Triclosan: An Instructive Tale

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released a final rule to ban triclosan and 18 other antimicrobial chemicals from soaps. We applaud this rule specifically because of the associated risks that triclosan poses to the spread of antibiotic resistance throughout the environment. This persistent chemical constantly stresses bacteria to adapt, and behavior that promotes antibiotic resistance needs to be stopped immediately when the benefits are null

Environmental Resource Management in Borderlands: Evolution from Competing Interests to Common Aversions

Great enthusiasm is attached to the emergence of cross-border regions (CBRs) as a new institutional arrangement for dealing with local cross-border environmental resource management and other issues that remain too distant from national capitals and/or too expensive to be addressed in the traditional topocraticmanner requiring instead local adhocratic methods. This study briefly discusses the perceived value of CBRs and necessary and sufficient conditions for the successful and sustainable development of such places. Then, assuming that necessary conditions can be met, the study investigates an intriguing hypothesis concerning the catalyzing of sustainable consensus for cross-border resource management based on a game theoretical approach that employs the use of dilemma of common aversion rather than the more traditional dilemma of competing common interests. Using this lens to investigate a series of events on the Pacific northwestern Canadian-American border in a part of the Fraser Lowland, we look for evidence of the emergence of an active and sustainable CBR to address local trans-border resource management issues. Although our micro-level scale fails to conclusively demonstrate such evidence, it does demonstrate the value of using this approach and suggests a number of avenues for further research

Ceramic composition at Chalcolithic Shiqmim, northern Negev desert, Israel: investigating technology and provenance using thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossils

Technological innovations in ceramic production and other crafts are hallmarks of the Chalcolithic period (4500–3600 BCE) in the southern Levant, but details of manufacturing traditions have not been fully investigated using the range of analytical methods currently available. This paper presents results of a compositional study of 51 sherds of ceramic churns and other pottery types from the Chalcolithic site of Shiqmim in the northern Negev desert. By applying complementary thin section petrography, instrumental geochemistry and calcareous nannofossil analyses, connections between the raw materials, clay paste recipes and vessel forms of the selected ceramic samples are explored and documented. The study indicates that steps in ceramic manufacturing can be related to both technological choices and local geology. Detailed reporting of the resulting data facilitates future comparative ceramic compositional research that is needed as a basis for testable regional syntheses and to better resolve networks of trade/exchange and social group movement

Committee, Government Diverging on Convergence?

The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications begins taking oral evidence next Tuesday in its Inquiry on Media Convergence and its Public Policy Impact. It is a broad inquiry, attempting to take in some of the high level issues that the Communications Review and the Leveson Inquiry are unwilling, or unable, to cover. It proposes to cover very general issues related to convergence of media asking whether there should be some kind of over-arching regulatory framework for broadcasting and the internet, and asks for suggestions for a ‘guiding principle’ for policy on convergence

HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS: DUAL LORA-NB-IOT REDUNDANT CONNECTIVITY

LoRa refers to a digital wireless data communication technology that enables very-long-range transmissions with low power consumption. Narrowband Internet-of-Things (NB-IoT) refers to a lower power standard focusing on indoor coverage. By combining LoRa and NB-IoT technologies, a low-energy device may receive the benefit of NB-IoT throughput, while consuming an amount of power similar to LoRa. The embodiments presented herein emulate a LoRa device over a NB-IoT network using a virtual gateway. Power usage of a device can be reduced by using LoRa and waking up NB-IoT on demand. A device may use LoRa as long as LoRa meets expected delivery ratio and timeliness criteria; the exact selection of which radio to use for each type of packet may be determined for each device by applying a machine learning profiler to the network at the beginning of the life of the device, with continuous learning thereafter. Heterogeneous LoRa-NB-IoT devices can also improve the reliability of a transmission by using both radios in parallel and introducing a frame replication and duplicate-elimination technique for highly critical packets. Thus, a device may be protected against network outages on either side

Gigahertz Optical Spin Transceiver

We present a time-resolved optical technique to measure electron spin dynamics with GHz dynamical bandwidth, transform-limited spectral selectivity, and phase-sensitive (lock-in) detection. Use of a continuous-wave (CW) laser and fast optical bridge enables greatly improved signal-to-noise characteristics compared to traditional optical sampling (pump-probe) techniques. We demonstrate the technique with a measurement of GHz-spin precession in n-GaAs. This approach may be applicable to other physical systems where stroboscopic techniques cannot be used because of either noise or spectral limitations

OVERRIDING DETERMINISTIC FLOWS

Real aging is not desirable for Deterministic Network (DetNet) flows. Defined herein are new techniques that provide a similar service for DetNet flows. The new techniques involve: utilizing new Quality of Service (QoS) values to indicate a packet that is a normal DetNet packet versus a reclassified packet; reclassifying a DetNet packet to a higher priority to avoid discarding N contiguous packets of the flow; ensuring that a reclassified packet progresses through automatic repeat request (ARQ) methods; and declassifying a DetNet packet to a lower priority rather than discarding it using IP-in-IP encapsulation and a deadline header with a deadline that is computed on the fly based on the remaining time till the bounded time of delivery for the packet