162 research outputs found
Workers and Jobs: The Balance is Shifting
In an era when the availability of skilled labor is deemed one of the most important ingredients of economic growth, Maine faces a labor shortage that is unlikely to disappear soon. Frank O’Hara traces the rapid growth of Maine’s labor force through the 1970s and 1980s, its slow growth through the 1990s, and explains why slow to no growth can be expected in the future. Unlike a decade ago when concern over the availability of Maine workers disappeared with the onset of a recession, O’Hara predicts this labor shortage is here to stay and has implications for al regions of the state. He describes several scenarios that could result from this labor shortage, including the end of economic growth, the stimulation of a new period of in-migration, and/or an improvement in workers’ conditions that is driven by the needs of business to retain its most talented workers
Getting Creative about Elderly Housing
In his commentary on Stephen Golant’s article in this issue, Frank O’Hara notes that Golant has very successfully identified the problems of some older homeowners. However, he suggests that the solution Golant proposes—government-assisted rental housing—may apply to only a few members of the group. Moreover, very little government-subsidized rental housing is being built or planned in Maine. Using Golant’s data, O’Hara extrapolates that affordability is the primary problem for older Maine homeowners. He notes that very few are interested in the public policy alternative that would best meet their needs, namely reverse mortgages. However, he observes that older Maine homeowners are increasingly willing to sell their homes and move into multi-family settings if the attractions are there
Housing Policies in Maine: A Historical Overview
Frank O’Hara traces the evolution of Maine’s housing policies from Maine’s settlement after the Revolutionary War to the current era, where concerns about sprawl and the preservation of communities have come to the fore. In doing so, O’Hara points out that the approach to housing has always reflected more than a desire to ensure every person has adequate shelter. Rather, it reflects core values and beliefs about society, our sense of beauty, and our relationship to the environment and one another. O’Hara urges policymakers to keep these broader constructs in mind when addressing Maine’s future housing needs. As history shows, Maine’s housing policies have formed the vital core of larger efforts to create vibrant and diverse community centers
Numerical simulation of exciton dynamics in Cu2O at ultra low temperatures within a potential trap
We have studied theoretically the relaxation behaviour of excitons in cuprous
oxide (Cu2O) at ultra low temperatures when excitons are confined within a
potential trap by solving numerically the Boltzmann equation. As relaxation
processes, we have included in this paper deformation potential phonon
scattering, radiative and non-radiative decay and Auger decay. The relaxation
kinetics has been analysed for temperatures in the range between 0.3K and 5K.
Under the action of deformation potential phonon scattering only, we find for
temperatures above 0.5K that the excitons reach local equilibrium with the
lattice i.e. that the effective local temperature is coming down to bath
temperature, while below 0.5K a non-thermal energy distribution remains.
Interestingly, for all temperatures the global spatial distribution of excitons
does not reach the equilibrium distribution, but stays at a much higher
effective temperature. If we include further a finite lifetime of the excitons
and the two-particle Auger decay, we find that both the local and the global
effective temperature are not coming down to bath temperature. In the first
case we find a Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) to occur for all temperatures
in the investigated range. Comparing our results with the thermal equilibrium
case, we find that BEC occurs for a significantly higher number of excitons in
the trap. This effect could be related to the higher global temperature, which
requires an increased number of excitons within the trap to observe the BEC. In
case of Auger decay, we do not find at any temperature a BEC due to the heating
of the exciton gas
Planar Metamaterials for Antireflection Coating
We present a novel antireflection approach utilizing planar metamaterials on
dielectric surfaces. It consists of a split-ring resonator array and a metal
mesh separated by a thin dielectric spacer. The coating dramatically reduces
the reflectance and greatly enhances the transmittance over a wide range of
incidence angles and a narrow bandwidth. Antireflection is achieved by
tailoring the magnitude and phase shifts of waves reflected and transmitted at
metamaterial boundaries, resulting in a destructive interference in reflection
and constructive interference in transmission. The coating can be very thin and
there is no requirement for the spacer dielectric constant
