Adjusted analysis: when groups differ on baseline characteristics (eg, age), analyses of outcome data are statistically modified to account for these differences. Blinding (masking): in an experimental study, refers to whether patients, clinicians providing an intervention, people assessing outcomes, and/or data analysts were aware or unaware of the group to which patients were assigned. In the design section of Evidence-Based Nursing abstracts of treatment studies, the study is identified as blinded, with specification of who was blinded; unblinded, if all parties were aware of patients' group assignments; or blinded (unclear) if the authors did not report or provide us with an indication of who was aware or unaware of patients' group assignments. Cohort study: a group of people with a common characteristic or set of characteristics are followed up for a specified period of time to determine the incidence of some outcome; there is no comparison group. Concealment of randomisation: concealment of randomisation is specified in the design section of Evidence-Based Nursing abstracts of treatment studies as follows: allocation concealed (deemed to have taken adequate measures to conceal allocation to study group assignments from those responsible for assessing patients for entry in the trial [ie, central randomisation; sequentially numbered, opaque, sealed envelopes; sealed envelopes from a closed bag; numbered or coded bottles or containers; drugs prepared by the pharmacy; or other descriptions that contain elements convincing of concealment]); allocation not concealed (deemed to have not taken adequate measures to conceal allocation to study group assignments from those responsible for assessing patients for entry in the trial [ie, no concealment procedure was undertaken, sealed envelopes that were not opaque or were not sequentially numbered, or other descriptions that contained elements not convincing of concealment]); unclear allocation concealment (the authors did not report or provide a description of an allocation concealment approach that allowed for the classification as concealed or not concealed). Confidence interval (CI): quantifies the uncertainty in measurement; usually reported as 95% CI, which is the range of values within which we can be 95% sure that the true value for the whole population lies. Constant comparison: a procedure used in qualitative research wherein newly collected data are compared in an ongoing fashion with data obtained earlier, to refine theoretically relevant categories. Discourse analysis: a qualitative method of investigation focused on the representation and creation of meaning through language and visual imagery. A discourse is defined as a patterned way of representing phenomena in social and material worlds. Effect size: a measure of effect that is typically used for continuous data when different scales are used to measure an outcome and is usually defined as the difference in means between the intervention and control groups divided by the standard deviation of the control or both groups; it can be used for combining results across studies in a meta-analysis. Ethnography (ethnographic study): an approach to inquiry that focuses on the culture or subculture of a group of people, with an effort to understand the world view of those under study. Factorial design: a design where 2 independent variables are simultaneously manipulated; it permits analysis of the main effects of the independent variables separately plus the interaction of these variables. Heterogeneity: the degree to which the effect estimates of individual studies in a meta-analysis differ significantly. Intention to treat analysis (ITT): all patients are analysed in the groups to which they were randomised, even if they failed to complete the intervention or received the wrong intervention. Meta-analysis: a method for combining the results of several independent studies that measure the same outcomes so that an overall summary statistic can be calculated. Number needed to treat (NNT): number of patients who need to be treated to prevent 1 additional negative event (or to promote 1 additional positive event); this is calculated as 1/absolute risk reduction (rounded to the next whole number), accompanied by the 95% confidence interval. p Value: a statistical value which relates the probability that the obtained results are due to chance alone (type I error); a p value < 0.05 means that there is less than a 1 in 20 probability of that result occurring by chance alone under the null hypothesis that there is no difference in the populations. Relative benefit increase (RBI): the proportional increase in the rates of good events between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Relative risk increase (RRI): the proportional increase in bad outcomes between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Relative risk reduction (RRR): the proportional reduction in bad outcomes between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Stratified randomisation: used in trials to ensure that equal numbers of participants with a particular characteristic (eg, age) are allocated to each comparison group. Symbolic interaction: a qualitative research method that focuses on the way in which people make sense of social interactions and the meanings they attach to social symbols such as language.


Our promotional outreach raises your visibility and credibility with press, analysts, and investors. You may receive recognition for your role as an open standards leader in OASIS press releases [9], web sites, newsletters [10], and data sheets [11]. We offer many avenues for promoting your news, maximizing your press coverage, and driving traffic to your web site. Members also take advantage of opportunities to speak at conferences, promote their products at OASIS Interop demos [12], and connect with prospects via open standards webinars [13] [14].


Over the last several years, solar energy technologies have been, or are in the process of being, deployed at unprecedented levels. A critical recent development, resulting from the massive scale of projects in progress or recently completed, is having the power sold directly to electric utilities. Such 'utility-scale' systems offer the opportunity to deploy solar technologies far faster than the traditional 'behind-the-meter' projects designed to offset retail load. Moreover, these systems have employed significant economies of scale during construction and operation, attracting financial capital, which in turn can reduce the delivered cost of power. This report is a summary of the current U.S. utility-scale solar state-of-the-market and development pipeline. Utility-scale solar energy systems are generally categorized as one of two basic designs: concentrating solar power (CSP) and photovoltaic (PV). CSP systems can be further delineated into four commercially available technologies: parabolic trough, central receiver (CR), parabolic dish, and linear Fresnel reflector. CSP systems can also be categorized as hybrid, which combine a solar-based system (generally parabolic trough, CR, or linear Fresnel) and a fossil fuel energy system to produce electric power or steam.


This Article, which is part of a symposium on "Law and Ethics at the Frontier of Genetic Technology," examines an unprecedented experimental study published in Science. The Science study indicated that psychopathic criminal offenders were more likely to receive lighter sentences if a judge was aware of genetic and neurobiological explanations for the offender's psychopathy. This Article contends that the study's conclusions derive from substantial flaws in the study's design and methodology. The hypothetical case upon which the study is based captures just one narrow and unrepresentative component of how genetic and neurobiological information operates, and the study suffers from serious omissions that affect the validity and reliability of its results. It is important to call attention to these problems given that the study's widely-publicized findings are likely to bolster inaccurate perceptions regarding the dangers of allowing behavioral genetics evidence in criminal cases. This Article concludes with a detailed discussion of a number of recent criminal cases involving behavioral genetics evidence. Familiarity with such cases may improve the real-world applicability of future experimental studies exploring the influence of genetics evidence on criminal cases.


Abstract Pathological aggregation and accumulation of α-synuclein in neurons play a core role in Parkinson's disease (PD) while its overexpression is a common PD model. Autophagy-lysosomal pathways are general intraneural mechanisms of protein clearance. Earlier a suppressed autophagy in the brain of young transgenic mice overexpressing the А53Т-mutant human α-synuclein (mut(PD)) was revealed. Previous studies have recognized that Cystatin C displays protective activity against neurodegeneration. This cysteine protease inhibitor attracts particular attention as a potential target for PD treatment related to autophagy modulation. Here we evaluated the mRNA levels of Cst3 encoding Cystatin C in different brain structures of 5 m.o. mut(PD) mice at standard conditions and after the chronic treatment with a neuroprotective agent, ceftriaxone (100 mg/kg, 36 days). The inflammatory markers, namely, microglial activation by IBA1 expression and mRNA levels of two chitinases genes (Chit1, Chia1), were also assessed but no significant difference was found between control and transgenic mice. Cst3 mRNA levels were significantly reduced in the striatum and amygdala in the transgenic PD model. Furthermore, this was associated with autophagy decline and might be added to early signs of synucleinopathy development. We first demonstrated the modulation of mRNA levels of Cst3 and autophagy marker Becn1 in the brain by ceftriaxone treatment. Taken together, the results support the potential of autophagy modulation through Cystatin C at early stages of PD-like pathology.


This paper presents findings from baseline surveys on student learning achievement, teacher effort and community participation in three Indian states, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Results indicate low teacher attendance and poor student learning. Parents and school committees are neither aware of their oversight roles nor participating in school management. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in outcomes across states. Karnataka has better student and teacher outcomes as well as higher levels of community awareness and participation than the other two states. The authors find substantial variation in teacher effort within schools, but most observable teacher characteristics are not associated with teacher effort. One reason for low teacher effort may be lack of accountability. Regression analysis suggests low rates of teacher attendance are only part of the problem of low student achievement. The gains in test scores associated with higher rates of attendance and engagement in teaching are small in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, suggesting teachers themselves may not be effective. Ineffective teaching may result from lack of accountability as well as poor professional development of teachers. Further research is needed to examine not only issues of accountability but also professional development of teachers.


