The global problematic issue of the olive oil industry is in its generation of large amounts of olive mill wastewater (OMW). The direct discharge of OMW to the soil is very common which presents environmental problems for olive oil producing countries. Both, positive as well as negative effects on soil have been found in earlier studies. Therefore, the current study hypothesized that whether beneficial effects or negative effects dominate depends on the prevailing conditions before and after OMW discharge to soil. As such, a better understanding of the OMW-soil interaction mechanisms becomes essential for sustainable safe disposal of OMW on soil and sustainable soil quality.
A field experiment was carried out in an olive orchard in Palestine, over a period of 24 months, in which the OMW was applied to the soil as a single application of 14 L m-2 under four different environmental conditions: in winter (WI), spring (SP), and summer with and without irrigation (SUmoist and SUdry). The current study investigated the effects of seasonal conditions on the olive mill wastewater (OMW) soil interaction in the short-term and the long-term. The degree and persistence of soil salinization, acidification, accumulation of phenolic compounds and soil water repellency were investigated as a function of soil depth and time elapsed after the OMW application. Moreover, the OMW impacts on soil organic matter SOM quality and quantity, total organic carbon (SOC), water-extractable soil organic carbon (DOC), as well as specific ultraviolet absorbance analysis (SUVA254) were also investigated for each seasonal application in order to assess the degree of OMW-OM decomposition or accumulation in soil, and therefore, the persisting effects of OMW disposal to soil.
The results of the current study demonstrate that the degree and persistence of relevant effects due to OMW application on soil varied significantly between the different seasonal OMW applications both in the short-term and the long-term. The negative effects of the potentially hazardous OMW residuals in the soil were highly dependent on the dominant transport mechanisms and transformation mechanisms, triggered by the ambient soil moisture and temperature which either intensified or diminished negative effects of OMW in the soil during and after the application season. The negative effects of OMW disposal to the soil decreased by increasing the retention time of OMW in soil under conditions favoring biological activity. The moderate conditions of soil moisture and temperature allowed for a considerable amount of applied OMW to be biologically degraded, while the prolonged application time under dry conditions and high temperature resulted in a less degradable organic fraction of the OMW, causing the OMW constituents to accumulate and polymerize without being degraded. Further, the rainfall during winter season diminished negative effects of OMW in the soil; therefore, the risk of groundwater contamination by non-degraded constituents of OMW can be highly probable during the winter season.


This study contributes to the still short literature on demand for drinking water quality in Africa by modeling Cameroonian households' choice of purifying drinking water.  Specifically, the study seeks to: analyze households' access to water and various measures undertaken to improve water quality; identify the factors driving households' decision to purify drinking water. Our analysis uses data from the second Multiple Indicators Cluster Survey carried out in 2006 by the National Institute of Statistics. In order to control for possible simultaneity of the choice of drinking water source and the decision to purify water or not before drinking it, a bivariate probit model is used for discrete analysis. Most previous studies have neglected to consider this issue in their analysis. Our findings suggest that households' educational level has a positive and statistically significant impact on households' decision to purify water before drinking it. Results also reveal that wealth quintile, health status and number of children less than five years strongly affect households' decision. In particular, the magnitude of the wealth quintile impact on households' decision is larger than those of the other variables. Implications for drinking water policies are discussed.


Academics, judges and other commentators complain that, for the past few decades, the Justices on the Supreme Court have been increasingly writing opinions that are unreadable for most Americans. Those critics complain that the opinions are too long and too complex, riddled with incomprehensible multi-part tests. They also attack the style of the opinions and assert that recent opinions are more likely to be written in a technocratic, rather than persuasive, style. There seems to be little consensus among the critics regarding why the Justices are writing opinions that are increasingly unreadable. Some attribute it to the increasing complexity of issues that the Court is considering. Others suggest that the shift could be attributable to the lack of trial court experience among Justices. In response to the criticisms, a few academics have conducted empirical research to determine whether certain opinions of the Supreme Court are more readable than other opinions. The authors of those studies have also attempted to identify factors that might influence the readability of an opinion, including (1) whether the opinion is a majority or dissenting opinion; (2) the number of Justices joining the opinion; (3) the ideology of the Justice authoring the opinion; and (4) the subject matter of the underlying dispute.None of the studies, however, have examined whether the Court's opinions have, in general, become less readable over time, as many critics assert. The attached article compares the readability of the opinions issued by the Supreme Court in the 1931, 1932, and 1933 terms to the opinions issued by the Court in the 2009, 2010, and 2011 terms. Since some commentators have suggested that the obfuscation of Supreme Court opinions is related to the increasing complexity of issues that the Court is addressing, it seemed logical to compare the readability of the Court's opinions from the 1930's, at a time before the "staturification" of law, and the expansion of federal administrative programs during the New Deal, to the modern opinions. In addition to exploring whether the Court's opinions have become less readable, this article also examines whether factors identified in other studies, such as the opinion type or the subject matter in dispute, correlate to the readability of the Court's opinions, either in the 1930's or today, and whether that has changed over time. Finally, the article examines which Justices, in the 1930s and today, wrote the most readable and least readable opinions. The data reviewed confirm that the Court's opinions today are significantly longer and less readable than the opinions from the 1930s, but it is not necessarily related to the "statutorification" of law or the expansion of federal administrative programs. It may, however, be related to a change in the culture of the Court that began in the 1940s, the proliferation of concurring and dissenting opinions. The data confirmed the findings of earlier studies that opinions addressing criminal law are generally the most readable, although they are significantly less readable today than they were in the 1930s. Opinions addressing administrative law and statutory law issues were the least readable in the 1930s and today. With respect to individual Justices, Justices Kagan and Cardozo wrote the most readable opinions for their respective time periods, while Justices Sotomayor and Stone wrote the least readable opinions.


Given that one of the central roles of political philosophy and criminal theory is illuminating the borders of justified state punishment, the modern crisis of overcriminalization is a painful defeat. Generations of legal theory, grounded in liberalism, has done little to stem the tide of criminal law and the explosion of criminal punishment. One notable island of decriminalization has been the retreat of criminal punishment surrounding marijuana consumption. With the combination of medical marijuana regimes, reduction of punishment, and halting steps toward full decriminalization, marijuana stands in stark contrast to the highly visible war on drugs that has driven much contemporary overcriminalization. This piece argues that opponents of overcriminalization have much to learn from the functional decriminalization of marijuana. Marijuana decriminalization has not been successful because of a swing in public attitudes about marijuana use. Rather, decriminalization is possible because advocates can marshal agreement across philosophical starting points, bringing both liberals and nonliberals into consensus. This groundswell demonstrates that legal theorists concerned about containing state power must look beyond liberal theories. Most importantly, this example reveals that legal theorists interested in turning back the tide of overcriminalization must do more than wait for areas of Rawlsian overlapping consensus; they must reach out to generate consensus with Rawlsian conjecture by viewing law not only from the liberal vantage point but from the nonliberal's perspective as well.


Selected by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war" How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.


The study "A Green New Deal for Europe" consists of two basic elements: Firstly it aims to cope with the economic crisis through intensive measures in order to systematically stimulate the eco-industries, to create jobs and to boost economic recovery. Secondly it aims at establishing the foundation for a green modernisation of the European economy. The study examines existing EU strategies policies and programs concerning their suitability to implement the Green New Deal. It proposes exemplary measures in the field of energy, mobility and resource use. The study has been compiled by the Wuppertal Institute on behalf of the Greens/European Free Alliance (EFA) Group in the European Parliament.


This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.


