Rituals, borne out of our embodied practical reason, are deeds that are counterintuitive in terms of cause and effect. From a cognitive point of view, two kinds of religious rituals can be identified: special agent rituals, where superhuman agents act on human patients (onceoff, highly emotional; e.g. initiations, weddings) and special instrument and patient rituals, where human agents act on superhuman patients (repeated, less emotional; e.g. sacrifices, Holy Communion). The idea of 'correctness' applies more stringently to the first kind than the second, for instance: Jacob's blessing of Ephraim and Manasseh in Genesis 48. Rituals stabilise, reconstitute and replicate our 'cosmos' or imaginative worlds as they realign our intersubjective relations. They are tenacious and persistent, because they evoke, usually in an emotional and motivational way, our sense of urgency, our deeply felt need to maintain sound social relations and our intuitive ability to form notions of a counterintuitive world. The aim of this article was therefore to highlight and illustrate the role our evolved mental tools play when conducting rituals, especially when conducting some rituals 'correctly' and others less stringently so. Furthermore, the psychological appeal that rituals have on the human mind was also explained.


Abstract. This paper addresses the Amazonian shortwave radiative budget over cloud-free conditions after considering three aspects of deforestation: (i) the emission of aerosols from biomass burning due to forest fires; (ii) changes in surface albedo after deforestation; and (iii) modifications in the column water vapour amount over deforested areas. Simultaneous Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) shortwave fluxes and aerosol optical depth (AOD) retrievals from the Moderate Resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MODIS) were analysed during the peak of the biomass burning seasons (August and September) from 2000 to 2009. A discrete-ordinate radiative transfer (DISORT) code was used to extend instantaneous remote sensing radiative forcing assessments into 24-h averages. The mean direct radiative forcing of aerosols at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) during the biomass burning season for the 10-yr studied period was −5.6 ± 1.7 W m −2 . Furthermore, the spatial distribution of the direct radiative forcing of aerosols over Amazonia was obtained for the biomass burning season of each year. It was observed that for high AOD (larger than 1 at 550 nm) the maximum daily direct aerosol radiative forcing at the TOA may be as high as −20 W m −2 locally. The surface reflectance plays a major role in the aerosol direct radiative effect. The study of the effects of biomass burning aerosols over different surface types shows that the direct radiative forcing is systematically more negative over forest than over savannah-like covered areas. Values of −15.7 ± 2.4 W m −2 τ 550 nm and −9.3 ± 1.7 W m −2 τ 550 nm were calculated for the mean daily aerosol forcing efficiencies over forest and savannah-like vegetation respectively. The overall mean annual land use change radiative forcing due to deforestation over the state of Rondonia, Brazil, was determined as −7.3 ± 0.9 W m −2 . Biomass burning aerosols impact the radiative budget for approximately two months per year, whereas the surface albedo impact is observed throughout the year. Because of this difference, the estimated impact in the Amazonian annual radiative budget due to surface albedo-change is approximately 6 times higher than the impact due to aerosol emissions. The influence of atmospheric water vapour content in the radiative budget was also studied using AERONET column water vapour. It was observed that column water vapour is on average smaller by about 0.35 cm (around 10% of the total column water vapour) over deforested areas compared to forested areas. Our results indicate that this drying contributes to an increase in the shortwave radiative forcing, which varies from 0.4 W m −2 to 1.2 W m −2 depending on the column water vapour content before deforestation. The large radiative forcing values presented in this study point out that deforestation could have strong implications in convection, cloud development and the ratio of direct to diffuse radiation, which impacts carbon uptake by the forest.


This paper explores the relationship between accessible sanitation and disability-inclusive employment in Bangladesh and Nigeria. Both countries have sanitation and hygiene challenges as well as disability-inclusive employment challenges, but the existing evidence on the intersection of these issues that is focused on Nigeria and Bangladesh is extremely limited. Building on the literature where this complex issue is addressed, this paper presents the findings of a qualitative pilot study undertaken in Nigeria and Bangladesh. It focuses on the need for toilets at work that are easy for people with disabilities to use in poor countries. These are sometimes called accessible toilets. Accessible sanitation is not regarded as a challenge that must be addressed by people with disabilities themselves, but as a challenge that must be addressed by many people working together – including governments, employers, and the community.


Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region's integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area's livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people's dependence on the automobile, Portland's plans use an urban-growth boundary to greatly increase the area's population density, spend most of the region's transportation funds on various rail transit projects, and promote construction of scores of high-density, mixed-use developments. When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the costs of Portland's planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily housing or in homes on tiny lots. They allowed congestion to increase to near-gridlock levels to force more people to ride the region's expensive rail transit lines. They diverted billions of dollars of taxes from schools, fire, public health, and other essential services to subsidize the construction of transit and high-density housing projects. Those high costs have not produced the utopia planners promised. Far from curbing sprawl, high housing prices led tens of thousands of families to move to Vancouver, Washington, and other cities outside the region's authority. Far from reducing driving, rail transit has actually reduced the share of travel using transit from what it was in 1980. And developers have found that so-called transit-oriented developments only work when they include plenty of parking. Portland-area residents have expressed their opposition to these plans by voting against light rail and density and voting for a property-rights measure that allows landowners to claim either compensation or waivers for land-use rules passed since they purchased their property. Opposition turned to anger when a 2004 scandal revealed that an insider network known as the light-rail mafia had manipulated the planning process to direct rail construction contracts and urban-renewal subsidies to themselves. These problems are all the predictable result of a process that gives a few people enormous power over an entire urban area. Portland should dismantle its planning programs, and other cities that want to maintain their livability would do well to study Portland as an example of how not to plan.


Bangladesh, with spectacular growth in both exports and output in recent years, has drawn attention to the hypothesis of export-led growth. The results on this hypothesis are nevertheless inconclusive. By selecting a relatively liberalized regime from 1979 to 2010, this study engages both the Johansen cointegration approach and innovation accounting with Bangladesh's output, exports, and imports. This comprehensive approach finds significant evidence on export-led growth in Bangladesh for both the long run and the short run. It finds that output growth also leads to export expansion. While export-import feedback is high, the import-output relation appears to be insignificant for the country. These findings suggest further export promotion and import liberalization not only for Bangladesh, but also for other emerging economies that aspire to grow fast but confront dilemmas with economic openness.


Abstract. We use observations from the April 2008 NASA ARCTAS aircraft campaign to the North American Arctic, interpreted with a global 3-D chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem), to better understand the sources and cycling of hydrogen oxide radicals (HOx≡H+OH+peroxy radicals) and their reservoirs (HOy≡HOx+peroxides) in the springtime Arctic atmosphere. We find that a standard gas-phase chemical mechanism overestimates the observed HO2 and H2O2 concentrations. Computation of HOx and HOy gas-phase chemical budgets on the basis of the aircraft observations also indicates a large missing sink for both. We hypothesize that this could reflect HO2 uptake by aerosols, favored by low temperatures and relatively high aerosol loadings, through a mechanism that does not produce H2O2. We implemented such an uptake of HO2 by aerosol in the model using a standard reactive uptake coefficient parameterization with γ(HO2) values ranging from 0.02 at 275 K to 0.5 at 220 K. This successfully reproduces the concentrations and vertical distributions of the different HOx species and HOy reservoirs. HO2 uptake by aerosol is then a major HOx and HOy sink, decreasing mean OH and HO2 concentrations in the Arctic troposphere by 32% and 31% respectively. Better rate and product data for HO2 uptake by aerosol are needed to understand this role of aerosols in limiting the oxidizing power of the Arctic atmosphere.


Chronic disease is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the United States. One-half of U.S. adults have at least one chronic disease condition and 25% have multiple chronic conditions that can lead to a restriction in an ability to do basic daily living activities. Low-income adults have a high incidence of chronic disease that increases with aging due to ongoing psychological stress, higher risk exposure, less healthy living conditions, and limited access to health services. Community-based wellness programs, in collaboration with academic institutions, can serve this population by providing access to health services, quality educational and activity-based experiences, and continual assessment and support. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the expertise of numerous faculty, students, and staff can be used to help mitigate a myriad of health conditions presented by this population. This article shares one university's creation, development, and delivery of an on-campus, multidisciplinary commun...


One of the most important works of gay literature, this haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past -and still poignantly present. It depicts the adventures of Malone, a beautiful young man searching for love amid New York's emerging gay scene. From Manhattan's Everard Baths and after-hours discos to Fire Island's deserted parks and lavish orgies, Malone looks high and low for meaningful companionship. The person he finds is Sutherland, a campy quintessential queen -and one of the most memorable literary creations of contemporary fiction. Hilarious, witty, and ultimately heartbreaking, Dancer from the Dance is truthful, provocative, outrageous fiction told in a voice as close to laughter as to tears.