The importance of the institutional framework for economic development is widely accepted today and it is duly stressed in the economic literature. The protection of property rights, the enforcement of contracts and an efficient legal system are the pillars of the contemporary rule of law. However, formal institutions cannot function without being internalized by the citizens and without the strong backing of social norms. Morality and social norms are the major elements of the informal institutional structure, the social capital, which is also critical for social welfare and economic development. In this paper we will discuss both the formal and the informal institutional framework of Ancient Athens, which was a free market society with economic problems similar to contemporary market societies. Athenians developed a highly sophisticated legal framework for the protection of private property, the enforcement of contracts and the efficient resolution of disputes. Such an institutional framework functioned effectively, cultivating trust and protecting the security of transactions. This entire system however was based on social norms such as reciprocity, the value of reputation and widely accepted business ethics. Conformity to social norms as well as moral behavior was fostered by social sanction mechanisms (such as stigma) and moral education. The Athenian example is a further proof of the importance of morality and social norms as transaction cost-saving devices even in quite sophisticated legal systems. Their absence or decline leads inevitably to the need for more regulation and litigation and to a growing preference for clear-cut rules instead of discretionary standards. Athenian law was pioneering in the development of rules and institutional mechanisms suitable for the reduction of transaction costs, many of them surviving in the most complex contemporary legal systems.


"Imagine a future world where computers can create universes -- digital environments made from binary ones and zeros. Imagine that within these universes there exist biological forms that reproduce, grow, and think. Imagine plantlike forms, ant colonies, immune systems, and brains, all adapting, evolving, and getting better at solving problems. Imagine if our computers became greenhouses for a new kind of nature. Just think what digital biology could do for us. Perhaps it could evolve new designs for us, think up ways to detect fraud using digital neurons, or solve scheduling problems with ants. Perhaps it could detect hackers with immune systems or create music from the patterns of growth of digital seashells. Perhaps it would allow our computers to become creative and inventive. Now stop imagining." digital biology is an intriguing glimpse into the future of technology by one of the most creative thinkers working in computer science today. As Peter J. Bentley explains, the next giant step in computing technology is already under way as computer scientists attempt to create digital universes that replicate the natural world. Within these digital universes, we will evolve solutions to problems, construct digital brains that can learn and think, and use immune systems to trap and destroy computer viruses. The biological world is the model for the next generation of computer software. By adapting the principles of biology, computer scientists will make it possible for computers to function as the natural world does. In practical terms, this will mean that we will soon have "smart" devices, such as houses that will keep the temperature as we like it and automobilesthat will start only for drivers they recognize (through voice recognition or other systems) and that will navigate highways safely and with maximum fuel efficiency. Computers will soon be powerful enough and small enough that they can become part of clothing. "Digital agents" will be able to help us find a bank or restaurant in a city that we have never visited before, even as we walk through the airport. Miniature robots may even be incorporated into our bodies to monitor our health. "Digital Biology" is also an exploration of biology itself from a new perspective. We must understand how nature works in its most intimate detail before we can use these same biological processes inside our computers. Already scientists engaged in this work have gained new insights into the elegant simplicity of the natural universe. This is a visionary book, written in accessible, nontechnical language, that explains how cutting-edge computer science will shape our world in the coming decades.


Planners, architects, urban designers and other built environment professionals engage with a myriad of checkboxes, guidelines, requirements and specifications, all of which potentially compromise creativity and innovation in urban design. Approaches that measure performance are accused of belying the nature of places as messy, plural, organic, accidental and emotive; trying to find a formula that works may tick boxes, but it risks creating soulless spaces, oppressing innovation and incorporation of inappropriate design elements. This paper argues that sustainability assessment methods do have something to contribute to creativity and innovation in urban design precisely because they encourage engagement with challenging and often complex societal priorities. Through interviews with built environment professionals and a critical examination of sustainability assessment methods, the authors suggest that such methods can promote creativity and innovation if they engage competently with sustainability, work at a scale that allows for both breadth and depth (typically greater than the building scale) and incorporate in their design a set of eight key characteristics designed to promote creativity and innovation.


In 1968 and 1970, U.S. and British radical feminists organized provocative protests at the Miss America and Miss World beauty pageants. While the American New York Radical Women expressed their outrage at women's objectification by picketing, engaging in street theater antics, and organizing a brief if peaceable outburst, British feminists raised a panic in London by throwing flour bombs and rotten produce at audience members and celebrity MC's, scattering plastic mice, spraying ink-filled squirt guns, and even snubbing out a cigarette on a policeman. Why were the U.S. radical feminists so much more decorous than their British sisters? In this article, I analyze how each of these radical feminist camps employed the strategies of outrage, law-breaking, and violence, noting that U.S. beauty pageant protesters were outrageous, but avoided the scandalous scofflawing and aggression of the London rebels. Investigating the historical and contemporary political worlds in which these two revolutionary groups worked, I show that U.S. and British attitudes toward law-breaking and violence were shaped by their native, early 20th century histories of feminism, as well as the American and European tumults and tragedies that characterized the age. Drawing on the work of Reva Siegel, Jack M. Balkin, and Lynda G. Dodd, I will then consider how the U.S. and British protesters influenced their countries' respective constitutional cultures and future feminist legal theories. Each camp's approach to outrage, law-breaking, and violence in street protest would later be felt in successes and failures on the constitutional front, and also resound in a law-faithful U.S. feminism that differs significantly from its skeptical, anti-authoritarian British complement.


Objective IELTS is a 2-level IELTS preparation course providing comprehensive training for both the Academic and General Training modules. The course is uniquely informed by the Cambridge Learner Corpus, using analysis of real IELTS candidate papers. The 2 levels of Objective IELTS can be used on their own or consecutively, so that lower-level students requiring a high band score can start preparing early. Each level offers 60-80 hours of study, which can be extended using the Workbook and CD-ROM.


The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Quality Control for Rental Assistance Subsidy Determinations studies provide national estimates of the extent, severity, costs, and sources of rent errors in tenant subsidies for the PHA-administered Public Housing, Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, and Moderate Rehabilitation programs; and the Housing-administered Section 8, Section 202 and Section 811 Project Rental Assistance Contracts (PRAC) and Section 202/162 Project Assistance Contracts (PAC). These programs account for nearly all of HUD's current housing assistance outlays administered by the Offices of Housing and Public and Indian Housing, as well as the large majority of units assisted by HUD. This study was designed to measure the extent of administrator income and rent determination error by housing providers. This study does not involve an audit of individual PHAs or projects; nor does it monitor the implementation of housing programs. Its focus is on identifying households where an error was made when calculating the amount of the household's rent; and providing nationally representative findings related to those errors. The errors we evaluated in this study affect the rent contributions tenants should have been charged. The findings presented in this report are a result of data collected from February through June 2010 for actions taken by Public Housing Authority (PHA) and project staff during Federal FY 2009 (October 2008 through September 2009). These findings show that the percent of errors, and the gross erroneous payments in the Public Housing, Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher, Moderate Rehabilitation, owner-administered Section 8, Section 202 and Section 811 (PRAC) and Section 202/162 (PAC) tenant subsidies continue to remain stable when compared with results from previous studies.


We present an implementation of general FFTs for graphics processing units (GPUs). Unlike most existing GPU FFT implementations, we handle both complex and real data of any size that can fit in a texture. The basic building block for our algorithms is a radix-2 Stockham formulation of the FFT for power-of-two data sizes that avoids expensive bit reversals and exploits the high GPU memory band-width efficiently. We implemented our algorithms using the DirectX9 API, which enables our routines to be used on many of the existing GPUs today. We have performed comparisons against optimized CPU-based and GPU-based FFT libraries (Intel Math Kernel Library and NVIDIA CUFFT, respectively). Our results on a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX GPU indicate a significant performance improvement over the existing libraries for many input cases.


Imaging studies of the breast comprise three principal sensing domains: structural, mechanical, and functional. Combinations of these domains can yield either additive or wholly new information, depending on whether one domain interacts with the other. In this report, we describe a new approach to breast imaging based on the interaction between controlled applied mechanical force and tissue hemodynamics. Presented is a description of the system design, performance characteristics, and representative clinical findings for a second-generation dynamic near-infrared optical tomographic breast imager that examines both breasts simultaneously, under conditions of rest and controlled mechanical provocation. The expected capabilities and limitations of the developed system are described in relation to the various sensing domains for breast imaging.


Network science deals with issues related to the aggregation, processing, and diffusion of information over graphs. While interactions among agents can be studied from the perspective of cluster formations, degrees of connectivity, and small-world effects, it is the possibility of having agents interact dynamically with each other, and influence each other's behavior, that opens up a plethora of notable possibilities and challenges. For example, the examination of how local interactions influence global behavior can lead to a broader understanding of how localized interactions in the social sciences, life sciences, and system sciences influence the evolution of the respective multi-agent networks. In this presentation, we examine the learning behavior of adaptive networked agents over both strongly and weakly-connected graphs. The discussion will reveal some interesting patterns of behavior on how information flows over graphs. In the strongly-connected case, all agents are able to learn the desired true state within the same accuracy level, thus attaining a level of 'social equilibrium,' even when the agents are subjected to different noise conditions. In contrast, in the weakly-connected case, a leader-follower relationship develops with some agents dictating the behavior of other agents regardless of the local information clues that are sensed by these other agents. The findings clarify how asymmetries in the exchange of data over graphs can make some agents dependent on other agents. This scenario arises, for example, from intruder attacks by malicious agents, from the presence of stubborn agents, or from failures by critical links. The results have useful implications for the design and operation of multi-agent systems, robotic swarms, and graph tomography.


