The exactness of a general Skoda complex

We show that a Skoda complex with a general plurisubharmonic weight function is exact if its 'degree' is sufficiently large. This answers a question of Lazarsfeld and implies that not every integrally closed ideal is equal to a multiplier ideal even if we allow general plurisubharmonic weights for the multiplier ideal, extending the result of Lazarsfeld and Lee \cite{LL}.Comment: References added, exposition streamlined, to appear in Michigan Mathematical Journa

Shades of Gray: Internal Control Reporting by Chinese U.S.-listed Firms

Chinese firms listing in the U.S. via reverse mergers (CRMs) have dominated prior media, regulator and research attention. Yet CRMs have effectively ceased, leaving Chinese firms listing via initial public offerings (CIPOs) as the relevant remaining class of Chinese firms listing on U.S. exchanges. This study documents salient differences between CIPOs, CRMs and U.S.-domiciled U.S.-listed firms by examining Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 302 and 404 ineffective internal control (IIC) and related disclosures that underlie financial reporting quality, with three main findings. First, both CIPOs and CRMs report significantly more IICs than U.S.-domiciled counterparts. Second, both CIPOs and CRMs under-report IICs to a greater degree than U.S.-domiciled counterparts (CIPO for only 302 disclosures). Third, CIPOs report and under-report IICs significantly less than CRMs. Collectively, our results clarify and recast prior characterizations of internal controls underlying the reporting quality of Chinese firms listed in the U.S. and elsewhere.preprin

Assessing Household Solid Fuel Use: Multiple Implications for the Millennium Development Goals

OBJECTIVE: The World Health Organization is the agency responsible for reporting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) indicator “percentage of population using solid fuels.” In this article, we present the results of a comprehensive assessment of solid fuel use, conducted in 2005, and discuss the implications of our findings in the context of achieving the MDGs. METHODS: For 93 countries, solid fuel use data were compiled from recent national censuses or household surveys. For the 36 countries where no data were available, the indicator was modeled. For 52 upper-middle or high-income countries, the indicator was assumed to be < 5%. RESULTS: According to our assessment, 52% of the world’s population uses solid fuels. This percentage varies widely between countries and regions, ranging from 77%, 74%, and 74% in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Western Pacific Region, respectively, to 36% in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, 16% in Latin America and the Caribbean and in Central and Eastern Europe. In most industrialized countries, solid fuel use falls to the < 5% mark. DISCUSSION: Although the “percentage of population using solid fuels” is classified as an indicator to measure progress towards MDG 7, reliance on traditional household energy practices has distinct implications for most of the MDGs, notably MDGs 4 and 5. There is an urgent need for development agendas to recognize the fundamental role that household energy plays in improving child and maternal health and fostering economic and social development

Transcriptomics reveals tissue/organ-specific differences in gene expression in the starfish Patiria pectinifera

This research was supported by Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) as “Eco-innovation Program (201300030002) and co-supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2016R1D1A3B03934086)

Experimental study on the coefficient of restitution of grain against block interfaces for natural and engineered materials

The coefficient of restitution (COR) is an important input parameter in the numerical simulation of granular flows, as it governs the travel distance, the lateral spreading and the design of barriers. In this study, a new custom-built micro-mechanical impact loading apparatus is presented along with impact experiments on engineered and natural materials. The COR and energy loss of various grains and base block combinations are studied, including fairly regular shaped Leighton Buzzard sand (LBS) grains as a natural soil and granite/rubber as base blocks, apart from the use of engineered materials for the grains (chrome steel balls, glass balls) and blocks (stainless steel, brass). The repeatability of the new micro-mechanical impact loading apparatus was checked by impacting chrome steel balls on stainless steel block. In all the test combinations, the higher and lower values of the COR are found for granite block (ranging between 0.75-0.95) and rubber block (ranging between 0.37-0.44) combinations, respectively. For the tested grain-block combinations, lower values of COR were observed for impacts between materials of low values of composite Young’s modulus. However, within the narrow range of composite surface roughness of the tested grain-block interfaces no particular trend was observed in the COR values. Compared to glass balls and chrome steel balls, greater scatter in the COR values is observed for natural sand grains. This is due to the variation of the elastic and morphological characteristics among individual LBS grains

Teaching Linux based Operating System

The teaching of operating system internals at UCT does not take a practical view of the operating system. Students are not given the opportunity to gain any experience with source code, and the inner functions. To decrease the impact of testing, a minimized version of the operating system would be ideal. The Linux operating system presents opportunities to alter source code, but the amount of information available to prospective users is limited. Also there is a means to implement a minimalist version of the kernel. Sections of interest are the scheduler, the file system, and the virtual memory manager. The goal was to provide detailed information about each section, as well as some means of altering it

The Firefighter Problem: A Structural Analysis

We consider the complexity of the firefighter problem where b>=1 firefighters are available at each time step. This problem is proved NP-complete even on trees of degree at most three and budget one (Finbow et al.,2007) and on trees of bounded degree b+3 for any fixed budget b>=2 (Bazgan et al.,2012). In this paper, we provide further insight into the complexity landscape of the problem by showing that the pathwidth and the maximum degree of the input graph govern its complexity. More precisely, we first prove that the problem is NP-complete even on trees of pathwidth at most three for any fixed budget b>=1. We then show that the problem turns out to be fixed parameter-tractable with respect to the combined parameter "pathwidth" and "maximum degree" of the input graph

Justice at Sea: Fishers’ politics and marine conservation in coastal Odisha, India

This is a paper about the politics of fishing rights in and around the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary in coastal Odisha, in eastern India. Claims to the resources of this sanctuary are politicised through the creation of a particularly damaging narrative by influential Odiya environmental actors about Bengalis, as illegal immigrants who have hurt the ecosystem through their fishing practices. Anchored within a theoretical framework of justice as recognition, the paper considers the making of a regional Odiya environmentalism that is, potentially, deeply exclusionary. It details how an argument about ‘illegal Bengalis’ depriving ‘indigenous Odiyas’ of their legitimate ‘traditional fishing rights’ derives from particular notions of indigeneity and territory. But the paper also shows that such environmentalism is tenuous, and fits uneasily with the everyday social landscape of fishing in coastal Odisha. It concludes that a wider class conflict between small fishers and the state over a sanctuary sets the context in which questions about legitimate resource rights are raised, sometimes with important effects, like when out at sea