Stable water isotopes in HadCM3: isotopic signature of El Nino-Southern Oscillation and the tropical amount effect

Stable water isotopes have been added to the full hydrological cycle of the Hadley Centre Climate model (HadCM3) coupled atmosphere-ocean GCM. Simulations of delta O-18 in precipitation and at the ocean surface compare well with observations for the present-day climate. The model has been used to investigate the isotopic anomalies associated with ENSO; it is found that the anomalous delta O-18 in precipitation is correlated with the anomalous precipitation amount in accordance with the "amount effect.'' The El Nino delta O-18 anomaly at the ocean surface is largest in coastal regions because of the mixing of ocean water and the more depleted runoff from the land surface. Coral delta O-18 anomalies were estimated, using an established empirical relationship, and generally reflect ocean surface delta O-18 anomalies in coastal regions and sea surface temperatures away from the coast. The spatial relationship between tropical precipitation and delta O-18 was investigated for the El Nino anomaly simulated by HadCM3. Weighting the El Nino precipitation anomaly by the precipitation amount at each grid box gave a large increase in the spatial correlation between tropical precipitation and delta O-18. This improvement was most apparent over land points and between 10 and 20 degrees of latitude

Lateralized Repetition Priming for Unfamiliar Faces

Peer reviewedPreprin

Understanding Preferences For Income Redestribution

Recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups. We employ a new pattern recognition technology, tree regression analysis, to uncover what these groups are. Using data from the General Social Survey, we present a new stylized fact that preferences for governmental provision of income redistribution vary systematically with race, gender, and class background. We explore the extent to which existing theories of income redistribution can explain our results, but conclude that current approaches do not fully explain the findings.

Understanding Divergent Views on Redistribution Policy in the United States

Particular demographic groups are often associated with distinct points of view across various dimensions of redistribution policy. In this paper, we investigate which demographic groups account for heterogeneity in views on welfare policy and views on appropriate levels of overall redistribution. Using data from the General Social Survey and classification tools, we find evidence that classifications of the population by race, socioeconomic status, and age have some predictive power. However, much heterogeneity in views on redistribution policy persists even within these demographic groupings and remains unexplained. Our results suggest that identity-based explanations for variations in these views have to be interpreted with caution.Data mining, classification and regression trees, random forests, redistribution preferences, welfare, identity

The Economics of Scientific Research Coalitions: Collaborative Network Formation in the Presence of Multiple Funding Agencies

The paper develops a formal model of coalition-building (“network” formation) among research units that seek competitive funding from a supra-regional program, while also drawing support from their respective regional funding agencies. This approach enables one to ask whether there are stable (equilibrium) outcomes in the interactions among the several funding entities, and to investigate what those outcomes would imply for the evolving distribution of scientific performance within the entire region and its national sub-regions. This analysis is motivated by the absence of frameworks of analysis applicable to problems of design of public R&D funding arrangements in the European Union, and in other regional systems were independent programs of “federal and state” support for research co-exists First, a model is developed to analyze how collaborations are formed under different sets of funding rules of an international funding institution, starting with a fixed finite population of research units and an associated distribution of reputed quality, or scientific reputation.. Collaborations are formed in the expectation of attracting supra-national funding, following a specific ordering procedure; this gives rise to a repeated non-cooperative game of coalition (or collaboration) formation with the distribution of payoffs within the collaboration following to a fixed rule. Non- cooperative games of coalition formation developed by Bloch (1995), and Ray and Vohra (1999), provides a useful framework single-period framework. Following Keely (1999), this type of game is applied to a multi-period setting in which a distribution of coalitions is tracked, along with the levels of funding received. The latter are determined according to a rule comparing the distribution of reputations within and across collaborations. Alternative possible external funding rules are analyzed to determine how they impact upon collaboration formation, and the resulting evolution of the reputation distribution (as that will be affected by the allocation of funding). In the second part of the analysis, various combinations of national and supra-national funding regimes are examined, but all the rules considered stipulate that collaborations are funded as a whole, regardless of the number of members; and that their funding is determined by the absolute level of average reputation, or of the variance in reputation, rather than just the rankings of the proposed networks. The Nash equilibria associated with each of the stipulated funding regimes can be compared, and to characterize the outcomes, the paper examines these two moments of the endogenously determined distributions research “competence” (signaled by the reputation measures) within the entire ensemble of research units and its national partitions. A numerical simulation helps illustrate the nature of the conclusions for policy design that can be drawn from this style of analysis.