Blinding (masking): in an experimental study, refers to whether patients, clinicians providing an intervention, people assessing outcomes, and/or data analysts were aware or unaware of the group to which patients were assigned. In the design section of Evidence-Based Nursing abstracts of treatment studies, the study is identified as blinded, with specification of who was blinded; unblinded, if all parties were aware of patients' group assignments; or blinded (unclear) if the authors did not report or provide us with an indication of who was aware or unaware of patients' group assignments. Cluster randomisation: randomisation of groups of people rather than individuals; this approach is often used to avoid "contamination" when the way in which people in one group are treated or assessed is likely to modify the treatment or assessment of people in other groups. Concealment of randomisation: concealment of randomisation is specified in the design section of Evidence-Based Nursing abstracts of treatment studies as follows: allocation concealed (deemed to have taken adequate measures to conceal allocation to study group assignments from those responsible for assessing patients for entry in the trial [ie, central randomisation; sequentially numbered, opaque, sealed envelopes; sealed envelopes from a closed bag; numbered or coded bottles or containers; drugs prepared by the pharmacy; or other descriptions that contain elements convincing of concealment]); allocation not concealed (deemed to have not taken adequate measures to conceal allocation to study group assignments from those responsible for assessing patients for entry in the trial [ie, no concealment procedure was undertaken, sealed envelopes that were not opaque or were not sequentially numbered, or other descriptions that contained elements not convincing of concealment]); unclear allocation concealment (the authors did not report or provide a description of an allocation concealment approach that allowed for the classification as concealed or not concealed). Confidence interval (CI): quantifies the uncertainty in measurement; usually reported as 95% CI, which is the range of values within which we can be 95% sure that the true value for the whole population lies. Constant comparison: a procedure used in qualitative research wherein newly collected data are compared in an ongoing fashion with data obtained earlier, to refine theoretically relevant categories. Conversation analysis: examines the organisation and structure of conversation, including all that is said. Critical ethnography: a qualitative research approach concerned with relations and power inequities between individuals and the sociopolitical framework, transformation of these relations, and attention to the research process as a form of action. Data saturation (saturation, redundancy): process of collecting data in a qualitative research study to the point where no new themes are generated. Fixed effects model: gives a summary estimate of the magnitude of effect in meta-analysis. It takes into account within-study variation but not between-study variation and hence is usually not used if there is significant heterogeneity. Hermeneutics: a qualitative research tradition related to phenomenology that uses the lived experiences of people as a tool for understanding the social, cultural, political, and historical context in which those experiences occur. Inception cohort: a defined, representative sample of patients is assembled for a study at a common (ideally early) point in their disease or condition and followed up over time. Intention to treat analysis (ITT): all patients are analysed in the groups to which they were randomised, even if they failed to complete the intervention or received the wrong intervention. Number needed to harm (NNH): number of patients who, if they received the experimental treatment, would lead to 1 additional person being harmed compared with patients who receive the control treatment; this is calculated as 1/absolute risk increase (rounded to the next whole number), accompanied by the 95% confidence interval. Number needed to treat (NNT): number of patients who need to be treated to prevent 1 additional negative event (or to promote 1 additional positive event); this is calculated as 1/absolute risk reduction (rounded to the next whole number), accompanied by the 95% confidence interval. Odds ratio (OR): describes the odds of a patient in the experimental group having an event divided by the odds of a patient in the control group having the event or the odds that a patient was exposed to a given risk factor divided by the odds that a control patient was exposed to the risk factor. Quasi-randomised study: participants are not randomly allocated to groups, but some other form of allocation is used (eg, day of the week, month of birth). Relative benefit increase (RBI): the proportional increase in the rates of good events between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Relative benefit reduction (RBR): the proportional decrease in rates of good events between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Relative risk (RR) (risk ratio): proportion of patients experiencing an outcome in the treated (or exposed) group divided by the proportion experiencing the outcome in the control (or unexposed) group. Relative risk increase (RRI): the proportional increase in bad outcomes between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Relative risk reduction (RRR): the proportional reduction in bad outcomes between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Standardised mean difference: in a systematic review, a way of combining the results of studies that may have measured the outcome (eg, pain) in different ways, using different scales; effects are expressed as a standard value, with no units (difference between 2 means / estimate of within group standard deviation). Weighted mean difference: in a meta-analysis, used to combine outcomes measured on continuous scales (eg, height), assuming that all trials measured the outcome on the same scale; the mean, standard deviation and sample size of each group are known, and weight given to each trial is determined by the precision of its estimate of effect.


The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 26–28, 2012 at Stanford University, Stanford, California USA. The six symposia held were AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge (cochaired by W. F. Lawless, Don Sofge, Mark Klein, and Laurent Chaudron); Designing Intelligent Robots (cochaired by George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Sarah Osentoski, and David Wingate); Game Theory for Security, Sustainability, and Health (cochaired by Bo An and Manish Jain); Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing (cochaired by Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, and David Martin); Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness (cochaired by Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama); and Wisdom of the Crowd (cochaired by Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, and Alex Sorokin). The papers of the six symposia were published in the AAAI technical report series.


A review of:

Bradford, Jane T., Barbara Costello, and Robert Lenholt. "Reference Service in the Digital Age: An Analysis of Sources Used to Answer Reference Questions." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 31.3 (May 2005): 263-72.

Objective – To test the hypothesis that electronic sources are used by librarians more often than print sources to answer questions at the reference desk.

Design – Use study.

Setting – Small, private university in the United States.

Subjects – Five full-time and two part-time librarians working at the reference desk for four months (two months in the fall of 2002, and two months in the spring of 2003).

Methods – The study recorded every question asked by library patrons during the two study periods, with the exception of non-library related directional questions and hardware problems. For each question recorded, librarians, while working solo at the reference desk, paraphrased the question and recorded the source(s) used to answer each question. Although questions were recorded regardless of source – in person, via email, or by telephone – the medium in which each question was asked and answered was not recorded. For the first half of the study period (fall 2002 semester), librarians kept manual records that were subsequently transcribed into a spreadsheet by a student assistant. In the second half of the study period (spring 2003 semester), the librarians entered data directly into a spreadsheet. The study's data monitor (who was also a study participant) was responsible for ensuring the integrity of the data and for assigning a category to each source. The source category 'librarian' was problematic in that it was unclear whether or not the actual source of the answer was the librarian or a source located by the librarian. After the first half of the study, the procedure was changed to require that a reference librarian was to label a source used to answer a question as 'librarian' only if the answer came from a librarian's own knowledge, and if it did not require consultation of an outside source. Categories were generated on the fly, as the data monitor reviewed the recorded questions and sources. By the end of the study, 23 categories had emerged. While all sources for answers were categorized, questions themselves were not. During the second part of the study, the gender of the patron asking the question at the reference desk was also recorded.

Main results –The results for the fall 2002 and spring 2003 semesters were similar. For the entire study period, librarians used a total of 3,487 sources to answer 2,491 questions. Sources fell into 23 different categories. The top 5 categories used to answer reference questions were databases (23.92%), librarians (23.6%), library catalogue (15.03%), internal Web page (12.27%), and reference books (9.38%). The top five categories accounted for 84.2% of all sources used. For 75% of the questions, librarians referred to a single source for an answer. Almost 60% of the sources used to answer questions were electronic. Of the internal Web pages used to answer questions, the library's online journal title listings accounted for 76%. Reference books were used to answer questions in less than 10% of cases. Less than 2% of the library's print reference collection (173 of 9,587 titles) was consulted to answer reference questions during the study period. The approximate 60:40 ratio of questions asked by female to male patrons corresponded to the university's student body ratio.

