Climate change is a challenge to society and to cope with requires assessment tools which are suitable to evaluate new technology options with respect to their impact on global climate. Here we present AirClim, a model which comprises a linearisation of atmospheric processes from the emission to radiative forcing, resulting in an estimate in near surface temperature change, which is presumed to be a reasonable indicator for climate change. The model is designed to be applicable to aircraft technology, i.e. the climate agents CO 2 , H 2 O, CH 4 and O 3 (latter two resulting from NO x -emissions) and contrails are taken into account. AirClim combines a number of precalculated atmospheric data with aircraft emission data to obtain the temporal evolution of atmospheric concentration changes, radiative forcing and temperature changes. These precalculated data are derived from 25 steady-state simulations for the year 2050 with the climate-chemistry model E39/C, prescribing normalised emissions of nitrogen oxides and water vapour at various atmospheric regions. The results show that strongest climate impacts (year 2100) from ozone changes occur for emissions in the tropical upper troposphere (60 mW/m 2 ; 80 mK for 1 TgN/year emitted) and from methane changes from emissions in the middle tropical troposphere (−2.7% change in methane lifetime; –30 mK per TgN/year). For short-lived species (e.g. ozone, water vapour, methane) individual perturbation lifetimes are derived depending on the region of emission. A comparison of this linearisation approach with results from a comprehensive climate-chemistry model shows reasonable agreement with respect to concentration changes, radiative forcing, and temperature changes. For example, the total impact of a supersonic fleet on radiative forcing (mainly water vapour) is reproduced within 10%. A wide range of application is demonstrated.


The transnational class action – a class action in which a portion of the class consists of non-U.S. claimants – is here to stay. Defendants typically resist the certification of transnational class actions on the basis that such actions provide no assurance of finality for a defendant, as it will always be possible for a non-U.S. class member to initiate subsequent proceedings in a foreign court. In response to this concern, many U.S. courts will analyze whether the "home" courts of the foreign class members would accord res judicata effect to an eventual U.S. judgment prior to certifying a U.S. class action containing foreign class members. The more likely the foreign court is to recognize a U.S. class judgment, the more likely that an American court will include those foreigners in the U.S. class action. Current scholarship accepts propriety of the res judicata analysis, but questions the manner in which the analysis is carried out. This Article breaks from the existing literature by arguing that the dynamics of class litigation render the res judicata effect of an eventual U.S. class judgment inherently unknowable to a U.S. court ex ante. In particular, I argue that certain "litigation dynamics" – specifically the process of proving foreign law via experts, the principle of party prosecution, and the litigation posture of the action – complicate the transnational class action landscape and prevent a court from accurately analyzing the res judicata issues at play. This is exacerbated by the "structural dynamics" of class litigation: the complexity of foreign law on the recognition and enforcement of judgments; the newness of class action law in most foreign countries; and the distinction between general and fact-specific grounds for non-enforcement of a U.S. class judgment. Accordingly, I argue that U.S. courts should abandon their illusory search for res judicata. Instead, courts should avoid the res judicata problem altogether by employing an opt-in mechanism for foreign class plaintiffs, whereby such plaintiffs are not bound unless they affirmatively undertake to be bound by U.S. class judgment. An opt-in mechanism for foreign plaintiffs also provides several advantages over the current opt-out mechanism: it allows all foreign claimants to participate in U.S. litigation if they so choose; it provides additional protections for absent foreign claimants; it respects international comity; and it sufficiently deters defendant misconduct.


World Radiation Monitoring Center (WRMC), the central archive of the Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN). All radiation measurements are stored together with collocated surface and upper-air meteorological observations and station metadata in an integrated database. These pages offer both: Information for all scientists who will use BSRN-data as well as information to any station scientist who delivers data.

BSRN is a project of the Data Assimilation Panel from the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) under the umbrella of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and as such is aimed at detecting important changes in the Earth's radiation field at the Earth's surface which may be related to climate changes. The data are of primary importance in supporting the validation and confirmation of satellite and computer model estimates of these quantities. At a small number of stations (currently 58) in contrasting climatic zones, covering a latitude range from 80°N to 90°S (see station maps ), solar and atmospheric radiation is measured with instruments of the highest available accuracy and with high
time resolution (1 to 3 minutes).

In 2004 the BSRN was designated as the global baseline network for surface radiation for the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). The BSRN stations also contribute to the Global Atmospheric Watch (GAW). Since 2011 the BSRN and the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) have reached a formal agreement to become cooperative networks.


This descriptive study was undertaken in order to assess the status of extension services in Malawi 10 years after implementation of the pluralistic and demand-driven extension policy. The findings would help practitioners and policy makers in their efforts to strengthen the extension system and enable it to serve the smallholder farmers more effectively. A worldwide extension assessment mail-out questionnaire was administered to 37 agricultural extension service providers to collect quantitative data on primary organizational goals, functions, and resources, and the linkages of different extension organizations within an agricultural innovation systems framework. The findings indicate that there were many players in agricultural extension service delivery as a result of the pluralistic policy but the government extension service remained the largest in terms of staffing and spread. The primary focus for most organizations was to help smallholder farmers improve their livelihoods with special efforts to target women. Government extension service was characterized by limited resources, but many field staff with low qualifications. Most of the other extension organizations had limited staff concentrated at higher levels with no grassroots staff thereby depending on government extension staff to reach farmers. Strong institutional linkages existed at district levels and local agencies as well as with non-governmental organizations but there were weak linkages with education and research institutions. Among others, the study calls for more investments in the government extension system while strengthening coordination with the civil society organizations to effectively serve the needs of smallholder farmers in Malawi.


In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land. The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many--members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us--and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future. Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs--that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off--brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough--either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises. In a new chapter, Quiggin brings the book up to date with a discussion of the re-emergence of pre-Keynesian ideas about austerity and balanced budgets as a response to recession.


In the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, one of the areas in dispute was the question of residual payments for online material. On the picket line, Buffy creator Joss Whedon discussed new ways online media production could be financed. After the strike, Whedon self-funded a web media production, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Whedon and his collaborators positioned Dr. Horrible as an experiment, investigating whether original online media content created outside of studio funding could be financially viable. Dr. Horrible was a bigger hit than expected, with a paid version topping the iTunes charts and a DVD release hitting the number two position on Amazon. This article explores which factors most obviously contributed to Dr. Horrible's success, whether these factors are replicable by other media creators, the incorporation of fan labor into web media projects, and how web-specific content creation relates to more traditional forms of media production.


Nemtin, Ben, et al. What Do You Want To Do Before You Die?: The Buried Life . New York: Artisan, 2012. Print. Nobody wants to think about dying. In fact, we often forget that our time is limited. The Buried Life, named after a Matthew Arnold poem, started in a garage in Victoria, BC when four disillusioned twenty-something university students got together to compile a list of 100 things they wanted to accomplish before they died. With a secondhand video camera and a used RV, these students set off for two weeks to tackle their bucket list.  Six years later, they are still travelling the world, crossing items off that list.  For every dream they accomplish, they help someone else fulfill a goal. "Write a bestselling book" was one dream on their list which they can now cross off. What Do You Want to Do Before You Die? is an illustrated compilation of stories about the background of the four members of The Buried Life, tales of how they crossed items off their list along with photographic evidence, and favourite quotations, as well as a list of items and narratives chosen from the tens of thousands of answers they have received in response to their question.  Dreams vary from the simple, "I want to have my first kiss", to the daring, "I want to climb the seven summits before I turn seventeen", to the heartbreaking, "I want to finally say good-bye to my four friends who were killed in a car accident".  Somewhere in this book, every reader will find a dream that resonates. This is a book that will jump out at a YA audience, especially reluctant readers. Not only does the title and cover create immediacy, but the stories contained within it are edgy and thought-provoking. At eight pages, the introduction is the longest stretch of text, while the rest of the accounts are absorbing one page reflections that are scattered between bold and colourfully illustrated pages. This book will inspire readers to step outside of the ordinary. Highly recommended:  4 out of 4 stars Reviewer:  Jennifer Lunny Jennifer Lunny is a new teacher-librarian at Ballenas Secondary School on Vancouver Island.  A former English and Social Studies teacher, she is excited to promote literacy in her new position. Finding that special book to connect with a student is one of the highlights of her job. She has spent the fall semester building the collection at her school with many of the titles that were proposed in this project.


The authors offer opinions on how management and corporate boards of directors can best manage investor relations with activist stockholders such as hedge funds who are demanding major changes within a corporation to improve stockholder return. Beverage industry firm PepsiCo is cited in support of the contention that creating and maintaining a long-term strategic plan is of value in thwarting such investors. Executives and directors are advised to analyze their corporations from the point of view of an activist investor, to create harmony within the board of directors and to measure performance against specific and publicly stated goals. INSET: Idea in Brief.