Abstract. Compiling and disseminating information about incidents and disasters are key to disaster management and relief. But due to inherent limitations of the acquisition process, the required information is often incomplete or missing altogether. To fill these gaps, citizen observations spread through social media are widely considered to be a promising source of relevant information, and many studies propose new methods to tap this resource. Yet, the overarching question of whether and under which circumstances social media can supply relevant information (both qualitatively and quantitatively) still remains unanswered. To shed some light on this question, we review 37 disaster and incident databases covering 27 incident types, compile a unified overview of the contained data and their collection processes, and identify the missing or incomplete information. The resulting data collection reveals six major use cases for social media analysis in incident data collection:
(1)
impact assessment and verification of model predictions,
(2)
narrative generation,
(3)
recruiting citizen volunteers,
(4)
supporting weakly institutionalized areas,
(5)
narrowing surveillance areas, and
(6)
reporting triggers for periodical surveillance.
Furthermore, we discuss the benefits and shortcomings of using social media data for closing information gaps related to incidents and disasters.


Staff Sgt. Seth Greer is the first New Jersey Army national Guardsman to wear the "Smokey the Bear" hat of an drill sergeant.
New enlistees to the New Jersey Army National Guard meet Greer as they report to the Recruit Sustainment Program at the National Guard Training Center in Sea Girt. The once-a-month program exists to prepare new recruits to ship off for eight weeks of basic training at an out-of-state military installation.
More on first Soldier the New Jersey National Guard has ever sent to the U.S. Army Drill Sergeant School from Staff Sgt. John Crankshaw.Read the full Guardlife story and view photos at: http://nj.gov/military/publications/guardlife/volume35no1/21.html


Polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins, dibenzofurans, and polychlorinated biphenyls are persistent environmental pollutants which ubiquitously occur as complex mixtures and accumulate in the food and feed chain due to their high lipophilic properties. Of the 419 possible congeners, only 29 share a common mechanism of action and cause similar effects, the so called dioxin-like compounds. Dioxin-like compounds evoke a broad spectrum of biochemical and toxic responses, i.e. enzyme induction, dermal toxicity, hepatotoxicity, immunotoxicity, carcinogenicity as well as adverse effects on reproduction, development, and the endocrine system in laboratory animals and in humans. Most, if not all, of the aforementioned responses, are mediated by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor. In the present work, the elicited biochemical effects of a selection of dioxin-like compounds and the non dioxin-like PCB 153 were examined in mouse (in vivo) and in human liver cell models (in vitro). Emphasis was given to the main contributors to the total toxic equivalents in human blood and tissues TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, PCB 118, PCB 126, and PCB 156, which likewise contribute about 90 % to the dioxin-like activity in the human food chain.
Three mouse in vivo studies were carried out aiming to characterize the alterations in hepatic gene expression as well as the induction of hepatic xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes after single oral dose. Based on the results obtained from mouse 3-day and 14-day studies, the seven test compounds can be categorized into three classes; the ones which are 'pure' AhR ligands (TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, and PCB 126) or solely CAR inducers (PCB 153), and the ones which are AhR/CAR mixed-type inducers (PCB 118, PCB 156). Moreover, the analysis of hepatic gene expression patterns after a single oral dose of either TCDD or PCB 153 revealed that the altered genes fundamentally differed. Profiling of significantly altered genes led to the conclusion that changes in gene expression were associated with different signalling pathways, in fact by AhR and CAR.
For investigating the role of the AhR in mediating biological responses, several experimental approaches were carried out, such as the analysis of blood plasma metabolites in Ahr knockout and wild-type mice. Genotype specifics and similarities were determined by HPLC-MS/MS analysis. Several plasma metabolites could be identified in both genotypes, but also differences were detected. Furthermore, an in vivo experiment was performed aiming to characterize AhR-dependent and -independent effects in female Ahr knockout and wild-type mice. For this purpose, mice received a single oral dose of TCDD and were killed 96 h later. Microarray analysis of mouse livers revealed that although the Ahr gene was knocked out in Ahr-/- mice, the quantity of affected genes were in the same order of magnitude as for Ahr+/+ mice, but the pattern of altered genes distinctly differed. In addition, the relative liver weights of TCDD-treated Ahr+/+ mice were significantly increased which led to the conclusion, that TCDD induced the development of hepatic steatosis in female Ahr wild-type.
The performed in vitro experiments aimed to characterize the effects elicited by selected DLCs and PCB 153 in human liver cell models by the use of HepG2 cells and primary human hepatocytes. In general, primary human hepatocytes were less responsive than HepG2 cells. This was not only observed in EC values derived from EROD assay, but also regarding microarray analysis in terms of differently regulated genes. In vitro REPs gained from both liver cell models widely confirmed the current TEFs, but some deviations occurred. The comparison of the TCDD-altered genes in both human cell types revealed that only a considerably small number of genes was in common up regulated by both human liver cell models, such as the established AhR-regulated highly inducible cytochrome P450s 1A1, 1A2, and 1B1 as well as other AhR target genes. Although the overlap was rather small, the TCDD-induced genes could be consistently associated with the broad spectrum of established dioxin-related biological responses. The gene expression pattern in primary human hepatocytes after treatment with selected DLCs (TCDD, 1-PnCDD, 4-PnCDF, and PCB 126) and PCB 153 was additionally characterized by microarray analysis. The highest response in terms of significantly altered genes was determined for TCDD, followed by 4-PnCDF, 1-PnCDD, and PCB 126, whereas exposure to PCB 153 did not evoke any significant changes in gene expression. The pattern of significantly altered genes was very homogenous among the four congeners. Genes associated with well-established DLC-related biological responses as well as novel dioxin-inducible target genes were identified, whereby an extensive overlap in terms of up regulated genes by all four DLCs occurred. In conclusion, the results from the in vitro experiments performed in primary human hepatocytes provided fundamental insight into the congeners' potencies and caused alterations in gene expression patterns. The obtained findings implicate that although the extent of enzyme inducibilities varied, the gene expression patterns are coincidental. Microarray analysis identified species-specific (mouse vs. human) as well as model-specific (in vitro vs. in vivo and transformed cells vs. untransformed cells) differences. In order to identify novel biomarkers for AhR activation due to treatment with dioxin-like compounds, five candidates were selected based on the microarray results i.e. ALDH3A1, TIPARP, HSD17B2, CD36, and AhRR. Eventually, ALDH3A1 turned out to be the most reliable and suitable marker for exposure to DLCs in both human liver cell models eliciting the highest mRNA inducibility among the five chosen candidates. In which way these species- and cell type-specific markers are involved in the dioxin-elicited toxic responses should be further characterized in vivo and in vitro.


So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning. – Morrie Schwartz, in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom Page 1 of 8 Preview


"Dissecting Bioethics," edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics. The section is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people's actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly self-evident issues are therefore particularly appreciated. The themes covered in the section so far include dignity, naturalness, public interest, community, disability, autonomy, parity of reasoning, symbolic appeals, and toleration. All submitted papers are peer reviewed. To submit a paper or to discuss a suitable topic, contact Tuija Takala at firstname.lastname@example.com.


The Friendship Theorem states that if any two people in a party have exactly one common friend, then there exists a politician who is a friend of everybody. In this paper, we generalize the Friendship Theorem. Let $\lambda$ be any nonnegative integer and $\mu$ be any positive integer. Suppose each pair of friends have exactly $\lambda$ common friends and each pair of strangers have exactly $\mu$ common friends in a party. The corresponding graph is a generalization of strongly regular graphs obtained by relaxing the regularity property on vertex degrees. We prove that either everyone has exactly the same number of friends or there exists a politician who is a friend of everybody. As an immediate consequence, this implies a recent conjecture by Limaye et. al.


State corporate law requires director services be provided by "natural persons." This Article puts this obligation to scrutiny, and concludes that there are significant gains that could be realized by permitting firms (be they partnerships, corporations, or other business entities) to provide board services. We call these firms "board service providers" (BSPs). We argue that hiring a BSP to provide board services instead of a loose group of sole proprietorships will increase board accountability, both from markets and judicial supervision. The potential economies of scale and scope in the board services industry (including vertical integration of consultants and other board member support functions), as well as the benefits of risk pooling and talent allocation, mean that large professional director services firms may arise, and thereby create a market for corporate governance distinct from the market for corporate control. More transparency about board performance, including better pricing of governance by the market, as well as increased reputational assets at stake in board decisions, means improved corporate governance, all else being equal. But our goal in this Article is not necessarily to increase shareholder control over firms – we show how a firm providing board services could be used to increase managerial power as well. This shows the neutrality of our proposed reform, which can therefore be thought of as a reconceptualization of what a board is rather than a claim about the optimal locus of corporate power.


