Taking Blockchain Seriously

In the present techno-political moment it is clear that ignoring or dismissing the hype surrounding blockchain is unwise, and certainly for regulatory authorities and governments who must keep a grip on the technology and those promoting it, in order to ensure democratic accountability and regulatory legitimacy within the blockchain ecosystem and beyond. Blockchain is telling (and showing) us something very important about the evolution of capital and neoliberal economic reason, and the likely impact in the near future on forms and patterns of work, social organization, and, crucially, on communities and individuals who lack influence over the technologies and data that increasingly shape and control their lives. In this short essay I introduce some of the problems in the regulation of blockchain and offer counter-narratives aimed at cutting through the hype fuelling the ascendency of this most contemporary of technologies

Qualified and Unqualified (N-R C) mental health nursing staff - minor differences in sources of stress and burnout. A European multi-centre study

BACKGROUND: Unqualified/non-registered caregivers (N-R Cs) will continue to play important roles in the mental health services. This study compares levels of burnout and sources of stress among qualified and N-R Cs working in acute mental health care. METHODS: A total of 196 nursing staff - 124 qualified staff (mainly nurses) and 72 N-R Cs with a variety of different educational backgrounds - working in acute wards or community mental teams from 5 European countries filled out the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the Mental Health Professional Scale (MHPSS) and the Psychosocial Work Environment and Stress Questionnaire (PWSQ). RESULTS: (a) The univariate differences were generally small and restricted to a few variables. Only Social relations (N-R Cs being less satisfied) at Work demands (nurses reporting higher demands) were different at the .05 level. (b) The absolute scores both groups was highest on variables that measured feelings of not being able to influence a work situation characterised by great demands and insufficient resources. Routines and educational programs for dealing with stress should be available on a routine basis. (c) Multivariate analyses identified three extreme groups: (i) a small group dominated by unqualified staff with high depersonalization, (ii) a large group that was low on depersonalisation and high on work demands with a majority of qualified staff, and (iii) a small N-R C-dominated group (low depersonalization, low work demands) with high scores on professional self-doubt. In contrast to (ii) the small and N-R C-dominated groups in (i) and (iii) reflected mainly centre-dependent problems. CONCLUSION: The differences in burnout and sources of stress between the two groups were generally small. With the exception of high work demands the main differences between the two groups appeared to be centre-dependent. High work demands characterized primarily qualified staff. The main implication of the study is that no special measures addressed towards N-R Cs in general with regard to stress and burnout seem necessary. The results also suggest that centre-specific problems may cause more stress among N-R Cs compared to the qualified staff (e.g. professional self-doubt)

Alignment of the CMS tracker with LHC and cosmic ray data

© CERN 2014 for the benefit of the CMS collaboration, published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License by IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation and DOI.The central component of the CMS detector is the largest silicon tracker ever built. The precise alignment of this complex device is a formidable challenge, and only achievable with a significant extension of the technologies routinely used for tracking detectors in the past. This article describes the full-scale alignment procedure as it is used during LHC operations. Among the specific features of the method are the simultaneous determination of up to 200 000 alignment parameters with tracks, the measurement of individual sensor curvature parameters, the control of systematic misalignment effects, and the implementation of the whole procedure in a multi-processor environment for high execution speed. Overall, the achieved statistical accuracy on the module alignment is found to be significantly better than 10μm

Ultrastructural and immunochemical studies of elastin-associated microfibrils / by Ian W. Prosser

Bibliography: leaves 266-303xviii, 303 leaves : ill ; 30 cm.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Pathology, 198

A contraint programming approach to the stable marriage problem

The Stable Marriage problem (SM) is an extensively-studied combinatorial problem with many practical applications. In this paper we present two encodings of an instance I of SM as an instance J of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem. We prove that, in a precise sense, establishing arc consistency in J is equivalent to the action of the established Extended Gale/Shapley algorithm for SM on I. As a consequence of this, the man-optimal and woman-optimal stable matchings can be derived immediately. Furthermore we show that, in both encodings, all solutions of I may be enumerated in a failure-free manner. Our results indicate the applicability of Constraint Programming to the domain of stable matching problems in general, many of which are NP-hard

Influence of repeated prescribed burning on incorporation of 13C from cellulose by forest soil fungi as determined by RNA stable isotope probing

Repeated prescribed burning is frequently used as a forest management tool and can influence soil microbial diversity and activity. Soil fungi play key roles in carbon and nutrient cycling processes and soil fungal community structure has been shown to alter with increasing burning frequency. Such changes are accompanied by changes to soil carbon and nitrogen pools, however, we know little regarding how repeated prescribed burning alters functional diversity in soil fungal communities. We amended soil with 13C-cellulose and used RNA stable isotope probing to investigate the effect of biennial repeated prescribed burning over a 34-year period on cellulolytic soil fungi. Results indicated that repeated burning altered fungal community structure. Moreover, fungal community structure and diversity in 12C and 13C fractions from the unburned soil were not significantly different from each other, while those from the biennial burned soils differed from each other. The data indicate that fewer active fungi in the biennially burned soil incorporated 13C from the labelled cellulose and that repeated prescribed burning had a significant impact on the diversity of an important functional group of soil fungi (cellulolytic fungi) that are key drivers of forest soil decomposition and carbon cycling processes