Tobacco and Intra Ocular Pressure

Glaucoma is an optic nerve disorder caused by raised intraocular pressure. Among many drugs and agents causing glaucoma, tobacco has been found to be one of the important agents. It is important for the clinical practitioners as well as the general population to be aware of the ill effects of tobacco on ocular circulation and intra ocular pressure

The Political Economy of Trade Policy: Empirical Approaches

In order to explain the prevalence and persistence of trade protection, a large body of work that departs from the notion of welfare maximizing governments and emphasizes instead political-economic determinants of policy has recently emerged. This survey paper summarizes and evaluates analytically the empirical component of this literature. We discuss a broad set of empirical findings which provide a convincing confirmation of the presence and significance of political economy influences. We also discuss some puzzles and controversies that have emerged in recent work.

Representation Variety of Fuchsian Groups in SO(p,q)

We estimate the dimension of the variety of homomorphisms from $\Gamma$ to $SO(p,q)$ with Zariski dense image, where $\Gamma$ is a Fuchsian group, and $SO(p,q)$ is the indefinite special orthogonal group with signature $(p,q)$.Comment: The format of exposition is slightly altered for the sake of clarit

Optimum energy allocation for detection in wireless sensor networks

The problem of binary hypothesis testing in a wireless sensor network is studied in the presence of noisy channels and for non-identical sensors. We have designed a mathematically tractable fusion rule for which optimal energy allocation for individual sensors can be achieved. In this thesis we considered two methods for transmitting the sensor observations; binary modulation and M-ary modulation. In binary modulation we are able to allocate the energy among the sensors and protect the individual quantized bits where as the M-ary modulation provides optimum energy allocation only among the sensors. The goal is to design a fusion rule and an energy allocation for the nodes subject to a limit on the total energy of all the nodes so as to optimize a cost function. Two cost functions were considered; the probability of error and the J-divergence distance measure. Probability of error is the most natural criteria used for binary hypothesis testing problem. Distance measure is applied when it is difficult to obtain a closed form for the error probability. Results of optimal energy allocation and the resulting probability of error are presented for the two cost functions. Comparisons are drawn between the two cost functions regarding the fusion rule, energy allocations and the error probability

Foreign Lobbies and US Trade Policy

In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending policy in a direction that would suit foreigners may not in fact be harmful: If the policy outcome absent any lobbying by foreigners is characterized by welfare-reducing trade barriers, lobbying by foreigners may result in reductions in such barriers and raise consumer surplus (and possibly improve welfare). Using a new data set on foreign political activity in the US, this paper investigates the relationship between trade protection and lobbying activity empirically. The approach taken in this paper is primarily a structural one. To model the role of foreign and domestic lobbies in determining trade policy, we develop first a theoretical framework building on the well-known work of Grossman and Helpman (1994); the econometric work that follows is very closely linked to the theory. Our analysis of the data suggests that foreign lobbying activity has significant impact on trade policy - and in the predicted direction: Tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are both found to be negatively related with foreign lobbying activity. We consider also extended specifications in which we include a large number of additional explanatory variables that have been suggested in the literature as determinants of trade policy (but that emerge from outside of the theoretical structure described above) and confirm the robustness of our findings in this setting.