performance of carbon paste electrodes (CPE) bulk modified with ionic liquid 1-allyl-3-methylimidazolium dicyanamide ([AMIM][DCA]), and surface modified with platinum on graphitized carbon (Pt-C) or platinum-ruthenium alloy on graphitized carbon (Pt,Ru-C) for analysis of hydrogen peroxide (H 2O2) were compared. The prepared working electrodes were characterized using scanning electron microscopy–energydispersive X-ray spectrometry, together with electrochemical impedance spectroscopic, cyclic voltammetric, and amperometric techniques. After method optimization, an enzyme cholesterol oxidase (ChOx) was immobilized on the surface of Pt,Ru-C/IL-CPE by Nafion®. The improved cholesterol amperometric determination was achieved in phosphate buffer solution pH 7.50 at a working potential of 0.60 V. Under the optimized experimental conditions, a linear relationship between oxidation current and cholesterol concentration was in the concentration range from 0.31 to 2.46 µM, with an estimated detection limit of 0.13 µM and relative standard deviation (RSD) below 4.2%. The optimized amperometric method in combination with the developed ChOx/Pt,Ru-C/IL-CPE biosensor showed good repeatability and high selectivity towards cholesterol biosensing despite the presence of possible interferences. The ChOx/Pt,Ru-C/IL-CPE was tested for the determination of the free cholesterol, by its enzymatic reaction product H 2O2, in a human blood serum sample. The percentage recovery ranged from 99.08 to 102.81%, while RSD was below 2.0% for untreated, as well as for spiked human blood serum sample.YISAC 2023 : 28th Young Investigators' Seminar on Analytical Chemistry : the book of abstracts; June 25-28, Belgrad

Gauss-Bonnet brane-world cosmology without Z2Z_{2}-symmetry

We consider a single 3-brane situated between two bulk spacetimes that posses the same cosmological constant, but whose metrics do not posses a $Z_{2}$-symmetry. On each side of the brane, the bulk is a solution to Gauss-Bonnet gravity. This asymmetry modifies junction conditions, and so new terms arise in the Friedmann equation. If these terms become dominant, these behave cosmological constant at early times for some case, and might remove the initial singularity for other case. However, we show that these new terms can not become dominant ones under usual conditions when our brane is outside an event horizon. We also show that any brane-world scenarios of this type revert to a $Z_{2}$-symmetric form at late times, and hence rule out certain proposed scenarios.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; Minor typos corrected. References added. V3: Numerical errors are corrected. Fig.1 and Fig.3 are replaced. V4: published versio

Asymmetric Swiss-cheese brane-worlds

We study a brane-world cosmological scenario with local inhomogeneities represented by black holes. The brane is asymmetrically embedded into the bulk. The black strings/cigars penetrating the Friedmann brane generate a Swiss-cheese type structure. This universe forever expands and decelerates, as its general relativistic analogue. The evolution of the cosmological fluid however can proceed along four branches, two allowed to have positive energy density, one of them having the symmetric embedding limit. On this branch a future pressure singularity can arise for either (a) a difference in the cosmological constants of the cosmological and black hole brane regions (b) a difference in the left and right bulk cosmological constants. While the behaviour (a) can be avoided by a redefinition of the fluid variables, (b) establishes a critical value of the asymmetry over which the pressure singularity occurs. We introduce the pressure singularity censorship which bounds the degree of asymmetry in the bulk cosmological constant. We also show as a model independent generic feature that the asymmetry source term due to the bulk cosmological constant increases in the early universe. In order to obey the nucleosynthesis constraints, the brane tension should be constrained therefore both from below and from above. With the maximal degree of asymmetry obeying the pressure singularity censorship, the higher limit is 10 times the lower limit. The degree of asymmetry allowed by present cosmological observations is however much less, pushing the upper limit to infinity.Comment: v2: considerably expanded, 19 pages, 8 figures, many new references. Pressure singularity censorship introduced, strict limits on the possible degree of asymmetry derived. v3: model independent analysis shows that the asymmetry bounds the brane tension from above. Limits on the maximal tension set. Version published in JCA