In this paper the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group reports on the pre-phase of an e-learning project, which was carried out in collaboration with the client. The project involved an initial exploration of the problem spaces, possibilities and challenges for an online accredited Continued Medical Education (CME) programme at the Lundbeck Institute. The CME programme aims at end-users, which are primarily general practitioners, but also specialists (psychiatrist and psychologists), from all over the world. The assumption was that it would be possible to identify and build on resources and competencies already existing in the client organisation. We asked: What is it we know? Uncovering the prerequisites and background of and with the client allowed us concurrently to identify: What do we not know? Working iteratively in collaboration with the client, allowed us to build on existing resources and networks, suggesting a design, which also included end-users community needs and work-context. Our argument is that if a preparation phase both seeks to confirm knowledge and contemplate what is not yet known, giving attention to the context and need of the client (i.e. not only end-users,) then it is possible to build on existing resources within the client organisation, leading to grounding of design decisions and a match between the e-learning environment designed and the capabilities of the client.


Copyright © 2021 by Korean Society of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Clinical and Experimental Otorhinolaryngology Vol. 14, No. 3: 359-361, August 2021 https://doi.org/10.21053/ceo.2021.00297


Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the United States and the second leading cause of cancer deaths. African American men are at the greatest risk for developing and dying from colorectal cancer. Using the Health Belief Model and the theory of Social Support as a framework, a cross-sectional, correlation design was used to gather data from a convenience sample of 52 older African American men. Measures used for this study were Champion's Health Belief Model Scale as adapted by Jacobs, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support and a self designed tool for intent to screen for colorectal cancer as suggested by Ajzen. The mean age of participants was 61 years. The majority of men were employed, married, had at least one additional person in the household, were high school graduates, and 63% had had a previous colonoscopy. Older African American men reported mixed findings on construct scale scores. Seriousness was rated as low with susceptibility and barriers rated just below average. Benefits, self-efficacy, social support and rated above average or high. No significant correlations were found between the HBM constructs, social support and past colonoscopy and intent to screen. Seriousness and barriers were significant with past colonoscopy with an independent t-test. While multiple regressions did show a significant increase between model scores, significance was small and social support did not add to the variance in intent to screen for colorectal cancer.


An ensemble consists of a set of individually trained classifiers (such as neural networks or decision trees) whose predictions are combined when classifying novel instances. Previous research has shown that an ensemble is often more accurate than any of the single classifiers in the ensemble. Bagging (Breiman, 1996c) and Boosting (Freund & Schapire, 1996; Schapire, 1990) are two relatively new but popular methods for producing ensembles. In this paper we evaluate these methods on 23 data sets using both neural networks and decision trees as our classification algorithm. Our results clearly indicate a number of conclusions. First, while Bagging is almost always more accurate than a single classifier, it is sometimes much less accurate than Boosting. On the other hand, Boosting can create ensembles that are less accurate than a single classifier - especially when using neural networks. Analysis indicates that the performance of the Boosting methods is dependent on the characteristics of the data set being examined. In fact, further results show that Boosting ensembles may overfit noisy data sets, thus decreasing its performance. Finally, consistent with previous studies, our work suggests that most of the gain in an ensemble's performance comes in the first few classifiers combined; however, relatively large gains can be seen up to 25 classifiers when Boosting decision trees.


The price of photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States (i.e., the cost to the system owner) has dropped precipitously in recent years, led by substantial reductions in global PV module prices. However, system cost reductions are not necessarily realized or realized in a timely manner by many customers. Many reasons exist for the apparent disconnects between installation costs, component prices, and system prices; most notable is the impact of fair market value considerations on system prices. To guide policy and research and development strategy decisions, it is necessary to develop a granular perspective on the factors that underlie PV system prices and to eliminate subjective pricing parameters. This report's analysis of the overnight capital costs (cash purchase) paid for PV systems attempts to establish an objective methodology that most closely approximates the book value of PV system assets.


We find the threshold between avoidable and unavoidable repetitions in circular words over $k$ letters for any $k\ge6$. Namely, we show that the number $CRT(k)=\frac{\left\lceil {k/2}\right\rceil{+}1}{\left\lceil {k/2}\right\rceil}$ satisfies the following properties.  For any $n$ there exists a $k$-ary circular word of length $n$ containing no repetition of exponent greater than $CRT(k)$. On the other hand, $k$-ary circular words of some lengths must have a repetition of exponent at least $CRT(k)$.


The full development and potential contribution of university extension is limited by confusion about its basic nature and misunderstanding about its relationship to other concepts such as public service and outreach. This article addresses the evolution, role, and basic characteristics of university extension, as well as various sources of uncertainty and confusion about it and the importance of achieving greater common understanding about its function. A framework and definition are provided for developing a shared perspective on the concept of university extension in the context of scholarship and public service.


In June 2009, at the Transcontinental Trusts conference in Geneva, His Honour Justice David Hayton said that the New Zealand Court of Appeal had got aspects of the law of trusts wrong in its decision in Official Assignee v Wilson [2008] 3 NZLR 45. The Court held that the test for proving a trust was a sham was whether the trustees and settlor had a common intention that the trust was not to be a genuine entitiy. Hayton prefers a more objective approach and looks to the objective effect of a shammer's conduct and not look for secret dishonest intentions which will hardly ever be revealed. Hayton's approach would ensure that trust property would be made available to creditors so that they were paid what they were due by declaring the trusts to be shams. Family trusts have become big business in New Zealand and are commonly used to protect a businessman's assets from creditors. While there is nothing illegal in setting up a family trust, it is my contention that the law pertaining to family trusts in New Zealand has become so far removed from the accepted principles of equity as to demand investigation. This paper explores the origins of equity and compares the modern family trust against the equitable principles which have been developed over hundreds of years, even as far back as Plato's Greece. The paper links the equity of Ancient Greece to Cicero in Rome, through the early Roman Church to the Chancellors serving English Kings. The law of England leads to the law of modern New Zealand. The paper goes on to examine the way the family trust has been used to defeat the legitimate claims of creditors. I aim to show that the approach taken by the New Zealand Court of Appeal is too narrow and favours the 'shamming' settlor at the expense of creditors who have given good consideration in comparison with volunteer beneficiaries. Moreover the family trust has become a mechanism that bears little relationship to recognised equitable principles and should lose the protection accorded to properly constituted trusts.


The facts are:-        The speed of light is different in different directions in the reference system connected with the Earth's surface, moving with 0.46 km/s at the equator. It has been demonstrated in various experiments for almost a hundred years.-        There is no experiment carried out in the area near the Earth's surface (our local reality), that proves ether-drift result on the speed of light, due to the Earth's motion on its trajectory around the Sun, which is approximately 30km/s.-        Undeniable fact is that the speed of light in a reference system, connected with the space itself, is constant in a homogeneous gravitational field, or in local time-spatial domain with the same gravitational potential.-        The speed of the light in a reference system, connected with the space itself, changes with the change of the intensity of the gravitational field. The Shapiro-time-delay effect and the anomaly in acceleration of the spaceships "Pioneer-10/11", "Galileo", and "Ulysses" at the border of the Solar system – are actually proving experiments of this reality.In this paper is shown why in a local time-spatial domain, where the units of the time and space are defined, it is impossible to register the change of the speed of light in a reference system connected with the space itself. It is because of the way of definition of the units of time and length and because of the synchronous change of all local units, all local physical constants – of the entire physical reality. As a conclusion - "uncertainty principle of the macro-world" is proposed.


To evaluate the quality of a person's sleep it is essential to identify the sleep stages and their durations. Currently, the gold standard in terms of sleep analysis is overnight polysomnography (PSG), during which several techniques like EEG (eletroencephalogram), EOG (electrooculogram), EMG (electromyogram), ECG (electrocardiogram), SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) and for example respiratory airflow and respiratory effort are recorded. These expensive and complex procedures, applied in sleep laboratories, are invasive and unfamiliar for the subjects and it is a reason why it might have an impact on the recorded data. These are the main reasons why low-cost home diagnostic systems are likely to be advantageous. Their aim is to reach a larger population by reducing the number of parameters recorded. Nowadays, many wearable devices promise to measure sleep quality using only the ECG and body-movement signals. This work presents an android application developed in order to proof the accuracy of an algorithm published in the sleep literature. The algorithm uses ECG and body movement recordings to estimate sleep stages. The pre-recorded signals fed into the algorithm have been taken from physionet1 online database. The obtained results have been compared with those of the standard method used in PSG. The mean agreement ratios between the sleep stages REM, Wake, NREM-1, NREM-2 and NREM-3 were 38.1%, 14%, 16%, 75% and 54.3%.


