The first print publication edited by Tavi Gevinson, the editor in chief of "Rookie," the website for teenage girls Tavi Gevinson started her personal blog, "Style Rookie" (http: //www.thestylerookie.com), in 2008, when she was eleven years old. It was a place where, from the confines of her bedroom in the suburbs, she could write about personal style and chronicle the development of her own. Within two years, the blog was averaging fifty thousand hits per day. Soon fashion designers were flying her around the world to attend and write about fashion shows, and to be a guest of honor at their parties.Soon Tavi's interests grew beyond fashion, into culture and art and, especially, feminism. In September 2011, when she was fifteen, she launched "Rookie" (http: //rookiemag.com), a website for girls like her: teenagers who are interested in fashion and beauty but also in dissecting the culture around them through a uniquely teen-girl lens. Rookie broke one million page views within its first six days. "Rookie Yearbook One "collects articles, interviews, photo editorials, and illustrations from the highly praised and hugely popular online magazine. In its first year, "Rookie" has established a large inclusive international community of avid readers. In addition to its fifty-plus regular writers, photographers, and illustrators (many of whom are teenage girls themselves), "Rookie"'s contributors and interviewees have included prominent makers of popular culture such as Lena Dunham, Miranda July, Joss Whedon, Jon Hamm, Zooey Deschanel, David Sedaris, Elle Fanning, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, John Waters, Chloe Sevigny, Liz Phair, Dan Savage, JD Samson, Ira Glass, Aubrey Plaza, Daniel Clowes, Carrie Brownstein, Paul Feig, Bethany Cosentino, Kimya Dawson, Fred Armisen, and Winnie Holzman.As a young teenager, Gevinson couldn't find what she was looking for in a teen magazine; "Rookie" is the one she created herself to fill that void. Her coolheaded intellect shines in "Rookie," arguably the most intelligent magazine ever made for a teen-girl audience. Gevinson writes with a humble but keen authority on such serious topics as body image, self-esteem, and first encounters with street harassment. She's equally deft at doling out useful advice, such as how to do a two-minute beehive, or how to deliver an effective bitchface. "Rookie"'s passionate staffers and faithful readers have helped make "Rookie" the strong community that it is.To date, Gevinson has written for "Harper's Bazaar," "Jezebel," "Lula," and "Pop," and is a contributing editor for "Garage" magazine. She has been profiled in "The New York Times" and "The New Yorker," and has been on the cover of "Pop," "L'Officiel," "Zeit""Magazin," and "Bust." As a speaker, she has made numerous presentations at venues such as IdeaCity, TEDxTeen, L2 Forum, and the "Economist" World in 2012 Festival. Last year Lady Gaga called her "the future of journalism."


In the ten years since enactment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the telecommunications industry has undergone profound technological and marketplace changes. In this article, I argue that the current statute regulates communications services, variously denominated as telecommunications, information services, cable, mobile, or the like, differently, even though these services increasingly compete against each other in the marketplace. This differential treatment occurs because the existing statutory service classifications are based almost entirely on outdated techno-functional constructs that force regulators to make metaphysical regulatory distinctions. Competition and convergence in the marketplace have undermined this so-called "stovepipe" regulatory scheme of the 1996 Act. It is time for the existing "stovepipe" model of regulation to be confined to the dustbin of communications policy history. In its place, Congress should adopt what I call a new Digital Age Communications Act, a market-oriented regime that would employ antitrust-like principles focusing on marketplace competition and the enhancement of consumer welfare to determine whether there is a need for regulatory intervention.


Just as today's observers struggle to justify the workings of the free market in the wake of a global economic crisis, an earlier generation of economists revisited their worldviews following the Great Depression. The Great Persuasion is an intellectual history of that project. Angus Burgin traces the evolution of postwar economic thought in order to reconsider many of the most basic assumptions of our market-centered world. Conservatives often point to Friedrich Hayek as the most influential defender of the free market. By examining the work of such organizations as the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association founded by Hayek in 1947 and later led by Milton Friedman, Burgin reveals that Hayek and his colleagues were deeply conflicted about many of the enduring problems of capitalism. Far from adopting an uncompromising stance against the interventionist state, they developed a social philosophy that admitted significant constraints on the market. Postwar conservative thought was more dynamic and cosmopolitan than has previously been understood. It was only in the 1960s and '70s that Friedman and his contemporaries developed a more strident defense of the unfettered market. Their arguments provided a rhetorical foundation for the resurgent conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and inspired much of the political and economic agenda of the United States in the ensuing decades. Burgin's brilliant inquiry uncovers both the origins of the contemporary enthusiasm for the free market and the moral quandaries it has left behind.


In his classic monograph, The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore argued that Christopher Columbus Langdell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Williston trumped up the legal credentials for their classical bargain theory of contract law. Gilmore's analysis has been subjected to extensive criticism, but its specific, sustained, and fundamental charge that the bargain theory was based on a fraudulent misrepresentation of precedential authority has never been questioned. In this Essay, I argue that Gilmore's case against the classical theorists rests on the suppressed premise that the precedential authority of cases resides in the express judicial reasoning used to decide them. In contrast, I argue that the classical theorists implicitly presuppose that the precedential authority of cases consists in the best theory that explains their outcomes, even if that theory is inconsistent with the case's express judicial reasoning. The classical view of precedential authority completely defuses Gilmore's charge of fraud. In Gilmore's view, merely demonstrating the inconsistency between the proposition for which the classical theorists cited a case and the express reasoning in that case suffices as proof of misrepresentation. But in the classical theorists' view, the express reasoning in a case is simply a theory of its precedential authority, which, like any theory, can be wrong. Thus, the classical theorists simply reject Gilmore's claim that a case cannot properly be cited for a proposition inconsistent with its express reasoning. The real dispute, then, between Gilmore and the classical theorists is over the nature of precedential authority and not the content of contract law. Having reframed the classic death-of-contract debate, I then trace these competing conceptions of precedential authority through the major schools of contemporary contract theory. I argue that a contract theory's embrace of one view instead of the other can be explained by the relative priority it accords to each of the two components in a conception of adjudicative legitimacy. A conception of adjudicative legitimacy consists in a theory of what it means for a decision to be based on law and a theory of what is required for law to be justified. I explain why theories according priority to the former tend to subscribe to the precedents-as-outcomes view, while theories according priority to the latter tend to favor the express reasoning view. The Essay concludes by arguing that the economic analysis of contract law subscribes to the precedents-as-outcomes view and therefore is the contemporary jurisprudential successor to the late nineteenth-century classical theorists.


Mobile devices as the iPhone and Android-based smartphones can be turned into useful tools for researchers in the field. The concept of a scholarly or scientific workbench can be extended by a mobile usage scenario, where the researcher takes photographs, records sounds, and performs basic metadata editing. We present the prototype and the architecture of a mobile workbench that uploads geo-tagged photographs taken by the camera of the smartphone into a digital repository. We discuss the idea of a research workbench as an integrated but loosely-coupled set of services; we show where in our solution the functionalities of a research workbench are contained or where other services can be added. Finally, we focus on the software running on the mobile phone, which is in itself a set of loosely-coupled applications.


Applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we investigate whether Russian blogs represent an alternative public sphere distinct from web-based Russian government information sources and the mainstream media. Based on data collected over a one-year period (December 2010 through December 2011) from thousands of Russian political blogs and other media sources, we compare the cosine similarity of the text from blogs, mainstream media, major TV channels, and official government websites. We find that, when discussing a selected set of major political and news topics popular during the year, blogs are consistently the least similar to government sources compared to TV and the mainstream media. We also find that the text of mainstream media outlets in Russia (primarily traditional and web-native newspapers) are more similar to government sources than one would expect given the greater editorial and financial independence of those media outlets, at least compared to largely state-controlled national TV stations. We conclude that blogs provide an alternative public sphere: a space for civic discussion and organization that differs significantly from that provided by the mainstream media, TV, and government.


In April 2010 the Icelandic Eyjafjallajokull stratovolcano emitted large clouds of volcanic ashes that provoked chaotic situations for the air traffic of the Northern hemisphere. The impact of the resulting atmospheric pollution may have widespread effects on the health of the populations living in the affected regions. For this reason, the study of the airborne particles brought by the ash clouds must cover not only their concentrations expressed in μg/m3, but also their size, shape and chemical composition. Our results revealed that during the eruption days, some periods with a higher concentration of the coarse particles (between 2.5 and 10 μm) were observed. The sphericity (R1) and roughness (R2) parameters showed specific characteristics of the particles, suggesting long distance of their origin. Furthermore, an increase up to 4 times more in the At% of the elements K, Al, Ca, Na and Si, which characterize the felsic lava, was observed during the eruption period.