Application of Novel PCR-Based Methods for Detection, Quantitation, and Phylogenetic Characterization of Sutterella Species in Intestinal Biopsy Samples from Children with Autism and Gastrointestinal Disturbances
Gastrointestinal disturbances are commonly reported in children with autism and may be associated with compositional changes in intestinal bacteria. In a previous report, we surveyed intestinal microbiota in ileal and cecal biopsy samples from children with autism and gastrointestinal dysfunction (AUT-GI) and children with only gastrointestinal dysfunction (Control-GI). Our results demonstrated the presence of members of the family Alcaligenaceae in some AUT-GI children, while no Control-GI children had Alcaligenaceae sequences. Here we demonstrate that increased levels of Alcaligenaceae in intestinal biopsy samples from AUT-GI children result from the presence of high levels of members of the genus Sutterella. We also report the first Sutterella-specific PCR assays for detecting, quantitating, and genotyping Sutterella species in biological and environmental samples. Sutterella 16S rRNA gene sequences were found in 12 of 23 AUT-GI children but in none of 9 Control-GI children. Phylogenetic analysis revealed a predominance of either Sutterella wadsworthensis or Sutterella stercoricanis in 11 of the individual Sutterella-positive AUT-GI patients; in one AUT-GI patient, Sutterella sequences were obtained that could not be given a species-level classification based on the 16S rRNA gene sequences of known Sutterella isolates. Western immunoblots revealed plasma IgG or IgM antibody reactivity to Sutterella wadsworthensis antigens in 11 AUT-GI patients, 8 of whom were also PCR positive, indicating the presence of an immune response to Sutterella in some children
Garden and landscape-scale correlates of moths of differing conservation status: significant effects of urbanization and habitat diversity
Moths are abundant and ubiquitous in vegetated terrestrial environments and are pollinators, important herbivores of wild plants, and food for birds, bats and rodents. In recent years, many once abundant and widespread species have shown sharp declines that have been cited by some as indicative of a widespread insect biodiversity crisis. Likely causes of these declines include agricultural intensification, light pollution, climate change, and urbanization; however, the real underlying cause(s) is still open to conjecture. We used data collected from the citizen science Garden Moth Scheme (GMS) to explore the spatial association between the abundance of 195 widespread British species of moth, and garden habitat and landscape features, to see if spatial habitat and landscape associations varied for species of differing conservation status. We found that associations with habitat and landscape composition were species-specific, but that there were consistent trends in species richness and total moth abundance. Gardens with more diverse and extensive microhabitats were associated with higher species richness and moth abundance; gardens near to the coast were associated with higher richness and moth abundance; and gardens in more urbanized locations were associated with lower species richness and moth abundance. The same trends were also found for species classified as increasing, declining and vulnerable under IUCN (World Conservation Union) criteria
Principles of Institutional-Evolutionary Political Economy – Converging Themes from the Schools of Heterodoxy
Depicting the tree of life: The philosophical and historical roots of evolutionary tree diagrams
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
The Variational Garrote
In this paper, we present a new variational method for sparse regression
using regularization. The variational parameters appear in the
approximate model in a way that is similar to Breiman's Garrote model. We refer
to this method as the variational Garrote (VG). We show that the combination of
the variational approximation and regularization has the effect of making
the problem effectively of maximal rank even when the number of samples is
small compared to the number of variables. The VG is compared numerically with
the Lasso method, ridge regression and the recently introduced paired mean
field method (PMF) (M. Titsias & M. L\'azaro-Gredilla., NIPS 2012). Numerical
results show that the VG and PMF yield more accurate predictions and more
accurately reconstruct the true model than the other methods. It is shown that
the VG finds correct solutions when the Lasso solution is inconsistent due to
large input correlations. Globally, VG is significantly faster than PMF and
tends to perform better as the problems become denser and in problems with
strongly correlated inputs. The naive implementation of the VG scales cubic
with the number of features. By introducing Lagrange multipliers we obtain a
dual formulation of the problem that scales cubic in the number of samples, but
close to linear in the number of features.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figure
- …