The alternative-comics master offers an indelible and idiosyncratic take on the protofeminist"["Woman Rebel"] is fine work from an excellent cartoonist and I urge you to jump right in."-Tom Spurgeon of "The Comics Reporter," from his introduction Peter Bagge's "Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story" is a dazzling and accessible biography of the social and political maverick, jam-packed with fact and fun. In his signature cartoony, rubbery style, Bagge presents the life of the birth-control activist, educator, nurse, mother, and protofeminist from her birth in the late nineteenth century to her death after the invention of the birth control pill. Balancing humor and respect, Bagge makes Sanger whole and human, showing how her flaws fueled her fiery activism just as much as her compassionate nature did. Sanger's life takes on a whole new vivacity as Bagge creates a fast-paced portrait of a trailblazer whose legacy as the founder of Planned Parenthood is still incredibly relevant, important, and inspiring.


Abstract. The General Lake Model (GLM) is a one-dimensional open-source code designed to simulate the hydrodynamics of lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands. GLM was developed to support the science needs of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), a network of researchers using sensors to understand lake functioning and address questions about how lakes around the world respond to climate and land use change. The scale and diversity of lake types, locations, and sizes, and the expanding observational datasets created the need for a robust community model of lake dynamics with sufficient flexibility to accommodate a range of scientific and management questions relevant to the GLEON community. This paper summarizes the scientific basis and numerical implementation of the model algorithms, including details of sub-models that simulate surface heat exchange and ice cover dynamics, vertical mixing, and inflow–outflow dynamics. We demonstrate the suitability of the model for different lake types that vary substantially in their morphology, hydrology, and climatic conditions. GLM supports a dynamic coupling with biogeochemical and ecological modelling libraries for integrated simulations of water quality and ecosystem health, and options for integration with other environmental models are outlined. Finally, we discuss utilities for the analysis of model outputs and uncertainty assessments, model operation within a distributed cloud-computing environment, and as a tool to support the learning of network participants.


Wearing a nicotine patch may help improve memory loss in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, according to a study published today in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study looked at individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the stage between normal aging and dementia when others begin to notice that an individual is developing mild memory or thinking problems. Many older adults with MCI go on to develop Alzheimer's disease. The study looked at 74 non-smokers with MCI and an average age of 76. Half of the patients were given a nicotine patch of 15 mg a day for six months and half received a placebo. The study was designed so neither the participants nor the investigators knew which group received the nicotine patch. Paul Newhouse, M.D., professor of Psychiatry and director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who authored the study, said the results of the study should not be viewed as an endorsement of smoking or of nicotine for normal individuals. ''What we and others have shown is that nicotine doesn't do much for memory and attention in the normal population, but it does do something for those whose cognitive function is already impaired.'' ''People with memory loss should not start smoking or using nicotine patches by themselves because there are harmful effects of smoking and a medication such as nicotine should only be used with a doctor's supervision,'' Newhouse said. ''But this study provides strong justification for further research into the use of nicotine for people with early signs of memory loss which may help us determine whether benefits persist over long periods of time and provide meaningful improvement.'' Newhouse said nicotine is a ''fascinating drug with interesting properties.'' The effects of nicotine are dependent on the initial state of a person's cognitive functioning, he said. ''If you're already functioning fine, but slip down the hill, nicotine will push you back up toward the top. A little bit of the drug makes poor performers better. Too much, and it makes them worse again, so there's a range. The key issue is to find the sweet spot where it helps.'' The study showed evidence of improvement across multiple cognitive tests for attention memory, speed of processing and consistency of processing. For example, after 6 months of treatment, the nicotine-treated group regained 46 percent of normal performance for age on long-term memory, whereas the placebo group worsened by 26 percent over the same time period. One area that didn't show significant improvement was that of ''global impression,'' which means a health care provider didn't observe the patient was any better or any worse. Newhouse said that future study is needed. ''We need to do a much longer and larger study, to see if we can make a significant impact on the process of change.'' Nicotine stimulates receptors in the brain that are important for thinking and memory and may have neuroprotective effects. People with Alzheimer's disease lose some of those receptors. Newhouse said the future of nicotinic treatment is to try to identify earlier stages at which treatment can be applied, to see if it changes the trajectory of those who already have evidence of memory loss. ''I don't think it's going to become a treatment for Alzheimer's disease by itself. That would be like trying to rebuild a house after a fire when the fire's still going. You need to prevent the fire. The holy grail would be changing the deterioration curve.'' Those in the study group receiving the nicotine patch experienced only minor side effects like nausea and dizziness, similar to what a person would experience when smoking a cigarette for the first time, Newhouse said. Those on the nicotine patch also experienced mild weight loss, not surprising since nicotine is an appetite suppressant. There were also no withdrawal symptoms reported when the study participants stopped using the nicotine patch.(Source: EurekAlert! A service of AAAS and Vanderbilt University Medical Center).


In selection tasks where target stimuli are accompanied by distractors, responses to target stimuli, target stimuli and the distractor stimuli can be encoded together as one episode in memory. Subsequent repetition of any aspect of such an episode can lead to the retrieval of the whole episode including the response. Thus, repeating a distractor can retrieve responses given to previous targets; this mechanism was labeled distractor-response binding and has been evidenced in several visual setups. Three experiments of the present thesis implemented a priming paradigm with an identification task to generalize this mechanism to auditory and tactile stimuli as well as to stimulus concepts. In four more experiments the possible effect of distractor-response binding on drivers' reactions was investigated. The same paradigm was implemented using more complex stimuli, foot responses, go/no-go responses, and a dual task setup with head-up and head-down displays. The results indicate that distractor-response binding effects occur with auditory and tactile stimuli and that the process is mediated by a conceptual representation of the distractor stimuli. Distractor-response binding effects also revealed for stimuli, responses, and framework conditions likely to occur in a driving situation. It can be concluded that the effect of distractor-response binding needs to be taken into account for the design of local danger warnings in driver assistance systems.


As we enter a room full of people, we instantly have a number of social perceptions. We have an automatic perception of others as subjective agents with their own points of view, thoughts, and goals, and we can quickly interpret minimal visual information to infer that something is animate. This book explores the perceptual and cognitive processes that allow humans to perceive and understand this social information quickly and apparently effortlessly. Top researchers in fields ranging from developmental psychology to vision science consider the perception of biological and animate motion, inferences based on this motion, and the early development of these abilities. These innovative contributions reflect a recent renewal of interest in the attribution of agency and the understanding of goal-directed behavior, which has been accompanied by a rapid increase in empirical discoveries enabled by such new experimental techniques as brain imaging. The research presented in Social Perception suggests that an intuitive understanding of others is an integral part of human psychology, develops early, relies on a network of brain regions, and may be compromised in autism. ContributorsDare Baldwin, Lara Bardi, H. Clark Barrett, Erin Cannon, You-jung Choi, Willem E. Frankenhuis, Tao Gao, Emily D. Grossman, Antonia Hamilton, Petra Hauf, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Jeff Loucks, Scott A. Love, Yuyan Luo, Elena Mascalzoni, Phil McAleer, Richard Ramsey, Lucia Regolin, M.D. Rutherford, Kara Sage, Brian J. Scholl, Maggie Shiffrar, Francesca Simion, Jessica Sommerville, James P. Thomas, Nikolaus Troje, Amanda Woodward.


In "The Making of Modern Britain", Andrew Marr paints a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation was shaken by war and peace. The two wars were the worst we had ever known and the episodes of peace among the most turbulent and surprising. As the political forum moved from Edwardian smoking rooms to an increasingly democratic Westminster, the people of Britain experimented with extreme ideas as they struggled to answer the question 'How should we live?' Socialism? Fascism? Feminism?. Meanwhile, fads such as eugenics, vegetarianism and nudism were gripping the nation, while the popularity of the music hall soared. It was also a time that witnessed the birth of the media as we know it today and the beginnings of the welfare state. Beyond trenches, flappers and Spitfires, this is a story of strange cults and economic madness, of revolutionaries and heroic inventors, sexual experiments and raucous stage heroines. From organic food to drugs, nightclubs and celebrities to package holidays, crooked bankers to sleazy politicians, the echoes of today's Britain ring from almost every page.


This paper describes the design of and experimentation with the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language (KQML), a new language and protocol for exchanging information and knowledge. This work is part a larger effort, the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort which is aimed at developing techniques and methodology for building large-scale knowledge bases which are sharable and reusable. KQML is both a message format and a message-handling protocol to support run-time knowledge sharing among agents. KQML can be used as a language for an application program to interact with an intelligent system or for two or more intelligent systems to share knowledge in support of cooperative problem solving. KQML focuses on an extensible set of performatives, which defines the permissible operations that agents may attempt on each other's knowledge and goal stores. The performatives comprise a substrate on which to develop higher-level models of inter-agent interaction such as contract nets and negotiation. In addition, KQML provides a basic architecture for knowledge sharing through a special class of agent called communication facilitators which coordinate the interactions of other agents The ideas which underlie the evolving design of KQML are currently being explored through experimental prototype systems which are being used to support several testbeds in such areas as concurrent engineering, intelligent design and intelligent planning and scheduling.


