There is a growing coalition of people in the US who hold a strong view that they would like the government to 'leave us alone'. The coalition includes home-schoolers, those who run small businesses and taxpayers. These groups do not want special favours from government and their priorities are very different from each other. However, the coalition is united in its desire for the government not to interfere in their lives. There is a coalition opposed to the 'leave us alone' coalition. This is the 'takings coalition' that views the proper role of government as taking money from others and giving it to them. All tax increases feed the 'takings coalition' and increase its strength and appetite. However, if taxes cannot be increased, the interest groups that wish to increase spending on their own favourite causes will only be able to do so if spending is decreased on other programmes – choices will have to be made and the 'takings coalition' will become fractious. Because there is a significant degree of fiscal decentralisation in the US, the states can lead the way in reducing government spending, taxation and regulation. In the US, states can copy each other's successful policies. States are, in a sense, in competition with each other. Those that follow policies that discourage business will see an exodus to states that have lower taxes and regulatory burdens. This is already happening. Currently, a majority of people live in states that have governors and legislatures that would be sympathetic to an agenda of lower taxation and less regulation. This provides reason for optimism. At the federal level, the Ryan budget plan provides hope that there will be a significant reduction in government spending compared with current projections. The plan would lead to lower and simpler taxes and the decentralisation of responsibility for welfare programmes. Ponzi Medicare and pensions schemes would be replaced by funded, individually controlled, defined contribution plans. If nothing changes in the US, spending at the federal level alone will increase to around 40 per cent of GDP from around 20 per cent today. The Ryan budget plan would bring the spending ratio back down to below 20 per cent. In order to maintain – and increase – momentum towards a free economy, we need to create favourable demographic trends. This can be done through radical reforms that give families control over education, pensions and welfare. When such reforms are carried out, those affected will tend to support economic policies that involve a less substantial role for the state. Detailed analysis of government spending around the world shows that there have been very rapid increases in the share of national income taken by the government. Since Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980, the proportion of national income spent by the US government at various levels has increased by around one third to 40 per cent. This increase will have had a significant impact on economic growth. Indeed, if government spending had remained at the same proportion of national income as in 1960, the evidence suggests that national income in the US would now be around 70 per cent higher than its current level. There are differences between European countries and the US. In particular, the UK has a very centralised fiscal system that does not provide the same opportunities for competition as the US federal system. However, there are similarities between Europe and the US when it comes to the dynamics of reform. There are a number of examples in Europe – for example, in health and education reform in Scandinavia – of reform leading to interest groups developing that are averse to reversing policy changes and, indeed, that promote further radical policy change.


As waste generation increases, so are initiatives to recover products and recycling. A particular waste that has continuously grown is plastics. Since its introduction, it has provided practical implications to different industries; however, it has also negatively affected the environment by its disposal. The recycling of plastic has offered opportunities to conserve non-renewable fossil fuels, reduce energy consumption, and avoid waste. Many countries seek for a sustainable system to recover plastics such as PET bottles. Mexico's high soft-drinks consumption had consequently increased the disposal of PET bottles. Mexico has developed a recycling industry of PET bottles by following a Shared Responsibility between government, industry and society. However, a lack of awareness and knowledge among the society about the importance to collect the bottles and to recycle them makes it imperative for the introduction of a system that could create a society that recycles more. Providing a description of the opportunities and challenges for a collection system in Mexico simplifies future chances of comprehending the direction and actions needed for increasing recycling activities in the country.


In a demonstration of a heretofore unknown motivational pathway for alcohol consumption, we recently showed that exposure to scents emitted by human females during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle could increase men's drinking. The current study examined the reverse: whether exposure to male sexual scents (androstenone) would increase women's drinking. One hundred three female participants were primed with either androstenone or a control prime (plain water) camouflaged as a men's "cologne." They then completed a laboratory assessment of beer consumption and related measures. (Nonalcoholic beer was used for methodological and safety reasons.) Results indicated that females exposed to the androstenone prime drank significantly more than those exposed to the control prime. Social and sexual expectancies taken subsequent to drinking (to avoid unwanted manipulation influences) were correlated with drinking in the primed group but not in the neutral group, supporting the idea that information-processing pathways related to alcohol use had been engaged in the primed group. Few females were ovulating, precluding assessment of the effects of fertility on this process. Because of the centrality of sexual signaling to fundamental evolutionary/biological forces, these results indicate a potentially powerful influence on alcohol consumption that calls for continued investigation.


The main purpose of the research was the development and testing of an assessment tool for the grading of Dutch students' performance in information problem solving during their study tasks. Scholarly literature suggests that an analytical scoring rubric would be a good tool for this. Described in this article are the construction process of such a scoring rubric and the evaluation of the prototype based on the assessment of its usefulness in educational practice, the efficiency in use and the reliability of the rubric. To test this last point, the rubric was used by two professors when they graded the same set of student products. 'Interrater reliability' for the professors' gradings was estimated by calculating absolute agreement of the scores, adjacent agreement and decision consistency. An English version of the scoring rubric has been added to this journal article as an appendix. This rubric can be used in various discipline-based courses in Higher Education in which information problem solving is one of the learning activities. After evaluating the prototype it was concluded that the rubric is particularly useful to graders as it keeps them focussed on relevant aspects during the grading process. If the rubric is used for summative evaluation of credit bearing student work, it is strongly recommended to use the scoring scheme as a whole and to let the grading work be done by at least two different markers.


This article calls attention to the pressing need to explore commercial television's racial, ethnic, cultural, and gendered representations across the Latin American and Spanish Caribbean region as well as documenting the ways in which non-white citizens are (and have been) coping with their social and televisual marginalization. The performance piece You Don't Look Like provides a unique opportunity to examine how those who have been excluded from and reconfigured in the local televisual frame have negotiated their invisibility and their constructed Otherness. By reenacting some of Puerto Rico's scenarios of blackness, You Don't Look Like questions and denounces the positionality of black citizens in the island's society, culture, and on television. The article argues that both directly and indirectly, Puerto Rico's scenarios of blackness not only imply specific geographical sites within the island but also the racialized bodies and cultures that flow back and forth across the Caribbean Sea.


Formalists contend that courts should apply strict textual analysis in interpreting contracts between sophisticated commercial parties. Sophisticated parties have the expertise and means to record their intentions in writing, reducing the litigation and uncertainty costs surrounding incomplete contracts. Moreover, to the extent courts misinterpret contracts, sophisticated parties may simply rewrite their contracts to clarify their true intent. We argue that the formalist approach imposes large costs on even sophisticated parties in the context of boilerplate contracts. Where courts make errors in interpreting boilerplate terms, parties face large collective action problems in rewriting existing boilerplate provisions. Any single party that attempts to change a boilerplate term will face a large market discount for deviating from the market standard. In such situations, a court erroneous interpretation that reduces overall contracting surplus may persist in an industry. We also contend that taking a more contextual approach, including evidence on course of conduct and industry custom, to contract interpretation will not ameliorate the difficulties inherent in the interpretation of boilerplate terms. The specific parties to a boilerplate contract often have no understanding of what the disputed boilerplate clause means. Where such parties attempt to supply their own ex post understandings, they may not represent the interests of the entire industry that relies on the particular boilerplate clause. We provide a new approach to the interpretation of boilerplate terms between sophisticated contracting parties. Courts should bypass an inquiry into the understanding of the parties to the current contract and instead go back to the point in the past when the disputed clause first became part of the boilerplate. Much like the enacting legislative body for a statute, the original drafting parties provide the best source of information on the original meaning of boilerplate contract terms. The original drafting parties will have spent the most time and resources in negotiating the contract term (and thus represent a true "meeting of the minds"). In a market populated with sophisticated parties on all sides, the drafting parties necessarily must balance the interests of all sides for a contract term to gain at least initial widespread acceptance in the industry. The drafters will also enjoy an expertise advantage over any court attempting to interpret a term. Taking a historical approach to the interpretation of boilerplate terms will create an incentive for standard setters to arise in industries comprised of sophisticated contracting parties to supply boilerplate terms and a detailed historical record of the meaning of the terms.


The legitimacy of investment treaty arbitration is a matter of heated debate. Asserting that arbitration is unfairly tilted toward the developed world, some countries have withdrawn from World Bank dispute resolution bodies or are taking steps to eliminate arbitration. In order to assess whether investment arbitration is the equivalent of tossing a two-headed coin to resolve investment disputes, this article explores the role of development status in arbitration outcome. It first presents descriptive, quantitative research about the developmental background of the presiding arbitrators who exert particular control over the arbitration process. The article then assesses how (1) the development status of the respondent state, (2) the development status of the presiding arbitrator, and (3) the interaction of these variables affect the outcome of investment arbitration. The results demonstrate that, at the macro level, development status does not have a statistically significant relationship with outcome. This suggests that the investment treaty arbitration system, as a whole, functions fairly and that the eradication or radical overhaul of the arbitration process is unnecessary. The existence of two statistically significant simple effects – namely that tribunals with presiding arbitrators from the developing world made smaller awards against developed states in particular circumstances – suggests that particularized reform could enhance the procedural integrity of arbitration. Irrespective of whether future research replicates the results, reforms targeted to redress possible imbalance in the system have the potential to enhance procedural justice and the perceived legitimacy of arbitration in an area with profound political and economic implications.