We live in the golden age of the photography book. Since the early 1990s, the number of photography book publishers has continued to grow while technological developments have placed more tools for bookmaking directly in the hands of photographers. For the students and working artists who have chosen photography as their primary means of expression, having their own photography book is seen as a passport to the international photography scene. Yet, few have more than a tentative grasp of the component parts of a book, an understanding of what they want to express, or the know-how needed to get a book published. Publish Your Photography Book is the first book to demystify the process of producing and publishing a book of photographs. Industry insiders Darius D. Himes and Mary Virginia Swanson survey the current landscape of photography book publishing and point out the many avenues to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. This expert guide is organized in six sections covering the rich history of the photo book; anoverview of the publishing industry; an intimate look at the process of making a book; a close review of how to market aphoto book; a section on case studies, built around discussions and interviews with published photographers; and a final section presenting a wealth of resources and information to aid in the understanding of the publishing world. Publish Your Photography Book also includes a number of additional interviews and contributions from industry professionals, including artists, publishers, designers, packagers, editors, and other industry experts who openly share their publishing experiences.


The Flavivirus genus (Flaviviridae family) comprises the most important arboviruses in the world such as dengue virus, West Nile virus (WNV), Zika virus (ZIKV), Japanese encephalitis virus and yellow fever virus (YFV). Every year, several outbreaks caused by flaviviruses are reported worldwide (i.e.: ZIKV and YFV outbreaks in South America) with a huge impact on economy and public health. In the last few decades, many aspects of the flavivirus biology and the interaction of flaviviruses with host cells have been elucidated. However, many underlying mechanisms concerning receptor usage, entry process and viral interaction with host cell factors are still not completely understood. Integrins, the major class of cell adhesion molecules have been implicated in the infectious cycle of different viruses including flaviviruses. A previous report proposed that a particular integrin, the αVβ3 integrin, might act as a cellular receptor for WNV. However, this hypothesis was not confirmed by other groups. In the present study, murine cell lines lacking the expression of one or more integrin subunits were used to evaluate the involvement of different integrins in the flavivirus infection cycle. Mouse fibroblasts lacking the expression of β1 integrin (MKF-β1-/-) or β3 integrin (MEF-β3-/-) subunits or αVβ3 integrin (MEF-αVβ3-/-) as well as their corresponding wild-type cells were utilized. A second model using Chinese hamster ovary cells (CHO-K1), a cell line that has been described to be refractory to some flaviviruses, were modified to express either αV (CHO-αV+/+) or β3 (CHO-β3+/+) integrin subunits. All cell lines were first characterized by confocal laser microscopy, flow cytometry and functional assays prior to infection to assess their integrin expression. The cell lines were then inoculated with different flaviviruses of public health relevance: WNV, YFV-17D, Usutu virus (USUV), Langat virus (LGTV) and ZIKV. Infection assays were designed in order to evaluate whether integrins influence i) cell susceptibility; ii) binding; iii) internalization and iv) replication of the investigated flaviviruses. Our findings clearly demonstrate that β1, β3 and αVβ3 integrins do not act as flavivirus cellular receptor or attachment factor since their ablation does not completely abrogate flavivirus infection in the investigated cell lines. Flavivirus binding to the cell surface of MEFs, MKFs and CHO cells was not disturbed by the genomic deletion of the above-mentioned integrins. The deletion of β1 and β3 integrin subunit did not affect internalization of any of the flaviviruses tested. In contrast to that, loss of αVβ3 integrin in the MEF-αVβ3-/- cells showed a statistically significant decrease in WNV and USUV internalization while ZIKV, YFV-17D and LGTV internalization remained unaffected suggesting that αVβ3 integrin might be involved in the internalization process of at least some flaviviruses. On the other hand, flavivirus replication was substantially impaired in the integrin-deficient cell lines in comparison to their corresponding wild-type cells. Both, MEF-β3-/- and MKF-β1-/- cells showed a statistically significant reduction on viral load for all flaviviruses tested in comparison to their respective wild-type cells. The MEF-αVβ3-/- cells in particular, showed a strong inhibition of flavivirus replication with a reduction of up to 99% on viral loads for all flaviviruses tested. Levels of flavivirus negative-strand RNA were substantially decreased in MEF-αVβ3-/- cells indicating that integrins might influence flavivirus RNA replication. The ectopic expression of either αV or β3 integrin subunits in CHO cells slightly increased the replication of all flaviviruses tested. Taken together, this is the first report highlighting the involvement of integrins in ZIKV, USUV, LGTV and YFV infection. The results strongly indicate that the investigated integrins play an important role in flavivirus infection and might represent a novel host cell factor that enhances flavivirus replication. Although the exact mechanism of interaction between integrins and flaviviruses is currently unknown, the results provided in this study deepen our insight into flavivirus - host cell interactions and open doors for further investigations.


This article presents a methodological construction for research on small groups of minority media producers, especially those who are involved in multilingual settings. The set of qualitative tools are explained and their advantages and disadvantages explored, based on the literature on the subject. Then, the debate is contrasted with the practical experience of its application with minority language producers, indigenous and ethnic radio broadcasters in Colombia and audiovisual producers in Wales. The reflection upon the results leads to a final discussion that brings the adjustments required to increase the advantages and diminish the disadvantages of the proposed combined three-step methodology of an interview to the double (ITTD), a day of participant observation, and a final lengthier semi-structured interview.


Evolutionary robotics (ER) aims to apply evolutionary computation techniques to the design of both real and simulated autonomous robots. The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics offers an authoritative overview of this rapidly developing field, presenting state-of-the-art research by leading scholars. The result is a lively, expansive survey that will be of interest to computer scientists, robotics engineers, neuroscientists, and philosophers. The contributors discuss incorporating principles from neuroscience into ER; dynamical analysis of evolved agents; constructing appropriate evolutionary pathways; spatial cognition; the coevolution of robot brains and bodies; group behavior; the evolution of communication; translating evolved behavior into design principles; the development of an evolutionary robotics--based methodology for shedding light on neural processes; an incremental approach to complex tasks; and the notion of "mindless intelligence" -- complex processes from immune systems to social networks -- as a way forward for artificial intelligence.ContributorsChristos Ampatzis, Randall D. Beer, Josh Bongard, Joachim de Greeff, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Marco Dorigo, Dario Floreano, Inman Harvey, Sabine Hauert, Phil Husbands, Laurent Keller, Michail Maniadakis, Orazio Miglino, Sara Mitri, Renan Moioli, Stefano Nolfi, Michael O'Shea, Rainer W. Paine, Andy Philippides, Jordan B. Pollack, Michela Ponticorvo, Yoon-Sik Shim, Jun Tani, Vito Trianni, Elio Tuci, Patricia A. Vargas, Eric D. Vaughan


Exploring recent changes in employment practices in seven industrialized countries (Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States) and in two essential industries (automobile and telecommunications), Harry C. Katz and Owen Darbishire find that traditional national systems of employment are being challenged by four cross-national patterns. The patterns, which are becoming ever more prevalent, can be categorized as low-wage, human resource management, Japanese-oriented, and joint team-based strategies. The authors go on to show that these changing employment patterns are closely related to the decline of unions and growing income inequality. Drawing upon plant-level evidence on emerging employment practices, they provide a comprehensive analysis of changes in employment systems and labor-management relations. They conclude that while the variation in employment patterns is increasing within countries, evidence suggests that there is much commonality across countries in the nature of that variation and also similarity in the processes through which variation is appearing. Hence the term "converging divergences."


This project proposes and applies a research strategy to understand types of cities using the case study of Bogota. This strategy combines a conceptual framework developed around the notion of 'centrality' and 'urban semiotics' as a method of qualitative enquiry in order to comprehend complex spatial arrangements as significant constituents of cultural geographies. In this sense, this study problematizes current tendencies such as spatial fragmentation and challenges the argument that contemporary urban ensembles in Latin America are either homogenized within globalization trends or illegible entities with no structural coherence.
Bogota is addressed as an instrumental case study to redraw generalizations developed from different methodological frameworks about the configuration process of spatial structures and their significance within the Latin American geography. Thus the study questions how urban centrality has evolved as an essential socio-cultural phenomenon and in this manner decodes the messages transmitted by main spatial arrangements. As a first step, the study discusses the construction of spatial meaning and its structural interpretation. In addition, the concept of centrality is examined in depth and an urban centrality typology is introduced to enable the analysis of spatial structures in socio-cultural terms. These contents are followed by the discussion of the existing approaches to the topic and their limitations. Subsequently, this research reconstructs the configuration of Bogota's spatial structure which is decoded in the last chapter.
The study concludes that the highly fragmented and uneven condition of urban space in Latin America can be read. The case study of Bogota substantiates that there is a code that paradoxically provides spatial cohesiveness within unstable socio-spatial hierarchies. Such a spatial code is deciphered through the reading of Bogota's spatial structure whose super-centre denotes 'the sacralisation of authoritarianism'. This is a 'structural meaning' related to a specific or intrinsic logic of spatial concentration that is useful for the further discussion of socio-spatial patterns and the meanings of Latin American cities. The concluding remarks integrate the main arguments and outline lines of action in spatial planning processes.


