n my hand I hold a metal box, festooned with labels, serial numbers, bar codes and tamper-proof seals. Inside the box is everything I have written over the past 10 years—articles, a book, memos, notes, programs, letters, e-mail, shopping lists. And there's still plenty of room left for everything I might hope to write in the next 10 years. For an author, it's a little humbling to see so much of a life's work encompassed in a tin box just big enough for a couple dozen pencils. The metal box, of course, is a disk drive. And it's not even the latest model. This one is a decade old and has a capacity of 120 megabytes, roughly equivalent to 120 million characters of unformatted text. The new disk that will replace it looks much the same—just a little slimmer and sleeker—but it holds a thousand times as much: 120 gigabytes, or 1.2 × 10 11 characters of text. That's room enough not only for everything I've ever written but also for everything I've ever read. Here in the palm of one hand is space for a whole intellectual universe—all the words that enter a human mind in a lifetime of reading. Disk drives have never been the most glamorous components of computer systems. The spotlight shines instead on silicon integrated circuits , with their extraordinary record of sustained exponential growth, doubling the number of devices on a chip every 18 months. But disks have put on a growth spurt of their own, first matching the pace of semiconductor development and then surpassing it; over the past five years, disk capacity has been doubling every year. Even technological optimists have been tak-en by surprise. Mechanical contraptions that whir and click, and that have to be assembled piece by piece, are not supposed to overtake the silent, no-moving-parts integrated circuit. Apart from cheering at the march of progress, there's another reason for taking a closer look at the evolution of the disk drive. Storage capacity is surely going to continue increasing, at least for another decade. Those little gray boxes will hold not just gigabytes but terabytes and someday maybe petabytes. (The very word sounds like a Marx Brothers joke!) We will have at our fingertips an information storehouse the size of a university library. But what will we keep in those vast, bit-strewn corridors, and how will we ever find anything …


This introduction posits that austerity is an instantiation of structural
adjustment programs (SAPs) and thus must be revisited in two ways, involving
its historical and geographical rendering. First, anthropological accounts should
think of austerity in the long term, providing encompassing genealogies of the
concept rather than seeing it as breach to historical continuity. Second, the discipline
should employ the comparative approach to bring together analyses of SAPs
in the Global South and austerity measures in the Global North, providing a more
comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon. We are interested in what austerity
does to people's temporal consciousness, and what such people do toward a policy
process that impacts their lives. We find, in this comparative pursuit, instead of
Foucauldian internalization, dissent and dissatisfaction.


This paper analyzes how Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD hereinafter) affects share repurchases in an emerging market where information asymmetry problem is severe. The results indicate that the frequency of bad news disclosures and the size of negative excess return in the KOSDAQ market increase in a statistically significant manner prior to share repurchase, while the frequency of good news disclosures increases after share repurchase. This is consistent with the hypothesis that firms show opportunistic behavior of buying their own stocks at a low price by taking advantage of fair disclosures. In order to analyze the cause of the opportunistic behavior, we examine variables, such as the number of stock options held by the management and the ratio of shareholding by CEO and related parties. We find empirical evidence that the stock compensation ratio for the management shows a positive relationship with good news disclosures following the completion of share repurchase. Our findings suggest that there exists information distortion in Reg FD in order to protect the management's ownership interest in Korean stock market.


The greatest number of patients in our department are those referred from the Department of Neurology. These patients usually present symptoms or conditions such as peripheral facial paralysis, primary headache, or cerebrovascular disorders; acupuncture and moxibustion treatment have resulted in an overall favorable effect. Regarding the effect of acupuncture and moxibustion treatment on the prevention of migraine attacks, a two-month course of acupuncture has been shown to decrease the number of days with a slight or moderate headache. Furthermore, we have seen a relation between the alleviation of headache and that of muscular tenderness in the neck-shoulder region and masticatory muscles. The results of Arterial Spin-Labeling MRI, by which we determine changes in cerebral blood flow before and after acupuncture stimulation in patients with migraine, have revealed that acupuncture stimulation induces an increase of blood flow in the thalamus and hypothalamus, opercular part, cingulate gyrus, and islet. This differs from the response obtained in healthy individuals. It has been shown that acupuncture and moxibustion for tension headache is highly effective and the action mechanism of acupuncture and moxibustion is associated with relaxation of masticatory muscles hypertonicity in the neck-shoulder region and normalization of circulation dynamics, contributing thereby to the alleviation of headache. Moreover, the automatic nervous system has been found to be related to such analgesic mechanism. Based on our experience, we consider that traditional medicine based on acupuncture and moxibustion is highly effective in patients with neurological symptoms.


