An Evaluation of Compressed Work Schedules and Their Impact on Electricity Use

As the largest energy consumer in the United States, the Department of Defense must consider all fiscally responsible means to improve energy efficiency. Budgetary and environmental concerns are a catalyst for numerous initiatives designed to reduce energy consumption. Congressional mandates outline the rate at which agencies must reduce facility energy use. In this study, Monte Carlo simulation was used to compare electricity consumption, cost, and emissions produced under 5-day workweeks and compressed work schedules. The research provides energy managers a template for evaluating compressed work schedules as a means to improve energy efficiency. The study found the relationship between the amount of electricity consumed on duty and non-duty days determines the effectiveness of compressed work schedules in improving energy efficiency. Electricity use in the test facilities on non-duty days was 72 to 90 percent of duty-day consumption. The resulting difference in electricity consumption, cost, and emissions was less than one percent when implementing compressed work schedules. Compressed work schedules can incrementally improve energy efficiency for facilities with lower levels of electricity consumption on non-duty days. Therefore, energy managers will achieve greater gains in energy efficiency by improving the facilities themselves rather than focusing on the use of the buildings

B cells are capable of independently eliciting rapid reactivation of encephalitogenic CD4 T cells in a murine model of multiple sclerosis

<div><p>Recent success with B cell depletion therapies has revitalized efforts to understand the pathogenic role of B cells in Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Using the adoptive transfer system of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a murine model of MS, we have previously shown that mice in which B cells are the only MHCII-expressing antigen presenting cell (APC) are susceptible to EAE. However, a reproducible delay in the day of onset of disease driven by exclusive B cell antigen presentation suggests that B cells require optimal conditions to function as APCs in EAE. In this study, we utilize an <i>in vivo</i> genetic system to conditionally and temporally regulate expression of MHCII to test the hypothesis that B cell APCs mediate attenuated and delayed neuroinflammatory T cell responses during EAE. Remarkably, induction of MHCII on B cells following the transfer of encephalitogenic CD4 T cells induced a rapid and robust form of EAE, while no change in the time to disease onset occurred for recipient mice in which MHCII is induced on a normal complement of APC subsets. Changes in CD4 T cell activation over time did not account for more rapid onset of EAE symptoms in this new B cell-mediated EAE model. Our system represents a novel model to study how the timing of pathogenic cognate interactions between lymphocytes facilitates the development of autoimmune attacks within the CNS.</p></div

Three-loop QCD corrections and b-quark decays

We present three-loop (NNNLO) corrections to the heavy-to-heavy quark transitions in the limit of equal initial and final quark masses. In analogy with the previously found NNLO corrections, the bulk of the result is due to the beta_0^2 alpha_s^3 corrections. The remaining genuine three-loop effects for the semileptonic b --> c decays are estimated to increase the decay amplitude by 0.2(2)%. The perturbative series for the heavy-heavy axial current converges very well.Comment: 5 page

Animal Arterivirus Infections

No abstract

Collection development in the era of big deals

Drawing on an original methodology using citations, downloads, and survey data, this paper analyzes journal usage patterns across 28 Canadian universities. Results show that usage levels vary across disciplines and that different academic platforms varied in their importance to different institutions, with for-profit platforms generally exhibiting lower usage. These results suggest economic inefficiencies exist in “big deal” academic journal subscriptions for universities, as most journals in such bundles are seldom or never used. We recommend that universities coordinate resource sharing and negotiate strategies with academic journal expenditures based on shared interests and usage trends

Finite size scaling in the 2D XY-model and generalized universality

In recent works (BHP), a generalized universality has been proposed, linking phenomena as dissimilar as 2D magnetism and turbulence. To test these ideas, we performed a MC study of the 2D XY-model. We found that the shape of the probability distribution function for the magnetization M is non Gaussian and independent of the system size --in the range of the lattice sizes studied-- below the Kosterlitz-Thoules temperature. However, the shape of these distributions does depend on the temperature, contrarily to the BHP's claim. This behavior is successfully explained by using an extended finite-size scaling analysis and the existence of bounds for M.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. Details of changes: 1. We emphasized in the abstract the range of validity of our results. 2. In the last paragraph the temperature dependence of the PDF was slightly re-formulate