Shifting Into Gear: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating a Car Ownership Program

Offers detailed strategies for organizations pursuing car ownership programs to help low-income residents obtain vehicles for employment access and family economic improvement

Preferences over Meyer’s Location-Scale Family

This paper extends Meyer’s (1987) location-scale family with general n random seed sources. Firstly, we clarify and generalize existing results to this multivariate setting. Some useful geometrical and topological properties of the location-scale expected utility functions are obtained. Secondly, we introduce and study some general non-expected utility functions defined over the location-scale (LS) family. Special care is made in characterizing the shape of the indifference curves induced by the LS expected utility functions and non-expected utility functions. Finally, efforts are also made to study several well-defined partial orders and dominance relations defined over the LS family. These include the first-, second- order stochastic dominance, the mean -variance rule, and a newly defined location-scale dominance.

Renminbising China's Foreign Assets

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, China has rolled out a number of initiatives to actively promote the international role of the renminbi and to denominate more of its international claims away from the US dollar and into the renminbi. This paper discusses the factors shaping the prospects of internationalising the renminbi from the perspective of the currency composition of China’s international assets and liabilities. These factors include, among others, underlying valuation and management of the renminbi.renminbi internationalisation, net international asset position, convertibility, exchange rate uncertainty, dollar peg

A Content Analysis of Interviewee Reports of Medical School Admissions Interviews

Introduction. Prospective medical school applicants use Internet websites to gain information about medical school interviews as well as to offer their experience in such interviews. This study examined applicants’ reported experiences of interviews and compared them to the purposes of the interview as purported by medical schools. Method. Content analysis of student feedback regarding medical school interviews at 161 medical schools was conducted for entries of over 4600 students applying to medical school who anonymously and voluntarily completed an online questionnaire. Results. Across all medical schools, nearly one half of all cited interview questions addressed non-cognitive characteristics of the applicants. Top ranked medical schools were reported to ask significantly more interpersonal and illegal questions and fewer academic/general knowledge questions than other medical schools. Lower ranked schools did not differ significantly in the types of questions reportedly asked applicants compared to other medical schools. Discussion. Medical school interviews are generally gathering types of information about applicants that admissions personnel identify as important in the admission decision. In addition to measuring interpersonal characteristics, medical school admissions interviews are assessing cognitive abilities and ethical decision-making. Sources on the Internet provide actual medical school interview questions to prospective students. This practice can help them gain an undue advantage in interviewing. Admissions committees and faculty who interview students may want to consider how best to obtain accurate and valid responses from applicants

Reversible, Opto-Mechanically Induced Spin-Switching in a Nanoribbon-Spiropyran Hybrid Material

It has recently been shown that electronic transport in zigzag graphene nanoribbons becomes spin-polarized upon application of an electric field across the nanoribbon width. However, the electric fields required to experimentally induce this magnetic state are typically large and difficult to apply in practice. Here, using both first-principles density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT, we show that a new spiropyran-based, mechanochromic polymer noncovalently deposited on a nanoribbon can collectively function as a dual opto-mechanical switch for modulating its own spin-polarization. These calculations demonstrate that upon mechanical stress or photoabsorption, the spiropyran chromophore isomerizes from a closed-configuration ground-state to a zwitterionic excited-state, resulting in a large change in dipole moment that alters the electrostatic environment of the nanoribbon. We show that the electronic spin-distribution in the nanoribbon-spiropyran hybrid material can be reversibly modulated via noninvasive optical and mechanical stimuli without the need for large external electric fields. Our results suggest that the reversible spintronic properties inherent to the nanoribbon-spiropyran material allow the possibility of using this hybrid structure as a resettable, molecular-logic quantum sensor where opto-mechanical stimuli are used as inputs and the spin-polarized current induced in the nanoribbon substrate is the measured output.Comment: Accepted by Nanoscal

Klein Levin syndrome is a steroid-responsive, non-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor-mediated encephalitis

Poster SessionBACKGROUND: Klein Levin syndrome is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder with periodic hypersomnia, cognitive and behavioural disturbance. It is postulated to be triggered by a viral illness or is a postinfectious immune-mediated encephalitis. With an increasing awareness of immune-med...published_or_final_versio

Multiband gravitational-wave event rates and stellar physics

Joint gravitational-wave detections of stellar-mass black-hole binaries by ground- and space-based observatories will provide unprecedented opportunities for fundamental physics and astronomy. We present a semianalytic method to estimate multiband event rates by combining selection effects of ground-based interferometers (like LIGO/Virgo) and space missions (like LISA). We forecast the expected number of multiband detections first by using information from current LIGO/Virgo data, and then through population synthesis simulations of binary stars. We estimate that few to tens of LISA detections can be used to predict mergers detectable on the ground. Conversely, hundreds of events could potentially be extracted from the LISA data stream using prior information from ground detections. In general, the merger signal of binaries observable by LISA is strong enough to be unambiguously identified by both current and future ground-based detectors. Therefore third-generation detectors will not increase the number of multiband detections compared to LIGO/Virgo. We use population synthesis simulations of isolated binary stars to explore some of the stellar physics that could be constrained with multiband events, and we show that specific formation pathways might be overrepresented in multiband events compared to ground-only detections.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures. Database and python code available at https://github.com/dgerosa/spops - Published in PR