A comparative and historical analysis of the so-called ultima ratio principle reveals that, despite its Latinate veneer, it is neither ancient nor universal, but a recent addition to the German criminal law canon. Upon further inquiry, ultima ratio also turns out to be ill-defined, undermotivated, and toothless, a fundamental legal principle and distinctive feature of criminal law honored in its ubiquitous breach. In the end, the iron legal principle of ultima ratio may appear more like the flexible police maxim of caveat dominus. Its frequent invocation suggests the need to reconceive legal science as a critical analysis of law in general, and of law's supposed principles in particular.


The development of 3G (the 3rd generation telecommunication) value-added services brings higher requirements of Quality of Service (QoS). Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) is one of three 3G standards, and enhancement of QoS for WCDMA Core Network (CN) becomes more and more important for users and carriers. The dissertation focuses on enhancement of QoS for WCDMA CN. The purpose is to realize the DiffServ (Differentiated Services) model of QoS for WCDMA CN. Based on the parallelism characteristic of Network Processors (NPs), the NP programming model is classified as Pool of Threads (POTs) and Hyper Task Chaining (HTC). In this study, an integrated programming model that combines both of the two models was designed. This model has highly efficient and flexible features, and also solves the problems of sharing conflicts and packet ordering. We used this model as the programming model to realize DiffServ QoS for WCDMA CN.
The realization mechanism of the DiffServ model mainly consists of buffer management, packet scheduling and packet classification algorithms based on NPs. First, we proposed an adaptive buffer management algorithm called Packet Adaptive Fair Dropping (PAFD), which takes into consideration of both fairness and throughput, and has smooth service curves. Then, an improved packet scheduling algorithm called Priority-based Weighted Fair Queuing (PWFQ) was introduced to ensure the fairness of packet scheduling and reduce queue time of data packets. At the same time, the delay and jitter are also maintained in a small range. Thirdly, a multi-dimensional packet classification algorithm called Classification Based on Network Processors (CBNPs) was designed. It effectively reduces the memory access and storage space, and provides less time and space complexity.
Lastly, an integrated hardware and software system of the DiffServ model of QoS for WCDMA CN was proposed. It was implemented on the NP IXP2400. According to the corresponding experiment results, the proposed system significantly enhanced QoS for WCDMA CN. It extensively improves consistent response time, display distortion and sound image synchronization, and thus increases network efficiency and saves network resource.


Full-color guide to everything you need to get the most out of your Nikon D5000! The Nikon D5000 packs a lot of punch into a camera that beginners will love, and now you can pack an equal amount of punch into the digital photographs you take with your new Nikon. Whether you want to understand the D5000's new exposure settings or learn photography basics such as aperture, shutter speed, and downloading photos, this book delivers. Walks you through the new Nikon D5000's features, including a 12.3 megapixel sensor, 19 auto-exposure modes, and a swivel viewfinder Shows beginners who may be new to DSLR cameras how to take good digital photographs-from using the right settings for things like sunsets, candelight, or portraits-to downloading to your computer and printing Demonstrates beginning to advanced techniques with over 200 full-color photos, giving you plenty of great ideas of what you can accomplish Offers practical tips and ideas from two expert digital photographers and authors Don't be intimidated by your new digital camera! This friendly For Dummies guide will get you up and running in no time.


Law is a cognitive profession and the legendary stressors in legal education and the practice of law can take a tremendous toll on cognitive capacity. Lawyers suffer from depression at triple the rate of non-lawyers. This article provides a groundbreaking synthesis on the neuroscience of achieving optimal cognitive fitness for all law students, law professors, and lawyers. A number of innovative companies have instituted programs designed to enhance the bottom line. Research shows that perks such as onsite gyms, stress management classes, and mindfulness training produce vibrant workplaces and thriving employees. Forward-looking law schools have created wellness programs designed to relieve law student stress and improve well-being. This article explains the neurobiological reasons these programs enhance employee performance and improve student achievement. Law school admissions are down, students are questioning the value of legal education, and the Carnegie Report is pressuring law schools to make legal education more practical. Learning about the neuroscience of cognitive wellness is critical to protecting brain function and enhancing cognitive performance. Legal educators have the power to bring this information to the attention of their law students, and to create a neuroscience-powered achievement culture in law schools. Law students need not wait for lethargic faculty deliberation of the impact a stressful law school learning environment has on their learning. Their professional identity, along with their capacity to build practice skills and a legal knowledge base, are at risk. Law students, law faculty, and lawyers should be educated about mitigating stress-related damage to the hippocampus, the role of sleep in memory formation, and enhancing cognitive function with exercise and contemplative practices.Neural self-hacking is likely to be the newest fitness movement. Law schools and law firms that want to support robust cognitive performance for their constituents will follow Google's lead and create achievement cultures designed to optimize cognitive wellness and limit sources of stress. With fresh insights into the complex world of brain function, this article explains brain structure; describes the parts of the brain used in cognition; and details how stress damages and kills brain cells. Neuroscience-based recommendations uncover the power of self-directed neuroplasticity in every law student, law professor, and lawyer to optimize cognition.