Many philosophers believe that normative ethics is in principle independent of psychology. By contrast, the authors of these essays explore the interconnections between psychology and moral theory. They investigate the psychological constraints on realizable ethical ideals and articulate the psychological assumptions behind traditional ethics. They also examine the ways in which the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of individual development, social psychology, and the limits on human capacities for rational deliberation affect morality.


Over the last few decades, numerous pharmaceuticals coming from domestic sewage, livestock, hospitals and industries have been determined in ground, surface and drinking waters. A common example of these pollutants are fluoroquinolones, which are powerful antibiotics used in human and veterinary medicine. The presence of fluoroquinolones in the environment even at low concentration constitutes a threat to ecosystems and human health because they can lead to bacterial resistance issues. Up to now the environmental impacts of fluoroquinolones and their degradation products are not fully understood but it is known that they can negatively affect plants and aquatic organisms. In this study the degradation of ciprofloxacin (CIP) present in synthetic freshwater was investigated under simulated sunlight. Concentrations before and after degradation were determined using HPLC-DAD. The mineralisation rate of the treated solution was monitored on a total organic carbon analyser. The ecotoxicity of the initial samples and the degradation mixtures was assessed on organisms belonging to different trophic levels: a marine bacterium (Vibrio fischeri), a freshwater invertebrate (Daphnia magna) and seed clover (Trifolium repens). In parallel, the EC50 of CIP was determined for all organisms. The Vibrio fischeri and Trifolium repens tests showed that EC50 value was more than 250 mg/L and for Daphnia magna was 190 mg/L. Photolysis of CIP showed that after 90 min of irradiation, CIP was almost totally degraded (99%). Photolysis process of CIP led to the formation of toxic by-products towards Vibrio fischeri. The toxicity test results on Trifolium repens did not show significant difference between the control and the treated plants. Thus, CIP and its degradation products have no effect on the germination or root length of Trifolium repens. Tests on Daphnia magna after 240 min irradiation showed a 94% reduction of the toxic effect. Non-purgeable organic carbon (NPOC) analysis showed that there is no significant mineralisation of the sample even after 240 min of irradiation.


OBJECTIVES
The authors assess the feasibility of using retrospective, indication-specific patient surveys to conduct hospital outcomes research in Germany. Surgical outcome and patient satisfaction were examined in patients who underwent common elective surgical procedures.

METHODS
Using the International Classification of Diseases Ninth Revision coding available in the Schwäbisch Gmünd health insurance data base, all patients for a defined period of time with one of the three following diagnoses were selected and questioned retrospectively using an indication-specific survey instrument: (1) varicose veins of the lower extremity; (2) nasal septum deviation; and (3) inner knee joint damage limited to patients undergoing arthroscopic meniscus repair. Survey content focused on preoperative conditions, pre- and postoperative symptoms, postoperative complications, the nature and duration of postoperative follow-up, and satisfaction with surgical outcome.

RESULTS
Significant postoperative improvement of preoperative symptoms was found for all three groups. Complete freedom from symptoms was found in 29.7% of patients treated for varicose veins, 24.1% of patients with meniscus repair, and in only 10.6% of patients with nasal septum deviation. Multivariate analyses indicated that postoperative impairment was the decisive variable governing patient satisfaction for all three groups.

CONCLUSIONS
The use of retrospective, indication-specific patient surveys constitutes a time-efficient, cost-effective, and patient-focused option for the systematic acquisition and evaluation of health outcomes in Germany. This methodology holds promise for international and domestic efforts to demonstrate the consequences of restructuring activities in the inpatient sector.


Background: Much debate is transpiring regarding whether chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) are different illnesses. Several prior studies that compared the Fukuda et al. CFS criteria to the Canadian ME/CFS criteria found that the Canadian criteria identified patients with more functional impairments and greater physical, mental, and cognitive problems than those who met Fukuda et al. criteria. These samples were located in the Chicago metropolitan area, so the results could not be generalized to other locations. In addition, past studies used a symptom questionnaire that was not specifically developed to tap the Canadian criteria. Purpose: The present comparative study of CFS and ME/CFS criteria was intended to correct the limitations of prior studies. Methods: This article used data from three distinct samples to compare patients who met criteria for the ME/CFS Canadian clinical case definition to those who met the Fukuda et al. CFS case definition. Results: Findings indicated that fewer individuals met the Canadian criteria than the Fukuda et al. criteria. Those who met the Canadian criteria evidenced more severe symptoms and physical functioning impairment. Conclusions: Future research should continue to compare existing case definitions and determine which criteria best select for this illness.


In this paper one aspect of the transition that must be made by experienced clinicians who become involved in conducting qualitative health research is examined, specifically, the differences between clinical and research interviewing. A clinician who is skillful and comfortable carrying out a clinical interview may not initially apprehend the important differences between these categories and contexts of interviewing. This situation can lead to difficulties and diminished quality of data collection because the purpose, techniques and orientation of a qualitative research interview are distinct from those of the clinical interview. Appreciation of these differences between interview contexts and genres, and strategies for addressing challenges associated with these differences, can help clinician researchers to become successful qualitative interviewers.


The internet is becoming more and more important in daily life. Fundamental changes can be observed in the private sector as well as in the public sector. In the course of this, active involvement of citizens in planning political procedures is more and more supported electronically. The expectations culminate in the assumption that information and communication technology (ICT) can enhance civic participation and reduce disenchantment with politics. Out of these expectations, a lot of eparticipation projects were initiated in Germany. Initiatives were established, e.g. the "Initiative eParticipation", which gave many incentives of electronic participation for policy and administration in order to strengthen decision-making processes with internet supported participation practices. This thesis consists of two major parts. In the first part, definitions of the essential terms are presented. The position of e-participation within the dimension of ebusiness is pointed out. In order to explain e-participation, basics of the classical offline participation are delivered. It will be shown that a change is in progress, not only because of the deployment of ICT. Subsequently, a framework to characterize eparticipation is presented. The European Union is encouraging the implementation of e-participation. So, the city of Koblenz should be no exception. But what is the current situation in Koblenz? To provide an answer to this question, the status quo was examined with the help of a survey among the citizens of Koblenz, which was developed, conducted and evaluated. This is the second major part of this thesis.


Consistent with a child × environment model it was hypothesized that anxious solitude and the middle school transition interact to influence peer mistreatment over time. A sample of 688 children participated in peer- and self-reported behavioral nominations assessing exclusion and victimization twice yearly from the fall of third grade through the spring of seventh grade, including the transition to middle school in the fall of sixth grade. Classroom emotional support was observed yearly. Piecewise growth curve models were used to model the level and slope of peer mistreatment outcomes before, at, and after the middle school transition, and assess child-driven, environment-driven, and child × environment effects. Observed classroom emotional support decreased at the middle school transition. According to peer-reports, high vs. average anxious solitary children experienced greater relative improvements in exclusion and victimization at the transition (child × environment effects). However, in both elementary and middle school, elevated anxious solitude predicted elevated peer exclusion and victimization (child-driven effects). Consistent with environment-driven effects, peer- and self-reports indicated decreased exclusion at the transition, indicating that exclusion occurred less frequently when peer-groups were not well-established. Furthermore, peer-, but not self-, reports indicated decreased victimization at the middle school transition, although overall both reporters indicated lower levels of victimization in middle vs. elementary school. Because improvements in peer mistreatment did not correspond to increased classroom emotional support, rearrangement of peer social structure appeared to have the biggest impact on peer mistreatment after the middle school transition.


For several decades Langston Hughes was simultaneously the foremost African American poet and the premier poet of the American Left. Without understanding that double identity and dual cultural role, there is little chance of winning a full or fair appreciation of his life and work. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas. Before enrolling at the historically black Lincoln University, he had worked at numerous menial jobs but also seen Africa, Mexico, and Paris. He would later make trips to the Soviet Union and to Spain during the Spanish Civil War. "Letter from Spain" was written in the midst of that war and handed to American poet Edwin Rolfe in Madrid for publication in the International Brigades magazine Volunteer for Liberty in November, 1937. Hughes would also write several stage plays and musicals, along with numerous newspaper columns, an autobiography, and several collections of short stories featuring his character Simple. Jazz and the blues remained a strong influence from his first books to the masterful collage poem Ask Your Mama (1962). Throughout his career, the typical Hughes poem communicated a rich social and political vision through deceptively simple language; his apparently straightforward rhetorical surfaces are intricately nuanced. He wrote some of America's most telling indictments of racism but also reached out to the poor of all ethnic backgrounds. And he was one of the few male poets of his generation who could write persuasively both about women and within a female persona.


This pioneering study of migrant journeys to Britain begins with Huguenot refugees in the 1680s and continues to asylum seekers and east European workers today. Analyzing the history and memory of migrant journeys, covering not only the response of politicians and the public but also literary and artistic representations, then and now, Kushner's volume sheds new light on the nature and construction of Britishness from the early modern era onwards. It is an essential tool for those wanting to understand why people come to Britain (or are denied entry) and how migrants have been viewed by state and society alike. The journeys covered vary from the famous (including the Empire Windrush in 1948) to the obscure, such as the Volga German transmigrants passing through Britain in the 1870s. While employing a broadly historical approach, Kushner incorporates insights from many other disciplines and employs a comparative methodology to highlight the importance of the symbolic as well as the physical nature of such journeys.