Recognizing anatomical structure properties depicted within digital representations may be the first step to conceptual understanding. Comparing stereoscopic and non-stereoscopic visualizations, there is little evidence whether stereoscopic visualisations better support the recognition of anatomical structure properties. Likewise, insufficient indication is given whether working with stereoscopic visualizations is in connection with situational variables such as increased situational intrinsic motivation and decreased visual attention performance. To clarify these queries, the present study focused on two e-learning environments dealing with the anatomy and physiology of the nasal cavity and with the anatomy and physiology of hearing. Participants were 8th grade students and teacher students. Working with stereoscopic imagery instead of non-stereoscopic imagery, both succeeded better in absolving anatomical structure-related tasks such as estimating anatomical spatial-relationships. Working with stereoscopic visualizations neither led to increased situational intrinsic motivation nor to decreased visual attention performance. On the one hand, the results show that stereoscopic visualization technology can be used without having any novelty effects. On the other hand, stereoscopic visualizations can be used without having impairments on visual working memory. Coming from these findings it should be investigated, whether the enhanced performance on anatomical structure-related tasks due to stereoscopic imagery can be used to also enhance conceptual understanding.


Interview with Aletha Barsanti regarding her experiences as the wife of U. S. Army General Olinto Barsanti. They married in 1942. She remembers their courtship in San Antonio; their assignments in Europe, Japan, and Washington, D.C.; raising their children; his activities in the Korean War; his promotion to general; military protocol for the wives of general officers; and his one-year tour in the Vietnam War as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died in May 1973.


Holders of rights sue the intermediately service providers (ISPs) for contributory liability through the ISPs knowledge of infringement specifically for copyright infringement trademark and other rights. Formalism in the light of corrective justice strictly limits ISPs liability to fault based liability theory, but to evaluate ISPs fault gives credit to the probabilistic knowledge that requires ISPs to serve as the police for owners of rights. Furthermore, they are for establishing corrective justice law applies the mathematics though on the knowledge of fault via attempts to achieve all of the answers regarding the measure of evaluating ISPs' knowledge from secondary liability rather than computing philosophy, social science, or realism. Other common theories recognize chief – justice brain or reasonable man mind induced as critical of ISPs' knowledge of infringement. This is in contrast with computing mind philosophy. Research will answer inconsistency of theories and ISP knowledge to protect all parties' rights.


Herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1) is the most common cause of sporadic viral encephalitis, which can be lethal or result in severe neurological defects even with antiviral therapy. While HSV-1 causes encephalitis in spite of HSV-1-specific humoral and cellular immunity, the mechanism by which HSV-1 evades the immune system in the central nervous system (CNS) remains unknown. Here we describe a strategy by which HSV-1 avoids immune targeting in the CNS. The HSV-1 UL13 kinase promotes evasion of HSV-1-specific CD8+ T cell accumulation in infection sites by downregulating expression of the CD8+ T cell attractant chemokine CXCL9 in the CNS of infected mice, leading to increased HSV-1 mortality due to encephalitis. Direct injection of CXCL9 into the CNS infection site enhanced HSV-1-specific CD8+ T cell accumulation, leading to marked improvements in the survival of infected mice. This previously uncharacterized strategy for HSV-1 evasion of CD8+ T cell accumulation in the CNS has important implications for understanding the pathogenesis and clinical treatment of HSV-1 encephalitis.


Ichigo Kurosaki has always been able to see ghosts, but this ability doesn't change his life nearly as much as his close encounter with Rukia Kuchiki, a Soul Reaper and member of the mysterious Soul Society. While fighting a Hollow, an evil spirit that preys on humans who display psychic energy, Rukia attempts to lend Ichigo some of her powers so that he can save his family; but much to her surprise, Ichigo absorbs every last drop of her energy. Now a fully-fledged Soul Reaper himself, Ichigo quickly learns that the world he inhabits is one full of dangerous spirits, and along with Rukia, who is slowly regaining her powers, it's Ichigo's job to both protect the innocent from Hollows and to help the spirits themselves find peace.


REA's MAXnotes for Plato's "Republic" MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.


Complex questions that require inferencing and synthesizing information from multiple documents can be seen as a kind of topic-oriented, informative multi-document summarization where the goal is to produce a single text as a compressed version of a set of documents with a minimum loss of relevant information. In this paper, we experiment with one empirical method and two unsupervised statistical machine learning techniques: K-means and Expectation Maximization (EM), for computing relative importance of the sentences. We compare the results of these approaches. Our experiments show that the empirical approach outperforms the other two techniques and EM performs better than K-means. However, the performance of these approaches depends entirely on the feature set used and the weighting of these features. In order to measure the importance and relevance to the user query we extract different kinds of features (i.e. lexical, lexical semantic, cosine similarity, basic element, tree kernel based syntactic and shallow-semantic) for each of the document sentences. We use a local search technique to learn the weights of the features. To the best of our knowledge, no study has used tree kernel functions to encode syntactic/semantic information for more complex tasks such as computing the relatedness between the query sentences and the document sentences in order to generate query-focused summaries (or answers to complex questions). For each of our methods of generating summaries (i.e. empirical, K-means and EM) we show the effects of syntactic and shallow-semantic features over the bag-of-words (BOW) features.


This Adobe-approved, project-based guide from one of the world's most popular web design authors, David Powers, will teach readers how to progress from designing static websites to building dynamic websites in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. Using step-by-step instructions with projects that build on the knowledge acquired in each lesson, readers will learn about the new PHP features in Dreamweaver CS5, including the ability to work in Live View with WordPress, as well as extended support for PHP code hints, syntax checking, and dynamically related files. Readers will learn how to upload images and send email with attachments using the Zend Framework. In contrast to existing books on the Zend Framework, this book will show web designers and developers with little or no programming experience how to use selected modules to integrate dynamic features into existing sites. There is a strong emphasis on following security best practices. Readers will also learn progressive enhancement techniques for updating pages seamlessly with PHP and Ajax.


Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" will be a cornerstone for personal spirituality and self-improvement for years to come, leading readers to a new levels of consciousness and inner peace. Taking off from the introspective work "The Power of Now", which is a number one bestseller and has sold millions of copies worldwide, Tolle provides the spiritual framework for people to move beyond themselves in order to make this world a better, more spiritually evolved place to live. Shattering modern ideas of ego and entitlement, self and society, Tolle lifts the veil of fear that has hung over humanity during this new millennium, and shines an illuminating light that leads to happiness and health that every reader can follow.


For Kendall's shape space we determine analytically Jacobi fields and parallel transport, and compute geodesic regression. Using the derived expressions, we can fully leverage the geometry via Riemannian optimization and reduce the computational expense by several orders of magnitude. The methodology is demonstrated by performing a longitudinal statistical analysis of epidemiological shape data.

As application example we have chosen 3D shapes of knee bones, reconstructed from image data of the Osteoarthritis Initiative. Comparing subject groups with incident and developing osteoarthritis versus normal controls, we find clear differences in the temporal development of femur shapes. This paves the way for early prediction of incident knee osteoarthritis, using geometry data only.


The article is about AI research in the context of a complex artistic behavior: expressive music performance. A computer program is presented that learns to play piano with 'expression' and that even won an international computer piano performance contest. A superficial analysis of an expressive performance generated by the system seems to suggest creative musical abilities. After a critical discussion of the processes underlying this behavior, we abandon the question of whether the system is really creative, and turn to the true motivation that drives this research: to use AI methods to investigate and better understand music performance as a human creative behavior. A number of recent and current results from our research are briefly presented that indicate that machines can give us interesting insights into such a complex creative behavior, even if they may not be creative themselves.


The steelpan, a Caribbean percussion instrument forged out of resistance and rebellion, was introduced to Edmonton in the 1960s. Over the years, Caribbean heritage students have taken it to play for the school's "Cultural Days" to let others experience some aspects of their culture. In this article, I recount some of their experiences. More importantly, like them I recognize its importance to their cultural and social development and assert that this instrument, which is germane to Caribbean people, can be incorporated into culturally relevant adult education programs for people of Caribbean heritage who are living in Canada. I conclude that because education had been a problematic issue for people of Caribbean heritage in Canada, frameworks that are trustworthy will have to ground any culturally relevant adult education programs. Throughout this article pseudonyms are used to maintain the research participants' identities.


