WHAT IS "THE BASIS," HOW IS IT MEASURED, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Basis behavior is generally considered to be the major determinant of hedging success or failure. In the course of our work as contract designers for Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc., we have come to the conclusion that there are many misconceptions and incorrect statements made about "the basis" among practitioners and academics alike. Our work suggests that basis values, how they are measured, what they represent and how they are interpreted may differ widely from one commodity contract to another due to differences in the specifications of the underlying futures market, as well as differences in the structure of the underlying cash market.Marketing,

The Inns of Court in London

It is a generally known fact that most of our American law was adopted from the English Common Law. Therefore, it should be interesting to learn how the English lawyers are educated. The Inns of Court: Lincoln\u27s Inn, Gray\u27s Inn, Inner Temple, and Middle Temple are the four principal Inns which gave rise to the English law schools

ParaHox gene expression in larval and postlarval development of the polychaete Nereis virens (Annelida, Lophotrochozoa).

RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are.BACKGROUND: Transcription factors that encode ANTP-class homeobox genes play crucial roles in determining the body plan organization and specification of different organs and tissues in bilaterian animals. The three-gene ParaHox family descends from an ancestral gene cluster that existed before the evolution of the Bilateria. All three ParaHox genes are reported from deuterostomes and lophotrochozoans, but not to date from any ecdysozoan taxa, and there is evidence that the ParaHox genes, like the related Hox genes, were ancestrally a single chromosomal cluster. However, unlike the Hox genes, there is as yet no strong evidence that the ParaHox genes are expressed in spatial and temporal order during embryogenesis. RESULTS: We isolated fragments of the three Nereis virens ParaHox genes, then used these as probes for whole-mount in situ hybridization in larval and postlarval worms. In Nereis virens the ParaHox genes participate in antero-posterior patterning of ectodermal and endodermal regions of the digestive tract and are expressed in some cells in the segment ganglia. The expression of these genes occurs in larval development in accordance with the position of these cells along the main body axis and in postlarval development in accordance with the position of cells in ganglia along the antero-posterior axis of each segment. In none of these tissues does expression of the three ParaHox genes follow the rule of temporal collinearity. CONCLUSION: In Nereis virens the ParaHox genes are expressed during antero-posterior patterning of the digestive system (ectodermal foregut and hindgut, and endodermal midgut) of Nereis virens. These genes are also expressed during axial specification of ventral neuroectodermal cell domains, where the expression domains of each gene are re-iterated in each neuromere except for the first parapodial segment. These expression domains are probably predetermined and may be directed on the antero-posterior axis by the Hox genes, whose expression starts much earlier during embryogenesis. Our results support the hypothesis that the ParaHox genes are involved in antero-posterior patterning of the developing embryo, but they do not support the notion that these genes function only in the patterning of endodermal tissues

Temperature Dependence of Line Widths of the Inversion Spectra of Ammonia

One of the purposes of this work is to investigate modifications that have to be made to a standard source-modulation microwave spectrograph so that it can be used to study gases at various temperatures. Another objective in this work is to determine experimentally the function of temperature that describes how the line widths of microwave spectral lines vary with changing temperature. The most important segment of the study is the temperature dependence of the line width since from an accurate knowledge of this temperature dependence one is able to determine what molecular force fields are present and the relative importance of parts of the molecular force field

A systematic review of the use of an expertise-based randomised controlled trial design

Acknowledgements JAC held a Medical Research Council UK methodology (G1002292) fellowship, which supported this research. The Health Services Research Unit, Institute of Applied Health Sciences (University of Aberdeen), is core-funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates. Views express are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Can a combination of the conformal thin-sandwich and puncture methods yield binary black hole solutions in quasi-equilibrium?

We consider combining two important methods for constructing quasi-equilibrium initial data for binary black holes: the conformal thin-sandwich formalism and the puncture method. The former seeks to enforce stationarity in the conformal three-metric and the latter attempts to avoid internal boundaries, like minimal surfaces or apparent horizons. We show that these two methods make partially conflicting requirements on the boundary conditions that determine the time slices. In particular, it does not seem possible to construct slices that are quasi-stationary and avoid physical singularities and simultaneously are connected by an everywhere positive lapse function, a condition which must obtain if internal boundaries are to be avoided. Some relaxation of these conflicting requirements may yield a soluble system, but some of the advantages that were sought in combining these approaches will be lost.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX2e, 2 postscript figure

Eclipsing binary stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds from the MACHO project: The Sample

We present a new sample of 4634 eclipsing binary stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), expanding on a previous sample of 611 objects and a new sample of 1509 eclipsing binary stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), that were identified in the light curve database of the MACHO project. We perform a cross correlation with the OGLE-II LMC sample, finding 1236 matches. A cross correlation with the OGLE-II SMC sample finds 698 matches. We then compare the LMC subsamples corresponding to center and the periphery of the LMC and find only minor differences between the two populations. These samples are sufficiently large and complete that statistical studies of the binary star populations are possible.Comment: 67 pages, 40 figure