Objective To summarise the evidence on the cost-effectiveness of acupuncture. Methods We identified full economic evaluations such as cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), cost-utility analysis (CUA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) alongside randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that assessed the consequences and costs of acupuncture for any medical condition. Eleven electronic databases were searched up to March 2011 without language restrictions. Eligible RCTs were assessed using the Cochrane criteria for risk of bias and a modified version of the checklist for economic evaluation. The general characteristics and the results of each economic analysis such as incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs) were extracted. Results Of 17 included studies, nine were CUAs that measured quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and eight were CEAs that assessed effectiveness of acupuncture based on improvements in clinical symptoms. All CUAs showed that acupuncture with or without usual care was cost-effective compared with waiting list control or usual care alone, with ICERs ranging from ¢3011/QALY (dysmenorrhoea) to ¢22 298/QALY (allergic rhinitis) in German studies, and from £3855/QALY (osteoarthritis) to £9951/QALY (headache) in UK studies. In the CEAs, acupuncture was beneficial at a relatively low cost in six European and Asian studies. All CUAs were well-designed with a low risk of bias, but this was not the case for CEAs. Conclusions Overall, this review demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of acupuncture. Despite such promising results, any generalisation of these results needs to be made with caution given the diversity of diseases and the different status of acupuncture in the various countries.


How can REDD credits be included in a future global carbon market, and what are the impacts of inclusion? We analyze ten different scenarios through 2020, varying the global emission caps and the REDD rules. An inclusion of REDD credits without any adjustments in the global cap will lower carbon prices significantly and cause crowding out. The cap must move towards the 2 degrees climate target if REDD inclusion is to maintain high carbon prices and strong incentives for emissions reductions in other sectors. At the same time, reaching the 2 degree target without full REDD inclusion will increase global mitigation costs by more than 50%.


Two familiar features of Ronald Dworkin's theory of adjudication generate a strange predicament. On the one hand, Dworkin maintains that most cases, including most "hard" cases, have "right answers." On the other hand, Dworkin argues that to discover that right answer, judges must avail themselves of moral considerations and moral argument: a party's rights follow from the principle which explains some significant portion of the prior institutional history and provides the best justification for that institutional history as a matter of political morality. But if moral considerations figure decisively in determining the answer to a legal dispute, then there can only be a single right answer as a matter of law if there is a single right answer to the question of political morality. Yet if morality is, as many seem to think, "subjective" in some sense, then there may be as many right answers as a matter of morality as there are judges and thus, consequently, no single right answer as a matter of law. Dworkin's response to this attack on the "objectivity" of morality asks us to distinguish between sensible, but defeasible, "internal" attacks on the objectivity of morality, from unintelligible, and irrelevant, "external" attacks on the objectivity of morality. The attacks, Dworkin argues, depend on the latter "external" perspective and, thus, reflect a misunderstanding about what is at stake in worrying about the objectivity of morality and, thus, in worrying about the objectivity of law. For the only type of objectivity that matters--namely, an "internal" objectivity--Dworkin's theory faces no predicament. Many have found Dworkin's internal/external distinction implausible or unclear. It may be usefully recast, I argue, as involving two competing paradigms of objectivity. On what I will call the "Naturalistic Conception," objectivity in any domain must be understood on the model of the natural sciences, whose objects of study are objective in the sense of being "mind-independent" and causally efficacious (i.e., in making a causal difference to the course of experience). The "Non-Naturalistic Conception," by contrast, denies that the type of objectivity found in the natural sciences is the relevant type of objectivity to aspire to in all domains. We shall see, I think, that the grain of truth in what Dworkin is getting at in his external/internal distinction is really best understood as the difference between a Naturalistic versus a Non-Naturalistic Conception of Objectivity. Dworkin would have us, then, embrace the latter as the only type of objectivity at stake in assessing his theory of adjudication. Dworkin's version of Non-Naturalism bears a striking similarity to John McDowell's. I conclude by arguing, however, that neither version provides an adequate account of objectivity: they fail to explain basic intuitions about objectivity (even in ethics), as well as leaving us with a picture of the "objectivity" of ethics that would, in fact, be quite congenial to the non-cognitivism that both McDowell and Dworkin purport to have left behind. If that is right, then the original predicament remains a live one for Dworkin's theory.


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Using visualization and exploration tools can be of great use for the understanding of a software system when only its source code is available. However, understanding a large software system by visualizing only its lower level artifacts (e.g., classes, methods) and the relations between them does not scale for industrial-size systems. To address the scalability issue, higher level hierarchical abstractions (e.g., package structure, clustered decompositions of the system) should be used together with relations between them that are usually aggregated from the lower level relations. In this paper, we present the concepts behind Softwarenaut, a tool aimed at exploring any kind of hierarchical decompositions of a system, and then we look at a specific exploration of a system. In the experiment, the hierarchical decomposition of the system is the result of applying a semantical clustering to group classes that use similar terms.


From Introduction: "Work on this project was begun early in 1944; and the results with respect to shale oil are reported in this Bulletin. Since this bulletin is only an index to this large repository of ideas relating to the the treatment of shale oil, the material is presented in the form of short notices describing the subject material of each patent, which consist of an abridgment of the patent (if British or Australian) or a typical claim in the case of the United States or foreign patents."


Destructive diseases of the lung like lung cancer or fibrosis are still often lethal. Also in case of fibrosis in the liver, the only possible cure is transplantation.

In this thesis, we investigate 3D micro computed synchrotron radiation (SR\( \mu \)CT) images of capillary blood vessels in mouse lungs and livers. The specimen show so-called compensatory lung growth as well as different states of pulmonary and hepatic fibrosis.

During compensatory lung growth, after resecting part of the lung, the remaining part compensates for this loss by extending into the empty space. This process is accompanied by an active vessel growing.
In general, the human lung can not compensate for such a loss. Thus, understanding this process in mice is important to improve treatment options in case of diseases like lung cancer.

In case of fibrosis, the formation of scars within the organ's tissue forces the capillary vessels to grow to ensure blood supply.

Thus, the process of fibrosis as well as compensatory lung growth can be accessed by considering the capillary architecture.

As preparation of 2D microscopic images is faster, easier, and cheaper compared to SR\( \mu \)CT images, they currently form the basis of medical investigation. Yet, characteristics like direction and shape of objects can only properly be analyzed using 3D imaging techniques. Hence, analyzing SR\( \mu \)CT data provides valuable additional information.

For the fibrotic specimen, we apply image analysis methods well-known from material science. We measure the vessel diameter using the granulometry distribution function and describe the inter-vessel distance by the spherical contact distribution. Moreover, we estimate the directional distribution of the capillary structure. All features turn out to be useful to characterize fibrosis based on the deformation of capillary vessels.

It is already known that the most efficient mechanism of vessel growing forms small torus-shaped holes within the capillary structure, so-called intussusceptive pillars. Analyzing their location and number strongly contributes to the characterization of vessel growing. Hence, for all three applications, this is of great interest. This thesis provides the first algorithm to detect intussusceptive pillars in SR\( \mu \)CT images. After segmentation of raw image data, our algorithm works automatically and allows for a quantitative evaluation of a large amount of data.

The analysis of SR\( \mu \)CT data using our pillar algorithm as well as the granulometry, spherical contact distribution, and directional analysis extends the current state-of-the-art in medical studies. Although it is not possible to replace certain 3D features by 2D features without losing information, our results could be used to examine 2D features approximating the 3D findings reasonably well.


In this article we investigate students' understanding of dot product as a projection. In the first part, we compare students' performance in three isomorphic multiple-choice problems: no-context, work and electric flux. We administered one of the three problems to 422 students who were in the process of completing required introductory physics courses. In the second part, we analyze the students' ability to connect the physical concepts with the dot product's formal representation. We carried out interviews with 14 students, in which they were asked to solve the same three isomorphic problems. Following the tests, we found a difference that was statistically significant: both physical context problems helped students select the projection interpretation option. However, the percentages of students that selected this option remained very low in the three problems. Moreover, during the interviews we noticed that students had serious difficulties in developing a coherent conceptual framework between the phy...


In this journal's Fall 2009 issue, the Forum section included an article by Gordon Selman and Mark Selman arguing that although Canadian adult education had existed as a social movement in the middle part of the 20th century, it is no longer a social movement. They also speculated about the causes of this change. In the Spring 2011 issue, Tom Nesbit responded that although the political influence of the field has declined, it is still a movement. He also argued that the purported causes were not significant or not relevant. This response to Nesbit recognizes and accepts the strengths of the field but argues that those strengths do not make it a social movement. It also argues that Nesbit has misconstrued the arguments intended to show that the distinctively Canadian aspects of the movement worked against it in its later years, and that a fear of missionary-like activities worked against asense of cohesion within the social movement.


Charles Darwin's masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species", shook society to its core on publication in 1859. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke but he would surely have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity. In "The Greatest Show on Earth" Richard Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of 'Intelligent Design' and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. Like a detective arriving on the scene of a crime, he sifts through fascinating layers of scientific facts and disciplines to build a cast-iron case: from the living examples of natural selection in birds and insects; the 'time clocks' of trees and radioactive dating that calibrate a timescale for evolution; the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors; to confirmation from molecular biology and genetics. All of this, and much more, bears witness to the truth of evolution. "The Greatest Show on Earth" comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is now flourishing as never before, especially in America. In Britain and elsewhere in the world, teachers witness insidious attempts to undermine the status of science in their classrooms. Richard Dawkins provides unequivocal evidence that boldly and comprehensively rebuts such nonsense. At the same time he shares with us his palpable love of the natural world and the essential role that science plays in its interpretation. Written with elegance, wit and passion, it is hard-hitting, absorbing and totally convincing.


