There are many carbonate reservoirs in US (and the world) with light oil and fracture pressure below its minimum miscibility pressure (or reservoir may be naturally fractured). Many carbonate reservoirs are naturally fractured. Waterflooding is effective in fractured reservoirs, if the formation is water-wet. Many fractured carbonate reservoirs, however, are mixed-wet and recoveries with conventional methods are low (less than 10%). Thermal and miscible tertiary recovery techniques are not effective in these reservoirs. Surfactant flooding (or huff-n-puff) is the only hope, yet it was developed for sandstone reservoirs in the past. The goal of this research is to evaluate dilute (hence relatively inexpensive) surfactant methods for carbonate formations and identify conditions under which they can be effective. Anionic surfactants (SS-6656, Alfoterra 35, 38, 63,65,68) have been identified which can change the wettability of the calcite surface to intermediate/water-wet condition as well or better than the cationic surfactant DTAB with a West Texas crude oil in the presence of Na{sub 2}CO{sub 3}. All the carbonate surfaces (Lithographic Limestone, Marble, Dolomite and Calcite) show similar behavior with respect to wettability alteration with surfactant 4-22. Anionic surfactants (5-166, Alfoterra-33 and Alfoterra-38 and Alfoterra-68), which lower the interfacial tension with a West Texas crude oil to very low values (<10{sup -2} nM/m), have also been identified. Plans for the next quarter include conducting wettability, mobilization, and imbibition studies.


We propose a system that determines the salience of entities within web documents. Many recent advances in commercial search engines leverage the identification of entities in web pages. However, for many pages, only a small subset of entities are important, or central, to the document, which can lead to degraded relevance for entity triggered experiences. We address this problem by devising a system that scores each entity on a web page according to its centrality to the page content. We propose salience classification functions that incorporate various cues from document content, web search logs, and a large web graph. To cost-effectively train the models, we introduce a novel soft labeling methodology that generates a set of annotations based on user behaviors observed in web search logs. We evaluate several variations of our model via a large-scale empirical study conducted over a test set, which we release publicly to the research community. We demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform competitive baselines and the previous state of the art, while keeping the human annotation cost to a minimum.


Morstad, Julie. how to . Simply Read books, 2013. Print. Anyone who is a fan of creative and lateral thinking will love this book. The simple text and illustrations evoke complex connections and imagination. The title gives away that it is a "how to…" book but the things to do and learn are not your usual "… make cookies" or "… build a birdhouse." I love that the text problems are answered by text-less illustrations. For example, "how to make new friends" is answered by an image of a child making sidewalk chalk drawings of various creatures (including people) and "how to wash your socks" is accompanied by a group of children stomping in a puddle of clean-looking water. While a few "how to's" are answered with several possibilities, most have only one. This might be considered a weakness or, on further reflection, the multiple-answer examples suggest a pattern so the reader will search for their own variations. I'll admit to some discomfort with the choice to make all the "how to" phrases unpunctuated and in lower case letters because I believe proper writing is learned through example. However, it is a tiny quibble about an inspirational book. I will be sure to feel the breeze and appreciate the face wash on my bike ride home in the rain. Recommended:  4 out of 4 stars Reviewer: David Sulz David is a Public Services Librarian at University of Alberta and liaison librarian to Economics, Religious Studies, and Social Work. He has university studies in Library Studies, History, Elementary Education, Japanese, and Economics;  he formerly taught in schools and museums. His interests include physical activity, music, home improvements, and above all, things Japanese.


WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017 WINNER OF THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2016 AMAZON.COM #1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Whitehead is on a roll: the reviews have been sublime' Guardian 'Luminous, furious, wildly inventive' Observer 'Hands down one of the best, if not the best, book I've read this year' Stylist 'Dazzling' New York Review of Books Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2017. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.


Africa is often seen as a continent of mass migration and displacement caused by poverty, violent conflict and environmental stress. Yet such perceptions are based on stereotypes rather than theoretically informed empirical research. Drawing on the migration and visa databases from the Determinants of International Migration – DEMIG project and the Global Bilateral Migration Database (GBMD), this paper explores the evolution and drivers of migration within, towards and from Africa in the post-colonial period. Contradicting common ideas of Africa as a 'continent on the move', the analysis shows that intra-African migration intensities have gone down. This may be related to state formation and the related imposition of barriers towards free movement in the wake of decolonisation as well as the concomitant rise of nationalism and inter-state tensions. While African migration remains overwhelmingly intra-continental, since the late 1980s there has been an acceleration and spatial diversification (beyond colonial patterns) of emigration out of Africa to Europe, North America, the Gulf and Asia. This diversification of African emigration seems partly driven by the introduction of visa and other immigration restrictions by European states. Contradicting conventional interpretations of African migration being essentially driven by poverty, violence and underdevelopment, increasing migration out of Africa seems rather to be driven by processes of development and social transformation which have increased Africans' capabilities and aspirations to migrate, a trend which is likely to continue in the future.


The current building codes provide limited prescriptive guidance on design for protection of buildings due to progressive collapse. Progressive collapse is a situation in which a localized failure in a structure, caused by an abnormal load, such as explosions or other happenings. Three procedures, often employed for determination of the structural response during progressive collapse i.e. linear static procedure (LSP), nonlinear static (NSP) and nonlinear dynamic (NDP) analyses. In nonlinear static analysis, a force-based method is applied and the structure is pushed down to the target force. In this research, a new displacement-based method will be proposed for nonlinear static analysis. In displacement-based method, the structure is pushed down to target displacement instead of target force (similar to the one in seismic pushover analysis). To make a nonlinear static analysis, instead of increasing the load around the area of the removed column, a maximum displacement is calculated and the upper node of the removed column is pushed up to target displacement. Here, to determine the target displacement, results from nonlinear dynamic and linear static analyses are compared. This paper tries to present a formula to calculate the target displacement using the linear static rather than the nonlinear dynamic analysis. For this reason, 3 buildings with 3, 5 and 10 stories have been seismically designed and studied. The results show that, this method is much more accurate in comparison to the recommended approach in current codes. Also, this method does not have the limitations of force-based nonlinear static analysis.


"Increased regional inequality has been a major concern in many emerging economies like China, India, Vietnam and Thailand. However, even a large inequality is observed within the lagging regions. The objective of this paper is to look into what are the sources of within region inequality using the community surveys and a census type of households in Western China. This snapshot view of inequality within and between rural villages in western China is based on a census-type household survey in three administrative villages and a sampling survey of 286 natural villages in the poor province of Guizhou in 2004. In contrast to coastal regions, nonfarm income is distributed unevenly in this inland western region. This accounts for the largest share of overall income inequality. But agriculture is still the rural people's major source of livelihood in this particular location. On the expenditure side, health care is one of the most important sources of inequality. Because rural income is strongly related to human capital, the uneven access to health care will translate into a larger income gap in the long run. The analysis based on the natural village survey indicates that income varies widely across villages. Access to infrastructure and markets, education, and political participation explain most of this variation. These findings have important implications on the future development strategy in promoting lagging regions development and poverty reduction. While the overall economic development will be the main instrument to bring the majority poor out of poverty, a targeted approach has become increasingly crucial in helping the poor villages and households. It is critical to understand why these villages and households can not participate in the growth process and how development programs and various transfer programs help them to overcome the constraints they face." Authors' Abstract


Intercollegiate student-athletes appear to be a high-risk population with respect to mental health. Student athletic therapists are one of the groups with whom these athletes may be comfortable disclosing concerns. The current study investigated the relationship between mental health literacy and mental health referral efficacy in a sample of intercollegiate student therapists. One hundred and eleven student athletic therapists (81 female, 29 male, 1 nondiscloure) competed a revised version of the multicomponent mental health literacy measure and a four-item measure of mental health referral efficacy. T tests revealed statistically significant differences in mental health literacy by gender and personal history, and a multiple linear regression revealed a significant model predicting referral efficacy from mental health literacy. There are several implications of these results, particularly when working with a high-risk population of student-athletes.


How does racism work in American Indian law and policy? Scholarship on the subject has too often assumed that racism works for Indians in the same way that it does for African Americans, and has therefore either emphasized the presence of hallmarks of White-Black racism, such as uses of blood quantum, as evidence of racism, or has emphasized the lack of such hallmarks, such as prohibitions on interracial marriage, to argue that racism is not a significant factor. This Article surveys the different eras of Indian-White interaction to argue that racism has been important in those interactions, but has worked in a distinctive way. North Americans were not primarily concerned with using Indian people as a source of labor, and therefore did not have to theorize Indians as inferior individuals to control that labor. Rather, the primary concern was to obtain tribal resources and use tribes as a flattering foil for American governments. Therefore it was necessary to theorize tribal societies as fatally and racially inferior, while emphasizing the ability of Indian individuals to leave their societies and join non-Indian ones. This theory addresses the odd paradox that the most unquestionably racist eras in Indian-White interaction emphasized and encouraged assimilation of Indian individuals. It contributes to the ongoing effort to understand the varying manifestations of racism in a multi-racial America. Most important, it provides a new perspective on efforts to curtail tribal sovereignty in the name of racial equality, revealing their connection to historic efforts to maintain the inferiority of Indian tribes by treating them as racial groups rather than political entities with governmental rights.