Nowadays, model-driven engineering (MDE) promises to ease software development by decreasing the inherent complexity of classical software development. In order to deliver on this promise, MDE increases the level of abstraction and automation, through a consideration of domain-specific models (DSMs) and model operations (e.g. model transformations or code generations). DSMs conform to domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs), which increase the level of abstraction, and model operations are first-class entities of software development because they increase the level of automation. Nevertheless, MDE has to deal with at least two new dimensions of complexity, which are basically caused by the increased linguistic and technological heterogeneity. The first dimension of complexity is setting up an MDE environment, an activity comprised of the implementation or selection of DSMLs and model operations. Setting up an MDE environment is both time-consuming and error-prone because of the implementation or adaptation of model operations. The second dimension of complexity is concerned with applying MDE for actual software development. Applying MDE is challenging because a collection of DSMs, which conform to potentially heterogeneous DSMLs, are required to completely specify a complex software system. A single DSML can only be used to describe a specific aspect of a software system at a certain level of abstraction and from a certain perspective. Additionally, DSMs are usually not independent but instead have inherent interdependencies, reflecting (partial) similar aspects of a software system at different levels of abstraction or from different perspectives. A subset of these dependencies are applications of various model operations, which are necessary to keep the degree of automation high. This becomes even worse when addressing the first dimension of complexity. Due to continuous changes, all kinds of dependencies, including the applications of model operations, must also be managed continuously. This comprises maintaining the existence of these dependencies and the appropriate (re-)application of model operations. The contribution of this thesis is an approach that combines traceability and model management to address the aforementioned challenges of configuring and applying MDE for software development. The approach is considered as a traceability approach because it supports capturing and automatically maintaining dependencies between DSMs. The approach is considered as a model management approach because it supports managing the automated (re-)application of heterogeneous model operations. In addition, the approach is considered as a comprehensive model management. Since the decomposition of model operations is encouraged to alleviate the first dimension of complexity, the subsequent composition of model operations is required to counteract their fragmentation. A significant portion of this thesis concerns itself with providing a method for the specification of decoupled yet still highly cohesive complex compositions of heterogeneous model operations. The approach supports two different kinds of compositions data-flow compositions and context compositions. Data-flow composition is used to define a network of heterogeneous model operations coupled by sharing input and output DSMs alone. Context composition is related to a concept used in declarative model transformation approaches to compose individual model transformation rules (units) at any level of detail. In this thesis, context composition provides the ability to use a collection of dependencies as context for the composition of other dependencies, including model operations. In addition, the actual implementation of model operations, which are going to be composed, do not need to implement any composition concerns. The approach is realized by means of a formalism called an executable and dynamic hierarchical megamodel, based on the original idea of megamodels. This formalism supports specifying compositions of dependencies (traceability and model operations). On top of this formalism, traceability is realized by means of a localization concept, and model management by means of an execution concept.


The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic by Sir William Petty (#1 in our series by Sir William Petty) Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. **Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** **eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** *****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** Title: Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic Author: Sir William Petty Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5619] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 23, 2002] [Most recently updated May 8, 2003] Edition: 10 Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII


Ultrafast fiber lasers with superb pulse and beam quality are becoming important in various fields of applications including high-precision material processing, bio-medicine, fiber optical communications, and ranging. This thesis is concerned with the research and development of ultrafast fiber laser technology. Passively mode-locked and Q-switched fiber lasers operating at 1-2.2 μm IR-spectral range have been developed and studied. Passively Q-switched Tm-Ho-doped fiber lasers operating at 2 μm were thoroughly investigated. A strong impact of a new effect dynamic gain induced pulse shortening, on the duration, repetition rate and energy of a Q-switched fiber laser was studied. Using this effect in combination with a short-length fiber cavity and a highly nonlinear antimonidebased semiconductor saturable absorber mirror resulted in generation of record-short 20 ns energetic Q-switched pulses at 2 μm. Well-controlled chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG) technology was developed and used for inscription of high-performance all-fiber dispersion compensators. All-fiber ytterbium (Yb) and bismuth (Bi) lasers generating picosecond soliton pulses at 1 μm and at 1.2 μm were demonstrated using CFBG-dispersion compensators. The powerful Ybdoped laser followed by an all-fiber amplifier was used to generate octave-spanning supercontinuum radiation in a nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. Various wavelength tuning methods of ultrafast soliton fiber lasers, such as selffrequency shifting of Raman solitons and electronic tuning using an acousto-optic tunable filter, were also investigated. In addition, an environmentally stable 200 fs mode-locked Yb-doped fiber laser with dispersion compensation by an index guiding photonic crystal fiber was demonstrated. Novel Bi-doped mode-locked fiber sources operating at a wavelength of ~1.2 μm using dilute nitride saturable absorbers were developed and studied. The first Bi-doped fiber laser delivering sub-picosecond soliton pulses was demonstrated. Harmonic modelocking in a Bi-doped mode-locked fiber laser with dispersion compensation by a CFBG was used to increase significantly the initially low repetition rate of the Bi-fiber laser. Pulse dynamics of mode-locked Bi-lasers were also investigated in detail. Ultrashort wavelength-tunable pulses beyond 2 μm with durations below 200 fs were generated through a soliton self-frequency shift in a Tm-Ho fiber amplifier seeded by a Tm-Ho master oscillator mode-locked by a GaSb-based saturable absorber. Finally, a novel ultra-broadband saturable absorber based on carbon nanotubes layered on top of an Ag-mirror was demonstrated. The same sample of polymer-free carbon nanotube absorber was used to reliably mode-lock ytterbium-, erbium-, and thulium-holmiumdoped soliton fiber lasers producing sub-picosecond pulses at 1 μm, 1.56 μm, and 2 μm, respectively.


Climate-induced changes to permafrost are altering high latitude landscapes in ways that could increase the vulnerability of the vast soil carbon pools of the region. Permafrost thaw is temporally dynamic and spatially heterogeneous because, in addition to the thickening of the active layer, localized thermokarst features form when ice-rich permafrost thaws and the ground subsides. Thermokarst produces a diversity of landforms and alters the physical environment in dynamic ways. To estimate potential changes to the carbon cycle it is imperative to quantify the size and distribution of thermokarst landforms. By performing a supervised classification on a high resolution IKONOS image, we detected and mapped small, irregular thermokarst features occurring within an upland watershed in discontinuous permafrost of Interior Alaska. We found that 12% of the Eight Mile Lake (EML) watershed has undergone thermokarst, predominantly in valleys where tussock tundra resides. About 35% of the 3.7 km2 tussock tundra class has likely transitioned to thermokarst. These landscape level changes created by permafrost thaw at EML have important implications for ecosystem carbon cycling because thermokarst features are forming in carbon-rich areas and are altering the hydrology in ways that increase seasonal thawing of the soil.


Based on the family of biorthogonal pairs of scaling functions consisting of cardinal B-splines and compactly supported dual generators on the whole real line, as presented by Cohen, Daubechies and Feauveau, we are concerned with the cnstruction of a new biorthogonal multiresolution analysis on the interval, such that the corresponding wavelet bases realize any desired order of moment condition on the interval.
In contrast to previous approaches we choose the well-established Schoenberg spline basis on the interval with equidistant knots for primal multiresolution which has already been used by Chui and Quak to construct semiorthogonal spline bases on the interval. After giving an overview of the concrete construction, we discuss the cavorable properties of the constructed basis functions.
The subsequent construction of the associated wavelets relies on the known method of stable completions, which has been presented by Dahmen, Kunoth and Urban as a helpful tool in constructing wavelet bases on the interval. Due to the fact, that we use all inner scaling functions, we use a high number of inner wavelets, so that the number of constructed boundary wavelets is very low, compared to former approaches. This is also true for the related wavelet basis with homogeneous or complementary boundary conditions.
In view of applications, there are two interesting questions.
Firstly, we investigate the condition number of the corresponding wavelet transforms.
Secondly, we treat the stiffness matrix of the Laplace operator concerning to our basis and show, that its condition number is much better than the condition number in other approaches.


