Showing 591 - 600 of 733 Items

Complaint-making as political participation in contemporary Russia

Date: 2012-09-01

Creator: Laura A. Henry

Access: Open access

Prior to December 2011, instances of widespread collective mobilization were relatively rare in contemporary Russia. Russian citizens are more likely to engage in a different means of airing grievances: making an official complaint to the authorities. This article considers how complaint-making, as a variety of political participation, may contribute either to authoritarian resilience or to political liberalization. The political significance of complaints made to the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Russian Federation is examined. Since it is the broader political context that shapes the significance of complaints, in the absence of meaningful elections individualized appeals to the state are unlikely to promote democratic change, although they may allow for redress of individual rights violations. © 2012 The Regents of the University of California.


KLT-type relations for QCD and bicolor amplitudes from color-factor symmetry

Date: 2018-03-01

Creator: Robert W. Brown, Stephen G. Naculich

Access: Open access

Color-factor symmetry is used to derive a KLT-type relation for tree-level QCD amplitudes containing gluons and an arbitrary number of massive or massless quark-antiquark pairs, generalizing the expression for Yang-Mills amplitudes originally postulated by Bern, De Freitas, and Wong. An explicit expression is given for all amplitudes with two or fewer quark-antiquark pairs in terms of the (modified) momentum kernel. We also introduce the bicolor scalar theory, the “zeroth copy” of QCD, containing massless biadjoint scalars and massive bifundamental scalars, generalizing the biadjoint scalar theory of Cachazo, He, and Yuan. We derive KLT-type relations for tree-level amplitudes of biadjoint and bicolor theories using the color-factor symmetry possessed by these theories.


The Effects of Exchange Rates on Employment in Canada

Date: 2013-06-05

Creator: Yao Tang, Haifang Huang, Ke Pang

Access: Open access

Under the flexible exchange rate regime, the Canadian economy is constantly affected by fluctuations in exchange rates. This paper focuses on employment in Canada. We find that appreciations of the Canadian dollar have significant effects on employment in manufacturing industries; such effects are mostly associated with the export-weighted exchange rate and not the import-weighted exchange rate. The export-weighted exchange rate elasticity of employment is -0.52. However, we also find that exchange rate fluctuations have little impact on Canada’s nonmanufacturing employment. Because the manufacturing sector accounts for only about 10% of the employment in Canada, the overall employment effect of exchange rates is small. In addition, we assess the potential employment impact of a boom in the global commodity market, which often leads to appreciations of the Canadian dollar. We find that a 12.21% increase in commodity prices (one standard deviation in the 1994-2007 data) reduces Canada’s manufacturing employment by 0.98%, less than 0.1% of the total industrial employment.



Emergence of dispersive shocks and rarefaction waves in power-law contact models

Date: 2017-06-16

Creator: H. Yasuda, C. Chong, J. Yang, P. G. Kevrekidis

Access: Open access

In the present work, motivated by generalized forms of the Hertzian dynamics associated with granular crystals, we consider the possibility of such models to give rise to both dispersive shock and rarefaction waves. Depending on the value p of the nonlinearity exponent, we find that both of these possibilities are realizable. We use a quasicontinuum approximation of a generalized inviscid Burgers model in order to predict the solution profile up to times near the formation of the dispersive shock, as well as to estimate when it will occur. Beyond that time threshold, oscillations associated with the highly dispersive nature of the underlying model emerge, which cannot be captured by the quasicontinuum approximation. Our analytical characterization of the above features is complemented by systematic numerical computations.


CrI3 revisited with a many-body ab initio theoretical approach

Date: 2021-06-01

Creator: Tom Ichibha, Allison L. Dzubak, Jaron T. Krogel, Valentino R. Cooper, Fernando A., Reboredo

Access: Open access

CrI3 has recently been shown to exhibit low-dimensional, long-range magnetic ordering from few layers to single layers of CrI3. The properties of CrI3 bulk and few-layered systems are uniquely defined by a combination of short-range intralayer and long-range interlayer interactions, including strong correlations, exchange, and spin-orbit coupling. Unfortunately, both the long-range van der Waals interactions, which are driven by dynamic, many-body electronic correlations, and the competing strong intralayer correlations, present a formidable challenge for the local or semilocal mean-field approximations employed in workhorse electronic structure approaches like density-functional theory. In this paper we employ a sophisticated many-body approach that can simultaneously describe long- and short-range correlations. We establish that the fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo (FNDMC) method reproduces the experimental interlayer separation distance of bulk CrI3 for the high-temperature monoclinic phase with a reliable prediction of the interlayer binding energy. We subsequently employed the FNDMC results to benchmark the accuracy of several density-functional theory exchange-correlation approximations.


