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'They paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews and the flying public... even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally.' (1) This Article contributes to the growing body of compliance law theory and scholarship. It does so by introducing a new and third approach to compliance called the fire-alarm approach. This approach is grounded in the theoretical perspectives of negotiated governance and director primacy. It also contrasts but complements two other well-known compliance approaches discussed by scholars: the policing and architectural approaches. The fire-alarm approach is executed throughout the compliance system that includes regulators, firms, executives, and third-party relationships. A virtue of the fire-alarm approach is that it helps reduce agency costs by increasing transparency and information flows across the various system elements. This is achieved through what are called information feedback loops. These information flows, or feedback loops, reduce agency costs that lead to opportunism, shirking of duties, and conflicts of interest. This, in turn, promotes the goals of regulation that are designed to ensure trust in the marketplace and the protection and integrity of public welfare, health, and safety. Part I discusses the fundamental problem of compliance as an agency cost problem related to information asymmetries. This part will examine how each subsystem within the compliance system generates its own unique set of agency costs. This part will also highlight the need for information feedback loops to address the significant information asymmetries created by the various principal-agent relationships that inure within the compliance system. Part II discusses the policing and architectural compliance approaches. These two approaches are vital yet fail to capture the entire portrait of effective compliance. Part III introduces the fire alarm approach to compliance that the scholarly literature has neglected. Part IV describes information loops and provides a list of examples that can reduce agency costs and improve the compliance system. Part V discusses various theoretical, normative, and policy implications that flow from this analysis., I.INTRODUCTION 99 II.PERVASIVE AGENCY COSTS WITHIN THE COMPLIANCE SYSTEM 104 A. Regulators 105 1. Overview 105 2. Agency Costs 108 B. Firms 109 1. Overview 110 2. Agency Costs 113 [...]

AbstractThe success of inertial confinement fusion experiments hinges on the production of perfectly round spherical capsules placed at the center of an implosion. Some of the most common ablator materials are grown on poly(alpha-methylstyrene) (PAMS) mandrels. Human operator–based optical inspection of individual PAMS mandrels followed by a selection decision, is a labor-intensive process that suffers from operator dependence. General Atomics has developed a robotic system to handle and image these delicate PAMS mandrels and has implemented an autonomous method for evaluating shell quality. The selection criteria of acceptable mandrels has been standardized by employing visual defect characterization tools and associated machine learning algorithms. This work discusses the mechanical upgrades made to the robot cell for handling shells, the suite of software tools developed for a more complete evaluation of individual shells, and correlating defect statistics from entire batches to production data from the PAMS fabrication process parameters.

Reliable disruption avoidance techniques are critical for the development of safe and economically viable fusion reactors. This incipient need has driven the fusion community to spend substantial effort to develop machine learning (ML) models that aim to assist in this area. One area of concern is a sudden loss in global confinement associated with an unintended back-transition from H-mode confinement to L-mode confinement (“H–L back-transition”), which can sometimes lead to a disruption and increased risk of damage to a reactor-grade fusion device. A recent experiment on DIII-D demonstrated a real-time control method able to steer away from such unwanted back transitions. The present confinement mode of the plasma was inferred in real-time using a temporal convolutional neural network that outputs a continuous scalar estimate suitable for input to a closed-loop controller. This scalar estimate was then regulated to a value consistent with H-mode by adjusting power associated with the ratio of the plasma pressure to magnetic pressure ( $\beta _{N}$ ). The model was trained on hundreds of thousands of discrete time steps of expert-labeled data of periods of H-mode and L-mode confinement, taken from hundreds of DIII-D tokamak discharges. This work presents these experimental results, including the method of collecting expert-labeled H- and L-mode confinement data, and the ML model performance and efficacy on the mode prediction task. In addition, the first application of this tool for H–L back-transition prevention is demonstrated in this experiment. Details are presented on the training of the neural network model, including concerns such as hyperparameter tuning and the network architecture. In addition, the methodology for embedding the neural network into the control system for real-time inference and closed-loop control is discussed.

Background Statin therapy is the primary lipid-lowering agent used in peripheral artery disease (PAD) patients. Although the benefits of statins have been described in the literature, most studies have focused on postoperative statin use and outcomes in major upper body vasculature. Our study aimed to assess the impact of statin therapy on postoperative outcomes of lower extremity endovascular interventions including mortality and amputation rates.Methods American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS-NSQIP) database from 2012 to 2019 was utilized for this study. Patients were divided into 2 groups: those on preoperative statins (Group I) and those not on statins (Group II). Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to assess statin’s effect on postoperative outcomes.Results A total of 12,217 patients (72.7%) were in Group I and 4599 patients (27.3%) were in Group II. The distribution of primary outcomes was as follows: Amputation (Group I: 3% vs Group II: 3.9%, P <.05) and Mortality (Group I: 1.6% vs Group II: 1.9%, P= .086). Statin use was associated with decreased amputation rates. Patients with tissue loss were 5 times more likely to undergo amputations (AOR: 5.58 [CI 2.29-13.63] P< .01) within 30-days postoperatively as compared to those whose presenting symptoms were claudication.Conclusion Statin therapy was associated with a decreased limb loss within 30-days after intervention at the time of lower extremity endovascular intervention. Patients presenting with rest pain and tissue loss had a higher incidence of limb loss than claudicants.

A framework that uses trademarks to measure the branding efforts of a firm is presented. These provide insights into the financial value of branding.

To establish the variability of vecuronium (lag-time, latency duration, clinical duration and complete recovery), original molecule, in a group of patients who received the agent prior to surgery under general anesthesia with endotracheal intubation.

Determinar la variabilidad del vecuronio (lag time, duración de latencia, duración clínica y recuperación completa), molécula original, en un grupo de pacientes que reciben este fármaco para ser intervenidos quirúrgicamente bajo anestesia general, con intubación endotraqueal.

In this paper we propose an inversion strategy for the analysis of spectropolarimetric measurements taken by Hinode in the quiet Sun. The Spectro-Polarimeter of the Solar Optical Telescope aboard Hinode records the Stokes spectra of the Fe I line pair at 630.2 nm with unprecendented angular resolution, high spectral resolution, and high sensitivity. We discuss the need to consider a localstray-light contamination to account for the effects of telescope diffraction. The strategy is applied to observations of a wide quiet Sun area at disk center. Using these data we examine the influence of noise and initial guess models in the inversion results. Our analysis yields the distributions of magnetic field strengths and stray-light factors. They show that quiet Sun internetwork regions consist mainly of hG fields with stray-light contamination of about 0.8.

Reports on the use of real time asymmetric processing on a Compact peripheral component interconnect (PCI) board with two or more processors running independently on the same memory subsystem. Performance gains with asymmetric processing; Speed capabilities of Compact PCI; Problem with putting more than one central processing unit board in a Compact PCI system.