This pest survey card was prepared in the context of the EFSA mandate on plant pest surveillance (M2017-0137) at the request of the European Commission. The purpose of the document is to assist the Member States to plan annual survey activities of quarantine organisms using a statistically sound and risk-based pest survey approach, in line with current international standards. The data requirements for such an activity include the pest distribution, its host range, its biology and risk factors, as well as available detection and identification methods. This document is part of a toolkit that consists of pestspecific documents, such as the pest survey cards, and generic documents relevant for all pests to be surveyed, including the general survey guidelines and statistical software such as RiBESS+. © European Food Safety Authority, 2020


It is now a well known that the next generation devices in many fields of the semiconductor industry will be based on 3D architectures. In this framework, low thermal budget annealing technological solutions are required. For many applications, either in the field of sensors, microprocessors or high density memories, the Laser Thermal Annealing (LTA), an ultrafast and low thermal budget process, is one of the most promising solutions. This UV (308 nm) pulsed laser annealing process has already been adopted in production for the passivation step of BackSide Illuminated CMOS Imaging Sensors, and the contact formation step of power devices. During the annealing process, the high temperature region (e.g. over 1400 °C) needs to be restrained to very thin layers (from nm to μm range) while keeping the underlying fragile layers (metal and bonding) and devices at a lower temperature (e.g. less than 300 °C). In order to offer appropriate annealing solutions to the recent developments in 3D architectures, an accurate modeling of the LTA process is needed. In this work, the goal is to adapt the laser process parameters for various desired junction depths in silicon (Figure 1) conditioned by the multitude of applications. The junction formation is realized in a very fast process (sub-μs) involving melting and diffusion in liquid phase. Therefore, a transient model taking into account the silicon solid/liquid phase change is required. The process parameters that need to be optimized in order to reproduce the experimental data for various annealing conditions are the laser fluency (i.e. energy density) and the pulse shape (characterized by the pulse duration). In this paper we present recent results in LTA process modeling for melt depth control. An excellent agreement is found between simulation and experiment. The advantage given by this modeling is the possibility to predict the effect of LTA parameters on the process. Potential applications for this tool are the process optimization, the process control software or the feasibility studies in case of new devices or process developments for various materials and applications. Figures used in the abstract Figure 1: LTA process schematic example for junction formation in crystalline silicon (c-Si). Melting Depth and junction abruptness depend on laser shot Fluency. Here, the difference between the melt velocity and the dopant diffusion one becomes visible for higher Fluencies.


Original Text (Jones, 1912) A Spendthrift, who had wasted his fortune, and had nothing left but the clothes in which he stood, saw a Swallow one fine day in early spring. Thinking that summer had come, and that he could now do without his coat, he went and sold it for what it would fetch. A change, however, took place in the weather, and there came a sharp frost which killed the unfortunate Swallow. When the Spendthrift saw its dead body he cried, 'Miserable bird! Thanks to you I am perishing of cold myself.'


James, N and de Bono, J and Spears, M and Clarke, NW and Mason, M and Dearnaley, D and Ritchie, A and Amos, C and Gilson, C and Jones, R and Matheson, DJ and Millman, R and Attard, G and Chowdhury, S and Cross, W and Gillessen, S and Parker, C and Russell, M and Berthold, D and Brawley, C and Adab, F and Aung, S and Birtle, AJ and Bowen, J and Brock, S and Chakraborti, P and Ferguson, C and Gale, J and Gray, E and Hingorani, M and Hoskin, P and Lester, J and Malik, Z and McKinna, F and McPhail, N and Money-Kyrle, J and O'Sullivan, J and Parikh, O and Protheroe, A and Robinson, A and Srihari, N and Thomas, C and Wagstaff, J and Wylie, J and Zarkar, A and Parmar, M and Sydes, M (2017) Abiraterone for Prostate Cancer Not Previously Treated with Hormone Therapy. The New England journal of medicine, 377 (4). pp. 338-351. ISSN 0028-4793 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1702900


Understanding and exploiting the abilities of the human visual system is an important part of the design of usable user interfaces and information visualizations. Good design enables quick, easy and veridical perception of key components of that design. An important facet of human vision is its ability to seemingly effortlessly perform "perceptual organization; it transforms individual feature estimates into perception of coherent regions, structures, and objects. We perceive regions grouped by proximity and feature similarity, grouping of curves by good continuation, and grouping of regions of coherent texture. In this paper, we discuss a simple model for a broad range of perceptual grouping phenomena. It takes as input an arbitrary image, and returns a structure describing the predicted visual organization of the image. We demonstrate that this model can capture aspects of traditional design rules, and predicts visual percepts in classic perceptual grouping displays.


When dealing with incomplete data in statistical learning, or incomplete observations in probabilistic inference, one needs to distinguish the fact that a certain event is observed from the fact that the observed event has happened. Since the modeling and computational complexities entailed by maintaining this proper distinction are often prohibitive, one asks for conditions under which it can be safely ignored. Such conditions are given by the missing at random (mar) and coarsened at random (car) assumptions. In this paper we provide an in-depth analysis of several questions relating to mar/car assumptions. Main purpose of our study is to provide criteria by which one may evaluate whether a car assumption is reasonable for a particular data collecting or observational process. This question is complicated by the fact that several distinct versions of mar/car assumptions exist. We therefore first provide an overview over these different versions, in which we highlight the distinction between distributional and coarsening variable induced versions. We show that distributional versions are less restrictive and sufficient for most applications. We then address from two different perspectives the question of when the mar/car assumption is warranted. First we provide a "static" analysis that characterizes the admissibility of the car assumption in terms of the support structure of the joint probability distribution of complete data and incomplete observations. Here we obtain an equivalence characterization that improves and extends a recent result by Grunwald and Halpern. We then turn to a "procedural" analysis that characterizes the admissibility of the car assumption in terms of procedural models for the actual data (or observation) generating process. The main result of this analysis is that the stronger coarsened completely at random (ccar) condition is arguably the most reasonable assumption, as it alone corresponds to data coarsening procedures that satisfy a natural robustness property.


The intention of this thesis was to characterise the effect of naturally occurring multivalent cations like Calcium and Aluminium on the structure of Soil Organic Matter (SOM) as well as on the sorption behaviour of SOM for heavy metals such as lead.
The first part of this thesis describes the results of experiments in which the Al and Ca cation content was changed for various samples originated from soils and peats of different regions in Germany. The second part focusses on SOM-metal cation precipitates to study rigidity in dependence of the cation content. In the third part the effects of various cation contents in SOM on the binding strength of Pb cations were characterised by using a cation exchange resin as desorption method.
It was found for soil and peat samples as well as precipitates that matrix rigidity was affected by both type and content of cation. The influence of Ca on rigidity was less pronounced than the influence of Al and of Pb used in the precipitation experiments. For each sample one cation content was identified where matrix rigidity was most pronounced. This specific cation content is below the cation saturation as expected by cation exchange capacity. These findings resulted in a model describing the relation between cation type, content and the degree of networking in SOM. For all treated soil and precipitate samples a step transition like glass transition was observed, determined by the step transition temperature T*. It is known from literature that this type of step transition is due to bridges between water molecules and organic functional groups in SOM. In contrast to the glass transition temperature this thermal event is slowly reversing after days or weeks depending on the re-conformation of the water molecules. Therefore, changes of T* with different cation compositions in the samples are explained by the formation of water-molecule-cation bridges between SOM-functional groups. No influence on desorption kinetics of lead for different cation compositions in soil samples was observed. Therefore it can be assumed that the observed changes of matrix rigidity are highly reversible by changing the water status, pH or putting agitation energy by shaking in there.


In this article, we consider the quasistatic boundary value problems of linear elasticity and nonlinear elastoplasticity, with linear Hooke's law in the elastic regime for both problems and with the linear kinematic hardening law for the plastic regime in the latter problem. We derive expressions and estimates for the difference of the solutions of both models, i.e. for the stresses, the strains and the displacements. To this end, we use the stop and play operators of nonlinear functional analysis. Further, we give an explicit example of a homotopy between the solutions of both problems.


Perfect your photos and images with this focused guide to the latest version of Photoshop Elements For most of us, the professional-level Photoshop is overkill for our needs. Amateur photographers and photo enthusiasts turn to Photoshop Elements for a powerful but simpler way to edit and retouch their snapshots. Photoshop Elements 9 For Dummies, fully updated and revised for the latest release of this software product, helps you navigate Elements to create, edit, fix, share, and organize the high-quality images you desire. Full color pages bring the techniques to life and make taking great photos fun and easy. Introduces you to the work area Shows you how to upload images to your computer Reviews ways to view, find, organize, and manage your photos Details how to modify your photos to your specifications Distills working with layers, contrast, color, clarity, filter, effects, styles, and type Explains how to print your creations, create a slide show, and optimize images for the Web Written by veteran digital imaging and print authors Barbara Obermeier and Ted Padova, this handy reference is a highly readable and enjoyable way to learn this powerful image editing application.