Learning distance metrics is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Previous distance-metric learning research assumes that the training and test data are drawn from the same distribution, which may be violated in practical applications. When the distributions differ, a situation referred to as covariate shift, the metric learned from training data may not work well on the test data. In this case the metric is said to be inconsistent. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel metric learning framework known as consistent distance metric learning (CDML), which solves the problem under covariate shift situations. We theoretically analyze the conditions when the metrics learned under covariate shift are consistent. Based on the analysis, a convex optimization problem is proposed to deal with the CDML problem. An importance sampling method is proposed for metric learning and two importance weighting strategies are proposed and compared in this work. Experiments are carried out on synthetic and real world datasets to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.


This paper forms the introductory chapter of Informal Carers and Private Law (Hart, 2012), setting out the scope of the book and justifying its focus on private law.Every day, large numbers of altruistic individuals, in the absence of any legal duty, provide substantial and essential services for elderly and disabled people. In doing so, many such informal carers suffer financial and other disadvantages. This book considers the scope for a "private law" approach to rewarding, supporting or compensating carers, an increasingly vital topic in the context of an ageing population and the need for savings in public expenditure. Adopting a comparative approach, the book explores the recognition of the informal carer and his or her relationship with the care recipient within diverse fields of private law, from unjust enrichment to succession. Aspects of the analysis include the importance of a promise of a reward from the care recipient and the appropriate measure of any remedy. In considering the potential for expansion of a "private law" approach for carers, the book addresses the fundamental and controversial question of the price of altruism.


The significant amount of research related to corporate social disclosure (CSD) over the last few decades indicates its importance. Prior studies have revealed continuous improvement in the level of CSD by corporations in different sectors. The recent economic and financial crisis has been identified by many economic and financial experts as the worst since the Second World War and is likely to have an impact on level of CSD. This study examines the extent of CSD before and during global financial crisis for 48 selected Australian companies. The results of the study reveal that there is an insignificant upward change in CSD during the financial crisis. In addition, this study examines the association between several firm level factors (profitability, leverage, change in profitability, change in leverage and size) and the extent of CSD and change in CSD. The study finds that the extent of CSD is not significantly associated with leverage and profitability but it is significantly associated with size. Additionally, change in profitability and size do not have any significant influence on change in CSD. However, change in leverage has a significant negative association with change in CSD.


This Article is an account of profound changes in the organization and practice of public interest law that have emerged over the past 25 years against the backdrop of globalization. Its central claim is that as the United States has become more globally interdependent, the institutional context of public interest law has been transformed, elevating transnational mobility as a basic feature of legal practice. The Article specifically examines three vectors of global change that have reshaped the terrain of US public interest law: the increasing magnitude and scope of undocumented immigration; the growth of free trade and its governing institutions; and the heightened political influence of human rights. It suggests that each of these trends has contributed to important institutional revisions within the US public interest system: the rise of immigrant rights as a distinctive category of public interest practice; the emergence of transnational advocacy as a response to the impact of US economic policy abroad; and the movement to promote domestic human rights, both as a way to resist the deregulatory thrust of market integration at home and to defend civil rights and civil liberties in the face of domestic conservatism and the War on Terror. After mapping the institutional scope and density of these changes, the Article appraises their influence on the goals public interest lawyers pursue, the tactics they deploy, and the professional roles they assume in the modern era.