Whamond, Dave. Oddrey . Toronto: Owlkids Books, 2012. Print Oddrey is different. "Her father said she danced to the beat of her own drum" - and a creative and colourful dance it is. Even her dog says, "Meow". When the children build snowmen Oddrey creates a colourful igloo. When the children have light bulbs of understanding, Oddrey has an elaborate chandelier. With Oddrey, all things are colourful, different and new. It is difficult, but inspiring, to sing in the rain when everyone else is miserably wet. It is hard to be cheery when others do not understand or appreciate you. "Sometimes Oddrey felt lonely." Everything changes when the good-natured Oddrey, cast against type as a very plain tree in "The Wizard of Oz", realizes that all is not going well and sets about helping the other students to remember their lines and dealing with a damaged stage set. Not only are her classmates grateful and accepting, they take a creative leaf from Oddrey's book and shine in their own way. This is a book to share, for there is so much to find in pictures that express, comment on, and enlarge the story. Lonely Oddrey works a complicated cat's cradle while lines of children strictly follow each other through the play station. After Oddrey's rescue, the same area is surrounded by children, hanging from the station, skidding down the slides in all kinds of inventive dress, walking on their hands, riding unicycles, all freed to be creative and adventurous, by a happy Oddrey. Dave Whamond's book is an engaging and witty celebration of creativity and an endorsement of being truly, and without fear, yourself. Oddrey's positive and sunny attitude enriches those around her and allows them to reach out and experiment too. Recommendation: 4 stars out of 4 Reviewer: Andrea Deakin Andrea has been involved with books since she was class librarian in Primary School; she later served as school librarian in schools both in England and in Canada, except for the first two years in Canada where she arrived in 1959. When she retired from teaching ( English and History) she was invited to review in February 1971, and continued to review for press, radio, and finally on the Internet (Deakin Newsletter from Okanagan College) until she retired in 2011. Forty years seemed sufficient, although she still cannot keep her nose out of good children's and YA fare.


China is among the most recent entrants into global competition enforcement, having adopted the first competition law of general application, the Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) after more than a decade of drafting. The AML and Merger Notification Thresholds, rules issued by decree of the State Council, became effective on August 3, 2008. Both the law and the guidelines were subject to public review and comment, and went through a number of drafts before final adoption. This article is a comprehensive comparison of merger standards across jurisdictions, with particular focus on the evolution of merger regulation in China. It comprises six parts; after an introduction, part two analyzes the AML with respect to mergers, part three examines predecessor pre-merger notification guidelines for foreign acquisitions and the "legislative history" of the AML pre-merger notification thresholds, which went through successive drafts and significant amendments between March and August, 2008. Part four addresses international benchmarking, raises unanswered questions and issues, and part five concludes. A variety of international organizations advocate strong national competition policy and use the substance and deployment of national antitrust law to evaluate a jurisdiction's economic regulation. With the adoption of the AML, China joined a growing number of states that have adopted comprehensive competition laws, but the test of the AML will be in its application. The challenges facing new enforcement agencies are vast: organizational, establishing enforcement procedures that comport with the existing Chinese legal system, allocating appropriate functions to three entities and coordinating process and substance, and, finally, establishing policies and priorities. Given the choice of where to begin enforcement, an agency should weigh the destructiveness of the restraint, importance and ability to enforce, and its own proficiency or readiness to enforce the particular category of violations. China chose to promulgate its first set of AML Guidelines on the subject of pre-merger notification. In a different system, pre-merger notification and enforcement may not be an obvious first step for a new competition agency implementing a new antitrust law. On the one hand, since the AML itself requires pre-merger notification but does not provide sufficient information to comply, Guidelines are needed. On the other hand, the relevant enforcement agency could have paced its enforcement of mergers. In addition, the enforcement mechanism in China will involve three different government ministries, each responsible for enforcing different segments of the AML. The SAIC, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, will be responsible for enforcing the provisions against abuse of dominant positions, the NDRC, National Development and Reform Commission, will be entrusted with anti-cartel enforcement, and MOFCOM, the Ministry of Commerce, will have jurisdiction over the merger review provisions of the AML. The organizational structure of three entities with separate responsibilities under the AML may complicate the priority-setting process and set up incentives for maximum activity by each as it competes for position. Additionally, given China's rapid economic growth and pace of mergers, including foreign investments, there may have been a felt need to assert enforcement power in this arena early. MOFCOM has already begun to issue additional draft Guidelines and review proposed mergers. Emerging from a lengthy drafting process, the operative agencies appear to be moving with alacrity. Going forward, clarity, transparency and predictability would be recommended in the refinement of the notification procedures and promulgation of substantive merger standards. The AML is indeterminate and judicial interpretation is unavailable, so a clear articulation of the appropriate methodology and controlling legal standard is an unfinished project. Retrospectively, the experience of the AML and Guideline process has revealed notable receptivity to international commentary on the substance and procedures of merger review. The now-adopted Notification Guidelines went through several public drafts and comments were affirmatively solicited from "all sectors of society" including domestic and foreign scholars and lawyers. Viewing the various official drafts and public comments suggests that some of the recommendations were taken on board. Additionally, the solicitation itself refers to the consensus-based international benchmarks of the ICN and asserts consistency with international standards. The application of the AML, Notification Guidelines and additional Guidelines continues to be a work in progress.


Libertarianism is sometimes portrayed as radical and even extreme. In this Afterword to a symposium on "Libertarianism and the Law" in the Chapman Law Review, I explain why, though it may be radical, libertarianism is far from extreme in comparison with its principal alternatives: the social justice of the Left or legal moralism of the Right. Social justice posits that everyone should get a certain amount of stuff; legal moralism posits that everyone should act in a certain way. But because there is no consensus about how much stuff each person should have or how exactly everyone should act, both of these comprehensive approaches are recipes for societal conflict. And the legal institutions that are necessary to implement each vision must be highly intrusive and coercive. In contrast, libertarianism is far more modest: it stipulates only that individuals may do what they please with what is theirs, requiring a legal system merely to define the proper jurisdiction of each person over their rightfully acquired property. I explain how the basic insight of libertarianism is rooted in the spirit of toleration that was the classical liberal solution to the socially destructive religious wars. Like Westphalian political "sovereigns" who are to leave each other in peace and not to interfere with each other's domestic affairs, classical liberalism posited the sovereignty of individuals to pursue the good life peacefully within their own jurisdictions, free from outside interference, provided they do not infringe upon the like jurisdictions of other sovereign individuals. I conclude by explaining how libertarianism contributes to the private law that defines the contours of these individual jurisdictions, and the public law that is supposed to confine government to its proper function of protecting the rights of persons better than they can protect themselves. Although many would prefer their own preferred visions of social justice or legal moralism (or both) to be imposed on everyone else, libertarianism represents an appealing "second best" or "middle way" alternative to having someone else's "wrong" vision of social justice or of morality imposed upon them.


There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.


All species and subspecies of the Hesperiidae known from the Philippines are listed and their distribution across the islands, preferred habitats and flight habits are indicated. By far the richest habitat is the primary lowland forest. In view of the high rate of deforestation it is estimated that 50% of the hesperiid species is endangered and may become extinct over the next 10 to 15 years. With 151 species the Philippines is considerably poorer than Borneo (214 species), but much richer than Sulawesi (84 species). In terms of endemicity, however, the Philippines is with 35 endemic species (23.2%) relatively much richer than Borneo (12 species, 5.6%), and almost as rich as Sulawesi (20 species, 23.8%). The distribution and endemicity of species and subspecies are analysed and compared with what is known of the geological history of the Philippines. It is concluded that the fauna is relatively young and essentially of Bornean derivation. The faunal connections with Sulawesi are ambiguous, and those with Taiwan very weak. Hie Hesperiidae do not provide patterns of vicariant speciation events in the Philippines, but there is a general north-south (Luzon-Mindanao) differentiation with an intermediate area of islands showing intricate and various biogeographic links. This agrees with the geological history: the islands of the Philippines are not the result of fragmentation of a single land mass (such a fragmentation could have been a vicariant speciation event), and most of the present-day islands apparently emerged from the sea and may have been much further apart rather than closer together in the geological past. Lowering of the sea level during the Ice Ages must have united the islands in a few clusters, but such clusters are not apparent in the distribution of the Hesperiidae, contrary to what has been reported for the Mammalia. Instead the islands between Luzon and Mindanao are seen as an area with repeatedly changing dispersal opportunities. Palawan does not fit in this picture; biogeographically it is best described as a northern extension of Sundaland (which geologically speaking its southern half actually is).