The drive to access basic education to school aged children, has preoccupied successive governments in independent Kenya. This has been evidenced by a series of activities aimed at boosting school enrolment and learning ranging from heavy allocation of the national budget to education, currently standing at 6.3% of the GDP, to the current implementation of the free primary education policy. Yet despite all this effort attaining EFA has remained illusive. So while primary school enrolment in 2003 rose from 5.8 to 7.1 million, it is estimated that there are still 2 million non-enrolled children. It is this reality of OOS children, that has over the years prompted a number of individuals or organizations, operating outside the formal system to initiate endeavours offering formal education. From individual cases in the 1980s, these initiatives multiplied in the 1990s and came to be formally recognised a Non Formal Schools (NFS). Policy documents exalted their role in reaching specific populations of excluded children and hence achieving EFA. However, no detailed study had been conducted on NFS in terms of their numbers, education provisions, to whom they are offered, how they are offered, their viability of replication and their overall place in the primary school education plan in the country. The task of this study was therefore to investigate how alternative learning approaches, such as NFS contribute to the provision of basic education in Kenya. This was done by examining the characteristics of NFS with respect to school orientation and classroom culture and how this enhances the attainment of basic education skills. Specifically, the study sought to (a) identify and analyse NFS according to school category and functions (b) understand their learning processes and factors impacting on them and (c) thereafter posit the contributions NFS are making towards enhancing the provision of basic education in Kenya. The study designed to answer the above objectives adopted an interactive research design comprising the quantitative and qualitative paradigms. First an institutional mapping survey comprising 30 institutions was conducted. Thereafter 8 cases were selected for detailed study. Additionally a desk review of NFE approaches targeting school aged children in selected countries was undertaken. The selection of the sites was informed by the fact that NFS are visible from a geographic point of view as they are mainly to be found in rural-remote districts and urban poor areas. Hence NFS in Samburu and Marsabit to represent Rural and Kisumu and Nairobi too represent Urban were studied. The data collection and analysis procedures were guided by the "nine building blocks of education" framework suggested by Anderson (1992) who suggests that optimum outcomes in education are the result of effective interaction among the 9 blocks viz. the learners, teachers, time, place, curriculum, pedagogy, community participation, administration and finances. The work is also presented along these nine blocks. On the whole, the study reveals that there has been an overly romanticism of the role of "alternative provisions". NFS are ascribed a big role without accompanying changes in policy and financing and without a full examination of its ability to provide an equitable learning experience. The schools are envisioned to augment the countries basic education plan and yet they have not been properly empowered to do so. Government documents depict a lack of clarity of the place of NFS in the overall basic education plan. For instance, they are quoted to be complementary institutions but the findings suggest that the majority of NFS, especially in urban are parallel institutions, competing against formal education rather than complementing it and operating in a vague and uncoordinated linkage with formal institutions (e.g. primary schools, examination council) offering basic education. The wording "non" has been used to justify difference which unfortunately has taken the shape of "just teaching" questionable content using equally questionably pedagogical skills. It is evident that NFS needs streamlining and this study makes suggestions on a more comprehensive educational plan that would accommodate vulnerable children and their quest for formal education. In this sense, this work belongs to the broader theme of school reform.


"We didn't think of our movies as underground or commercial or art or porn; they were a little of all of those, but ultimately they were just 'our kind of movie.'"--Andy Warhol Andy Warhol was a remarkably prolific filmmaker, creating more than 100 movies and nearly 500 of the film portraits known as Screen Tests. And yet relatively little has been written about this body of work. Warhol withdrew his films from circulation in the early 1970s and it was only after his death in 1987 that they began to be restored and shown again. With "Our Kind of Movie" Douglas Crimp offers the first single-authored book about the full range of Andy Warhol's films in forty years--and the first since the films were put back into circulation. In six essays, Crimp examines individual films, including Blow Job, Screen Test No. 2, and Warhol's cinematic masterpiece The Chelsea Girls (perhaps the most commercially successful avant-garde film of all time), as well as groups of films related thematically or otherwise--films of seductions in confined places, films with scenarios by Ridiculous Theater playwright Ronald Tavel. Crimp argues that Warhol's films make visible new, queer forms of sociality. Crimp does not view these films as cinema-verite documents of Warhol's milieu, or as camera-abetted voyeurism, but rather as exemplifying Warhol's inventive cinema techniques, his collaborative working methods, and his superstars' unique capabilities. Thus, if Warhol makes visible new social relations, Crimp writes, that visibility is inextricable from his making a new kind of cinema. In "Our Kind of Movie" Crimp shows how Warhol's films allow us to see against the grain--to see differently and to see a different world, a world of difference.


In a recent article (Bardhan and Klasen, 1999) we had reviewed UNDP's gender-related indices included in the annual Human Development Reports since 1995. In particular, we had suggested certain modifications to the Gender-Related Development Index (GDI), including a revision of the earned income component of the GDI. Partly based on our comments, UNDP modified the procedure for calculating the GDI in the 1999 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1999). Since the 1999 Report presents the new procedure in the technical annex without mentioning that it is different from previous years' procedure, we want to briefly describe the changes made and their effects on the GDI ranking of countries.


How do we make sense of other people and of ourselves? What do we know about the people we encounter in our daily lives and about the situations in which we encounter them, and how do we use this knowledge in our attempt to understand, predict, or recall their behavior? Are our social judgments fully determined by our social knowledge, or are they also influenced by our feelings and desires? Social cognition researchers look at how we make sense of other people and of ourselves. In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field. The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, "hot" cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.


In this hypnotic epic novel, Mo Yan, the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of this generation, takes us on a journey to a conjured province of contemporary China known as the Republic of Wine a corrupt and hallucinatory world filled with superstitions, gargantuan appetites, and surrealistic events. When rumors reach the authorities that strange and excessive gourmandise is being practiced in the city of Liquorland (so named for the staggering amount of alcohol produced and consumed there), veteran special investigator Ding Gou'er is dispatched from the capital to discover the truth. His mission begins at the Mount Lou Coal Mine, where he encounters the prime suspect Deputy Head Diamond Jin, legendary for his capacity to hold his liquor. During the ensuing drinking duel at a banquet served in Ding's honor, the investigator loses all sense of reality, and can no longer tell whether the roast suckling served is of the animal or human variety. When he finally wakes up from his stupor, he has still found no answers to his rapidly mounting questions. Worse yet, he soon finds that his trusty gun is missing. Interspersed throughout the narrative and Ding's faltering investigation are letters sent to Mo Yan by one Li Yidou, a doctoral candidate in Liquor Studies and an aspiring writer. Each letter contains a story that Li would like the renowned author's help in getting published. However, Li's tales, each more fantastic and malevolent than the last, soon begin alarmingly to resemble the story of Ding's continuing travails in Liquorland. Peopled by extraordinary characters a dwarf, a scaly demon, a troupe of plump, delectable boys raised in captivity, a cookery teacher who primes her students with monstrous recipes Mo Yan's revolutionary tour de force reaffirms his reputation as a writer of world standing. Wild, bawdy, politically explosive, and subversive, "The Republic of Wine" is both mesmerizing and exhilarating, proving that no repressive regime can stifle true creative imagination."


To say that it is difficult to divorce the debate over the suitability of trying terrorism suspects in the Article III courts from the politics of the moment would be an epic understatement. Especially in light of the Obama Administration's decisions to (1) try the "9/11 defendants" in the civilian courts and (2) subject Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to civilian - rather than military - jurisdiction, recent months have witnessed a renewed barrage of objections to subjecting such extraordinary cases to the ordinary processes of our criminal justice system. These critiques have included claims that such trials make the city in which they occur a target for future attacks; that they provide the defendants with a platform from which to spew anti-American propaganda; that they risk publicly revealing information about intelligence sources and methods; that they are enormously costly both with regard to the security measures they require and the judicial resources they consume; and, most substantively, that they put pressure on the courts to sanction exceptional departures from procedural or evidentiary norms that will eventually become settled as the rule - what we might characterize as either a "distortion effect" or a "seepage problem."Although these arguments are not new, they do raise fundamental questions about whether the civilian courts are able effectively to function in certain high-profile terrorism cases and to balance the rights of the defendants with the very real practical, logistical, and substantive difficulties that such prosecutions tend to raise. And while any number of groups have attempted to answer these questions at the macro level, there have been few concerted studies of individual trials. This symposium article attempts a different approach, focusing on the specific procedural and evidentiary issues confronted in one of the more legally significant of the post-September 11 criminal prosecutions completed as of this Article - the trial of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali.As this article suggests, Abu Ali is a microcosm both of the unique difficulties these cases present and the ways in which such issues have generally been resolved by federal trial judges exercising creativity and flexibility. Moreover, Abu Ali provides particular proof of the extent to which advancements in courtroom technology may well mitigate at least some of the practical obstacles that courts face in transnational terrorism cases. Finally, whatever difficulties Abu Ali may have presented for the civilian criminal justice system, it is not at all clear why the same difficulties wouldn't also be present had Abu Ali been tried in a military commission. The claimed errors at trial that were analyzed by the Fourth Circuit were all constitutionally grounded, and there is little in the way of precedent for the proposition that either the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination or the Sixth Amendment's right to confrontation have less force before a military tribunal - especially where the defendant is a U.S. citizen.To be sure, like this Article's conclusions, its aim is modest. There are a host of reasons why it would be wrong to draw sweeping lessons from the story of one particular case, no matter how significant that one case may be. In addition, even an assessment just of the Abu Ali litigation is lacking for any appreciation of the myriad problems that government or defense counsel likely encountered behind the scenes; the story told here is one reconstructed entirely from the public record, a record that could also be read with a far more skeptical eye. Nevertheless, my hope is that a candid discussion of the Abu Ali litigation - including its triumphs and its shortcomings - will add meaningful substantive content to a conversation that, for the moment, seems awash in unsubstantiated (and largely partisan) rhetoric.


