The Mississippi River System Shallow Draft Barge Market – Perfectly Competitive or Oligopolistic?

Most transportation textbooks and articles on inland waterway navigation assume a perfectly competitive Mississippi River system barge industry. One study found the 1972 and 1977 grain barge industry to be oligopolistic. A second study of the U.S. barge industry found "intra industry competition for the barge industry on a day-to-day basis with easy entry and exit." Using the concentration ratio and the Herfindahl Index, this study found the Mississippi River barge industry to be oligopolistic. These results suggest that Mississippi River navigation infrastructure studies should not use long run marginal barge costs as a proxy for barge rates

The impact of a pilot continuing professional development module on hospital pharmacists’ preparedness to provide contemporary advice on the clinical use of vancomycin

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.BACKGROUND: Revised international clinical guidelines for the antibiotic vancomycin have changed the advice pharmacists need to provide to medical and nursing colleagues. OBJECTIVES: (1) To determine the self-reported confidence of hospital pharmacists to provide contemporary advice on vancomycin and (2) to evaluate hospital pharmacists' knowledge to provide contemporary advice on vancomycin following a pilot continuing professional development (CPD) module. METHODS: The study was a prospective two-phase design in an Australian teaching hospital. Phase one: a survey of pharmacist self-reported confidence to eight questions on providing contemporary advice on vancomycin. Responses were recorded using a Likert scales. Phase two: The provision of a pilot online CPD module on vancomycin containing knowledge-based assessment based on a clinical vignette. Likert scales recorded self-reported confidence were reported as median and interquartile range (IQR). Knowledge assessment was reported using descriptive statistics. The main outcome measure were the self-reported confidence, and knowledge of pharmacists regarding provision of contemporary advice on clinical vancomycin use. RESULTS: Response rates for surveys; confidence n = 35 (72.9 %) and knowledge n = 31 (58.5 %). Phase one: confidence was highest regarding vancomycin dosing and monitoring with 71.4-81.6 % of respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing that they were confident in these domains. Respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing were least confident regarding intravenous administration and infusion related reactions, 57.1 and 45.7 % respectively. Respondents who provided advice on vancomycin >10 times in the prior 12 months reported significantly higher confidence in; therapeutic range 1 (IQR 1-2) versus 2 (IQR 1-3) p = 0.02; amending dosage based on therapeutic drug monitoring results 2 (IQR 1-3) versus 3 (IQR 2-3) p = 75 % of pharmacists. CONCLUSION: Pharmacists' self-reported confidence to managing vancomycin was variable but generally high. Knowledge scores were consistently high after pharmacists completed a pilot CPD module on vancomycin. These data provides impetus for a randomised controlled study across multiple sites to determine the extent to which pharmacist knowledge on vancomycin can be attributed to completion of an online CPD

Integrating Through-Wafer Interconnects with Active Devices and Circuits

Through wafer interconnects (TWIs) enable vertical stacking of integrated circuit chips in a single package. A complete process to fabricate TWIs has been developed and demonstrated using blank test wafers. The next step in integrating this technology into 3D microelectronic packaging is the demonstration of TWIs on wafers with preexisting microcircuitry. The circuitry must be electrically accessible from the backside of the wafer utilizing the TWIs; the electrical performance of the circuitry must be unchanged as a result of the TWI processing; and the processing must be as cost effective as possible. With these three goals in mind, several options for creating TWIs were considered. This paper explores the various processing options and describes in detail, the final process flow that was selected for testing, the accompanying masks that were designed, the actual processing of the wafers, and the electrical test results

Containerization on Petascale HPC Clusters

Containerization technologies provide a mechanism to encapsulate applications and many of their dependencies, facilitating software portability and reproducibility on HPC systems. However, in order to access many of the architectural features that enable HPC system performance, compatibility between certain components of the container and host are required, resulting in a trade-off between portability and performance. In this work, we discuss our early experiences running three state-of-the-art containerization technologies on the petascale Frontera system. We present how we build the containers to ensure performance and security and their performance at scale.We ran microbenchmarks at a scale of 4,096 nodes and demonstrate the near-native performance and minimal memory overheads by the containerized environments at 70,000 processes on 1,296 nodes with a scientific application MILC - a quantum chromodynamics code.UT Austin-Portugal Program, a collaboration between the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology and the University of Texas at Austin, award UTA18-001217Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC

Selectively bred lines of mice show response and drug specificity for genetic regulation of acute functional tolerance to ethanol and

ABSTRACT Genetic regulation of acute tolerance to ethanol may be associated with ethanol consumption and other ethanol-related behaviors in rodents. We have used lines of mice, selectively bred for high and low acute functional tolerance (HAFT and LAFT, respectively) to ethanol-induced loss of balance to test this hypothesis. Replicate HAFT and LAFT lines differ in AFT to ethanol-induced loss of balance by 4.4-and 5-fold, respectively. Frequency distributions and mean AFT scores for those lines, F 1 , and backcrosses show a dominance for the HAFT phenotype. Time courses for acquisition and decay showed that AFT to ethanol-induced loss of balance developed rapidly, could be maintained up to 6 h with repeated doses, and decayed 6 h after peak tolerance and discontinuance of ethanol administration. The lines did not differ in initial sensitivity as measured by brain ethanol concentration at loss of balance, indicating that initial sensitivity and AFT to loss of balance were not coselected traits. Surprisingly, HAFT versus LAFT lines did not differ in development of AFT to loss of righting response, or hypothermia, indicating different mechanisms or neuronal systems mediate genetic influences on these measures. Voluntary ethanol consumption was low in both of the replicate lines, but HAFT lines consumed greater amounts of ethanol than LAFT lines. The HAFT and LAFT lines developed AFT to pentobarbital-induced loss of balance, however, there were no line differences in rates or extent of the AFT development. These results show that genetic regulation of AFT development is drug-as well as response-specific