Constitutionality of the Illinois Draft Card Burning Act

Pre-emption, a doctrine based on Article VI of the United States Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”), considers “…the validity of state laws in the light of… Federal laws touching on the same subject.” Where state and federal laws embrace the same subject matter the question is whether Congress intended to preclude state legislative participation in the area or to allow concurrent power. If Congress did intend to preclude state legislation on the subject, the state law must be struck down as a violation of Article VI. Where there is no directly expressed Congressional intent the Court must discover that intent, and as Justice Black noted in Hines v. Davidowitz: “There is not – and from the nature of the problem there cannot be – any rigid formula or rule which can be used as a universal pattern to determine the meaning and purpose of every Act of Congress.

Gravitational Lensing Characteristics of the Transparent Sun

The transparent Sun is modeled as a spherically symmetric and centrally condensed gravitational lens using recent Standard Solar Model (SSM) data. The Sun's minimum focal length is computed to a refined accuracy of 23.5 +/- 0.1 AU, just beyond the orbit of Uranus. The Sun creates a single image of a distant point source visible to observers inside this minimum focal length and to observers sufficiently removed from the line connecting the source through the Sun's center. Regions of space are mapped where three images of a distant point source are created, along with their associated magnifications. Solar caustics, critical curves, and Einstein rings are computed and discussed. Extremely high gravitational lens magnifications exist for observers situated so that an angularly small, unlensed source appears near a three-image caustic. Types of radiations that might undergo significant solar lens magnifications as they can traverse the core of the Sun, including neutrinos and gravitational radiation, are discussed

Comprehensive Analysis of Non Redundant Protein Database

Background: Scientists around the world use NCBI’s non-redundant (NR) database to identify the taxonomic origin and functional annotation of their favorite protein sequences using BLAST. Unfortunately, due to the exponential growth of this database, many scientists do not have a good understanding of the contents of the NR database. There is a need for tools to explore the contents of large biological datasets, such as NR, to better understand the assumptions and limitations of the data they contain. Results: Protein sequence data, protein functional annotation, and taxonomic assignment from NCBI’s NR database were placed into a BoaG database, a domain-specific language and shared data science infrastructure for genomics, along with a CD-HIT clustering of all these protein sequences at different sequence similarity levels. We show that BoaG can efficiently perform queries on this large dataset to determine the average length of protein sequences and identify the most common taxonomic assignments and functional annotations. Using the clustering information, we also show that the non-redundant (NR) database has a considerable amount of annotation redundancy at the 95% similarity level. Conclusions: We implemented BoaG and provided a web-based interface to BoaG’s infrastructure that will help researchers to explore the dataset further. Researchers can submit queries and download the results or share them with others. Availability and implementation: The web-interface of the BoaG infrastructure can be accessed here: http://boa.cs.iastate.edu/boag. Please use user = boag and password = boag to login. Source code and other documentation are also provided as a GitHub repository: https://github.com/boalang/NR_Dataset

Exploring the utility of the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale.

Background: State boredom–the experience of boredom in the moment – is related to a number of psychosocial issues. Until the recent creation of the Multidimensional State Boredom Scale (MSBS), research was constrained by the lack of a comprehensive, validated measure. However, the MSBS could benefit from further evaluation. Aim: To more thoroughly validate the MSBS. Methods: In two studies, participants were induced into a state of either boredom or non-boredom, and then completed the MSBS. Results: Discriminant analysis showed that the full MSBS was able to correctly classify 68.1% (Study 2) – 84.1% (Study 1) of participants into their experimental condition. Based on 14 further DA analysis, a subset of eight items (a potential short form) is proposed. Differential item functioning (Study 1) found only one item to which responding differed by gender. Discussion: Use of the MSBS, including the full scale versus the short form, is discussed. Which experiential components of boredom may be particularly important for classifying bored individuals, and the issue of variability across boredom manipulations, are also considered

Implementation and performance of SIBYLS: a dual endstation small-angle X-ray scattering and macromolecular crystallography beamline at the Advanced Light Source.