Background Mild therapeutic hypothermia following cardiac arrest is neuroprotective, but its effect on myocardial dysfunction that is a critical issue following resuscitation is not clear. This study sought to examine whether hypothermia and the combination of hypothermia and pharmacological postconditioning are cardioprotective in a model of cardiopulmonary resuscitation following acute myocardial ischemia. Methodology/Principal Findings Thirty pigs (28–34 kg) were subjected to cardiac arrest following left anterior descending coronary artery ischemia. After 7 minutes of ventricular fibrillation and 2 minutes of basic life support, advanced cardiac life support was started according to the current AHA guidelines. After successful return of spontaneous circulation (n = 21), coronary perfusion was reestablished after 60 minutes of occlusion, and animals were randomized to either normothermia at 38°C, hypothermia at 33°C or hypothermia at 33°C combined with sevoflurane (each group n = 7) for 24 hours. The effects on cardiac damage especially on inflammation, apoptosis, and remodeling were studied using cellular and molecular approaches. Five animals were sham operated. Animals treated with hypothermia had lower troponin T levels (p<0.01), reduced infarct size (34±7 versus 57±12%; p<0.05) and improved left ventricular function compared to normothermia (p<0.05). Hypothermia was associated with a reduction in: (i) immune cell infiltration, (ii) apoptosis, (iii) IL-1β and IL-6 mRNA up-regulation, and (iv) IL-1β protein expression (p<0.05). Moreover, decreased matrix metalloproteinase-9 activity was detected in the ischemic myocardium after treatment with mild hypothermia. Sevoflurane conferred additional protective effects although statistic significance was not reached. Conclusions/Significance Hypothermia reduced myocardial damage and dysfunction after cardiopulmonary resuscitation possible via a reduced rate of apoptosis and pro-inflammatory cytokine expression.


Several technological enhancements have been made to METI's commercial Emergency Care Simulator (ECS) with regard to how microgravity affects human physiology. The ECS uses both a software-only lung simulation, and an integrated mannequin lung that uses a physical lung bag for creating chest excursions, and a digital simulation of lung mechanics and gas exchange. METI s patient simulators incorporate models of human physiology that simulate lung and chest wall mechanics, as well as pulmonary gas exchange. Microgravity affects how O2 and CO2 are exchanged in the lungs. Procedures were also developed to take into affect the Glasgow Coma Scale for determining levels of consciousness by varying the ECS eye-blinking function to partially indicate the level of consciousness of the patient. In addition, the ECS was modified to provide various levels of pulses from weak and thready to hyper-dynamic to assist in assessing patient conditions from the femoral, carotid, brachial, and pedal pulse locations.


In this paper, we address the problem of change in an abstract argumentation system. We focus on a particular change: the addition of a new argument which interacts with previous arguments. We study the impact of such an addition on the outcome of the argumentation system, more particularly on the set of its extensions. Several properties for this change operation are defined by comparing the new set of extensions to the initial one, these properties are called "structural" when the comparisons are based on set-cardinality or set-inclusion relations. Several other properties are proposed where comparisons are based on the status of some particular arguments: the accepted arguments; these properties refer to the "evolution of this status" during the change, e.g., Monotony and Priority to Recency. All these properties may be more or less desirable according to specific applications. They are studied under two particular semantics: the grounded and preferred semantics.


Excerpt] Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: Cambodia 2002 is descriptive in nature. When the ILO commissioned the researchers for the Country Study Series, each was asked to follow the comprehensive research protocol appended to this document. The resulting report therefore includes country background information, statistics about people with disabilities and their organizations, a description of relevant legislation and policies and their official implementing structures, as well as the education, training and employment options available to people with disabilities. While few countries have such information readily available, researchers were asked to note the existence or lack of specific data points and to report data when it did exist.


New neurons are formed in the dentate gyrus of the mammalian hippocampus
throughout adulthood. Rates of adult neurogenesis can be manipulated by
pharmacological and environmental factors. Specifically, two factors that lead to
increased neurogenesis are the antidepressant fluoxetine which increases the
proliferation of neural progenitor cells and environmental enrichment which increases
neuronal survival. Although the putative function of adult neurogenesis is unknown,
there is accumulating evidence that it plays a role in hippocampal-dependent learning
and memory and as a self-repair response following brain insult. The aim of the present
study was investigate whether increasing neurogenesis in rats could promote a
recovery of spatial function following dentate gyrus damage. Intradentate infusions of
colchcine selectively ablated the majority of dorsal dentate gyrus granule cells. Rats
where then tested on the Morris water maze and matched to treatment groups. In the
treatment paradigm aimed at increasing rates of neurogenesis, rats were given daily
saline or fluoxetine injections and either lived in standard housing or a novel enriched
environment for 5 weeks with BrdU injections occurring in the middle. Ki67-staining
revealed a decrease in cell proliferation associated with the enriched environment.
Doublecortin-staining revealed that fluoxetine increased cell survival in the standard
housing. BrdU/NeuN-colabeling qualitatively revealed that neurogenesis did occur in the
damaged dentate gyrus, but at a low rate. Overall, dentate gyrus lesions significantly
decreased the proliferation and survival of new neurons following treatment. We
concluded that the colchicine dose used profoundly disrupted the neurogenic niche and that the enriched environment was inhibiting proliferation because it was more stressful
than the standard housing. In the post-treatment behavioral testing, lesion rats had
significant spatial memory deficits but did improve and enriched rats improved more
than standard housed rats. On the probe test, lesion rats outperformed sham rats and
lesion rats in the enriched environment outperformed all other rats on target search but
not target crossings which may be interpreted as an increased resistance to extinction.