We make use of new methodological advances in quantifying oil supply and monetary policy shocks that are exogenous with respect to macroeconomic conditions to examine the response of state economies to these shocks. Our approach is parsimonious and straightforward: once exogenous oil supply shocks and monetary policy shocks have been identified, the dynamic response of state economies to exogenous shocks can be analyzed directly using ordinary least squares (OLS) and other conventional methods of inference. The fact that no identifying assumptions are required makes our findings invariant to different identification schemes. Results indicate that an exogenous monetary policy shock typically causes a decrease in real personal income. The paper also documents a fair degree of similarity in the response of real personal income to exogenous oil supply across many states. Like the aggregate response, following an exogenous oil supply shock, real personal income decreases in many states.


This Article argues that inter-agency coordination is one of the great challenges of modern governance. It explains why lawmakers frequently assign overlapping and fragmented delegations that require agencies to "share regulatory space," why these delegations are so pervasive and stubborn, and why consolidating or eliminating agency functions will not solve the problems they create. The Article describes a variety of tools that Congress, the President and the agencies can use to manage coordination challenges effectively, including agency interaction requirements, formal inter-agency agreements, and joint policymaking. The Article assesses the relative costs and benefits of these coordination tools, using the normative criteria of efficiency, effectiveness and accountability, and concludes that the benefits of coordination will frequently justify its costs. To varying extents, these instruments can reduce regulatory costs for both government and the private sector, improve expertise, and ameliorate the risk of bureaucratic drift without compromising transparency. Coordination can also help to preserve the functional aspects of shared or overlapping authority, which include promoting inter-agency competition and accountability, while minimizing its dysfunctions in terms of discordant policy. While burdensome, shared regulatory space should also provide an important opportunity for the President to extend his reach. The Article argues that the President is uniquely positioned and motivated to manage the problems of shared regulatory space, and that coordination tools afford him the chance to put his stamp on policy. The Article recommends a comprehensive executive branch effort to promote stronger inter-agency coordination and improve coordination instruments. Of course, any presidential exercise of centralized supervision must operate within legal bounds, and often will be politically contentious. On balance, however, presidential leadership will be crucial to managing the serious coordination challenges presented by modern governance, and existing political and legal checks on potential overreach are sufficient to manage any conflicts with Congress. The Article concludes by exploring the implications of enhanced inter-agency coordination for judicial review. Courts might adjust standards of review to promote coordination, but even under existing standards of review policy decisions arrived at through strong inter-agency coordination likely will attract greater deference. The Article shows that greater coordination is relatively unlikely to impact the outcome of the Chevron inquiry for reviewing agency legal interpretations. Yet it also suggests some minor doctrinal adjustments that could lead to greater deference where agencies use certain coordination instruments to adopt shared legal interpretations. The larger conceptual purpose of the Article is to draw attention to the phenomenon of shared regulatory space and highlight the pressing need for inter-agency coordination as a response. It invites scholars and practitioners to focus on inter-agency dynamics, which requires a departure from the single-agency focus that has traditionally been so central to administrative law.


In spite of our substantive knowledge about global un-sustainability, insufficient progress is being made to halt systematic socio-ecological decline. Much information is readily available on downstream impacts, with limited focus on upstream activities driving such effects. This thesis uses backcasting from socioecological principles for sustainability to identify major upstream human activities violating these principles, the underlying drivers reinforcing such activities, alternative practices already in use with potential for significant expansion, and emerging opportunities for action across different sectors of society. Results show emerging patterns of high magnitude violations across all four socio-ecological principles indicating nexus points in energy, transportation and agriculture. These activities are reinforced by our societal structure which is designed to meet human needs through a growth paradigm which in turn does not adequately consider the ongoing health of ecosystems or the sustainable functioning of society itself. Shifting to potential solutions, examples focus on themes such as renewable energy, green chemicals, organic agriculture, and self-organising network structures. Recognising that these actions may not be enough, the thesis explores elements of a global vision which could guide progress. Emerging nexus points for societal change include education, information flows (particularly the media), design (as a leverage point), self-organization, and governance.


The paper begins with an overview of the history of ABS for commercial vehicles followed by a brief description of the technology of the BOSCH ABS at the time it went into mass production in 1981. Subsequently it describes the field experiences with ABS including the experiences of drivers and operators. These experiences are reflected in the equipment which BOSCH offers today. Additional functions such as ASR (traction control) have been integrated. The paper provides an overview of the functions available today and their implementation. The paper concludes with a purpose discussion on potential continued developments and an attempt to describe the systems which will be required by the mid 90s.


Contemporary sport culture is characterized as highly masculinized, where female athletes are continually marginalized in traditional media. Despite evidence suggesting that media representation of athletes has a meaningful impact on social outcomes and participation rates of women and girls, little is known about gendered representations of athletes on social media and in the context of mega-sporting events. This paper examines the gendered representations of athletes on Twitter during the 2018 Commonwealth Games using framing theory. A total of 133,338 tweets were analyzed using sentiment and word-frequency analyses. Results indicate gender differences concerning athlete representation on Twitter, albeit marginal. In particular, the findings reveal that seemingly neutral words (e.g., "dedicated," "talented," and "hard working") could carry gendered connotations. Recommendations are provided to guide stakeholders to advance a more inclusive sport culture through the strategic use of social media during mega-sporting events.


Arterials such as State Route (SR) 99 north and south of Seattle have characteristics that are considered by many cities to be undesirable. In response, several cities are implementing redevelopment plans to increase road safety, create a more aesthetically pleasing local environment, and enhance the economic vitality and attractiveness of the communities. The cities' redevelopment proposals for SR 99 and other state routes include landscaped medians, many with trees placed close to the roadway in either the median or shoulder areas. However, WSDOT's clear zone width criterion may not always be met when trees are placed within curbed medians. To address the desires of cities to implement aesthetic designs, WSDOT chose to adopt an in-service evaluation process that would study collision, environmental, operational, and maintenance experiences in the field. This report summarizes the findings of two of the 13 median treatment projects included in the in-service evaluation of alternative median treatments. It provides before data and condition information on all median sections, but because most of the roadway sections have only recently been improved, it provides after data for only two phases of improvements, those on SR 99 in the City of SeaTac. The conclusions of the before and after analysis on those two sections of roadway indicate that no dramatic changes in roadway safety have occurred as a result of the change from continuous two-way left turn lanes and limited sidewalks to a streetscape that includes full sidewalks and landscaped medians with turn pockets, and where both sidewalks and medians include small trees as part of the landscaping. While no definitive conclusions about the safety impacts of landscaped medians can be drawn at this point in the multi-year in-service evaluation, it can be said that there is no indication that the roadways are less safe than before the landscaping was planted. Therefore, it is recommended that the current in-service evaluation be continued as planned.


A variety of techniques have been developed to manage incidents efficiently. However, very little guidance exists for agencies wishing to initiate such efforts. This document serves to provide this guidance by discussing the process of developing and implementing an incident management system. Generally, the process consists of seven steps: defining the problem, setting goals and objectives, developing alternatives, evaluating and selecting from those alternatives, implementing, re-evaluating after a specified time, and refining the system. The alternatives which were developed in this document fall under five basic categories depending on how they benefit incident management efforts. These categories include incident detection, response, site management, clearance, and motorist information. Specific information, including technique description, relative costs and benefits, operational requirements, and funding variations, is given for each incident management technique included in these categories. More generally, concerns such as jurisdictional issues, geographical constraints, available resources, operational procedures, training requirements, and administrative coordination are discussed in detail to aid in mitigating difficulties early in the incident management system development process.


We propose a new approach for mobile visualization and interaction of temporal information by integrating support for time with today's most prevalent visualization of spatial information the map. Our approach allows for an easy and precise selection of the time that is of interest and provides immediate feedback to the users when interacting with it. It has been developed in an evolutionary process gaining formative feedback from end users.