The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of the volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the Works are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes.


This paper assesses the risk-adjusted performance of US buyouts. It provides evidence for a significant outperformance of this asset class compared to a mimicking portfolio of equally risky levered investments in the S&P 500 Index. It draws on a unique and proprietary set of data on 199 US buyout fund investments between 1984 and 2004. For each of them we determine a public market equivalent that matches it with respect to its timing and its systematic risk. The regression of the buyout internal rates of return on the internal rates of return of the mimicking portfolio yields, after a correction for selection bias in our data, a positive and statistically significant alpha. Our sensitivity analyses highlight the importance of a comprehensive risk-adjustment that considers operating risk and leverage risk for an accurate assessment of buyout performance. The analyses further confirm the notion that buyout investors choose industries with low operating risks, make use of financial leverage when advantageously, and transfer an important portion of the transaction risks to the lenders.


The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software, or the story of the Internet, or the story of "smart" hand-held devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development: digitization--the coding of information, computation, and control in binary form, ones and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of techniques, devices, and machines, yielding more than the sum of their parts; the steady advance of electronic technology, as characterized famously by "Moore's Law"; and the human-machine interface. Ceruzzi guides us through computing history, telling how a Bell Labs mathematician coined the word "digital" in 1942 (to describe a high-speed method of calculating used in anti-aircraft devices), and recounting the development of the punch card (for use in the 1890 U.S. Census). He describes the ENIAC, built for scientific and military applications; the UNIVAC, the first general purpose computer; and ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. Ceruzzi's account traces the world-changing evolution of the computer from a room-size ensemble of machinery to a "minicomputer" to a desktop computer to a pocket-sized smart phone. He describes the development of the silicon chip, which could store ever-increasing amounts of data and enabled ever-decreasing device size. He visits that hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, and brings the story up to the present with the Internet, the World Wide Web, and social networking.


Why You Hear What You Hear is the first book on the physics of sound for the nonspecialist to empower readers with a hands-on, ears-open approach that includes production, analysis, and perception of sound. The book makes possible a deep intuitive understanding of many aspects of sound, as opposed to the usual approach of mere description. This goal is aided by hundreds of original illustrations and examples, many of which the reader can reproduce and adjust using the same tools used by the author (e.g., very accessible applets for PC and Mac, and interactive web-based examples, simulations, and analysis tools will be found on the book's website: whyyouhearwhatyouhear.com.) Readers are positioned to build intuition by participating in discovery. This truly progressive introduction to sound engages and informs amateur and professional musicians, performers, teachers, sound engineers, students of many stripes, and indeed anyone interested in the auditory world. The book does not hesitate to follow entertaining and sometimes controversial side trips into the history and world of acoustics, reinforcing key concepts. You will discover how musical instruments really work, how pitch is perceived, and how sound can be amplified with no external power source. Sound is key to our lives, and is the most accessible portal to the vibratory universe. This book takes you there. * The first book on sound to offer interactive tools, building conceptual understanding via an experiential approach * Supplementary website (http://www.whyyouhearwhatyouhear.com) will provide Java, MAX, and other free, multiplatform, interactive graphical and sound applets * Extensive selection of original exercises available on the web with solutions * Nearly 400 full-color illustrations, many of simulations that students can do


of a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Studies Office of The University of Southern Mississippi in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy


Born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867, Marie Curie was forbidden to attend the male-only University of Warsaw, so she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study physics and mathematics. There she met a professor named Pierre Curie, and the two soon married, forming one of the most famous scientific partnerships in history. Together they discovered two elements and won a Nobel Prize in 1903. (Later Marie won another Nobel award for chemistry in 1911.) She died in Savoy, France, on July 4, 1934, a victim of many years of exposure to toxic radiation.


The high resource demand of the building sector clearly indicates the need to search for alternative, renewable and energy-efficient materials. This work presents paper-laminated sandwich elements with a core of corrugated paperboard that can serve as architectural components with a load-bearing capacity after a linear folding process. Conventional methods either use paper tubes or glued layers of honeycomb panels. In contrast, the folded components are extremely lightweight, provide the material strength exactly where it is statically required and offer many possibilities for design variants. After removing stripes of the paper lamination, the sandwich can be folded in a linear way at this position. Without the resistance of the missing paper, the sandwich core can be easily compressed. The final angle of the folding correlates with the width of the removed paper stripe. As such, this angle can be described by a simple geometric equation. The geometrical basis for the production of folded sandwich elements was established and many profile types were generated such as triangular, square or rectangular shapes. The method allows the easy planning and fast production of components that can be used in the construction sector. A triangle profile was used to create a load-bearing frame as supporting structure for an experimental building. This first permanent building completely made of corrugated cardboard was evaluated in a two-year test to confirm the efficiency of the developed components. In addition to the frame shown in this paper, large-scale sandwich elements with a core of folded components can be used to fabricate lightweight ceilings and large-scale sandwich components. The method enables the efficient production of linearly folded cardboard elements which can replace normal wooden components like beams, pillars or frames and bring a fully recycled material in the context of architectural construction.


Victoria Ocampo's work and linguistic aptitude were often criticized due to her gender and privileged social position. Her abilities were seen as intrusions into languages, cultures and a world of intellectual exchange in which she was tolerated, but never accepted. In light of recent studies on intercultural maturity, this essay argues that Ocampo's relationship between language and culture can now be read as a blueprint for the modern world. This world is that of increased interest in globalization, one in which it is less and less rare that family members need a passport in order to visit one another, and in which heritage language speakers are no longer the odd minority. The world today is marked by transculturation and other incidences of overlapping ethnic and national heritages historically isolated for their "otherness" within a dominant socio-cultural structure seeking homogeneity to a white, western European ideology.


Partitioned methods allow one to build a simulation capability for coupled problems by reusing existing single-component codes. In so doing, partitioned methods can shorten code development and validation times for multiphysics and multiscale applications. In this work, we consider a scenario in which one or more of the"codes"being coupled are projection-based reduced order models (ROMs), introduced to lower the computational cost associated with a particular component. We simulate this scenario by considering a model interface problem that is discretized independently on two non-overlapping subdomains. We then formulate a partitioned scheme for this problem that allows the coupling between a ROM"code"for one of the subdomains with a finite element model (FEM) or ROM"code"for the other subdomain. The ROM"codes"are constructed by performing proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) on a snapshot ensemble to obtain a low-dimensional reduced order basis, followed by a Galerkin projection onto this basis. The ROM and/or FEM"codes"on each subdomain are then coupled using a Lagrange multiplier representing the interface flux. To partition the resulting monolithic problem, we first eliminate the flux through a dual Schur complement. Application of an explicit time integration scheme to the transformed monolithic problem decouples the subdomain equations, allowing their independent solution for the next time step. We show numerical results that demonstrate the proposed method's efficacy in achieving both ROM-FEM and ROM-ROM coupling.


Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.


