119 research outputs found
Symposium on State and Local Taxation
The commerce clause as an instrument of federalism facilitates a system of government that places a national government over fifty sovereign states. Federalism requires a balancing of the interest in a unified national approach to government with the competing interest in state sovereignty. As Justice Brennan explained:
Our Constitution is an instrument of federalism. The Constitution furnishes the structure for the operation of the States with respect to the National Government and with respect to each other.. ..Because there are 49 States and much of the Nation\u27s commercial activity is carried on by enterprises having contacts with more States than one, a common and continuing problem of constitutional interpretation has been that of adjusting the demands of individual States to regulate and tax these enterprises in light of the multi-state nature of our federation.
The commerce clause provides: The Congress shall have Power ... To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. \u27 The commerce clause has been interpreted not only as conferring power on the national government to regulate commerce, but also as limiting the states\u27 power to interfere with commerce. This restriction on state power often is referred to as the negative implication of the commerce clause or as the dormant commerce clause principle. Under the authority of the commerce clause, the United States Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional a variety of state regulatory and taxation measures as unduly burdening commerce
Benefit of enabling fine-grained routing and load balancing
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-63).Data volumes are exploding. It is essential to use multiple machines to store such large amounts of data. To address this explosion, storage systems like databases need to be distributed across many machines. Transactions that access a few tuples, often seen in web workloads such as Twitter, do not run optimally using traditional partitioning schemes [25]. Hence, increasing the number of machines often presents a bottleneck for workloads where each transaction accesses just a few tuples. Fine-grained partitioning can fix the scale out problem introduced by simplistic partitioning schemes. In this thesis, I introduce a design of a distributed query execution system that handles fine-grained partitioning using look-up tables. I introduce look-up tables, which is a mapping from a tuple attribute to a tuple back-end location such that fine grained partitioning can be supported. I show through both synthetic and real data that fine-grained partitioning enabled by look-up tables can increase throughput of a distributed database system. My goal is scale-out with the number of machines used in the distributed database. I show in my experiments that scale-out can be reached if an ideal partitioning can be created. I test my implementation on a Wikipedia data set. I show in this example a factor of three times better performance compared to the optimal hash partitioning scheme with eight back-ends and signs of continual scale-out with more machines. Through the use of large data sets and projecting my results onto even larger data sets, I show that look-up tables can be used to represent complex partitioning schemes for databases containing billions of tuples.by Aubrey Lynn Tatarowicz.M.Eng
VizWiz
The lack of access to visual information like text labels, icons,and colors can cause frustration and decrease independence for blind people. Current access technology uses automatic approaches to address some problems in this space, but the technology is error-prone, limited in scope, and quite expensive. In this paper, we introduce VizWiz, a talking application for mobile phones that offers a new alternative to answering visual questions in nearly real-time—asking multiple people on the web. To support answering questions quickly, we introduce a general approach for intelligently recruiting human workers in advance called quikTurkit so that workers are available when new questions arrive. A field deployment with 11 blind participants illustrates that blind people can effectively use VizWiz to cheaply answer questions in their everyday lives, highlighting issues that automatic approaches will need to address to be useful. Finally, we illustrate the potential of using VizWiz as part of the participatory design of advanced tools by using it to build and evaluate VizWiz::LocateIt, an interactive mobile tool that helps blind people solve general visual search problems
Observation of the Dependence of Scintillation from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Argon on Drift Field
We have exposed a dual-phase Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr-TPC)
to a low energy pulsed narrowband neutron beam, produced at the Notre Dame
Institute for Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics to study the scintillation
light yield of recoiling nuclei in a LAr-TPC. A liquid scintillation counter
was arranged to detect and identify neutrons scattered in the LAr-TPC target
and to select the energy of the recoiling nuclei.
We report the observation of a significant dependence on drift field of
liquid argon scintillation from nuclear recoils of 11 keV. This observation is
important because, to date, estimates of the sensitivity of noble liquid TPC
dark matter searches are based on the assumption that electric field has only a
small effect on the light yield from nuclear recoils.Comment: v3 updated to reflect published version, including a set of plots for
49.9 keV dat
Measurement of Scintillation and Ionization Yield and Scintillation Pulse Shape from Nuclear Recoils in Liquid Argon
We have measured the scintillation and ionization yield of recoiling nuclei
in liquid argon as a function of applied electric field by exposing a
dual-phase liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr-TPC) to a low energy
pulsed narrow band neutron beam produced at the Notre Dame Institute for
Structure and Nuclear Astrophysics. Liquid scintillation counters were arranged
to detect and identify neutrons scattered in the TPC and to select the energy
of the recoiling nuclei. We report measurements of the scintillation yields for
nuclear recoils with energies from 10.3 to 57.3 keV and for median applied
electric fields from 0 to 970 V/cm. For the ionization yields, we report
measurements from 16.9 to 57.3 keV and for electric fields from 96.4 to 486
V/cm. We also report the observation of an anticorrelation between
scintillation and ionization from nuclear recoils, which is similar to the
anticorrelation between scintillation and ionization from electron recoils.
