A Fiber Detector Radiation Hardness Test

An intense 146 MeV/c pion beam was stopped inside a scintillating fiber detector made out of 12 planes with 16 pixels each, where every pixel consists out of 8 times 8 scintillating fibers of 500 mkm diameter dense packed. The detector was irradiated for 52 hours to more than 1 Mrad at its center. Before and directly after the irradiation the detector has been exposed to a particle beam to compare the corresponding light output. This study was continued during the following three months using cosmic rays. No damage was found taking into account the measurement errors of 5-10 %. In contrast a 9 cm deep lucite degrader became irreversibly non-transparent in the irradiation region.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Organic Farming Certification – the Costs of Reducing Transaction Costs

Since 1991, the European Union regulates the organic food market. By implementing the organic regulation and the corresponding inspection and certification system, organic markets were fostered, but the financial costs and bureaucratic drift of this system are controversial. Up to now, there exist only very rough estimates of the overall burden of organic producers, mostly considering only the cash costs and neglecting opportunity costs of the certified entities, which are likely to be of considerable magnitude. As a first step in approximating the amount of these costs, this paper uses the concept of Transaction Costs in order to identify and structure the relevant cost types. The quantification of this concept needs data which will soon become available

Central Bank Collateral Policy: Insights from Recent Experience

The collateral policy of central banks played a critical role during the recent financial crisis, as they worked to bolster liquidity and alleviate the funding pressures facing financial institutions. This article examines central bank collateral policy and discusses three areas in which central banks can use their collateral policy to influence financial market practices: promoting greater transparency for securitized products, improving practices related to credit risk, and reducing procyclicality in the management of market risk.

Commission to practice what it preaches

An ORGAP (Evaluation of the European Action Plan for Organic Food and Farming) research project paper questions whether the EU Commission is line with its own Principles of good governance regarding the revision process of the EU Organic Regulation

Marketing implications of traditional and ICT-mediated leisure activities

This study investigates the role of traditional and information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated leisure activities in consumer behaviour. An online survey of 558 members and 1319 ex-members of an Australian DVD rental company gathered preferences for nine traditional leisure activities and seven ICT-mediated leisure activities. The results of a cluster analysis showed four clusters with significant cluster differences across leisure activities and across demographics and consumer behaviours. For practitioners, the study illustrates how profiling customers on their leisure preferences can increase advertising effectiveness, reflect loyalty and help predict customer lifetime value. For academia, the results reveal how another consumer dimension, leisure activities, relates to demographic and behavioural characteristics

National Puzzler\u27s League

You probably noticed that some authors of anagrams use pseudonyms. Most of them are members of the National Puzzlers League (NPL), an Americna non-profit organization focused on puzzling, primarily in the realm of word play and word games. Founded in 1883, NPL is the oldest puzzlers\u27 organization in the world. it originally hosted semiannual conventions in February and September of each year, but conventions are now held annually, in July

Random Chance or Loaded Dice: The Politics of Judicial Designation

[Excerpt] “In the 1950s and 1960s, the southern states struggled to respond to the civil rights decisions being issued by the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the new civil rights laws being passed by Congress. The judicial battleground for this perfect storm of evasion and massive resistance was found in the “old” Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which encompassed the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In the “old” Fifth Circuit, a minority of liberal appeals court judges—sympathetic to the civil rights movement—used all legal and administrative power at their disposal to make sure that the federal district and appeals courts were complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown v. Board of Education. In their ground-breaking book A Court Divided: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Politics of Judicial Reform, political scientists Deborah J. Barrow and Thomas G. Walker carefully examined the political behavior of these aforementioned liberal appeals court judges and found evidence that Elbert Parr Tuttle, the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge from 1960 to 1967, was manipulating, or “gerrymandering,” the assignment of appeals court judges to both three-judge district court panels, and three-judge appellate court panels to guarantee that the panels had at least two liberal judges who would enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation rulings.

The Mission of the Church and its Unity

Process and Progress: A Case Study in India. The mission of the church and its unity are integrally related: the Lord has given the mission to His one church, just as He has given unity to the people of God in mission. In John 17, 20-21, He says, “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou. Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” This rather complicated way of describing unity and mission makes it inescapable that the two always go together and that the denial or weakening of one becomes the denial or weakening of the other

Designing a Trace Format for Heap Allocation Events

Dynamic storage allocation continues to play an important role in the performance and correctness of systems ranging from user productivity software to high-performance servers. While algorithms for dynamic storage allocation have been studied for decades, much of the literature is based on measuring the performance of benchmark programs unrepresentative of many important allocation-intensive workloads. Furthermore, to date no standard has emerged or been proposed for publishing and exchanging representative allocation workloads. In this paper, we describe a preliminary design of a trace format for such workloads and investigate its effectiveness at representing large allocation traces. Our proposal allows for a flexible encoding of information in the trace to achieve greater compression. We evaluate our preliminary design in two dimensions. First, we measure how effective these encodings are at reducing trace size. Second we consider how a meta-level specification language could be used to describe such formats and to generate trace readers and writers automatically