The US raid that killed Osama bin Laden has raised concerns about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. In the process of building two new plutonium production reactors and a new reprocessing facility to fabricate more nuclear weapons fuel, Pakistan is also developing new delivery systems. The authors estimate that if the country's expansion continues, Pakistan's nuclear weapons stockpile could reach 150–200 warheads in a decade. They assess the country's nuclear forces, providing clear analysis of its nuclear command and control, nuclear-capable aircraft, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles.


Background Few studies have looked at how obesity affects injury outcomes among vehicle occupants involved in traffic collisions. Objective To estimate the association of obesity with death risk among drivers of passenger vehicles aged ≥16 and to examine effect modification by driver sex, driver seat belt use, vehicle type and collision type. Methods We conducted a matched-pair cohort study using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. WHO body mass index (BMI) categories were calculated. Data were analysed using conditional Poisson regression. Results Estimated risk ratios (RRs) were slightly raised for underweight drivers (RR=1.19, 95% CI 0.86 to 1.63). RR increased with higher BMI categories and were 1.21 (0.98 to 1.49) for BMI 30–34.9, 1.51 (1.10 to 2.08) for BMI 35–39.9 and 1.80 (1.15 to 2.84) for BMI ≥40. Estimated BMI effects varied by gender. We found no meaningful variation across levels of vehicle type, collision type or seat belt use. Conclusions Findings from this study suggest that obese vehicle drivers are more likely to die from traffic collision-related injuries than non-obese occupants involved in the same collision. Education is needed to improve seat belt use among obese people, as is research to understand the potential role of comorbidities in injury outcomes.


The implementation of a TMS solution is a highly complex and mission critical project. If executed correctly a good TMS can deliver a number of benefits to the organization in terms of optimization, greater efficiency, reduced errors and improved revenue through accurate invoicing. However a number of projects fail to realize these benefitsfor a host of reasons such as an incorrect product selection, over customization of the system and lack of detailed processes. The evaluation and selection of the right transportation management system is a very critical step in the successful implementation of a TMS product as well as ensuring that the organization is able to realize the benefits expected from the system. Transportation Management with SAP TM 9 is a guide for CIO/CXOs evaluating options for various transportation management solutions available in the market and helps inappropriate decision making before committing investment. A proven evaluation framework and guidance provided in the book can help decision makers with product selection and help to create a business case for management approval and design a future roadmap for the organization. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of what SAP transportation management is and is useful for teams involved in TM Implementation and roll outs to ensure preparedness. The book explains end-to-end freight life cycle processes, functional system landscape, implementation challenges and post go-live precautions required to optimize investments in SAP TM. Transportation Management with SAP TM 9 also acts as a step by step implementation guide with details of configuration required to set up a TM9 system. This book also covers the upgrade of SAP TM8 to SAP TM9 which will be useful for existing clients who are on TM 8. Nonavailability of SAP TM skilled resources is a major challenge faced by organizations and the book provides a detailed competency building plan along with skill set requirements to create a competent and trained workforce to manage-transformation. The current book available in the market on SAP TM is based on Version 6 release which does not cover air freight processes. Our book covers end-to-end air freight configuration scenarios for logistic companies. What youll learn Step-by-step configuration and implementation guidance for SAP TM v9 An understanding of the transportation management solutions landscape Guidance on TMS product selection Industry best practices for SAP TM implementation Processes supported by SAP TMWho this book is for CIOs / CXOs / decision makers of organizationpurchasing SAP TM solution Business users SAP TM pre-sales team SAP TM implementation /roll-out /AMS consultants


This dissertation pinpoints empathy deficit as a major social issue in the United States and it argues that schools could help address this root problem by offering humanity training. As an example of how humanity training could be implemented in higher education, "The Souls of Good Folk" is offered as a pedagogy of humanity for the composition classroom. This pedagogy uses Cornel West's derivative philosophy of prophetic pragmatism as a lens of cultural criticism and community action. Furthermore, the pedagogy employs W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk as an example of prophetic pragmatism enacted in the real world. It expands Du Bois's trajectory from a focus on Blacks to a generalized "good folk." Du Bois's book is not used as a blueprint for social transformation, but analyzing it could inform ways of addressing social problems.
"The Souls of Good Folk" critical pedagogy uses the word souls to represent people's actions and the phrase "good folk" to represent anyone who shows society what needs improving and possibly offer ways of doing it. Good folk include marginalized people, cultural workers, grassroots activists, teachers, artists, musicians, and others that help America see itself in efforts to make appropriate changes. The work of good folk is reviewed in this classroom as literature and tangible examples of how to enhance society. The composition classroom is the site for this pedagogy due to its focus on critical
literacy – actively and questioningly engaging with the text to read underlying messages – which is needed to help solve social problems.
Teaching through a prophetic pragmatist framework is critical academic work, for it helps produce responsible democratic citizens and it sustains local communities. The prophetic pragmatist classroom is an experiential learning laboratory that combines traditional teaching methods with progressive, hands-on approaches to make experience paramount to the learning process. The main objectives of this pedagogy are for students to understand social issues comprehensively and to find creative, empathetic ways of addressing these problems.


Craig B. Thompson, MD, has been named the new Director of the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania and Associate Vice President for Cancer Services of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. The Abramson Cancer is Center is one of only 39 NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers in the United States and one of the top five in National Cancer Institute funding. Last fiscal year, over 50,000 outpatient visits, 3400 inpatient admissions, 24,000 chemotherapy treatments, and more than 65,000 radiation treatments came through the Abramson Cancer Center (ACC). In his new position, Thompson will direct all clinical divisions of the ACC which include: the Rena Rowan Breast Center; the Melanoma and Pigmented Lesion Program; the Head and Neck Cancer Program; Neuro-Oncology; Urologic Oncology; Surgical Oncology; Radiation Oncology; Gynecologic Oncology; Gastrointestinal cancer; and hematologic cancers such as Leukemia, Lymphoma, and Myeloma. As Director, Thompson will oversee 300 active cancer researchers and 299 full- time Penn physicians and faculty from eight Schools and 41 Departments across the University involved in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. He will be responsible for $180 million in grant funding for cancer research and training, including $83.4 million in NCI funding. His additional clinical duties will include heading the PENN Medicine Cancer Steering Committee and the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Network. The Abramson Cancer Center is the cornerstone of the Penn Cancer Network, which is the group of community hospitals throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey collaborating with the ACC to provide subspecialty care not usually available at most community hospitals, as well as the vast research and technological resources for patient care throughout the region. "Dr. Thompson was selected for this position because of his reputation for excellence as a pioneer in cancer research, an exceptional educator, and above all, his career-long dedication to finding new approaches to treating and curing cancer," says Arthur H. Rubenstein, MBBCH, Executive Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System and Dean of the School of Medicine. Thompson joined Penn in 1999 as a Professor of Medicine, Scientific Director of The Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute (the basic science branch of Penn's Cancer Center), and Penn's first Chair of the Department of Cancer Biology. He will continue to serve in both of these positions in addition to his new appointment. "This is a very exciting time for Penn with the construction of a proton therapy treatment facility and the Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, which is to house all prevention, diagnostic, treatment, and support cancer services in a single patient-centered environment," says Ralph W. Muller, Chief Executive Officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Board Certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology, Dr. Thompson has also served as Deputy Director of the Abramson Cancer Center since 1999. Last year, he was selected as a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, an honor awarded to only four cancer scientists in 2005. After an undergraduate career at Dartmouth College and graduate training at Dartmouth Medical School, Dr. Thompson received his MD degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He received clinical training in Internal Medicine at Harvard University and in Medical Oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute at the University of Washington. From there, Dr. Thompson was a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, until 1983, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, also in Bethesda, from 1982 to 1987. In 1987, Dr. Thompson joined the faculty of the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Medicine and an Associate Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 1993, he moved to the University of Chicago and was promoted to Professor of Medicine, Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Director of the Gwen Knapp Center for Lupus and Immunology Research. Dr. Thompson currently serves as Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Vice Chairman of the GM Cancer Research Prize Committee, a member of the Lasker Prize Jury, and as an Associate Editor of Cell, Science, Immunity, and Cancer Cell . In the past, Dr. Thompson has served as the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Damon Runyon/Walter Winchell Cancer Foundation, Chairman of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Cancer Institute, and a member of the Experimental Immunology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Thompson is the holder of a number of patents related to immunotherapy and apoptosis, and is a founder of two biotechnology companies. In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Thompson is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, and the American Association of Physicians. Thompson resides on the Main Line with his wife Tullia Lindsten, MD, PhD. Together they have two children. PENN Medicine is a $2.7 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and high-quality patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Penn's School of Medicine is ranked #2 in the nation for receipt of NIH research funds; and ranked #4 in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's most recent ranking of top research-oriented medical schools. Supporting 1,400 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine. The University of Pennsylvania Health System includes three hospitals [Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, which is consistently ranked one of the nation's few "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center]; a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multispecialty satellite facilities; and home care and hospice. About the Abramson Cancer Center: The Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania was established in 1973 as a center of excellence in cancer research, patient care, education and outreach. Today, the Abramson Cancer Center ranks as one of the nation's best in cancer care, according to U.S. News and World Report, and is one of the top five in National Cancer Institute (NCI) funding. It is one of only 39 NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers in the United States. Home to one of the largest clinical and research programs in the world, the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania has 300 active cancer researchers and 299 Penn physicians involved in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment. More information about the Abramson Cancer Center is available at: www.pennhealth.com/cancer.


