Michael Braun

Preface.List of Contributors.PART I. SYNTHETIC METHODS.Direct Conversion of Sugar Glycosides into Carbocycles (Peter I. Dalko and Pierre Sinay).Synthesis of Diaryl Ethers: A Long-Standing Problem Has Been Solved (Fritz Theil).Take The Right Catalyst: Palladium-Catalyzed CC-, CN- and CO-Bond Formation on Chloro-Arenes (Rainer Stumer).Alkyne Metathesis in Natural Product Synthesis (Thomas Lindel).Transition Metal-Catalyzed Functionalization of Alkanes (Oliver Seitz).An Eldorado for Homogeneous Catalysis? (Gerald Dyker).New and Selective Transition Metal Catalyzed Reactions of Allenes (A. Stephen K. Hashmi).Controlling Stereoselectivity with the Aid of a Reagent-Directing Group (Bernhard Breit).Solvent-Free Organic Syntheses (Jurgen O. Metzger).Fluorous Techniques: Progress in Reaction-Processing and Purification (Ulf Diederichsen).Recent Developments in Using Ionic Liquids as Solvents and Catalysts for Organic Synthesis (Peter Wasserscheid).Recent Advances on the Sharpless Asymmetric Aminohydroxylation (Dmitry Nilov and Oli ver Reiser).Asymmetric Phase Transfer Catalysis (Christabel Carter and Adam Nelson).Asymmetric Catalytic Aminoalkylations: New Powerful Methods for the Enantioselective Synthesis of Amino Acid Derivatives, Mannich Bases, and Homoallylic Amines (Michael Arend and Xiaojing Wang).IBX - New Reactions with an Old Reagent (Thomas Wirth).Parallel Kinetic Resolutions (Jason Eames).The Asymmetric Baylis-Hillman-Reaction (Peter Langer).Simple Amino Acids and Short-Chain Peptides as Efficient Metal-free Catalysts in Asymmetric Syntheses (Harald Groger, et al.).Recent Developments in Catalytic Asymmetric Strecker-Type Reactions (Larry Yet).Highly Enantioselective or Not? - Chiral Monodentate Monophosphorus Ligands in the Asymmetric Hydrogenation (Igor V. Komarov and Armin Borner).Improving Enantioselective Fluorination Reactions: Chiral N-Fluoro Ammonium Salts and Transition Metal Catalysts (Kilian Muniz).Catalytic Asymmetric Olefin Metathesis (Amir H. Hoveyda and Richard R. Schrock).Activating Protecting Groups for the Solid Phase Synthesis and Modification of Peptides, Oligonucleotides and Oligosaccharides (Oliver Seitz).Traceless Linkers for Solid-Phase Organic Synthesis (Florencio Zaragoza Dorwald).Merging Solid-Phase and Solution-Phase Synthesis: The Resin-Capture- Release Hybrid Technique (Andreas Kirschning and Rudiger Wittenberg).Polymeric Scavenger Reagents in Organic Synthesis (Jason Eames and Michael Watkinson).PART II. APPLICATIONS.Total Syntheses of Vancomycin (Lars H. Thoresen and Kevin Burgess).Bryostatin and Their Analogues (Ulf Diederichsen).Eleutherobin: Synthesis, Structure/Activity Relationship, and Pharmacophore (Ulf Diederichsen).Total Synthesis of the Natural Products CP-263,114 and CP-225,917 (Ulf Diederichsen and Katrin B. Lorenz).Polyene Cyclization to Adociasulfate 1 (Thomas Lindel and Cordula Hopmann).Sanglifehrin A: An Immunosuppressant Natural Product from Malawi (Thomas Lindel).Short Syntheses of the Spirotryprostatins (Thomas Lindel).The Chemical Total Synthesis of Proteins (Oliver Seitz).Solid-Phase Synthesis of Oligosaccharides (Ulf Diederichsen and Thomas Wagner).Polymer-Supported Synthesis of Non-Oligomeric Natural Products (Stefan Sommer, et al.).Explosions as a Synthetic Tool? Cycloalkynes as Precursors to Fullerenes, Buckytubes and Buckyonions (Rudiger Faust).Dendralenes: From a Neglected Class of Polyenes to Versatile Starting Materials in Organic Synthesis (Henning Hopf).Fascinating Natural and Artificial Cyclopropane Architectures (Rudiger Faust).Index.

Virtual advisors often increase sales for those customers who find such online advice to be convenient and helpful. However, other customers take a more active role in their purchase decisions and prefer more detailed data. In general, we expect that websites are more preferred and increase sales if their characteristics (e.g., more detailed data) match customers' cognitive styles (e.g., more analytic). “Morphing” involves automatically matching the basic “look and feel” of a website, not just the content, to cognitive styles. We infer cognitive styles from clickstream data with Bayesian updating. We then balance exploration (learning how morphing affects purchase probabilities) with exploitation (maximizing short-term sales) by solving a dynamic program (partially observable Markov decision process). The solution is made feasible in real time with expected Gittins indices. We apply the Bayesian updating and dynamic programming to an experimental BT Group (formerly British Telecom) website using data from 835 priming respondents. If we had perfect information on cognitive styles, the optimal “morph” assignments would increase purchase intentions by 21%. When cognitive styles are partially observable, dynamic programming does almost as well—purchase intentions can increase by almost 20%. If implemented system-wide, such increases represent approximately $80 million in additional revenue.

The thermal expansion of single-crystalline ${\mathrm{C}}_{6}$ is studied using high-resolution capacitance dilatometry. In addition to the orientational-ordering transition at 261 K, we observe a transition at ${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{g}}$\ensuremath{\approxeq}90 K due to the freezing in of orientational disorder, which has the character of a glass transition. The relaxation near ${\mathit{T}}_{\mathit{g}}$ is studied by varying the heating (cooling) rate over more than two decades. It is found to obey an Arrhenius behavior with ${\mathit{E}}_{\mathit{a}}$=288\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}5 meV within a simple glass-transition model.

Abstract We examine optimal insurance purchase decisions of individuals that exhibit behavior consistent with Regret Theory. Our model incorporates a utility function that assigns a disutility to outcomes that are ex post suboptimal, and predicts that individuals with regret‐theoretical preferences adjust away from the extremes of full insurance and no insurance coverage. This prediction holds for both coinsurance and deductible contracts, and can explain the frequently observed preferences for low deductibles in markets for personal insurance.

Discrete choice models are commonly used by applied statisticians in numerous fields, such as marketing, economics, finance, and operations research. When agents in discrete choice models are assumed to have differing preferences, exact inference is often intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques make approximate inference possible, but the computational cost is prohibitive on the large datasets now becoming routinely available. Variational methods provide a deterministic alternative for approximation of the posterior distribution. We derive variational procedures for empirical Bayes and fully Bayesian inference in the mixed multinomial logit model of discrete choice. The algorithms require only that we solve a sequence of unconstrained optimization problems, which are shown to be convex. One version of the procedures relies on a new approximation to the variational objective function, based on the multivariate delta method. Extensive simulations, along with an analysis of real-world data, demonstrate that variational methods achieve accuracy competitive with Markov chain Monte Carlo at a small fraction of the computational cost. Thus, variational methods permit inference on datasets that otherwise cannot be analyzed without possibly adverse simplifications of the underlying discrete choice model. Appendices C through F are available as online supplemental materials.