Abstract For any child, residential location is a large determinant of well-being. At the negative extreme, a neighborhood can pose threats to children's well-being far exceeding those present within the home in typical cases of child protection removal. The worst neighborhoods pose direct threats to children's physical and psychological well-being, and they also adversely affect children indirectly by creating stressors that undermine parents' abilities to care for children. Pervasive crime and substance abuse, in particular, substantially elevate risks to children beyond those created just by less capable or less motivated parents. Given that a relatively high percentage of adults who live in the worst neighborhoods are marginal to begin with, in terms of their inherent capacities for giving care and maintaining safe and healthy homes, the additional threats present in the larger residential environment push the experience of most children in such neighborhoods below what most people -- including those who live in the neighborhoods -- would regard as a minimally acceptable quality of life. Because such neighborhoods are also likely to have inadequate -- even dangerous -- schools and few legal employment opportunities, living in them severely diminishes the life prospects of children forced to grow up in them. To date, government efforts to improve the lives of these children, and scholarly writing on the topic, have focused on urban renewal and criminal law enforcement in these neighborhoods. These have mostly been unsuccessful, where they do succeed they typically do so by simply relocating the dysfunction to another neighborhood, and even if renewal efforts undertaken today might ultimately be successful that is of no help to a child born today into dangerous urban blight. The only way to ensure that children do not suffer the effects of growing up in deeply dysfunctional communities is to get them out now. Policy should shift to a strategy of separating children as early as possible from the adults who are creating toxic social environments in impoverished areas. In fact, programs that have assisted parents who wished to relocate with their children from high-poverty, inner-city neighborhoods to low-poverty areas have greatly improved the children's well-being and longterm life prospects. This Article presents a novel argument for expanding such relocation programs, an argument founded upon basic rights of children -- not rights against private actors who might harm them, though children certainly possess such rights, but rather rights against the state. I argue that the state violates basic rights of children by making certain decisions about children's lives that effectively consign many of them to living in hellish conditions. To remedy this violation of children's rights, the state should now institute reforms such as giving children first priority in distribution of housing vouchers and in provision of relocation assistance and, most controversially, making relocation out of the most dangerous neighborhoods mandatory rather than voluntary for parents who have and wish to retain custody of children. The state should no more permit parents to house children in apartments where stray bullets come through windows and drug addicts clutter the hallways outside than permit parents to take children into casinos and nightclubs. This Article argues that the state is legally free, and in fact morally and legally obligated, to adopt new legal rules and policies aimed at ensuring that no children live in the horrible neighborhoods that exist, and likely will always exist, in our society. It also presents a constitutional lever for overcoming political and community resistance to taking the necessary measures. These measures would entail changes to the law in three broad areas -- child maltreatment, domestic relations, and zoning.


Land use tools and techniques have impressive potential to reduce energy consumption, improve the economy, and mitigate climate change. This article explores the little understood influence of local land use decision-making on energy conservation and sustainable development and how it can mitigate climate change if properly assisted by the federal and state governments. The construction and use of buildings combined with extensive vehicular travel throughout the nation's human settlements consume large amounts of energy, and much of that consumption is highly inefficient. By enforcing and enhancing energy codes, encouraging the use of combined heat and power and district energy systems, properly orienting and commissioning buildings, incorporating renewable energy resources, and promoting transit and other methods of reducing vehicle miles travelled, local land use law's potential to achieve energy conservation and sustainable development can be unlocked. These techniques can be organized at the neighborhood level and aggregated by adopting local Energy Conservation Zoning Districts in neighborhoods where significant energy conservation can be achieved. The article proposes federal and state policies, combining features of both the Coastal Zone Management Act and the Enterprise Zone initiative, that can facilitate local land use initiatives that will shape human settlements and control the built environment as a new path toward energy efficiency and climate change mitigation.


The "neuroscience revolution" has now gained the attention of legal thinkers and is poised to be the catalyst for significant changes in the law. Over the past several decades, research in functional neuroimaging has sought to explain a vast array of human thought processes and behaviors, and the law has taken notice. Although functional neuroimaging is not yet close to being a staple in the courtroom, the information acquired from these studies has been featured in a handful of cases, including a few before the United States Supreme Court. Our assertion involves the incorporation of functional neuroscience evidence in tort law related to the variety of mental states, including intent, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. As the courts become saturated with neurimaging evidence, it is imperative to be prepared with a framework for addressing the many legal questions that the new neuroscience will pose. Our proposed neuroscience model of tort law is both simple and complex. Its simplicity lies in a workable framework for allowing the law to move forward while incorporating functional neuroimaging evidence in tort law. Its complexity is in the challenges posed by the interpretation of the neuroscience data and by extrapolation from the evidence to the legal issues. Our model is intended to commence the discourse about ways in which tort law may be improved through an understanding of, and appropriate use of, information acquired through the newest technologies of functional neuroimaging. We intend this model to provide guidance to judges and attorneys when confronted with functional neuroimaging evidence in tort cases, and we anticipate that serious consideration of the model will propel courts toward incorporating these relevant social and scientific advances into the evolving principles of tort law.


Early involvement of students in hands-on research experiences are known to demystify research and promote the pursuit of careers in science. But in large enrolment departments such opportunities for undergraduates to participate in research are rare. To counteract such lack of opportunities, inquiry-based laboratory module in plant tissue culture was implemented in an undergraduate botany course impacting approximately 140 Hispanic minority students per year. In this module, spread throughout the semester, the students used African violet to gain experience in plant tissue culture techniques. The objective was for the students to learn how to take part of the plant from in vivo to in vitro culture. This required the establishment of aseptic techniques and the use of different media components to multiply plants under in vitro conditions. In depth assessment of gain-of content knowledge and gain-of confidence revealed that our inquiry-based approach allowed the students to learn while increasing their self-perception of scientific methodology. In three semesters, the students reported a 2.5-fold overall increase in the post-module assessment for content knowledge compared to pre-module assessment. Similarly, approximately 85% of the students reported that they gained self-confidence in many aspects pertaining to conducting future research such as the use of primary literature, the design and performance of novel scientific experiments, and the formulation of a testable hypothesis. Though this lab module was solely in plant tissue culture, the inquiry-based nature of the exercise developed students' research skills and built confidence which is important in increasing retention of students in sciences.


Over the past several years, Americans have become more aware and more vocal regarding the number of illegal aliens who have taken up residence in the United States. While this issue—and a resolution of this issue—is still being debated, many have questioned why current enforcement efforts are so lax. The focus of this paper is on the government agency responsible for the enforcement of our immigration laws, and in particular how the actions of this agency are influenced by political interests. This paper fills a gap in the literature-to-date by examining the enforcement of immigration laws within the interior of the nation. While other studies put border enforcement efforts in a political framework, this analysis is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to place interior enforcement within the interest-group theory of government framework. Our findings indicate that pressure groups shape the pattern of enforcement that emerges. Despite polls that indicate a majority of Americans favoring stricter enforcement, government enforcement agencies charged with this responsibility apparently succumb to the wishes of those that matter most politically.


The contribution introduces a method for the distributed process modelling in order to support the process orientation in Structural Engineering, i.e., the modelling, analysis and management of planning processes. The approach is based on the Petri Net theory for the modelling of planning processes and workflows in Structural Engineering. Firstly, a central and coarse process model serves as a pre-structuring system for the detailed modelling of the technical planning activities. Secondly, the involved planning participants generate distributed process models with detailed technical workflow information. Finally, these distributed process models will be combined in the central workflow net. The final net is of great importance for the process orientation in Structural Engineering, i.e., the identification, publication, analysis, optimization and finally the management of planning processes.


This paper addresses two related questions.The first relates to Langdell and his development of a doctrinal theory of contract law. The substance and method of Langdell's work has not been well understood and this paper uses a variety of historical materials to remedy this problem. It begins with a review of contract law prior to Langdell. Contract law at this time was in a very primitive state. The available treatises were confusing and the cases themselves offered little guidance for predicting future case outcomes. The paper then proceeds to examine Langdell's method by describing certain logic texts that describe the Nineteenth Century conception of scientific methodology. This enables us to recreate not only the substance of Langdell's theory, but also its method. Further, understanding its method allows us to ask crucial questions about justification: What is it that makes Langdell believe that his theory of contract law is correct?The second question addressed in this paper relates to legal theory and the use of doctrinal theories in legal decision making. As a pragmatist, I reject the idea that there is one form of legal reasoning. Instead I believe that the courts employ a variety of strategies to navigate between the demand for justice in the individual case and the need to develop general theories that can be used to predict future decisions. Doctrinal theories are one of these strategies and, without question, a very important one. In the final section I use what we have learned about Langdell to identify the way in which doctrinal theories work and to explain their success.


A review of:
Ranger, Sara L. "Grey Literature in Special Libraries: Access in Use." Publishing Research Quarterly 21.1 (Spring 2005): 53-63.

Objective – To examine the barriers to making grey literature (literature not controlled by commercial publishers) easier to access in special libraries.

Design – Interviews.

Setting – Variety of special libraries (government, corporate and specialized academic) in the United States.