Mediaeval Iberia was rife with inter-religious conflict between Christians, Jews, and Muslims that incited forced conversions and culminated in mass expulsions. Yet, in the midst of such a harrowing time in the peninsula's history, there were occasional elements of harmony between these three groups, made all the more impressive in their rarity. King Alfonso X, the Wise, was a man whose rule exhibited a relative tranquility in inter-religious relations some have even suggested is deserving of altering his sobriquet to Alfonso the Tolerant. Through an examination of his law code, the Siete Partidas, and a compilation of several hundred canticles, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, this paper pinpoints elements of Alfonso's rule to critically assess the claims of his tolerance.


The report on the state of the drugs problem in Europe presents the EMCDDA's yearly overview of the drug phenomenon. This is an essential reference book for policymakers, specialists and practitioners in the drugs field or indeed anyone seeking the latest findings on drugs in Europe. Published every autumn, the report contains non-confidential data supported by an extensive range of figures.


"Where has this book been all my professional life? It is about time someone wrote this book. The author covers many basic, practical issues that other authors omit in a format that makes for a great troubleshooting reference and for casual perusing. There are a lot of books available that give a broad overview of system and network administration, and there are a lot of detailed books on each specific topic covered in this book, but I don't know of any other place where I can get so much useful, practical information on such a wide range of topics in such a concise and readable form. I will highly recommend it to my friends and colleagues who are trying to manage their own systems. I am anxious to show it to our instructors who teach data communications and networks as a possible text or lab manual."-Ron McCarty, instructor and program chair, Computer Science, Penn State Erie"This book takes a very unique approach and is very flexible. It offers a great deal to the home user, students, small businesses-all the way to any Linux sys admin that needs a handy reference. I found it very refreshing in terms of style, stated goals, presentation, ease of use, direction, and the "present and future" value of the content. In other words the author is very current and knowledgeable. I would recommend this book to every level from programmer to manager."-Joe Brazeal, Information Technician III, Southwest Power Pool"This book is an excellent resource for new Linux administrators. I was impressed with the comprehensive set of 35 topic chapters, making this book a very useful reference. I know of no other work like this."-George Vish II, Linux curriculum program manager and senior education consultant, Hewlett-Packard Education"I would recommend this book to novice Linux users and administrators. It covers a lot of topics, and makes it easy for readers to follow along."-Bret Strong, education consultant, Hewlett-Packard Company"Linux Quick Fix Notebook is a well-written guide to designing, installing, and maintaining Linux servers. Many Linux reference texts are just simple rewrites of Linux i¾¨mani¾¨ and i¾¨infoi¾¨ pages, but this book addresses the real issues that systems administrators encounter when working with Linux. The author provides a pedagogical guide to learning Linux server administration. In addition, the book includes step-by-step information so that users can quickly take advantage of the best that open source software has to offer today. I would recommend this book to both beginning and intermediate users of Linux."-Joseph Naberhaus, Professor of Networking, Universidad Del MarAn indispensable guide for every Linux administratorInstant access to precise, step-by-step solutions for every essential Linux administration taskFrom basic configuration and troubleshooting to advanced security and optimizationIf you're responsible for delivering results with Linux, Linux® Quick Fix Notebook brings together all the step-by-step instructions, precise configuration commands, and real-world guidance you need. This distilled, focused, task-centered guide was written for sysadmins, netadmins, consultants, power users...everyone whose livelihood depends on making Linux work, and keeping it working.This book's handy Q&A format gives you instant access to specific answers, without ever forcing you to wade through theory or jargon. Peter Harrison addresses virtually every aspect of Linux administration, from software installation to security, user management to Internet services-even advanced topics such as software RAID and centralized LDAP authentication. Harrison's proven command-line examples work quickly and efficiently, no matter what Linux distribution you're using. Here's just some of what you'll learn how to do: Build Linux file/print servers and networks from scratch Troubleshoot Linux and interpret system error messages Control every step of the boot process Create, manage, secure, and track user accounts Install, configure, and test Linux-based wireless networks Protect your network with Linux iptables firewalls Set up Web, e-mail, DNS, DHCP, and FTP servers And much more...© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.