Conclusion – The results of this study confirm the researchers' hypothesis that librarians use electronic sources with greater frequency than they use print sources to answer patrons' reference questions. The surprising finding in this study is the proportion (approximately one quarter) of reference questions answered by the librarians themselves, without the need to consult an outside source, either print or electronic. The study suggests that a large proportion of the reference collection goes unused in answering patrons' questions and that librarians often answer a question using only a single a source of information. A reshelving study analyzing use of the reference collection is underway to supplement the results of the current study.


The transition from international to local ownership provides the perfect barometer to gauge the health and general well-being of a country's peacebuilding process. It offers the opportunity to assess the past, plan for the future and, in the process, nurture the environment that fosters and cultivates opportunities for broader participation in issues of national interest. Peacebuilding, with its emphasis on decentralised empowerment is, in many ways, an exercise in social engineering. It offers one of the few opportunities for marginalised groups to engage with the power structures in ways that enhance the boundaries of power. Without doubt, a vocal and vibrant grassroots citizenry improves governance at various layers of society and contributes to our understanding of the peace-development continuum. But what exactly is local ownership of a peace process, and what is its relationship to sustainable peacebuilding in the context of Sierra Leone? This paper attempts to address these questions.


This short paper is describing a demonstrator that is complementing the paper "Towards Cross-Media Feature Extraction" in these proceedings. The demo is exemplifying the use of textual resources, out of which semantic information can be extracted, for supporting the semantic annotation and indexing of associated video material in the soccer domain. Entities and events extracted from textual data are marked-up with semantic classes derived from an ontology modeling the soccer domain. We show further how extracted Audio-Video features by video analysis can be taken into account for additional annotation of specific soccer event types, and how those different types of annotation can be combined.


In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an executive order requiring that all females entering sixth grade be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), igniting national debate that echoed arguments heard across the globe over public policy, sexual health, and the politics of vaccination. Three Shots at Prevention explores the contentious disputes surrounding the controversial vaccine intended to protect against HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection. When the HPV vaccine first came to the market in 2006, religious conservatives decried the government's approval of the vaccine as implicitly sanctioning teen sex and encouraging promiscuity while advocates applauded its potential to prevent 4,000 cervical cancer deaths in the United States each year. Families worried that laws requiring vaccination reached too far into their private lives. Public health officials wrestled with concerns over whether the drug was too new to be required and whether opposition to it could endanger support for other, widely accepted vaccinations. Many people questioned the aggressive marketing campaigns of the vaccine's creator, Merck & Co. And, since HPV causes cancers of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, and anus, why was the vaccine recommended only for females? What did this reveal about gender and sexual politics in the United States? With hundreds of thousands of HPV-related cancer deaths worldwide, how did similar national debates in Europe and the developing world shape the global possibilities of cancer prevention? This volume provides insight into the deep moral, ethical, and scientific questions that must be addressed when sexual and social politics confront public health initiatives in the United States and around the world.


This article investigates the concept of using cell-phone technology for obtaining information about unofficial (off-register) transfers in land as are commonly undertaken by the urban poor in South Africa. Since the introduction of social housing programmes in South Africa after the democratic elections in 1994, mass land distribution and housing projects have been undertaken. Formal transfer of these properties has been discouraged by policy (such as a moratorium on transfers for a period of years), and the inaccessibility of land professionals and formal processes to the poor. From the disuse of formal transfer mechanisms one can conclude that these fail, at least in part, to meet the needs of this segment of society. Cell- (mobile) phone technology penetrates urban poverty more than other interactive technologies such as the internet, largely due to the lack of access to computers and the 'digital divide'. The aim of this article is exploratory. It investigates the potential use of cell-phone technology as a means to inform authorities that a transfer of property has taken place informally or semi-formally. Such information could pave the way for a process of formal registration and hence aid the upkeep of the deeds registration system. Research into the potential use of the cell-phone as an information and communication technology (ICT) tool of land administration, particularly in the developing world, is undertaken. It is envisaged that a more detailed investigation will follow, which will include an analysis of organisational and legislative capacity. Further study in which the use of cell-phone technology in land administration is tested, taking into consideration structural/organisational factors as well as socio-economic and cultural factors and motivating factors for use, may be required.


PC6 is a classic acupuncture point in traditional Chinese medicine. It is considered to be effective when treating cardiovascular disorders. In the present review the authors have focused on the neurophysiological bases of the effects of PC6 stimulation on cardiovascular mechanisms. Experimental studies have shown that the hypothalamic rostral ventrolateral medulla, arcuate nucleus and ventrolateral periaqueductal gray are involved in acupuncture attenuation of sympathoexcitatory cardiovascular reflex responses. This long-loop pathway also appears to contribute to the long-lasting, acupuncture-mediated attenuation of sympathetic premotor outflow and excitatory cardiovascular reflex responses. Acupuncture of PC6 modulates the activity in the cardiovascular system, an effect that may be attributed to attenuation of sympathoexcitatory cardiovascular reflex responses.


There are few couples in the history of 20th-century American art and culture more prominent than Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough. In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces-World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s-on two articulate, creative individuals.


This paper presents an adaptive and adaptable system and its evaluation. The system is based on a commercial spreadsheet application and provides adaptation opportunities for defining a user- and task-specific user interface (new menu entries and key shortcuts for subrouting names and parameters, changing default parameters). The development following a design-evaluation-redesign approach has shown that adaptations are accepted if the user has the opportunity to control their timing and content. This does not necessarily mean that the adaptation is initiated and performed by the user alone (adaptability). On the contrary, the strictly user-controlled adaptation is too demanding for the user. The paper shows how the user's own adaptations can be supported by the system by initial adaptive suggestions showing the rationale of adaptations and the way to perform them.


For a variety of reasons, the MATLAB-Java interface was never fully documented. This is really quite unfortunate: Java is one of the most widely used programming languages, having many times the number of programmers and programming resources as MATLAB. Also unfortunate is the popular claim that while MATLAB is a fine programming platform for prototyping, it is not suitable for real-world, modern-looking applications. Undocumented Secrets of MATLAB-Java Programming aims to correct this misconception. This book shows how using Java can significantly improve MATLAB program appearance and functionality, and that this can be done easily and even without any prior Java knowledge. Readers are led step-by-step from simple to complex customizations. Code snippets, screenshots and numerous online references are provided to enable the utilization of this book as both a sequential tutorial and as a random-access reference suited for immediate use. Java-savvy readers will find it easy to tailor code samples for their particular needs; for Java newcomers, an introduction to Java and numerous online references are provided. This book demonstrates how The MATLAB programming environment relies on Java for numerous tasks, including networking, data-processing algorithms and graphical user-interface (GUI) We can use MATLAB for easy access to external Java functionality, either third-party or user-created Using Java, we can extensively customize the MATLAB environment and application GUI, enabling the creation of visually appealing and usable applications


Nineteen labs representing nine nations participated in the GEOTRACES intercalibration initiative that determined concentrations of 232Th, 230Th, 231Pa, or 10Be in seawater, suspended particles or sediments. Results generally demonstrated good agreement among labs that analyzed marine sediments. Two sets of seawater samples, aliquots of particulate material filtered in situ, and/or aliquots of biogenic sediments were distributed to participating labs. Internal consistency among participating labs improved substantially between the first and second set of seawater samples. Contamination was a serious problem for 232Th. Standard Niskin bottles introduced no detectable contamination, whereas sample containers, reagents, and labware were implicated as sources of contamination. No detectable differences in concentrations of dissolved 232Th, 230Th, or 231Pa were observed among samples of seawater filtered through Nuclepore, Supor, or QMA (quartz) filters with pore diameters ranging between 0.4 and 1.0 µm. Isotope yield monitors equilibrate with dissolved Th in seawater on a time scale of much less than 1 day. Samples of filtered seawater acidified to a pH between 1.7 and 1.8 experienced no detectable loss of dissolved Th or Pa during storage for up to 3 years. The Bermuda Atlantic Time Series station will serve as a GEOTRACES baseline station for future intercalibration of 232Th and 230Th concentrations in seawater. Efforts to improve blanks and standard calibration are ongoing, as is the development of methods to determine concentrations of particulate nuclides, tests of different filtration methods, and an increasing awareness of the need to define protocols for reporting uncertainties.