The goal of this work is to develop statistical natural language models and processing techniques
based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), especially the recently introduced Long Short-
Term Memory (LSTM). Due to their adapting and predicting abilities, these methods are more
robust, and easier to train than traditional methods, i.e., words list and rule-based models. They
improve the output of recognition systems and make them more accessible to users for browsing
and reading. These techniques are required, especially for historical books which might take
years of effort and huge costs to manually transcribe them.
The contributions of this thesis are several new methods which have high-performance computing and accuracy. First, an error model for improving recognition results is designed. As
a second contribution, a hyphenation model for difficult transcription for alignment purposes
is suggested. Third, a dehyphenation model is used to classify the hyphens in noisy transcription. The fourth contribution is using LSTM networks for normalizing historical orthography.
A size normalization alignment is implemented to equal the size of strings, before the training
phase. Using the LSTM networks as a language model to improve the recognition results is
the fifth contribution. Finally, the sixth contribution is a combination of Weighted Finite-State
Transducers (WFSTs), and LSTM applied on multiple recognition systems. These contributions
will be elaborated in more detail.
Context-dependent confusion rules is a new technique to build an error model for Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) corrections. The rules are extracted from the OCR confusions
which appear in the recognition outputs and are translated into edit operations, e.g., insertions,
deletions, and substitutions using the Levenshtein edit distance algorithm. The edit operations
are extracted in a form of rules with respect to the context of the incorrect string to build an
error model using WFSTs. The context-dependent rules assist the language model to find the
best candidate corrections. They avoid the calculations that occur in searching the language
model and they also make the language model able to correct incorrect words by using context-
dependent confusion rules. The context-dependent error model is applied on the university of
Washington (UWIII) dataset and the Nastaleeq script in Urdu dataset. It improves the OCR
results from an error rate of 1.14% to an error rate of 0.68%. It performs better than the
state-of-the-art single rule-based which returns an error rate of 1.0%.
This thesis describes a new, simple, fast, and accurate system for generating correspondences
 between real scanned historical books and their transcriptions. The alignment has many challenges, first, the transcriptions might have different modifications, and layout variations than the
original book. Second, the recognition of the historical books have misrecognition, and segmentation errors, which make the alignment more difficult especially the line breaks, and pages will
not have the same correspondences. Adapted WFSTs are designed to represent the transcription. The WFSTs process Fraktur ligatures and adapt the transcription with a hyphenations
model that allows the alignment with respect to the varieties of the hyphenated words in the line
breaks of the OCR documents. In this work, several approaches are implemented to be used for
the alignment such as: text-segments, page-wise, and book-wise approaches. The approaches
are evaluated on German calligraphic (Fraktur) script historical documents dataset from "Wan-
derungen durch die Mark Brandenburg" volumes (1862-1889). The text-segmentation approach
returns an error rate of 2.33% without using a hyphenation model and an error rate of 2.0%
using a hyphenation model. Dehyphenation methods are presented to remove the hyphen from
the transcription. They provide the transcription in a readable and reflowable format to be used
for alignment purposes. We consider the task as classification problem and classify the hyphens
from the given patterns as hyphens for line breaks, combined words, or noise. The methods are
applied on clean and noisy transcription for different languages. The Decision Trees classifier
returns better performance on UWIII dataset and returns an accuracy of 98%. It returns 97%
on Fraktur script.
A new method for normalizing historical OCRed text using LSTM is implemented for different texts, ranging from Early New High German 14th - 16th centuries to modern forms in New
High German applied on the Luther bible. It performed better than the rule-based word-list
approaches. It provides a transcription for various purposes such as part-of-speech tagging and
n-grams. Also two new techniques are presented for aligning the OCR results and normalize the
size by using adding Character-Epsilons or Appending-Epsilons. They allow deletion and insertion in the appropriate position in the string. In normalizing historical wordforms to modern
wordforms, the accuracy of LSTM on seen data is around 94%, while the state-of-the-art combined rule-based method returns 93%. On unseen data, LSTM returns 88% and the combined
rule-based method returns 76%. In normalizing modern wordforms to historical wordforms, the
LSTM delivers the best performance and returns 93.4% on seen data and 89.17% on unknown
data.
In this thesis, a deep investigation has been done on constructing high-performance language
modeling for improving the recognition systems. A new method to construct a language model
using LSTM is designed to correct OCR results. The method is applied on UWIII and Urdu
script. The LSTM approach outperforms the state-of-the-art, especially for unseen tokens
during training. On the UWIII dataset, the LSTM returns reduction in OCR error rates from
1.14% to 0.48%. On the Nastaleeq script in Urdu dataset, the LSTM reduces the error rate
from 6.9% to 1.58%.

Finally, the integration of multiple recognition outputs can give higher performance than a
single recognition system. Therefore, a new method for combining the results of OCR systems is
explored using WFSTs and LSTM. It uses multiple OCR outputs and votes for the best output
to improve the OCR results. It performs better than the ISRI tool, Pairwise of Multiple Sequence and it helps to improve the OCR results. The purpose is to provide correct transcription
so that it can be used for digitizing books, linguistics purposes, N-grams, and part-of-speech
tagging. The method consists of two alignment steps. First, two recognition systems are aligned
using WFSTs. The transducers are designed to be more flexible and compatible with the different symbols in line and page breaks to avoid the segmentation and misrecognition errors.
The LSTM model then is used to vote the best candidate correction of the two systems and
improve the incorrect tokens which are produced during the first alignment. The approaches
are evaluated on OCRs output from the English UWIII and historical German Fraktur dataset
which are obtained from state-of-the-art OCR systems. The Experiments show that the error
rate of ISRI-Voting is 1.45%, the error rate of the Pairwise of Multiple Sequence is 1.32%, the
error rate of the Line-to-Page alignment is 1.26% and the error rate of the LSTM approach has
the best performance with 0.40%.
The purpose of this thesis is to contribute methods providing correct transcriptions corresponding to the original book. This is considered to be the first step towards an accurate and
more effective use of the documents in digital libraries.


Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5 The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? William Butler Yeats'


The purpose of this study was to investigate church leaders' perceptions of motivational factors for a sports ministry in churches in Pretoria. A survey questionnaire was developed by the researchers to investigate the above perceptions. The survey consisted of demographic questions and perception questions using a structured and a semi-structured questionnaire. The results of the survey were assessed by calculating the significance of each motivational factor for a sports ministry in the church, as perceived by the respondents. Participants were recruited from 32 church leaders from a wide variety of denominational and cultural backgrounds in Pretoria. Results showed that a sports ministry could assist the church in evangelism and fulfilling the Great Commission. Over 95% of all respondents agreed that a sports ministry would have a positive impact on evangelism. The results of the survey showed that the participants from the churches in Pretoria are supportive of a sports ministry as a general strategy to help churches to promote evangelism and outreach, to cross cultural barriers, to keep in touch with society and to provide a place for teaching life skills and develop leaders.


John P. Bringewatt's recent note makes several important observations about the Supreme Court's opinion in Snyder v. Louisiana. Although he provides reasonable support for the claim that Snyder represents a sea change in Batson jurisprudence, the US Supreme Court's fresh opinion in Thaler v. Haynes (rendered on February 22, 2010) reads the Snyder majority opinion narrowly and suggests the possibility that Snyder is not as potent as it should be. The Haynes per curiam's guarded reading of Snyder signals the need for courts to continue to conduct the bird's-eye cumulative analysis that the Court performed in Miller-El v. Dretke [hereinafter Miller-El II]. If lawyers challenging discriminatory peremptory strikes and trial courts replicate Snyder's single-juror approach but ignore concomitant Miller-El circumstantial evidence of intentional discrimination, Snyder may (counterintuitively) sap Miller-El II of its on-the-ground transformative potential. In other words, lawyers should not rely too much on the "more individualized focus" observed and applauded by the author because a narrow framing of a Batson challenge in the Snyder opinion's image (rather than a wider framing with a focus on the Miller-El factors) may fail in front of courts that view Snyder differently than does Bringewatt. A slightly different interpretation of the historical arc of the relevant cases and a critical reconsideration of Snyder's circumstances foreshadow the outcome in Haynes and reveal nuances that suggest problems with Bringewatt's theory.