For the past several decades, U.S. policymakers and the courts have charged a largely deregulatory course with respect to telecommunications. During the initial stages, these decisionmakers responded to technological improvements by narrowing regulation to cover only those portions of industry that remained natural monopolies and deregulating those portions that became open to competition. Eventually, Congress began regulating individual network components rather than services, mandating that incumbent local telephone companies provide unbundled access to any network element. As these elements became open to competition, the courts prompted the Federal Communications Commission to release almost the entire network from unbundling obligations. The advent of the Obama Administration, the recent financial crisis, and the persistence of regulatory intervention in Europe has prompted a debate over whether the U.S. should begin to reregulate. This article reviews how regulation has forced the consumers and providers to bear the costs associated with rate regulation, prevented them from benefitting from the efficiencies associated with vertical integration, have forced them to bear the implementation costs of unbundling, and adversely affected incentives to invest in new network capacity. More recent arguments in favor of using unbundling as a way to help new entrants climb the "ladder of investment" have proven difficult to administer and empirically unsubstantiated. As a matter of comparative second-best analysis, the decision should be based on the tradeoff between short-run static efficiency losses and long-run dynamic efficiency gains and institutional considerations, such as the greater administrability of structural relief, the benefits of decentralized decisionmaking, the distortions caused by regulatory lag, and biases in governmental decisionmaking processes, which generally favor deregulation. Moreover, the increasing viability of competition heightens the importance of investment incentives and makes the costs of regulatory intervention harder to justify.


Formulaic language is at the heart of corpus linguistic research, and learner corpus research (LCR) is no exception. As multiword units of all kinds (e.g., collocations, phrasal verbs, speech formulae) are notoriously difficult for learners, and corpus linguistic techniques are an extremely powerful way of exploring them, they were an obvious area for investigation by researchers from the very early days of LCR. In the first part of this article, the focus is on the types of learner corpus data investigated and the most popular method used to analyze them. The second section describes the types of word sequences analyzed in learner corpora and the methodologies used to extract them. In the rest of the article, we summarize some of the main findings of LCR studies of the learner phrasicon, distinguishing between co-occurrence and recurrence. Particular emphasis is also placed on the relationship between learners' use of formulaic sequences and transfer from the learner's first language. The article concludes with some proposals for future research in the field.


We propose and analyze a multiscale model for acid-mediated tumor invasion accounting for stochastic effects on the subcellular level. The setting involves a PDE of reaction-diffusion-taxis type describing the evolution of the tumor cell density, the movement being directed towards pH gradients in the local microenvironment, which is coupled to a PDE-SDE system characterizing the dynamics of extracellular and intracellular proton concentrations, respectively. The global well-posedness of the model is shown and numerical simulations are performed in order to illustrate the solution behavior.


This paper traces the history of the ancillary police powers doctrine in Canadian police law/ constitutional law over the past 40 years. It identifies a doctrine creep wherein a heading of police power which had modest origins has expanded massively. The expansion is spatial and conceptual and reached its reductio ad absurdum when the entire central area of Quebec city was zoned into no-go areas by police acting without legislative authority, claiming the right to erect barricades in public streets, to issue passes (or not) as necessarily ancillary to police powers. The paper includes the only English translation of the Tremblay case, in which this power was considered and an analysis of both Tremblay and other authorities on the matter. Other matters considered include the Emergencies Act, Riot Act, the notion of public forum, trespass law, anti-globalization protests and aboriginal land claims as giving colour of right to be present on lands.


Theodore Dreiser was one of the most important American writers from the period of
1900 to the 1930s. Of signal importance to understanding Dreiser's life and works are the years
he lived in Greenwich Village, 1914 to 1919. He left his wife, Sara, and established a bohemian
life of extravagance and sexual adventure, forming simultaneous liaisons with dozens of women,
most of whom seeking to establish their own literary careers. He shamelessly exploited their
desire for mentorship by seducing them even as he employed them to type and edit his
manuscripts. Estelle Bloom Kubitz was one of the most significant of these women and also one
about whom little is known.
That Kubitz was simultaneously in love with Dreiser and repelled by him is evident in
letters to her sister and in an unpublished manuscript, "I and One of the Others," where Dreiser
appears as S.O.B. and Kubitz as Miss DamnPhool. Dreiser himself began an account of his
relationship with Kubitz entitled "Gloom," intending it to
be part of his serialized novel "This Madness" (1929) but left it unfinished. This thesis is a
biographical introduction to "Gloom" and "I and One of the Others." Both texts advance an
understanding of the Dreiser-Kubitz relationship by revealing Dreiser's attraction to Kubitz and
the effects his promiscuity had on her.


We present a study of anonymized data capturing a month of high-level communication activities within the whole of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging system. We examine characteristics and patterns that emerge from the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, rather than the actions and characteristics of individuals. The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date. We report on multiple aspects of the dataset and synthesized graph. We find that the graph is well-connected and robust to node removal. We investigate on a planetary-scale the oft-cited report that people are separated by "six degrees of separation" and find that the average path length among Messenger users is 6.6. We also find that people tend to communicate more with each other when they have similar age, language, and location, and that cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.


Description The algorithm builds the histogram of the values of the degree of all nodes, which will be delivered in the two output files. Pros & Cons The network to analyze must be undirected, otherwise there are no special constraints. Applications Basic analysis tool, not particular for special disciplines or problems. Implementation Details The algorithm requires two inputs, the file where the edges of the network are listed and the number of points one wishes to have in the binned distribution described below. A first read-in of the inputfile will set the values of the number of nodes and edges of the network. In the second read-in the degrees of all nodes will be calculated. Then the distribution is calculated. The program generates two output files, corresponding to two different ways of partitioning the interval spanned by the values of degree. In the first output, the occurrence of any degree value between the minimum and the maximum is estimated and divided by the number of nodes of the network, so to obtain the probability: the output displays all degree values in the interval with their probabilities. The second output gives the distribution, i.e. the interval spanned by the values of degree is divided into bins whose size grows while going to binned higher values of the variable. The size of each bin is obtained by multiplying by a fixed number the size of the previous bin. The program calculates the fraction of nodes whose degree falls within each bin. Because of the different sizes of the bins, these fractions must be divided by the respective bin size, to have meaningful averages. This technique is particularly suitable to study skewed distributions: the fact that the size of the bins grows large for large degree values compensates for the fact that not many nodes have high degree values, so it suppresses the fluctuations that one would observe by using bins of equal size. On a double logarithmic scale, which is very useful to determine the possible power law behavior of the distribution, the points of the latter will appear equally spaced on the x-axis. The program runs in a time O(m), m being the number of edges of the network. Usage Hints A simple application of this algorithm could be to calculate the degree distribution of networks created by the modeling algorithms of the NWB. For instance, the network file can be created through the Barabasi-Albert model. Links Source Code Acknowledgements The algorithm was implemented and documented by S. Fortunato, integrated by S. Fortunato and W. Huang. References Albert, R., and Barabasi, A.-L. (2002) . Review of Modern Physics 74:47-97. Statistical mechanics of complex networks Newman, M.E.J. (2003) SIAM Review 45:167-256. The structure and function of complex networks. Pastor-Satorras, R., Vespignani, A. (2004) Evolution and Structure of the Internet. Cambridge University Press. Boccaletti, S., Latora, V., Moreno, Y.,Chavez, M., Hwang, D.-U. (2006) . Physics Reports 424: 175-308. Complex networks: Structure and dynamics See Also


Recently, studies of B2C e-commerce have used intention theory to understand the role of trust of Internet transactions but most have investigated only a component of e-commerce (e.g., initial adoption or continuance) and neglected the role of good relations with the consumer in ensuring a successful sustained relationship. Therefore, a model that went beyond intention and included key relational concepts (satisfaction, value, loyalty, etc.) was developed. Trust and its components are a major part of this model, which was based on strong theoretical foundations. Fifteen hypotheses were formulated. Data on the constructs were collected from 420 respondents and analyzed using elliptical re-weighted least squares as the estimation method to test model validity and the hypotheses. An additional relationship between satisfaction and customer loyalty was investigated. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.


Nytra, David. The Secret of the Stone Frog . Somerville: TOON Books, 2012. Print. The Secret of the Stone Frog is the first graphic novel for children from newcomer David Nytra. This book seems to be steeped in various traditions from children's literature, making it at once new, yet familiar. Anthropomorphic animals, delightful and peculiar worlds, and adventure in a dream are just a few of the traditions that Nytra draws from. Siblings Leah and Alan wake up one morning and are surprised to find themselves in the middle of an enchanted forest. As they are wondering how to get home, a stone frog speaks up and offers to be their guide. On their journey home, the brother and sister travel through a strange and spectacular world, not unlike Alice in Wonderland , where they encounter fantastic creatures at every turn. First they come across a garden with giant bees, then an orchard with enormous cherries where they meet some lions that play croquet and keep giant rabbits as pets. The lions, who are dressed as dandies, are both friendly and familiar; you feel like you know them from somewhere but you're not quite sure where, and you wish you could spend some more time with them. Later in their travels, Leah and Alan encounter walking deep-sea creatures dressed in Victorian hats and suits, oddly proportioned humans, and buildings that seem to be fluid and alive. Upon returning home, Leah announces that their parents have decided she is old enough to have her own room, leaving the reader wondering if this was a final journey into a fantasy world, or a first journey that was meant to prepare Alan to go back on his own. Not surprisingly, readers are drawn into the fantasy world right from the very first panel. Nytra's black and white pen and ink drawings are stunning. Finely rendered, busy backgrounds contrast with the simple shapes and faces of the children and the frogs. Further contrast is noticeable between things that are depicted realistically and those that are more cartoonish. Nytra masterfully uses black and white to enhance the feeling of the story; some panels are light and whimsical while others are dark and frightening. Simple dialogue makes this book accessible for young readers in grades two and three, although older children that are fond of fantasy are also likely to enjoy this charming book. Some illustrations may frighten young children. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Metthea Maddern Matthea is a Masters student in the Teacher-Librarianship through Distance Learning Program at the University of Alberta.