Many ventures involved in information, communications and entertainment ("ICE") industries have begun to expand their array of offered services. Technological convergence, digitization and the ability of the Internet to handle many different service types within a single bitstream make it possible for companies to offer "quadruple play" bundles of wireless and wireline telephony, video, and Internet access services. Financial and efficiency gains from vertical integration, and the search for new revenues to replace declining margins from maturing and newly competitive services, combine to create robust incentives for carriers to diversify.Diversification by ventures typically results in a single company providing services that fit within more than one regulatory classification. This frustrates the FCC's desire to apply a single regulatory classification to services and service providers, a process the Commission could achieve when ventures concentrated on one function, e.g., operating a conduit for content created by others, and offered one readily identifiable service, e.g., telephony. Diversification also obscures the specific reach of the FCC's regulatory wingspan, both in terms of what regulatory classification applies to which services and what regulatory safeguards the Commission can lawfully apply. For example, an appellate court recently reversed the FCC's attempt to subject Internet Service Providers ("ISPs") to regulatory safeguards identified in Title II of the Communications Act, as amended, but which the Commission wanted to apply using the concept of "ancillary jurisdiction" based on Title I of the Act. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the FCC's attempt to apply such safeguards on ventures classified as information service providers, a status that qualifies for a largely unregulated "safe harbor."In light of an appellate court reversal, the FCC must rethink how it can serve the public interest and safeguard consumers, despite having broadly applied the information service classification to all Internet services and ISPs. Already the FCC has had to find ways to impose Title II-type regulatory safeguards on providers of Voice over the Internet Protocol ("VoIP") service. Additionally the Commission has avoided making necessary regulatory classifications as to which category new services such as VoIP and Internet Protocol Television fit. Absent a legislative remedy the FCC must find a way that will pass muster with reviewing court, but also provide necessary safeguards. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has proposed to reclassify Internet access as Title II regulated service subject to extensive forbearance from applying many regulatory safeguards he considers unnecessary. Such a re-classification, coming on the heels of court reversal, appears as after the fact scrambling to re-arrange the wingspan of Title II jurisdiction without statutory authority.This paper will explain how the FCC has backed itself into a corner in light of its predisposition to apply the information service classification indiscriminately and its perceived duty to make either/or determinations about services, i.e., to apply either the telecommunications service classification singularly, or the information service singularly to a convergent service that combines both elements. The paper also will provide recommendations on how the Commission might recognize that convergent services, such as Internet access, combine both components in much the same way as wireless cellular telephone companies offer both regulated common carrier telecommunications services, subject to forbearance, and unregulated information services via the same conduit. The paper recommends that in light of the ascending importance of Internet access and the lack of sustainable competition that would favor self-regulation, Congress should amend the Communications Act to authorize the FCC to apply limited elements of Title II safeguards as already exists for wireless telephony. In light of the failure of Congress to reach consensus, the paper suggests that the FCC safeguard consumers when information service providers cause harm as the Commission did when a DSL service provider blocked access to competing VoIP services.


Finite automata model a wide array of applications in software engineering, from regular expressions to specification languages. Finite transducers are an extension of finite automata to model functions on lists of elements, which in turn have uses in fields as diverse as computational linguistics and model-based testing. Symbolic finite transducers are a further generalization of finite transducers where transitions are labeled with formulas in a given background theory. Compared to classical finite transducers, symbolic transducers are far more succinct in the case of finite alphabets, because they have no need to enumerate all cases of a transition; symbolic transducers can also use theories, such as the theory of linear arithmetic over integers or reals, with infinite alphabets. Given a decision procedure for the background theory, we show novel algorithms for composition and equivalence checking for a large class of symbolic finite transducers, namely the class of single-valued transducers. Our algorithms give rise to a complete decidable algebra of symbolic transducers. Unlike previous work, we do not need any syntactic restriction of the formulas on the transitions, only a decision procedure; in practice we leverage recent advances in satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solvers. We show how to decide single-valuedness, which means that symbolic finite transducers arising from practice can be checked to see if our algorithms apply. Our base algorithms are unusual in that they are nonconstructive, so we exhibit a separate model generation algorithm that can quickly find counterexamples in the case two symbolic finite transducers are not equivalent. As a key example, string manipulation is a particularly important application of our theoretical results with immediate benefits to bug finding. Our work makes symbolic finite transducers a practical approach for software engineering applications, such as the analysis of security-critical sanitization functions in web pages and model based testing. Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-32 March 14, 2011


Written by Brian Azzarello; Art by Eduardo Risso, and Dave Johnson The second trade paperback in the 100 BULLETS line, this book resumes the tale of the mysterious Agent Graves who offers ordinary wronged people the opportunity to kill with impunity using 100 bullets that he supplies them with. But even as Agent Graves continues to approach and manipulate his "clients," questions about the ghoulish agent start to arise as people from his past begin to appear, revealing interesting information about their former acquaintance. In the end though, these facts only lead to different questions as the mystery behind Agent Graves' motives deepens.


The aim of the study was to explore the prevalence of specific symptoms of depression in athletes and to test differences in the likelihood of athletes exhibiting these symptoms across age, sex, type of team sport, and level of competition. A sample of Icelandic male and female team sport athletes (N = 894, 18–42 years) was included in the study. Of the athletes exhibiting clinically significant depressive symptoms on the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, 37.5% did not exhibit core symptoms of depression. Compared with males, females were significantly more likely to exhibit depressed mood, feelings of worthlessness/guilt, and problems with sleep, fatigue, appetite, and concentration. Within males, differences were mostly related to neurovegetative aspects of depression (sleep and appetite), whereas in females, differences were related to cognitive/emotional aspects (e.g., depressed mood, guilt/worthlessness). The findings underline the importance of exploring specific symptoms of depression to provide a richer understanding of depressive symptomology in athletes.


In 1995, the Cato Institute published a groundbreaking study, "The Work vs. Welfare Trade-Off", which estimated the value of the full package of welfare benefits available to a typical recipient in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. It found that not only did the value of such benefits greatly exceed the poverty level but, because welfare benefits are tax-free, their dollar value was greater than the amount of take-home income a worker would receive from an entry-level job. Since then, many welfare programs have undergone significant change, including the 1996 welfare reform legislation that ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and replaced it with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program. Accordingly, this paper examines the current welfare system in the same manner as the 1995 paper. Welfare benefits continue to outpace the income that most recipients can expect to earn from an entry-level job, and the balance between welfare and work may actually have grown worse in recent years. The current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work. Welfare currently pays more than a minimum-wage job in 35 states, even after accounting for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and in 13 states it pays more than $15 per hour. If Congress and state legislatures are serious about reducing welfare dependence and rewarding work, they should consider strengthening welfare work requirements, removing exemptions, and narrowing the definition of work. Moreover, states should consider ways to shrink the gap between the value of welfare and work by reducing current benefit levels and tightening eligibility requirements.


The Earned Income Tax Credit is unique among social programs in that benefits are not paid out evenly across the calendar year. We exploit this feature of the EITC to investigate how the credit influences the food expenditure patterns of eligible households. We find that eligible households spend relatively more on healthy items including fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and poultry, and dairy products during the months when most refunds are paid.


Abstract. Seasonal variations in cloud droplet number concentration ( N CD ) in low-level stratiform clouds over the boreal forest are estimated from MODIS observations of cloud optical and microphysical properties, using a sub-adiabatic cloud model to interpret vertical profiles of cloud properties. An uncertainty analysis of the cloud model is included to reveal the main sensitivities of the cloud model. We compared the seasonal cycle in N CD , obtained using 9 yr of satellite data, to surface concentrations of potential cloud activating aerosols, measured at the SMEAR II station at Hyytiala in Finland. The results show that N CD and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentrations have no clear correlation at seasonal time scale. The fraction of aerosols that actually activate as cloud droplet decreases sharply with increasing aerosol concentrations. Furthermore, information on the stability of the atmosphere shows that low N CD is linked to stable atmospheric conditions. Combining these findings leads to the conclusion that cloud droplet activation for the studied clouds over the boreal forest is limited by convection. Our results suggest that it is important to take the strength of convection into account when studying the influence of aerosols from the boreal forest on cloud formation, although they do not rule out the possibility that aerosols from the boreal forest affect other types of clouds with a closer coupling to the surface.


There has been significant attention focused on the impacts of fire frequency and season of burn on ecological processes in the Kruger National Park (KNP). Whilst there has been some examination of these fire effects on soil properties, the explicit linkages of these effects to the hydrology of soils in burnt areas has remained a gap in our understanding. During August 2010, a field scoping campaign was undertaken to assess the impacts, if any, of long-term fire treatments on the hydrology of soils on the experimental burn plots (EBPs) in the KNP. Using various hydrometric and soil physical characterisation instruments soil, hydraulic conductivity and soil strength variations were determined across the extreme fire treatment on the EBPs, the annual August (high fire frequency) plots and the control (no burn) plots, on both the granite and basalt geologies of Pretoriuskop and Satara, respectively. It was found that there were soil hydrological and structural differences to fire treatments on the basalt burn plots, but that these were not as clear on the granite burn plots. In particular, hot, frequent fires appeared to reduce the variation in soil hydraulic conductivity on the annual burn plots on the basalts and led to reduced cohesive soil strength at the surface. Conservation implications: The KNP burn plots are one of the longest running and well studied fire experiments on African savannahs. However, the impacts of fire management on hydrological processes in these water-limited ecosystems remains a gap in our understanding and needs to be considered within the context of climate and land-use changes in the savannah biome.