This essay, prepared for the Notre Dame Law Review's Symposium, "The American Congress: Legal Implications of Gridlock," considers three ways in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1937 Court-packing bill was related to the phenomenon of gridlock in the 1930s. First, as FDR's public remarks on the subject demonstrate, he believed that the early New Deal was a victim of partisan gridlock between the Democrat-controlled political branches and the Republican-controlled judiciary. Moreover, he did not believe that the impasse could be overcome through an amendment to the Constitution, for he regarded Article V's supermajority requirements as virtually encoding gridlock into the amendment process. The Court-packing bill was thus a response to that interbranch gridlock. Second, the bill was itself a casualty of gridlock within Congress owing to two institutional features of that body: the committee system, and the Senate filibuster. Third, the Court-packing fight helped to cement a bi-partisan anti-New Deal coalition in Congress that mobilized to frustrate much of the President's second-term agenda, resulting in gridlock between the President and Congress. The Court-packing controversy thus managed, in a single, high-profile episode, to present in sharp relief and in a variety of configurations the gridlock-related implications of several features of our political and constitutional system.


The conflict between the Colombian government and armed Marxist guerillas that began in the mid 1960s have left over 3 million people as refugees in their own country. Not often mentioned in the world media, these internally displaced people (IDPs) are a part of everyday life in the South-American country of Colombia. The IDPs often live deplorable conditions, in constant fear of arbitrary killings with no long-term solution in sight. This creates a precarious humanitarian situation. The Colombian IDP problem is labeled one of the world's forgotten crises by the Norwegian branch of Doctors Without Borders (MSF).


The term "Augmented Reality (AR)" denotes the superposition of additional virtual objects and supplementary information over real images. The joint project Enhanced Reality (ER)1 aims at a generic AR-system. The ER-project is a cooperation of six different research groups of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Koblenz-Landau. According to Ronald Azuma an AR-system combines real and virtual environments, where the real and virtual objects are registered in 3-D, and it provides interactivity in real time [Azu97]. Enhanced Reality extends Augmented Reality by requiring the virtual objects to be seamlessly embedded into the real world as photo-realistic objects according to the exact lighting conditions. Furthermore, additional information supplying value-added services may be displayed and interaction of the user may even be immersive. The short-term goal of the ER-project is the exploration of ER-fundamentals using some specific research scenarios; the long-term goal is the development of a component-based ER-framework for the creation of ER-applications for arbitrary application areas. ER-applications are developed as single-user applications for users who are moving in a real environment and are wearing some kind of visual output device like see-through glasses and some mobile end device. By these devices the user is able to see reality as it is, but he can also see the virtual objects and the additional information about some value-added service. Furthermore he might have additional devices whereby he can interact with the available virtual objects. The development of a generic framework for ER-applications requires the definition of generic components which are customizable and composable to build concrete applications and it requires a homogeneous data model which supports all components equally well. The workgroup "Software Technology"2 is responsible for this subproject. This report gives some preliminary results concerning the derivation of a component-based view of ER. There are several augmented reality frameworks like ARVIKA, AMIRE, DWARF, MORGAN, Studierstube and others which offer some support for the development of AR-applications. All of them ease the use of existing subsystems like AR-Toolkit, OpenGL and others and leverage the generation process for realistic systems by making efficient use of those subsystems. Consequently, they highly rely on them.


Gates are a new notation for representing mixture models and context-sensitive independence in factor graphs. Factor graphs provide a natural representation for message-passing algorithms, such as expectation propagation. However, message passing in mixture models is not well captured by factor graphs unless the entire mixture is represented by one factor, because the message equations have a containment structure. Gates capture this containment structure graphically, allowing both the independences and the message-passing equations for a model to be readily visualized. Different variational approximations for mixture models can be understood as different ways of drawing the gates in a model. We present general equations for expectation propagation and variational message passing in the presence of gates.


The discrete nature of the dispersed phase (swarm of droplet) in stirred and pulsed liquid-liquid extraction columns makes its mathematical modelling of such complex system a tedious task. The dispersed phase is considered as a population of droplets distributed randomly with respect to their internal properties (such as: droplet size and solute concentration) at a specific location in space. Hence, the population balance equation has been emerged as a mathematical tool to model and describe such complex behaviour. However, the resulting model is too complicated. Accordingly, the analytical solution of such a mathematical model does not exist except for particular cases. Therefore, numerical solutions are resorted to in general. This is due to the inherent nonlinearities in the convective and diffusive terms as well as the appearance of many integrals in the source term. However, modelling and simulation of liquid extraction columns is not an easy task because of the discrete nature of the dispersed phase, which consist of population of droplets. The natural frame work for taking this into account is the population balance approach.
In part of this doctoral thesis work, a rigours mathematical model based on the bivariate population balance frame work (the base of LLECMOD ''Liquid-Liquid Extraction Column Module'') for the steady state and dynamic simulation of pulsed (sieve plate and packed) liquid-liquid extraction columns is developed. The model simulates the coupled hydrodynamic and mass transfer for pulsed (packed and sieve plate) extraction columns. The model is programmed using visual digital FORTRAN and then integrated into the LLECMOD program. Within LLECMOD the user can simulate different types of extraction columns including stirred and pulsed ones. The basis of LLECMOD depends on stable robust numerical algorithms based on an extended version of a fixed pivot technique after Attarakih et al., 2003 (to take into account interphase solute transfer) and advanced computational fluid dynamics numerical methods. Experimental validated correlations are used for the estimation of the droplet terminal velocity in extraction columns based on single and swarm droplet experiments in laboratory scale devices. Additionally, recent published correlations for turbulent energy dissipation, droplet breakage and coalescence frequencies are discussed as been used in this version of LLECMOD. Moreover, coalescence model from literature derived from a stochastical description have been modified to fit the deterministic population model. As a case study, LLECMOD is used here to simulate the steady state performance of pulsed extraction columns under different operating conditions, which include pulsation intensity and volumetric flow rates are simulated. The effect of pulsation intensity (on the holdup, mean droplet diameter and solute concentration) is found to have more profound effect on systems of high interfacial tension. On the hand, the variation of volumetric flow rates have substantial effect on the holdup, mean droplet diameter and solute concentration profiles for chemical systems with low interfacial tension. Two chemical test systems recommended by the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (water-acetone (solute)-n-butyl acetate and water-acetone (solute)-toluene) and an industrial test system are used in the simulation. Model predictions are successfully validated against steady state and transient experimental data, where good agreements are achieved. The simulated results (holdup, mean droplet diameter and mass transfer profiles) compared to the experimental data show that LLECMOD is a powerful simulation tool, which can efficiently predict the dynamic and steady state performance of pulsed extraction columns.
In other part of this doctoral thesis work, the steady state performance of extraction columns is studied taking into account the effect of dispersed phase inlet condition (light or heavy phase is dispersed) and the direction of mass transfer (from continuous to dispersed phase and vice versa) using the population balance framework. LLECMOD, a program that uses multivariate population balance models, is extended to take into account the direction of mass transfer and the dispersed phase inlet. As a case study, LLECMOD is used to simulate pilot plant RDC columns where the steady state mean flow properties (dispersed phase hold up and droplet mean diameter) and the solute concentration profiles are compared to the available experimental data. Three chemical systems were used: sulpholane–benzene–n-heptane, water–acetone–toluene and water–acetone–n-butyl acetate. The dispersed phase inlet and the direction of mass transfer as well as the chemical system physical properties are found to have profound effect on the steady state performance of the RDC column. For example, the mean droplet diameter is found to persist invariant when the heavy phase is dispersed and the extractor efficiency is higher when the direction of mass transfer is from the continuous to the dispersed phase. For the purpose of experimental validation, it is found that LLECMOD predictions are in good agreement with the available experimental data concerning the dispersed phase hold up, mean droplet diameter and solute concentration profiles in both phases.
In a further part of this doctoral thesis, a mathematical model is developed for liquid extraction columns based on the multivariate population balance equation (PBE) and the primary secondary particle method (PSPM) introduced by Attarakih, 2010 (US Patent Application: 0100106467). It is extended to include the momentum balance for the dispersed phase. The advantage of momentum balance is to eliminate the need for often conflicting correlations used in estimating the terminal velocity of single and swarm of droplets. The resulting mathematical model is complex due to the integral nature of the population balance equation. To reduce the complexity of this model, while maintaining most of the information drawn from the continuous population balance equation, the concept of the PSPM is used. Based on the multivariate population balance equation and the PSPM a mathematical model is developed for any liquid extraction column. The secondary particle could be envisaged as a fluid particle carrying information about the distribution as it is evolved in space and time, in the meanwhile the primary particles carry the mean properties of the population such as total droplet concentration; mean droplet diameter dispersed phase hold up and so on. This information reflects the particle-particle interactions (breakage and coalescence) and transport (convection and diffusion). The developed model is discretized in space using a first-order upwind method, while semi-implicit first-order scheme in time is used to simulate a pilot plant RDC extraction column. Here the effect of the number of primary particles (classes) on the final predicted solution is investigated. Numerical results show that the solution converge fast even as the number of primary particle is increased. The terminal droplet velocity of the individual primary particle is found the most sensitive to the number of primary particles. Other mean population properties like the droplet mean diameter, mean hold up and the concentration profiles are also found to converge along the column height by increasing the number of primary particles. The predicted steady state profiles (droplet diameter, holdup and the concentration profiles) along a pilot RDC extraction column are compared to the experimental data where good agreement is achieved.
In addition to this a robust rigorous mathematical model based on the bivariate population balance equation is developed to predict the steady state and dynamic behaviour of the interacting hydrodynamics and mass transfer in Kuhni extraction columns. The developed model is extended to include the momentum balance for the calculation of the droplet velocity. The effects of step changes in the important input variables (such as volumetric flow rates, rotational speed, inlet solute concentrations etc.) on the output variables (dispersed phase holdup, mean droplet diameter and the concentration profiles) are investigated.
The last topic of this doctoral thesis is developed to transient problems. The unsteady state analysis reveals the fact that the largest time constant (slowest response) is due to the mass transfer. On the contrary, the hydrodynamic response of the dispersed phase holdup is very fast when compared to the mass transfer due to the relative fast motion of the dispersed droplets with respect to the continuous phase. The dynamic behaviour of the dispersed and continuous phases shows a lag time that increases away from the feed points of both phases. Moreover, the solute concentration response shows a highly nonlinear behaviour due to both positive and negative step changes in the input variables. The simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental ones and show the usefulness of the model.