The Supreme Court's decision in Concepcion is widely regarded as heralding the demise of small-claims class actions whenever contracts of adhesion are involved in the transaction-which means for virtually all consumer and employment claims. Amending the Federal Arbitration Act to overturn Concepcion would be a relatively simple exercise in legislative drafting, but in the current political climate such efforts are unlikely to succeed. Thus far, proposed federal corrective legislation has failed to pass, and federal agency regulation of class waivers has been lacking. State legislatures might have the political ability to pass corrective legislation, but virtually all state limitations on class waivers in mandatory arbitration clauses are foreclosed by federal preemption under Concepcion. This Article proposes an alternative approach that could be taken at the state level: statutory qui tam actions to enforce civil penalties for violations of state consumer protection and employment laws. A qui tam action is a representative action brought on behalf of the state, to enforce the state's claim for civil penalties, rather than a class action to recover compensation for individual injuries. The penalties are owed to the state, with a share of the recovery payable to the plaintiff as an incentive to private enforcement. The action is for the public benefit, for the law enforcement purpose of ensuring compliance with state law, rather than for private benefit. Thus, the rationale 0f Concepcion simply does not apply to such actions. Indeed, allowing private parties to contract away the state legislature's chosen means of enforcing claims that belong to the state would seriously impair the state's ability to execute core governmental functions. It would be an intrusion into state sovereignty that should give pause to neo-federalists such as the majority in Concepcion. California's Private Attorneys General Act (PA GA), which provides a mechanism for private enforcement of civil penalties for violation of the state labor code, is an example of how a state might use the qui tam model to hold defendants accountable for mass harms without being vulnerable to FAA preemption under Concepcion. After describing the operation of PAGA and how courts have interpreted it, I propose some simple adjustments that would increase the likelihood that courts would find Concepcion inapplicable to a PAGA-style qui tam statute. Qui tam actions are not a perfect substitute for class actions, because they can provide only limited compensation to victims. But they may partially fill the deterrence gap that Concepcion is widely expected to create.


A self-published phenomenon examining the habits that kept our ancestors disease-free—now with a prescriptive plan for "The Human Diet" to help us all live long, vital, healthy lives. Physician and biochemist Cate Shanahan, M.D. examined diets around the world known to help people live longer, healthier lives—diets like the Mediterranean, Okinawa, and "Blue Zone"—and identified the four common nutritional habits, developed over millennia, that unfailingly produce strong, healthy, intelligent children, and active, vital elders, generation after generation. These four nutritional strategies—fresh food, fermented and sprouted foods, meat cooked on the bone, and organ meats—form the basis of what Dr. Cate calls "The Human Diet." Rooted in her experience as an elite athlete who used traditional foods to cure her own debilitating injuries, and combining her research with the latest discoveries in the field of epigenetics, Dr. Cate shows how all calories are not created equal; food is information that directs our cellular growth. Our family history does not determine our destiny: what you eat and how you live can alter your DNA in ways that affect your health and the health of your future children. Deep Nutrition offers a prescriptive plan for how anyone can begin eating The Human Diet to: *Improve mood *Eliminate cravings and the need to snack *Boost fertility and have healthier children *Sharpen cognition and memory *Eliminate allergies and disease *Build stronger bones and joints *Get younger, smoother skin Deep Nutrition cuts through today's culture of conflicting nutritional ideologies, showing how the habits of our ancestors can help us lead longer, healthier, more vital lives.


Why does there seem to be such a wide gap between the subject matter of the usual first-year contracts course and what practitioners (particularly transactional lawyers) actually experience? This article is an attempt to bridge the gap, combining insights from academic theory and real-world law practice. My claim is that the law as discipline has developed its own powerful but self-contained conceptual framework — in the coinage of one noted scholar, "an epistemic trap." The subject matter of contract law, something that is largely the creation of private parties and not the state, requires dealing with legal truth not just as a coherent body of normative doctrine, but also correspondent in some way to the parties' actual self-legislation. In other words, the exercise of understanding the law relating to transactions is not wholly descriptive —"to what did the parties agree? Nor is it wholly normative — "what should be done when the parties dispute the nature or terms of their agreement after the fact?" Much of the difficulty of the first-year contract law enterprise lies in this conflation of the law's usual after-the-fact normative focus (as, say, in tort or criminal law) with an inquiry into what private law the parties actually meant to create before the fact. I propose escaping the epistemic trap with a turn to metaphor theory. The underlying metaphor common to prevailing conceptions of contract law, and which demands some form of correspondent truth from the contract (and contract law), is "contract as model of the transaction." I suggest alternative metaphors of categories as containers, ideas as objects, and the transaction lifecycle as a journey. The goal is to focus on the "subjective to objective" process of the transactional lifecycle, and to consider the perspectives of the participants in or observers of that process. In particular, I consider the models and metaphors that shape the conceptual frames from within which those participants and observers perceive, make use of, and derive meaning from what end up as contracts, the objective manifestations of agreements.


International law's traditional emphasis on state practice has long been questioned, as scholars have paid increasing attention to other important - though sometimes inchoate - processes of international norm development. Yet, the more recent focus on transnational law, governmental and non-governmental networks, and judicial influence and cooperation across borders, while a step in the right direction, still seems insufficient to describe the complexities of law in an era of globalization. Accordingly, it is becoming clear that "international law" is itself an overly constraining rubric and that we need an expanded framework, one that situates cross-border norm development at the intersection of legal scholarship on comparative law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, cyberlaw, and the cultural analysis of law, as well as traditional international law. Moreover, this new scholarship must be truly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights not only of international relations theorists, but also of anthropologists, sociologists, critical geographers, and cultural studies scholars. Such insights afford a more nuanced idea of how people actually form affiliations, construct communities, and receive and develop legal norms, often with little regard for the fixed geographical boundaries of the nation-state system. This Article refers to such a broader frame of analysis as "law and globalization." Although "globalization" is, of course, a controversial term, the idea of law and globalization nevertheless provides a useful lens for viewing the plural ways in which legal norms are disseminated in the Twenty-first Century. This Article sketches the contours of what it might mean to emphasize law and globalization, rather than simply international law. It suggests four important ways in which the study of law and globalization enlarges the traditional focus of international law and then identifies ten areas of conceptual inquiry that are already coalescing within the scholarly literature to form the core of a study of law and globalization.


Their insights are extraordinary, their behaviors unusual. Their brains—shaped by the era of microprocessors, access to limitless information, and 24-hour news and communication—are remapping, retooling, and evolving. They're not superhuman. They're your twenty-something coworkers, your children, and your competition. Are you keeping up? In iBrain, Dr. Gary Small, one of America's leading neuroscientists and experts on brain function and behavior, explores how technology's unstoppable march forward has altered the way young minds develop, function, and interpret information. iBrain reveals a new evolution catalyzed by technological advancement and its future implications: Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price? While high-tech immersion can accelerate learning and boost creativity, it also has its glitches, among them the meteoric rise in ADD diagnoses, increased social isolation, and Internet addiction. To compete and thrive in the age of brain evolution, and to avoid these potential drawbacks, we must adapt, and iBrain—with its Technology Toolkit—equips all of us with the tools and strategies needed to close the brain gap.


The goal of this study is to assess if the reproductive strategy of a brooding land snail shifts along a climatic gradient. We focused on the following traits: timing and length of the reproductive season, brood size, ontogenetic dynamics of embryos, and reproductive mode (viviparity versus egg-laying). We dissected the central European door snail Alinda biplicata, collected monthly from eight populations covering the oceaniccontinental climatic gradient within the species' distribution range. Forty percent of the 1706 dissected individuals were brooding. The species displayed a spring-summer reproductive activity pattern: intrauterine brooding was recorded between March and September; first embryos of a developmental stage that equals that of live-born neonates appeared in late April. Brooding started approximately when the mean daily temperature of a month exceeds ca. 5°C, thus the ontogenetic development of embryos is advancing earlier in populations under the influence of mild oceanic climate, and later in the eastern, more continental part of the range, or in submontane localities. A range-wide synchrony in reproduction occurred in May, when average temperatures and precipitation display a high rangewide similarity. The mean number of intrauterine eggs decreased between spring and summer in all populations (April: 10.9 ± 2.9; September: 6.4 ± 2.4), suggesting a gradual release of neonates which are not immediately replaced in uteri by new eggs. Snails from areas with long frosty winters do not invest much in a second reproductive period in late summer. Embryos of advanced embryonic stage were found in the reproductive tract of individuals from each population, thus we refute the hypothesis that A. biplicata switches its reproductive strategy towards oviparity under the influence of oceanic climate.


Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods. It applies and extends the now standard approach from the international literature to document that the positive productivity differential of exporters compared to non-exporters is statistically significant, and substantial, even when observed firm characteristics and unobserved firm specific effects are controlled for. For West German plants (but not for East German plants) some empirical evidence for self-selection of more productive firms into export markets is found. There is no evidence for the hypothesis that plants which start to export perform better in the three years after the start than their counterparts which do not start to sell their products on the world market. Results for West Germany support the hypothesis that the productivity differential between exporters and non-exporters is at least in part the result of a market driven selection process in which those export starters that have low productivity at starting time fail as a successful exporter in the years after the start, and only those that were more productive at starting time continue to export.