The current study, aims at analyzing the relationship between the distance from urban open spaces and citizens' access to and usage of those spaces. The necessity of this study roots in modern life damages including increasing urbanization, separation from nature, individualism and decrease in face-to-face social interaction, ever-increasing stress and decrease in people's power and tolerance. Therefore, regarding negative consequences on people' bodies and souls, the importance of urban open spaces has been highlighted. Research method is survey. For data gathering, researcher-made questionnaires have been used. Based on data type which has nominal and ordinal measurement scales, Chi-square and Kruskal Wallis Models have been employed. Also, the present research is applied and problem-oriented. Research population consists of Isfahan citizens and research sample has been selected through random sampling. Research hypothesis is "the extent citizens use urban open spaces (meaning that neighborhood parks). The Sample size was equal 366 respondents (valid questionnaires=366). The independent variable is, the distance of citizens from those spaces". Findings indicate that there is a significant relationship between distance of citizens' housings from urban open spaces as independent variable and their usage from those spaces as dependent variable. This relationship's significance level is 0.05 with 4 degree of freedom. In addition, with significance level of 0.01, there is significant relationship between settlement in different neighborhood and the attitude of citizens toward the distance from neighborhood parks as a barrier on the way of going to parks. Therefore, the conclusion emphasizes, on build more parks and of course closer to citizens, for reduces distance to parks. Otherwise, it's obviously the physical and psychological damage will occur


For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking." Stephen Hawking


Orientation: The researcher described the systems psychodynamics of boundary management in organisations. The data showed how effective boundary management leads to good holding environments that, in turn, lead to containing difficult emotions. Research purpose: The purpose of the research was to produce a set of theoretical assumptions about organisational boundaries and boundary management in organisations and, from these, to develop a set of hypotheses as a thinking framework for practising consulting psychologists when they work with boundaries from a systems psychodynamic stance. Motivation for the study: The researcher used the belief that organisational boundaries reflect the essence of organisations. Consulting to boundary managers could facilitate a deep understanding of organisational dynamics. Research design, approach and method: The researcher followed a case study design. He used systems psychodynamic discourse analysis. It led to six working hypotheses. Main findings: The primary task of boundary management is to hold the polarities of integration and differentiation and not allow the system to become fragmented or overly integrated. Boundary management is a primary task and an ongoing activity of entire organisations. Practical/managerial implications: Organisations should work actively at effective boundary management and at balancing integration and differentiation. Leaders should become aware of how effective boundary management leads to good holding environments that, in turn, lead to containing difficult emotions in organisations. Contribution/value-add: The researcher provided a boundary-consulting framework in order to assist consultants to balance the conceptual with the practical when they consult.


Urban planners are often challenged with the task of developing design solutions which must meet multiple, and often contradictory, criteria. In this paper, we investigated the trade-offs between social, psychological, and energy potential of the fundamental elements of urban form: the street network and the building massing. Since formal methods to evaluate urban form from the psychological and social point of view are not readily available, we developed a methodological framework to quantify these criteria as the first contribution in this paper. To evaluate the psychological potential, we conducted a three-tiered empirical study starting from real world environments and then abstracting them to virtual environments. In each context, the implicit (physiological) response and explicit (subjective) response of pedestrians were measured. To quantify the social potential, we developed a street network centrality-based measure of social accessibility. For the energy potential, we created an energy model to analyze the impact of pure geometric form on the energy demand of the building stock. The second contribution of this work is a method to identify distinct clusters of urban form and, for each, explore the trade-offs between the select design criteria. We applied this method to two case studies identifying nine types of urban form and their respective potential trade-offs, which are directly applicable for the assessment of strategic decisions regarding urban form during the early planning stages.


The use of organic solvents indoors as well as outdoors causes severe toxic effects on both the occupants and non-occupants. In the present study, effects of shoe polish, organic solvents, and adhesives on the health status of shoe makers in upper d istrict Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan were evaluated. Histories and blood samples were taken from both the exposed and non-exposed people. Blood biochemical parameters and hematological analysis was performed using UV Double Beam Spectrophotometer and Fully Automated Hematology Analyzer SYSMIX (Japan). There was significant increase in blood triglyceride, cholesterol, low density lipoprotein, high density lipoprotein, serum glutamate pyruvate transaminase, alkaline phosphatase, creatinine, and uric acid level of workers. No effect on blood glucose level was observed in workers as compared to non-exposed control. In shoe making workers, the results for hemoglobin level, total red blood cells count, hematocrit value, mean corpuscular volume, mean cell hemoglobin level, mean cell hemoglobin concentration were normal. There was significant increase in total leukocyte count, lymphocytosis, Eosinophilia and monocyte count in shoe making workers as compared to control. A significant decrease was observed in platelets and neutrophil count of workers when compared to the control group. The results showed an alteration in biochemical parameters and up to some extent in hematological parameters in exposed workers as compared to control. The study suggests that these people are at a higher risk to various health hazards as compared to those who are not exposed to such environment. Concentration of these compounds must be measured so that proper protective measures may be adopted by the workers. Also same study involving a large population size is also recommended to identify other health problems related to exposure to these chemicals.


In this paper, we elucidate the equivalence between inference in game theory and machine learning. Our aim in so doing is to establish an equivalent vocabulary between the two domains so as to facilitate developments at the intersection of both fields, and as proof of the usefulness of this approach, we use recent developments in each field to make useful improvements to the other. More specifically, we consider the analogies between smooth best responses in fictitious play and Bayesian inference methods. Initially, we use these insights to develop and demonstrate an improved algorithm for learning in games based on probabilistic moderation. That is, by integrating over the distribution of opponent strategies (a Bayesian approach within machine learning) rather than taking a simple empirical average (the approach used in standard fictitious play) we derive a novel moderated fictitious play algorithm and show that it is more likely than standard fictitious play to converge to a payoff-dominant but risk-dominated Nash equilibrium in a simple coordination game. Furthermore we consider the converse case, and show how insights from game theory can be used to derive two improved mean field variational learning algorithms. We first show that the standard update rule of mean field variational learning is analogous to a Cournot adjustment within game theory. By analogy with fictitious play, we then suggest an improved update rule, and show that this results in fictitious variational play, an improved mean field variational learning algorithm that exhibits better convergence in highly or strongly connected graphical models. Second, we use a recent advance in fictitious play, namely dynamic fictitious play, to derive a derivative action variational learning algorithm, that exhibits superior convergence properties on a canonical machine learning problem (clustering a mixture distribution).


Sometimes, sexist language is blatant and universally shunned. Other times, it is more subtle and even socially acceptable. For instance, as summarized in this article, substantial social science research has considered the use of male-gendered generics (the use of such words as he, man, chairman, or mankind to represent both women and men) rather than gender-neutral alternatives (such as she or he, human, chairperson, or humankind). This research concludes that male-gendered generics are exclusionary of women and tend to reinforce gender stereotypes. Yet, these words may not be recognized as discriminatory because their use is perceived as normative and therefore not unusual. In addition, those who use these words may not be intentionally harmful. Complaining about their use may even be criticized as a trivial activity or an overly sensitive reaction. Given this social science research, there is a surprising absence of awareness on the use and effect of these words among lawyers, law faculty, law student, and judges. Based on our original empirical analysis of hundreds of legal documents (judicial opinions, legal briefs, and law review articles), we find that the legal community continues to use male-gendered words even though gender-neutral alternatives exist. Thus, while some judges, lawyers, and legal scholars may not intend to be sexist, they are being subtly sexist. The research reveals a strong general pattern of the dominant use of the male-gendered option in a number of word pairs (four out of the nine word pairs) and substantial use in three other word pairs. In contrast, there is the dominant use of the gender-neutral word option in two word pairs. Finally, the article offers some proactive suggestions. While the legal community is reluctant to change, it did shift from using the male-gendered option of reasonable man to the gender-neutral reasonable person. We suggest that this change occurred because of the legal community's heightened awareness of the sexist nature of the use of reasonable man, and that a heightened awareness of the subtle sexism of all male-gendered generics could prompt further changes. The article ends with a useful guide on gender neutral language that can be duplicated for distribution in the legal community and elsewhere.


This paper estimates successfully a version of the monetary approach to foreign exchange rates applied to the US dollar for the post-1973 floating exchange rate period. Although this approach has lately fallen in disrepute, the statistical evidence is strongly in support of the model. The results conform to expectations. All coefficients have the correct sign and are highly significant statistically. The null hypothesis that the coefficient on the money stock variable is equal to +1 fails to be rejected in all four estimated regressions. This reflects money neutrality. The null hypothesis that the coefficient on the scale variable is equal to -1 fails to be rejected in all these four regressions. This means that there are neither economies nor diseconomies of scale for aggregate income. The joint null hypothesis that both of the above two constraints hold fails to be rejected at marginal significance levels much higher than 10% for the first two regressions and fails to be rejected at a marginal significance level higher than 2% for the last two regressions. Finally, the adjustment to the long run falls upon the real interest rate and probably upon the scale variable. There is evidence that the foreign exchange rate, the money supply, and the nominal interest rate are all weakly exogenous. One implication of this study is that businesses, economists, individual investors, central bankers and policy-makers should have a more benign look upon fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, and should become convinced that these fluctuations are determined by fundamental forces.