Non-transgenic genome modifications in a hemimetabolous insect using zinc-finger and TAL effector nucleases

Date: 2012-09-17

Creator: Takahito Watanabe, Hiroshi Ochiai, Tetsushi Sakuma, Hadley W. Horch, Naoya, Hamaguchi, Taro Nakamura, Tetsuya Bando, Hideyo Ohuchi, Takashi Yamamoto, Sumihare Noji, Taro Mito

Access: Open access

Hemimetabolous, or incompletely metamorphosing, insects are phylogenetically relatively basal and comprise many pests. However, the absence of a sophisticated genetic model system, or targeted gene-manipulation system, has limited research on hemimetabolous species. Here we use zinc-finger nuclease and transcription activator-like effector nuclease technologies to produce genetic knockouts in the hemimetabolous insect Gryllus bimaculatus. Following the microinjection of mRNAs encoding zinc-finger nucleases or transcription activator-like effector nucleases into cricket embryos, targeting of a transgene or endogenous gene results in sequence-specific mutations. Up to 48% of founder animals transmit disrupted gene alleles after zinc-finger nucleases microinjection compared with 17% after microinjection of transcription activator-like effector nucleases. Heterozygous offspring is selected using mutation detection assays that use a Surveyor (Cel-I) nuclease, and subsequent sibling crosses create homozygous knockout crickets. This approach is independent from a mutant phenotype or the genetic tractability of the organism of interest and can potentially be applied to manage insect pests using a non-transgenic strategy. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.


"whimsical contrasts": Love and marriage in The Minister's Wooing and Our Nig

Date: 2011-03-01

Creator: Tess Chakkalakal

Access: Open access



Cloning of the first cDNA encoding a putative CCRFamide precursor: identification of the brain, eyestalk ganglia, and cardiac ganglion as sites of CCRFamide expression in the American lobster, Homarus americanus

Date: 2020-12-01

Creator: J. Joe Hull, Melissa A. Stefanek, Patsy S. Dickinson, Andrew E. Christie

Access: Open access

Over the past decade, many new peptide families have been identified via in silico analyses of genomic and transcriptomic datasets. While various molecular and biochemical methods have confirmed the existence of some of these new groups, others remain in silico discoveries of computationally assembled sequences only. An example of the latter are the CCRFamides, named for the predicted presence of two pairs of disulfide bonded cysteine residues and an amidated arginine-phenylalanine carboxyl-terminus in family members, which have been identified from annelid, molluscan, and arthropod genomes/transcriptomes, but for which no precursor protein-encoding cDNAs have been cloned. Using routine transcriptome mining methods, we identified four Homarus americanus (American lobster) CCRFamide transcripts that share high sequence identity across the predicted open reading frames but more limited conservation in their 5′ terminal ends, suggesting the Homarus gene undergoes alternative splicing. RT-PCR profiling using primers designed to amplify an internal fragment common to all of the transcripts revealed expression in the supraoesophageal ganglion (brain), eyestalk ganglia, and cardiac ganglion. Variant specific profiling revealed a similar profile for variant 1, eyestalk ganglia specific expression of variant 2, and an absence of variant 3 expression in the cDNAs examined. The broad distribution of CCRFamide transcript expression in the H. americanus nervous system suggests a potential role as a locally released and/or circulating neuropeptide. This is the first report of the cloning of a CCRFamide-encoding cDNA from any species, and as such, provides the first non-in silico support for the existence of this invertebrate peptide family.


Ds+ decays to + and +

Date: 1992-01-01

Creator: J. Alexander, C. Bebek, K. Berkelman, D. Besson, T. E., Browder, D. G. Cassel, E. Cheu, D. M. Coffman, P. S. Drell, R. Ehrlich, R. S. Galik, M. Garcia-Sciveres, B. Geiser, B. Gittelman, S. W. Gray, D. L. Hartill, B. K. Heltsley, K. Honscheid, J. Kandaswamy, N. Katayama, P. C. Kim, D. L. Kreinick, J. D. Lewis, G. S. Ludwig, J. Masui, J. Mevissen, N. B. Mistry, S. Nandi, C. R. Ng, E. Nordberg, C. Grady

Access: Open access

Using the CLEO II detector, we have accurately measured Ds decay branching ratios relative to the mode for the and states, for which there are conflicting claims; our results are 0.540.090.06 and 1.200.150.11, respectively. © 1992 The American Physical Society.