In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career "In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin--seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French--convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy. When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of 1778; and helped to negotiate the peace of 1783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man. In A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerges a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.


Winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, an "elegant and haunting novel of war, art and memory" (The Independent) from the critically acclaimed author of The Gift of Rain. Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes." Then she can design a garden for herself. As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?


Wannier-Stark states for semiconductor superlattices in strong static fields, where the interband Landau-Zener tunneling cannot be neglected, are rigorously calculated. The lifetime of these metastable states was found to show multiscale oscillations as a function of the static field, which is explained by an interaction with above-barrier resonances. An equation, expressing the absorption spectrum of semiconductor superlattices in terms of the resonance Wannier-Stark states is obtained and used to calculate the absorption spectrum in the region of high static fields.


A graph $\Gamma$ with diameter $d$ is strongly distance-regular if $\Gamma$ is distance-regular and its distance-$d$ graph $\Gamma _d$ is strongly regular. The known examples are all the connected strongly regular graphs (i.e. $d=2$), all the antipodal distance-regular graphs, and some distance-regular graphs with diameter $d=3$. The main result in this paper is a characterization of these graphs (among regular graphs with $d$ distinct eigenvalues), in terms of the eigenvalues, the sum of the multiplicities corresponding to the eigenvalues with (non-zero) even subindex, and the harmonic mean of the degrees of the distance-$d$ graph.


This report gives an insight into basics of stress field simulations for geothermal reservoirs.
The quasistatic equations of poroelasticity are deduced from constitutive equations, balance
of mass and balance of momentum. Existence and uniqueness of a weak solution is shown.
In order of to find an approximate solution numerically, usage of the so–called method of
fundamental solutions is a promising way. The idea of this method as well as a sketch of
how convergence may be proven are given.


Given a special focus on Design for Environment (DfE) methods and tools, the objectives of this thesis are to, "Identify basic design-related requirements that a method or tool should fulfill in order to become actively used by engineering designers", and to "Investigate how those basic requirements could be used to make DfE methods and tools more actively used in industry among engineering designers". The research has shown that designers in general have three main purposes for utilizing methods and tools, of which the last two could be seen as subsets of the first one. The purposes are to: (1) facilitate various kinds of communication within the product development process; (2) integrate knowledge and experience into the methods and tools as a know-how backup; and (3) contribute with structure in the product development process. The low degree of follow-up implies a risk that methods and tools are used that affect the work within the company in a negative way. In order to be able to better follow-up methods and tools regarding both their utilization and usefulness, there is a need for a better definition of requirements for methods and tools. Most of all designers' related requirements are related to their' aims to fulfill the product performance and keep down the development time. This can be concluded as four major requirements, that a DfE method or tool, as well as a common method or tool, must exhibit: (1) be easy to adopt and implement, (2) facilitate designers to fulfill specified requirements on the presumptive product, and at the same time (3) reduce the risk that important elements in the product development phase are forgotten. Both these two latter requirements relate to a method or tool's degree of appropriateness. The second and the third requirements are related to the fourth requirement, which is found to be the most important: that the use of the method or tool (4) must reduce the total calendar time (from start to end) to solve the task. The conclusion is that DfE methods and tools must be designed to comply to a higher degree with the main users - in this case the designers' requirements for methods and tools


Why is Europe's great monetary endeavor, the Euro, in trouble? A string of economic difficulties in Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and other Eurozone nations has left observers wondering whether the currency union can survive. In this book, Markus Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau argue that the core problem with the Euro lies in the philosophical differences between the founding countries of the Eurozone, particularly Germany and France. But the authors also show how these seemingly incompatible differences can be reconciled to ensure Europe's survival. As the authors demonstrate, Germany, a federal state with strong regional governments, saw the Maastricht Treaty, the framework for the Euro, as a set of rules. France, on the other hand, with a more centralized system of government, saw the framework as flexible, to be overseen by governments. The authors discuss how the troubles faced by the Euro have led its member states to focus on national, as opposed to collective, responses, a reaction explained by the resurgence of the battle of economic ideas: rules vs. discretion, liability vs. solidarity, solvency vs. liquidity, austerity vs. stimulus. Weaving together economic analysis and historical reflection, The Euro and the Battle of Ideas provides a forensic investigation and a road map for Europe's future.


This article argues that civil marriage and democracy are inherently incompatible, whether they are assessed from a trans-cultural perspective that reduces them to their most universal aspects, or from a culturally situated perspective that accounts for their uniquely American elaborations. Across virtually all cultures, civil marriage privileges sexual partners by offering them exclusive access to highly desirable government benefits, while democracy presupposes liberty and equality. When governments privilege sexual partners, they effectively deprive their citizens of liberty by encouraging them to enter sexual partnerships rather than self-determining based on their own preferences; they effectively deprive their citizens of equality by establishing an insidious status hierarchy. While some deprivations of liberty and equality are justified – for example, those that promote social welfare – this article argues that those resulting from civil marriage are emphatically unjustified. The incompatibility that exists on a trans-cultural level is magnified when one considers civil marriage and democracy in their American elaborations. American civil marriage privileges not only sexual partners but also religious, patriarchal, and heterosexist ideologies, while American democracy presupposes respect for the Due Process, Equal Protection, Establishment, and Free Speech Clauses. Even if American civil marriage could be stripped of its religious, patriarchal, and heterosexist aspects, it would remain an essentially undemocratic institution due to its inherent privileging of sexual partners. Inasmuch as American civil marriage cannot be democratized, this article argues that it should be abolished. It does not, however, propose (as some have) that American civil marriage be replaced by a relatively analogous "civil union" regime. It instead proposes that states remove themselves entirely from the business of affirming sexual partnerships. It explains that abolishing civil marriage would not only enhance American democracy, but also enable states to reallocate their resources away from sexual partners and toward individual providers. While sexual partners do not necessarily deserve government benefits, individuals who provide for dependents do – yet they are often denied such benefits under our current system. It should be emphasized that this article applies only to civil marriage, and does not propose to limit the ability of sexual partners to celebrate their commitments through private ceremonies or to dissolve their relationships according to the terms of private contracts.


Universal embeddings, such as BERT or ELMo, are useful for a broad set of natural language processing tasks like text classification or sentiment analysis. Moreover, specialized embeddings also exist for tasks like topic modeling or named entity disambiguation. We study if we can complement these universal embeddings with specialized embeddings. We conduct an in-depth evaluation of nine well known natural language understanding tasks with SentEval. Also, we extend SentEval with two additional tasks to the medical domain. We present PubMedSection, a novel topic classification dataset focussed on the biomedical domain. Our comprehensive analysis covers 11 tasks and combinations of six embeddings. We report that combined embeddings outperform state of the art universal embeddings without any embedding fine-tuning. We observe that adding topic model based embeddings helps for most tasks and that differing pre-training tasks encode complementary features. Moreover, we present new state of the art results on the MPQA and SUBJ tasks in SentEval.