The go-to guidebook for deploying Big Data solutions with HadoopToday's enterprise architects need to understand how the Hadoop frameworks and APIs fit together, and how they can be integrated to deliver real-world solutions. This book is a practical, detailed guide to building and implementing those solutions, with code-level instruction in the popular Wrox tradition. It covers storing data with HDFS and Hbase, processing data with MapReduce, and automating data processing with Oozie. Hadoop security, running Hadoop with Amazon Web Services, best practices, and automating Hadoop processes in real time are also covered in depth. With in-depth code examples in Java and XML and the latest on recent additions to the Hadoop ecosystem, this complete resource also covers the use of APIs, exposing their inner workings and allowing architects and developers to better leverage and customize them.The ultimate guide for developers, designers, and architects who need to build and deploy Hadoop applicationsCovers storing and processing data with various technologies, automating data processing, Hadoop security, and delivering real-time solutionsIncludes detailed, real-world examples and code-level guidelinesExplains when, why, and how to use these tools effectivelyWritten by a team of Hadoop experts in the programmer-to-programmer Wrox styleProfessional Hadoop Solutions is the reference enterprise architects and developers need to maximize the power of Hadoop.


As might be expected from the difficulty of traversing it, the Sahara Desert has been a fairly effective barrier to direct contact between its two edges; trans-Saharan language contact is limited to the borrowing of non-core vocabulary, minimal from south to north and mostly mediated by education from north to south. Its own inhabitants, however, are necessarily accustomed to travelling desert spaces, and contact between languages within the Sahara has often accordingly had a much greater impact. Several peripheral Arabic varieties of the Sahara retain morphology as well as vocabulary from the languages spoken by their speakers' ancestors, in particular Berber in the southwest and Beja in the southeast; the same is true of at least one Saharan Hausa variety. The Berber languages of the northern Sahara have in turn been deeply affected by centuries of bilingualism in Arabic, borrowing core vocabulary and some aspects of morphology and syntax. The Northern Songhay languages of the central Sahara have been even more profoundly affected by a history of multilingualism and language shift involving Tuareg, Songhay, Arabic, and other Berber languages, much of which remains to be unraveled. These languages have borrowed so extensively that they retain barely a few hundred core words of Songhay vocabulary; those loans have not only introduced new morphology but in some cases replaced old morphology entirely. In the southeast, the spread of Arabic westward from the Nile Valley has created a spectrum of varieties with varying degrees of local influence; the Saharan ones remain almost entirely undescribed. Much work remains to be done throughout the region, not only on identifying and analysing contact effects but even simply on describing the languages its inhabitants speak.


German medical devices companies are at the forefront of technology when it comes to innovation and R&D. Most of the European medical device manufacturing companies are located in Germany and the number of patents filed by these companies shows the amount of innovation in the industry. A majority of these medical devices are exported within the European Union countries. Economic slowdown combined with market saturation and increased competition makes Europe a very competitive market for these companies. Indian on the other hand is one of the fasted growing economies in the world. The Indian medical device sector is relatively an untapped markets for innovative medical devices. There are tremendous market opportunities due to the fact that local manufacturing base for medical devices are underdeveloped
and often neglected. Most of the local Indian manufactures are engaged in producing basic medical devices and mostly into medical disposables and supplies. Around 70% of the medical devise sold in India are imported products. There is a huge demand and supply gap that is not being filled by the local manufacturers. India offers the perfect new market opportunity for German medical companies looking to venture into emerging new markets. There is abundant supplied of skilled manpower, with wages lower than that of the neighbouring China. India also has a rapidly growing middle class with increasing purchasing power. However, the regulations in the Indian medical device industry are not very clear and transparent. The Indian bureaucratic system is rampant with corruption and red tapes that needs to be tackled and navigated skilfully. A Germany company looking to enter the Indian market needs to understand that nothing in India can be implemented by a text book style entry strategy. In this thesis, we will analyse few of the most suitable entry strategies for German medical device companies with the advantages and disadvantages of each entry mode. We will also analyse the process of doing business in India, which requires an understanding of various aspect of the Indian culture and business relationship building in India. Further, we will analyse the current market scenario with a brief analyse of the local manufacturers currently in the market along with some information on foreign players in the market. Will also interview 5 experts from the medical field and look into few real case studies.


In this paper we discuss three types of adjectival participles in Greek, ending in -tos and –menos, and provide a further argument for the view that finer distinctions are necessary in the domain of participles (Kratzer 2001, Embick 2004). We further compare Greek stative participles to their German (and English) counterparts. We propose that a number of semantic as well as syntactic differences shown by these derive from differences in their respective morpho-syntactic composition.


Profitable ideas and techniques for advertising on Facebook Tap into the explosive growth of social media and reach your customers with effective Facebook advertising campaigns and savvy insights into how to use this social media phenomenon effectively. Its all here and more in this detailed, easy-to-follow guide from two award-winning marketers. You'll learn what makes a good Facebook ad, how to apply the latest strategies and tactics for effective pay-per-click and cost-per-impression advertising, how to test your ad results, and much more. Explores Facebook advertising inside and out; there are now more than 400 million active Facebook users and over 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook Works as an all-around, hands-on guide for both experienced and new Facebook advertisers Walks you through planning and creating an advertising campaign Explains writing effective ad copy, how to use landing pages, and how to test and optimize your ads Shows you how to use Facebook Insights to understand your results and how to create reports that analyze data Put your company's best face forward with the sound advertising tips and techniques in Facebook Advertising For Dummies.


Recent studies have identified that the activation of protein kinase C (PKC) and increased diacylglycerol (DAG) levels initiated by hyperglycemia are associated with many vascular abnormalities in retinal, renal, and cardiovascular tissues. Among the various PKC isoforms, the beta- and delta-isoforms appear to be activated preferentially in the vasculatures of diabetic animals, although other PKC isoforms are also increased in the renal glomeruli and retina. The glucose-induced activation of PKC has been shown to increase the production of extracellular matrix and cytokines; to enhance contractility, permeability, and vascular cell proliferation; to induce the activation of cytosolic phospholipase A2; and to inhibit Na+-K+-ATPase. The synthesis and characterization of a specific inhibitor for PKC-beta isoforms have confirmed the role of PKC activation in mediating hyperglycemic effects on vascular cells, as described above, and provide in vivo evidence that PKC activation could be responsible for abnormal retinal and renal hemodynamics in diabetic animals. Transgenic mice overexpressing PKC-beta isoform in the myocardium developed cardiac hypertrophy and failure, further supporting the hypothesis that PKC-beta isoform activation can cause vascular dysfunctions. Interestingly, hyperglycemia-induced oxidative stress may also mediate the adverse effects of PKC-beta isoforms by the activation of the DAG-PKC pathway, since treatment with D-alpha-tocopherol was able to prevent many glucose-induced vascular dysfunctions and inhibit DAG-PKC activation. Clinical studies are now in progress to determine whether PKC-beta inhibition can prevent diabetic complications.


