Peace Has No Borders

Film Screening and Q/A with co-directors: During the Iraq War, veterans from the United States crossed the border to Canada seeking refuge from serving in what they viewed as an unjust and immoral war. Peace Has No Borders follows three resisters and their supporters through a ten-year effort to remain in Canada. Peace Has No Borders takes place within the backdrop of a previous migration to Canada. Between 1965-1973, over 50,000 Americans crossed the border seeking refuge from what is now widely recognized as a misguided war. Forty years later, Canada faces the same political dilemma – whether to give refuge to U.S. veterans. The optimism the resisters experienced during their initial years in Canada is tempered by the enormity of the political landscape they face. The threat of deportation is always alive. Peace Has No Borders tells a complex story that weaves the resisters’ personal struggles against the framework of the political power of the conservative Canadian government and demonstrates how a decision of conscience can affect the course of one’s life. Deb and Denis’ films examine significant social and political movements. The FBI’s War on Black America is a rigorous examination of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program. It remains a relevant cautionary story about the dangers of government surveillance. Howard Zinn: You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train (short-listed for an Academy Award in 2005) looks at the history of social movements of the 20th century through the eyes of activist and historian Howard Zinn. Peace Has No Borders is another chapter, reflecting on the impact of social activism and war on the lives of individuals who made the choice to resist war and cross borders. Trailer: https://vimeo.com/202461851 Keywords: Iraq War, veterans, border, resistance, resister, Canada, immigration, Prime Minister Harper, Vietnam War, peace

Legal investor protection and takeovers

This paper examines the role of legal investor protection for the efficiency of the market for corporate control when bidders are financially constrained. In the model, stronger legal investor protection increases bidders' outside funding capacity. However, absent effective bidding competition, this does not improve efficiency, as the bid price, and thus bidders' need for funds, increases one-for-one with the pledgeable income. In contrast, under effective competition for the target, the increased outside funding capacity improves efficiency by making it less likely that more efficient but less wealthy bidders are outbid by less efficient but wealthier rivals

Towards inter-organizational Enterprise Architecture Management - Applicability of TOGAF 9.1 for Network Organizations

Network organizations and inter-organizational systems (IOS) have recently been the subjects of extensive research and practice. Various papers discuss technical issues as well as several complex business considerations and cultural issues. However, one interesting aspect of this context has only received adequate coverage so far, namely the ability of existing Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) frameworks to address the diverse challenges of inter-organizational collaboration. The relevance of this question is grounded in the increasing significance of IOS and the insight that many organizations model their architecture using such frameworks. This paper addresses the question by firstly conducting a conceptual literature review in order to identify a set of challenges. An EAM framework was then chosen and its ability to address the challenges was evaluated. The chosen framework is The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) 9.1 and the analysis conducted with regard to the support of network organizations highlights which issues it deals with. TOGAF serves as a good basis to solve the challenges of “Process and Data Integration” and “Infrastructure and Application Integration”. Other areas such as the “Organization of the Network Organization” need further support. Both the identification of challenges and the analysis of TOGAF assist academics and practitioners alike to identify further research topics as well as to find documentation related to inter-organizational problems in EAM

Electroweak double logarithms in inclusive observables for a generic initial state

High energy observables are characterized by large electroweak radiative corrections of infrared origin; double logarithms are present even for inclusive cross sections, thus violating the Bloch Nordsieck theorem. This effect, related to the initial states carrying nonabelian isospin charges, is here investigated for {\sl any} inclusive cross section in the SU(2)$\otimes$U(1) symmetric limit, that is appropriate for energies much higher than the weak scale. We develop a general formalism allowing to calculate the all order double log resummed cross sections once the hard (tree level) ones are known. The relevant cases of fermion-fermion, fermion-boson and boson-boson scattering are discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Legal Investor Protection and Takeovers

We study the role of legal investor protection for the efficiency of the market for corporate control. Stronger legal investor protection limits the ease with which an acquirer, once in control, can extract private benefits at the expense of non-controlling investors. This, in turn, increases the acquirer’s capacity to raise outside funds to finance the takeover. Absent effective competition for the target, the increased outside funding capacity does not make efficient takeovers more likely, however, because the bid price, and thus the acquirer’s need for funds, increase in lockstep with his pledgeable income. In contrast, under effective competition, the increased outside funding capacity makes it less likely that the takeover outcome is determined by the bidders’ financing constraints–and thus by their internal funds–and more likely that it is determined by their ability to create value. Accordingly, stronger legal investor protection can improve the efficiency of the takeover outcome. Taking into account the interaction between legal investor protection and financing constraints also provides new insights into the optimal allocation of voting rights, sales of controlling blocks, and the role of legal investor protection in cross-border M&A.

hsa‐miR‐374b‐5p regulates expression of the gene U2AF homology motif (UHM) kinase 1