Subjects – Sixteen librarians from fourteen organizations in Washington, Michigan and Texas were interviewed. Four of the organizations were government libraries, four were corporate libraries and five were specialized academic libraries. One of the interviews was not used because the organization did not maintain a collection of paper-based grey literature.

Methods – Librarians were selected as possible interview subjects via three methods: some were previously familiar with the author; some were referred to the author by friends, family and colleagues; two candidates volunteered in response to a presentation of the project at a professional meeting. Interviews were conducted between February 2002 and May 2003. A standard set of seven questions were used, but often followed with further questions. The interviews were conducted either in the library or the librarian's office. The interviews were tape-recorded and the answers were written down. Interviews typically lasted between fifteen and thirty minutes and asked about the current state, holdings, access and use of grey literature in the special library.

Main Results – Results from the interviews suggest a wide variance in the percentage of users that access grey literature. Grey literature was used less in the corporate libraries than the academic and government libraries. The percentage of the collection made up of grey literature also varied widely between the different libraries. Reports were found to be the most popular form of grey literature, although most of the libraries reported owning conference proceedings and newsletters in addition to reports. One interesting observation found during the interviews was that most of the users of grey literature are also producers of grey literature. The librarians surveyed reported that some of the reasons for using grey literature included use in research, to write (often more grey literature), interest in the topic, for class assignments, as records of previous practices, for localized studies, and for creating models and practices. Results found that for the libraries surveyed, much of the grey literature remains uncatalogued and what has been catalogued was done using a variety of methods. Over half of the libraries surveyed had their grey literature accessible online.

Conclusion – Two main reasons were cited as explanations for why grey literature was not used as much as it should be: lack of cataloguing and visibility. In many of the libraries surveyed, much of the grey literature had not been catalogued, making it difficult to find and use the resources. Reasons cited for not cataloguing grey literature include lack of time, funds and/or knowledge. As well, in many of the libraries surveyed, it was found that the holdings of grey literature were not readily visible to the users, so users were not even aware that it existed.

To improve the awareness and accessibility of grey literature, the author recommends regional depositories for grey literature, international standards for cataloguing and more cooperation between special libraries.


Social media consists of Internet technologies that allow users to create and share content, and to foster dialogues among other users. Examples include software applications for communication (blogging, social networking, discussion forums), collaboration (wikis, social bookmarking), and multimedia (sharing photographs, video, and livecasting). In the world of science, social media is becoming an increasingly integral component of both research and education. My experience with two types of social media, blogging and podcasting, has convinced me that scientists must embrace these applications to enhance research, and to better communicate their work to the public.


The implementation of stored procedures in MySQL 5.0 a huge milestone -- one that is expected to lead to widespread enterprise adoption of the already extremely popular MySQL database. If you are serious about building the web-based database applications of the future, you need to get up to speed quickly on how stored procedures work -- and how to build them the right way. This book, destined to be the bible of stored procedure development, is a resource that no real MySQL programmer can afford to do without.In the decade since MySQL burst on the scene, it has become the dominant open source database, with capabilities and performance rivaling those of commercial RDBMS offerings like Oracle and SQL Server. Along with Linux and PHP, MySQL is at the heart of millions of applications. And now, with support for stored procedures, functions, and triggers in MySQL 5.0, MySQL offers the programming power needed for true enterprise use.MySQL's new procedural language has a straightforward syntax, making it easy to write simple programs. But it's not so easy to write secure, easily maintained, high-performance, and bug-free programs. Few in the MySQL world have substantial experience yet with stored procedures, but Guy Harrison and Steven Feuerstein have decades of combined expertise.MySQL stored programming fundamentals -- tutorial, basic statements, SQL in stored programs, and error handlingBuilding MySQL stored programs -- transaction handling, built-in functions, stored functions, and triggersMySQL stored programs in applications -- using stored programs with PHP, Java, Perl, Python, and .NET (C# and VB.NET)Optimizing MySQL stored programs -- security, basic and advanced SQL tuning, optimizing stored program code, and programming best practicesA companion web site contains many thousands of lines of code, that you can put to use immediately.Guy Harrison is Chief Architect of Database Solutions at Quest Software and a frequent speaker and writer on MySQL topics. Steven Feuerstein is the author of Oracle PL/SQL Programming, the classic reference for Oracle stored programming for more than ten years. Both have decades of experience as database developers, and between them they have authored a dozen books. In MySQL Stored Procedure Programming, they put that hard-won experience to good use. Packed with code examples and covering everything from language basics to application building to advanced tuning and best practices, this highly readable book is the one-stop guide to MySQL development. It consists of four major sections:


We address a variety of challenges for analysis and enhancement of Computational Video. We present novel post-processing methods to bridge the difference between professional and casually shot videos mostly seen on online sites. Our research presents solutions to three well-defined problems: (1) Video stabilization and rolling shutter removal in casually-shot, uncalibrated videos; (2) Content-aware video retargeting; and (3) spatio-temporal video segmentation to enable efficient video annotation. We showcase several real-world applications building on these techniques. We start by proposing a novel algorithm for video stabilization that generates stabilized videos by employing L1-optimal camera paths to remove undesirable motions. We compute camera paths that are optimally partitioned into constant, linear and parabolic segments mimicking the camera motions employed by professional cinematographers. To achieve this, we propose a linear programming framework to minimize the first, second, and third derivatives of the resulting camera path. Our method allows for video stabilization beyond conventional filtering, that only suppresses high frequency jitter. An additional challenge in videos shot from mobile phones are rolling shutter distortions. Modern CMOS cameras capture the frame one scanline at a time, which results in non-rigid image distortions such as shear and wobble. We propose a solution based on a novel mixture model of homographies parametrized by scanline blocks to correct these rolling shutter distortions. Our method does not rely on a-priori knowledge of the readout time nor requires prior camera calibration. Our novel video stabilization and calibration free rolling shutter removal have been deployed on YouTube where they have successfully stabilized millions of videos. We also discuss several extensions to the stabilization algorithm and present technical details behind the widely used YouTube Video Stabilizer. We address the challenge of changing the aspect ratio of videos, by proposing algorithms that retarget videos to fit the form factor of a given device without stretching or letter-boxing. Our approaches use all of the screens pixels, while striving to deliver as much video-content of the original as possible. First, we introduce a new algorithm that uses discontinuous seam-carving in both space and time for resizing videos. Our algorithm relies on a novel appearance-based temporal coherence formulation that allows for frame-by-frame processing and results in temporally discontinuous seams, as opposed to geometrically smooth and continuous seams. Second, we present a technique, that builds on the above mentioned video stabilization approach. We effectively automate classical pan and scan techniques by smoothly guiding a virtual crop window via saliency constraints. Finally, we introduce an efficient and scalable technique for spatio-temporal segmentation of long video sequences using a hierarchical graph-based algorithm. We begin by over-segmenting a volumetric video graph into space-time regions grouped by appearance. We then construct a region graph over the obtained segmentation and iteratively repeat this process over multiple levels to create a tree of spatio-temporal segmentations. This hierarchical approach generates high quality segmentations, and allows subsequent applications to choose from varying levels of granularity. We demonstrate the use of spatio-temporal segmentation as users interact with the video, enabling efficient annotation of objects within the video. Part of this talks will will expose attendees to use the Video Stabilizer on YouTube and the video segmentation system at videosegmentation.com. Please find appropriate videos to test the systems. Part of the work described above was done at Google, where Matthias Grundmann, Vivek Kwatra and Mei Han are, and Professor Essa is working as a Consultant. Part of the work were efforts of research by Matthias Grundmann and Daniel Castro, as part of their research efforts as students at GA Tech.


The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) Project was designed to improve our understanding of the relationship between clouds and solar and longwave radiation. This is achieved using satellite broad-band instruments to map the top-of-atmosphere radiation fields with coincident data from satellite narrow-band imagers employed to retrieve the properties of clouds associated with those fields. This paper documents the CERES Edition-2 cloud property retrieval system used to analyze data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Visible and Infrared Scanner and by the MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectrometer instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites covering the period 1998 through 2007. Two daytime retrieval methods are explained: the Visible Infrared Shortwave-infrared Split-window Technique for snow-free surfaces and the Shortwave-infrared Infrared Near-infrared Technique for snow or ice-covered surfaces. The Shortwave-infrared Infrared Split-window Technique is used for all surfaces at night. These methods, along with the ancillary data and empirical parameterizations of cloud thickness, are used to derive cloud boundaries, phase, optical depth, effective particle size, and condensed/frozen water path at both pixel and CERES footprint levels. Additional information is presented, detailing the potential effects of satellite calibration differences, highlighting methods to compensate for spectral differences and correct for atmospheric absorption and emissivity, and discussing known errors in the code. Because a consistent set of algorithms, auxiliary input, and calibrations across platforms are used, instrument and algorithm-induced changes in the data record are minimized. This facilitates the use of the CERES data products for studying climate-scale trends.


