The Effects of Health and Environmental Regulation on Technological Change in the Chemical Industry: Theory and Evidence

This paper presents the final results of a research effort which investigated the effects of environmental/safety regulation on technological change in the U.S. chemical industry. (1) The term environmental/safety regulation is used to include the legislation, regulations, and other related actions which attempt to control environmental pollution, protect worker health and safety, or ensure the safety of consumer products. Technological changes arising from regulation encompass both the immediate modifications in manufactured products or industrial processes which may be necessary in order to comply with regulation and the more indirect, or ancillary, effects regulation can have on technological change for non-regulatory, "main business" purposes. The major emphasis in this work is on technological change for compliance purposes. We distinguish technological change from innovation. Innovation means new product or process technology actually brought by a firm into first commercial use. The term technological change has a broader scope and includes "non-innovative" changes

BLITZEN: A highly integrated massively parallel machine

The architecture and VLSI design of a new massively parallel processing array chip are described. The BLITZEN processing element array chip, which contains 1.1 million transistors, serves as the basis for a highly integrated, miniaturized, high-performance, massively parallel machine that is currently under development. Each processing element has 1K bits of static RAM and performs bit-serial processing with functional elements for arithmetic, logic, and shifting

The Remarkable Mid-Infrared Jet of Massive Young Stellar Object G35.20-0.74

The young massive stellar object G35.20-0.74 was observed in the mid-infrared using T-ReCS on Gemini South. Previous observations have shown that the near infrared emission has a fan-like morphology that is consistent with emission from the northern lobe of a bipolar radio jet known to be associated with this source. Mid-infrared observations presented in this paper show a monopolar jet-like morphology as well, and it is argued that the mid-infrared emission observed is dominated by thermal continuum emission from dust. The mid-infrared emission nearest the central stellar source is believed to be directly heated dust on the walls of the outflow cavity. The hydroxyl, water, and methanol masers associated with G35.20-0.74 are spatially located along these mid-infrared cavity walls. Narrow jet or outflow cavities such as this may also be the locations of the linear distribution of methanol masers that are found associated with massive young stellar objects. The fact that G35.20-0.74 has mid-infrared emission that is dominated by the outflow, rather than disk emission, is a caution to those that consider mid-infrared emission from young stellar objects as only coming from circumstellar disks.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters; 4 pages; 2 figures; a version with full resolution images is available here: http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~debuizer

Optimized Effective Potentials in Finite Basis Sets

The finite basis optimized effective potential (OEP) method within density functional theory is examined as an ill-posed problem. It is shown that the generation of nonphysical potentials is a controllable manifestation of the use of unbalanced, and thus unsuitable, basis sets. A modified functional incorporating a regularizing smoothness measure of the OEP is introduced. This provides a condition on balanced basis sets for the potential, as well as a method to determine the most appropriate OEP potential and energy from calculations performed with any finite basis set.Comment: 23 pages, 28 figure

Electronic Structure of Superconducting Ba6c60

We report the results of first-principles electronic-structure calculations for superconducting Ba6C60. Unlike the A3C60 superconductors, this new compound shows strong Ba-C hybridization in the valence and conduction regions, mixed covalent/ionic bonding character, partial charge transfer, and insulating zero-gap band structure.Comment: 11 pages + 4 figures (1 appended, others on request), LaTeX with REVTE