School districts are having problems staffing classrooms with teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine how the eight items within the public school Facilities and Resources domain of the 2008 North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions survey predict teachers' stated intentions to return to the same assignment in North Carolina. The survey items were divided into three clusters: technology, facilities, and instructional materials. A discriminant function analysis was conducted to predict teachers' stated intentions to return to the same assignment or to change positions.
This study found that teachers want to work in a school environment that is safe and has sufficient access to appropriate instructional materials and resources to teach effectively. The study also found that the survey respondents in the "stay" group, which are the teachers that did not plan to leave their current assignment, were classified with better accuracy (96.6%) and were more positive about their work environment. The results of this study confirm a relationship between teachers' stated intentions to stay in their current assignment, the condition of school facilities, and the availability of resources in public schools in North Carolina. Implications for policy and practice are presented along with suggestions for further research.


When the English Reformation began, it brought about not only religious changes, but also changes in social practices. With these changes, the virgin—a figure long associated with spiritual purity and lauded by the Catholic Church—was dislocated from her previous prominence in English society. Despite her displacement, the virgin continued to appear frequently in later sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literature. This dissertation considers how early modern English writers constructed virginity in a post-Reformation culture and posits that the tensions between the figure of the virgin and her lack of a cultural niche created a space for writers to examine, formulate, and redefine her. Defensive virginity, a concept based on a phrase coined by Luce Irigaray, is used in this study as a lens for examining differing literary reconfigurations of virginity in early modern English texts from a variety of genres. Irigaray's term has not to date been utilized as a frame for analyzing texts, but this investigation shows that defensive virginity appears within early modern literature as a possible venue of female agency, for defensive virginity is an action that inscribes agency on the part of the female character who is depicted as defending her virginity. The chapters in this work are divided into case studies that show the varied representations of defensive virginity over a course of time as a way of demonstrating the prevalence of defensive virginity in the period.


DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable ; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain upon the bleak walls upon the vacant eye-like windows upon a few rank sedges and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium the bitter lapse into everyday life the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it I paused to think what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher ? It was a mystery all insoluble ; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression ; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down but with a shudder even more thrilling than before upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.


Highly available cloud storage is often implemented with complex, multi-tiered distributed systems built on top of clusters of commodity servers and disk drives. Sophisticated management, load balancing and recovery techniques are needed to achieve high performance and availability amidst an abundance of failure sources that include software, hardware, network connectivity, and power issues. While there is a relative wealth of failure studies of individual components of storage systems, such as disk drives, relatively little has been reported so far on the overall availability behavior of large cloudbased storage services.

We characterize the availability properties of cloud storage systems based on an extensive one year study of Google's main storage infrastructure and present statistical models that enable further insight into the impact of multiple design choices, such as data placement and replication strategies. With these models we compare data availability under a variety of system parameters given the real patterns of failures observed in our fleet.


This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.


Common Core Eureka Math for Grade 7, Module 5 Created by teachers, for teachers, the research-based curriculum in this series presents a comprehensive, coherent sequence of thematic units for teaching the skills outlined in the CCSS for Mathematics. With four-color illustrations, complete lesson plans, and reproducible student worksheets and assessments, this resource is uniquely designed to support teachers in developing content-rich, integrated learning experiences that adhere to established standards and encourage student engagement. Developed by Common Core, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to producing content-rich liberal arts curricula for America's K-12 schools, Common Core Mathematics is the most comprehensive CCSS-based mathematics curriculum available today. * The modules are sequenced and paced to support the teaching of mathematics as an unfolding story that follows the logic of mathematics itself. * They embody the instructional "shifts" and the standards for mathematical practice demanded by the CCSS. * Each module contains a sequence of lessons that combine conceptual understanding, fluency, and application to meet the demands of each topic in the module. * Formative assessments are included to support data-driven instruction. * The modules are written by teams of master teachers and mathematicians. This Module addresses Statistics and Probability. Common Core Learning Standards Addressed in Grade 7, Module 5: 7.SP.1, 7.SP.2, 7.SP.3, 7.SP.4, 7.SP.5, 7.SP.6, 7.SP.7, 7.SP.8


A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol's account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.


Legals-SB NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF: SHARYN L. SEATON CASE NO. 30-201901057984-PR-PL-CJC To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of SHARYN L. SEATON. A Petition for PROBATE has been filed by: MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS, a CA licensed Private Professional Fiduciary (#999) in the Superior Court of California, County of ORANGE. The Petition for Probate requests that MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent. The petition requests the decedent's will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court. The Petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representat ive to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the p roposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: April 25, 2019 at 2:00 PM in Dept. C8, 700 Civic Center Dr., West, Santa Ana, CA 92701. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined in section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any pet i t i on o r accoun t as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorney for petitioner: Trent C. Marcus, Esq. Law Offices of Trent C. Marcus 19900 Beach Blvd., C-1 Huntington Beach, CA 92648 (714) 964-6335 S e a l B e a c h S u n 3/28,4/4,4/11/201979223 Legals-SB NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF: SHARYN L. SEATON CASE NO. 30-201901057984-PR-PL-CJC To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of SHARYN L. SEATON. A Petition for PROBATE has been filed by: MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS, a CA licensed Private Professional Fiduciary (#999) in the Superior Court of California, County of ORANGE. The Petition for Probate requests that MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent. The petition requests the decedent's will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court. The Petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representat ive to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the p roposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: April 25, 2019 at 2:00 PM in Dept. C8, 700 Civic Center Dr., West, Santa Ana, CA 92701. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined in section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any pet i t i on o r accoun t as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorney for petitioner: Trent C. Marcus, Esq. Law Offices of Trent C. Marcus 19900 Beach Blvd., C-1 Huntington Beach, CA 92648 (714) 964-6335 S e a l B e a c h S u n 3/28,4/4,4/11/201979223 Legals-SB NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF: SHARYN L. SEATON CASE NO. 30-201901057984-PR-PL-CJC To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both, of SHARYN L. SEATON. A Petition for PROBATE has been filed by: MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS, a CA licensed Private Professional Fiduciary (#999) in the Superior Court of California, County of ORANGE. The Petition for Probate requests that MARTIN J. LEJNIEKS be appointed as personal representative to administer the estate of the decedent. The petition requests the decedent's will and codicils, if any, be admitted to probate. The will and any codicils are available for examination in the file kept by the court. The Petition requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representat ive to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the p roposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority. A hearing on the petition will be held in this court as follows: April 25, 2019 at 2:00 PM in Dept. C8, 700 Civic Center Dr., West, Santa Ana, CA 92701. If you object to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney. If you are a creditor or a contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined in section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under section 9052 of the California Probate Code. Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law. You may examine the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any pet i t i on o r accoun t as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk. Attorney for petitioner: Trent C. Marcus, Esq. Law Offices of Trent C. Marcus 19900 Beach Blvd., C-1 Huntington Beach, CA 92648 (714) 964-6335 S e a l B e a c h S u n 3/28,4/4,4/11/201979223


Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology challenging the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of the world's most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound impact on many fields - including business, medicine, and politics - but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research in one book. In "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make choices. One system is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the other is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities - and also the faults and biases - of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behaviour. The importance of properly framing risks, the effects of cognitive biases on how we view others, the dangers of prediction, the right ways to develop skills, the pros and cons of fear and optimism, the difference between our experience and memory of events, the real components of happiness - each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions. Drawing on a lifetime's experimental experience, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our professional and our personal lives-and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. "Thinking, Fast and Slow" will transform the way you take decisions and experience the world.