Debates over "originalism" have been a central focus of contemporary constitutional theory for three decades. One of the features of this debate has been disagreement about what "originalism" is. More worrisome is the possibility that the arguments between contemporary originalists and their opponents, the "living constitutionalists", are confused – with each side of the debate making erroneous assumptions about the content of their opponent's theories.The aim of this chapter is to clarify these debates by providing a history of contemporary originalism and then developing an account of the core or focal content of originalist theory. The history reveals that contemporary originalist theory has evolved – the mainstream of originalist theory began with an emphasis on the original intentions of the framers but has gradually moved to the view that the "original meaning" of the constitution is the "original public meaning" of the text. Even today, originalists disagree among themselves about a variety of important questions, including the normative justification for a constitutional practice that adheres to original meaning. Despite evolution and continued disagreement, however, contemporary originalist theory has a core of agreement on two propositions. First, almost all originalists agree that the linguistic meaning of each constitutional provision was fixed at the time that provision was adopted. Second, originalists agree that our constitutional practice both is (albeit imperfectly) and should be committed to the principle that the original meaning of the Constitution constrains judicial practice.The question whether living constitutionalists actually disagree with these core principles of originalist theory is a complex one. On one interpretation, living constitutionalism and originalism are (mostly) compatible: the constitution lives inside the "construction zone," the boundaries of which are marked by the original meaning of the text. On another interpretation, living constitutionalism is incompatible with originalism: living constitutional doctrine and practices can override even original meaning of the text, even when that meaning is clear.


This book presents the mysterious formula that rules art, nature, and science. This book deals with the Divine Proportion, a secret code that rules art, nature, and science. It is known by many names: Golden Mean, Sacred Cut and Phi are only a few; and it is not by chance that the Divine Proportion was given its name. It has been called divine because over thousands of years it has been deemed to be so.The Divine Proportion reveals a number of simple patterns: It is seen in the seed patterns of fruits, the family tree of bees, the pyramids of Egypt, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, the human body, shells...the list is endless.Mathematicians use the Greek symbol F to represent the Divine Proportion and equate it to a number that is defined by the ratio (1 + v5) / 2 or 1.6180339...Numbers do little, however, in describing this unique ratio that is found everywhere in nature and for 2500 years has been an aesthetic guide in art and architecture.Beginning with calculations found on clay tablets in ancient Babylon, the story of Divine Proportion can be traced alongside the history of numbers to the fractals of the digital age. As its many forms unfold we uncover the Golden Rectangle in the Parthenon, Golden Spirals in the human inner ear, a Golden Angle in the petal patterns of a rose, and the Fibonacci numbers in lilies, daisies, pineapples, and in our own DNA.With its natural balance and elegant beauty, the Divine Proportion is a perpetual reminder that our hope for regeneration and continuity lies in realizing the meaningful and harmonious relationship of all the parts to the whole.


Many international business leaders consider a global mind-set desirable, but few know how to embed it companywide. A corporate global mind-set differs from having a few managers think globally. That comes first. But global thinking must be incorporated into an organization's processes so that everyone knows how to handle the tug-of-war between local responsiveness and corporate efficiency.

Two Northeastern University professors studied global companies and found that inculcating a corporate global mind-set lagged behind the will to do so. IBM made the most progress. Having originally overemphasized global consistency, it learned to embrace a more flexible approach, adopting global-policy-development teams, worldwide knowledge networks and appropriate performance measures.

Unfortunately, many American executives regard globalization as pursuing standardized products through centralized decision making. In favoring global consistency, they often fail to secure local cooperation. Through a global mind-set, corporate-decision-making processes become more permeable to influences from beyond the home country. The authors show how managers can determine when an issue calls for a locally adaptive response, when it calls for a globally consistent response and when both elements are needed. The corporate global mind-set is a requirement for motivating a diverse and sprawling work force and giving it a common purpose.


The Georgia Institute of Technology‐Goddard Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model is used to simulate the aerosol optical thickness t for major types of tropospheric aerosols including sulfate, dust, organic carbon (OC), black carbon (BC), and sea salt. The GOCART model uses a dust emission algorithm that quantifies the dust source as a function of the degree of topographic depression, and a biomass burning emission source that includes seasonal and interannual variability based on satellite observations. Results presented here show that on global average, dust aerosol has the highest t at 500 nm (0.051), followed by sulfate (0.040), sea salt (0.027), OC (0.017), and BC (0.007). There are large geographical and seasonal variations of t, controlled mainly by emission, transport, and hygroscopic properties of aerosols. The model calculated total ts at 500 nm have been compared with the satellite retrieval products from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) over both land and ocean and from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) over the ocean. The model reproduces most of the prominent features in the satellite data, with an overall agreement within a factor of 2 over the aerosol source areas and outflow regions. While there are clear differences among the satellite products, a major discrepancy between the model and the satellite data is that the model shows a stronger variation of t from source to remote regions. Quantitative comparison of model and satellite data is still difficult, due to the large uncertainties involved in deriving the t values by both the model and satellite retrieval, and by the inconsistency in physical and optical parameters used between the model and the satellite retrieval. The comparison of monthly averaged model results with the sun photometer network [Aerosol Robotics Network (AERONET)] measurements shows that the model reproduces the seasonal variations at most of the sites, especially the places where biomass burning or dust aerosol dominates.


A review of:

Todd, Ross J. "Student Learning Through Ohio School Libraries: A Summary of the Ohio Research Study." Ohio Educational Library Media Association 15 Dec. 2003. Ohio Educational Library Media Association (OELMA), 2004. 15 Nov. 2006
 http://www.oelma.org/StudentLearning/documents/OELMAResearchStudy8page.pdf .

Objective – This study explored links between school libraries and student learning outcomes that were defined in a multidimensional context, using data provided by the students themselves. The researchers examined learning outcomes that reached beyond the existing correlations of school library services and standardized test scores. Insight was provided into the interactions between students and school libraries that affect student learning. An overarching goal of the study was to establish ongoing dialogue to focus on evidence based practices that may lead to continuous improvement in school library services and to provide the basis for further research.

Design – Web based survey.

Subjects – Participants were 13,123 students in grades 3-12 and 879 faculty at 39 schools across the state.

Setting – Ohio Public school libraries.
Methods – Thirty-nine effective school libraries, staffed by credentialed school librarians, were chosen through a judgment sampling process, using criteria based on Ohio Guidelines for Effective School Library Media Programs. The guidelines are aligned to academic content standards, assessments, resources, and professional development.

Two web based surveys were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from students and faculty: The Impacts on Learning Survey, composed of Likert scale responses to 48 statements and an open-ended critical incident question for students.
 The Perceptions of Learning Impacts Survey was a similar survey for faculty.

Survey questions were based on Dervin's theory of information seeking that advances the idea of 'helps' as the constructive process of bridging gaps in information use that lead to new knowledge or making sense (sense-making) in relation to a perceived information need (Todd and Kuhlthau). The term 'helps' includes both inputs (help that the school library provides in engaging students in learning) and outputs (learning outcomes of academic achievement and active agency in the learning process).
The survey statements included a combination of conclusions based on selections from school library research studies, and the Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning from the American Association of School Librarians' Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning.

The two surveys were used to triangulate multiple sources of data to illustrate the "helps" provided by the school library to student learning. Students were also given the opportunity to describe "helps" in their own words in an open-ended critical incident question.

Main results – The data showed that the selected effective school libraries were perceived as providing 'helps' in dynamic ways that appeared to have a transformative effect on student learning. School libraries and librarians were viewed as having an active role in the learning process. Of the students surveyed, 99.4 % believed that school libraries helped them become better learners. The results were grouped into seven blocks of 'help' concepts that frame the contributions of the school library and the school librarian to student learning (Table 1).
The study noted that perceptions of the effect of school libraries are strongest for elementary students, and perceptions of the effect decrease as students move through middle and high school. Comments from students indicate that mastery of information skills that lead to independent learning may contribute to the perception that the library is not as strong a 'help' in later school years.
In ranking the mean scores of the block concepts, the effective school library ranked strongest as a resource agent and technical agent, to support student research and projects with both print and non-print resources. The qualitative data further clarified student perceptions that the library contributed to individualized learning, knowledge construction, and academic achievement. Instructional interventions that benefited from contributions by the librarian included conducting research effectively; identifying key ideas; analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information; and developing personal conclusions.
In comparing student and faculty data, there was consistency in the perception of value in the top three conceptual groups of "helps": libraries as resource agents, as agents for information literacy development, and as agents for knowledge construction.
Conclusion – The data analysis illustrated that school libraries were actively involved in student learning and were perceived as important factors in student learning and achievement by both students and faculty. Consistency throughout the sample showed perceptions of multiple effects of school
libraries in facilitating student learning for building knowledge.
Student comments and survey results showed that students perceived the library as providing strong support for reading for curriculum and informational needs and as less helpful with regard to individual reading for pleasure or personal pursuits. The study speculates that perhaps the emphasis on academics and test-oriented schooling may leave students little time to pursue independent reading interests during school hours.

The study identified factors for effective school libraries: informational, transformational, and formational elements. These factors may be used as building blocks for shaping practices that help effective school libraries bring about student achievement. Informational: Resources, technological infrastructure, and reading resources.
 Transformational: Information literacy, technological literacy, and reading engagement.
 Formational: Knowledge creation, use, production, dissemination, values, and reading literacy.
The visual model of the factors for effective practice and their relationship to student outcomes will be of particular help to practitioners. (Todd and Kuhlthau 23)


Agent modeling -- the ability to model and reason other agents' knowledge, beliefs, goals, and actions -- is central to intelligent interaction. The Workshop on Agent Modeling, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, was organized to bring together researchers working in these areas to assess the state of the art and discuss the common issues in representation and reasoning with models of agents.


