My Brother\u27s Recital

The big night had arrived. My eight; year-old brother was to perform on the eighty-eight in his first recital. Tonight was the climax of a month of madness. Four long weeks had seen the rise and fall of the neighbors\u27 patience. Day and night, night and day, all they heard was piano, piano, piano! They, as well as we, almost went mad. It would not have been too bad if Al could have played the piano without making it an instrument of torture .. But his brand of music involved no more than two fingers, one on each hand

A Fixed Effects Analysis of the Adoption of New Technologies in the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1899-1929

This paper focuses on the relationship between technical and institutional changes in Cuba a leader in the use of continuousprocess technologies being applied to cane sugar manufacture in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Using a fixed effects model of the sugar manufacturer's decision to invest in new technologies, we show that a change in institutional factors had an impact on the adoption of the new technologies. The results show that differences in cane contracting arrangements affected the ease with which mills adopted new technologies. These differences were based on historical factors in the evolution of the cane farming institution in Cuba that affected whether the cane lands were the property of the farmer or the mill. This distinction created differences in the cane farmers' bargaining positions in the renegotiation of contracts with the mill, and it resulted in variation in the long-run costs of procuring cane at different mills

Evolution of the star formation histories of BLAST galaxies

We have measured star formation histories (SFHs) and stellar masses of galaxies detected by the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope (BLAST) over approximately 9 square degrees centred on the Chandra Deep Field South. We have applied the recently developed SFH reconstruction method of Dye et al. to optical, near-infrared and mid-infrared photometry of 92 BLAST galaxies. We find significant differences between the SFHs of low mass (<10^11 M_sol) and high mass (>10^11 M_sol) galaxies. On average, low mass galaxies exhibit a dominant late burst of star formation which creates a large fraction of their stellar mass. Conversely, high mass systems tend to have a significant amount of stellar mass that formed much earlier. We also find that the high mass SFHs evolve more strongly than the low mass SFHs. These findings are consistent with the phenomenon of downsizing observed in optically selected samples of galaxies.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS Letters. 5 pages. 4 figure

Simulating Dye-Sensitized TiO2 Heterointerfaces in Explicit Solvent: Absorption Spectra, Energy Levels, and Dye Desorption

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) represent a valuable, efficient, and low-cost alternative to conventional semiconductor photovoltaic devices. A deeper understanding of the dye/semiconductor heterointerface and of the dye-sensitized semiconductor/ electrolyte interactions are fundamental for further progress in DSC technology. Here we report an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation of a dye-sensitized TiO2 heterointerface “immersed” in an explicit water environment for an efficient organic dye, followed by TDDFT excited state calculations of the coupled dye/semiconductor/ solvent system. This new computational protocol and the extended model system allows us to gain unprecedented insight into the excited state changes occurring for the solvated dye-sensitized heterointerface at room temperature, and to provide an atomistic picture of water-mediated dye desorption