The summation of the existentialist philosophy threaded throughout all his writing, Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" is translated by Justin O'Brien with an introduction by James Wood in "Penguin Classics". In this profound and moving philosophical statement, Camus poses the fundamental question: is life worth living? If human existence holds no significance, what can keep us from suicide? As Camus argues, if there is no God to give meaning to our lives, humans must take on that purpose themselves. This is our 'absurd' task, like Sisyphus forever rolling his rock up a hill, as the inevitability of death constantly overshadows us. Written during the bleakest days of the Second World War, "The Myth of Sisyphus" ("Le Mythe de Sisyphe") argues for an acceptance of reality that encompasses revolt, passion and, above all, liberty. This volume contains several other essays, including lyrical evocations of the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran, the settings of his great novels "The Outsider" and "The Plague". Albert Camus (1913-60) is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include "The Fall", "The Outsider" and "The First Man". Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, Camus is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international. If you enjoyed "The Myth of Sisyphus", you might like Camus' "The Outsider", also available in "Penguin Modern Classics". "Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century". (Jean-Paul Sartre).


Canada's rural idyll is embedded within the colonial legacy of a white settler society; however, little research has examined how class and gender uphold this articulation of rurality and whiteness. This article draws on ethnographic research with white, working-class rural youth to develop an intersectional analysis of rural imaginaries. The analysis shows how youth construct their own rural identities through racialized representations of urban and global "others." I argue that these racist place-narratives must be understood in the context of competing discourses of rurality in Canada: the romanticized pure white rural of colonial history, and the pathologized poor white rural of a cosmopolitan future. Even as youth locate their gendered performances within the rural idyll, they are marked as "dirts" by their classed, rural status. By inscribing racist discourses onto others, youth resist the classist imagery projected onto their community and thereby reclaim a pure white rural idyll.


A century has passed since the assassination of Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand, yet the repercussions of the devastating global conflict that followed still echo. In this provocative book, historian Ian Beckett turns the spotlight on twelve particular events of the First World War that continue to shape the world today. Focusing on episodes both well known and scarcely remembered, Beckett tells the story of the Great War from a new perspective, stressing accident as much as strategy, the small as well as the great, the social as well as the military, and the long term as much as the short term. The Making of the First World War is global in scope. The book travels from the deliberately flooded fields of Belgium to the picture palaces of Britain's cinema, from the idealism of Wilson's Washington to the catastrophic German Lys offensive of 1918. While war is itself an agent of change, Beckett shows, the most significant developments occur not only on the battlefields or in the corridors of power, but also in hearts and minds. Nor may the decisive turning points during years of conflict be those that were thought to be so at the time. With its wide reach and unexpected conclusions, this book revises - and expands - our understanding of the legacy of the First World War.


Envelope from M. C. Elliott at 3335 [Montgall] Ave., Kansas City, Missouri to Linnet White, addressed as Mrs. Claude D. White in Denver, Colorado. It is postmarked Kansas City, Missouri August 17, 1917, and the date Aug 28 is also stamped on the front. The return address is written on the back, along with some other handwritten notes. The right edge of the envelope has been torn.


The fourth volume that contains the early myths and legends which led to the writing of Tolkien's epic tale of war, The Silmarillion. In this fourth volume of The History of Middle-earth, the shaping of the chronological and geographical structure of the legends of Middle-earth and Valinor is spread before us. We are introduced to the hitherto unknown Ambarkanta or "Shape of the World", the only account ever given of the nature of the imagined Universe, ccompanied by maps and diagrams of the world before and after the cataclyusms of The War of the Gods and the Downfall of Numenor. The first map of Beleriend is also reproduced and discussed. In The Annals of Valinor and The Annals of Beleriend we are shown how the chronology of the First Age was moulded: and the tale is told of Aelfwine, the Englishman who voyaged into the True West and came to Tol Eressea, Lonely Isle, where he learned the ancient history of Elves and Men. Also included are the original 'Silmarillion' of 1926, and the Quenta Noldorinwa of 1930 - the only version of the myths and legends of the First Age that J R R Tolkien completed to their end.


In recent years, federal prison sentences have often far outstripped state sentences for the same criminal conduct. This is the result of the confluence of two trends. First, crime has become increasingly federalized, so that the very same criminal conduct typically punished by state law, such as drug trafficking, gun possession, and child pornography offenses, is increasingly being punished in federal court. Second, the federal sentencing guidelines and statutory mandatory minimum sentences for many of these offenses have grown so as to far exceed the sentences available in state court. Virtually all federal defendants who have challenged their sentences as, "cruel and unusual punishment," in violation of the Eighth Amendment have failed. This is not surprising. The Supreme Court jurisprudence on cruel and unusual carceral punishments is extraordinarily deferential to legislative judgments about how harsh prison sentences ought to be for particular crimes. This deferential approach stems largely from concerns of federalism, for all of the Court's modern cases on the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause have addressed state, not federal, sentencing practices. Thus, they have addressed the Eighth Amendment only as incorporated by the Fourteenth. Indeed, one must go back a century to find a Supreme Court case addressing proportionality in the context of federal sentencing, and that case was highly atypical. Thus, federal courts find themselves applying a deferential standard designed in large part to safeguard the values of federalism in cases where those values do not call for deference. The task of this article is to re-discover the meaning of the, "pure" Eighth Amendment, unmediated by the Fourteenth. Recent academic commentary about the original understanding of the Eighth Amendment correctly focuses our attention on the Clause's main purpose of comparing a given punishment to those generally meted out at common law for the same conduct. Yet these commentators fail to adequately appreciate the extent to which the Eighth Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was an attempt by the Anti-Federalists to secure individual rights through the preservation of a robust form of state sovereignty. Moreover, the Anti-Federalists, and their political heirs, the Republicans, rejected a, "pre-realist," vision of common law in favor of an approach that recognized the common law as varying State to State. Thus, the Anti-Federalists took a decidedly State-centered and State-specific approach to the common-law rights that the Eighth Amendment was designed to encapsulate. And the views and general outlook of the Anti-Federalists are critical to a complete understanding of the Bill of Rights, for it was they who won the concession of the adoption of the Bill as the price of union. This contextualized account of the ratification of the Eighth Amendment evidences a design to limit the power of the federal government to inflict punishment for crimes to the same extent that the States limited their own power to punish. That is to say, whether a federal punishment for a crime is, "cruel and unusual," can be answered only in reference to the punishment for the same conduct meted out by the States. Moreover, the Anti-Federalists' views on the nature of the common law indicate that the appropriate comparator is the State where the criminal conduct occurred, not the States generally. But, in either event, the standard for determining whether a federal sentence is "cruel and unusual" ought to be far more stringent than that used in reviewing Eighth and Fourteenth Amendment challenges to State sentences.


A review of:

Madarash-Hill, Cherie and J.B. Hill. "Electronically Enriched Enhancements in Catalog Records: A Use Study of Books Described on Records With URL Enhancements Versus Those Without." Technical Services Quarterly 23.2 (2005): 19-31.
Abstract

Objective – To compare the use of books described by catalogue records that are enhanced with URL links to such information as dust jackets, tables of contents, sample text, and publishers' descriptions, with the use of books described by records that are not enhanced with such links.
Design – Use study.

Setting – Academic library (Southeastern Louisiana University, Sims Memorial Library).

Subjects – 180 records with enhancements and 180 records (different titles) without enhancements.

Methods – The study identified the sample of unenhanced records by conducting searches of the broad subject terms "History", "United States", "Education", and "Social" and limiting the searches to books. The enhanced sample was derived in the same manner, but with additional search limiters to identify only those records that had URL enhancements. An equal sample of enhanced and unenhanced records (50 or 30 of each) was tracked for each of four search terms. Only records for books that could be checked out were included, as use statistics were based on whether or not a book was borrowed. While half of the enhanced records had full-text elements (such as descriptions) that were indexed and thus searchable, the rate of use for these records was not tracked separately from the enhanced records that only had URL enhancements.

Main results – Books described on records with URL enhancements for publisher descriptions, tables of contents, book reviews, or sample text had higher use than those without URL enhancements. Only 7% of titles with URLs, compared with 21% of those without, had not been borrowed. 74.67% of titles with URLs had been checked out one or two times, compared with 69.5% of those without URLs. The number of titles with enhanced records that had 3 or more checkouts was almost double the rate of unenhanced titles (18% to 9.5%).
Conclusion – The authors conclude that catalogue records that have electronic links to book reviews, cover jackets, tables of contents, or publisher descriptions can lead to higher use of books, particularly if textual enhancements such as descriptions are also searchable.