The SIBYLS beamline (12.3.1) of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, supported by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, is optimized for both small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and macromolecular crystallography (MX), making it unique among the world's mostly SAXS or MX dedicated beamlines. Since SIBYLS was commissioned, assessments of the limitations and advantages of a combined SAXS and MX beamline have suggested new strategies for integration and optimal data collection methods and have led to additional hardware and software enhancements. Features described include a dual mode monochromator [containing both Si(111) crystals and Mo/B(4)C multilayer elements], rapid beamline optics conversion between SAXS and MX modes, active beam stabilization, sample-loading robotics, and mail-in and remote data collection. These features allow users to gain valuable insights from both dynamic solution scattering and high-resolution atomic diffraction experiments performed at a single synchrotron beamline. Key practical issues considered for data collection and analysis include radiation damage, structural ensembles, alternative conformers and flexibility. SIBYLS develops and applies efficient combined MX and SAXS methods that deliver high-impact results by providing robust cost-effective routes to connect structures to biology and by performing experiments that aid beamline designs for next generation light sources

Declarative visitors to ease fine-grained source code mining with full history on billions of AST nodes

Software repositories contain a vast wealth of information about software development. Mining these repositories has proven useful for detecting patterns in software development, testing hypotheses for new software engineering approaches, etc. Specifically, mining source code has yielded significant insights into software development artifacts and processes. Unfortunately, mining source code at a large-scale remains a difficult task. Previous approaches had to either limit the scope of the projects studied, limit the scope of the mining task to be more coarse-grained, or sacrifice studying the history of the code due to both human and computational scalability issues. In this paper we address the substantial challenges of mining source code: a) at a very large scale; b) at a fine-grained level of detail; and c) with full history information. To address these challenges, we present domain-specific language features for source code mining. Our language features are inspired by object-oriented visitors and provide a default depth-first traversal strategy along with two expressions for defining custom traversals. We provide an implementation of these features in the Boa infrastructure for software repository mining and describe a code generation strategy into Java code. To show the usability of our domain-specific language features, we reproduced over 40 source code mining tasks from two large-scale previous studies in just 2 person-weeks. The resulting code for these tasks show between 2.0x--4.8x reduction in code size. Finally we perform a small controlled experiment to gain insights into how easily mining tasks written using our language features can be understood, with no prior training. We show a substantial number of tasks (77%) were understood by study participants, in about 3 minutes per task

Cattle feedlot facilities and management study : a progress report on the first test at the University's Weldon Springs experimental feedlots

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Visible Light Photo-oxidation of Model Pollutants Using CaCu3Ti4O12: An Experimental and Theoretical Study of Optical Properties, Electronic Structure, and Selectivity

[Image: see text] Charge transfer between metal ions occupying distinct crystallographic sublattices in an ordered material is a strategy to confer visible light absorption on complex oxides to generate potentially catalytically active electron and hole charge carriers. CaCu(3)Ti(4)O(12) has distinct octahedral Ti(4+) and square planar Cu(2+) sites and is thus a candidate material for this approach. The sol−gel synthesis of high surface area CaCu(3)Ti(4)O(12) and investigation of its optical absorption and photocatalytic reactivity with model pollutants are reported. Two gaps of 2.21 and 1.39 eV are observed in the visible region. These absorptions are explained by LSDA+U electronic structure calculations, including electron correlation on the Cu sites, as arising from transitions from a Cu-hybridized O 2p-derived valence band to localized empty states on Cu (attributed to the isolation of CuO(4) units within the structure of CaCu(3)Ti(4)O(12)) and to a Ti-based conduction band. The resulting charge carriers produce selective visible light photodegradation of 4-chlorophenol (monitored by mass spectrometry) by Pt-loaded CaCu(3)Ti(4)O(12) which is attributed to the chemical nature of the photogenerated charge carriers and has a quantum yield comparable with commercial visible light photocatalysts