Assuming that the energy loss partitions into excitons and ion pairs from
Kr internal conversion electrons is comparable to that from Bi
conversion electrons, we obtained the numbers of excitons () and ion
pairs () and their ratio () produced by nuclear recoils from
16.9 to 57.3 keV. Motivated by arguments suggesting direction sensitivity in
LAr-TPC signals due to columnar recombination, a comparison of the light and
charge yield of recoils parallel and perpendicular to the applied electric
field is presented for the first time.Comment: v2 to reflect published versio
Results from the first use of low radioactivity argon in a dark matter search
Liquid argon is a bright scintillator with potent particle identification
properties, making it an attractive target for direct-detection dark matter
searches. The DarkSide-50 dark matter search here reports the first WIMP search
results obtained using a target of low-radioactivity argon. DarkSide-50 is a
dark matter detector, using two-phase liquid argon time projection chamber,
located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso. The underground argon is
shown to contain Ar-39 at a level reduced by a factor (1.4 +- 0.2) x 10^3
relative to atmospheric argon. We report a background-free null result from
(2616 +- 43) kg d of data, accumulated over 70.9 live-days. When combined with
our previous search using an atmospheric argon, the 90 % C.L. upper limit on
the WIMP-nucleon spin-independent cross section based on zero events found in
the WIMP search regions, is 2.0 x 10^-44 cm^2 (8.6 x 10^-44 cm^2, 8.0 x 10^-43
cm^2) for a WIMP mass of 100 GeV/c^2 (1 TeV/c^2 , 10 TeV/c^2).Comment: Accepted by Phys. Rev.
Forward Neutral Pion Transverse Single Spin Asymmetries in p+p Collisions at \sqrt{s}=200 GeV
We report precision measurements of the Feynman-x dependence, and first
measurements of the transverse momentum dependence, of transverse single spin
asymmetries for the production of \pi^0 mesons from polarized proton collisions
at \sqrt{s}=200 GeV. The x_F dependence of the results is in fair agreement
with perturbative QCD model calculations that identify orbital motion of quarks
and gluons within the proton as the origin of the spin effects. Results for the
p_T dependence at fixed x_F are not consistent with pQCD-based calculations.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Characterisation and Carriage Ratio of Clostridium difficile Strains Isolated from a Community-Dwelling Elderly Population in the United Kingdom
Background
Community-associated Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) appears to be an increasing problem. Reported carriage rates by C.difficile are debatable with suggestions that primary asymptomatic carriage is associated with decreased risk of subsequent diarrhoea. However, knowledge of potential reservoirs and intestinal carriage rates in the community, particularly in the elderly, the most susceptible group, is limited. We have determined the presence of C.difficile in the faeces of a healthy elderly cohort living outside of long-term care facilities (LCFs) in the United Kingdom.
Methods
Faecal samples from 149 community-based healthy elderly volunteers (median age 81 years) were screened for C.difficile using direct (Brazier's CCEY) and enrichment (Cooked Meat broth) culture methods and a glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH) immunoassay. Isolates were PCR-ribotyped and analysed for toxin production and the presence of toxin genes.
Results
Of 149 faecal samples submitted, six (4%) were found to contain C.difficile. One particular sample was positive by both the GDH immunoassay and direct culture, and concurrently produced two distinct strain types: one toxigenic and the other non-toxigenic. The other five samples were only positive by enrichment culture method. Overall, four C.difficile isolates were non-toxigenic (PCR-ribotypes 009, 026 (n = 2) and 039), while three were toxigenic (PCR-ribotypes 003, 005 and 106). All individuals who had a positive culture were symptom-free and none of them had a history of CDI and/or antibiotics use in the 3 month period preceding recruitment.
Conclusions
To our knowledge, this is the first study of the presence of C.difficile in healthy elderly community-dwelling individuals residing outside of LCFs. The observed carriage rate is lower than that reported for individuals in LCFs and interestingly no individual carried the common epidemic strain PCR-ribotype 027 (NAP1/BI). Further follow-up of asymptomatic carriers in the community, is required to evaluate host susceptibility to CDI and identify dynamic changes in the host and microbial environment that are associated with pathogenicity
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