In this paper, we show how to determine several properties of a finite graph $G$ from its Ihara zeta function $Z_{G}(u)$. If $G$ is connected and has minimal degree at least 2, we show how to calculate the number of vertices of $G$. To do so we use a result of Bass, and in the case that $G$ is nonbipartite, we give an elementary proof of Bass' result. We further show how to determine whether $G$ is regular, and if so, its regularity and spectrum. On the other hand, we extend work of Czarneski to give several infinite families of pairs of non-isomorphic non-regular graphs with the same Ihara zeta function. These examples demonstrate that several properties of graphs, including vertex and component numbers, are not determined by the Ihara zeta function. We end with Hashimoto's edge matrix T. We show that any graph $G$ with no isolated vertices can be recovered from its $T$ matrix. Since graphs with the same Ihara zeta function are exactly those with isospectral T matrices, this relates again to the question of what information about $G$ can be recovered from its Ihara zeta function.


In regards to objects designed for children, trends of the moment continue to highly influence the market. These design trends, however, do not often reflect a true understanding of the child as a user. Research shows that versatility, multi-use and ability to function for the growing child are fundamental in designing products for preschool-age children. To achieve these attributes, designers should turn away from designs that are too specific and instead provide varied, abstract forms that would give children more autonomy in their creative play. This thesis develops and evaluates a play system design for preschool-age children using the concept of interaction as its foundation. Areas of supporting literature include interactive design theory and practice, play, child development, and qualitative research methods as it relates to study with children. The play system, created through a generative design process, is validated through case-study observations and professional assessments. Results, from this thesis investigation, reveal that the play system design succeeds in promoting different areas of child development. Findings from the analysis also illustrate the potential benefits of interaction between a product and its user.


The artist lionizes Kentucky senator Henry Clay, author of the Compromise of 1850, and slams his political foes and critics of the compromise, particularly those in the Taylor administration. A text in the lower margin reads: "A Fable--In the Reign of Zackery 1st the Goddess of Liberty Designed a Statue. a Model of a Man which she exhibited before the King, his Ministers, & the People. the Beauty of the Statue Elicited such shouts of Approbation from the People that the King's Ministers fired with Jealousy determined to Destroy it, but after many Ineffectual attempts were obliged to Desist amidst the Laughter of the Court & the People." The King is clearly President Taylor, who sits on a throne at the far left, in uniform and holding a sword instead of a scepter. A spittoon is on the floor before him, and a black court jester crouches beside the throne holding a copy of the newspaper the "Republic." A larger-than-life statue of Henry Clay, in armor and holding a shield inscribed "Compromise" and a sword, stands in the center of the scene. Clay's sword bears the words, "I fight for my Country! Traitors Beware." The statue towers over the figures that surround it, which include Taylor cabinet members Reverdy Johnson, George W. Crawford, and Thomas Ewing (on the right) and Secretary of State John M. Clayton (on the left). Crawford and Ewing regard the broken ax and saw which they hold in their hands. Crawford (to Johnson): "Look here Just see what a great Big Piece Ive Broke of my Gulpin Ax. I'll send in a Gulpin Claim for this. Valuable Ax this." The allusion is to Crawford's lucrative and questionable role as counsel for the Galphin family's successful suit against the federal government, an arrangement which provoked heated criticism in the press. The controversy over this Taylor administration scandal reached its peak in April, May and June of 1850. Johnson: "The Ax, was Broke before you used it, however, you Lie & I'll Swear to it, & we'll Pockett the Plunder between us." Ewing: "Why Ive Broke nearly all the teeth of my Chickensaw against this Infernall Statue. I'le send in a Big Claim for this." Clayton gestures entreatingly to Taylor: "Why the Devil dont your Imperial Majesty assist us, I can assure your Majesty, it's much Easier discharging a Bullitt, from a Republic, than it is injuring this Statue." Journalist Alexander C. Bullitt was a Taylor advisor and, beginning in 1849, editor of the administration organ the Washington "Republic." Bullitt appears here as the black court fool. Taylor hugs to his chest the tiny figure of New York senator William H. Seward, who sits on his lap. Seward was an insider in the short-lived Taylor administration, and a vigorous opponent of the Compromise of 1850. Taylor says, "Consider the weight of my Crown, Dear Clayton. besides my sick Baby, little Billey, requires, all my Care. moreove as the People like the Statue, I'de rather not Compromise myself, in the matter. assume the Responsibility Yourself, you'r used to it." Just to the right of the throne stand (left to right) senators Thomas Hart Benton, Daniel Webster, and Henry S. Foote. Benton: "Why its a Miserable Statue. a wretched abortion, the inscriptions on the Sword & Shield are in very Bad Taste, very Bad Taste indeed." Benton was an adamant critic of the Compromise. Foote (to Webster): "I think its a Splendid Statue. Which Party do you go for." Webster: "The Party thats likely to win. Of Course, I shall Keep one eye on the Statue, & the other on the Chair, & act according to circumstances." Senator Lewis Cass stands to the right of Foote, in the background, saying, "I rather like the Inscription on the Shield." Clay does, however, have some friends here. On the far right is a crowd of people led by the figure of Liberty, a young maiden in a classical gown holding a staff and liberty cap. She addresses Johnson and the others, "Gentlemen! I made this Statue as a Model of a Man. now though it is only of Clay & I wafted it here in a Breath, still with all your efforts, you can neither move it from its Base, or inflict the slightest Injury upon it. its innate strenght [sic] will defy all your Puny attempts." Liberty's followers enjoin, "Why I think it's a Beautifull Statue," and "So do I! Hurrah! for the Clay Statue." "The Clay Statue," though tentatively dated 1849 by Weitenkampf, must have appeared in 1850, certainly after Henry Clay's presentation of the compromise in January and probably as late as the spring, at the height of the Galphin controversy.


Guangtu Gao National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture ARS-USDA The mission of the National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture (NCCCWA) is to enhance the nation's aquaculture production by developing improved germplasm and technologies that increase farm efficiency, product quality, and environmental sustainability. Research focuses primarily on rainbow trout and encompasses genetics, genomics, physiology, aquatic animal health, and aquaculture engineering. Ultimately we envision growth in US aquaculture production that supports recreational activities and provides a healthy seafood option for consumers


The shift in the practice of human-computer interaction (HCI) Design from user-centered to context-based design marks a significant change in focus. With context-based design, designers start not with a preconceived idea of what users should do, but with an understanding of what users actually do. Context-based design focuses on the situation in which the technology will be used -- the activities relating to it and their social contexts. Designers must also realize that introduction of the technology itself changes the situation; in order to design workable systems, the design process must become flexible and adaptive. In Activity-Centered Design, Geri Gay and Helene Hembrooke argue that it is time to develop new models for HCI design that support not only research and development but also investigations into the context and motivation of user behavior.Gay and Hembrooke examine the ongoing interaction of computer systems use, design practice, and design evaluation, using the concepts of activity theory and related methods as a theoretical framework. Among the topics they discuss are the reciprocal relationship between the tool and the task, how activities shape the requirements of particular tools and how the application of the tools begins to reshape the activity; differing needs and expectations of participants when new technology is introduced, examining in particular the integration of wireless handheld devices into museums and learning environments; and the effect of the layout of the computing space on movement, function, and social interaction. Gay and Hembrooke then apply their findings on the use of technology in everyday contexts to inform future HCI design practice.


Financial Inclusion poses policy challenges on a scale and with an urgency that is unique for developing countries which house more than 90% of the world's unbanked population. Developed countries policy makers have recognised that there are complex and multi-dimensional factors that contribute to financial exclusion and therefore require a comprehensive variety of providers, products and technologies that best suits the socio-economic, political, cultural and geographical conditions in these countries. India's experience as a developing country towards ensuring financial inclusion and weeding out financial exclusion has been unique. Indian economy has achieved a phenomenal economic growth during the last decade or so. But this growth has not been inclusive. Mobile phones, E-Mail, E-Commerce, Swanky Cars, trendy dresses, plastic money and 24-hour banking through ATMs have all become a reality in the country but only in the cities and towns. One of the reasons for this exclusive growth witnessed in the country has been attributed to the failure of the second generation reforms which were broadly related with financial sector reforms aimed to achieve greater financial inclusion. The problem of 'Financial Exclusion' is severe in the country. The State of Jammu & Kashmir is no exception to this socio-economic problem. An effort has been made in this paper to assess how serious the problem of financial exclusion is in the state? What has been the impact of the initiatives taken by RBI towards greater 'Financial Inclusion' & what more needs to be done to achieve full & meaningful financial inclusion?