"Gamers at Work is a critical resource for new and experienced business leadersfor anyone who feels unprepared for the demanding and seemingly insurmountable trials ahead of them." Peter Molyneux OBE, founder, Lionhead Studios "Gamers at Work explores every imaginable subtlety of the video-game industry through the fascinating stories of those who took the risks and reaped the rewards." Hal Halpin, president, Entertainment Consumers Association "This is the sort of book that can tear the most hardcore gamers away from their PCs, Macs, or consoles for a few hours of rewarding reading." North County Times "Gamers at Work is truly an invaluable resource that's well worth adding to your personal library." Wii Love It There are few companies in the video-game industry that have withstood the test of time; most startups exit as quickly as they enter. In Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play, the countless challenges of building successful video-game developers and publishers in this unstable industry are explored through interviews containing entertaining stories, humorous anecdotes, and lessons learned the hard way. Gamers at Work presents an inside look at how 18 industry leaders play the odds, seize opportunities, and transform small businesses into great businesses. Here, in Gamers at Work, you will find their stories replete with their personal struggles, corporate intrigue, and insights into strategy, leadership, and management. Gamers at Work: Explores the formation of entertainment software companies from the perspectives of successful founders who played the odds Provides insight into why experienced professionals sacrifice the comfort of gainful employment for the uncertainty and risk of the startup Shares the experiences and lessons that shape the lives, decisions, and struggles of entrepreneurs in this volatile business Featured Entrepreneurs: Trip Hawkins, Electronic Arts (Madden NFL) Nolan Bushnell, Atari (Pong) Wild Bill Stealey, MicroProse Software (Sid Meier's Civilization) Tony Goodman, Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires) Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian Entertainment (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II) Tim Cain, Troika Games (Arcanum, Vampire: the MasqueradeBloodlines) Warren Spector, Junction Point Studios (Disney Epic Mickey) Doug & Gary Carlston, Broderbund Software (Prince of Persia, Carmen Sandiego) Don Daglow, Stormfront Studios (Neverwinter Nights, Tony La Russa Baseball) John Smedley, Verant Interactive (EverQuest, PlanetSide) Ken Williams, Sierra On-Line (King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry) Lorne Lanning, Oddworld Inhabitants (Oddworld) Chris Ulm, Appy Entertainment (FaceFighter, Trucks & Skulls) Tobi Saulnier, 1st Playable (Kung Zhu, Yogi Bear) Christopher Weaver, Bethesda Softworks (The Elder Scrolls) Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted) Ted Price, Insomniac Games (Spyro, Resistance) Other books in the Apress At Work Series: Coders at Work, Seibel, 978-1-4302-1948-4 Venture Capitalists at Work, Shah & Shah, 978-1-4302-3837-9 CIOs at Work, Yourdon, 978-1-4302-3554-5 CTOs at Work, Donaldson, Seigel, & Donaldson, 978-1-4302-3593-4 Founders at Work, Livingston, 978-1-4302-1078-8 European Founders at Work, Santos, 978-1-4302-3906-2 Women Leaders at Work, Ghaffari, 978-1-4302-3729-7 Advertisers at Work, Tuten, 978-1-4302-3828-7 What youll learn How to lead and execute strategy as an entrepreneur About developing meaningful, long-term business relationships Recognize strategic opportunities and threats How and when to take the next step without compromising principles About balancing dreams with practical considerations To avoidthe pitfalls that can trigger disaster To learn from mistakes and make informed course corrections Who this book is for Software professionals or managers, usually working in the video games industry Game developers interested in starting an independent studio Gamers who are interested in the history of games and game studios


Sexual harassment law has become a serious threat to freedom of speech in the context of "hostile environment" claims. Freedom of association is under attack by state and local laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sex in public accommodations, with the phrase "public accommodations" defined to include private clubs and organizations. Religious employers, such as church schools, have seen their free exercise rights challenged by a series of lawsuits alleging sex discrimination for actions taken in accordance with the employers' religious beliefs.Courts generally have been unsympathetic to constitutional defenses to anti-discrimination lawsuits. The Supreme Court has led the way by consistently ruling that the government has a compelling interest in eliminating discrimination that trumps civil liberties. The compelling interest test is applied without regard to the specific facts of the case at bar. The author concludes that the Court's application of the compelling interest test permits courts to render decisions based on vague ideological commitments that have no basis in the Constitution. There are also many non-constitutional reasons that civil liberties should be protected from encroachment by anti-discrimination laws. Among other things, concern for civil liberties reflects appropriate skepticism of concentrating power in the hands of the government; offers protection of individual and group autonomy, including the autonomy of those protected by anti-discrimination laws; shields unpopular minority groups from discriminatory enforcement of anti-discrimination laws; limits church-state conflict; and protects against overly-zealous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws in contexts where such enforcement creates a clear net social loss.