Malaria eradication involves eliminating malaria from every country where transmission occurs. Current theory suggests that the post-elimination challenges of remaining malaria-free by stopping transmission from imported malaria will have onerous operational and financial requirements. Although resurgent malaria has occurred in a majority of countries that tried but failed to eliminate malaria, a review of resurgence in countries that successfully eliminated finds only four such failures out of 50 successful programmes. Data documenting malaria importation and onwards transmission in these countries suggests malaria transmission potential has declined by more than 50-fold (i.e. more than 98%) since before elimination. These outcomes suggest that elimination is a surprisingly stable state. Elimination's 'stickiness' must be explained either by eliminating countries starting off qualitatively different from non-eliminating countries or becoming different once elimination was achieved. Countries that successfully eliminated were wealthier and had lower baseline endemicity than those that were unsuccessful, but our analysis shows that those same variables were at best incomplete predictors of the patterns of resurgence. Stability is reinforced by the loss of immunity to disease and by the health system's increasing capacity to control malaria transmission after elimination through routine treatment of cases with antimalarial drugs supplemented by malaria outbreak control. Human travel patterns reinforce these patterns; as malaria recedes, fewer people carry malaria from remote endemic areas to remote areas where transmission potential remains high. Establishment of an international resource with backup capacity to control large outbreaks can make elimination stickier, increase the incentives for countries to eliminate, and ensure steady progress towards global eradication. Although available evidence supports malaria elimination's stickiness at moderate-to-low transmission in areas with well-developed health systems, it is not yet clear if such patterns will hold in all areas. The sticky endpoint changes the projected costs of maintaining elimination and makes it substantially more attractive for countries acting alone, and it makes spatially progressive elimination a sensible strategy for a malaria eradication endgame.


In light of projected climate change impacts in the Baltic Sea region, there is a strong need for enhanced understanding about adaptation needs. In this regard, the role of local level decision makers will be crucial to the success of such adaptation strategies. This primer aims to provide local decision makers with insights and knowledge on the subject. This primer has been prepared as part of the project RADOST (Regional Adaptation Strategies for the
German Baltic Sea Coast), which is funded by the
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.


Roughly speaking, the family of combinatorial games consists of two-player games with perfect information (no hidden information as in some card games), no chance moves (no dice) and outcome restricted to (lose, win), (tie, tie) and (draw, draw) for the two players who move alternately. Tie is an end position such as in tic-tac-toe, where no player wins, whereas draw is a dynamic tie: any position from which a player has a nonlosing move, but cannot force a win. Both the easy game of Nim and the seemingly difficult chess are examples of combinatorial games. And so is go. The shorter terminology game, games is used below to designate combinatorial games.


[1] The most extensive set of free tropospheric ozone measurements ever compiled across midlatitude North America was measured with daily ozonesondes, commercial aircraft and a lidar at 14 sites during July-August 2004. The model estimated stratospheric ozone was subtracted from all profiles, leaving a tropospheric residual ozone. On average the upper troposphere above midlatitude eastern North America contained 15 ppbv more tropospheric residual ozone than the more polluted layer between the surface and 2 km above sea level. Lowest ozone values in the upper troposphere were found above the two upwind sites in California. The upper troposphere above midlatitude eastern North America contained 16 ppbv more tropospheric residual ozone than the upper troposphere above three upwind sites, with the greatest enhancement above Houston, Texas, at 24 ppbv. Upper tropospheric CO measurements above east Texas show no statistically significant enhancement compared to west coast measurements, arguing against a strong influence from fresh surface anthropogenic emissions to the upper troposphere above Texas where the ozone enhancement is greatest. Vertical mixing of ozone from the boundary layer to the upper troposphere can only account for 2 ppbv of the 16 ppbv ozone enhancement above eastern North America; therefore the remaining 14 ppbv must be the result of in situ ozone production. The transport of NOx tracers from North American anthropogenic, biogenic, biomass burning, and lightning emissions was simulated for the upper troposphere of North America with a particle dispersion model. Additional box model calculations suggest the 24 ppbv ozone enhancement above Houston can be produced over a 10 day period from oxidation reactions of lightning NOx and background mixing ratios of CO and CH4. Overall, we estimate that 69–84% (11–13 ppbv) of the 16 ppbv ozone enhancement above eastern North America is due to in situ ozone production from lightning NOx with the remainder due to transport of ozone from the surface or in situ ozone production from other sources of NOx.


BACKGROUND. The effect of a brief analytical treatment interruption (ATI) on the HIV‐1 latent reservoir of individuals who initiate antiretroviral therapy (ART) during chronic infection is unknown. METHODS. We evaluated the impact of transient viremia on the latent reservoir in participants who underwent an ATI and at least 6 months of subsequent viral suppression in a clinical trial testing the effect of passive infusion of the broadly neutralizing Ab VRC01 during ATI. RESULTS. Measures of total HIV‐1 DNA, cell‐associated RNA, and infectious units per million cells (IUPM) (measured by quantitative viral outgrowth assay [QVOA]) were not statistically different before or after ATI. Phylogenetic analyses of HIV‐1 env sequences from QVOA and proviral DNA demonstrated little change in the composition of the virus populations comprising the pre‐ and post‐ATI reservoir. Expanded clones were common in both QVOA and proviral DNA sequences. The frequency of clonal populations differed significantly between QVOA viruses, proviral DNA sequences, and the viruses that reactivated in vivo. CONCLUSIONS. The results indicate that transient viremia from ATI does not substantially alter measures of the latent reservoir, that clonal expansion is prevalent within the latent reservoir, and that characterization of latent viruses that can reactivate in vivo remains challenging. TRIAL REGISTRATION. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02463227 FUNDING. Funding was provided by the NIH.


The case focuses on two major challenges in deal making in emerging market economies---deal sourcing and negotiation---by focusing on a real (but disguised) Indian private equity deal. In 2010 Surya Tutoring was a fast-growing tutoring academy for high school students aspiring to gain admission to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). Surya's CEO, R. K. Sharma, wanted to expand its reach beyond Kota (a city of 1 million people in the northern state of Rajasthan), which had become the center of the IIT prep school industry and home to tens of thousands of students studying for the rigorous IIT entrance exam. Sharma knew there was vast untapped potential in the teeming Indian metropolises of Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, and Bangalore, as well as in foreign markets such as Dubai and Australia. Sharma had received term sheets from two private equity firms willing to finance Surya's expansion. By the end of the month he needed to decide which to accept: the offer from big bulge bracket fund Blackgem, or the one from ZenCap, a small Indian firm based in Mumbai with which he had become intimately familiar during the past year.

After analyzing and discussing the case, students should be able to:

Identify the differences between the United States and an emerging market such as India when it comes to deal sourcing, negotiation, and financial contracting

Value a growth equity transaction in an emerging economy, including financial, contractual, and qualitative (social networks, local knowledge, trust) aspects of the deal


Autoethnography is an intriguing and promising qualitative method that offers a way of giving voice to personal experience for the purpose of extending sociological understanding. The author's experience of writing an autoethnography about international adoption has shown her, however, that autoethnography can be a very difficult undertaking. In writing her autoethnography, she confronted anxiety-producing questions pertaining to representation, balance, and ethics. As well, she dealt with the acceptability of her autoethnography by informal and formal reviewers. In this article she discusses the challenges she faced in her autoethnographic project to inform future autoethnographers and to inspire them to share their experiences and reflections. For the author questions linger, but she hopes that sharing issues that arise in autoethnographic work will strengthen our understandings of this challenging yet highly promising form of inquiry.


We apply CMB lensing techniques to large scale structure and solve for the 3-D cosmic tidal field. We use small scale filamentary structures to solve for the large scale tidal shear and gravitational potential. By comparing this to the redshift space density field, one can measure the gravitational growth factor on large scales without cosmic variance. This potentially enables accurate measurements of neutrino masses and reconstruction of radial modes lost in 21 cm intensity mapping, which are essential for CMB and other cross correlations. We relate the tidal fields to the squeezed limit bispectrum, and present initial results from simulations and data from the SDSS.


Islamist terrorism may have its roots in the Middle East, but it has long since expanded globally. Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, is no exception. Jemaah Islamiyah has for more than fifteen years fought to transform Indonesia into an Islamist state. In recent years, its terrorist campaign has suffered setbacks. As Jemaah Islamiyah regroups, it builds upon the experience of Middle East terrorist groups. From AlQaeda, it adopts philosophical underpinnings that guide its dual strategy. From Hamas and Hezbollah, it borrows an "inverse triangle model" in which a broad network of social services supports a smaller jihadist core, and from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates it adopts a model of charities and NGOs that help Jemaah Islamiyah advance its jihadist goals. [R]


The topical outline of the developments in the legal environment in which marketing functions is presented below. Since only the most important cases as evaluated by the editorial staff are presented, the lack of important cases may lead to the absence of entries under one or more subtopics. For individual items covered, more detailed information may be obtained by reference to the source cited. Reference to CCH is to the Commerce Clearing House's Trade Regulation Reporter; reference to BNA is to the Bureau of National Affairs' Antitrust & Trade Regulation Report. Contributions by members of the editorial staff are identified by the contributor's surname appearing in the headnote of each specific entry.