National security law scholarship tends to focus on the balancing of security and liberty, and the overwhelming bulk of that scholarship is about such balancing on the horizontal axis among branches at the federal level. This Article challenges that standard focus by supplementing it with an account of the vertical axis and the emergent, post-9/11 role of state and local government in American national security law and policy. It argues for a federalism frame that emphasizes vertical intergovernmental arrangements for promoting and mediating a dense array of policy values over the long term. This federalism frame helps in understanding the cooperation and tension between the federal and local governments with respect to counterterrorism and national security intelligence, and also yields insights to guide reform of those relationships. The Article emphasizes two important values that have been neglected in the sparse scholarship on local government and national security functions: (1) accountability and the ways vertical intergovernmental arrangements enhance or degrade it, and (2) efficiency and the ways those arrangements promote public policy effectiveness. This Article reveals the important policy benefits of our shared federal-local national security system, and it suggests ways to better capture these benefits, especially if terrorism threats evolve to include a greater domestic component.


With the spread of the Human Immuno-Deficiency Virus and sexually transmitted diseases, it is extremely important for sexually active individuals to protect themselves properly if they decide to engage in sexual intercourse. Knowledge of HIV and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome has been associated with safer sexual practices, but knowledge alone does not totally explain risky sexual practices. This study examined how 154 college students' knowledge of HIV/AIDS, relationship status, perceptions of condom use, and perceptions of personal risk affect condom use during sexual intercourse. The impact of trust and love justifications along with the approval of peers were also examined. Perceptions of condom use and perceptions of personal risk were compared by gender and ethnicity; how perception of personal risk is related to condom use and condom use intentions was also examined. Condom use intention was found to be a significant predictor of condom use, and a significant difference of means for condom use intentions was reported between individuals who used condoms during their last experience with sexual intercourse and those who did not use condoms during their last sexual experience


Thompson, Holly. Orchards , New York: Delacorte Press, 2011. Print. Orchards is a poetic novel written by Holly Thompson. It tells the story of Kana Goldberg, an American girl, half-Jewish and half-Japanese, who is sent to spend the summer with her mother's family in Japan working on their mikan farm. (Mikan is a type of Japanese orange.) A school-mate, Ruth, has committed suicide and Kana is a member of the group of girls who had excluded and locked horns with the girl over a boy, not realizing at the time that she suffered from bi-polar disease and that she was reaching out to the boy for support. The book is less about Kana accepting responsibility for her involvement in the confrontation with Ruth than it is about mending relationships and the process of Kana overcoming her anger and feelings of guilt. The book challenges us to set aside our own pre-conceived notions about bullying and consider the idea that everyone is vulnerable to depression, and that what gets sensationalized in the media as bullying is not always a black and white case of cruelty, but is sometimes a case of misunderstanding that escalates in dramatic fashion when emotions are mixed in. Kana's fixation on Ruth and the pressure of a community that blames her and the other girls constitute an invisible burden that puts her at risk of the unthinkable, too. "Suicide can spread like a virus," Kana's grandmother warns. Kana's 'exile' to a strange country turns out to be a chance to ground herself amongst her family, make peace with the presence of death in life, find confidence in who she is, and learn how to make a difference in the world of the living. Readers expecting a remorseful narrative may feel unsatisfied, but because the book reads quickly and the language is pleasurable, they may also decide to re-read it for a second impression. The reason it reads quickly is that Thompson has chosen to tell the story in a kind of free-flowing verse. Stanzas of varying lengths define sentence-like sequences, with the breaks between stanzas replacing the conventional sentence demarcators of full stops and capitalized first words. Line breaks play the role of commas, controlling the flow without impeding it. These syntactic arrangements complement the imagistic and uncluttered style of the writing, giving an inward, contemplative feel to the story. Because it is a subtle book, it would be most suitable for an older teen who is perceptive and has literary sensibilities. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: John Huck John Huck is a metadata and cataloguing librarian at the University of Alberta. He holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and maintains a special interest in the spoken word. He is also a classical musician and has sung semi-professionally for many years.


On-street parking has been considered problematic by engineers for many years. In fact, numerous studies have concluded that diagonal or angle parking in particular is potentially more of a safety concern than parallel or no parking at all. It is a common position of many states, including Iowa, to discourage or completely prohibit angle parking on primary road extensions in urban areas. However, with the acceptance of "context sensitive design" and traffic calming techniques, policies for on-street parking are receiving re-consideration in many agencies including the FHWA. This study was undertaken to analyze operational and safety histories in the state of Iowa where various types of on-street parking have existed for many years, concentrating in particular on smaller communities. Specifically of interest was a comparison of diagonal parking locations to other types with regard to related crash histories. If possible, it was intended to develop guidelines to assist Iowa Department of Transportation designers in the consideration of parking requirements for road improvements through small communities. In this regard, several criteria were analyzed to determine possible contribution to crash history including road width, clearance to parked vehicles, traffic volumes, community population, and length of parking area. None of these factors, with the possible exception of population, displayed a clearly definable relationship to crash history. However, when average crash rates for various parking types were compared for non-intersection crashes, differences in rates between areas with diagonal parking and those with parallel parking were almost negligible. In fact, those observed rates were less than sample locations with no parking at all. These results seem to indicate that indeed there may exist no compelling justification for blanket prohibition of angle parking along Iowa's primary extensions in all urban areas. Rather, a case-by-case investigation with each project design of the most applicable parking type would seem appropriate in smaller communities.


A computational fluid dynamic comparison was performed between on-design and offdesign flow rates through a four-bladed and a three-bladed axial pump inducer. The simulations were run time-resolved and with two phases (water and water vapor). Turbulence modeling employed the realizable kmodel and cavitation was predicted using the Rayleigh-Plesset model. The solution discretization is second order accurate in space and first order accurate in time. The results show classical breakdown curves for all four cases. Breakdown is the condition where the entire flow path in the inducer becomes filled with vapor and the head rise over the inducer is decreased dramatically. The purpose of this paper is to compare performance behaviors between a three-bladed and four-bladed inducer operating at on-design and off-design flow rates. Certain rotating instabilities have previously been observed with the four-bladed inducer and we investigate whether similar instabilities exist for a three-bladed geometry. We also investigate how off-design operation affects the stability of both inducer geometries.


With the further development of market economy, small and middle enterprises have been the important support for the economic developments of various countries. However, the financing difficulty has largely contrasted with the important contribution of small and middle enterprises for the national economic development. As viewed from the course of the development of small and middle enterprises in the world, the financing difficulty of small and middle enterprises in the world has been a true fact. After the financial crisis broke out, the financing difficulty of small and middle enterprises is increasingly being deepened, and the governments of various countries have adopted multiple measures to deal with this problem. In this article, by analyzing the different financing modes adopted by US, Japan and Euro countries under the economic situation of financial crisis, the proper financing mode in the present economic environment is expected to be found for effectively solving the problem of financing difficulty for small and middle enterprises.


Abstract The central objective of early prevention in Germany is an improved cooperation between professional groups of the health services and child and youth welfare in interprofessional networks. This objective derives from the realisation that proper care for families with infants can only be achieved if the various groups act in close integration. The 'Federal Initiative early prevention' explicitly calls for freelance midwives to be integrated in this context. However, only a few scientific findings on midwives' cooperation in networks of early prevention have been published to date. This integrative review aims to identify the central themes of interprofessional cooperation of midwives in out-of-hospital obstetrical care from national and international research literature. A systematic search of five research databases for publications between 2005 and 2015 was performed, complemented by a manual search. 25 studies were identified describing various contexts where midwives in out-of-hospital obstetrical care cooperate with other professional groups. Four key themes were analysed: contexts of cooperation, benefits of cooperation, facilitating and restrictive factors of cooperation, and competencies of cooperation. The studies show that there is only limited research coverage of the midwives' perspective regarding interprofessional cooperation. The existing studies examine the cooperation of midwives primarily with health care professionals, and secondarily with professionals in the social services. In order to expand knowledge on the cooperation of freelance midwives in the networks of early prevention, future research should focus on the perspective of midwives regarding cooperation with other professional groups, both in the health care sector and in the field of social services.


Social capital is fundamentally concerned with resources in social relations. This Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world to address important questions on the determinants, manifestations and consequences of social capital. Combining cutting-edge theory and appropriate data and methods, it presents a challenge to both social capital researchers interested in explaining social inequality and to policy-makers with responsibility for designing effective measures for enhancing social cohesion.


Based on recent experiments with time-lapse fluorescent imaging, we propose a cellular automaton model for the dynamics of vascular endothelial cells (ECs) in angiogenic morphogenesis. The model successfully reproduces cell mixing behavior, elongation and bifurcation of blood vessels. The results suggest that the two-body interaction between ECs, which is repulsive in short distance and become attractive in moderately long distance, is essential to the dynamics of ECs, in particular, to the cell mixing behavior. The corresponding analytically solvable differential equation model is also proposed.