We describe a lexicon of Arabic verbs constructed on the basis of Semitic patterns and used in a resource-based method of morphological annotation of written Arabic text. The annotated output is a graph of morphemes with accurate linguistic information. An enhanced FST implementation for Semitic languages was created. This system is adapted also for generating inflected forms. The language resources can be easily updated. The lexicon is constituted of 15 400 verbal entries. We propose an inflectional taxonomy that increases the lexicon readability and maintainability for Arabic speakers and lingui sts. Traditional grammar defines inflectional verbal classes by using verbal pattern-classes and root-classes, related to the nature of each of the triliteral root-consonants. Verbal pattern-classes are clearly defined but root-classes are complex. In our taxonomy, traditional pattern-classes are reused and root-classes are simply redefined. Our taxonomy provides a straightforward encoding scheme for inflectional variations and orthographic adjustments due to assimilation and agglutination. We have tested and evaluated our resource against 10 000 diacriticized verb occurrences in the Nemlar corpus and compared it to Buckwalter resources. The lexical coverage is 99.9 % and a laptop needs two minutes in order to generate and compress the inflected lexicon of 2.5 million forms into 4 Megabytes.


Digital elevation models (DEM) generated in geographical information systems (GIS) have proven to be useful tools in hydrological research, aiding, amongst others, the delineation of catchment areas, identification of drainage patterns and flow pathways as well as for runoff determinations. They are of particular value in areas of comparatively flat topography, where such tasks are often difficult to perform. However, owing to the fact that elevation differences in wetlands typically fall below or just into the range of contour intervals of standard topographic maps being generally 20 m, and 5m for some areas, the latter fail to give enough detail. This means that sufficiently detailed relief information is often difficult to obtain for wetland research. Sitespecific, high-resolution relief surveys are too expensive, relative to many research budgets, to constitute a viable alternative. Based on an approximately 12 km2 study area surrounding a karst-related peatland, this paper presents a method to retrieve the required high-resolution elevation data at 1 m intervals, at low cost, from satellite imagery in Google Earth™. The paper describes procedures used to capture and process the data using GIS ArcDesktop™ to produce a high-resolution contour map and DEM. For quality assurance purposes the generated map is visually compared to 5 m and 20 m contour intervals of standard topographic maps (1:50000) issued by the Chief Directorate Surveys and Mapping (CDSM). After correcting an off-set of 5 m it was found that the deviation of the generated contour map based on Google data from CDSM contours was in the same order as the deviation between the 2 CDSM contour sets. Finally, all 3 contour maps were compared to a contour map of 0.5 m-interval resolution specifically generated for the study area using aerial photography from an airborne survey. This too confirmed the overall good reliability of the generated, Google Earth™-based, contour map. Although Google Earth™'s contour models are based on data of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), the direct use of freely available SRTM data for localised, high-resolution DEM yielded unsatisfactory results. This may be due to (unspecified) procedures, or unknown data sources employed by Google Earth™ that enhance the quality of relief data. With updating intervals of 2 to 4 years, satellite imagery in Google Earth™ offers the additional advantage of containing much more recent information on relevant hydrological features than the outdated topographic maps available for the study area. It is concluded that the presented method allows the generation of high-resolution DEMs especially for areas of flat topography where adequate relief information is either not available or too costly to generate. These DEMs are useful for further wetland research.


A firsthand account and incisive analysis of modern protest, revealing internet-fueled social movements greatest strengths and frequent challenges To understand a thwarted Turkish coup, an antiWall Street encampment, and a packed Tahrir Square, we must first comprehend the power and the weaknesses of using new technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. An incisive observer, writer, and participant in todays social movements, Zeynep Tufekci explains in this accessible and compelling book the nuanced trajectories of modern protestshow they form, how they operate differently from past protests, and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change. Tufekci speaks from direct experience, combining on-the-ground interviews with insightful analysis. She describes how the internet helped the Zapatista uprisings in Mexico, the necessity of remote Twitter users to organize medical supplies during Arab Spring, the refusal to use bullhorns in the Occupy Movement that started in New York, and the empowering effect of tear gas in Istanbuls Gezi Park. These details from life inside social movements complete a moving investigation of authority, technology, and cultureand offer essential insights into the future of governance.


Using memory work, a group of eight adults in a university setting wrote, shared, and theorized memories of life challenges we experienced. In this study, we have adapted and refined memory work as a method, and we model this by presenting and examining a comprehensive case example of memory work. Our memories were of four main types: stories of dangerous events, the unruly body/self, leaving home/returning home, and negotiating social relationships. Processes of writing, performing, witnessing, and theorizing led us to identify ruptures and turning points that revealed ways in which we have been culturally inscribed as well as our agency in integrating social discourses into our identity. Our results point to the value of collaborative autobiography as a route to insight, a way to build community, and a means to democratize research.


In an increasingly networked public, the Internet and social media provide rich opportunities for reconnecting youth with their civic life. In a questionnaire study of 578 14-20 year old youth, we explore the relationship between Internet technology experiences, civic efficacy, community identification, and civic engagement in their everyday lives. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes of digital youth, we found that most rely on email and text messaging to communicate with others in their local communities about civic issues. Further, those more experienced with technologies in the public sphere (such as blogs, wikis, and Twitter) had higher levels of civic engagement. Teens who strongly identified with their local community and who had higher levels of civic efficacy were especially likely to be civically engaged. These results highlight the importance of encouraging youth to emotionally connect to their local communities, and to do so online in the public sphere rather than through more personal communication channels.


Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center have developed an assay that may be used to help identify new genes that can predict a predisposition to cancer. The study, published in the April issue of Radiation Research, was done in yeast and mammalian cells. Cancer cells show persistent genetic instability and the researchers, led by Robert Schiestl, have discovered a mechanism that switches on that genetic instability. If they can uncover and understand the molecular pathways at work in promoting genetic instability, they may be able to develop ways to switch that mechanism off, restoring stability. "We all have several hundred cells in our body that go crazy every day, and they're taken out by our immune system," said Schiestl, a professor of pathology, radiation oncology and environmental health sciences and a Jonsson Cancer Center scientist. "What's important is that those cells don't grow and spread and invade other regions of our body. Cancer cells are able to grow, spread and invade because the continued genetic instability can disturb the cellular program and create a growth advantage. Unfortunately, the immune system is not very effective at taking cancer cells out." The assay determines the efficiency of the repair mechanism when DNA suffers a double-strand break, when both strands in the double helix are severed. These breaks cause genetic instability and are particularly dangerous because they can lead to genome rearrangements or deletions of certain genes that, when gone, result in cancer. "Every cell has double strand breaks all the time," said Schiestl, senior author of the study. "It is how the cell tries to fix these breaks that is key, the capacity and the efficiency of the repair so no further harm occurs." A cell that can't efficiently repair itself could result in cancer. In the study, researchers irradiated cells to create double strand breaks. They wanted to determine if a double strand break occurs in one area of the DNA is the instability limited to that area or also evident elsewhere. The standard thinking was that the genetic instability would be localized to the area of the break. However, Schiestl and his team showed that a break in one area has an "in trans" effect, meaning the instability could surface anywhere. "What we have shown now in this paper is that DNA damage at one position in the genome, causes a certain mechanism of genetic instability all over the genome," Schiestl said. Specifically, the team irradiated cells and then transformed them with a DNA fragment that detects the efficiency and the accuracy of double strand break repair. The key in this experiment was that the DNA fragment was not irradiated. In this way, the researchers could demonstrate that the radiation triggered a specific mechanism of double strand break repair in the DNA fragment that did not receive any radiation. The effect was still noticeable after almost all the DNA damage the radiation caused in the cells was repaired, showing that the mechanism that is induced by the radiation is independent of the actual damage caused by the radiation. Schiestl had previously shown that a single DNA double strand break also induces genetic instability all over the genome at sites that are not damaged, again a proof that double strand breaks induce genetic instability in trans. Interestingly, many cancer cells show an elevated induction of the specific DNA double strand break repair mechanism found induced in trans in this study, as if the cancer cells had this mechanism somehow induced and were not able to switch it off. "Now we have to identify the mechanism of the pathway, identify the genes involved in inducing that pathway and that might give us targets that we can inhibit with drugs to try to reduce genetic instability," Schiestl said. "That could lead to a cancer treatment. Any time you can stop the growth of a cancer, you've won. It doesn't damage other tissues or spread to other organs. We might be able to stop the instability before it results in cancer." The research was funded in part by a National Institutes of Health grant and a NASA graduate student fellowship. Other members of Schiestl's team included Zorica Scuric, Cecilia Chan and Kurt Hafer. UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has more than 350 researchers and clinicians engaged in disease research, prevention, detection, control, treatment and education. One of the nation's largest comprehensive cancer centers, the Jonsson center is dedicated to promoting research and translating basic science into leading-edge clinical studies. In July 2008, the Jonsson Cancer Center was named among the top 10 cancer centers nationwide by U.S. News & World Report, a ranking it has held for nine consecutive years. For more information on the Jonsson Cancer Center, visit our website at http://www.cancer.ucla.edu. Kim Irwin (email@example.com) (310) 206-2805