Eye-trackers have been used in the past to identify visual foci in images, find task-related image regions, or localize affective regions in images. However, they have not been used for identifying specific objects in images. In this paper, we investigate whether it is possible to assign image regions showing specific objects with tags describing these objects by analyzing the users' gaze paths. To this end, we have conducted an experiment with 20 subjects viewing 50 image-tag-pairs each. We have compared the tag-to-region assignments for nine existing and four new fixation measures. In addition, we have investigated the impact of extending region boundaries, weighting small image regions, and the number of subjects viewing the images. The paper shows that a tag-to-region assignment with an accuracy of 67% can be achieved by using gaze information. In addition, we show that multiple regions on the same image can be differentiated with an accuracy of 38%.


"Jouette Bassler's volume on the Pastoral Letters is a model of careful, clearly written cogent interpretation. She gives faithful attention to the problematic trees along the exegetical path, yet without losing sight of the forest. Organized by literary units but not avoiding difficult verses, Bassler's commentary keeps before the reader the unfolding history of the early Christian community from which the text emerges. It is unquestionably the best resource we have on the Pastoral Letters." -- Charles B. Cousar, Columbia Theological Seminary "Bassler's commentary has the crispness of style and no-nonsense quality about it that one has come to expect from its author. The underlying learning is evident throughout. It results in careful, critical exegesis that places the Pastorals securely in their social and historical context. All relevant issues are explained and discussed. Bassler is particularly good at referring the reader to other texts that illuminate her own, with a broad range over Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Christian texts. She presupposes the non-Pauline authorship of the Pastorals, but otherwise has no special axes to grind. As an introductory commentary for theological students, it could not be bettered." --Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Copenhagen University, Denmark


The research purpose was to learn about existing joint use public-academic libraries in Canada including their establishment, structure, benefits, and challenges and to determine the requirements for successful partnerships. Following a literature review, a short survey was conducted to gather data on the number, location, and types of public-academic library partnerships. In-depth telephone interviews were then held with key personnel from joint use libraries to learn more about the libraries and the nature of the partnerships. The research surfaced three unique examples of joint use public-academic libraries. In addition, key requirements for successful partnerships that were posited through the literature review were supported by the research data – commitment, a shared vision, and a need that requires fulfillment. Possible limitations of the research are the initial survey's reliance on responses from academic library directors and the survey timing. There is limited information about partnerships between Canadian public and academic libraries and no single document that brings together data on partnerships across Canada. With this study, public and academic libraries will learn of successful joint use Canadian public-academic libraries along with the key requirements for sustainable partnerships.


The molluscs of the brackish waters in the Netherlands (Mollusca) The Netherlands is a river delta rich in brackish waters. The organisms in these waters need to be adapted to extreme conditions, especially large fluctuations in chlorinity. However, several species occur optimally in this habitat. In this paper a review is presented of the molluscs living in brackish waters in the Netherlands. All available data from literature, collections, literature and databanks were compiled for this cause. In The Netherlands a large variety of brackish waters can be found, like lakes, canals, old creeks, shallow pools, lagoons, estuaries and dykes. This paper focusses on the waters on the landside of the dikes. All species found in these waters are treated here. From brackish waters which are in open connection with the sea only the true brackish water species are mentioned. In table 3 the species are listed which can be found in brackish waters in The Netherlands. A small group of species can be called characteristic of this habitat: Hydrobia acuta, Hydrobia ventrosa, Heleobia stagnorum, Corambe obscura, Mytilopsis leucophaeata, Cerastoderma glaucum, Littorina saxatilis tenebrosa, Tenellia adspersa. Most other species of brackish waters have a marine origin and prefer higher chlorinities. Many of them live in the Lake Grevelingen, a big lake without tidal influence in the southwestern part of the Netherlands. Mytilopsis leucophaeata prefers water with a chlorinity between 0,5 and 5‰. A small group of species, like Theodoxus fluviatilis, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, Mercuria confusa and Radix ovata, enter the brackish areas from freshwater environments. In the subsoil of the western part of the Netherlands brackish water molluscs from tens to thousands of years old can be found (fig. 1). These faunas consist of great quantities of Hydrobia ventrosa, Littorina saxatilis tenebrosa and Cerastoderma glaucum. Not so common, but often present, are Hydrobia ulvae, Hydrobia acuta, Scrobicularia plana, Macoma balthica and Mytilus edulis. Rare are Abra tenuis, Rissoa membranacea, Heleobia stagnorum, Retusa obtusa and Onoba aculeus. After circa 1600 Mya arenaria is present. Mytilopsis leucophaeata is introduced in Europa from 1835 (Antwerpen harbour), and so it is never found fossil. In the last century three species characteristic for brackish waters became extinct in the Netherlands: Corambe obscura, Lacuna vincta and Rissoa membranacea. The information is summarized per species. In the distribution maps all records of the characteristic brackish water species are shown. For the marine species only records of the landside of the dike are included on the maps and for freshwater species only the records in brackish waters are shown. In a separate chapter the mollusc fauna is summarized per area. Within these areas well known sites of brackish water molluscs are indicated (figure 19-21). Many natural brackish waters have been destroyed by human activities. However, many of the sites with brackish waters are now created and maintained by man. A natural transition from freshwater to saltwater (sea) is only present in the estuaries of the Eems-Dollard and the Wester- Schelde, and in some creeks in saltwater marshes along dune areas. The fauna in these areas is poor because of the very strong fluctuations in salinity. Brackish waters are one of the most threatened habitats of Europe and they deserve a high level of protection. Where possible new brackish waters should be created.


"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.


Good governance in health systems is an ideal which is difficult to achieve in its totality but is said to exist if overarching societal goals and values such as solidarity, equity and participation are realized. It requires a process of decision-making and effective implementation and can be judged on the basis of how government institutions conduct their public affairs, manage resources and respond to their citizen's needs. Standard definitions see good governance as having eight major characteristics: it is participatory, consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive, and follows the rule of law. Furthermore, it should seek to eliminate corruption, take account of the views of minorities and the most vulnerable in society, and respond to the present and future needs of society.


Past experience provides a rich source of predictive information about the world that could be used to guide and optimize ongoing perception. However, the neural mechanisms that integrate information coded in long-term memory (LTM) with ongoing perceptual processing remain unknown. Here, we explore how the contents of LTM optimize perception by modulating anticipatory brain states. By using a paradigm that integrates LTM and attentional orienting, we first demonstrate that the contents of LTM sharpen perceptual sensitivity for targets presented at memory-predicted spatial locations. Next, we examine oscillations in EEG to show that memory-guided attention is associated with spatially specific desynchronization of alpha-band activity over visual cortex. Additionally, we use functional MRI to confirm that target-predictive spatial information stored in LTM triggers spatiotopic modulation of preparatory activity in extrastriate visual cortex. Finally, functional MRI results also implicate an integrated cortical network, including the hippocampus and a dorsal frontoparietal circuit, as a likely candidate for organizing preparatory states in visual cortex according to the contents of LTM.


Measuring available bandwidth over a network path in the Internet is a challenging research problem. In this thesis we have studied this problem and developed a new technique called "eChirp". First, the effectiveness of pathChirp [1] is studied in terms of model performance of chirp packet train structure, actual bandwidth, queuing delay and excursion segmentation. Then we remodeled the chirp train structure. The eChirp can measure the available bandwidth over a network path efficiently and accurately with heavy and light load links. To measure the available bandwidth, the packet probing rate configuration used in pathChirp technique is modified by changing its chirp train structure. The modified structure uses multiple chirp trains (three trains) that provides better probing rate configuration and ultimately gives better bandwidth measurement. Per-packet available bandwidth is calculated using weighted average of per-packet bandwidth of three trains. We also determined the bounds of probing rate parameter which was questionable in pathChirp and affects the available bandwidth measurement accuracy. The eChirp technique has been experimented with numerous network path topologies with low and high link loads with CBR cross-traffic conditions using NS-2 simulated network and results are compared with most recent pathChirp technique. Simulation results show that the proposed eChirp technique is better than pathChirp scheme in terms of estimating available bandwidth.