Frequency of neurolopsychological deficits after traumatic brain injury

El traumatismo craneoencefálico (TCE) puede conllevar impactantes cambios en la vida cotidiana, que incluyen alteraciones a nivel social, profesional, comunicativo y cognitivo (dificultades atencionales, mnemónicas y ejecutivas). Este estudio tuvo por objeto caracterizar la ocurrencia de déficits neuropsicológicos post-TCE y constatar el impacto ocasionado por el nivel de severidad del trauma en el desempeño cognitivo de los pacientes. Participaron 96 adultos en la muestra total, que fue dividida en dos grupos para evaluar el nivel de severidad del trauma: TCE leve (n=39) y TCE grave (n=77). La gravedad de la lesión se clasificó por medio de la Escala de Coma de Glasgow, por la duración de la pérdida de consciencia, o por la amnesia post-traumática. No había diferencias entre la edad y la escolaridad de los participantes. Para la comparación entre los grupos en cuanto a la distribución de ocurrencia de déficits neuropsicológicos, se utilizó el Chi-cuadrado. Se utilizó una batería de evaluación neuropsicológica flexible conformada por tareas verbales y visoespaciales de habilidades lingüísticas, mnemónicas y ejecutivas. Los grupos no se diferenciaron en cuanto a las variables sociodemográficas. Los pacientes con TCE leve tuvieron mejores puntajes comparados con los de TCE grave (número de errores y categorías completadas del Test de clasificación de tarjetas de Wisconsin- [WCST, por sus siglas en inglés]; errores en la parte B del Test de Hayling; y en la interferencia retro y proactiva del Test de aprendizaje auditivo verbal de Rey [RAVLT, por sus siglas en inglés]. El nivel de severidad del trauma parece mostrar diferencias en los individuos en cuanto al desempeño en memoria episódica de información nueva y en el control de interferencia entre los recuerdos; lo mismo se aplica a las funciones de flexibilidad e inhibición. Estos resultados sugieren que es necesaria una mayor inversión en acciones de políticas públicas, priorizando intervenciones neurocognitivas reeducativas y métodos de prevención de accidentes relacionados con lesiones traumáticas que tengan alta incidencia de secuelas.El traumatismo craneoencefálico (TCE) puede conllevar impactantes cambios en la vida cotidiana, que incluyen alteraciones a nivel social, profesional, comunicativo y cognitivo (dificultades atencionales, mnemónicas y ejecutivas). Este estudio tuvo por objeto caracterizar la ocurrencia de déficits neuropsicológicos post-TCE y constatar el impacto ocasionado por el nivel de severidad del trauma en el desempeño cognitivo de los pacientes. Participaron 96 adultos en la muestra total, que fue dividida en dos grupos para evaluar el nivel de severidad del trauma: TCE leve (n=39) y TCE grave (n=77). La gravedad de la lesión se clasificó por medio de la Escala de Coma de Glasgow, por la duración de la pérdida de consciencia, o por la amnesia post-traumática. No había diferencias entre la edad y la escolaridad de los participantes. Para la comparación entre los grupos en cuanto a la distribución de ocurrencia de déficits neuropsicológicos, se utilizó el Chi-cuadrado. Se utilizó una batería de evaluación neuropsicológica flexible conformada por tareas verbales y visoespaciales de habilidades lingüísticas, mnemónicas y ejecutivas. Los grupos no se diferenciaron en cuanto a las variables sociodemográficas. Los pacientes con TCE leve tuvieron mejores puntajes comparados con los de TCE grave (número de errores y categorías completadas del Test de clasificación de tarjetas de Wisconsin- [WCST, por sus siglas en inglés]; errores en la parte B del Test de Hayling; y en la interferencia retro y proactiva del Test de aprendizaje auditivo verbal de Rey [RAVLT, por sus siglas en inglés]. El nivel de severidad del trauma parece mostrar diferencias en los individuos en cuanto al desempeño en memoria episódica de información nueva y en el control de interferencia entre los recuerdos; lo mismo se aplica a las funciones de flexibilidad e inhibición. Estos resultados sugieren que es necesaria una mayor inversión en acciones de políticas públicas, priorizando intervenciones neurocognitivas reeducativas y métodos de prevención de accidentes relacionados con lesiones traumáticas que tengan alta incidencia de secuelas.Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can lead to significant changes in daily life, as well as in social, labor, communicative, and cognitive domains (attention, memory and executive functions). This study aimed to characterize the occurrence of post-TBI neuropsychological deficits as well as to determine whether there is an impact related to the level of severity of the trauma on the patient's performance. Ninety-six adults participated in the study, who were divided in two groups to assess the trauma's level of severity: mild TBI (n=39) and severe TBI (n=57). This severity was classified by the Glasgow Coma Scale, by the duration of consciousness loss, or by post-traumatic amnesia. There were no differences between the groups regarding variables of age and years of schooling. A Chi- square test was used to do a comparison between the two groups in terms of occurrence of neuropsychological deficits. Verbal, visuospatial, mnemonic, linguistic and executive tests composed a flexible neuropsychological battery. Patients with mild TBI had better scores compared to those with severe TBI (number of errors and in completed categories of the Modified Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (MWCST); errors in Part B of The Hayling Test; and proactive and retroactive interference in the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT). The severity of the trauma seems to differentiate individual's performance on episodic memory of new information and in the control of interference between memories; the same is applied to flexibility and inhibition functions. These results suggest the need for more investments in public health policy actions, prioritizing neurocognitive remedial intervention and prevention methods for such condition with high incidence of sequelae

Operation Notes Illustrated With Digital Images

We would like to report on our experience of illustrating our operation notes with pre-, per- and post-operative digital images

Dense Building Instrumentation Application for City-Wide Structural Health Monitoring

The Community Seismic Network (CSN) has partnered with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to initiate a campus-wide structural monitoring program of all buildings on the premises. The JPL campus serves as a proxy for a densely instrumented urban city with localized vibration measurements collected throughout the free-field and built environment. Instrumenting the entire campus provides dense measurements in a horizontal geospatial sense for soil response; in addition five buildings have been instrumented on every floor of the structure. Each building has a unique structural system as well as varied amounts of structural information via structural drawings, making several levels of assessment and evaluation possible. Computational studies with focus on damage detection applied to the campus structural network are demonstrated for a collection of buildings. For campus-wide real-time and post-event evaluation, ground and building response products using CSN data are illustrating the usefulness of higher spatial resolution compared to what was previously typical with sparser instrumentation