On September 2, 1971, the chemist Paul Lauterbur had an idea that would change the practice of medical research. Considering recent research findings about the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals to detect tumors in tissue samples, Lauterbur realized that the information from NMR signals could be recovered in the form of images -- and thus obtained noninvasively from a living subject. It was an unexpected epiphany: he was eating a hamburger at the time. Lauterbur rushed out to buy a notebook in which to work out his idea; he completed his notes a few days later. He had discovered the basic method used in all MRI scanners around the world, and for this discovery he would share the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2003. This book, by Lauterbur's wife and scientific partner, M. Joan Dawson, is the story of Paul Lauterbur's discovery and the subsequent development of the most important medical diagnostic tool since the X-ray.With MRI, Lauterbur had discovered an entirely new principle of imaging. Dawson explains the science behind the discovery and describes Lauterbur's development of the idea, his steadfastness in the face of widespread skepticism and criticism, and related work by other scientists including Peter Mansfield (Lauterbur's Nobel co-recipient), and Raymond Damadian (who famously feuded with Lauterbur over credit for the ideas behind MRI). She offers not only the story of one man's passion for his work but also a case study of how science is actually done: a flash of insight followed by years of painstaking work.


Artificial waters containing the xenobiotics atrazine, bisphenol A and chlorendic acid were treated by use of micro-disinfection apparatus, based on electrochemical ozone production. The design and working principle, as well as the applicability of the apparatus for the degradation of the target compounds is presented. The initial concentrations of the analytes were chosen to be in the mg L−1 order. Degradation and transformation of the analytes was determined via LC-MS, UV/Vis, and IC. Bisphenol A was degraded completely within short ozonation times, but complete mineralization could not be achieved. Ion chromatography indicated formic and oxalic acid to be transformation products. For atrazine a degradation of 96% could be achieved within 3 h. Intermediate transformation products, like desethylatrazine, desisopropylatrazine, and desethyl-desisopropylatrazine, are formed and further degraded to formic acid and chloride. Chlorendic acid was degraded by up to 40% of the initial concentration. Analyses by UV/Vis and IC again showed formic acid, chloride, and also chlorate to be transformation products.


The periodic bounce configurations responsible for quantum tunneling are obtained explicitly and are extended to the finite energy case for minisuperspace models of the Universe. As a common feature of the tunneling models at finite energy considered here we observe that the period of the bounce increases with energy monotonically. The periodic bounces do not have bifurcations and make no contribution to the nucleation rate except the one with zero energy. The sharp first order phase transition from quantum tunneling to thermal activation is verified with the general criteria.


This article explores the factor structure of the School Counselor Multicultural Self-Efficacy Scale (SCMES). For this study, a total of 181 usable scales were returned by members of the American School Counselor Association. Exploratory factor analysis on the 90-item scale suggested a six-factor structure. The six factors or subscales that evolved were (a) Knowledge of Multicultural Counseling Concepts, (b) Using Data and Understanding Systemic Change, (c) Developing Cross-Cultural Relationships, (d) Multicultural Awareness, (e) Multicultural Assessment, and (f) Applying Racial Concepts to Practice. Ethnicity and the number of multicultural counseling courses taken were significantly related to several of the SCMES's factors. Implications for future research and practice are delineated.


Demand response (DR) resources present a potentially important source of grid flexibility however, DR in grid models is limited by data availability and modeling complexity. This presentation focuses on the co-optimization of DR resources to provide energy and ancillary services in a production cost model of the Colorado "test system". We assume each DR resource can provide energy services by either shedding load or shifting its use between different times, as well as operating reserves: frequency regulation, contingency reserve, and flexibility (or ramping) reserve. There are significant variations in the availabilities of different types of DR resources, which affect both the operational savings as well as the revenue for each DR resource. The results presented include the system-wide avoided fuel and generator start-up costs as well as the composite revenue for each DR resource by energy and operating reserves.


B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most common leukemia among adults in the Western world with a median age of 72 years of CLL patients at diagnosis. The most common genomic aberration in CLL is the deletion of a critical region in chromosomal band 13q14.3, which is deleted in more than 50 % of patients. The high frequency of deletions of 13q14.3 in CLL and other tumors points to a tumor suppressor mechanism localized in the critical region. The candidate genes localized in the critical region in 13q14.3 have been shown to be monoallelically expressed. Towards elucidation of the tumor suppressor mechanism in 13q14.3, the epigenetic modifications of genes and CpG-islands in the region were analyzed in this thesis. Monoallelic expression of almost all genes in the critical region in 13q14.3 in non-malignant cells was detected to be marked by epigenetic modifications at promoter and exonic regions of these genes. A chromatin pattern specific for monoallelically expressed and imprinted genes, which is promoter-restricted enrichment of dimethylated lysine 4 of histone H3 (H3K4me2), was detected at the genes DLeu2/BCMSUN and C13ORF1. Detection of this specific chromatin pattern led to identification of a novel monoallelically expressed gene in the region: C13ORF1. Here, C13ORF1 was in addition to RFP2 and DLeu2/BCMSUN, shown to be monoallelically expressed in B- and T-cells from healthy donors. The chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) methodology was established in order to quantify two chromatin modifications at the critical region. ChIP was technically established and optimized to analyze enrichment of the histone mark H3K4me2 that is correlated with an active transcription state, and of the histone variant macroH2A, which was shown to be allelically enriched at monoallelically silenced loci, at 13q14.3. In addition, also DNA-methylation of the CpG-islands was analyzed. Thus, an epigenetic code of the candidate genes that correlates with their transcription status was determined in non-malignant hematopoietic and CLL cells. In non-malignant cells, the epigenetic code identifies one active and one inactive copy of the critical region in 13q14.3. Thereby, the genes DLeu2/BCMSUN and C13ORF1 are monoallelically expressed from the epigenetically active allele and their expression status is marked by a distinct chromatin pattern. In contrast, the distinct chromatin pattern could not be detected at the gene RFP2 that was earlier shown to be monoallelically expressed. The quantification of H3K4me2 and macroH2A occurrence at RFP2 points to allelic differences of enrichment at the gene locus, although this could not be further defined by the chosen methods. However, allelic enrichment of chromatin marks could be detected at two distinct loci in the 5'-regions of the large noncoding RNA genes, BCMS and DLeu2/BCMSUN, in samples derived from healthy probands. Thereby, in this study, two candidate locus control regions (LCRs) were identified that are located in the CpG-islands D and E in the promoter region of the two large ncRNAs and showed differential DNA-methylation and histone modifications. The differential epigenetic code and the localization of the candidate LCRs suggest their involvement in the regulation of expression of the two large ncRNA genes that span the critical region in 13q14.3. In summary these findings suggest a model of the epigenetically regulated tumor suppressor mechanism in 13q14.3 that leads to monoallelic expression of the candidate genes in the region. This model consists of the features that i) 13q14.3 is present in one active and one silent chromosome copy in non-malignant healthy cells, ii) the large ncRNAs BCMS and BCMSUN are likely involved in the regulation (in cis) of expression of the other genes in 13q14.3, and iii) differential epigenetic modifications of candidate LCRs control transcription of the large ncRNA genes. Accordingly, the epigenetic status of the LCRs is critical for transcription of the ncRNAs that in turn regulate the expression of the candidate genes in the critical region. Surprisingly, the most evident epigenetic aberration at 13q14.3 was the generally higher enrichment of the active chromatin mark at the region in CLL cells. However, also the inactive chromatin mark was increased at 13q14.3 in CLL cells. Significant differences of enrichment of H3K4me2 and macroH2A between non-malignant and CLL cells, were detected at CpG-islands B, C and E and at the exonic region of DLeu2/BCMSUN, which clearly showed that the aberrant modifications in CLL are most evident at the promoter regions of the genes C13ORF1, RFP2 and DLeu2/BCMSUN, respectively. The chromatin pattern that marks monoallelic expression at C13ORF1 and DLeu2/BCMSUN remained unchanged in the analyzed CLL cells. However, in CLL cells derived from patients with different genomic aberrations, the deletion of genomic material from 13q14.3 and loss of active chromatin marks could be correlated. This suggests that in del(13q) CLL patients, indeed the active copy of 13q14.3 is lost, which would explain downregulation of expression of the genes in the critical region observed in these patients. In line with the proposed model of the tumor suppressor mechanism in 13q14.3, the most evident aberrant epigenetic modifications of 13q14.3 in CLL cells were detected at the two candidate LCRs, where distinct epimutations were detected. Thus, an epimutation in 13q14.3 was shown that could be responsible for the inactivation of the epigenetic regulatory mechanism of 13q14.3 in CLL cells. Further, these findings suggest that the regulatory impact of the ncRNAs, the LCR or another yet unidentified part of the critical region in 13q14.3 is affected by this epimutation, which leads to deregulation and inactivation of the tumor suppressive function of 13q14.3. In conclusion, a specific epigenetic code at the genes in the critical region in 13q14.3 was determined that is correlated with their transcriptional state. Evidence was obtained for a model of epigenetic regulation that implies differential chromatin packaging of the two copies of 13q14.3 and results in monoallelic expression of the candidate genes in healthy B- and T-cells. Furthermore, two candidate LCRs were identified in the critical region in 13q14.3 in non-malignant cells that showed distinct epimutations in CLL cells. The localization and the detected epimutations of the LCRs in CLL point to their role in regulation of the ncRNA genes that most likely regulate expression of the other genes in the critical region. On the basis of these findings, further characterization of epigenetic features at 13q14.3 will help to fully elucidate the complex epigenetic regulatory network that controls the tumor suppressor mechanism in 13q14.3. The findings presented here will help to understand the pathogenicity of (epigenetic) inactivation of the tumor suppressor mechanism in CLL and thereby provide the basis for development of more efficient and specific therapies for CLL in the future.


