Ditching Your Duty: When Must Private Entities Comply with Federal Antidiscrimination Law?

This Commentary considers how the Fifth Circuit characterizes “services, programs, and activities” of public agencies in Ivy v. Williams, in the context of determining whether a private entity is subject to federal antidiscrimination law. “Services, programs, and activities” of public agencies must comply with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, whether directly distributed by a public or a private entity. This Commentary argues private driving schools in Texas that distribute a driving course necessary to obtaining a drivers’ license are subject to Title II because the providing the course functionally constitutes a program of the Texas Education Agency, a public agency. Though this case was dismissed as moot by the Supreme Court on technical grounds, the issue remains poignant

Optimal closing of a pair trade with a model containing jumps

A pair trade is a portfolio consisting of a long position in one asset and a short position in another, and it is a widely applied investment strategy in the financial industry. Recently, Ekstr\"om, Lindberg and Tysk studied the problem of optimally closing a pair trading strategy when the difference of the two assets is modelled by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. In this paper we study the same problem, but the model is generalized to also include jumps. More precisely we assume that the above difference is an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type process, driven by a L\'evy process of finite activity. We prove a verification theorem and analyze a numerical method for the associated free boundary problem. We prove rigorous error estimates, which are used to draw some conclusions from numerical simulations.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures

Electron Transport in Quantum Dots Defined in Low-Dimensional Semiconductor Structures

This thesis focuses on electron transport in single and double quantum dots defined in low-dimensional, narrow-band-gap III-V semiconductor materials. Fabrication schemes are presented for defining single and double quantum dots in lateral InGaAs/InP heterostructures, either by a combination of etching and local gating or solely by local top gating. The quantum dots are here electrostatically confined in at least one dimension. This allows for insitu control of the tunnel coupling of the quantum dots using gate voltages. Nanowire-defined quantum dots have also been studied. Here, the quantum dots are formed in an InSb nanowire segment through a metal electrode Schottky barrier. Electron transport properties have been investigated in these systems at low temperatures and single-electron charging behavior consistent with both many- and few-electron single quantum dots was observed. Magneto-transport measurements of InGaAs defined many- and few-electron single quantum dots show level-dependent effective electron g-factors of ~ 2 - 4. For the InSb nanowire quantum dot, giant and level-depended g-factors of up to ~ 70 were observed. The level-to-level fluctuation in the g-factor is attributed to the presence of strong spin-orbit interaction in these systems. The magnitude of the spin-orbit interaction was investigated in an InSb nanowire quantum dot by finite bias magneto-spectroscopy. Spin-orbit mixing of a ground state and a first excited state with opposite spins induced an avoided level crossing in the quantum dot dominated by Zeeman energy. The avoided level crossing allowed a spin-orbit energy of ~ 280 μeV to be directly extracted. The spin filling sequence of a few-electron InGaAs single quantum dot was also investigated using ground state magneto-spectroscopy and parallel spin filling configurations were identified. From these configurations the lower bound of the exchange energy in the dot was estimated to be ~ 210 μeV. Single quantum dots were also studied in the strong coupling regime where correlated electron transport processes become important. Here, co-tunneling, the spin-1/2 Kondo effect as well as an gate-induced splitting of the Kondo effect of a few-electron InGaAs quantum dot were investigated and the characteristic energy scales of the system were extracted. In addition, the degeneracy point of two quantum levels of equal spin was studied in the strong coupling regime of an InSb nanowire quantum dot. Strong suppression of the co-tunneling background current was observed at the level degeneracy. This current suppression is attributed to the destructive interference of two spin-correlated conduction paths. Pauli spin blockade at the (3,5) → (2,6) charge state transition in an InGaAs defined double quantum dot was identified, where (N1,N2) refers to the number of electrons in dot 1 and dot 2, respectively. An integrated quantum point contact charge state read-out sensor was used to determine the exact charge state of the double quantum dot. Leakage current was observed through the spin blockade, caused by triplet-to-singlet relaxation. The main contribution to the mixing of the singlet and triplet states is attributed to the hyperfine interaction between the electron spin and nuclear spin in the material. An effective nuclear magnetic field of ~ 2.7 mT was determined from the magnetic field dependence of the leakage current for detuned energy levels

Non-Convex Rank/Sparsity Regularization and Local Minima

This paper considers the problem of recovering either a low rank matrix or a sparse vector from observations of linear combinations of the vector or matrix elements. Recent methods replace the non-convex regularization with $\ell_1$ or nuclear norm relaxations. It is well known that this approach can be guaranteed to recover a near optimal solutions if a so called restricted isometry property (RIP) holds. On the other hand it is also known to perform soft thresholding which results in a shrinking bias which can degrade the solution. In this paper we study an alternative non-convex regularization term. This formulation does not penalize elements that are larger than a certain threshold making it much less prone to small solutions. Our main theoretical results show that if a RIP holds then the stationary points are often well separated, in the sense that their differences must be of high cardinality/rank. Thus, with a suitable initial solution the approach is unlikely to fall into a bad local minima. Our numerical tests show that the approach is likely to converge to a better solution than standard $\ell_1$/nuclear-norm relaxation even when starting from trivial initializations. In many cases our results can also be used to verify global optimality of our method