CHICAGO — Many of today's running shoes feature a heavy cushioned heel. New research presented today at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) found that these shoes may alter an adolescent runner's biomechanics (the forces exerted by muscles and gravity on the skeletal structure) and diminish performance. Researchers recruited 12 adolescent competitive athletes from local track teams, and asked them to run on a treadmill in large heel trainers, track flats and without any shoes (barefoot) at four different speeds. Biomechanics – stride length, heel height during posterior swing phase and foot/ground contact – were measured with a motion capture system. " Running barefoot or running in less of a running shoe (toe shoes, for example) is a newer trend, " said Scott Mullen, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon at The University of Kansas Hospital. " What we were trying to evaluate is whether or not the foot strike would change in an adolescent – who doesn't yet have a permanently established gate – when they changed their shoe or running speed. " The researchers found that shoe type " dramatically " altered running biomechanics in the adolescent runners. When wearing cushioned heel trainers, the athletes landed on their heel 69.8 percent of the time at all speeds. With the track flats, the heel was the first point of contact less than 35 percent of the time; and when barefoot, less than 30 percent of the time. Shoes with cushioned heels promote a heel-‐ strike running pattern, whereas runners with track flats and barefoot had a forefoot or mid-‐foot strike pattern. " What we found is that simply by changing their footwear, the runners' foot strike would change, " said Dr. Mullen. " When they ran in the cushioned heel or an average running shoe ─ even when running a 5-‐ minute mile ─ the athletes landed on their heel first. " Many adolescent runners train in cushioned heels and compete in track spikes, " which may give them less of a (performance) advantage " in competition, said Dr. Mullen. As a 2010 study found that heel strike running distributes more energy to hips and knees, running in flat-‐ soled shoes that promote a forefoot strike may " present a healthier foot strike for runners over a lifetime, possibly resulting in fewer hip and knee problems, " said Dr. Mullen. More research is needed to …


Philosophy of teaching statements are autobiographical reflective statements on teaching and learning. Such statements can therefore be regarded as a window into the professional identities of teachers, and are increasingly called for internationally when promotion and appointments are considered. In this paper the philosophy of teaching statements of final-year History Education student teachers, are used as the units of analysis. Although meaningful themes on their emerging professional identities as prospective History teachers materialised, in the article I argue that their philosophy of teaching statements were burdened by constraints such as a lack of experience and the educational context they found themselves in. In conclusion I contend that although the philosophy of teaching statements provided nothing more than a porthole into the multilayered emerging professional identities of the History student teachers it gave the latter the opportunity to develop a picture of themselves as History teachers.


The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ("Dodd-Frank") was enacted in July 2010. Dodd-Frank's preamble proclaims that one of the statute's primary purposes is to "end 'too big to fail' [and] to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts." Dodd-Frank does contain useful reforms, including potentially favorable alterations to the supervisory and resolution regimes for systemically important financial institutions ("SIFIs"). However, Dodd-Frank falls far short of the fundamental reforms that would be needed to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) the public subsidies that are currently exploited by "too big to fail" ("TBTF") financial institutions. After briefly describing the financial crisis that led to the enactment of Dodd-Frank, this article evaluates whether the new statute is likely to solve the TBTF problem. Dodd-Frank establishes a new umbrella oversight body – the Financial Stability Oversight Council – that will designate SIFIs and make recommendations for their regulation. The statute also authorizes the Federal Reserve Board ("FRB") to apply enhanced supervisory requirements to SIFIs. Most importantly, Dodd-Frank establishes a new systemic resolution regime – the Orderly Liquidation Authority ("OLA") – that should provide a superior alternative to the "bailout or bankruptcy" choice that federal regulators confronted when they dealt with failing SIFIs during the financial crisis. Nevertheless, Dodd-Frank does not solve the TBTF problem. Congress did not adequately strengthen statutory limits on the ability of large complex financial institutions ("LCFIs") to grow through mergers and acquisitions. The enhanced prudential standards to be imposed on SIFIs under Dodd-Frank rely heavily on capital-based regulation, which has repeatedly failed to prevent financial crises in the past. Moreover, the success of Dodd-Frank's supervisory reforms will depend heavily on many of the same federal agencies that failed to stop excessive risk-taking by LCFIs in the past and, in the process, showed their vulnerability to political influence wielded by LCFIs and their trade associations. Dodd-Frank's most promising reform – the OLA – does not completely close the door to future transactions that protect creditors of failing LCFIs. The FRB and the Federal Home Loan Banks retain authority to provide emergency liquidity assistance to troubled LCFIs. The FDIC can borrow from the Treasury and can also use the "systemic risk exception" to the Federal Deposit Insurance Act in order to generate funding to protect creditors of failed SIFIs and their subsidiary banks. While Dodd-Frank has made bailouts more difficult, the continued existence of these additional sources of financial assistance indicates that Dodd-Frank probably will not prevent TBTF rescues during future episodes of systemic financial distress. Contrary to my earlier recommendation, Dodd-Frank does not require SIFIs to pay risk-based assessments to pre-fund the Orderly Liquidation Fund ("OLF"), which will cover the costs of resolving failed SIFIs. Instead, the OLF will be forced to borrow the necessary funds in the first instance from the Treasury (i.e., the taxpayers). Dodd-Frank also does not include my previous proposal for a strict regime of structural separation between SIFI-owned banks and their nonbank affiliates. Thus, unlike Dodd-Frank, my earlier proposals would (i) require SIFIs to internalize the potential costs of their activities by paying risk-based premiums to pre-fund the OLF, and (ii) prevent SIFI-owned banks from transferring their safety net subsidies to their nonbank affiliates. In combination, my proposals would strip away many of the public subsidies currently exploited by financial conglomerates and would subject them to the same type of market discipline that investors have applied over the past three decades in breaking up inefficient commercial and industrial conglomerates. Financial conglomerates have never demonstrated their ability to provide beneficial services to customers and attractive returns to investors without relying on federal safety net subsidies during good times and taxpayer-financed bailouts during crises. Congress must remove those subsidies and create a true "market test" for LCFIs, in which case market forces would probably compel many LCFIs to break up voluntarily.


The purpose of this document is to examine the origins of, evidence for, and solutions to choral/orchestral balance problems in performance. By consulting several primary sources, this study demonstrates that these balance issues rose to prominence during the early nineteenth century, and that conductors of that era addressed these problems in ways that are different from modern solutions. The performance of choral/orchestral works occurred less often during the early twentieth century, and because many conductors from this generation were not regularly working in the choral/orchestral medium, a knowledge gap resulted. Thus, a new generation of conductors needed to develop their own methodology as balance issues resurfaced following a revival of combined performances beginning in the 1940s. Selected studies published within the last fifty years offer possible solutions to choral/orchestral balance problems. Some authors contend that exaggerated enunciation and vocal resonance from the choristers are the keys to resolving imbalances. Others approach balance problems by controlling the volume of the orchestra. Still others choose to alter the relative positions of the performers on stage to affect balance problems. An online survey instrument through surveymonkey.com augments this study. Over two hundred conductors who frequently prepare choruses to sing with orchestras participated in the survey, offering wisdom from their experiences grappling with choral/orchestral balance problems. Utilizing the survey data, this study offers a categorized collection of practical ideas and rehearsal techniques that will serve as a reference for conductors as they address choral/orchestral imbalances. There are three principal outcomes of this study. First, it offers several reasons why choral/orchestral balance problems developed significantly during the nineteenth century and explain how conductors of that era addressed the problems. Second, it gives conductors a comprehensive overview of existing recent research on choral/orchestral balance. Third, the survey shows that present-day conductors consider acoustic imbalance between chorus and orchestra an issue with which they struggle, to what they attribute these imbalances, and how they address them. Ultimately, this document provides conductors with both a greater understanding of choral/orchestral imbalances and a variety of new methodologies for addressing them, both from the past and the present.


Learn to use Kickstarter to make your great ideas a reality As a crowd-funding website for creative projects, Kickstarter has the power to make creative ideas come to life. This helpful guide walks you through the potential of this amazing tool, which has helped project creators successfully launch their projects since 2009. You'll learn how to create a Kickstarter account, set up your first project, and effectively use social media to bring awareness to your project and build up the community around it to hopefully reach the goal of 100 percent funding. * Explains how to determine if you meet the requirements to create a project * Gets you started with creating your first project, choosing a great project image, and write a compelling project title and description * Helps you establish rewards for project backers * Zeroes in on deciding a funding duration and funding goal Whether you have an idea for a movie, video game, gadget or anything in between, Kickstarter For Dummies is the fun and friendly guide to help you get the funds to make your idea happen!