Does blogging have anything to do with legal scholarship? Could blogging transform the legal academy? This paper suggests that these are the wrong questions. Blogs have plenty to do with legal scholarship - that's obvious. But what blogs have to do with legal scholarship isn't driven by anything special about blogs qua weblogs, qua collections of web pages that share the form of a journal or log. The relationship between blogging and the future of legal scholarship is a product of other forces - the emergence of the short form, the obsolesce of exclusive rights, and the trend towards the disintermediation of legal scholarship. Those forces and their relationship to blogging will be the primary focus of this paper. The transition from the "long form" to the "short form" involves movement from very long law review articles and multivolume treatises to new forms of legal scholarship, including the blog post, the idea piece, and the use of collaborative online authoring environments such as wikis. The transition from exclusive rights to open source requires publication in formats that provide full text searchability and the use of copyright to insure that scholarship can be freely downloaded and duplicated. The trend toward disintermediation reflects the diminished role of traditional intermediaries such as student and peer editorial boards and the growing role of search engines such as Google. These trends are the result of technology change and the fundamental forces that drive legal scholarship. Each of the three trends, the short form, open access, and disintermediation reduces search costs and access costs to legal scholarship. Reducing costs has other important implications, including the facilitation of the globalization of legal scholarship and the reduction of lag times between the production and full-scale dissemination of new scholarship. Each of these important trends is facilitated by blogs and blogging, but the blog or weblog is only one form that these trends can take. Blogs express and facilitate the fundamental forces that are already transforming legal scholarship in fundamental ways.


The goal of this work is the development and investigation of an interdisciplinary and in itself closed hydrodynamic approach to the simulation of dilute and dense granular flow. The definition of "granular flow" is a nontrivial task in itself. We say that it is either the flow of grains in a vacuum or in a fluid. A grain is an observable piece of a certain material, for example stone when we mean the flow of sand. Choosing a hydrodynamic view on granular flow, we treat the granular material as a fluid. A hydrodynamic model is developed, that describes the process of flowing granular material. This is done through a system of partial differential equations and algebraic relations. This system is derived by the kinetic theory of granular gases which is characterized by inelastic collisions extended with approaches from soil mechanics. Solutions to the system have to be obtained to understand the process. The equations are so difficult to solve that an analytical solution is out of reach. So approximate solutions must be obtained. Hence the next step is the choice or development of a numerical algorithm to obtain approximate solutions of the model. Common to every problem in numerical simulation, these two steps do not lead to a result without implementation of the algorithm. Hence the author attempts to present this work in the following frame, to participate in and contribute to the three areas Physics, Mathematics and Software implementation and approach the simulation of granular flow in a combined and interdisciplinary way. This work is structured as follows. A continuum model for granular flow which covers the regime of fast dilute flow as well as slow dense flow up to vanishing velocity is presented in the first chapter. This model is strongly nonlinear in the dependence of viscosity and other coefficients on the hydrodynamic variables and it is singular because some coefficients diverge towards the maximum packing fraction of grains. Hence the second difficulty, the challenging task of numerically obtaining approximate solutions for this model is faced in the second chapter. In the third chapter we aim at the validation of both the model and the numerical algorithm through numerical experiments and investigations and show their application to industrial problems. There we focus intensively on the shear flow experiment from the experimental and analytical work of Bocquet et al. which serves well to demonstrate the algorithm, all boundary conditions involved and provides a setting for analytical studies to compare our results. The fourth chapter rounds up the work with the implementation of both the model and the numerical algorithm in a software framework for the solution of complex rheology problems developed as part of this thesis.


In this paper, we investigate the relationship between a graduate's field of study and probability of finding a stable job in a labor market which is flexible as regards atypical jobs but highly protective regarding stable jobs. We apply a discrete-time hazard model, taking into account unobservable heterogeneity, to analyze the transition to a stable job of students who graduated from the University of Calabria in 2004, at one, three and five years distance. Main findings indicate that, after controlling for a wide range of characteristics, Engineering graduates have a higher probability of finding a stable job than graduates in Economics and Business followed by those with a degree in Sciences, Political Science, and Humanities. These results confirm that, even in a deprived area, investing in occupational specific human capital can be seen as an "insurance" against the risk of unemployment or an unstable job.


Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines has begun its destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.


From Introduction] This country study for Australia is part of the ILO project 'Employment of People with Disabilities – the Impact of Legislation' which aims to enhance the capacity of national governments in selected countries of Asia and East Africa to implement effective legislation concerning the employment of people with disabilities. Starting with a systematic examination of laws in place to promote employment and training opportunities for people with disabilities in selected countries of Asia and the Pacific (Australia, Cambodia, China, Fiji, Japan, India, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Thailand), the project sets out to examine the operation of such legislation, identify the implementation mechanisms in place and suggest improvements Technical assistance is provided to selected national governments in implementing necessary improvements.


A comprehensive, self-contained treatment presenting general results of the theory. Establishes a geometric intuition and a working facility with specific geometric practices. Emphasizes applications through the study of interesting examples and the development of computational tools. Coverage ranges from analytic to geometric. Treats basic techniques and results of complex manifold theory, focusing on results applicable to projective varieties, and includes discussion of the theory of Riemann surfaces and algebraic curves, algebraic surfaces and the quadric line complex as well as special topics in complex manifolds.


Practical Advice for Gamers by Jane McGonigal Reality is Broken explains the science behind why games are good for us--why they make us happier, more creative, more resilient, and better able to lead others in world-changing efforts. But some games are better for us than others, and there is too much of a good thing. Here are a few secrets that arent in the book to help you (or the gamer in your life) get the most positive impact from playing games. This practical advice--5 key quidelines, plus 2 quick rules--is scientifically backed, and it can be summed up in a single sentence: Play games you enjoy no more than 21 hours a week; face-to-face with friends and family as often as you can; and in co-operative or creator modes whenever possible. 1. Dont play more than 21 hours a week. Studies show that games benefit us mentally and emotionally when we play up to 3 hours a day, or 21 hours a week. (In extremely stressful circumstances--such as serving in the military during war-time--research shows that gamers can benefit from as many as 28 hours a week.) But for virtually everyone else, whenever you play more than 21 hours a week, the benefits of gaming start to decline sharply. By the time youre spending 40 hours or more a week playing games, the psychological benefits of playing games have disappeared entirely--and are replaced with negative impacts on your physical health, relationships, and real-life goals. So always strive to keep your gaming in the sweet spot: 721 hours a week. 2. Playing with real-life friends and family is better than playing alone all the time, or with strangers. Gaming strengthens your social bonds and builds trust, two key factors in any positive relationship. And the more positive relationships you have in real life, the happier, healthier and more successful you are. You can get mental and emotional benefits from single-player games, or by playing with strangers online--but to really unlock the power of games, its important to play them with people you really know and like as often as possible. A handy rule-of-thumb: try to make half of your gaming social. If you play 10 hours a week, try to play face-to-face with real-life friends or family for at least 5 of those hours. (And if youre not a gamer yourself--but you have a family member who plays games all the time, it would do you both good to play together--even if you think you dont like games!) 3. Playing face-to-face with friends and family beats playing with them online. If youre in the same physical space, youll supercharge both the positive emotional impacts and the social bonding. Many of the benefits of games are derived from the way they make us feel--and all positive emotions are heightened by face-to-face interaction. Plus, research shows that social ties are strengthened much more when we play games in the same room than when we play games together online. Multi-player games are great for this. But single-player works too! You can get all the same benefits by taking turns at a single-player game, helping and cheering each other on. 4. Cooperative gameplay, overall, has more benefits than competitive gameplay. Studies show that cooperative gameplay lifts our mood longer, and strengthens our friendships more, than competing against each other. Cooperative gameplay also makes us more likely to help someone in real life, and better collaborators at work--boosting our real-world likeability and chances for success. Competition has its place, too, of course--we learn to trust others more when we compete against them. But if we spend all our time competing with others, we miss out on the special benefits of co-op play. So when youre gaming with others, be sure to check to see if there are co-op missions or a co-op mode available. An hour of co-op a week goes a long way. (Find great co-op games for every platform, and a family-friendly list too, at Co-Optimus, the best online resource for co-op gaming.) 5. Creative games have special positive impacts. Many games encourage or even require players to design and create as part of the gameplay process--for example: Spore, Little Big Planet, and Minecraft; the Halo level designer and the Guitar Hero song creator. These games have been shown to build up players sense of creative agency--and they make us more likely to create something outside of the game. If you want to really build up your own creative powers, creative games are a great place to start. Of course, you can always take the next creative step--and start making your own games. If youve never made a game, its easier than you think--and there are some great books to help you get started. 2 Other Important Rules: * You can get all of the benefits of a good game without realistic violence--you (or your kids) dont have to play games with guns or gore. If you feel strongly about violence, look to games in other genres--theres no shortage of amazing sports, music, racing, puzzle, role-playing, casual, strategy and adventure games. *Any game that makes you feel bad is no longer a good game for you to play. This should be obvious, but sometimes we get so caught up in our games that we forget theyre supposed to be fun. If you find yourself feeling really upset when you lose a game, or if youre fighting with friends or strangers when you play--youre too invested. Switch to a different game for a while, a game that has lower stakes for you personally. Or, especially if you play with strangers online, you might find yourself surrounded by other players who say things that make you uncomfortable--or who just generally act like jerks. Their behavior will actually make it harder for you to get the positive benefits of games--so dont waste your time playing with a community that gets you down. Meanwhile, if you start to wonder if youre spending too much time on a particular game maybe youre starting to feel just a tiny bit addicted--keep track of your gaming hours for one week. Make sure they add up to less than 21 hours! And you may want to limit yourself to even fewer for a little while if youre feeling too much gamer regret.