Downlink Spectral Efficiency of Cell-Free Massive MIMO with Full-Pilot Zero-Forcing

Cell-free Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ensures ubiquitous communication at high spectral efficiency (SE) thanks to increased macro-diversity as compared cellular communications. However, system scalability and performance are limited by fronthauling traffic and interference. Unlike conventional precoding schemes that only suppress intra-cell interference, full-pilot zero-forcing (fpZF), introduced in [1], actively suppresses also inter-cell interference, without sharing channel state information (CSI) among the access points (APs). In this study, we derive a new closed-form expression for the downlink (DL) SE of a cell-free Massive MIMO system with multi-antenna APs and fpZF precoding, under imperfect CSI and pilot contamination. The analysis also includes max-min fairness DL power optimization. Numerical results show that fpZF significantly outperforms maximum ratio transmission scheme, without increasing the fronthauling overhead, as long as the system is sufficiently distributed.Comment: Paper published in 2018 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). {\copyright} 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other use

Аналіз витрат палива сільськогосподарської техніки

Abstract—An analysis of broadcasting in massive MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) systems with a limited coherence interval is presented. When broadcasting common information, such as control signals, the base station does not have channel state information to the terminals. We propose that the base station broadcasts this common information using a low dimensional orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC). This code is mapped onto the large antenna array with the use of a dimension reducing matrix, effectively “shrinking” the channel. The terminal can estimate the effective channel and decode the information, even when the coherence interval is short compared to the number of base station antennas. Different OSTBCs are compared in terms of outage capacity in practical scenarios using estimated CSI. In particular, the trade-off between diversity and rate, when little or no time/frequency diversity is available, is investigated

Folkbokföringssekretess -Att leva med livet som insats

Människor som lever under hot eller har utsatta yrken kan behöva ett skydd för sina folkbokföringsuppgifter för att inte drabbas av hot eller våld. Detta skydd erbjuds idag i tre former, nämligen sekretessmarkering, kvarskrivning och nya folkbokföringsuppgifter. Sekretessmarkering är det första och vanligaste steget för den som känner sig hotad och vill få skydd för sina personuppgifter. Denna första åtgärd, sekretessmarkering, är idag inte lagreglerad. Det finns en utarbetad praxis hos Skatteverket för när sekretessmarkering skall medges, men i slutändan är beviljandet anhängigt på inställningen hos den enskilde beslutsfattaren. Eftersom sekretessmarkeringen inte finner något lagstöd går ett negativt beslut inte att överklaga. Däremot kan den sökande komma in med en ny ansökan och hoppas på bättre tur med den. Kvarskrivning är lagreglerat i FBL, den som lever under hot kan ansöka om att få bli fortsatt folkbokförd på sin gamla adress efter en flytt. Denna kvarskrivning är möjlig i tre år. Nya folkbokföringsuppgifter är ytterst ovanligt att någon beviljas. Det är en ultima ratio. När alla andra vägar att söka skydda en person folkbokföringsvägen är prövade, och har misslyckats, kan det bli aktuellt med nya folkbokföringsuppgifter. Människor som arbetar inom kriminalvården och då särskilt kriminalvårdare arbetar mycket klientnära och träffar de intagna dagligen. Det är då omöjligt att de intagna inte får reda på något om personalen som vistas i deras närhet. Det är dock en känslig fråga hur mycket en kriminalvårdare skall avslöja om sig själv. All personal skall bära namnbricka med för- och efternamn, så det får de intagna ovillkorligen reda på. Men andra saker, som var vårdaren bor, om han eller hon är gift, om han eller hon har barn och andra liknande uppgifter är sådant som det är upp till den enskilde vårdaren att berätta, eller inte berätta, om. Det har runt millennieskiftet tillsatts ett par utredningar som alla berört frågan om skydd för folkbokföringsuppgifter utifrån olika infallsvinklar. Ett par av dessa har presenterat förslag till ny lagstiftning. Dessa förslag har tidsmässigt sammanfallit väl, men de slutsatser som utredarna drar är inte i alla lägen desamma

The importance of pot size, growing density and planting position for establishment and plant growth using container seedlings : analysis of JackPot & PowerPot