Greenstone is a suite of  software  tools for building and distributing  digital library  collections on the  Internet  or  CD-ROM . It is  open-source , multilingual software, issued under the terms of the  GNU General Public License . Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the  University of Waikato , and has been developed and distributed in cooperation with  UNESCO  and the Human Info NGO in Belgium.


Beginning Database Design, Second Edition provides short, easy-to-read explanations of how to get database design right the first time. This book offers numerous examples to help you avoid the many pitfalls that entrap new and not-so-new database designers. Through the help of use cases and class diagrams modeled in the UML, youll learn to discover and represent the details and scope of any design problem you choose to attack. Database design is not an exact science. Many are surprised to find that problems with their databases are caused by poor design rather than by difficulties in using the database management software. Beginning Database Design, Second Edition helps you ask and answer important questions about your data so you can understand the problem you are trying to solve and create a pragmatic design capturing the essentials while leaving the door open for refinements and extension at a later stage. Solid database design principles and examples help demonstrate the consequences of simplifications and pragmatic decisions. The rationale is to try to keep a design simple, but allow room for development as situations change or resources permit. Provides solid design principles by which to avoid pitfalls and support changing needs Includes numerous examples of good and bad design decisions and their consequences Shows a modern method for documenting design using the Unified Modeling Language What youll learn Avoid the most common pitfalls in database design. Create clear use cases from project requirements. Design a data model to support the use cases. Apply generalization and specialization appropriately. Secure future flexibility through a normalized design. Ensure integrity through relationships, keys, and constraints. Successfully implement your data model as a relational schema. Who this book is for Beginning Database Design, Second Edition is aimed at desktop power users, developers, database administrators, and others who are charged with caring for data and storing it in ways that preserve its meaning and integrity. Desktop users will appreciate the coverage of Excel as a plausible database for research systems and lab environments. Developers and database designers will find insight from the clear discussions of design approaches and their pitfalls and benefits. All readers will benefit from learning a modern notation for documenting designs that is based upon the widely used and accepted Universal Modeling Language.


KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) is one of European's key centers of innovation and intellectual talent for almost two centuries. Recognized as Sweden's most prestigious technical university, KTH is also the country's oldest and largest. Computerized simulation technique was recognized as a fundamental component of the higher-education sector at KTH as early as the fifties. Although the utilization of these tools in research is now considered to be standard, the educational aspects are not. In this field, the method of instruction followed by practice is considered to be a superior pedagogic method compared to lecture to many. The current method emphasizes on demonstrative activities of the learners known as phenomeno-graphic learning. However, phenomeno-graphic learning is viable if there are breadth and depth in the physic, mathematic, computer science and graphic, operational strategy and methodology, etc. illuminating weakness of learning by doing method. This work aims to report the success and progress of the course, numerical methods in energy technology, which utilizes Computational Fluid Dynamics cods such as STAR-CCM+ as the tool. Learning methodology is based on instructional design and andragogically approach that offers an elaboration on the mechanism of learning process and its premeditated in context of a prescribed framework. The results indicated the prominence of student sensitive and constructive learning process and the advantages of using a preferred framework in guiding the students in a pertinent context (area). The method particularly incorporates the constructivist principles that lead to enhance the learning process. In addition, the conclusions of this study similarly illuminate the vast potentials of computational fluid dynamic for research, evaluation and educational purposes.


The editorial team greatly appreciates the reviewers who have dedicated their considerable time and expertise to the journal's rigorous editorial process over the past 12 months, regardless of whether the papers are finally published or not [...]


Abstract. From 13 July–9 August 2007, 25 ozonesondes were launched from Las Tablas, Panama as part of the Tropical Composition, Cloud, and Climate Coupling (TC4) mission. On 5 August, a strong convective cell formed in the Gulf of Panama. World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) data indicated 563 flashes (09:00–17:00 UTC) in the Gulf. NO2 data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) show enhancements, suggesting lightning production of NOx. At 15:05 UTC, an ozonesonde ascended into the southern edge of the now dissipating convective cell as it moved west across the Azuero Peninsula. The balloon oscillated from 2.5–5.1 km five times (15:12–17:00 UTC), providing a unique examination of ozone (O3) photochemistry on the edge of a convective cell. Ozone increased at a rate of ~1.6–4.6 ppbv/hr between the first and last ascent, resulting cell wide in an increase of ~(2.1–2.5) × 106 moles of O3. This estimate agrees to within a factor of two of our estimates of photochemical lightning O3 production from the WWLLN flashes, from the radar-inferred lightning flash data, and from the OMI NO2 data (~1.2, ~1.0, and ~1.7 × 106 moles, respectively), though all estimates have large uncertainties. Examination of DC-8 in situ and lidar O3 data gathered around the Gulf that day suggests 70–97% of the O3 change occurred in 2.5–5.1 km layer. A photochemical box model initialized with nearby TC4 aircraft trace gas data suggests these O3 production rates are possible with our present understanding of photochemistry.


When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Noam Chomsky's nativism. In this revised and expanded new edition, Sampson revisits his original arguments in the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original publication. Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in the 1960s, it has increasingly come to be accepted that language and other knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes. According to this view, human beings are born with a rich structure of cognition already in place. But people do not realize how thin the evidence for that idea is. The 'Language Instinct' Debate examines the various arguments for instinctive knowledge, and finds that each one rests on false premisses or embodies logical fallacies. The structures of language are shown to be purely cultural creations. With a new chapter entitled 'How People Really Speak' which uses corpus data to analyse how language is used in spontaneous English conversation, responses to critics, extensive revisions throughout, and a new preface by Paul Postal of New York University, this new edition will be an essential purchase for students, academics, and general readers interested in the debate about the 'language instinct'.


Cosmology often uses intricate formulas and mathematics to derive new theories and concepts. We do something different in this paper: We look at biological processes and derive from these heuristics so that the revised cosmology agrees with astronomical observations but does also agree with standard biological observations. We show that we then have to replace any type of singularity at the start of the universe by a condensation nucleus and that the very early period of the universe usually assumed to be inflation has to be replaced by a period of rapid crystal growth as in Weiss magnetization domains. Impressively, these minor modifications agree well with astronomical observations including removing the strong inflation perturbations which were never observed in the recent BICEP2 experiments. Furthermore, looking at biological principles suggests that such a new theory with a condensation nucleus at start and a first rapid phase of magnetization-like growth of the ordered, physical laws obeying lattice we live in is in fact the only convincing theory of the early phases of our universe that also is compatible with current observations. We show in detail in the following that such a process of crystal creation, breaking of new crystal seeds and ultimate evaporation of the present crystal readily leads over several generations to an evolution and selection of better, more stable and more self-organizing crystals. Moreover, this explains the "fine-tuning" question why our universe is fine-tuned to favor life: Our Universe is so self-organizing to have enough offspring and the detailed physics involved is at the same time highly favorable for all self-organizing processes including life. This biological theory contrasts with current standard inflation cosmologies. The latter do not perform well in explaining any phenomena of sophisticated structure creation or self-organization. As proteins can only thermodynamically fold by increasing the entropy in the solution around them we suggest for cosmology a condensation nucleus for a universe can form only in a "chaotic ocean" of string-soup or quantum foam if the entropy outside of the nucleus rapidly increases. We derive an interaction potential for 1 to n-dimensional strings or quantum-foams and show that they allow only 1D, 2D, 4D or octonion interactions. The latter is the richest structure and agrees to the E8 symmetry fundamental to particle physics and also compatible with the ten dimensional string theory E8 which is part of the M-theory. Interestingly, any other interactions of other dimensionality can be ruled out using Hurwitz compositional theorem. Crystallization explains also extremely well why we have only one macroscopic reality and where the worldlines of alternative trajectories exist: They are in other planes of the crystal and for energy reasons they crystallize mostly at the same time, yielding a beautiful and stable crystal. This explains decoherence and allows to determine the size of Planck ́s quantum h (very small as separation of crystal layers by energy is extremely strong). Ultimate dissolution of real crystals suggests an explanation for dark energy agreeing with estimates for the "big rip". The halo distribution of dark matter favoring galaxy formation is readily explained by a crystal seed starting with unit cells made of normal and dark matter. That we have only matter and not antimatter can be explained as there may be right handed mattercrystals and left-handed antimatter crystals. Similarly, real crystals are never perfect and we argue that exactly such irregularities allow formation of galaxies, clusters and superclusters. Finally, heuristics from genetics suggest to look for a systems perspective to derive correct vacuum and Higgs Boson energies. *version 1 was submitted 09.06.2019 to the university library as a letter to Prof. Smolin, Perimeter Institute; this present version 2 for OPUS server as a preprint has title, abstract, polished English and proper formatting added but otherwise the same contents.


North Carolina State University and North Carolina A&T State University commit themselves to positive action to secure equal opportunity regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability. In addition, the two Universities welcome all persons without regard to sexual orientation. North Carolina State University, North Carolina A&T State University, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and local governments cooperating. Fall, 2007