LIFE3: A predictive costing tool for digital collections

Predicting the costs of long-term digital preservation is a crucial yet complex task for even the largest repositories and institutions. For smaller projects and individual researchers faced with preservation requirements, the problem is even more overwhelming, as they lack the accumulated experience of the former. Yet being able to estimate future preservation costs is vital to answering a range of important questions for each. The LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) project, which has just completed its third phase, helps institutions and researchers address these concerns, reducing the financial and preservation risks, and allowing decision makers to assess a range of options in order to achieve effective preservation while operating within financial restraints. The project is a collaboration between University College London (UCL), The British Library and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Funding has been supplied in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN)

Lunar magnetization concentrations (MAGCONS) antipodal to young large impact basins

Electron reflection measurements from Apollo 15 and 16 subsatellites show that patches of strong surface magnetic fields ranging in size from less than about 7 km to greater than 500 km are distributed over the surface of the Moon. With the exception of a few regions, no obvious association to surface geology has been found. Researchers examined the antipodes of 23 winged impact basins for which electron reflection measurements are available. It was concluded that the apparent temporal variations for the basin antipodes may reflect real variations in the lunar magnetic field

Frequency Locking in Spatially Extended Systems

A variant of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation is used to investigate the frequency locking phenomena in spatially extended systems. With appropriate parameter values, a variety of frequency-locked patterns including flats, $\pi$ fronts, labyrinths and $2\pi/3$ fronts emerge. We show that in spatially extended systems, frequency locking can be enhanced or suppressed by diffusive coupling. Novel patterns such as chaotically bursting domains and target patterns are also observed during the transition to locking

Evaluation of Formal posterior distributions via Markov chain arguments

We consider evaluation of proper posterior distributions obtained from improper prior distributions. Our context is estimating a bounded function $\phi$ of a parameter when the loss is quadratic. If the posterior mean of $\phi$ is admissible for all bounded $\phi$, the posterior is strongly admissible. We give sufficient conditions for strong admissibility. These conditions involve the recurrence of a Markov chain associated with the estimation problem. We develop general sufficient conditions for recurrence of general state space Markov chains that are also of independent interest. Our main example concerns the $p$-dimensional multivariate normal distribution with mean vector $\theta$ when the prior distribution has the form $g(\|\theta\|^2) d\theta$ on the parameter space $\mathbb{R}^p$. Conditions on $g$ for strong admissibility of the posterior are provided.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOS542 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Vector and Axial-Vector Charmonium-like States

After constructing all the tetraquark interpolating currents with $J^{PC}=1^{-+}, 1^{--}, 1^{++}$ and $1^{+-}$ in a systematic way, we investigate the two-point correlation functions to extract the masses of the charmonium-like states with QCD sum rule. For the $1^{--}$ $qc\bar q\bar c$ charmonium-like state, $m_X=4.6\sim4.7$ GeV, which implies a possible tetraquark interpretation for the state Y(4660). The masses for both the $1^{++}$ $qc\bar q\bar c$ and $sc\bar s\bar c$ charmonium-like states are around $4.0\sim 4.2$ GeV, which are slightly above the mass of X(3872). For the $1^{-+}$ $qc\bar q\bar c$ charmonium-like state, the extracted mass is $4.5\sim 4.7$ GeV. We also discuss the possible decay modes and experimental search of the $1^{-+}$ charmonium-like states.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures and 6 table

Intrinsic Josephson Effects in the Magnetic Superconductor RuSr2GdCu2O8

We have measured interlayer current transport in small sized RuSr2GdCu2O8 single crystals. We find a clear intrinsic Josephson effect showing that the material acts as a natural superconductor-insulator-ferromagnet-insulator-superconductor superlattice. So far, we detected no unconventional behavior due to the magnetism of the RuO2 layers.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

The determinants of pollution levels: Firm-level evidence from Chinese manufacturing

Using a large, unique, firm-level dataset from the Chinese manufacturing sector, we study important factors that are related to emission intensity for three pollutants in China – sulfur dioxide, wastewater, and soot. Our main findings are as follows: (1) compared to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), both foreign-owned firms and domestic public-listed firms exhibit less intensive pollutant emissions; (2) firms in regions with less local protection have lower pollution intensity; (3) better property rights protection is negatively correlated with pollutant discharge over and beyond the national standards; and (4) larger firms, firms in industries that export more, and firms with more educated employees pollute less. These results suggest that China should not target foreign firms more harshly in its effort to reduce industrial pollution. Better institutions in the form of more effective law enforcement and lower entry barriers across regional markets are also means of curbing China’s pressing environmental problems during its current stage of economic development.postprin