We have calculated the consensus sequence for human mitochondrial DNA using over 800 available sequences. Analysis of this consensus reveals an unexpected lack of diversity within human mtDNA worldwide. Not only is more than 83% of the mitochondrial genome invariant, but in over 99% of the variable positions, the majority allele was found in at least 90% of the individuals. In the remaining 0.22% of the 16,569 positions, which we conservatively refer to as "ambiguous," every one could be reliably assigned to either a purine or pyrimidine ancestral state. There was only one position where the most common allele had an allele frequency of less than 50%, but this has been shown to be a mutational hot spot. On average, the individuals in our dataset differed from the Eve consensus by 21.6 nucleotides. Sequences derived from sub-Saharan Africa were considerably more divergent than average. Given the high mutation rate within mitochondria and the large geographic separation among the individuals within our dataset, we did not expect to find the original human mitochondrial sequence to be so well preserved within modern populations. With the exception of a very few ambiguous nucleotides, the consensus sequence clearly represents Eves mitochondrial DNA sequence.


During the summer of 1940 the faculty of Teachers College developed the Creed of Democracy under the leadership of Professor Thomas H. Briggs. This and the associated documents have had a far-flung influence. Every department of Teachers College probably has members on Defense Committees and Emergency Committees and in similar activities in their particular fields—members who will gladly be of service to teachers and school administrators anywhere by furnishing information on specific questions. To facilitate the process of getting together persons interested in the same fields, Dean William F. Russell asked Professor Paul R. Mort to serve as a correlating agent. As a result, several committees were appointed. During the year additional faculty members were drawn into various defense activities outside the College. Conferences of the committee chairmen during the Summer School of 1941 led to the plan of holding a meeting at which persons concerned with various aspects of the defense problem would present brief statements of their activities. The purpose was to help teachers build a picture of what might be done by the schools on their own initiative. Professor Benjamin R. Andrews was instrumental in preparing the present document to supplement these verbal statements with brief accounts of what some of the Teachers College Staff are doing in defense work and with suggestions of services that teachers everywhere can render to promote community stability and welfare at present and also the protection and improvement of the position of America on into the post-emergency period. Teachers should be ready to initiate local leadership in their own communities by consulting with municipal officials and bringing together informal groups to canvass the local situation, getting in touch with their governors and such national agencies as may be necessary, in order to provide local committees to undertake such community services.


Although knowledge representation is one of the central and, in some ways, most familiar concepts in AI, the most fundamental question about it -- What is it? -- has rarely been answered directly. Numerous papers have lobbied for one or another variety of representation, other papers have argued for various properties a representation should have, and still others have focused on properties that are important to the notion of representation in general. In this article, we go back to basics to address the question directly. We believe that the answer can best be understood in terms of five important and distinctly different roles that a representation plays, each of which places different and, at times, conflicting demands on the properties a representation should have. We argue that keeping in mind all five of these roles provides a usefully broad perspective that sheds light on some longstanding disputes and can invigorate both research and practice in the field.


Bangladesh is mainly formed by alluvial deposits, facing riverbank erosion very frequently due to unvarying alteration of river channels. This study is aimed at computing the actual bank shifting along the Manu River within Bangladesh for a period of thirteen years (1997-2010). The entire course of Manu River from upstream of India Border, Moulvibazar to the confluence with the Kushiyara River at Manumukh, Sherpur for a stretch of around 69 km has been studied using an integrated approach of Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS). The channel configuration of the Manu River has been mapped for the years 1997 and 2010 using Landsat satellite images. The analysis divulged that the Manu River is a highly meandering river with several very critical sections where the river has been suffering enormously with the erosion problem and shifting characteristics. The enumerated river shifting was found very high as the maximum left bank shifting and maximum right bank shifting had occurred at Rajnagar, Moulvibazar of 656 m and 628 m respectively, in the mentioned period. The results deliver latest and steadfast evidence on the dynamic fluvio-geomorphology of the Manu River for designing and execution of erosion control schemes.


Nodal integration of finite elements has been investigated recently. Compared with full integration it shows better convergence when applied to incompressible media, allows easier remeshing and highly reduces the number of material evaluation points thus improving efficiency. Furthermore, understanding it may help to create new integration schemes in meshless methods as well. The new integration technique requires a nodally averaged deformation gradient. For the tetrahedral element it is possible to formulate a nodal strain which passes the patch test. On the downside, it introduces non-physical low energy modes. Most of these "spurious modes" are local deformation maps of neighbouring elements. Present stabilization schemes rely on adding a stabilizing potential to the strain energy. The stabilization is discussed within this article. Its drawbacks are easily identified within numerical experiments: Nonlinear material laws are not well represented. Plastic strains may often be underestimated. Geometrically nonlinear stabilization greatly reduces computational efficiency. The article reinterpretes nodal integration in terms of imposing a nonconforming C0-continuous strain field on the structure. By doing so, the origins of the spurious modes are discussed and two methods are presented that solve this problem. First, a geometric constraint is formulated and solved using a mixed formulation of Hu-Washizu type. This assumption leads to a consistent representation of the strain energy while eliminating spurious modes. The solution is exact, but only of theoretical interest since it produces global support. Second, an integration scheme is presented that approximates the stabilization criterion. The latter leads to a highly efficient scheme. It can even be extended to other finite element types such as hexahedrals. Numerical efficiency, convergence behaviour and stability of the new method is validated using linear tetrahedral and hexahedral elements.


Commentators analyzing the Supreme Court's watershed decision in Graham v. Florida, which prohibited sentences of life without parole for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide crimes, have generally done so in substantive proportionality terms, ignoring or downplaying parole in the process. This Article challenges that approach, focusing on the intersection of proportionality and parole as a jumping off point. Taking parole seriously makes clear that Graham is difficult to understand solely in terms of substantive proportionality concepts like individual culpability and punishment severity. Instead, the decision can be seen as establishing a rule of constitutional criminal procedure, one that links the validity of punishment to the institutional structure of sentencing. By requiring the state to revisit its first-order sentencing judgments at a later point in time, Graham mandates a procedural space for granular, individualized, and ultimately more reliable sentencing determinations. I expose this procedural and institutional side of parole's constitutional significance, situate it within the constitutional landscape of sentencing, and sketch some of its implications for the future of sentencing regulation.


Professional wrestling is often seen as a suspect sport and marginal entertainment. It is also one of the most popular performance practices in the United States and around the world, drawing millions of spectators to live events and televised broadcasts. That its display of violence is at once simulated and actual is part of the appeal for the fans who debate performance choices with as much energy as they argue about their favorite wrestlers. Its ongoing scenarios and presentations of manly and not so-manly characters--from the flamboyantly feminine to the hypermasculine--simultaneously celebrate and critique, parody and affirm the American dream and the masculine ideal. This book looks at the world of professional wrestling both from the fan's-eye-view high in the stands and from the ringside in the wrestlers' gym. It begins with a look at the way in which performances are constructed and sold to spectators, both on a local level and in the "big leagues" of the WWF and the WCW. A close-up view of a group of wrestlers as they work out, get their faces pushed to the mat as part of their initiation into the fraternity of the ring, and the dream of stardom follows. The second half of the book explores professional wrestling's carnivalesque presentation of masculinities ranging from the cute to the brute, as well as the way in which the performances of women wrestlers almost inevitably enter into the realm of pornographic. Finally, it explores the question of the "real" and the "fake" as the fans themselves confront it. The game of wrestling may indeed be fixed, but no more so than the game of life. The real power may rest with the invisible money men, but at least in the arena, fans know the rules by which this particular game is played and are free to insist that the action meet their expectations. Sharon Mazer is coordinator of the drama program and lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.


Participation in a sport is widely considered a valuable form of physical activity, especially for children and adolescents. In addition, many think that sport participation translates to future physical activity. However, limited research has examined the ability of youth sport to significantly contribute to meeting daily physical activity guidelines (60 min/day of moderate to vigorous physical activity) and whether the physical activity behaviors of youth sport participants will translate into future, habitual activity in both the short and the long term. In this paper, available research on the role of youth sport in the promotion of physical activity is evaluated. Two major questions are used to frame the discussion: How much physical activity do youth sport participants attain during games and practices, and does sport participation during childhood and adolescence translate into habitual physical activity in adulthood? This is followed by ideas for future research and preliminary recommendations for best practices or policies.


From Aunt Annie's alligator to the colourful Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz, Dr. Seuss's delightful book introduces early learners to the letters of the alphabet through an amazing array of crazy creatures. With his unique combination of hilarious stories, zany pictures and riotous rhymes, Dr. Seuss has been delighting young children and helping them learn to read for over fifty years. Creator of the wonderfully anarchic Cat in the Hat, and ranked among the UK's top ten favourite children's authors, Seuss is firmly established as a global best-seller, with nearly half a billion books sold worldwide. As the first step in a major rebrand programme, HarperCollins is relaunching 17 of Dr. Seuss's best-selling books, including such perennial favourites as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and Fox in Socks. In response to consumer demand, the bright new cover designs incorporate much needed guidance on reading levels, with the standard paperbacks divided into three reading strands - Blue Back Books for parents to share with young children, Green Back Books for budding readers to tackle on their own, and Yellow Back Books for older, more fluent readers to enjoy. Dr. Seuss's ABC belongs to the Blue Back Book range.


