Overcoming the boundary effects in surface spline interpolation

Surface spline interpolation when the domain is all of R^d isknown to converge much faster to the data function f than inthe case when the domain is the unit ball. This difference isunderstood to be due to boundary effects which, as will be shown,also affect the size of the surface spline's coefficients. Wepropose a modified form of surface spline interpolation which,to a great extent, overcomes these boundary effects. This modifiedsurface spline interpolant uses only the values of f at thegiven interpolation points.     

Alternative Second-Order Conditions in Constrained Optimization

New formulations are given for the second-order necessary conditions in parameter optimization with equality constraints. The new conditions are shown to be equivalent to previously known conditions by using the properties of projection matrices. The various conditions require different computational tools. As one of the obtained conditions requires standard computational tools (i.e., matrix inversion and eigenvalue computation), it might be useful in applications (e.g., real-time optimization schemes), when these standard tools are already in use.     

ALS-associated mutant SOD1<Superscript>G93A</Superscript> causes mitochondrial vacuolation by expansion of the intermembrane space and by involvement of SOD1 aggregation and peroxisomes

Background  

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is an age-dependent neurodegenerative disease that causes motor neuron degeneration, paralysis and death. Mutations in Cu, Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1) are one cause for the familial form of this disease. Transgenic mice expressing mutant SOD1 develop age-dependent motor neuron degeneration, skeletal muscle weakness, paralysis and death similar to humans. The mechanism whereby mutant SOD1 induces motor neuron degeneration is not understood but widespread mitochondrial vacuolation has been observed during early phases of motor neuron degeneration. How this vacuolation develops is not clear, but could involve autophagic vacuolation, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT) or uncharacterized mechanisms. To determine which of these possibilities are true, we examined the vacuolar patterns in detail in transgenic mice expressing mutant SOD1^G93A.     

Dichlorocarbene Addition to

In contrast to the terminal phosphinidene complex PhPW(CO)(5) (2), which adds to [5]metacyclophane (1) in a 1,4-fashion, dichlorocarbene preferentially adds in a 1,2-fashion to the formal "anti-Bredt" type double bond of the aromatic ring of 1 to afford the norcaradiene 11b, which immediately rearranges to the bridged cycloheptatriene 12b and further by a [1,5] sigmatropic chlorine migration to the isomeric 13b as the first observable product. More slowly, the latter isomerizes via a dissociative mechanism to give 15b. A computational study supports the notion that the [1,5] chlorine migration in the rearrangement 12b --> 13b, for which an activation barrier of 70.2 kJ mol(-)(1) was calculated, is essentially concerted with minor charge separation. In contrast, the analogous [1,5] chlorine migration in the flat model compound 7,7-dichlorocycloheptatriene (12a) displays features of a dissociative pathway.     

Affinely Prime Dynamical Systems

This paper deals with representations of groups by "affine" automorphisms of compact,convex spaces,with special focus on "irreducible" representations:equivalently "minimal" actions.When the group in question is PSL(2,R),the authors exhibit a oneone correspondence between bounded harmonic functions on the upper half-plane and a certain class of irreducible representations.This analysis shows that,surprisingly,all these representations are equivalent.In fact,it is found that all irreducible affine representations of this group are equivalent.The key to this is a property called "linear Stone-Weierstrass"for group actions on compact spaces.If it holds for the "universal strongly proximal space"of the group (to be defined),then the induced action on the space of probability measures on this space is the unique irreducible affine representation of the group.