Chapter 42 U.S. C. § 1983, was originally enacted as section 1 of the Ku Klux Act. Not surprisingly, the history of the Ku Klux Act has played an important role in the interpretation of 42 U.S. C. § 1983. Unfortunately, the generally accepted history of the Ku Klux Act is incomplete, distorted, and, in some respects, demonstrably wrong. The conventional history of the Ku Klux Act is flawed in three respects. First, it omits the first several chapters of the story. The conventional history begins with Grant's March 23, 1871, message to the Forty-second Congress and completely overlooks the political and legislative maneuvering that preceded Grant's message. Second, the conventional history overstates Grant's role as the instigator in the enactment of the Ku Klux Act when he was, at most, a hesitant supporter of a struggle waged by the congressional Radicals - and refused to take any public position on the issue until persuaded to do so by a persistent lobbying effort. Third, the conventional history fails to disclose that there was a rough draft of the section of the Ku Klux Act that became 42 U.S. C. § 1983. In its least accurate version, the conventional history states that the Ku Klux Act was drafted by the Morton-Butler Committee. In its more accurate version, the conventional history treats the Ku Klux Act as having sprung entirely from the mind of Samuel Shellabarger. However, this version fails to mention that Shellabarger substantially copied section 1 from a bill written by Senator Frelinghuysen and never recognizes that Shellabarger's revisions of that section shed important light on the meaning of 42 U.S. C. § 1983. This article completes and corrects the historical record. By doing so, it should dispel the remarkably persistent myth that the Forty-second Congress never intended the provision to cover constitutional wrongs unless those wrongs were actually authorized by state law - a myth that Justices Scalia and Thomas have attempted to use as a license to restrict the scope of 42 U.S. C. § 1983 in ways that they admit would otherwise be unjustifiable.


Advanced sensing systems, sophisticated algorithms, and increasing computational resources continuously enhance the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). To date, despite that some vehicle based approaches to driver fatigue/drowsiness detection have been realized and deployed, objectively and reliably detecting the fatigue/drowsiness state of driver without compromising driving experience still remains challenging. In general, the choice of input sensorial information is limited in the state-of-the-art work. On the other hand, smart and safe driving, as representative future trends in the automotive industry worldwide, increasingly demands the new dimensional human-vehicle interactions, as well as the associated behavioral and bioinformatical data perception of driver. Thus, the goal of this research work is to investigate the employment of general and custom 3D-CMOS sensing concepts for the driver status monitoring, and to explore the improvement by merging/fusing this information with other salient customized information sources for gaining robustness/reliability. This thesis presents an effective multi-sensor approach with novel features to driver status monitoring and intention prediction aimed at drowsiness detection based on a multi-sensor intelligent assistance system -- DeCaDrive, which is implemented on an integrated soft-computing system with multi-sensing interfaces in a simulated driving environment. Utilizing active illumination, the IR depth camera of the realized system can provide rich facial and body features in 3D in a non-intrusive manner. In addition, steering angle sensor, pulse rate sensor, and embedded impedance spectroscopy sensor are incorporated to aid in the detection/prediction of driver's state and intention. A holistic design methodology for ADAS encompassing both driver- and vehicle-based approaches to driver assistance is discussed in the thesis as well. Multi-sensor data fusion and hierarchical SVM techniques are used in DeCaDrive to facilitate the classification of driver drowsiness levels based on which a warning can be issued in order to prevent possible traffic accidents. The realized DeCaDrive system achieves up to 99.66% classification accuracy on the defined drowsiness levels, and exhibits promising features such as head/eye tracking, blink detection, gaze estimation that can be utilized in human-vehicle interactions. However, the driver's state of "microsleep" can hardly be reflected in the sensor features of the implemented system. General improvements on the sensitivity of sensory components and on the system computation power are required to address this issue. Possible new features and development considerations for DeCaDrive are discussed as well in the thesis aiming to gain market acceptance in the future.


To identify potential biomarkers of salt stress in the freshwater mussel Elliptio complanata, we examined transcriptional responses of the common mussel Elliptio complanata to controlled NaCl exposures. The data set is a table of counts, with the rows being the transcripts detected in the samples in the experiment and the columns identifying the samples. Four mussles were exposed to normal freshwater and four mussels were exposed to high salinity (two ppt), for a period of seven days.


The Supreme Court partially settled a long-standing dispute about the purpose and scope of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) when it decided Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain at the end of its 2004 term - but it raised an equally important set of questions, ones that bear greatly on the future of ATS litigation and the foreign relations of the United States. Sosa held that the ATS is solely a jurisdictional statute that does not provide a general cause of action for violations of international law. However, backtracking on its "only jurisdictional" interpretation, it held out the possibility that the statute might allow judicial recognition of a narrow subset of modern customary international law (CIL) causes of action. That subset would be those substantially analogous to those for which the First Congress specifically intended to ATS to provide jurisdiction: offenses against ambassadors, violations of safe passage, and piracy. However, the Court did not set out a clear method for determining whether a CIL norm sufficiently resembles the historic offenses, leaving the "ultimate criteria" for future resolution. This Article fleshes out the historical test contemplated by Sosa by identifying the defining characteristics of the three historic offenses, which are now the characteristics that a CIL norm must posses to be actionable under the ATS. Piracy is jurisdictionally and conceptually most closely related to the modern human rights offenses that have been litigated under the ATS thus far. It was the only universal jurisdiction offense known to common law and the law of nations, and thus the Article pays particular attention to the characteristics that gave it this unique status. A combination of six characteristics allowed piracy to become a universally cognizable offense against the law of nations by minimizing the problems and dangers that would otherwise accompany universal jurisdiction. First, piracy was a crime in the municipal law of all nations; international law merely reflected an already ubiquitous condemnation of the conduct. Second, piracy had a narrow and universally-agreed on definition; the conduct it proscribed was well understood, thus preventing conflicts between states about the propriety of universal jurisdiction. Third, all nations made piracy punishable by death. Thus universal jurisdiction would not lead to forum shopping or disputes among nations as to what punishment should be inflicted. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, pirates were private actors who had refused the protection of their home states by failing to obtain a letter of marque. They could expect little succor from their home state, since they had turned their back on it, and thus a prosecuting nation would not expect the home state to take offense. Fifth, piracy occurred on the high seas. While this did not make traditional jurisdictional limitations moot, it did make conventional enforcement difficult, and thus universal jurisdiction might seem an attractive auxiliary to domestic prosecution. Finally, pirates indiscriminately attacked the ships of all nations, as they were not constrained by ties of national loyalty or the limitations contained in a letter of marque. Thus many maritime states had a particularly strong interest in punishing pirates because their ships could fall prey to them, and all states would be economically harmed by disruptions of international commerce. Having thus articulated the specifics of Sosa's historical test, the Article administers it to modern human rights offenses, and finds that they do not satisfy the test. New CIL norms do not posses one or more of the important properties that made piracy safe for UJ and enforceable by common law. Thus providing redress for modern CIL offenses would entail profound dangers not contemplated by the First Congress they enacted the ATS with the limited purpose of allowing suits dealing with piracy, ambassadors, and safe conducts. Comparing piracy to modern international law norms reveals that new causes of action under the ATS cannot be created without abandoning the fidelity to the historical paradigms mandated by the Court. The Court in Sosa may as well have shut the door to new causes altogether, for the door that it leaves "ajar subject to vigilant doorkeeping" has nothing behind it.


Over the last four years, the National Library of Scotland has saved money and improved user access to online historical maps through the implementation of new open source technologies. These new tools include a new Viewer for MrSID images using OpenLayers, a collaborative Georeferencer application, new Tile Map Services for delivering georeferenced historical maps online, and a new GeoServer and OpenLayers application for accessing 44,000 series maps as clickable indexes. All of these applications were developed by Petr Pridal / Klokan Technologies, in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, and all of them are easily extendible to other map libraries. These open source tools also provide an excellent basis for collaboration with other map libraries, sharing technology, experience and advice.


How do we find hot stocks without getting burned? How do we fatten our portfolios and stay financially healthy? Former hedge-fund manager and longtime Wall Street commentator Jim Cramer explains how to invest wisely in chaotic times, and he does so in plain English in a style that is as much fun as investing is -- or should be, when it's done right.For starters, Cramer recommends devoting a portion of your assets to speculation. Everyone wants to find the big winners that can bring outsized gains, and Cramer explains how to allocate your portfolio so that you can afford to take this kind of risk wisely. He explains why "buy and hold" is a losing philosophy: For Cramer, it's "buy and homework." If you can't spend an hour a week researching each of your stocks, then you should hand off your portfolio to a mutual fund -- and Cramer identifies the very few mutual funds that he'd recommend.Cramer reveals his Ten Commandments of Trading (Commandment #5: Tips are for waiters). He explains why he's not afraid to compare investing to gambling (and tells you which book on gambling you should read to become a better investor). He discloses his Twenty-Five Rules of Investing (Rule #4: Look for broken stocks, not broken companies).Cramer shows how to compare stock prices in a way that you can understand, how to spot market tops and bottoms, how to know when to sell, how to rotate among cyclical stocks to catch the big moves, and much more. "Jim Cramer's Real Money" is filled with insider advice that really works, information that Cramer himself used to make millions during his fourteen-year career on Wall Street.Written in Cramer's distinctive turbocharged style, this is every investor's guide to what you really must know to make big money in the stock market.