Over the past fifty years, many scholars have tried to explain what has caused the dramatic decrease in antitrust's political salience, but the purpose of this article is more to describe how the shift has affected the way we now do the "antitrust enterprise" and to connect this shift to our concern for the political values that we believe underlie the antitrust laws. We connect free markets with free people, favoring open markets and the opportunity to compete as well as seeing the connection between free markets and democratic values and institutions. We also believe that a balance of institutional power is necessary to advance the goals that free markets embody.The institutional aspects of today's antitrust enterprise, however, are increasingly out of balance, threatening the democratic economic and political goals of the antitrust laws. The shift that Richard Hofstadter first described has led to an antitrust system captured by lawyers and economists advancing their own self-referential goals, free of political control and economic accountability. Some of this professional control is inevitable, of course, because antitrust is a system of legal ordering of economic relationships. But antitrust is also public law designed to serve public ends. Today's unbalanced system now puts too much control in the hands of technical experts, moving antitrust enforcement too far away from its democratic roots.We characterize the result of this shift toward technocracy as antitrust's democracy deficit. We draw upon the concept of a democracy deficit from the literature analyzing and critiquing the European Union and the World Trade Organization. The term has generally been used to refer to policy making by unaccountable and non-transparent technocratic institutions far removed from democratic (or national) control. The concern for democratic decision making has also been reflected in a new interest in global administrative law and the importance of basic principles of transparency and due process as a way to control the administrative state. This interest in administrative law principles has likewise led to a closer examination of how well antitrust conforms to due process and institutional norms. Our concern over antitrust's move away from more democratically controlled institutions toward greater reliance on technical experts is not just animated by a theoretical preference for democracy. A preference for democratic institutions implicitly assumes that more democratically arranged institutions will, in general, produce preferable antitrust policies and outcomes. We think this is particularly true today, when the imbalance between democratic control and technocratic control has put antitrust on a thin diet of efficiency, one that has weakened antitrust's ability to control corporate power. Nevertheless, our concern about a democracy deficit does not lead us to a full-throated embrace of populism. Political values change over time, affected by how the world has changed and the lessons we can take from the social sciences. Rather, we think that by redressing the democracy deficit we can move the needle back toward policies that reflect more general political understandings and views of antitrust policy and improve the institutions and outcomes for antitrust law in the process.We begin our article by charting the democracy deficit as reflected in the conduct of the major institutions of the antitrust system — the courts, the Congress, and public enforcers — and compare the situation in the United States with that of the evolving competition law enforcement regime in Europe. In the second part of the article we explore the link between technocracy and ideology, discussing how a technocratic approach has today come to support an extreme laissez faire ideology for antitrust enforcement. Finally, our article concludes with some thoughts on why more democracy would be good for antitrust.


The study examined the effect of capacity building programmes of development agencies (NDDC and SPDC) on well being of beneficiaries in the Niger delta, by assessing participant's income before and after participation and their perception about the effects of the training programme on them using multidimensional criteria such as their educational, health, shelter, skill acquisition and general standard of living needs. A sample size of 300 respondents was selected from the 22 capacity development (study) centers chosen from Rivers and Bayelsa state using purposive-cluster and random sampling techniques. The result of the study indicates that there was a nominal positive change of income in favour of the participating youths exposed to the programme, the study concluded that the skills acquisition pogrammes of the development agencies were effective at improving the wellbeing needs of the participants. It was recommended that donors of both programmes SPDC and NDDC should ensure sustainability by creating more study centres with well-equipped facilities for the training; effective supervision, and monitoring. There is need for adequate funding to ensure prompt payment of stipends and starter packs. Apart from this, experts and professionals should be engaged to train this youth.


In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable--it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age--that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas--personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa. Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.


This paper concerns a knowledge structure called method , within a compu-tational model for human oriented deduction. With human oriented theoremproving cast as an interleaving process of planning and verification, the body ofall methods reflects the reasoning repertoire of a reasoning system. While weadopt the general structure of methods introduced by Alan Bundy, we make anessential advancement in that we strictly separate the declarative knowledgefrom the procedural knowledge. This is achieved by postulating some stand-ard types of knowledge we have identified, such as inference rules, assertions,and proof schemata, together with corresponding knowledge interpreters. Ourapproach in effect changes the way deductive knowledge is encoded: A newcompound declarative knowledge structure, the proof schema, takes the placeof complicated procedures for modeling specific proof strategies. This change ofparadigm not only leads to representations easier to understand, it also enablesus modeling the even more important activity of formulating meta-methods,that is, operators that adapt existing methods to suit novel situations. In thispaper, we first introduce briefly the general framework for describing methods.Then we turn to several types of knowledge with their interpreters. Finally,we briefly illustrate some meta-methods.


People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. Nichols has deeper concerns than the current rejection of expertise and learning, noting that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy-or in the worst case, a combination of both. The Death of Expertise is not only an exploration of a dangerous phenomenon but also a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age.


This summary report presents an overview of the level of traveler usage (e.g., how many vehicles use the freeways) and travel performance (e.g., how fast they are traveling, where and how often congestion occurs) on the principal urban freeways in the central Puget Sound area. The freeways studied in this project are managed by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) using its FLOW system, a coordinated network of traffic monitoring, measuring, information dissemination, and control devices that operates on urban state and Interstate highways in the central Puget Sound region. Data presented in this report were collected by the WSDOT's freeway surveillance system. The project that led to this report is intended to meet two separate purposes: 1) to enhance WSDOT's ability to monitor and improve its traffic management efforts on Seattle-area highways, and 2) to provide useful information to the public and decision makers about the status of the freeway system's operational performance. This report is primarily intended to meet the second of these objectives. However, the software developed to assist in freeway data analysis for this project and many of the graphics presented in this report are directly applicable to the first objective.


Advances in fields of inquiry as diverse as neuroscience, molecular biology, genomics, developmental psychology, epidemiology, sociology, and economics are catalyzing an important paradigm shift in our understanding of health and disease across the lifespan. This converging, multidisciplinary science of human development has profound implications for our ability to enhance the life prospects of children and to strengthen the social and economic fabric of society. Drawing on these multiple streams of investigation, this report presents an ecobiodevelopmental framework that illustrates how early experiences and environmental influences can leave a lasting signature on the genetic predispositions that affect emerging brain architecture and long-term health. The report also examines extensive evidence of the disruptive impacts of toxic stress, offering intriguing insights into causal mechanisms that link early adversity to later impairments in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental well-being. The implications of this framework for the practice of medicine, in general, and pediatrics, specifically, are potentially transformational. They suggest that many adult diseases should be viewed as developmental disorders that begin early in life and that persistent health disparities associated with poverty, discrimination, or maltreatment could be reduced by the alleviation of toxic stress in childhood. An ecobiodevelopmental framework also underscores the need for new thinking about the focus and boundaries of pediatric practice. It calls for pediatricians to serve as both front-line guardians of healthy child development and strategically positioned, community leaders to inform new science-based strategies that build strong foundations for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, and lifelong health.


The Speedy DDR2 controller is intended as an improvement on the Xilinx MIG controller for Virtex 5 FPGAs. Designed entirely from scratch on the ML505 development board, it achieves better performance at the same clock rate than the MIG controller while consuming comparable resources. The tight timing constraints imposed by high speed DDR2 clash with the worst case timing constraint style of FPGA design in a way that presents unique challenges. This paper discusses the primary design problems resulting from that paradox and contrasts approaches to their solution. Performance is then compared between the Speedy DDR2 controller and the MIG controller from Xilinx. The source code has been written to be more readable, maintainable and modifiable than the MIG design, and is also freely downloadable from the web.


