1,557 research outputs found
The Outsider and Sunk Cost Effects on 'Dango' in Public Procurement Bidding: An Experimental Analysis.
This paper presents the result of experiments for finding some insight into an effect of the new bidding system in Japanese public construction works procurement on bidders' collusion, which is called 'dango'. We focused on an effect of the entry of an outsider who is not a dango member. The main conclusion of the experiments is that an outsider, a subject who is not allowed to communicate with other subjects, has a robust effect to prevent other subjects from colluding and to make the winning price decrease considerably.CONSTRUCTION ; PRICES ; BIDDING
Possible direct method to determine the radius of a star from the spectrum of gravitational wave signals
We computed the spectrum of gravitational waves from a dust disk star of
radius R inspiraling into a Kerr black hole of mass M and specific angular
momentum a. We found that when R is much larger than the wave length of the
quasinormal mode, the spectrum has several peaks and the separation of peaks
is proportional to irrespective of M and a. This
suggests that the radius of the star in coalescing binary black hole - star
systems may be determined directly from the observed spectrum of gravitational
wave. This also suggests that the spectrum of the radiation may give us
important information in gravitational wave astronomy as in optical astronomy.Comment: 4 pages with 3 eps figures, revtex.sty, accepted for publication in
Phys. Rev. Let
Dynamic black holes through gravitational collapse: Analysis of multipole moment of the curvatures on the horizon
We have investigated several properties of rapidly rotating dynamic black
holes generated by gravitational collapse of rotating relativistic stars. At
present, numerical simulations of the binary black hole merger are able to
produce a Kerr black hole of J_final / M_final^2 up to = 0.91, of gravitational
collapse from uniformly rotating stars up to J_final / M_final^2 ~ 0.75, where
J_final is the total angular momentum and M_final the total gravitational mass
of the hole. We have succeeded in producing a dynamic black hole of spin
J_final / M_final^2 ~ 0.95 through the collapse of differentially rotating
relativistic stars. We have investigated those dynamic properties through
diagnosing multipole moment of the horizon, and found the following two
features. Firstly, two different definitions of the angular momentum of the
hole, the approximated Killing vector approach and dipole moment of the current
multipole approach, make no significant difference to our computational
results. Secondly, dynamic hole approaches a Kerr by gravitational radiation
within the order of a rotational period of an equilibrium star, although the
dynamic hole at the very forming stage deviates quite far from a Kerr. We have
also discussed a new phase of quasi-periodic waves in the gravitational
waveform after the ringdown in terms of multipole moment of the dynamic hole.Comment: 13 pages with 19 figures, revtex4-1.cls. Accepted for publication in
the Physical Review
Scalar GW detection with a hollow spherical antenna
We study the response and cross sections for the absorption of GW energy in a
Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory by a resonant mass detector shaped as a hollow
sphere.Comment: latex file, 9 page
Regulation of caspase-3 processing by cIAP2 controls the switch between pro-inflammatory activation and cell death in microglia.
Cell Death and Disease is an open-access journal published by Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons licence, users will need to obtain permission from the licence holder to reproduce the material.The activation of microglia, resident immune cells of the central nervous system, and inflammation-mediated neurotoxicity are typical features of neurodegenerative diseases, for example, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. An unexpected role of caspase-3, commonly known to have executioner role for apoptosis, was uncovered in the microglia activation process. A central question emerging from this finding is what prevents caspase-3 during the microglia activation from killing those cells? Caspase-3 activation occurs as a two-step process, where the zymogen is first cleaved by upstream caspases, such as caspase-8, to form intermediate, yet still active, p19/p12 complex; thereafter, autocatalytic processing generates the fully mature p17/p12 form of the enzyme. Here, we show that the induction of cellular inhibitor of apoptosis protein 2 (cIAP2) expression upon microglia activation prevents the conversion of caspase-3 p19 subunit to p17 subunit and is responsible for restraining caspase-3 in terms of activity and subcellular localization. We demonstrate that counteracting the repressive effect of cIAP2 on caspase-3 activation, using small interfering RNA targeting cIAP2 or a SMAC mimetic such as the BV6 compound, reduced the pro-inflammatory activation of microglia cells and promoted their death. We propose that the different caspase-3 functions in microglia, and potentially other cell types, reside in the active caspase-3 complexes formed. These results also could indicate cIAP2 as a possible therapeutic target to modulate microglia pro-inflammatory activation and associated neurotoxicity observed in neurodegenerative disorders
Ultrarelativistic circular orbits of spinning particles in a Schwarzschild field
Ultrarelativistic circular orbits of spinning particles in a Schwarzschild
field described by the Mathisson-Papapetrou equations are considered. The
preliminary estimates of the possible synchrotron electromagnetic radiation of
highly relativistic protons and electrons on these orbits in the gravitational
field of a black hole are presentedComment: 9 page
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