Guide to the Common Fishes of South Dakota

South Dakota is home to more than 100 fish species. This guide is a reference to the most common 50 species. Included are tips for identification, distribution maps and brief life histories. Also included is a comprehensive listing of the known fish species in South Dakota

What Affects the Quality of Economic Analysis for Life-Saving Investments?

Economic analysis of life-saving investments in both the public and private sectors has the potential to dramatically improve longevity and the quality of life, but only if the analyses on which decisions are based are done well. In this paper we analyze a dataset that provides information on the content and quality of journal articles that measure the cost-effectiveness of life-saving investments. Our study is the first to provide a detailed multivariate analysis of factors affecting objective measures of quality. We also explore whether a series of recommendations by an expert panel convened by the U.S. Public Health Service affect the way analyses of specific life-saving investments are done. Our results suggest that four factors are positively correlated with an index we construct to measure analytical quality: 1. having at least one author affiliated with a university; 2. publication in a journal that has experience in publishing these analyses; 3. if the life-saving investment is located in the U.S., and 4. if the analysis considers a measure of social costs or benefits. Somewhat surprisingly, a study's funding source and whether it is affiliated with industry are not significantly correlated with the quality index. Finally, neither time nor the panel guidelines had an impact on the index.

The Promise of Prediction Markets

Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve decision making in the private and public sectors. We argue that U.S. regulators should lower barriers to the creation and design of prediction markets by creating a safe harbor for certain types of small stakes markets. We believe our proposed change has the potential to stimulate innovation in the design and use of prediction markets throughout the economy, and in the process to provide information that will benefit the private sector and government alike.Technology and Industry

Restrictions and extensions of semibounded operators

We study restriction and extension theory for semibounded Hermitian operators in the Hardy space of analytic functions on the disk D. Starting with the operator zd/dz, we show that, for every choice of a closed subset F in T=bd(D) of measure zero, there is a densely defined Hermitian restriction of zd/dz corresponding to boundary functions vanishing on F. For every such restriction operator, we classify all its selfadjoint extension, and for each we present a complete spectral picture. We prove that different sets F with the same cardinality can lead to quite different boundary-value problems, inequivalent selfadjoint extension operators, and quite different spectral configurations. As a tool in our analysis, we prove that the von Neumann deficiency spaces, for a fixed set F, have a natural presentation as reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, with a Hurwitz zeta-function, restricted to FxF, as reproducing kernel.Comment: 63 pages, 11 figure

CHERI Concentrate: Practical Compressed Capabilities

We present CHERI Concentrate, a new fat-pointer compression scheme applied to CHERI, the most developed capability-pointer system at present. Capability fat-pointers are a primary candidate for enforcing fine-grained and non-bypassable security properties in future computer systems, although increased pointer size can severely affect performance. Thus, several proposals for capability compression have been suggested but these did not support legacy instruction sets, ignored features critical to the existing software base, and also introduced design inefficiencies to RISC-style processor pipelines. CHERI Concentrate improves on the state-of-the-art region-encoding efficiency, solves important pipeline problems, and eases semantic restrictions of compressed encoding, allowing it to protect a full legacy software stack. We analyze and extend logic from the open-source CHERI prototype processor design on FPGA to demonstrate encoding efficiency, minimize delay of pointer arithmetic, and eliminate additional load-to-use delay. To verify correctness of our proposed high-performance logic, we present a HOL4 machine-checked proof of the decode and pointer-modify operations. Finally, we measure a 50%-75% reduction in L2 misses for many compiled C-language benchmarks running under a commodity operating system using compressed 128-bit and 64-bit formats, demonstrating both compatibility with and increased performance over the uncompressed, 256-bit format

Efficient Synthesis of Novel Plasticizers by Direct Palladium-Catalyzed Di- or Multi-carbonylations

Diesters are of fundamental importance in the chemical industry and are used for many applications, e.g. as plasticizers, surfactants, emulsifiers, and lubricants. Herein, we present a straightforward and efficient method for the selective synthesis of diesters via palladium-catalyzed direct carbonylation of di- or polyols with readily available alkenes. Key-to-success is the use of a specific palladium catalyst with the “built-in-base” ligand L16 providing esterification of all alcohols and a high n/iso ratio. The synthesized diesters were evaluated as potential plasticizers in PVC films by measuring the glass transition temperature (Tg) via differential scanning calorimetry (DSC)

Estimation of cosmological parameters using adaptive importance sampling

We present a Bayesian sampling algorithm called adaptive importance sampling or Population Monte Carlo (PMC), whose computational workload is easily parallelizable and thus has the potential to considerably reduce the wall-clock time required for sampling, along with providing other benefits. To assess the performance of the approach for cosmological problems, we use simulated and actual data consisting of CMB anisotropies, supernovae of type Ia, and weak cosmological lensing, and provide a comparison of results to those obtained using state-of-the-art Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). For both types of data sets, we find comparable parameter estimates for PMC and MCMC, with the advantage of a significantly lower computational time for PMC. In the case of WMAP5 data, for example, the wall-clock time reduces from several days for MCMC to a few hours using PMC on a cluster of processors. Other benefits of the PMC approach, along with potential difficulties in using the approach, are analysed and discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figure

In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states: a toy theory

We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide variety of quantum phenomena are found to have analogues within this toy theory. Such phenomena include: the noncommutativity of measurements, interference, the multiplicity of convex decompositions of a mixed state, the impossibility of discriminating nonorthogonal states, the impossibility of a universal state inverter, the distinction between bi-partite and tri-partite entanglement, the monogamy of pure entanglement, no cloning, no broadcasting, remote steering, teleportation, dense coding, mutually unbiased bases, and many others. The diversity and quality of these analogies is taken as evidence for the view that quantum states are states of incomplete knowledge rather than states of reality. A consideration of the phenomena that the toy theory fails to reproduce, notably, violations of Bell inequalities and the existence of a Kochen-Specker theorem, provides clues for how to proceed with this research program.Comment: 32 pages, REVTEX, based on a talk given at the Rob Clifton Memorial Conference, College Park, May 2003; v2: minor modifications throughout, updated reference