Intercomparison of soil pore water extraction methods for stable isotope analysis

Funded by NSERC Discovery Grant U.S. Forest Service U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies OfficePeer reviewedPostprin

Public Perceptions of Corruption in Tanzania: How Does the Corruption Perceived by a Sample of People in Arusha, Tanzania Compare to Tanzania’s Transparency International CPI Rating of 3.2 and What Does It Mean for Tanzania?

The World Bank defines corruption as “the abuse of public power for private benefit.” The definition of corruption can have many permutations, however, and acts of corruption are rarely recorded, thus it is difficult to quantify the level of graft in a town, city, or nation. In response to this problem, non-governmental agencies like Transparency International proposed using questionnaire-based surveys to measure public perceptions of corruption. This particular study focuses on trying to measure perceptions of corruption in Arusha, Tanzania. Arusha is a major metropolitan area in Tanzania, located in the northeastern part of the nation. Using Arushans as the sample population, this study describes how a non-representative sample of Tanzanians perceives and is affected by corruption in their country. Tanzanians gave insights on what corruption is, where it comes from, if it will continue, and described any personal experience they may have had with corruption. The results give a unique point of view on how Tanzania’s Corruption Perception Index rating of 3.2 translates to public perception of corruption. Data was collected on April 8 to April 28, 2011 via oral interviews, with the help of a Kiswahili translator. The sample population was a randomly chosen sample of all buyers within the Central Market during the time of my study. Once this data was collected, I analyzed it using descriptive statistics and used the findings to create a picture of my samples’ perceptions of corruption in Tanzania. In total, 84.4% of my sample population of 180 short-interviews in Arusha, Tanzania responded that corruption exists in Tanzania. Of this 84.4%, 96.2% said that corruption impedes economic growth in Tanzania, and 72% admitted to having a personal experience with corruption. In addition, 54.4% of the total sample population thought that corruption would either continue or emerge in Tanzania in the future. The results indicate that corruption is rampant throughout Tanzania and affects the nation on multiple levels. Yet, the future of corruption in Tanzania remains in question and unfortunately, taming the lion and putting an end to corruption will not be an easy task

Small modifications to network topology can induce stochastic bistable spiking dynamics in a balanced cortical model

Published April 17, 2014Directed random graph models frequently are used successfully in modeling the population dynamics of networks of cortical neurons connected by chemical synapses. Experimental results consistently reveal that neuronal network topology is complex, however, in the sense that it differs statistically from a random network, and differs for classes of neurons that are physiologically different. This suggests that complex network models whose subnetworks have distinct topological structure may be a useful, and more biologically realistic, alternative to random networks. Here we demonstrate that the balanced excitation and inhibition frequently observed in small cortical regions can transiently disappear in otherwise standard neuronal-scale models of fluctuation-driven dynamics, solely because the random network topology was replaced by a complex clustered one, whilst not changing the in-degree of any neurons. In this network, a small subset of cells whose inhibition comes only from outside their local cluster are the cause of bistable population dynamics, where different clusters of these cells irregularly switch back and forth from a sparsely firing state to a highly active state. Transitions to the highly active state occur when a cluster of these cells spikes sufficiently often to cause strong unbalanced positive feedback to each other. Transitions back to the sparsely firing state rely on occasional large fluctuations in the amount of non-local inhibition received. Neurons in the model are homogeneous in their intrinsic dynamics and in-degrees, but differ in the abundance of various directed feedback motifs in which they participate. Our findings suggest that (i) models and simulations should take into account complex structure that varies for neuron and synapse classes; (ii) differences in the dynamics of neurons with similar intrinsic properties may be caused by their membership in distinctive local networks; (iii) it is important to identify neurons that share physiological properties and location, but differ in their connectivity.Mark D. McDonnell, Lawrence M. War

Hydrological connectivity inferred from diatom transport through the riparian-stream system

Funding for this research was provided by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) in the framework of the BIGSTREAM (C09/SR/14), ECSTREAM (C12/SR/40/8854) and CAOS (INTER/DFG/11/01) projects. We are most grateful to the Administration des Services Techniques de l’Agriculture (ASTA) for providing meteorological data. We also acknowledge Delphine Collard for technical assistance in diatom sample treatment and preparation, François Barnich for the water chemistry analyses, and Jean-François Iffly, Christophe Hissler, Jérôme Juilleret, Laurent Gourdol and Julian Klaus for their constructive comments on the project and technical assistance in the field.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Patents, Tax Shelters, and the Firm