Ca 70 % av skogsföryngringarna i Sverige utförs genom markberedning och plantering där täckrotsplantor dominerar marknaden, speciellt i landets norra delar. Föryngringsarbetet kräver varje år stora arbetsinsatser inom odling, lagring, transport och plantering och kostnaderna för dessa moment sjunker med minskad krukstorlek och ökad odlingstäthet. Detta gör mindre plantor till ett ekonomiskt attraktivt val. Huvudsyftet med denna studie var därför att utvärdera hur väl mindre plantor presterar efter ett antal år i fält relativt större plantor. Studien utfördes genom att analysera tre olika lokaler i mellersta delarna av Norrland, alla med varierande ståndortsindex men med liknade marktyp, grundförhållande, ytstruktur och lutning (GYL). På dessa lokaler undersöktes en rad samband för att analysera hur krukstorlek, odlingstäthet och använd planteringspunkt påverkar en plantas etableringsförmåga, tillväxt och näringsupptag. De plantor som analyserades var SCAs Jackpot och deras nyare, mindre planta Powerpot, studien omfattade enbart tallplantor. Resultatet visade att överlevnaden för jackpot och den mindre plantan Powerpot var lika hög då de planterats i väl utförda planteringspunkter med hög andel mineraljord med minst 10 cm till den omvända mineraljordskanten. I mindre väl utförda planteringspunkter har dock Jackpot en signifikant lägre plantavgång. Tillväxtsmässigt så spelar valet av planta mindre roll, båda odlingssystemen växer lika bra på alla planteringspunkter, detsamma gäller för plantornas näringsstatus. Denna skiljer sig inte varken beroende på vilken planta eller planteringspunkt som har används. Med resultatet som bakgrund är en ökad användning av Powerpot väl motiverad så länge plantan används på de hyggen där en väl utförd markberedning är gjord, i dessa fall kan stora besparingar göras. Den ekonomiska förlust som uppstår då planttypen används i de sämre utförda planteringspunkter som trots allt kommer finnas på dessa hyggen, bör tack vare besparingarna förmodligen kunna räknas tillbaka i andra delar av produktionskedjan. Framtida studier bör fokusera på större planturval och samtidigt undersöka om det är möjligt att öka vitaliteten hos Powerpot, t.ex. genom att förändra odlingstiden innan leverans.Approximately 70% of forest regeneration in Sweden are carried out through soil scarification and planting of forest seedlings. Container-grown seedlings dominates this market, especially in the northern parts of the country. The yearly regeneration work require major efforts in cultivation, storage, transportation and planting and the costs of these operations decreases with increased crop density and use of smaller pot sizes. This makes smaller seedlings an attractive option economically. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate how well smaller plants are performing after a number of years in the field relatively larger plants. The study was conducted by analyzing three different areas in the central parts of northern Sweden, all with varying site index but with similar soil type and GYL. On these areas several relationships was examined to clarify what role the pot size, growing density and used planting positions play for seedling survival, seedling growth and nutrient uptake. The plants used in the study was SCA's jackpot and their newer, smaller seedling Powerpot, only pine seedlings were analyzed. The results showed that the survival of the jackpot and the smaller Powerpot was equal when they were planted in well-executed planting spots with a high proportion of mineral soil and a minimum of 10 cm to the mineral soil edge. In less well-executed planting spots, however Jackpot had a significantly lower level of plant mortality. Growth-wise the choice of plant size plays a much smaller role, both cultivation systems grow equally well on all planting spots, the same thing applies to the seedlings nutritional status it does not change significantly in regards to what cultivation system or planting spot that are used. With the results as background an increased use of Powerpot is well motivated as long as the seedling are used on areas where a well performed soil scarification is made, in these cases, big economic gains can be made. The economic loss that will occur when the seedling type is used in the poorly preformed planting spots that unfortunately still will occur on these regeneration areas should, thanks to the savings probably be possible to counted back earlier in the production chain. Future studies should focus on using a greater number of samples while exploring whether it is possible to increase the vitality of Powerpot, maybe by changing the cultivation time before delivery

Методологические подходы к изучению дисциплины "Основы медицинской статистики" студентами фармацевтического факультета

методика преподаванияпреподаваниеобразование медицинскоеОБУЧЕНИЕСТАТИСТИКА /обучвысшее образованиемедицинская статистик

Local Partial Zero-Forcing Precoding for Cell-Free Massive MIMO

Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is a promising distributed network architecture for 5G-and-beyond systems. It guarantees ubiquitous coverage at high spectral efficiency (SE) by leveraging signal co-processing at multiple access points (APs), aggressive spatial user multiplexing and extraordinary macro-diversity gain. In this study, we propose two distributed precoding schemes, referred to as \textit{local partial zero-forcing} (PZF) and \textit{local protective partial zero-forcing} (PPZF), that further improve the spectral efficiency by providing an adaptable trade-off between interference cancelation and boosting of the desired signal, with no additional front-hauling overhead, and implementable by APs with very few antennas. We derive closed-form expressions for the achievable SE under the assumption of independent Rayleigh fading channel, channel estimation error and pilot contamination. PZF and PPZF can substantially outperform maximum ratio transmission and zero-forcing, and their performance is comparable to that achieved by regularized zero-forcing (RZF), which is a benchmark in the downlink. Importantly, these closed-form expressions can be employed to devise optimal (long-term) power control strategies that are also suitable for RZF, whose closed-form expression for the SE is not available.Comment: This paper was accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on March 31, 2020. {\copyright} 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other use