A new species of Acmaeodera (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) from Big Bend National Park, Texas : with synonymy for other species occurring in the United States

Acmaeodera tiquilia Westcott and Barr, new species, from Big Bend National Park, Texas is described, figured, and discussed in considerable detail, particularly in relation to the similar and partially sympatric A. recticollis Fall. A neotype is designated for A. quatuordecimspilota Obenberger and that species is synonymized with A. ornata (Fabricius). Additionally, A. gibbula gila Knull is synonymized with A. gibbula LeConte; A. nautica Van Dyke is synonymized with A. simulata Van Dyke

Evaluating the productive efficiency and performance of U.S. commercial banks

This paper reviews various approaches to the measurement of core inflation that have been proposed in recent years. The objective is to determine whether the European Central Bank (ECB) should pay special attention to one or other of these measures in assessing inflation developments in the euro area. I put particular emphasis on the conceptual and practical problems that arise in the measurement of core inflation, and propose some criteria that could be used by the ECB to choose a core inflation measure.Banks and banking

The lumbar spine has an intrinsic shape specific to each individual that remains a characteristic throughout flexion and extension

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A new species of \u3ci\u3eAcmaeodera\u3c/i\u3e (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) from Big Bend National Park, Texas, with synonymy for other species occurring in the United States

Acmaeodera tiquilia Westcott and Barr, new species, from Big Bend National Park, Texas is described, figured, and discussed in considerable detail, particularly in relation to the similar and partially sympatric A. recticollis Fall. A neotype is designated for A. quatuordecimspilota Obenberger and that species is synonymized with A. ornata (Fabricius). Additionally, A. gibbula gila Knull is synonymized with A. gibbula LeConte; A. nautica Van Dyke is synonymized with A. simulata Van Dyke

A new species of \u3ci\u3eAcmaeodera\u3c/i\u3e (Coleoptera: Buprestidae) from Big Bend National Park, Texas, with synonymy for other species occurring in the United States

Acmaeodera tiquilia Westcott and Barr, new species, from Big Bend National Park, Texas is described, figured, and discussed in considerable detail, particularly in relation to the similar and partially sympatric A. recticollis Fall. A neotype is designated for A. quatuordecimspilota Obenberger and that species is synonymized with A. ornata (Fabricius). Additionally, A. gibbula gila Knull is synonymized with A. gibbula LeConte; A. nautica Van Dyke is synonymized with A. simulata Van Dyke

SSD Admission Control for Content Delivery Networks

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are utilized to deliver content with low latency. Solid State Drive (SSD) devices are a cost-effective option for intermediate tier caches in servers used in CDNs. However, excessive writes of content to SSD devices can degrade useful life of such devices. This disclosure describes admission control techniques to manage content in an SSD cache. In particular, a popularity metric for content items is determined based on an inter-arrival time. The popularity metric takes into account past admission history and is dynamically to account for variations in content popularity over different time periods. These techniques balance the SSD cache write rates to optimize the device life and cache performance

Room-temperature ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal showing a large and divergent density

The ferroelectric nematic phase (NF) is a recently discovered phase of matter in which the orientational order of the conventional nematic liquid crystal state is augmented with polar order. Atomistic simulations suggest that the polar NF phase would be denser than conventional nematics owing to contributions from polar order. Using an oscillating U-tube densitometer, we obtain detailed temperature-dependent density values for a selection of conventional liquid crystals with excellent agreement with earlier reports. Having demonstrated the validity of our method, we then record density as a function of temperature for M5, a novel room-temperature ferroelectric nematic material. We present the first experimental density data for a NF material as well as density data for a nematic that has not previously been reported. We find that the room-temperature NF material shows a large (>1.3 g cm3) density at all temperatures studied, with an increase in density at phase transitions. The magnitude of the increase for the intermediate splay-ferroelectric nematic (NX-NF) transition is an order of magnitude smaller than the isotropic-nematic (I-N) transition. Present results may be typical of ferroelectric nematic materials, potentially guiding material development, and is especially relevant for informing ongoing studies into this emerging class of materials