Since the landmark State Street decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, patentable subject matter has encompassed business methods, including tax investment strategies. Patents provide approximately twenty years of exclusive rights in the claimed method, in return for public disclosure in a published patent. Typically, the efficacy of specialized investment strategies will be diminished as they become generally known and so widely practiced; for this reason, many tax investment methods have been implemented under confidentiality agreements in order to prevent them from becoming widely practiced. However, patenting of such strategies may allow them to be practiced without confidentiality agreements, as the exclusive rights in the patent prevent the method from being generally adopted. We examine the effects of the shift from confidentiality to exclusive rights by drawing upon our previous work regarding intellectual property and the theory of the firm. The theory of the firm predicts several effects of such a shift from use of confidentiality to use of patents, due to the potentially lowered transactions costs associated with the patent. For example, partner firms that are necessarily affiliated with investment transactions formerly had to be prevented from unauthorized use of knowledge gained in the transaction. This could be accomplished by means of confidentiality agreements, but such agreements are cumbersome and difficult to enforce. The high costs of negotiating, policing, and enforcing confidentiality agreements may have created pressure to bring as much of the transaction as possible in house. Patenting of the transactions may lower such costs, allowing more of the transaction to be outsourced. Similarly, patenting may have an effect on the hiring, retention, and mobility of employees involved in such transactions. Employees who were skilled at such transactions formerly may have had difficulty changing firms, as they would be unable to take with them specific transactional skills learned under confidentiality agreements, or even describe such skills to a new employer. Patenting of the transactions removes the veil of confidentiality, allowing employees to discuss their skills with potential employers, even if the specific transactions cannot be used by the new employer. Assuming that tax shelter patents will be with us so long as there are business method patents, and that business method patents are for all practical purposes here to stay, we discuss the likely outcomes that tax shelter patents will have on the structure of investment firms and the mobility of skilled employees between such firms

Patents, Tax Shelters, and the Firm

Since the landmark State Street decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, patentable subject matter has encompassed business methods, including tax investment strategies. Patents provide approximately twenty years of exclusive rights in the claimed method, in return for public disclosure in a published patent. Typically, the efficacy of specialized investment strategies will be diminished as they become generally known and so widely practiced; for this reason, many tax investment methods have been implemented under confidentiality agreements in order to prevent them from becoming widely practiced. However, patenting of such strategies may allow them to be practiced without confidentiality agreements, as the exclusive rights in the patent prevent the method from being generally adopted. We examine the effects of the shift from confidentiality to exclusive rights by drawing upon our previous work regarding intellectual property and the theory of the firm. The theory of the firm predicts several effects of such a shift from use of confidentiality to use of patents, due to the potentially lowered transactions costs associated with the patent. For example, partner firms that are necessarily affiliated with investment transactions formerly had to be prevented from unauthorized use of knowledge gained in the transaction. This could be accomplished by means of confidentiality agreements, but such agreements are cumbersome and difficult to enforce. The high costs of negotiating, policing, and enforcing confidentiality agreements may have created pressure to bring as much of the transaction as possible in house. Patenting of the transactions may lower such costs, allowing more of the transaction to be outsourced. Similarly, patenting may have an effect on the hiring, retention, and mobility of employees involved in such transactions. Employees who were skilled at such transactions formerly may have had difficulty changing firms, as they would be unable to take with them specific transactional skills learned under confidentiality agreements, or even describe such skills to a new employer. Patenting of the transactions removes the veil of confidentiality, allowing employees to discuss their skills with potential employers, even if the specific transactions cannot be used by the new employer. Assuming that tax shelter patents will be with us so long as there are business method patents, and that business method patents are for all practical purposes here to stay, we discuss the likely outcomes that tax shelter patents will have on the structure of investment firms and the mobility of skilled employees between such firms

Trade-Offs Between Responsiveness and Naturalness for Player Characters

Real-time animation controllers are fundamental for animating characters in response to player input. However, the design of such controllers requires making trade-offs between the naturalness of the character’s motions and the promptness of the character’s response. In this paper, we investigate the effects of such tradeoffs on the players’ enjoyment, control, satisfaction, and opinion of the character in a simple platform game. In our first experiment, we compare three controllers having the same responsiveness, but varying levels of naturalness. In the second experiment, we compare three controllers having increasing realism but at the expense of decreased responsiveness. Not surprisingly, our least responsive controller negatively affects players’ performance and perceived ability to control the character. However, we also find that players are most satisfied with their own performance using our least natural controller, in which the character moves around the environment in a static pose; that differences in animation can significantly alter players’ enjoyment with responsiveness being equal; and that players do not report increased motion quality with our most natural controller, despite viewers outside of a game context rating the same controller as significantly more natural than our other conditions

Electromagnetic interferences from plasmas generated in meteoroids impacts

It is shown that the plasma, generated during an impact of a meteoroid with an artificial satellite, can produce electromagnetic radiation below the microwave frequency range. This interference is shown to exceed local noise sources and might disturb regular satellite operations.Comment: 6 pages, no figures. This version macthes the published versio