Access to agricultural information ensures that stakeholders in the farming system can make informed decisions towards increasing agricultural productivity. Agricultural information and data are stored in distributed systems and repositories (using different pieces of software and databases) that expose a variety of research outputs with various metadata formats. Often grey literature, journal articles and technical reports are lost as technologies are not employed to ensure that such resources are online, accessible and shared widely within the agricultural stakeholders. This paper reviews AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) as an international collaboration and partnership in collecting and using agricultural bibliographic data to enable researchers and policy makers retrieve related agricultural and scientific information and data. AGRIS database, therefore, uses bibliographic data as an aggregator of locating related content across information systems available on the Web through taking advantage of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies. Besides linking related content, AGRIS has a potential to gather like-minded researchers around AGRIS content to discuss and share ideas – this implies creating a social media layer by creating AGRIS social media.


The research described in this paper shows that main parameter of applied researches of acoustic cavitation are not the intensity the temperatures of plasma in the cavitation bubbles (power of sonoluminescence), but the power of pressure pulses, which they produce, and which cause destruction of phases existing in a liquid (power of erosion). The distribution of the density power of erosion in space can be the subject of numerically simulated, if it is assumed that process of multibubble cavitation is an ergodic process. For this the integral of pressure superposition from all bubbles of cavitation field at any point in space, must be approximated by the function of the pressure pulse on the surface of a single cavitation bubble, that pulsate with a period equal to the period of oscillations of the harmonic wave. This superposition can be described using a two metrics of space, which belongs to this point. The first – the average distance from this point until all points of the cavitation region, determines the average time of arrival at this point of the total perturbation of pressure. Second – means harmonic distance and determines the average coefficient of attenuation of this perturbation. The results of computational and laboratory experiments illustrate the adequacy and the applicability of model. The model makes it possible to quantitatively compare the results of physical and chemical effects of cavitation in the any liquids in the reactors of any size and design. The model also gives a sufficient degree of accuracy and reliability of performing the technical calculations for the design of such devices and the possibility to make comparative assessments of the different reactors.


Frustration over the lack of preparation for the patient at discharge is, unfortunately, all too familiar for nurses today. After the primary care provider has written the discharge order, nurses find themselves the last resource. Often, the patient will have questions about medications, diet, activity guidelines, or follow-up that were not addressed by the physician. The nurse must now provide answers. Most patients have become so overloaded with information throughout their hospital stay that there is little chance they will be able to remember all the instructions to guide their first days at home. Nurses, for the most part, do all they can possibly do to educate patients. Most realize that discharge starts with admission; however, patient education has become so routine that often nurses are doing an insufficient job as patient educators.


The Kronecker product of two Schur functions $s_{\lambda}$ and $s_{\mu}$, denoted $s_{\lambda}\ast s_{\mu}$, is defined as the Frobenius characteristic of the tensor product of the irreducible representations of the symmetric group indexed by partitions of $n$, $\lambda$ and $\mu$, respectively. The coefficient, $g_{\lambda,\mu,\nu}$, of $s_{\nu}$ in $s_{\lambda}\ast s_{\mu}$ is equal to the multiplicity of the irreducible representation indexed by $\nu$ in the tensor product. In this paper we give an algorithm for expanding the Kronecker product $s_{(n-p,p)}\ast s_{\lambda}$ if $\lambda_1-\lambda_2\geq 2p$. As a consequence of this algorithm we obtain a formula for $g_{(n-p,p), \lambda ,\nu}$ in terms of the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients which does not involve cancellations. Another consequence of our algorithm is that if $\lambda_1-\lambda_2\geq 2p$ then every Kronecker coefficient in $s_{(n-p,p)}\ast s_{\lambda}$ is independent of $n$, in other words, $g_{(n-p,p),\lambda,\nu}$ is stable for all $\nu$.


For everybody, if you want to start joining with others to read a book, this carcinogen risk assessment is much recommended. And you need to get the book here, in the link download that we provide. Why should be here? If you want other kind of books, you will always find them. Economics, politics, social, sciences, religions, Fictions, and more books are supplied. These available books are in the soft files.