Scott Kelby, author of The Digital Photography Book (the best-selling digital photography book of all time), is back with another follow-up to his smash best-seller, with an entirely new book that picks up right where volume 3 left off. It's even more of that "Ah ha, so that' s how they do it," straight-to-the-point, skip-the-techno-jargon stuff people can really use today, and that made volume 1 the world's best-selling book on digital photography.This book truly has a brilliant premise, and here's how Scott describes it: "If you and I were out on a shoot and you asked me, 'Hey Scott, I want the light for this portrait to look really soft and flattering. How far back should I put this softbox?' I wouldn't give you a lecture about lighting ratios, or flash modifiers. In real life, I'd just turn to you and say, 'Move it in as close to your subject as you possibly can, without it actually showing up in the shot.' Well, that's what this book is all about: you and I out shooting where I answer questions, give you advice, and share the secrets I've learned, just like I would with a friend--without all the technical explanations and techie photo speak."Each page covers a single concept on how to make your photography better. Every time you turn the page, you'll learn another pro setting, tool, or trick to transform your work from snapshots into gallery prints. If you're tired of taking shots that look "okay," and if you're tired of looking in photography magazines and thinking, "Why don't my shots look like that?" then this is the book for you.This isn't a book of theory, full of confusing jargon and detailed concepts. This is a book on which button to push, which setting to use, and when to use it. With another 200 of the most closely guarded photographic "tricks of the trade," this book gets you shooting dramatically better-looking, sharper, more colorful, more professional-looking photos every time.


The detection and characterisation of undesired lead structures on shaft surfaces is a concern in production and quality control of rotary shaft lip-type sealing systems. The potential lead structures are generally divided into macro and micro lead based on their characteristics and formation. Macro lead measurement methods exist and are widely applied. This work describes a method to characterise micro lead on ground shaft surfaces. Micro lead is known as the deviation of main orientation of the ground micro texture from circumferential direction. Assessing the orientation of microscopic structures with arc minute accuracy with regard to circumferential direction requires exact knowledge of both the shaft's orientation and the direction of surface texture. The shaft's circumferential direction is found by calibration. Measuring systems and calibration procedures capable of calibrating shaft axis orientation with high accuracy and low uncertainty are described. The measuring systems employ areal-topographic measuring instruments suited for evaluating texture orientation. A dedicated evaluation scheme for texture orientation is based on the Radon transform of these topographies and parametrised for the application. Combining the calibration of circumferential direction with the evaluation of texture orientation the method enables the measurement of micro lead on ground shaft surfaces.


Raymond Sarlot bought the Chateau Marmont in 1975, but what was originally a business purchase became a love affair as he delved into the hotel's incredible history. From its perch overlooking the Sunset Strip, the glamorous Marmont reigned for decades as the spot for artists, writers, musicians, and actors of every stripe and remains a home-away-from-home for A-listers like Scarlett Johansson and Johnny Depp. Here, Sarlot and co-author Fred E. Basten share a wealth of scandalous and intriguing tales about them all, from the stars of Hollywood's Golden Era like Jean Harlow and Grace Kelly to idols of the sixties and seventies like Jim Morrison and John Belushi (who tragically died there in 1982). Whether your obsession is Hollywood history or celebrity gossip, Life at the Marmont has plenty of gripping, juicy stories to fascinate.


John Berger's writings on photography are some of the most original of the twentieth century. This selection contains many groundbreaking essays and previously uncollected pieces written for exhibitions and catalogues in which Berger probes the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith - and the lives of those photographed - with fierce engagement, intensity and tenderness. The selection is made and introduced by Geoff Dyer, author of the award-winning The Ongoing Moment. How do we see the world around us? This is one of a number of pivotal works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision for ever. John Berger was born in London in 1926. His acclaimed works of both fiction and non-fiction include the seminal Ways of Seeing and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and he now lives in a small village in the French Alps. Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and several non-fiction books. Winner of the Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award, Dyer is also a regular contributor to many publications in the UK and the US. He lives in London.


The third edition of this innovative work again provides a unique perspective on the clinical discovery process by providing input from experts within the NIH on the principles and practice of clinical research. Molecular medicine, genomics, and proteomics have opened vast opportunities for translation of basic science observations to the bedside through clinical research. As an introductory reference it gives clinical investigators in all fields an awareness of the tools required to ensure research protocols are well designed and comply with the rigorous regulatory requirements necessary to maximize the safety of research subjects. Complete with sections on the history of clinical research and ethics, copious figures and charts, and sample documents it serves as an excellent companion text for any course on clinical research and as a must-have reference for seasoned researchers.

 Incorporates new chapters on Managing Conflicts of Interest in Human Subjects Research, Clinical Research from the Patient's Perspective, The Clinical Researcher and the Media, Data Management in Clinical Research, Evaluation of a Protocol Budget, Clinical Research from the Industry Perspective, and Genetics in Clinical Research

 Addresses the vast opportunities for translation of basic science observations to the bedside through clinical research

 Delves into data management and addresses how to collect data and use it for discovery

 Contains valuable, up-to-date information on how to obtain funding from the federal government


Public health and social measures (PHSMs) are an important strategy to slow transmission of COVID-19 and reduce the pressure on health care systems, but they can place a significant burden on people, especially when they restrict movement or access to services. This brief aims to inform policy decisions in South Africa that balance the benefit of PHSMs for reducing transmission with other priorities, including economic and social impacts. It is based on the review, synthesis and analysis of data illuminating different dimensions of COVID-19 in South Africa—including a nationally representative telephone poll, media monitoring, epidemiological data and other publicly available data sources. Data sources and methods are described at the end of the document.


The marine caridean fauna of East Africa has been little studied. Prior to World War 1, German authors produced a number of general studies but the emphasis of these papers was on crabs. Most of the carideans are reported from Zanzibar. Hilgendorf (1869) reported two unidentified species of Alpheus from Zanzibar. Pfeffer (1889) reported Coralliocaris graminea also from Zanzibar and in 1894 Ortmann added the hippolytid Saron marmoratus. Lenz (1905) reported three pontoniine shrimps, two hippolytids and six alpheids from Zanzibar. In 1905 also, Nobili reported Gelastocaris paronae from Zanzibar. The first World War terminated these studies and there seems to have been little further interest until Taramelli (1955) reported again on the crustacea of Zanzibar, recording five species of shrimps, three of which were not previously recorded. The present study is based upon the results of collecting from shallow water in the Casuarina Point and Watamu National Marine Parks at Malindi, Kenya, over a period of three days during spring tide conditions, in March, 1973. Collections were kept as generalized as possible and no special efforts were made to concentrate on special habitats. A total of 67 species are represented in the material collected, but these are considered to represent only a small portion of the total variety present. The collection is noteworthy for the presence of a number of rare or little known species as well as one new species, but also for the absence of a considerable number of common and well known shrimps that have been found to be widespread on East African coasts. It is probable that further collections could readily double or even treble the number of species known from the Parks. The positions of the localities at which collections were made are approxi-


This is a review of James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, a CATO Institute publication, edited by John Samples. The thesis of the review is that Madison has been improperly presented as a believer in limited government. Rather his public and private writings indicate that he was suspicious of the market, and saw the need for positive government in order to regulate private economic power. He also believed that the meaning of words was dim and doubtful, requiring interpretation.


Objective - The study examined whether a prompt sheet improved the reference interview process for health information advisers working at NHS Direct, a 24 hour telephone helpline that provides confidential health care advice for the public in England.

Method - A randomised control trial was conducted at eight NHS Direct sites across England in 2003-04. Newly recruited health information advisers (n=30), full and part-time, were randomly allocated to a control group (n=15) or intervention group (n=15), and 26 completed the study. Existing health information advisers were involved in the planning and design of the intervention. The prompt sheet included prompts for demographic information, reason for call, condition/treatment plan, existing knowledge of caller, special needs of the caller, handling a call empathetically, conclusion. Testing of reference interview expertise was done at the end of basic training, and two months later, using the same ten test questions, that were based on common questions received by NHS Direct. A relevance framework for possible responses was drawn up for each question for scoring test responses, with more relevant responses scoring higher than less relevant responses.

Results - The average score of prompt (experimental) and non-prompt (control) participants increased on the second test, for each of the 10 questions. The prompt group improved significantly more overall than the control group. There was variation within the groups. Sixteen health information assistants showed a net increase in their score over all ten questions (10 experimental group, six control group). The post-test score for an individual on a particular question did sometimes decrease from the pre-test score, but all 26 improved on at least one question. Previous call handler experience did not appear to influence the extent of improvement, but length and type of experience in the post may have an influence.

Conclusion - The trial demonstrated the benefit of a simple and inexpensive prompt sheet for some, though not all, newly recruited health information advisers to improve their reference interview technique.