Recent studies have revealed that the internal representations that we construct from the environment and maintain in visual short-term memory (VSTM) to guide behavior are highly flexible and can be selectively modulated according to our task goals and expectations. In the current study, we conducted two experiments to compare and contrast neural mechanisms of selective attention related to searching for target items within perceptual versus VSTM representations. We used event-related potentials to investigate whether searching for relevant target items from within VSTM representations involves spatially specific biasing of neural activity in a manner analogous to that which occurs during visual search for target items in perceptual arrays. The results, replicated across the two experiments, revealed that selection of a target object within a search array maintained in VSTM proceeds through a similar mechanism as that in the perceptual domain. In line with previous results, N2pc potentials were obtained when targets were identified within a perceptual visual-search array. Interestingly, equivalent N2pcs, with similar time courses and scalp distributions, were also elicited when target items were identified within a VSTM representation. The findings reinforce the notion of highly flexible VSTM representations that can be modulated according to task goals and suggest a large degree of overlap in the spatially specific neural mechanisms of target selection across the perceptual and VSTM domains.


Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. He makes the case that the American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and freedom of conscience.Smith maintains that the distinctive American contribution to religious freedom was not in the First Amendment, which was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. What was important was the commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Rather than upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.


Defining 'social entrepreneurship' has in the past proved problematic, and debate continues concerning what it does and does not entail and encompass. This unique book frames the debates surrounding the phenomenon and argues that many of the difficulties relating to the study of social entrepreneurship are rooted in methodological issues. Highlighting these issues, the book sets out ideas and implications for researchers using alternative methodologies.


Given an undirected connected network and a weight function finding a basis of the cut space with minimum sum of the cut weights is termed Minimum Cut Basis Problem. This problem can be solved, e.g., by the algorithm of Gomory and Hu [GH61]. If, however, fundamentality is required, i.e., the basis is induced by a spanning tree T in G, the problem becomes NP-hard. Theoretical and numerical results on that topic can be found in Bunke et al. [BHMM07] and in Bunke [Bun06]. In the following we present heuristics with complexity O(m log n) and O(mn), where n and m are the numbers of vertices and edges respectively, which obtain upper bounds on the aforementioned problem and in several cases outperform the heuristics of Schwahn [Sch05].


Local government law has fallen behind the times. Over the past two decades, economists have developed a deep understanding of 'agglomeration economics,' or the study of how and why mobile citizens and firms locate in cities. Their work argues that people decide to move to cities because of the reduced transportation costs for goods, increased labor market depth, and intellectual spillovers cities provide - that is, individuals and firms locate in cities in order to get the benefits of being near one another. Economically-minded local government law scholars have ignored this burgeoning literature and instead have continued to examine exclusively a separate set of benefits people get from their location decisions, the gains from 'sorting.' As analyzed in the well-known Tiebout model, individuals move between local governments in a region in order to receive public policies that fit their preferences.This paper seeks to develop the framework for a modern law and economic method for analyzing local governmental law. Specifically, it claims that there is an inverse relationship between the gains from agglomeration and sorting. Having many small local governments, and enabling individuals to choose their local public policies by sorting among them, affects the organization and density of people in metropolitan areas, creating movement away from economically-optimal location decisions. Sorting thus reduces agglomerative efficiency. Similarly, the existence of agglomerative gains means that individuals are making location decisions for reasons other than matching their preferences for public policies. Agglomeration therefore causes a reduction in the efficiency of sorting.States face a tradeoff between maximizing agglomerative and sorting efficiency in deciding how much power, and which responsibilities, to allocate to local governments. The need to balance these two conflicting sources of efficiency and changes in the nature of agglomerative gains over the last hundred years explains a great deal about the history of American local government law, current allocations of power between local governments and state legislatures, judicial decisions about local governmental power and the proper role for the federal government in policy areas, like housing and transportation, that are primarily regulated at the local level.


