Saying No to Stakeholding

What if America were to make good on its promise of equal opportunity by [XXX]? That\u27s the bold proposal set forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott.... The quotation above is from the Yale University Press announcement describing Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott\u27s new book, with one change: we have substituted [XXX] for the authors\u27 catchphrase summary of their proposal. What do you think the missing words might be? How would you enable America to make good on its promise of equal opportunity ? As you ponder that question, you might consider the following feature of the Ackerman/ Alstott proposal. It calls for the federal government to spend an additional $255 billion per year (p. 35). Perhaps that is not surprising; perhaps you might have trouble spending much less if you wanted to make good on the promise of equal opportunity. So what would Ackerman and Alstott do

Point Detection of Pathogens in Oral Samples

We have outlined our progress with respect to developing a novel device for monitoring oral samples for bacterial and/or viral pathogens. The system is based on an existing device for measuring drugs of abuse in an oral sample. The sample is collected on an absorbent pad that delivers a metered dose to the cassette. The sample is then separated into 4 channels for the detection of antigen, RNA or DNA, and host antibodies to the pathogen. The detection system involves the Upconverting Phosphor Technology (UPT), whereby the captured pathogen analyte is detected by interrogation of the UPT particles with near-infrared light, and the emitted visible light is detected by the analyzer. Several of the steps in this process have already been worked out for viral and/or bacterial pathogens, and most of the remaining effort will be aimed at integrating these steps into a single microfluidic device while maintaining the current sensitivity

Temperature trends at the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii

Observations at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, established the systematic increase of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. For the same reasons that this site provides excellent globally averaged CO2 data, it may provide temperature data with global significance. Here, we examine hourly temperature records, averaged annually for 1977-2006, to determine linear trends as a function of time of day. For night-time data (22:00 to 06:00 LST (local standard time)) there is a near-uniform warming of 0.040 degrees C yr(-1). During the day, the linear trend shows a slight cooling of -0.014 degrees C yr(-1) at 12:00 LST (noon). Overall, at Mauna Loa Observatory, there is a mean warming trend of 0.021 degrees C yr(-1). The dominance of night-time warming results in a relatively large annual decrease in the diurnal temperature range (DTR) of -0.050 degrees C yr(-1) over the period 1977-2006. These trends are consistent with the observed increases in the concentrations of CO2 and its role as a greenhouse gas (demonstrated here by first-order radiative forcing calculations), and indicate the possible relevance of the Mauna Loa temperature measurements to global warming.</p

Scaling and correlations in the dynamics of forest-fire occurrence

Forest-fire waiting times, defined as the time between successive events above a certain size in a given region, are calculated for Italy. The probability densities of the waiting times are found to verify a scaling law, despite that fact that the distribution of fire sizes is not a power law. The meaning of such behavior in terms of the possible self-similarity of the process in a nonstationary system is discussed. We find that the scaling law arises as a consequence of the stationarity of fire sizes and the existence of a non-trivial ``instantaneous'' scaling law, sustained by the correlations of the process.Comment: Not a long paper, but many figures (but no large size in kb

Analyticity and uniform stability in the inverse spectral problem for Dirac operators

We prove that the inverse spectral mapping reconstructing the square integrable potentials on [0,1] of Dirac operators in the AKNS form from their spectral data (two spectra or one spectrum and the corresponding norming constants) is analytic and uniformly stable in a certain sense.Comment: 19 page

Inverse spectral problems for Dirac operators with summable matrix-valued potentials

We consider the direct and inverse spectral problems for Dirac operators on $(0,1)$ with matrix-valued potentials whose entries belong to $L_p(0,1)$, $p\in[1,\infty)$. We give a complete description of the spectral data (eigenvalues and suitably introduced norming matrices) for the operators under consideration and suggest a method for reconstructing the potential from the corresponding spectral data.Comment: 32 page

Time trends and persistence in European temperature anomalies.

This paper looks at the level of persistence in the temperature anomalies series of 114 European cities. Once this level of persistence has been identified, the time trend coefficients are estimated and the results indicate that most of the series examined display positive trends, supporting thus climate warming. Moreover, the results obtained confirm the hypothesis that long-memory behaviour cannot be neglected in the study of temperature time series, changing, therefore, the estimated effect of global warming.pre-print825 K

Non-characteristic Half-lives in Radioactive Decay

Half-lives of radionuclides span more than 50 orders of magnitude. We characterize the probability distribution of this broad-range data set at the same time that explore a method for fitting power-laws and testing goodness-of-fit. It is found that the procedure proposed recently by Clauset et al. [SIAM Rev. 51, 661 (2009)] does not perform well as it rejects the power-law hypothesis even for power-law synthetic data. In contrast, we establish the existence of a power-law exponent with a value around 1.1 for the half-life density, which can be explained by the sharp relationship between decay rate and released energy, for different disintegration types. For the case of alpha emission, this relationship constitutes an original mechanism of power-law generation

The similarity problem for JJ-nonnegative Sturm-Liouville operators

Sufficient conditions for the similarity of the operator $A := 1/r(x) (-d^2/dx^2 +q(x))$ with an indefinite weight r(x)=(\sgn x)|r(x)| are obtained. These conditions are formulated in terms of Titchmarsh-Weyl $m$-coefficients. Sufficient conditions for the regularity of the critical points 0 and $\infty$ of $J$-nonnegative Sturm-Liouville operators are also obtained. This result is exploited to prove the regularity of 0 for various classes of Sturm-Liouville operators. This implies the similarity of the considered operators to self-adjoint ones. In particular, in the case r(x)=\sgn x and $q\in L^1(R, (1+|x|)dx)$, we prove that $A$ is similar to a self-adjoint operator if and only if $A$ is $J$-nonnegative. The latter condition on $q$ is sharp, i.e., we construct $q\in \cap_{\gamma <1} L^1(R, (1+|x|)^\gamma dx)$ such that $A$ is $J$-nonnegative with the singular critical point 0. Hence $A$ is not similar to a self-adjoint operator. For periodic and infinite-zone potentials, we show that $J$-positivity is sufficient for the similarity of $A$ to a self-adjoint operator. In the case $q\equiv 0$, we prove the regularity of the critical point 0 for a wide class of weights $r$. This yields new results for "forward-backward" diffusion equations.Comment: 36 pages, LaTeX2e, version 2; addresses of the authors added, the reference [38] update