The past decade has seen an enormous expansion of the doctrine of universal jurisdiction. Universal jurisdiction is an exception to traditional rules of international jurisdiction; it allows any nation, even one with no connection to the offense, to try people suspected of extraordinarily heinous crimes. High-profile examples of universal jurisdiction include the Belgian proceedings against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the international tribunals for war crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the growing docket of human rights litigation in U.S. federal courts. Courts that have joined in this expansion of universal jurisdiction, and the scholars who support them, rely on one key precedent - the law of piracy - to legitimize departing from the traditional jurisdictional requirements. For hundreds of years, piracy was the only offense that was considered universally cognizable. The new universal jurisdiction (NUJ) uses piracy as its precedential and conceptual foundation. Piracy, the argument goes, merely illustrates the broader principle that whatever offenses most shock the conscience of a given era can be prosecuted by any nation. Exercises of universal jurisdiction can have dangerous consequences because they can be seen as encroachments on another nation's sovereign prerogatives. The piracy analogy maintains that at least for heinous crimes, this concern is unfounded: the jurisdictional treatment of piracy proves that nations do not mind ceding jurisdiction over people suspected of egregiously vile offenses. This Article refutes the generally-accepted view that piracy became a universally cognizable offense because of its heinousness, and by extension, the notion that piracy law can provide a valid precedent or model for the NUJ. The Article shows that piracy existed side-by-side with privateering, a form of state-licensed piracy that was entirely legal under the law of nations. That piracy was considered acceptable when committed with sovereign authorization shows that piratical conduct was not viewed as innately heinous in the sense that NUJ crimes are. Furthermore, the Article explains that piracy is simply a species of robbery, and was never regarded as significantly more heinous than robbery is regarded today. The fallacy of the piracy analogy casts into doubt the soundness of many cases that use the analogy to justify their expansion of universal jurisdiction. It also has cautionary implications for international tribunals that might seek to exercise universal jurisdiction, such as the International Criminal Court.


In Chamber of Commerce et al v. Edmund G. Brown, the Supreme Court offers one theory of judicial invalidation that protects employers' freedom of speech claims and reinvigorates federal preemption doctrine within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Prescinding from an architectonic conception of freedom of speech that is supported forcefully and explicitly by the First Amendment, the Court relies on preemption doctrine to invalidate two provisions of a California statute because the enactment constitutes regulation, which intrudes into a zone that is protected and reserved for market freedom. The Court properly upholds its previous stance permitting employers to speak directly to their employees about unionization, but supporters of this decision might do well to withhold their applause. This is so because the Supreme Court, consistent with precedent, has been reluctant to substantiate such rights energetically. The Chamber of Commerce Court breathes life into this pattern.In addition to examining labor law preemption principles, I inspect the often-contestable conception of neutrality in light of the existence of scholarship advocating an expansion in state labor law innovation aimed at reducing employer rights. The penultimate purpose of such innovation seems clear enough: to increase the level of unionization in the United States and to restore collective action to its previously ascendant status. It is doubtful that this objective can be seen as a "neutral" one. Instead, this goal is delineated by the declining importance of labor unions in the United States and the mounting appeal of paternalistic intrusions into the market. In light of this goal, employers, when confronted with either legislative or judicial assertions of neutrality, should be forgiven for suffering from a prevenient sense of doom. This impression is often made tangible via partisan enactments and adjudication.With the advent of postmodern discourse and the possibility that courts have become captive to progressive rhetoric that is not found within the Constitution, I argue that the Supreme Court should reconsider its reliance on the NLRA and preemption doctrine as the primary vehicle to vindicate employers' rights and should instead return to the Constitution itself as a basis for its defense of what has become increasingly difficult to defend: the free speech rights of employers and employees within a labor-management context. This approach is exemplified by recapturing the Supreme Court's understanding of Virginia Electric as an independent ground for relief. This case, decided before the Wagner Act was amended adding explicit protection of employers' speech, stands for the proposition that employer and labor union "attempts to persuade to action with respect to joining or not joining unions are within the First Amendment's guaranty."Ultimately however, I argue that even a return to First Amendment principles will not be enough to protect employers' freedom of expression rights. Indeed, it is unlikely that a liberal democratic state can sustain its ostensibly neutral stance on anything, including union organizing unless it recaptures what is arguably missing in American society: a shared understanding of essentials, such as truth. It is not possible to live in a democratic society that papers over deeply antagonistic world-views, except temporarily. This quandary implies that endless elucidation may be the looming destination of all debates including the employer free speech wrangle.


The Winter 2014-15 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited. This staff-edited issue of Ploughshares features a diverse collection of poems, essays, and stories. The prose ranges from surreal humor — David Cameron's "Mannequin," about a man's relationship with a life-size doll he buys to use the HOV lane — to tragedy in Lisa Gruenberg's essay on the experiences of her Viennese father and his family during the Holocaust. Sherrie Flick's Plan B essay looks at the joy and rage of gardening, and Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillaint write an appreciation of the Dominican-American poet Rhina P. Espaillat. The Winter issue also features poetry by Philip Levine, Sherod Santos, Nalini Jones, Laurie Sewall, and Gary Young; an interview with Zacharis Award winner Roger Reeves; and the winners of the annual Emerging Writer's Contest.


A search for heavy resonances decaying into a pair of Z bosons leading to + − + − and + −νν̄ final states, where stands for either an electron or a muon, is presented. The search uses proton–proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb−1 collected with the ATLAS detector during 2015 and 2016 at the Large Hadron Collider. Different mass ranges for the hypothetical resonances are considered, depending on the final state and model. The different ranges span between 200 and 2000 GeV. The results are interpreted as upper limits on the production cross section of a spin-0 or spin-2 resonance. The upper limits for the spin-0 resonance are translated to exclusion contours in the context of Type-I and Type-II two-Higgs-doublet models, while those for the spin-2 resonance are used to constrain the Randall–Sundrum model with an extra dimension giving rise to spin-2 graviton excitations.


The "Cost of Basic Needs" (CBN) approach to drawing consumption based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN approach are often demonstrably utility inconsistent. Here, we introduce an information theoretic approach for estimating utility consistent poverty lines. An example of the approach is provided for the case of Mozambique. The approach represents a powerful addition to the poverty analyst's toolkit and enhances the attractiveness of the CBN approach for practical poverty measurement problems. JEL Classification codes: C81, D12, O12.


Article history: Received 25 April 2014 Received in revised form 8 May 2014 Accepted 20 May 2014 Available online 16 August 2014


The paper presents how occurred the elaboration and approval of the curriculum proposed for sociology in High School, its guiding principles and general characteristics. It reflects on the format idealized by the Department of Education (see) for the project Sao Paulo Faz Escola, in consideration of the limitations and conditions of the public, in terms of human resources and infrastructure. The text discusses the challenges theoretical, methodological, didactic and pedagogical proposal to transform books for teachers and students, considering deadlines, sources of information, copyrights that ess had access, among other adaptations. Finally, the paper discusses the scope and limits of the proposal, considering the prolonged absence of sociology in school curricula, the lack of licensed teachers in the area and time spent on discipline in the curriculum.


Abstract This paper reports the effect of the parboiling time on dehulled kernel out-turns (DKO) of African breadfruit seeds, and the most recent effort to upgrade an existing dehuller and its performance. Two common and readily available varieties – Treculia var. africana and var. inverse were used in the study. The seeds were parboiled for 0 (control), 2, 5, 8, 11 and 14 minutes and then dehulled. The result revealed that the parboiling time had a significant effect on the DKO of the two varieties of the seed. The DKO increased from 0 to 5 min of the treatment, after which it decreased considerably up to 14 min of the parboiling time. The obtained data were used to develop a non-linear quadratic regression model to predict the DKO as a function of the parboiling time. The performance evaluation of the breadfruit seeds dehuller revealed that it was significantly influenced by the variety.


The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of academic librarians on two topics: the delivery of services to students and faculty in a time of rapid technological changes and an organizational structure appropriate for delivering services to students in a time of rapid technological changes. Several researchers agree that to successfully provide services to users, librarians must understand that leadership is not just a matter of position or authority, it should occur at all levels of the organization (DeLong, 2009; Dewey, 2005; Hernon, 2007; Johnson, 1990; Kouzes & Posner, 1987; Lee, 1993). Further the literature also indicates that a library organizational pattern that encourages teamwork is more conducive for meeting the service needs of students and faculty in a time of rapid technological changes (Drake, 2000; Jones, 1999; Katzenbach & Smith, 1999; Poole & Denny, 2001; Riggs, 1997). The participants in this study consisted of academic librarians working in community colleges, universities, and colleges in North Carolina. A total of 374 participants responded to the questionnaires, for a 36% response rate. The academic librarians were surveyed using two different instruments, the Leadership Practices Inventory Self (LPI-S) (Kouzes & Posner, 2003) and the Team Questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were performed on the data from the Team Questionnaire and the LPI-S (Kouzes & Posner, 2003). Pearson Product-Moment correlations were produced to analyze the relationships between the academic librarians' perceptions of leadership behaviors, their preference for working in teams, and their preference for organizational structure. The analysis returned significant evidence to conclude that the participants in the study preferred working in teams. There was a statistically significant relationship between each of the academic librarians' perceived practice on the LPI-S (Kouzes & Posner, 2003) and the preference for working in teams. The preference for working in a flat organizational structure was not as strong as the preference for working in teams.