The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) has improved tremendously due to the application of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite this progress, building a new ASR system remains a challenging task, requiring various resources, multiple training stages and significant expertise. This paper presents our Eesen framework which drastically simplifies the existing pipeline to build state-of-the-art ASR systems. Acoustic modeling in Eesen involves learning a single recurrent neural network (RNN) predicting context-independent targets (phonemes or characters). To remove the need for pre-generated frame labels, we adopt the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) objective function to infer the alignments between speech and label sequences. A distinctive feature of Eesen is a generalized decoding approach based on weighted finite-state transducers (WFSTs), which enables the efficient incorporation of lexicons and language models into CTC decoding. Experiments show that compared with the standard hybrid DNN systems, Eesen achieves comparable word error rates (WERs), while at the same time speeding up decoding significantly.


The autoimmune polyendocrinopathy–candidiasis–ectodermal dystrophy (APECED) syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by a mutation in the autoimmune regulator (AIRE) gene. Immune deficiency, hypoparathyroidism and Addison's disease due to autoimmune dysfunction are the major clinical signs of APECED. We report on a 21-year-old female APECED patient with two inactivating mutations in the AIRE gene. She presented with sudden onset of periodic nausea. Adrenal insufficiency was diagnosed by means of the ACTH stimulation test. Despite initiation of hormone replacement therapy with hydrocortisone and fludrocortisone, nausea persisted and the patient developed cognitive deficits and a loss of interest which led to the diagnosis of depression. She was admitted to the psychiatric department for further diagnostic assessment. An EEG showed a focal epileptic pattern. Glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) antibodies, which had been negative eight years earlier, were now elevated in serum and in the cerebrospinal fluid. Oligoclonal bands were positive indicating an inflammatory process with intrathecal antibody production in the central nervous system (CNS). The periodic nausea was identified as dialeptic seizures, which clinically presented as gastrointestinal aura followed by episodes of reduced consciousness that occurred about 3–4 times per day. GAD antibody-associated limbic encephalitis (LE) was diagnosed. Besides antiepileptic therapy, an immunosuppressive treatment with corticosteroids was initiated followed by azathioprine. The presence of nausea and vomiting in endocrine patients with autoimmune disorders is indicative of adrenal insufficiency. However, our case report shows that episodic nausea may be a symptom of epileptic seizures due to GAD antibodies-associated LE in patients with APECED. Learning points: Episodic nausea cannot only be a sign of Addison's disease, but can also be caused by epileptic seizures with gastrointestinal aura due to limbic encephalitis. GAD antibodies are not only found in diabetes mellitus type 1, but they are also associated with autoimmune limbic encephalitis and can appear over time. Limbic encephalitis can be another manifestation of autoimmune disease in patients with APECED/APS-1 that presents over the time course of the disease.


The set of teaching materials known as The Legal Process continue to exert tremendous influence over mainstream public-law scholarship. Developed by Harvard Law Professors Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks in the late 1950s, those materials formed the cornerstone of the legal education of generations of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. In part for that reason, the methods of legal interpretation and institutional analysis they articulated arguably still constitute the reigning paradigm of scholarship in the areas of statutory interpretation, federal courts, and administrative law.Despite their pervasive influence, however, the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of The Legal Process are poorly understood. The standard historical account of the text denies any such foundations exist, characterizing it instead as an effort by its editors to respond to the skeptical threat of Legal Realism by advancing an "instrumentalist" or "neutral" theory of law that denied the need for, or value of, any deeper philosophical justification. Though originally offered as a critique of the approach embodied in the teaching materials, that account has been accepted even by those working within the Legal Process framework.That acceptance is surprising and troubling, because the standard historical account is deeply mistaken. In the first chapter of The Legal Process, the editors consciously advance controversial positions on the nature of morality, law, and legal knowledge. And if one looks carefully at those positions and the sources the editors rely on in staking them out, one can see that they were trying to construct a model of legal practice and scholarship based on the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of one strand of philosophical pragmatism. Understanding such philosophical commitments not only enables us to better explain how Hart and Sacks took themselves to be responding to Legal Realism, but also forces us to consider how more recent efforts to ground legal practice fare in comparison.


The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 brought to light threats and vulnerabilities that face the United States. In response, the U.S. Government is directing the effort to secure the nation's critical infrastructure by creating programs to implement the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (1). One part of this effort involves assessing Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. These systems are essential to the control of critical elements of our national infrastructure, such as electric power, oil, and gas production and distribution. Since their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defense or economic security of the United States, one of the main objectives of this program is to identify vulnerabilities and encourage the public and private sectors to work together to design secure control systems that resolve these weaknesses. This paper describes vulnerability assessment methodologies used in ongoing research and assessment activities designed to identify and resolve vulnerabilities so as to improve the security of the nation's critical infrastructure.


The purpose of this paper is to examine unusual characterizations of Guenevere in the Arthurian tradition relating to the tensions between courtly love, chivalry, and Christianity. Texts are drawn from the medieval and Victorian periods and include works from Marie de France, Thomas Chestre, and William Morris. Part one of the paper involves the intertextual relationships between Marie de France's twelfth century "Lai de Lanval" and Thomas Chestre's fifteenth century retelling. Variances in the characterizations of Guenevere are examined and a pattern begins to emerge. While Marie de France's Guenevere is sympathetic from a courtly point of view, Chestre's rewriting significantly magnifies the character's shortcomings, resulting in a more brutal treatment of the queen in the text. Marie de France's Guenevere, then, appears as a courtly failure while Chestre's is a chivalric failure. Morris, writing some four hundred years after Chestre, and working from a direct influence by Malory, recasts Guenevere in two poems, "The Defence of Guenevere" and "King Arthur's Tomb". His treatment utilizes a dramatic form with minimal commentary. The two poems further illustrate tensions inherent in Guenevere's life; the former depicting a victory of courtly love over chivalric loyalty, and the latter of Christianity over courtly love. Ultimately, Guenevere chooses Christianity, and as such, reclaims her own autonomy and agency.


In a recently proposed graphical compression algorithm by Choi and Szpankowski (2012), the following tree arose in the course of the analysis. The root contains $n$ balls that are consequently distributed between two subtrees according to a simple rule: In each step, all balls independently move down to the left subtree (say with probability $p$) or the right subtree (with probability $1-p$). A new node is created as long as there is at least one ball in that node. Furthermore, a nonnegative integer $d$ is given, and at level $d$ or greater one ball is removed from the leftmost node before the balls move down to the next level. These steps are repeated until all balls are removed (i.e., after $n+d$ steps). Observe that when $d=\infty$ the above tree can be modeled as a trie that stores $n$ independent sequences generated by a binary memoryless source with parameter $p$. Therefore, we coin the name $(n,d)$-tries for the tree just described, and to which we often refer simply as $d$-tries. We study here in detail the path length, and show how much the path length of such a $d$-trie differs from that of regular tries. We use methods of analytic algorithmics, from Mellin transforms to analytic poissonization.


Goto, Hiromi. Darkest Light . Toronto: Razorbill Canada, 2011. Print. Darkest Light is a sequel, of sorts, to Goto's 2009 fantastic allegorical work Half World . However, Darkest Light takes on a more nuanced approach to its characters' struggles, asking the question, 'Can a person who has done wrong rehabilitate himself?' Half World drew its lines of good and evil in a more traditional way, with an outcast heroine battling an evil force living in the world between the dead and the living. In contrast, Darkest Light slowly unravels the mystery of the life of its protagonist, Gee. We see the recurrence of some of the same characters from Goto's first book in the series, including the knowledgeable wise-woman, Ms. Wei, and the outcast heroine, Melanie Tamaki. But Darkest Light turns its focus on Gee, the baby brought out from Half World by Melanie, and who is now sixteen, having lived with Ms. Wei since. Illustrator Jillian Tamaki has collaborated on this book as with the Half World , and the style of her shadowy sketches captures Goto's descriptions of Gee. Gee has grown up lonely, his Popo (Ms. Wei) his only friend; there is something about his ghostly physical presence and his deep-black eyes that put off almost all others, humans and animals alike. After a confrontation with two classmate bullies, he meets neo-Goth, Cracker, a young lesbian who feels some kinship with Gee's physical and emotional difference. When Ms. Wei's life is endangered by some of the demons of Half World, Gee and Cracker enter the world to save her. Goto has taken an interesting path to investigate the question of how to atone for one's wrong actions by going into the world of fantasy, where the most evil of all the Half World demons tries to change, tempted by his old lovers and friends, as well as by the power he used to wield. Goto's writing can, at times, read as flat, and the demons in Half World are exaggerated enough to be more cartoonish than frightening. But the emotion she evokes between Gee and his grandmother and Cracker is quite moving, and her book is likely to appeal to young readers who recognize the struggle to find their own paths in the world that doesn't welcome difference. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Allison Sivak Allison Sivak is the Assessment Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people's trust in the credibility of information content.


This beautiful children's book contains stories from Japanese folklore that have been passed down from generation to generation. "Urashima Taro and Other Japanese Children's Favorite Stories" features ten thrilling and funny adventures, including "The Fairy Crane," "The Dragon's Tears" and "Why the Red Elf Cried."