The fear of somatic sensations is highly relevant in the etiology and maintenance of various disorders. Nevertheless, little is known about this fear of body symptoms and many questions are yet unanswered. Especially physiological studies on interoceptive threat are rare. Therefore, the present thesis investigated defensive mobilization, autonomic arousal, and brain activation during the anticipation of, exposure to, and recovery from unpleasant body sensations. Symptoms were provoked using a standardized hyperventilation procedure in a sample of high (and as controls: low) anxiety sensitive individuals - a population high at risk for developing a panic disorder and high in fear of internal body symptoms.
In study one, anxious apprehension was investigated during anticipation of interoceptive threat (somatic sensations evoked by hyperventilation) and exteroceptive threat (electric shock). Symptom reports, autonomic arousal, and defensive mobilization assessed by the startle eyeblink response were analyzed. Extending the knowledge on anticipation of interoceptive threat, study two investigated the neural networks activated during anxious apprehension of unpleasant body sensations. Symptom reports and startle response data were collected during a learning session after which participants high and low in fear of somatic symptoms attended a fMRI session anticipating threat (hyperventilation – learned to provoke unpleasant symptoms) or safety (normal breathing). Study three examined the actual exposure to internal body symptoms, investigating symptoms reports, autonomic arousal, and the startle eyeblink response during guided breathing (hyperventilation and, as a non-provocative comparison condition, normoventilation) and during recovery. And finally, study four addressed changes in the defensive mobilization during repeated interoceptive exposure via a hyperventilation procedure. High and low anxiety sensitive persons went through two guided hyperventilation and normoventilation procedures that were spaced one week apart while symptom reports, breathing parameters, and startle response magnitudes were measured.
In study one it was demonstrated that the anticipation of exteroceptive threat led to a defensive and autonomic mobilization in high and low anxiety sensitive individuals, while during interoceptive threat only high anxiety sensitive participants were characterized by a potentiated startle response and autonomic activation. Imaging data of study two revealed that 1) during anticipation of hyperventilation all participants were characterized by an increased activation of a fear network consisting of anterior insula/ orbitofrontal cortex and rostral parts of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex/ dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, 2) high fear individuals showed higher anxious apprehension than low fear controls during the entire context (safe and threat conditions), indexed by an overall stronger activation of the described network, and 3) while low fear controls learned that (undisclosed to all participants) in the fMRI scanner the threat cue was not followed by an unpleasant hyperventilation task, high fear participants continued to show stronger fear network activation to this cue. In study three it was demonstrated, that the hyperventilation procedure led to a marked increase in somatic symptoms and to autonomic arousal. While high and low anxiety sensitive groups did not differ during hyperventilation, in the early recovery only high anxiety sensitive individuals showed defensive mobilization, indicated by potentiated startle response magnitudes, and increased autonomic arousal after hyperventilation as compared to after normoventilation. Substantiating these findings, in study four all participants reported more symptoms during hyperventilation than during normoventilation, in both sessions. Nevertheless, only high anxiety sensitive participants displayed a potentiation of startle response magnitudes after the first hyper- vs. normoventilation. One week later, when the exercise was repeated this potentiation was no longer present and thus both groups no longer differed in their defensive mobilization. Even more, the number of reported baseline symptoms decreased from session one to session two in the high-AS group. While high anxiety sensitive persons reported increased baseline anxiety symptoms in session one, groups did not anymore differ in session two.
These data indicate that the standardized hyperventilation procedure is a valid paradigm to induce somatic symptoms. Moreover, it induces anxious apprehension especially in persons highly fearful of internal body symptoms. The repetition of interoceptive exposure, however, reduces associated fear in highly fearful individuals. Thus, this paradigm might provide an innovative method to study anxious apprehension and also treatment effects in patients with panic disorder. The present findings are integrated and discussed in the light of the current literature.


In recent decades, institutions, teachers, and students report a decline in field trip attendance. The impact of this decline on educational and societal outcomes such as social-emotional skill acquisition is unknown. Social-emotional learning (SEL) are skills thought to be important to life and relationship success and are associated with better long-term student outcomes. This study describes the results of the first-ever longitudinal experiment of the effects of multiple arts- related field trips on elementary school students of color in a large urban school district. Treated students attended field trips to an art museum, a live theater production, and a symphony performance. We find significant educational benefits from attending multiple arts field trips on social-emotional outcomes, including increased feelings of tolerance and social perspective taking. Our findings also suggest that female treatment students exhibit increased conscientiousness as compared to their control group peers, however these effects dissipate when treatment ceases. Further, female students who receive three additional field trips in a second treatment year act more conscientious than in the prior year of treatment. Increased exposure to the arts through field trip experiences does not, however, appear to increase students' desire to consume or participate in the arts, nor do we find an impact of treatment on empathy. These findings suggest that arts-related field trips elicit meaningful changes in students' social- emotional attitudes and actions and that a decline in field trip attendance may be detrimental.


Tory Burch sees the world in colour, inspired by people, places, and ideas--all of which influence her brand, synonymous with print and color. In her first book, she explores what living in colour means to her. The book is organised by colour, each one brought to life through images of her own collections and travels; how she entertains; style icons; the works of artists, authors, and interior designers she admires; and the advice of business leaders--many of whom are interviewed within. The book also offers a glimpse into the more personal moments in Tory's life, such as family trips with her boys or the indelible ways in which her parents, Buddy and Reva Robinson, influenced her collection, company, and philosophy. The foreword is written by Anna Wintour, artistic director of Conde Nast and editor-in-chief of Vogue, and the cover features Damien Hirst's Beautiful Primal Urges Rug, (c) Damien Hirst and Science Ltd., all rights reserved / DACS, London / ARS, NY 2014. Courtesy of Other Criteria. 100% of the gross proceeds received by Tory Burch LLC from the sale of this book will benefit the Tory Burch Foundation.


Present increases of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere and surface waters suggest that CO2 related changes in seawater carbonate chemistry will become a general stress factor in aquatic environments. Our knowledge of compensatory mechanisms for systemic acid-base disturbances in cephalopods is limited. This study preliminarily concludes that Sepia officinalis joins a high capacity of acid-base regulation normally found in vertebrates with the ability to maintain or even slightly decrease aerobic energy turnover during acute hypercapnic exposure. In vivo data collected from cannulated specimens illustrated that a metabolic alkalosis, generated by an active accumulation of bicarbonate ions, was sufficient to fully compensate for the respiratory acidosis and buffer haemolymph pH. Monitoring of brain energy status by 31P-NMR spectroscopy found only minor shifts in adenylate ratios. Considering the full compensation of haemolymph pH, it is interesting that brain intracellular pH remained depressed under hypercapnia. This suggests a protective function for lowered brain pHi, where tissue specific metabolic depression could support the maintenance of whole animal energy balance during CO2 stress. Taking into consideration the ability of certain cephalopod species to retain protons and acidic metabolites within the mantle muscle to prevent disturbances of haemolymph homeostasis, further work will focus on measuring the degree of acid-base regulation in muscle tissue. Together these data will allow us to determine if the full level of motoric activity can be conserved in Sepia officinalis during acute hypercapnia.


The author of Yoga Journal's most-read column presents the first holistic guide to yogaA user-friendly guide illustrated with 240 two-color photographs and illustrations, "Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit" sets forth the tenets of this gentle yet rigorous exercise as no other book has. Integrating the teachings of every tradition, internationally renowned yoga instructor Donna Farhi reveals how yoga enhances the connections between the mind, body, and spirit. She outlines the seven simple movement principles that underlie all human motion and provides exercises to help readers understand how they can achieve all yoga postures. She also discusses the ten ethical precepts that are the foundation of all yoga teachings and explains how to incorporate them into a spiritually and emotionally rewarding inner practice.At the heart of "Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit" are more than seventy-five yoga asanas or postures. Each is one pictured and described in detail, and they are arranged into related groups--including standing postures, sitting postures, arm balances, and breathing practices--or easy reference. A selection of yoga practices of varying lengths and levels of difficulty provides challenges and inspiration for beginner, intermediate, and advanced students.A huge resurgence of interest in yoga is sweeping the country. With its broad scope and holistic approach, "Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit" is the ideal book for today's mainstream audience.


A necessary feature for equilibrium is that beliefs about the behavior of other agents are rational. We argue that in stationary OLG environments this implies that any future generation in the same situation as the initial generation must do as well as the initial generation did in that situation. We conclude that the existing equilibrium concepts in the literature do not satisfy this condition. We then propose an alternative equilibrium concept, organizational equilibrium, that satisfies this condition. We show that equilibrium exists, it is unique, and it improves over autarky without achieving optimality. Moreover, the equilibrium can be readily found by solving a maximization program.