"Despite prior research indicating Parent Training (PT) is an efficacious treatment for children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), few conclusions can be made about the efficacy given the inconsistent manner in which PT programs have been implemented. Also remaining unclear is whether reported clinical improvements are due to altered parenting styles or other factors targeted by PT programs. In response to this situation, the current study conducted a therapeutic component analysis to determine whether a complete PT program, which included contingency management and AD/HD counseling (Anastopoulos & Barkley, 1990), was superior to a didactic-attention control (D-AC) group, which only taught AD/HD counseling. A total of 126 clinic-referred children with ADHD, between 6 and 11 years of age, and their parent(s) participated. Although increases in knowledge of AD/HD and contingency management were reported as predicted, differences in treatment effectiveness across the two groups did not emerge as anticipated; both groups experienced improvements related to child, parent, and family functioning. However, treatment-related group differences were evident with respect to child emotional functioning suggesting PT was superior to the D-AC group. These findings were examined in terms of their clinical significance using methodology by Jacobson and Truax (1991). Findings indicate that treatment aimed at increasing knowledge of AD/HD, which is rarely integrated into behavioral treatments, may enhance existing treatments."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


In the last decade economic historians have been stirred to what has been called a "New Economic History" which uses quantitative tools along with the standard qualitative judgmental implements found in the historian's toolbox. While accounting history, as adolescent as it is, does not presume to need a "quantified" overhaul, nonetheless it would seem that some attention would be warranted with regard to the use of these methods in analyzing blocks of accounting artifacts not yet added to the main stream of historical knowledge. For example, a recent paper presented at the history session in New Orleans referred to available annual accounting statements (internal and external of large publicly held firms). Archival data of this same corporate era is known to be available both on the continent and in the far east as well. Much of this information and the classificatory scheme it follows affords a continuous type of evidence which could be used to develop series of "microaccounting" cases which could lend themselves to quantitative analysis and inference with regard to the accounting policy and trends within. These new inferences would assist accounting historians who are seeking to explain portions of the evolution of various disclosure techniques and the relationship between such techniques and their environment political, education and economic. A call for innovative usages of quantification is by no means the limit to what historical pathways might be cleared. Indeed the accounting history of the 19th century, at least in this country, is a vast and relatively unmapped territory which has been crossed only by a few hearty prospectors and they have found the era rich with a lore of important accomplishment. In another section of this issue Professor Stone recalls the "Who Was Who in American Accounting in 1909?" It would be much more difficult to identify the "Who's Who" of 1825 or 1850 or 1875. Yet there were skillful and articulate practitioners of accountancy then just as now. The names of Thomas Jones of New York, Ira Mayhew of Boston, E. G. Folsom of Albany, S. W. Crittenden of Philadelphia and George Soule of


The duties owed by independent directors of large corporations to monitor the corporation's affairs have never had more political salience. Given the Enron-era debacles, the recent meltdown in our nation's financial sector, the dependence of workers on equity investments to secure their retirements, the globalization of American corporate law principles, and the complexity of managing corporations with international operations, the legal standards used to evaluate whether directors have complied with their fiduciary duties will be a subject of growing international policy interest. This article addresses an important dimension of that issue by examining the role of good faith in corporate law, and its use as the definition of the state of mind with which a director must act to comply with the fiduciary duty of loyalty. In particular, this article employs an historical, etymological, and policy-oriented analysis to address the question of whether the obligation of directors to act in good faith is a separate, free-standing fiduciary duty, or a fundamental aspect of the core duty of loyalty.We conclude, consistent with the Delaware Supreme Court's recent decision in Stone v. Ritter, that in the American corporate law tradition, the basic definition of the duty of loyalty is the obligation to act in good faith to advance the best interests of the corporation. What this article also shows is that the duty of loyalty has traditionally been conceived of as being much broader than the duty to avoid acting for personal financial advantage. The duty of loyalty also precludes acting for unlawful purposes, and affirmatively requires directors to make a good faith effort to monitor the corporation's affairs and compliance with law.Finally, we highlight a critical policy implication resulting from Stone v. Ritter, which is that an independent director who is accused of having failed in her monitoring duties may only be held liable if a court finds that she breached her duty of loyalty by consciously failing to make a good faith effort to comply with her duty of care. By requiring a finding of bad faith before imposing liability on an independent director, the corporate law, as explicated by Stone, protects the policy interests underlying the business judgment rule from erosion.


This paper examines barriers to research on university continuing education (UCE) in terms of two groups of factors: those that inhibit adult education research generally, and those that are specific to the UCE context and adversely affect research activity in this setting. Within UCE, the mandate, culture, qualifications of staff, the nature of work, and the nature of research that is conducted make traditional approaches to research problematic. The paper suggests that acceptance of a broader conceptualization of research by university continuing educators could enhance research related to practice.


Published to coincide with the centenary of the first expeditions to reach the South Pole, An Empire of Ice presents a fascinating new take on Antarctic exploration. Retold with added information, it's the first book to place the famed voyages of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, his British rivals Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and others in a larger scientific, social, and geopolitical context. Efficient, well prepared, and focused solely on the goal of getting to his destination and back, Amundsen has earned his place in history as the first to reach the South Pole. Scott, meanwhile, has been reduced in the public mind to a dashing incompetent who stands for little more than relentless perseverance in the face of inevitable defeat. An Empire of Ice offers a new perspective on the Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth century by looking at the British efforts for what they actually were: massive scientific enterprises in which reaching the South Pole was but a spectacular sideshow. By focusing on the larger purpose, Edward Larson deepens our appreciation of the explorers' achievements, shares little-known stories, and shows what the Heroic Age of Antarctic discovery was really about.


We examine investor order choices using evidence from a recent period when the NYSE trades in decimals and allows automatic executions. We analyze the decision to submit or cancel an order or to take no action. For submitted orders, we distinguish order type (market vs. limit), order side (buy vs. sell), execution method (auction vs. automatic), and pricing aggressiveness. We find that the NYSE exhibits positive serial correlation in order type on an order-by-order basis, which suggests that follow-on order strategies dominate adverse selection or liquidity considerations at a moment in time. Aggregated levels of order flow also exhibit positive serial correlation in order type, but appear to be non-stationary processes. Overall, changes in aggregated order flow have an order-type serial correlation that is close to zero at short aggregation intervals, but becomes increasingly negative at longer intervals. This implies a liquidity exhaustion–replenishment cycle. We find that small orders routed to the NYSE's floor auction process are sensitive to the quoted spread, but that small orders routed to the automatic execution system are not. Thus, in addition to foregoing price improvement, traders selecting the speed of automatic executions on the NYSE do so with little regard for the quoted cost of immediacy. As quoted depth increases, traders respond by competing on price via limit orders that undercut existing bid and ask prices. Limit orders are more likely and market sells are less likely late in the trading day. These results are helpful in understanding the order arrival process at the NYSE and have potential applications in academics and industry for optimizing order submission strategies.


The Missing Entrepreneurs 2015 is the third edition in a series of annual reports that provide data and policy analysis on inclusive entrepreneurship. Inclusive entrepreneurship involves business start-up and self-employment activities that contribute to social inclusion as well as to economic growth, covering entrepreneurship activities by social groups such as youth, women, seniors, immigrants and the unemployed. The report contains data on the scale and scope of entrepreneurship and self-employment activities across EU Member States by social target groups, as well as the barriers they face. The report also contains special thematic chapters on supporting growth for entrepreneurs from disadvantaged and under-represented groups, effective coaching and mentoring, and the role of public procurement in supporting inclusive entrepreneurship. Each thematic chapter discusses current policy issues and challenges, and makes recommendations for EU policy makers. The report also provides inspiring policy-practice examples from each of the 28 EU Members.


Soft goals extend the classical model of planning with a simple model of preferences. The best plans are then not the ones with least cost but the ones with maximum utility, where the utility of a plan is the sum of the utilities of the soft goals achieved minus the plan cost. Finding plans with high utility appears to involve two linked problems: choosing a subset of soft goals to achieve and finding a low-cost plan to achieve them. New search algorithms and heuristics have been developed for planning with soft goals, and a new track has been introduced in the International Planning Competition (IPC) to test their performance. In this note, we show however that these extensions are not needed: soft goals do not increase the expressive power of the basic model of planning with action costs, as they can easily be compiled away. We apply this compilation to the problems of the net-benefit track of the most recent IPC, and show that optimal and satisficing cost-based planners do better on the compiled problems than optimal and satisficing netbenefit planners on the original problems with explicit soft goals. Furthermore, we show that penalties, or negative preferences expressing conditions to avoid, can also be compiled away using a similar idea.