This Article examines whether a university can count opportunities in competitive cheer to demonstrate compliance with Title IX. A federal court in Connecticut recently considered this question for the first time. Although it held that the sport as it currently exists is not sufficiently similar to other varsity sports to qualify for Title IX compliance, the decision has mobilized two separate governing bodies to propose more organized and competitive versions of competitive cheer as possible NCAA emerging sports. This Article argues that these proposals would satisfy regulators and the courts. It then discusses how competitive cheer has potential to improve Title IX compliance, in a way that would benefit women's sports generally, by expanding the definition of sport to include those that are women-driven and by reclaiming as sport an activity - cheer - that was initially deployed to separate women from athleticism. In light of these reasons, as well as the burgeoning interest in competitive cheer at the college and high school levels, the Article concludes that the NCAA should promote the growth of competitive cheer by endorsing it as an emerging sport for women.


The results of fMRI brain scanning require extensive analysis in the laboratory. In Handling Digital Brains, Morana Alac shows that fMRI researchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures, and talk as they work with computers. Ala argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning we must consider their dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands. These multimodal actions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals. A semiotician trained in cognitive science, Ala grounds her discussion in concepts from Peirce's semiotics and her methodology in ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis. Basing her observations on videotaped records of activity in three fMRI research labs, Alac describes scientists' manual engagement with digital visuals of the human brain. Doing so, she turns her attention to the issue of practical thinking. Ala argues that although fMRI technology directs scientists to consider human thinking in terms of an individual brain, scientific practices in the fMRI lab demonstrate thinking that engages the whole lived body and the world in which the body is situated. The turn toward the digital does not bring with it abstraction but a manual and embodied engagement. The practical and multimodal engagement with digital brains in the laboratory challenges certain assumptions behind fMRI technology; it suggests our hands are essential to learning. and the making of meaning.


Most courts and scholarship assume that privacy and free speech are always in conflict, even though each of these traditions can be traced back to writings by Louis D. Brandeis – his 1890 Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy" and his 1927 concurrence in Whitney v. California. How can modern notions of privacy and speech be so fundamentally opposed if Brandeis played a major role in crafting both? And how, if at all, did Brandeis recognize or address these tensions? These questions have been neglected by scholars of First Amendment law, privacy, and Brandeis. In this paper, I argue that the puzzle of Brandeis's views on privacy and speech can be resolved in a surprising and useful way. My basic claim is that Brandeis came to largely abandon the tort theory of privacy he expounded in "The Right to Privacy." As a young lawyer, Brandeis conceived of privacy as a tort action protecting emotional injury from newspaper stories that revealed private facts. But Brandeis's ideas evolved over his life. He soon came to believe strongly in a contrary idea he called "the duty of publicity." This is the notion that disclosure of most kinds of fraud and wrongdoing are in the public interest; that as he famously put it, "sunlight is the best disinfectant." When Brandeis came to think through First Amendment issues after the First World War, tort privacy could no longer consistently fit into his influential theories of civil liberty. But while Brandeis changed his mind about tort privacy, what he replaced it with is even more interesting. In his Olmstead dissent and free speech writings, Brandeis identified a second conception of privacy that I call "intellectual privacy." Brandeis reminds us that the generation of new ideas requires a certain measure of privacy to succeed, and that in this way intellectual privacy and free speech are mutually supportive. I conclude by suggesting some contemporary implications of Brandeis's rejection of tort privacy and his linkage of intellectual privacy with free speech.


In the context of AdS/CFT correspondence the two Wilson loop correlator is examined at both zero and finite temperatures. On the basis of an entirely analytical approach we have found for Nambu-Goto strings the functional relation dSc(Reg)/dL = 2πk between Euclidean action Sc and loop separation L with integration constant k, which corresponds to the analogous formula for point-particles. The physical implications of this relation are explored in particular for the Gross-Ooguri phase transition at finite temperature.


Few real software systems are built completely from scratch nowadays. Instead, systems are built iteratively and incrementally, while integrating and interacting with components from many other systems. These systems also last longer than their developers might imagine —- they are, in effect, eternal. Nevertheless the platforms, tools and environments we use to develop software are still largely based on an outmoded model that presupposes that software systems are closed and will not significantly evolve after deployment. We claim that in order to enable effective and graceful evolution of eternal systems, we must make them self-aware. A self-aware eternal system supports evolution by: (i) providing explicit, first-class models of software artifacts, change and history at the level of the platform, (ii) continuously analysing static and dynamic evolution to track emergent properties, and (iii) closing the gap between the domain model and the developers' view of the evolving system. We outline our vision of self-aware eternal systems and identify the research challenges to realizing this vision.


Hardware prototyping is an essential part in the hardware design flow. Furthermore, hardware prototyping usually relies on system-level design and hardware-in-the-loop simulations in order to develop, test and evaluate intellectual property cores. One common task in this process consist on interfacing cores with different port specifications. Data width conversion is used to overcome this issue. This work presents two open source hardware cores compliant with AXI4-Stream bus protocol, where each core performs upsizing/downsizing data width conversion.


Armstrong, Kelley.  The Calling . Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012. Print. Ontario writer, Kelley Armstrong, author of the New York Times and  Globe and Mail bestselling Darkest Powers young adult urban fantasy trilogy, brings us the second offering of her Darkness Rising trilogy.  The first in the trilogy, 2011's The Gathering , was previously reviewed in the inaugural issue of Deakin , Vol. 1 No 1. This book is not recommended as a standalone, as The Calling starts immediately where we left off with The Gathering and the author's recap on events and characters is minimal, which for fans of series is refreshing. Sixteen-year-old Maya Delaney and her friends have been forced to flee from their community of Salmon Creek, a small town on Vancouver Island, during a forest fire that was surely deliberately set.  After their rescue helicopter makes an emergency landing in the remote wilderness, the group is on the run and forced to survive using nothing but their wits and their supernatural abilities that begin to unfold as they find themselves in danger.  Through this we learn more about Maya's friends as well as the circumstances surrounding the death of her best friend, Serena, in a bizarre swimming accident the previous year. Maya also learns a lot about her own powers but perhaps the most mysterious event is the introduction of Calvin Antone, a man who is pursuing Maya, and who admits to being her biological father. Teen readers will certainly delight in the run-and-hide action as well as the intensifying romance, but I couldn't help feeling a little let down by The Calling .  After the adrenaline-fuelled and plot-driven action of The Gathering , the lack of storyline and character development in this book was disappointing. With that said, however, we don't have long to wait to see how things turn out for Maya - the final title in the trilogy, The Rising , is set for release in April 2013. As such, I am giving it three stars out of four on the promise of the final book. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Debbie Feisst Debbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta.  When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.


When Co-Active Coaching was first released in 1998, this pioneering work set the stage for what has become a cultural and business phenomenon and helped launch the profession of coaching. Published in more than ten languages now, this book has been used as the definitive resource in dozens of corporate, professional development and university-based coaching programs as well as by thousands of individuals looking to elevate their communication, relationship and coaching skills. This fully revised third edition of Co-Active Coaching has been updated to reflect the expanded vision of the newly updated Co-Active Model and coaching course curriculum at The Coaches Training Institute, the training organization founded and run by the authors for 20 years. The third edition emphasizes evoking transformational change in the client and extends the use of the Co-Active Model into leadership management and its effectiveness throughout organizations. This edition also contains an on-line Coach's Toolkit (replacing the CD of the second edition), several new coaching demonstrations and more than 35 updated exercises, questionnaires, checklists and reproducible forms.