This paper examines the nutritional and veterinary effects of tannins on ruminants and makes some comparisons with non-ruminants. Tannin chemistry per se is not covered and readers are referred to several excellent reviews instead: (a) Okuda T et al.Heterocycles 30:1195–1218 (1990); (b) Ferreira D and Slade D. Nat Prod Rep 19:517–541 (2002); (c) Yoshida T et al. In Studies in Natural Product Chemistry. Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, pp. 395–453 (2000); (d) Khanbabaee K and van Ree T. Nat Prod Rep 18:641–649 (2001); (e) Okuda et al.Phytochemistry 55:513–529 (2000). The effects of tannins on rumen micro-organisms are also not reviewed, as these have been addressed by others: (a) McSweeney CS et al.Anim Feed Sci Technol 91:83–93 (2001); (b) Smith AH and Mackie RI. Appl Environ Microbiol 70:1104–1115 (2004). This paper deals first with the nutritional effects of tannins in animal feeds, their qualitative and quantitative diversity, and the implications of tannin–protein complexation. It then summarises the known physiological and harmful effects and discusses the equivocal evidence of the bioavailability of tannins. Issues concerning tannin metabolism and systemic effects are also considered. Opportunities are presented on how to treat feeds with high tannin contents, and some lesser-known but successful feeding strategies are highlighted. Recent research has explored the use of tannins for preventing animal deaths from bloat, for reducing intestinal parasites and for lowering gaseous ammonia and methane emissions. Finally, several tannin assays and a hypothesis are discussed that merit further investigation in order to assess their suitability for predicting animal responses. The aim is to provoke discussion and spur readers into new approaches. An attempt is made to synthesise the emerging information for relating tannin structures with their activities. Although many plants with high levels of tannins produce negative effects and require treatments, others are very useful animal feeds. Our ability to predict whether tannin-containing feeds confer positive or negative effects will depend on interdisciplinary research between animal nutritionists and plant chemists. The elucidation of tannin structure–activity relationships presents exciting opportunities for future feeding strategies that will benefit ruminants and the environment within the contexts of extensive, semi-intensive and some intensive agricultural systems. Copyright © 2006 Society of Chemical Industry


Expert Oracle Application Express Plugins is your go to book on the groundbreaking plugin architecture introduced in Oracle Application Express 4.0. Using the new APEX functionality, you can create well-packaged, documented, reusable components and reliably leverage your coding investments across many applications. Components you create can define new item and region types, specify validation processes, and present dynamic actions to client applications. You can design innovative and colorful ways to display information, such as displaying the temperature using an image of a thermometer, or displaying sales velocity in the form of an automotive speedometer. The new plugin architecture is sure to create a tidal wave of creativity. AuthorMartin D'Souzashows everything you need to know to get started in building and deploying plugins of your own design. Youll learn the underlying architecture, including the APIs used to tie your plugins seamlessly into an Application Express environment. Youll learn about the different types of plugins, and youll walk through examples of each to ensure that you can create the right type of plugin when you need it. Finally, Expert Oracle Application Express Plugins shows how to work as part of the larger Application Express community by leveraging that communitys efforts and by giving back as you deploy your own plugins to the broad audience of Application Express developers. Presents the architecture and APIs available for customizing Application Express Gives clear examples of plugin development, for each type of plugin Helps you work as part of the broader community of plugin developers What youll learn Understand the APEX plugin architecture Design and develop each of the four types of plugin Debug and troubleshoot plugin-based applications Deploy your plugins to the wider community Make your plugins compatible across different browsers Master the plugin APIs that APEX provides Who this book is for Expert Oracle APEX Plugins is aimed at Oracle Application Express developers wanting to develop reusable components using Application Expresss new, plugin architecuture. The book appeals to in-house developers wanting to preserve their investment in writing code by packaging it for convenient reuse in other applications. The book also appeals to commercial software developers who want to write plugins for sale.


This paper introduces Vocville, a causal online game for learning vocabularies. I am creating this application for my master thesis of my career as a "Computervisualist" (computer visions) for the University of Koblenz - Landau. The application is an online browser game based on the idea of the really successful Facebook game FarmVille. The application is seperated in two parts; a Grails application manages a database which holds the game objects like vocabulary, a Flex/Flash application generates the actual game by using these data. The user can create his own home with everything in it. For creating things, the user has to give the correct translation of the object he wants to create several times. After every query he has to wait a certain amount of time to be queried again. When the correct answer is given sufficient times, the object is builded. After building one object the user is allowed to build others. After building enough objects in one area (i.e. a room, a street etc.) the user can activate other areas by translating all the vocabularies of the previous area. Users can also interact with other users by adding them as neighbors and then visiting their homes or sending them gifts, for which they have to fill in the correct word in a given sentence.


Computer simulation played a key role in the optimization of a displacement ventilation system in a school auditorium by helping to reconfigure the locations of the diffusers and the exhausts in order to eliminate unnecessary air flow. Displacement ventilation systems, which locate the air supply on the floor instead of the ceiling, are gaining popularity in North America because they are more efficient and require less energy to maintain a given level of comfort. However, displacement ventilation systems are generally more difficult to design due to several inherent issues like the need to avoid temperature gradients and drafts with the air supply located near the people.


This paper aims to investigate the dimensions under which the macro-environment for liquid biofuels has been structured during the time, respectively by German scientists, journalists, and policy-makers, and how these three stakeholders related to each other. Research was carried out on German official government documents (168 documents), mass media news (760 news), and scientific articles (168 articles) on the topic 'liquid biofuels'. Text Mining techniques were used to extract knowledge from textual documents' content. The results indicate that German scientists have used environmental, agronomic and technological dimension more frequently; journalists focused more on geopolitical and economics dimensions; and, policy-makers have emphasized more technological, geopolitical and environmental dimensions. Adherence and Homogeneity Tests suggest that there is some degree of proximity between mass media and government, less between mass media and science, and the least between government and science when configurating the macro-environment for liquid biofuels.


Front:
Text describes action on various war fronts: Russia, Solomons, New Guinea, Aleutians, Bolivia, Tunisia, Air offensive.

Large world map is keyed to text and illustrates time zones around the world.

Inset maps show Sicily and Tunis.

Includes photographs: Malaria control, Super block-buster [8,000 lb. aerial bomb], Change of ownership [captured Mercedes Benz troop-carrier], Bren-gun carriers support British Grenadiers in Kasserine Pass, Italian troops in the African war zone.

Back:
The Marine Corps. A unified fighting force. Graphic image shows helmeted Marine soldiers with rifles attacking a tropical island with ships and transport boats in background, as well as various photos of parachutes, bombardments, etc.


Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists have identified a protein that prevents the body's immune system from recognizing and attacking Hodgkin lymphoma cells. Based on this finding, the researchers are now investigating targeted therapies to disable this molecular "bodyguard" and boost a patient's ability to fight the blood cancer. If the strategy proves successful, patients might escape some of the long-term complications ˆ like heart damage and the threat of a second cancer ˆ caused by standard treatments that include radiation, said Margaret Shipp, MD, of Dana- Farber, who headed the study. A report was posted online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on July 30 and is due to appear in an upcoming print issue of the journal. "We're excited about this treatment lead," said Shipp, a medical oncologist. "We are currently generating antibodies that can neutralize the 'bodyguard' protein, and we'd like to fast-track this experimental therapy into clinical trials." Nearly 8,200 people in the United States ˜ the great majority of them young adults ˜ will be diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in 2007, according to the American Cancer Society, with an estimated 1,070 deaths. The cancer begins in the lymph nodes and channels that distribute infection-fighting white blood cells around the body. Its symptoms can include swollen glands in the neck, night sweats and fatigue. The biological trademark of Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of giant, mutant white blood cell called the Reed-Sternberg cell that is found in the lymph node tumors. While most solid cancers consist almost entirely of tumor cells, says Shipp, Hodgkin tumors, which can reach the size of a basketball, contain only about 5 percent cancerous Reed-Sternberg cells; the rest are different types of immune cells recruited to fight the tumor, but they are ineffective. "You would expect with all these host immune cells attracted to the area of the tumor cells that they would mount a great antitumor response," Shipp says. "But that's not the case. There are a lot of immune cells, but they're the wrong kind." The immune army includes different types of T cells, such as T helper 1 (Th1) cells designed to recognize and kill foreign infectious agents and sometimes tumors, T helper 2 (Th2) cells, which normally control allergic responses, and T regulatory (Treg) cells that suppress other T-cell types and shut down an immune response when the job is done. The Hodgkin tumors are overloaded with Th2 and Treg cells that act as bodyguards for the cancer by weakening the Th1 immune response against it. Przemyslaw Juszczynski, MD, PhD, Jing Ouyang, PhD, and colleagues from the Shipp laboratory, together with collaborators from Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Broad Institute and the University of Buenos Aires, hunted for the source of the cancer cells' protection. Using gene microarray chips, the scientists looked for genes that were active in Reed-Sternberg cells but not in cells of another non- Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma. The comparison revealed that a gene called Gal1 was up to 30 times more active in the Reed-Sternberg cells, causing them to secrete large quantities of a protein ˆ Gal1 or Galectin 1 ˆ that turns down the Th1 immune response. The Shipp team then defined the mechanism for Gal1 overexpression in Hodgkin lymphoma. Next, they demonstrated that Th1 immune cells underwent apoptosis, or cell death, when treated with Gal1, leaving increased numbers of Th2 cells and the suppressive Treg cells. Using a gene-silencing technique, RNA interference or RNAi, they then turned off the Gal1 gene in Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg cells and showed that it blocked the death of infiltrating normal Th1 cells, making them an equal force to the Th2 cells. "Likely what's happening here is that the tumor cells essentially hijack a normal regulatory program and use it to avoid being knocked off by the immune response," explains Shipp, who is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. "These observations provide an important explanation for why you have this ineffective immune response in Hodgkin lymphoma." She adds that this bodyguard strategy may not be limited to Hodgkin lymphoma. One of the collaborating authors, Gabriel Rabinovich, PhD, of the University of Buenos Aires, has blocked Gal1 in mice with a form of the deadly skin cancer melanoma, and the animal's immune system succeeded in eliminating the cancer, Shipp says. "We think it's very possible that this strategy will be applicable to other types of cancer." The study's other authors are Stefano Monti, PhD, Scott Rodig, MD, PhD, Kunihiko Takeyama, MD, PhD, Jeremy Abramson, MD, Wen Chen, PhD, and Jeffery Kutok, MD, PhD. The research was funded by the Miller Family Research Foundation. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (www.dana-farber.org) is a principal teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School and is among the leading cancer research and care centers in the United States. It is a founding member of the Dana- Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC), designated a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute. For more information contact: Richard Saltus; Bill Schaller; Tel.: 617.632.4090