The WTO Doha negotiations are often referred to as a "development round." Yet that characterization is controversial, due to weaknesses in the Doha Declaration and limited progress in the early negotiations. This paper offers a comprehensive assessment of the Doha Round from the perspective of development policy. It draws on recent summit-level commitments on development, initiatives by development organizations, and policy analyses by scholars and NGOs. Together, these instruments establish a coherent and highly legitimate set of global norms on development. Trade negotiations like Doha are poorly suited to many aspects of development policy. Yet they can still make major contributions: e.g., by modifying trade rules that impede development, giving priority to issues of concern to developing countries (DCs), allowing DCs to implement market reforms gradually while developing appropriate social policies and institutions, and providing for full DC participation in WTO affairs. Thus, the WTO should not leave development policy to multilateral development banks and other specialized organizations, but rather should strengthen its collaboration with them to more effectively promote development. The paper identifies two schools of thought on reform of the trade regime among development specialists. (1) An "enlightened standard view" emphasizes access to Northern markets for DC exports, especially in sectors like labor-intensive manufactures and agriculture; complementary policy changes within DCs (including market reforms and social policies); aid for trade and reform; and improved WTO participation. (2) A more critical view also calls for rebalancing TRIPs and other agreements, enhancing special and differential treatment (SDT), exempting DCs from inappropriate institutional requirements, and acting on important issues like food security and access to medicines. The Doha Declaration authorized negotiations on some issues in both groups, while giving unprecedented rhetorical prominence to development. However, it failed to act on other issues, or did so only in limited ways, e.g., by requiring new DC concessions as the price of rule modifications. The first 18 months of negotiations have also been troubling: Stalemates on agriculture and other central issues have thrown the timetable of the Round into doubt, and governments appear reluctant to give concrete effect to the rhetoric of the Declaration, deadlocking on SDT, TRIPs and public health, and other development issues, mainly along North-South lines. The paper concludes by outlining strategies of political action that advocates might adopt to restore development concerns to the heart of the Round. These include hard bargaining at the Cancun ministerial meeting and in other settings, invocation of accepted norms and commitments, and public diplomacy.


Absence of unified data collection tools and over reporting to the higher levels are major problems in the health management information systems (HMIS) in many developing countries. Building on the notions of boundary objects and knowledge boundary, this study examined the challenges and opportunities for developing unified data collection tools and health reports. To do so, an interpretative case study was conducted in Ethiopia during the inception of HMIS reform in order to improve the quality of health information. The reform process includes standardizing data collection and reporting tools for all health facilities across the country.The focus of this study is a family folder that is designed to capture the community health data by the health extension workers of Ethiopia. The findings indicate a tendency to use multiple registers and reports at the health facilities to fulfill the information demand of different partners. This challenge need to be dealt through discussion, negotiation and convergence of conflicting interests among stakeholders to address the identified defy.


The literature addressing the meaning of a commitment made by holders of patents 'essential' to a standard to licence such patents on 'fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory' (FRAND) terms and conditions is now substantial. While reaching quite different conclusions, a number of authors have addressed this as a question of economic theory: what limitations (if any) on the freedom of the parties negotiating a licence to essential patents will best ensure efficient outcomes? On the basis of such analyses, authors have variously argued that, in order to satisfy a 'fair and reasonable' commitment, a patent holder: • Must charge no more than the incremental value of his invention over the next best technical alternative; • Must not negotiate for a royalty-free cross-licence as part of the consideration for a licence; • Must set his royalty rate based on a mathematical proportion of all patents essential to the practice of a standard; • Must set his royalty rate in such a way as to prevent cumulative royalties on the standardised product from exceeding a low percentage of the total sale price of that product; • Must not raise requested royalty rates after the standard has been adopted, or after the relevant market has grown to maturity; • Is not entitled to seek injunctive relief against a standard implementer should they fail to agree on licence terms. The types of economic arguments relied on by these authors to justify these restrictive regimes may well be useful in debating public policy and the proper application of national competition law – although one of the present authors and others have elsewhere critiqued the merits of many of these calls for what is essentially government intervention in the private licencing process. But in this paper we step back to ask a different question: What do these arguments and proposed regimes have to do with the contract which is the source of the FRAND obligation?


I argue that the core of genuinely academic freedom ought to be freedom in research and teaching, subject to disciplinary standards of expertise. I discuss the law in the United States, Germany, and England, and express doubts about the American view that distinctively academic freedom ought to encompass "extramural" speech on matters of public importance (speakers should be protected from employment repercussions for such speech, but not because of their freedom qua academics).
I treat freedom of academic expression as a subset of general freedom of expression, focusing on the Millian argument that freedom of expression maximizes discovery of the truth, one regularly invoked by defenders of academic freedom. Marcuse argued against Mill (in 1965) that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression would not maximize discovery of the truth. I show that Marcuse agreed with Mill that free expression is only truth- and utility-maximizing if certain background conditions obtain: thus Mill argues that the British colony in India would be better off with "benevolent despotism" than Millian liberty of expression, given that its inhabitants purportedly lacked the maturity and education requisite for expression to be utility-maximizing. Marcuse agrees with Mill that the background conditions are essential, but has an empirical disagreement with him about what those are and when they obtain: Mill finds them wanting in colonial India, Marcuse finds them wanting in capitalist America.
Perhaps surprisingly, Marcuse believes that "indiscriminate" toleration of expression should be the norm governing academic discussions, despite his doubts about the utility-maximizing value of free expression in capitalist America. Why think that? Here is a reason: where disciplinary standards of expertise govern debate, the discovery of truth really is more likely, but only under conditions of "indiscriminate" freedom of argument, i.e., academic freedom. This freedom is not truly "indiscriminate": its boundaries are set by disciplinary competence, which raises an additional question I try to address.
In sum, the libertarians (Mill and Popper) and the Marxists (Marcuse) can agree that academic freedom is justified, at least when universities are genuine sites of scientific expertise and open debate.


This paper presents an affordable, fully automated and accurate mapping solutions based on ultra-light UAV imagery. Several datasets are analysed and their accuracy is estimated. We show that the accuracy highly depends on the ground resolution (flying height) of the input imagery. When chosen appropriately this mapping solution can compete with traditional mapping solutions that capture fewer high-resolution images from airplanes and that rely on highly accurate orientation and positioning sensors on board. Due to the careful integration with recent computer vision techniques, the post processing is robust and fully automatic and can deal with inaccurate position and orientation information which are typically problematic with traditional techniques.


Hamman's syndrome (spontaneous subcutaneous emphysema and pneumomediastinum) is a rare complication of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), with a multifactorial etiology. Awareness of this syndrome is important: it is likely underdiagnosed as the main symptom of shortness of breath is often attributed to Kussmaul's breathing and the findings on chest radiograph can be subtle and easily missed. It is also important to be aware of and consider Boerhaave's syndrome as a differential diagnosis, a more serious condition with a 40% mortality rate when diagnosis is delayed. We present a case of pneumomediastinum, pneumopericardium, epidural emphysema and subcutaneous emphysema complicating DKA in an eighteen-year-old patient. We hope that increasing awareness of Hamman's syndrome, and how to distinguish it from Boerhaave's syndrome, will lead to better recognition and management of these syndromes in patients with diabetic ketoacidosis. Learning points: Hamman's syndrome (spontaneous subcutaneous emphysema and pneumomediastinum) is a rare complication of DKA. Presentation may be with chest or neck pain and shortness of breath, and signs are subcutaneous emphysema and Hamman's sign – a precordial crunching or popping sound during systole. Boerhaave's syndrome should be considered as a differential diagnosis, especially in cases with severe vomiting. The diagnosis of pneumomediastinum is made on chest radiograph, but a CT thorax with water-soluble oral contrast looking for contrast leak may be required if there is high clinical suspicion of Boerrhave's syndrome. Hamman's syndrome has an excellent prognosis, self-resolving with the correction of the ketoacidosis in all published cases in the literature.