CLEARER: a new tool for the analysis of X-ray fibre diffraction patterns and diffraction simulation from atomic structural models

Fibre diffraction can provide structural information about polymers and biopolymers that is unobtainable using other methods. This method has been used to elucidate the structures of many polymers, biopolymers and protein assemblies. Extracting structural information from fibre diffraction patterns is a major challenge. A computer program called CLEARER has been developed that aids the detailed analysis of polycrystalline fibre diffraction patterns. It offers an easy-to-use interface that enables diffraction data processing, analysis and simulation of diffraction patterns. It is likely to be applicable to structural determination for a wide range of polymeric fibrous materials. CLEARER simplifies and speeds up the data analysis process and helps to utilize all of the structural information present in the analysed X-ray and electron diffraction patterns

The association between hysterectomy and ovarian cancer risk: A population-based record-linkage study

Background: Recent studies have called into question the long-held belief that hysterectomy without oophorectomy protects against ovarian cancer. This population-based longitudinal record-linkage study aimed to explore this relationship, overall and by age at hysterectomy, time period, surgery type, and indication for hysterectomy. Methods: We followed the female adult Western Australian population (837 942 women) across a 27-year period using linked electoral, hospital, births, deaths, and cancer records. Surgery dates were determined from hospital records, and ovarian cancer diagnoses (n¼1640) were ascertained from cancer registry records.We used Cox regression to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between hysterectomy and ovarian cancer incidence. Results: Hysterectomy without oophorectomy (n¼78 594) was not associated with risk of invasive ovarian cancer overall (HR ¼ 0.98, 95% CI ¼ 0.85 to 1.11) or with the most common serous subtype (HR ¼ 1.05, 95% CI ¼ 0.89 to 1.23). Estimates did not vary statistically significantly by age at procedure, time period, or surgical approach. However, among women with endometriosis (5.8%) or with fibroids (5.7%), hysterectomy was associated with substantially decreased ovarian cancer risk overall (HR ¼ 0.17, 95% CI ¼ 0.12 to 0.24, and HR ¼ 0.27, 95% CI ¼ 0.20 to 0.36, respectively) and across all subtypes. Conclusions: Our results suggest that for most women, having a hysterectomy with ovarian conservation is not likely to substantially alter their risk of developing ovarian cancer. However, our results, if confirmed, suggest that ovarian cancer risk reduction could be considered as a possible benefit of hysterectomy when making decisions about surgical management of endometriosis or fibroids

A novel, resistance-linked ovine PrP variant and its equivalent mouse variant modulate the in vitro cell-free conversion of rPrP to PrPres

Prion diseases are associated with the conversion of the normal cellular prion protein, PrPc, to the abnormal, disease-associated form, PrPSc. This conversion can be mimicked in vitro by using a cell-free conversion assay. It has recently been shown that this assay can be modified to use bacterial recombinant PrP as substrate and mimic the in vivo transmission characteristics of rodent scrapie. Here, it is demonstrated that the assay replicates the ovine polymorphism barriers of scrapie transmission. In addition, the recently identified ovine PrP variant ARL168Q, which is associated with resistance of sheep to experimental BSE, modulates the cell-free conversion of ovine recombinant PrP to PrPres by three different types of PrPSc, reducing conversion efficiencies to levels similar to those of the ovine resistance-associated ARR variant. Also, the equivalent variant in mice (L164) is resistant to conversion by 87V scrapie. Together, these results suggest a significant role for this position and/or amino acid in conversion

The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995-2010: Some Descriptive Statistics

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Members is the most active among international courts. The functioning of the DS system has attractive research interest among both lawyers and economists. This paper reports some descriptive statistics of the working of the DS system based on the recently updated Horn and Mavroidis WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set. The data set covers all 426 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until August 11, 2011, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until July 28, 2011. There are in total approximately 67 000 observations. Each dispute is followed through its legal life via the panel stage, the Appellate Body stage, through to the implementation stage. The paper provides information on fundamental aspects of the use of the DS system, such as: • How active have the different countries been as complainants and as respondents? • Which agreements and which provisions are most commonly cited? • How are the adjudicating panels composed? • How successful have the different participants been?WTO; Dispute Settlement; Developing Countries