This is the LMF version of the Asturian Freeling lexicon. FreeLing is a developer-oriented library providing language analysis services. FreeLing is designed to be used as an external library from any application requiring this kind of services. Nevertheless, a simple main program is also provided as a basic interface to the library, which enables the user to analyze text files from the command line. The original Catalan and Spanish sense dictionaries are extracted from EuroWordNet, and the reduced subsets included in this FreeLing package are distibuted under GNU GPL license.


Between 2013 and 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) undertook a survey of innovative approaches that enable markets to act as incentives in the transition towards sustainable agriculture in developing countries. Through a competitive selection process, 15 cases from around the world provide insights into how small-scale initiatives that use sustainable production practices are supported by market demand, and create innovations in the institutions that govern sustainable practices and market exchanges. These cases respond to both local and distant consumers' concerns about the quality of the food that they eat. The book evidences that the initiatives rely upon social values (e.g. trustworthiness, health [nutrition and food safety], food sovereignty, promotion of youth and rural development, farmer and community livelihoods) to adapt sustainable practices to local contexts, while creating new market outlets for food products. Specifically, private sector and civil society actors are leading partnerships with the public sector to build market infrastructure, integrate sustainable agriculture into private and public education and extension programmes, and ensure the exchange of transparent information about market opportunities. The results are: (i) system innovations that allow new rules for marketing and assuring the sustainable qualities of products; (ii) new forms of organization that permit actors to play multiple roles in the food system (e.g. farmer and auditor, farmer and researcher, consumer and auditor, consumer and intermediary); (iii) new forms of market exchange, such as box schemes, university kiosks, public procurement or systems of seed exchanges; and (iv) new technologies for sustainable agriculture (e.g. effective micro-organisms, biopesticides and soil analysis techniques). The public sector plays a key role in providing legitimate political and physical spaces for multiple actors to jointly create and share sustainable agricultural knowledge, practices and products.


One of the mechanisms of neurotoxicity is the induction of oxidative stress. There is hardly any cure for neurotoxicity in modern medicine, whereas many drugs in Ayurveda possess neuroprotective effects; however, there is no scientific validation for these drugs. Ksheerabala is an ayurvedic drug which is used to treat central nervous system disorders, arthritis, and insomnia. The aim of our study was to evaluate the effect of Ksheerabala on quinolinic acid-induced toxicity in rat brain. The optimal dose of Ksheerabala was found from a dose escalation study, wherein it was found that Ksheerabala showed maximum protection against quinolinic acid-induced neurotoxicity at a dose of 15 µL/100 g body weight/day, which was selected for further experiments. Four groups of female albino rats were maintained for 21 days as follows: 1. Control group, 2. Quinolinic acid (55 µg/100 g body weight), 3. Ksheerabala (15 µL/100 g body weight), 4. Ksheerabala (15 µL/100 g body weight) + Quinolinic acid (55 µg/100 g body weight). At the end of the experimental period, levels of lipid peroxidation products, protein carbonyls, and activities of scavenging enzymes were analyzed. The results revealed that quinolinic acid intake caused enhanced lipid and protein peroxidation as evidenced by increased levels of peroxidation products such as malondialdehyde, hydroperoxide, conjugated dienes, and protein carbonyls. On the other hand, the activities of scavenging enzymes such as catalase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase, and glutathione reductase as well as the concentration of glutathione were reduced. On coadminstration of Ksheerabala along with quinolinic acid, the levels of all the biochemical parameters were restored to near-normal levels, indicating the protective effect of the drug. These results were reinforced by histopathological studies.


The abundant thaw lakes and ponds in the circumarctic receive a new pool of organic carbon as permafrost peat soils degrade, which can be exposed to significant irradiance that potentially increases as climate warms and ice cover shortens. Exposure to sunlight is known to accelerate the transformation of dissolved organic matter (DOM) into molecules that can be more readily used by microbes. We sampled the water from two common classes of ponds found in the ice-wedge system of continuous permafrost regions of Canada, polygonal and runnel ponds, and followed the transformation of DOM over 12 days by looking at dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration and DOM absorption and fluorescence properties. The results indicate a relatively fast decay of color (3.4 and 1.6% loss d−1 of absorption at 320 nm for the polygonal and runnel pond, respectively) and fluorescence (6.1 and 8.3% loss d−1 of total fluorescent components, respectively) at the pond surface, faster in the case of humic-like components, but insignificant losses of DOC over the observed period. This result indicates that direct DOM mineralization (photochemical production of CO2) is apparently minor in thaw ponds compared to the photochemical transformation of DOM into less chromophoric and likely more labile molecules with a greater potential for microbial mineralization. Therefore, DOM photolysis in arctic thaw ponds can be considered as a catalytic mechanism, accelerating the microbial turnover of mobilized organic matter from thawing permafrost and the production of greenhouse gases, especially in the most shallow ponds. Under a warming climate, this mechanism will intensify as summers lengthen.


The U.S. economy experienced solid growth in 2004, with light-vehicle sales rising to 16.8 million units. What can we expect in 2005 and 2006? At a recent Chicago Fed symposium, auto industry experts came together to analyze the sector's performance and discuss the outlook for next year and beyond.


The computation of relatedness between two fragments of text in an automated manner requires taking into account a wide range of factors pertaining to the meaning the two fragments convey, and the pairwise relations between their words. Without doubt, a measure of relatedness between text segments must take into account both the lexical and the semantic relatedness between words. Such a measure that captures well both aspects of text relatedness may help in many tasks, such as text retrieval, classification and clustering. In this paper we present a new approach for measuring the semantic relatedness between words based on their implicit semantic links. The approach exploits only a word thesaurus in order to devise implicit semantic links between words. Based on this approach, we introduce Omiotis, a new measure of semantic relatedness between texts which capitalizes on the word-to-word semantic relatedness measure (SR) and extends it to measure the relatedness between texts. We gradually validate our method: we first evaluate the performance of the semantic relatedness measure between individual words, covering word-to-word similarity and relatedness, synonym identification and word analogy; then, we proceed with evaluating the performance of our method in measuring text-to-text semantic relatedness in two tasks, namely sentence-to-sentence similarity and paraphrase recognition. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms every lexicon-based method of semantic relatedness in the selected tasks and the used data sets, and competes well against corpus-based and hybrid approaches.


This material is copyright Cambridge University Press or reproduced with permission from other copyright owners. It may be downloaded and printed for personal reference, but not otherwise copied, altered in any way or transmitted to others (unless explicitly stated otherwise) without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. Hypertext links to other Web locations are for the convenience of users and do not constitute any endorsement or authorisation by Cambridge University Press.


Legally binding custom is conventionally analyzed in terms of two independent elements: regularities of behavior (usus) and convictions of actors engaging in the behavior that it is legally required (opinio juris). This additive conception of custom is deeply flawed. This Essay argues that we must abandon the additive conception and replace it with an account of custom that understands legally relevant customs as norms that arise from discursive normative practices embedded in rich contexts of social interaction characterized by intermeshing anticipations and interconnected conduct. The hallmark of legally binding customs, it is argued, is not the addition of belief or conviction to behavior, but rather the integration of meaningful conduct into a web of legally recognized reasons and arguments.