Private equity fund managers take a share of the profits of the partnership as the equity portion of their compensation. The tax rules for compensating service partners create a planning opportunity for managers who receive the industry-standard "two and twenty" (a two percent management fee and twenty percent profits interest). By taking a portion of their pay in the form of partnership profits, fund managers defer income derived from their labor efforts and convert it from ordinary income into long-term capital gain. This quirk in the tax law allows some of the richest workers in the country to pay tax on their labor income at a low rate. Changes in the investment world - the growth of private equity funds, the adoption of portable alpha strategies by institutional investors, and aggressive tax planning - suggest that reconsideration of the partnership profits puzzle is overdue. In this Article, I offer a menu of reform alternatives, including a novel cost-of-capital approach that would strike an appropriate balance between treating returns on human capital as ordinary income and rewarding entrepreneurial activity with a tax subsidy. While there is ample room for disagreement about the scope and mechanics of the reform alternatives, this Article establishes that the status quo is an untenable position as a matter of tax policy. Among the various alternatives, perhaps the best starting point is a baseline rule that would treat carried interest distributions as ordinary income. Alternatively, Congress could adopt a more complex "cost of capital" approach that would convert a portion of carried interest into ordinary income on an annual basis, or it could allow fund managers to elect into either the ordinary income or "cost of capital" approach. Any of these alternatives to the status quo would tax carried interest distributions to fund managers in a manner that more closely matches how our tax system treats other forms of compensation, thereby improving economic efficiency and discouraging wasteful regulatory gamesmanship. These changes would also reconcile private equity compensation with our progressive tax rate system and widely-held principles of distributive justice.


This article argues that systematic conservation planning (SCP) is an intrinsic part of the adaptive management approach within SANParks and should not be seen as a separate or different initiative. SCP operates within a complex environment that requires a deliberately adaptive approach. The similarities in philosophy, structure and functional elements of the planning process and approach between adaptive management and SCP, as applied within SANParks, are highlighted. The article distils requirements for ensuring that SCP remains strategically adaptive in its approach. Conservation implication: A deliberately adaptive approach to SCP improves its effectiveness in guiding the implementation of conservation actions and is a requirement for effective conservation planning in a complex environment.


Cylindrical objects made usually of fired clay but sometimes of stone were found at the Yarmukian Pottery Neolithic sites of Sha'ar HaGolan and Munhata (first half of the 8th millennium BP) in the Jordan Valley. Similar objects have been reported from other Near Eastern Pottery Neolithic sites. Most scholars have interpreted them as cultic objects in the shape of phalli, while others have referred to them in more general terms as "clay pestles," "clay rods," and "cylindrical clay objects." Re-examination of these artifacts leads us to present a new interpretation of their function and to suggest a reconstruction of their technology and mode of use. We suggest that these objects were components of fire drills and consider them the earliest evidence of a complex technology of fire ignition, which incorporates the cylindrical objects in the role of matches.


This paper presents a new Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) approach for assisting clinicians in the selection of antiretroviral drugs for patients infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). The approach is comparable to laboratory genotypic resistance testing in that it aims to determine which viral mutations a patient is carrying and predict which drugs they are most likely resistant to. But, instead of genetically analysing samples of the virus taken from patients --which is not always practicable --our approach infers likely mutations using the patient's full clinical history and a model of drug resistance maintained by a leading HIV research agency. Unlike previous applications of abduction, our approach does not attempt to find the "best" explanations, as we can never be absolutely sure which mutations a patient is carrying. Rather, the intrinsic uncertainty of this domain means that multiple alternative explanations are inevitable and we must seek ways to extract useful information from them. The computational and pragmatic issues raised by this approach have led us to develop a new ALP methodology for handling numerous explanations and for drawing predictions with associated levels of confidence. We present our in-Silico Sequencing System (iS3) for reasoning about HIV drug resistance as a concrete example of this approach.


Do you ever know the book? Yeah, this is a very interesting book to read. As we told previously, reading is not kind of obligation activity to do when we have to obligate. Reading should be a habit, a good habit. By reading, you can open the new world and get the power from the world. Everything can be gained through the book. Well in brief, book is very powerful. As what we offer you right here, this israel vision and reality is as one of reading book for you.


Introduction. Part I: Getting Started in Bioinformatics. Chapter 1: Finding Out What Bioinformatics Can Do for You. Chapter 2: How Most People Use Bioinformatics. Part II: A Survival Guide to Bioinformatics. Chapter 3: Using Nucleotide Sequence Databases. Chapter 4: Using Protein and Specialized Sequence Databases. Chapter 5: Working with a Single DNA Sequence. Chapter 6: Working with a Single Protein Sequence. Part III: Becoming a Pro in Sequence Analysis. Chapter 7: Similarity Searches on Sequence Databases. Chapter 8: Comparing Two Sequences. Chapter 9: Building a Multiple Sequence Alignment. Chapter 10: Editing and Publishing Alignments. Part IV: Becoming a Specialist: Advanced Bioinformatics Techniques. Chapter 11: Working with Protein 3-D Structures. Chapter 12: Working with RNA. Chapter 13: Building Phylogenetic Trees. Part V: The Part of Tens. Chapter 14: The Ten (Okay, Twelve) Commandments for Using Servers. Chapter 15: Some Useful Bioinformatics Resources. Index.


The Defense of Marriage Act has been abandoned by the executive and held unconstitutional by courts, so it is time to think about what will be left in its place. Federal law frequently asks whether a couple is married. But marriage is primarily a creature of state law, and states differ as to who may marry. The federal government has no system for deciding what state's law governs a marriage, though more than a thousand legal provisions look to marital status, more than a hundred thousand same-sex couples report being married, and many of those marriages ultimately cross state lines. Unless a federal choice of law system is designed, DOMA's demise will lead to chaos.This paper argues that such a system can and should be designed: Because the underlying choice-of-law problem is ultimately a problem of statutory interpretation, Congress can and should replace it with a clear choice-of-law rule. Failing that, federal courts can and should develop a common law rule of their own - they are not (and should not be) bound by the Supreme Court's decision in Klaxon v. Stentor Electric. The paper further argues that different institutions should solve the problem differently: If Congress acts, it should recognize all marriages that were valid in the state where they took place. If, instead, the courts create a common-law rule, they should recognize all marriages that are valid in the couple's domicile.The implications of this argument run far beyond the demise of DOMA. In all areas of what is here called "interstitial law," federal interpretive institutions can and should devise a set of choice-of-law rules for federal law that draws upon state law, and what set of rules is proper may well depend on who adopts them.


The prevalent affirmative action policy in school choice limits the number of admitted majority students to give minority students higher chances to attend their desired schools. There have been numerous efforts to reconcile affirmative action policies with celebrated matching mechanisms such as the deferred acceptance and top trading cycles algorithms. Nevertheless, it is theoretically shown that under these algorithms, the policy based on majority quotas may be detrimental to minorities. Using simulations, we find that this is a more common phenomenon rather than a peculiarity. To circumvent the inefficiency caused by majority quotas, we offer a different interpretation of the affirmative action policies based on minority reserves. With minority reserves, schools give higher priority to minority students up to the point that the minorities fill the reserves. We compare the welfare effects of these policies. The deferred acceptance algorithm with minority reserves Pareto dominates the one with majority quotas. Our simulations, which allow for correlations between student preferences and school priorities, indicate that minorities are, on average, better off with minority reserves while adverse effects on majorities are mitigated.


On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills--and unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go. As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the past, a beautiful rookie cop brings him alive in the present. No official warning can break them apart--or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a few hard turns. Suddenly all of L.A. is in an uproar, and Bosch, fighting to keep control, is driven to the brink of an unimaginable decision.


A free flow of ideas and information is vital to the process of scientific inquiry, and in turn to the ability to address economic, environmental and social development issues both in the sub–Saharan Africa region and globally. Most of the challenges facing scholarly publishing in sub–Saharan Africa are global and do not respect national boundaries. Scholarly publishing enables research findings of scholars to cross international boundaries to provide strong, positive connections between individual scholars, institutions and nations. Such exchanges contribute to the expansion of the global knowledge base to which the sub–Saharan Africa region is linked. Participation in the global arena through scholarly communication may enable the sub–Saharan Africa region to have access to knowledge and information it needs to succeed in the global economy that is being digitized rapidly. Scholarly publishing is as a result of research and innovation which may improve the quality of knowledge and information produced by scholars in the sub–Saharan Africa region. This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of scholarly publishing in sub–Saharan Africa in the twenty–first century. The paper also proposes ways of capitalising on the vast opportunities of enhancing knowledge production and dissemination in sub–Saharan Africa through scholarly publishing in the twenty–first century. An analysis of publication records of sub–Saharan Africa between 1997 and 2007 in the Thompson Scientific was conducted. There are many challenges confronting scholarly publishing in sub–Saharan Africa. The challenges include technological, socio–political, economic and environmental. The twenty–first century brings with it opportunities that may enhance sub–Saharan Africa's visibility of scholarly publishing.