It may be a while before Internet telephony with VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) reaches critical mass, but there's already tremendous movement in that direction. A lot of organizations are not only attracted to VoIP's promise of cost savings, but its ability to move data, images, and voice traffic over the same connection. Think of it: a single Internet phone call can take information sharing to a whole new level. That's why many IT administrators and developers are actively looking to set up VoIP-based private telephone switching systems within the enterprise. The efficiency that network users can reach with it is almost mind-boggling. And cheap, if the system is built with open source software like Asterisk. There are commercial VoIP options out there, but many are expensive systems running old, complicated code on obsolete hardware. Asterisk runs on Linux and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment. And you can program it to your liking.Asterisk's flexibility comes at a price, however: it's not a simple system to learn, and the documentation is lacking. Asterisk: The Future of Telephony solves that problem by offering a complete roadmap for installing, configuring, and integrating Asterisk with existing phone systems. Our guide walks you through a basic dial plan step by step, and gives you enough working knowledge to set up a simple but complete system.What you end up with is largely up to you. Asterisk embraces the concept of standards-compliance, but also gives you freedom to choose how to implement your system. Asterisk: The Future of Telephony outlines all the options, and shows you how to set up voicemail services, call conferencing, interactive voice response, call waiting, caller ID, and more. You'll also learn how Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seamlessly across disparate networks. And you won't need additional hardware. For interconnection with digital and analog telephone equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices.Ready for the future of telephony? We'll help you hook it up.


Alzheimer's disease is a fatal and neurodegenerative disease with as many as 5.3 million Americans living with the disease. One of the characteristic hallmarks of Alzheimer's is the amyloid plaques that build up around the neurons. The aggregated amyloid-β (Aβ) peptide is one of the main components of the amyloid plaques found in individuals with Alzheimer's disease. Interestingly, high concentrations of metals (copper, zinc and iron) were found inside these amyloid plaques. The Aβ peptide can be either 40 or 42 residues in length but studies have shown the metal binding site is within the first 16 residues. Copper interactions with Aβ have been studied extensively, but there is no consensus on the coordinating ligands and binding affinity of metal to the peptide. The residues suspected in binding are the N-terminus (N-terminal amine or aspartate group), and the histidines in positions 6, 13, and 14.   The purpose of this research is to study the thermodynamics of copper binding to the Aβ peptide using isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). Our goal is to understand the thermodynamics of copper binding to Aβ and give insight into the residues suspected in binding. We have studied copper binding to the shorter Aβ16 and Aβ28 along with Ac-Aβ16 and Ac-Aβ28 to determine the thermodynamic contribution from the N-terminus. We have observed a thermodynamic difference between the acetylated and nonacetylated forms of the peptide. We have also studied the thermodynamic contributions of the three histidine residues by studying copper binding to Aβ28(H6A), Aβ28(H13A), and Aβ28(H14A). These studies provide information about the metal binding site of Aβ. Understanding copper coordination and affinity to Aβ may give insight regarding metal chelators that can be used for drug therapy.


For the past 10 to 20 years, drug consumption rooms (DCRs) have become an integrated part of the drug treatment and harm reduction strategy in a variety of countries in Western Europe, North America and Australia. However, they have not yet been established in the majority of countries worldwide.This briefing paper provides a short summary of the background, history and objectives of DCRs, and analyses available evidence regarding their impact. The second part of the briefing paper consists of an overview of the various DCRs in different countries, with a particular focus on the concepts used to develop these facilities with regard to the local political, cultural and social situation of each country.


Educational book about business and agriculture. Includes tables for conversions of various weights and measures, population and census data, information for making purchases and sales in agriculture, and business advice, along with an extensive section of advertisements.


It has been shown that having intellectual disabilities impacts to reduce performance compared to athletes without this impairment. However, it has also been demonstrated that there is a not a direct link between intelligence and athletic performance. To advance elite ID sport more needs to be understood about the relationship between this impairment and sporting performance. This is vital if competition classification systems are to be based on theory and evidence. This study used the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) as an approach to classification and examined the impact of multiple health problems on athletic performance. A health survey was administered to two groups of athletes with ID: elite and regional level athletes. Athletes with Down Syndrome were also identified. Overall disability scores predicted sporting performance, but not IQ or Down Syndrome. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the ICF framework and classification.


Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is limited in the quantity and quality of items that can be retained over time. Importantly, these two mnemonic parameters interact: increasing the number of items in VSTM reduces the quality with which they are represented. Here, we ask whether this trade-off is under top-down control. Specifically, we test whether participants can strategically optimise the trade-off between quality and quantity for VSTM according to task demands. We manipulated strategic trade-off by varying expectations about the number of to-be-remembered items (Experiments 1–2) or the precision required for the memory-based judgement (Experiment 3). In a final experiment, we manipulated both variables in a complementary way to maximise the motivation to strategically control the balance between number and the quality of items encoded into VSTM. In different blocks, performance would benefit most either by encoding a large number of items with low precision or by encoding a small number of items with high precision (Experiment 4). In all experiments, we compared VSTM performance on trials matched for mnemonic demand, but within contexts emphasising the quality or quantity of VSTM representations. Across all four experiments, we found no evidence to suggest that participants use this contextual information to bias the balance between the number and precision of items in VSTM. Rather, our data suggest that the trade-off may be determined primarily by stimulus-driven factors at encoding.


Motor control is a young and aspiring field of natural science. Over the past 40 years, it has become an established field of study with several important theoretical developments, including the equilibrium-point hypothesis and its more recent version known as the control with referent spatial coordinates, the principle of abundance, the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis, and the concept of dynamic neural field as the means of task formulation. Important experimental advances have included the exploration of the notion of synergies, the links between descending signals from the brain and referent coordinates of the effectors, and applications of motor control principles to analysis of disordered movements. Further maturation of motor control requires focusing on theory-driven studies. It promises fruitful applications to applied fields such as movement disorders and rehabilitation.


Purpose. Animal-derived drugs are the major source of biological products and traditional medicine, but they are often difficult to identify, causing confusion in the clinical application. Among these medicinal animals, a number of animal species are endangered, leading to the destruction of biodiversity. The identification of animal-derived drugs and their alternatives would be a first step toward biodiversity conservation and safe medication. Until now, no effective method for identifying animal-derived drugs has been demonstrated; DNA-based species identification presents a brand-new technique. Methods. We designed primers to amplify a 523-bp fragment of 12S rRNA and generated sequences for 13 individuals within six medicinal animal species. We examined the efficiency of species recognition based on this sequence, and we also tested the taxonomic affiliations against the GenBank database. Results. All the tested drugs were identified successfully, and a visible gap was found between the inter-specific and intra-specific variation. We further demonstrated the importance of data exploration in DNA-based species identification practice by examining the sequence characteristics of relative genera in GenBank. This region of the 12S rRNA gene had a 100% success rate of species recognition within the six medicinal animal species. Conclusions. We propose that the 12S rRNA locus might be universal for identifying animal-derived drugs and their adulterants. The development of 12S rRNA for indentifying animal-derived drugs that share a common gene target would contribute significantly to the clinical application of animal-derived drugs and the conservation of medicinal animal species.

This article is open to POST-PUBLICATION REVIEW. Registered readers (see "For Readers") may comment by clicking on ABSTRACT on the issue's contents page.


Revelation 2:1-7: 1: Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; 2: I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: 3: And hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted. 4: Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love. 5: Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. 6: But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. 7: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.


With the digital transformation being one of the most discussed topics in the business world today, many enterprises – especially small and medium sized ones – find themselves struggling with the understanding of new digital technologies and thus the potential benefits and risks for their companies. New technologies like the Internet of Things, Blockchain or Machine Learning have great potential for businesses. However, carefully evaluating and selecting purposeful technologies – aligned to the digital strategy – is the key to success. Technologies appear, change and also vanish so rapidly in the digital age, that a proper understanding is crucial for a sustainable technological foundation. Focusing on the characteristic features of technologies, the presented approach promises to create a better technological understanding for decision makers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a playful manner: With a serious game that fosters insight and allays fears of digitalization.