Using an analysis of the first full year of CALIPSO lidar measurements, this paper derives unprecedented, altitude-resolved seasonal distributions of desert dust transported over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and the surrounding areas. The CALIPSO lidar observations include numerous large dust plumes over the northern slope and eastern part of the TP, with the largest number of dust events occurring in the spring of 2007, and some layers being lofted to altitudes of 11–12 km. Generation of the Tibetan airborne dusts appears to be largely associated with source regions to the north and on the eastern part of the plateau. Examination of the CALIPSO time history reveals an "airborne dust corridor" due to the eastward transport of dusts originating primarily in these source areas. This corridor extends from west to east and shows a seasonality largely modulated by the TP through its dynamical and thermal forcing on the atmospheric flows. On the southern side, desert dust particles originate predominately in Northwest India and Pakistan. The dust transport occurs primarily in dry seasons around the TP western and southern slopes and dust particles become mixed with local polluted aerosols. No significant amount of dust appears to be transported over the Himalayas. Extensive forward trajectory simulations are also conducted to confirm the dust transport pattern from the nearby sources observed by the CALIPSO lidar. Comparisons with the OMI and MODIS measurements show the unique capability of the CALIPSO lidar to provide unambiguous, altitude-resolved dust measurements.


Advances in light sources and time resolved spectroscopy have made it possible to excite specific atomic vibrations in solids and to observe the resulting changes in electronic properties but the mechanism by which phonon excitation causes qualitative changes in electronic properties has remained unclear. Here we show that the dominant symmetry-allowed coupling between electron density and dipole active modes implies an electron density-dependent squeezing of the phonon state which provides an attractive contribution to the electron-electron interaction, independent of the sign of the bare electron-phonon coupling and with a magnitude proportional to the degree of laser-induced phonon excitation. Reasonable excitation amplitudes lead to non-negligible attractive interactions that may cause significant transient changes in electronic properties including superconductivity. The mechanism is generically applicable to a wide range of systems, offering a promising route to manipulating and controlling electronic phase behavior in novel materials.


Forty years after its first publication this much-loved Child's Play classic is as popular as ever. Ingenious die-cut holes bring this iconic nursery rhyme to life, and Pam Adams' fabulous illustrations lend humour and vibrancy to the proceedings. Bouncy images, innovative die cutting and favourite rhymes make Books with Holes a must for every child. Available in three formats, suitable for babies, toddlers, pre-schoolers and the nursery or classroom.


All rights reserved. This publication is intended for use solely by faculty, students, and staff of Nova Southeastern University. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, now known or later developed, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author or the publisher.


Change in the First Amendment landscape tends towards the incremental, but the Supreme Court's opinion two terms ago in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC — holding that religious institutions enjoy a range of First Amendment protections that do not extend to other individuals or organizations — is better understood as a jurisprudential earthquake. The suddenness and scale of the shift helps to explain the turmoil that has ensued in the lower courts and law journals. And yet, it could be that the biggest aftershock has yet to be felt. The Court left open the most important functional question that exists in scenarios where there will be constitutional winners and losers: what, or who, is a 'religious institution' for First Amendment purposes?The lower federal courts have begun to grapple with the question, but no satisfactory approach exists. Drawing on the historical sources and values animating Hosanna-Tabor and its Religion Clause predecessors, this Article provides a workable framework for distinguishing between those institutions that fall within the scope of the religious institutions category and those that do not. The framework proposed here proceeds from a purposive analysis that turns on which institutions will most often and most effectively use the newly identified and exclusive protections to benefit society as a whole. To this end, the framework favors institutions that have as their purpose (1) protection of individual conscience; (2) protection of group rights; and (3) provision of desirable societal structures.


We compared output from 3 dynamic process-based models (DMs: ECOSSE, MILLEN- NIA and the Durham Carbon Model) and 9 bioclimatic envelope models (BCEMs; including BBOG ensemble and PEATSTASH) ranging from simple threshold to semi-process-based models. Model simulations were run at 4 British peatland sites using historical climate data and climate projections under a medium (A1B) emissions scenario from the 11-RCM (regional climate model) ensemble under- pinning UKCP09. The models showed that blanket peatlands are vulnerable to projected climate change; however, predictions varied between models as well as between sites. All BCEMs predicted a shift from presence to absence of a climate associated with blanket peat, where the sites with the lowest total annual precipitation were closest to the presence/absence threshold. DMs showed a more variable response. ECOSSE predicted a decline in net C sink and shift to net C source by the end of this century. The Durham Carbon Model predicted a smaller decline in the net C sink strength, but no shift to net C source. MILLENNIA predicted a slight overall increase in the net C sink. In contrast to the BCEM projections, the DMs predicted that the sites with coolest temperatures and greatest total annual precipitation showed the largest change in carbon sinks. In this model inter-comparison, the greatest variation in model output in response to climate change projections was not between the BCEMs and DMs but between the DMs themselves, because of different approaches to modelling soil organic matter pools and decomposition amongst other processes. The difference in the sign of the response has major implications for future climate feedbacks, climate policy and peatland manage- ment. Enhanced data collection, in particular monitoring peatland response to current change, would significantly improve model development and projections of future change.


Igbo African tradition, characterised mainly by rituals and myths, has often been regarded as too codified and therefore a dead end of sorts, as M.J.C. Echeruo observes in his article "The dramatic limits of Igbo ritual" (1981). But Esiaba Irobi, in his plays of revolutionary aesthetics, decodes this and has practically given it limbs, sinews and all, breathing into it a Marxist revolutionary life. The result of this miscegenation of forms is a  dramaturgy that is rich both in the African tradition and culture of songs, dirges, anecdotes, and the age grade system-propelled communal festivals of ritual sacrifice, on one hand, and the Marxist Brechtian revolutionary aesthetics, characterised by a dramatisation of what Frantz Fanon (1963: 255) sees as "the blood-thirsty tension fed by classes", dialectics, and the alienation techniques on the other. In Esiaba Irobi's Hangmen Also Die (1989) and Nwokedi (1991), we see this "blood thirsty tension" fully and boisterously, if psychoanalytically, dramatised. For what he presents in these plays is a psycho-dramatic portraiture of characters, especially disenchanted characters, bitterly going against their oppressors. These model "victims of the system", as Francois Maspero (1980: viii) would say, have been driven to the fringes of reason by vicious and blindfolding oppression and they fight back sporadically and blindly at whoever they stumble on especially in Hangmen. But in Nwokedi they have matured into a visionary vanguard force, having realized the collective nature of the struggle to dislodge their oppressors. In the end, Irobi has literarily responded to Fanon's (1963: 255) clarion call that "we must invent", that "we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man", while recognizing (and creatively appropriating) "the sometimes prodigious thesis which Europe has put forward." Key words: Esiaba Irobi; Nigerian theatre; revolutionary aesthetics; revolutionary violence.


For computational reasons, the spline interpolation of the Earth's gravitational potential is usually done in a spherical framework. In this work, however, we investigate a spline method with respect to the real Earth. We are concerned with developing the real Earth oriented strategies and methods for the Earth's gravitational potential determination. For this purpose we introduce the reproducing kernel Hilbert space of Newton potentials on and outside given regular surface with reproducing kernel defined as a Newton integral over it's interior. We first give an overview of thus far achieved results considering approximations on regular surfaces using surface potentials (Chapter 3). The main results are contained in the fourth chapter where we give a closer look to the Earth's gravitational potential, the Newton potentials and their characterization in the interior and the exterior space of the Earth. We also present the L2-decomposition for regions in R3 in terms of distributions, as a main strategy to impose the Hilbert space structure on the space of potentials on and outside a given regular surface. The properties of the Newton potential operator are investigated in relation to the closed subspace of harmonic density functions. After these preparations, in the fifth chapter we are able to construct the reproducing kernel Hilbert space of Newton potentials on and outside a regular surface. The spline formulation for the solution to interpolation problems, corresponding to a set of bounded linear functionals is given, and corresponding convergence theorems are proven. The spline formulation reflects the specifics of the Earth's surface, due to the representation of the reproducing kernel (of the solution space) as a Newton integral over the inner space of the Earth. Moreover, the approximating potential functions have the same domain of harmonicity as the actual Earth's gravitational potential, i.e., they are harmonic outside and continuous on the Earth's surface. This is a step forward in comparison to the spherical harmonic spline formulation involving functions harmonic down to the Runge sphere. The sixth chapter deals with the representation of the used kernel in the spherical case. It turns out that in the case of the spherical Earth, this kernel can be considered a kind of generalization to spherically oriented kernels, such as Abel-Poisson or the singularity kernel. We also investigate the existence of the closed expression of the kernel. However, at this point it remains to be unknown to us. So, in Chapter 7, we are led to consider certain discretization methods for integrals over regions in R3, in connection to theory of the multidimensional Euler summation formula for the Laplace operator. We discretize the Newton integral over the real Earth (representing the spline function) and give a priori estimates for approximate integration when using this discretization method. The last chapter summarizes our results and gives some directions for the future research.