Objective: We aimed to identify a microRNA (miRNA) that is significantly upregulated in blood and in cells of the oral mucosa upon exposure to the periodontitis main risk factors oral inflammation and tobacco smoke, to subsequently identify its target gene and to describe the molecular mechanism of gene regulation. Background: miRNAs are associated with many disorders. Array-based miRNA expression studies indicated a number of differentially expressed miRNAs in the pathology of oral diseases. However, these miRNAs mostly lacked replication, and their target genes have remained unknown. Methods: 863 miRNAs were analyzed in blood from 18 PD cases and 70 controls (Geniom Biochip). Selected miRNAs were analyzed for upregulation in the inflamed oral mucosa of PD patients using published miRNA expression profiling studies from gingival cells. hsa-miR-374b-5p mimic was overexpressed in primary gingival fibroblasts (pGFs) from 3 donors, and genome-wide mRNA expression was quantified (Clarion Array). Gene-specific regulation was validated by qRT-PCR and Luciferase activity in HeLa cells. Results: hsa-miR-374b-5p showed >twofold change (FC) in 3 independent studies performed in blood, gingival tissues, and cells. After hsa-miR-374b-5p overexpression, genome-wide expression analysis showed UHMK1 as top 1 downregulated gene in pGFs (p = 2.5 × 10-04 , fold change = -1.8). Reporter genes demonstrated that hsa-miR-374b-5p downregulates mRNA levels (p = .02; FC = -1.5), leading to reduction in protein activity (p = .013, FC = -1.3). Conclusions: hsa-miR-374b-5p is upregulated in blood and ginvial cells exposed to oral inflammation and tobacco smoke and regulates UHMK1, which has a role in osteoclast differentiation

Memory Latency Distribution-Driven Regulation for Temporal Isolation in MPSoCs

Temporal isolation is one of the most significant challenges that must be addressed before Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) can be widely adopted in mixed-criticality systems with both time-sensitive real-time (RT) applications and performance-oriented non-real-time (NRT) applications. Specifically, the main memory subsystem is one of the most prevalent causes of interference, performance degradation and loss of isolation. Existing memory bandwidth regulation mechanisms use static, dynamic, or predictive DRAM bandwidth management techniques to restore the execution time of an application under contention as close as possible to the execution time in isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel distribution-driven regulation whose goal is to achieve a timeliness objective formulated as a constraint on the probability of meeting a certain target execution time for the RT applications. Using existing interconnect-level Performance Monitoring Units (PMU), we can observe the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) of the per-request memory latency. Regulation is then triggered to enforce first-order stochastical dominance with respect to a desired reference. Consequently, it is possible to enforce that the overall observed execution time random variable is dominated by the reference execution time. The mechanism requires no prior information of the contending application and treats the DRAM subsystem as a black box. We provide a full-stack implementation of our mechanism on a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) platform (Xilinx Ultrascale+ MPSoC), evaluate it using real and synthetic benchmarks, experimentally validate that the timeliness objectives are met for the RT applications, and demonstrate that it is able to provide 2.2x more overall throughput for NRT applications compared to DRAM bandwidth management-based regulation approaches

Electroweak Bloch-Nordsieck violation at the TeV scale: "strong" weak interactions ?

Hard processes at the TeV scale exhibit enhanced (double log) EW corrections even for inclusive observables, leading to violation of the Bloch-Nordsieck theorem. This effect, previously related to the non abelian nature of free EW charges in the initial state (e- e+, e- p, p p ...), is here investigated for fermion initiated hard processes and to all orders in EW couplings. We find that the effect is important, especially for lepton initiated processes, producing weak effects that in some cases compete in magnitude with the strong ones. We show that this (double log) BN violating effect has a universal energy dependence, related to the Sudakov form factor in the adjoint representation. The role of this form factor is to suppress cross section differences within a weak isospin doublet, so that at very large energy the cross sections for left-handed electron-positron and neutrino-positron scattering become equal. Finally, we briefly discuss the phenomenological relevance of our results for future colliders.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, uses epsfig.sty and subequation.st

Towards inter-organizational Enterprise Architecture Management - Applicability of TOGAF 9.1 for Network Organizations Completed Research Paper

ABSTRACT Network organizations and inter-organizational systems (IOS) have recently been the subjects of extensive research and practice. Various papers discuss technical issues as well as several complex business considerations and cultural issues. However, one interesting aspect of this context has only received adequate coverage so far, namely the ability of existing Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) frameworks to address the diverse challenges of inter-organizational collaboration. The relevance of this question is grounded in the increasing significance of IOS and the insight that many organizations model their architecture using such frameworks. This paper addresses the question by firstly conducting a conceptual literature review in order to identify a set of challenges. An EAM framework was then chosen and its ability to address the challenges was evaluated. The chosen framework is The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) 9.1 and the analysis conducted with regard to the support of network organizations highlights which issues it deals with. TOGAF serves as a good basis to solve the challenges of "Process and Data Integration" and "Infrastructure and Application Integration". Other areas such as the "Organization of the Network Organization" need further support. Both the identification of challenges and the analysis of TOGAF assist academics and practitioners alike to identify further research topics as well as to find documentation related to inter-organizational problems in EAM