Australian consumer law gives inadequate protection to consumers who have purchased defective goods. Surveys show that there is widespread lack of awareness of consumer rights. Detriment is caused to consumers by uncertainty and inadequacies in the law. Most significantly, because the law determines the period for which goods must be durable by applying a test of reasonableness, there is uncertainty about how long particular types of goods should last and, because consumers lack the money, time and persistence to take such matters to court, suppliers are effectively left free to determine the duration of warranties. The paper examines data obtained from consumer surveys and the recommendations contained in the recent Commonwealth Consumer Affairs Advisory Council report. It ends with a proposed model code which would contain a provision imposing on all consumer contracts an implied guarantee that goods were of satisfactory quality. The code would define 'satisfactory quality' as including a requirement of durability. Where a consumer brought an action against a supplier for breach of the implied term, the onus would be on the supplier to prove that it was unreasonable for the goods to be durable for the period as the consumer asserted they should be. By imposing the burden of litigation on suppliers wanting to prove the inapplicability of the guarantee (rather than, as at present, placing the burden on consumers to prove that it was reasonable for goods to be durable for a specific period), the law would alter the behaviour of suppliers by extending the period during which they would be prepared to give redress to consumers in order to avoid litigation.


First published in 1984, a picture book in which the Little Mouse will do all he can to save his strawberry from the Big, Hungry Bear, even if it means sharing it with the reader. The Little Mouse and the Big Hungry Bear are known and loved by millions of children around the world. Little Mouse loves strawberries, but so does the bear...How will Little Mouse stop the bear from eating his freshly picked, red, ripe strawberry.


This publication provides an overview of forest resource attributes for Missouri based on an annual inventory conducted by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program at the Northern Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service. These estimates, along with web-posted core tables, will be updated annually. For more information please refer to page 4 of this report.


This article declares the connotation of the Urban Land Ecosystem Health by ecological economics theory and method based on the study of ecosystem health. Besides, this paper constructs the evaluation system composed of "Vigor-Organization-Resilience-Ecosystem service function-Lifestyle" to analyse the urban land ecosystem healthy status in Chengdu city, and the evaluation results are calculated by parametric synthesis method. The results indicate that the system has been generally getting healthier from 2001 to 2009, ending up with a relative stable state in recent years, which is attributed to a series of policies. Thus, it is necessary for the government to take measures to spur the city vigor release, resilience and service enhancement, and a positive attitude towards the urban land ecosystem healthy protection should be established among the public.


School-based assessment (SBA) approach in evaluating students' academic progress was officially introduced by the Ministry of Education Malaysia and implemented in-line with the Standards-based Primary School Curriculum, in stages starting in 2011 as part of Malaysia educational reform. Under this approach, teachers are given greater responsibility to design quality assessments that align with their students' learning outcomes Hence, the objectives of this qualitative case study is focused on how the newly introduced assessment approach has benefits the teaching and learning process in evaluating Year 1 academic progress in three urban Chinese primary schools. Data collected from interviews involving three Year 1 Chinese language teachers found that teachers have very positive perspectives towards SBA and that overall both teachers and students have benefited from this system. However, there are also weaknesses that need to be acknowledged and improvements to be made. The findings implicate that for SBA to be successful, teachers need to be creative, using varying strategies in their teaching and exploiting repertoire of methods in assessing their students. Further study on the matter is inevitable in ensuring the success of SBA's implementation.


Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students' and new attorneys' knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close work on legal writing assignments provides a unique opportunity for less-experienced attorneys to engage in meaningful dialogue with more-experienced attorneys, with the assignment acting as a catalyst for the transfer of knowledge of law and legal practice from expert to novice; and lastly, meaningful feedback on legal writing provides an opportunity for more-experienced attorneys to evaluate and critique a less-experienced attorney's thinking, including her analysis of substantive law and legal concepts, as well as her professional decision-making. Indeed, legal writing projects afford legal novices an invaluable opportunity to apply their knowledge of the law, engage legal experts through work on discrete matters, and receive useful individual guidance on the substance of their work and their judgment on practice matters. While legal writing classes are well-established as fundamental courses in the modern law school curriculum, particularly during the first year, the many benefits of legal writing have not been fully realized in law school teaching. Given recent demands for law schools to produce students who are better prepared to meet the demands of legal practice, the time has come for law schools to take a fresh look at the role of writing in legal education. This Article articulates a plan for law schools going forward that will help bridge the gap that currently exists between legal theory and practice in legal education. The paper argues that to better prepare law students for practice, law school teaching must consistently go beyond the acquisition of knowledge of the law, and more frequently include the application of this knowledge to a client's legal problem. As legal writing provides a particularly useful opportunity for students to engage in the meaningful study of law and to apply their knowledge of law in a practice context, this Article brings legal writing into the current "practice-ready" debate. This Article urges law schools to rethink the role that legal writing can play in preparing students for the challenges of today's legal practice, and to increase the quantity and quality of legal writing practice opportunities in their curriculums.


In this thesis we develop a shape optimization framework for isogeometric analysis in the optimize first–discretize then setting. For the discretization we use
isogeometric analysis (iga) to solve the state equation, and search optimal designs in a space of admissible b-spline or nurbs combinations. Thus a quite
general class of functions for representing optimal shapes is available. For the
gradient-descent method, the shape derivatives indicate both stopping criteria and search directions and are determined isogeometrically. The numerical treatment requires solvers for partial differential equations and optimization methods, which introduces numerical errors. The tight connection between iga and geometry representation offers new ways of refining the geometry and analysis discretization by the same means. Therefore, our main concern is to develop the optimize first framework for isogeometric shape optimization as ground work for both implementation and an error analysis. Numerical examples show that this ansatz is practical and case studies indicate that it allows local refinement.


Oil spillage is one of the environmental problems faced by Zimbabwe in terms of land contamination with hazardous substances. In Zimbabwe the environmental management act calls for the remediation of oil contaminated sites with best remedial techniques which will remove all the contaminants. This research was done to prove the effectiveness of bio gel in Zimbabwe. Contaminated sites which included the old generator area, fuel storage area and basement area had soil samples and their replicates taken at various depths of 0-30cm, 30-60cm and 60-90 cm. These were analyzed for pH and Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons (TPH) at Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDC) Laboratory. Multivariate analysis was done using General Linear Model in SPSS version 16.0 statistical software to determine the difference in biodegradation of petroleum hydrocarbon concentration across the sites with change in time and depths. From this study it was concluded that bio gel is effective in removing oils on oil contaminated soils. There was generally a marked decrease in the 0-30cm depth than in 30-60cm and 60-90cm. It was observed that the highest degradation occurred between week 6 and week 8 in the 0-30cm depth. There was an average of 63.4% reduction in the 0-30cm depth at the basement areas and 68.2% reduction in the fuel tanks. The Least Significant Difference Post Hoc tests indicated significant difference in TPH (P<0.05) between weeks. The Least Significant Difference (LSD) Post Hoc tests also indicated significant difference (P<0.05) across sites but there was an insignificant difference between basement area 2 (BS2) and old generator (OG) which was the control.


In this paper, we explore methods for comparing agent behavior with human behavior to assist with validation. Our exploration begins by considering a simple method of behavior comparison. Motivated by shortcomings in this initial approach, we introduce behavior bounding, an automated model-based approach for comparing behavior that is inspired, in part, by Mitchell's Version Spaces. We show that behavior bounding can be used to compactly represent both human and agent behavior. We argue that relatively low amounts of human effort are required to build, maintain, and use the data structures that underlie behavior bounding, and we provide a theoretical basis for these arguments using notions of PAC Learnability. Next, we show empirical results indicating that this approach is efiective at identifying differences in certain types of behaviors and that it performs well when compared against our initial benchmark methods. Finally, we demonstrate that behavior bounding can produce information that allows developers to identify and fix problems in an agent's behavior much more efficiently than standard debugging techniques.


Typical instances, that is, instances that are representative for a particular situ-ation or concept, play an important role in human knowledge representationand reasoning, in particular in analogical reasoning. This wellADknown obser-vation has been a motivation for investigations in cognitive psychology whichprovide a basis for our characterization of typical instances within conceptstructures and for a new inference rule for justified analogical reasoning withtypical instances. In a nutshell this paper suggests to augment the proposi-tional knowledge representation system by a non-propositional part consistingof concept structures which may have directly represented instances as ele-ments. The traditional reasoning system is extended by a rule for justifiedanalogical inference with typical instances using information extracted fromboth knowledge representation subsystems.