This article considers the interplay between habeas corpus law and the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. Certain peculiarities of federal habeas have given a schizophrenic character to recent Supreme Court decisions on ineffective assistance. At the same time that the Court has displayed a new willingness to extend Sixth Amendment protections to the plea-bargaining arena, the Court has also evinced a particular hostility to ineffective assistance claims arising in habeas. The present article identifies the roots of this schizophrenia in the Court's 2000 decision in Williams v. Taylor. The Court's trajectory from Williams to the present suggests that, absent a significant ideological makeover, the Court is unlikely in habeas cases to bring greater vigor and clarity to the right to effective assistance. The Court and advocates pushing the Court to adopt stronger Sixth Amendment protections should thus focus their efforts on cases emerging directly from state-court systems, rather than on collateral post-conviction challenges in federal court.


As academic advising has become more central to the work of universities and colleges, especially in relation to retention and graduation, efforts are being made to improve collaboration among different advising groups within these institutions. These efforts, at a number of campuses, include the emergence of training programs and institution level leadership bodies that oversee advising processes. Many of these efforts, however, are based on older paradigms of leadership and strategy. This article proposes a new model for guiding the work of these bodies based on more recent thinking that has emerged from the fields of leadership studies and chaos and complexity science as they relate to human behavior.


Purpose: Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, can be leveraged as a surrogate measure of response to therapeutic interventions in medicine. Cysteine aspartic acid–specific proteases, or caspases, are essential determinants of apoptosis signaling cascades and represent promising targets for molecular imaging. Here, we report development and in vivo validation of [18F]4-fluorobenzylcarbonyl–Val–Ala–Asp(OMe)–fluoromethylketone ([18F]FB-VAD-FMK), a novel peptide-based molecular probe suitable for quantification of caspase activity in vivo using positron emission tomography (PET). Experimental Design: Supported by molecular modeling studies and subsequent in vitro assays suggesting probe feasibility, the labeled pan-caspase inhibitory peptide, [18F]FB-VAD-FMK, was produced in high radiochemical yield and purity using a simple two-step, radiofluorination. The biodistribution of [18F]FB-VAD-FMK in normal tissue and its efficacy to predict response to molecularly targeted therapy in tumors was evaluated using microPET imaging of mouse models of human colorectal cancer. Results: Accumulation of [18F]FB-VAD-FMK was found to agree with elevated caspase-3 activity in response to Aurora B kinase inhibition as well as a multidrug regimen that combined an inhibitor of mutant BRAF and a dual PI3K/mTOR inhibitor in V600EBRAF colon cancer. In the latter setting, [18F]FB-VAD-FMK PET was also elevated in the tumors of cohorts that exhibited reduction in size. Conclusions: These studies illuminate [18F]FB-VAD-FMK as a promising PET imaging probe to detect apoptosis in tumors and as a novel, potentially translatable biomarker for predicting response to personalized medicine. Clin Cancer Res; 20(8); 2126–35. ©2014 AACR.


In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book--the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today--and why the revolution is just beginning.


In automatic summarization, centrality-as-relevance means that the most important content of an information source, or a collection of information sources, corresponds to the most central passages, considering a representation where such notion makes sense (graph, spatial, etc.). We assess the main paradigms, and introduce a new centrality-based relevance model for automatic summarization that relies on the use of support sets to better estimate the relevant content. Geometric proximity is used to compute semantic relatedness. Centrality (relevance) is determined by considering the whole input source (and not only local information), and by taking into account the existence of minor topics or lateral subjects in the information sources to be summarized. The method consists in creating, for each passage of the input source, a support set consisting only of the most semantically related passages. Then, the determination of the most relevant content is achieved by selecting the passages that occur in the largest number of support sets. This model produces extractive summaries that are generic, and language- and domainindependent. Thorough automatic evaluation shows that the method achieves state-of-the art performance, both in written text, and automatically transcribed speech summarization, including when compared to considerably more complex approaches.


ILLUSTRATED BY CHRISTIAN BIRMINGHAM. A lyrical and moving tale of a young boy growing up in Africa, and his lifelong friendship with a white lion. "All my life I'll think you you, I promise I will. I won't ever forget you." Bertie rescues an orphaned white lion cub from the African veld. They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Bertie swears that one day they will see one another again, but it is the butterfly lion which ensures that their friendship will never be forgotten.


In our current screen-saturated culture, we take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. The computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information. They structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. Learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge, says Johanna Drucker, has become an essential contemporary skill.Graphesis" provides a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. Among the most significant of these formats is the graphical user interface (GUI)--the dominant feature of the screens of nearly all consumer electronic devices. Because so much of our personal and professional lives is mediated through visual interfaces, it is important to start thinking critically about how they shape knowledge, our behavior, and even our identity.Information graphics bear tell-tale signs of the disciplines in which they originated: statistics, business, and the empirical sciences. Drucker makes the case for studying visuality from a humanistic perspective, exploring how graphic languages can serve fields where qualitative judgments take priority over quantitative statements of fact. Graphesis "offers a new epistemology of the ways we process information, embracing the full potential of visual forms and formats of knowledge production.


Sequence data from this article has been deposited with the GenBank Data Library under accession nos. AY823998-AY824946. ABSTRACT The evolution of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) during chronic infection involves the rapid, continuous turnover of genetic diversity. However, the role of natural selection, relative to random genetic drift, in governing this process is unclear. We tested a stochastic model of genetic drift using partial envelope sequences sampled longitudinally in 28 infected children. In each case the Bayesian posterior (empirical) distribution of coalescent genealogies was estimated using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Posterior predictive simulation was then used to generate a null distribution of genealogies assuming neutrality, with the null and empirical distributions compared using four genealogy-based summary statistics sensitive to non-neutral evolution. Because both null and empirical distributions were generated within a coalescent framework, we were able to explicitly account for the confounding influence of demography. From the distribution of corrected p values across patients, we conclude that empirical genealogies are more asymmetric than expected if evolution is driven by mutation and genetic drift only, with an excess of low frequency polymorphisms in the population. This indicates that although drift may still play an important role, natural selection has a strong influence on the evolution of HIV-1 envelope. A negative relationship between effective population size and substitution rate indicates that as the efficacy of selection increases, a smaller proportion of mutations approaches fixation in the population. This suggests the presence of deleterious mutations. We therefore conclude that intra-host HIV-1 evolution in envelope is dominated by purifying selection against low frequency deleterious mutations that do not reach fixation.


This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. The first, developed in Part II, asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for relevant patterns of human behavior, most notably those studied by behavioral decision scientists. This Part therefore reviews important behavioral findings, illustrating their application and relevance to a broad range of legal questions. Part III then argues that the behavioral approach is empirically driven, engaging in both the theoretical application of extant empirical findings to the law and the generation of new, legally relevant, experimental and observational evidence. As this Part shows, moreover, each of these behavioral genres possesses different methodological strengths and weaknesses, and they therefore both substitute for and complement one another, in different respects. Part IV explains that the behavioral approach encounters a series of "gaps" between the type of empirical evidence provided by behavioral decision researchers and the data required to resolve legal questions. Legal scholars should therefore be aware of these gaps, which may limit the usefulness of extant behavioral evidence for legal analysis. This Part also addresses what legal scholars may do to overcome these gaps and distinguish real gaps from imaginary ones. Part V completes the body of the Article, arguing that the behavioral analysis of law is simultaneously normatively neutral and normatively relevant. It is normatively neutral because the behavioral analysis of law is not committed to any specific legal goal or value system. This fundamental neutrality, in turn, makes the behavioral approach a versatile instrument, which can help generate important normative conclusions in the service of scholars evaluating the law based on any normative criteria - from justice to welfare and more. Part VI concludes.