In order to improve the distribution system for the Nordic countries the BASF AG considered 13 alternative scenarios to the existing system. These involved the construction of warehouses at various locations. For every scenario the transportation, storage, and handling cost incurred was to be as low as possible, where restrictions on the delivery time were given. The scenarios were evaluated according to (minimal) total cost and weighted average delivery time. The results led to a restriction to only three cases involving only one new warehouse each. For these, a more accurate model for the cost was developed and evaluated, yielding results similar to a simple linear model. Since there were no clear preferences between cost and delivery time, the final decision was chosen to represent a compromise between the two criteria. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Abstract: Gridlock is an extreme traffic state where vehicle cannot move at all. This research studies the development of gridlock by theoretical and numerical analysis. It is shown that the development of gridlock can be divided into several stages. The core of the development is the evolution of congestion loop. A congestion loop is comprised of a number of consecutively connected spillover links. The evolution of a congestion loop always tends to be stable, i.e. the state of all related links tends to be identical.. Under the stable condition, traffic states of all links are identical. A novel concept, "virtual signal" is proposed to describe the queue propagation and spillover during the stabilization. Simulation results show that congestion propagates in an accelerated way. The prevention of the first congestion loop is crucial. The achieved results have potential use for future network traffic control design and field applications.


"The best guide to the Metasploit Framework." HD Moore, Founder of the Metasploit Project The Metasploit Framework makes discovering, exploiting, and sharing vulnerabilities quick and relatively painless. But while Metasploit is used by security professionals everywhere, the tool can be hard to grasp for first-time users. Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide fills this gap by teaching you how to harness the Framework and interact with the vibrant community of Metasploit contributors. Once you've built your foundation for penetration testing, you'll learn the Framework's conventions, interfaces, and module system as you launch simulated attacks. You'll move on to advanced penetration testing techniques, including network reconnaissance and enumeration, client-side attacks, wireless attacks, and targeted social-engineering attacks. Learn how to: Find and exploit unmaintained, misconfigured, and unpatched systems Perform reconnaissance and find valuable information about your target Bypass anti-virus technologies and circumvent security controls Integrate Nmap, NeXpose, and Nessus with Metasploit to automate discovery Use the Meterpreter shell to launch further attacks from inside the network Harness standalone Metasploit utilities, third-party tools, and plug-ins Learn how to write your own Meterpreter post exploitation modules and scripts You'll even touch on exploit discovery for zero-day research, write a fuzzer, port existing exploits into the Framework, and learn how to cover your tracks. Whether your goal is to secure your own networks or to put someone else's to the test, Metasploit: The Penetration Tester's Guide will take you there and beyond.


Christmas is a time of seasonal cheer, family get-togethers, holiday parties, and-gift giving. Lots and lots--and lots--of gift giving. It's hard to imagine any Christmas without this time-honored custom. But let's stop to consider the gifts we receive--the rooster sweater from Grandma or the singing fish from Uncle Mike. How many of us get gifts we like? How many of us give gifts not knowing what recipients want? Did your cousin really look excited about that jumping alarm clock? Lively and informed, Scroogenomics illustrates how our consumer spending generates vast amounts of economic waste--to the shocking tune of eighty-five billion dollars each winter. Economist Joel Waldfogel provides solid explanations to show us why it's time to stop the madness and think twice before buying gifts for the holidays. When we buy for ourselves, every dollar we spend produces at least a dollar in satisfaction, because we shop carefully and purchase items that are worth more than they cost. Gift giving is different. We make less-informed choices, max out on credit to buy gifts worth less than the money spent, and leave recipients less than satisfied, creating what Waldfogel calls "deadweight loss." Waldfogel indicates that this waste isn't confined to Americans--most major economies share in this orgy of wealth destruction. While recognizing the difficulties of altering current trends, Waldfogel offers viable gift-giving alternatives. By reprioritizing our gift-giving habits, Scroogenomics proves that we can still maintain the economy without gouging our wallets, and reclaim the true spirit of the holiday season.


One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius-a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.


Vibroacoustic disease (VAD) is a whole-body, systemic pathology, characterized by the abnormal proliferation of extra-cellular matrices, and caused by excessive exposure to low frequency noise (LFN). VAD has been observed in LFN-exposed professionals, such as, aircraft technicians, commercial and military pilots and cabin crewmembers, ship machinists, restaurant workers, and disk-jockeys. VAD has also been observed in several populations exposed to environmental LFN. This report summarizes what is known to date on VAD, LFN-induced pathology, and related issues. In 1987, the first autopsy of a deceased VAD patient was performed. The extent of LFN induced damage was overwhelming, and the information obtained is, still today, guiding many of the associated and ongoing research projects. In 1992, LFN-exposed animal models began to be studied in order to gain a deeper knowledge of how tissues respond to this acoustic stressor. In both human and animal models, LFN exposure causes thickening of cardiovascular structures. Indeed, pericardial thickening with no inflammatory process, and in the absence of diastolic dysfunction, is the hallmark of VAD. Depressions, increased irritability and aggressiveness, a tendency for isolation, and decreased cognitive skills are all part of the clinical picture of VAD. LFN is a demonstrated genotoxic agent, inducing an increased frequency of sister chromatid exchanges in both human and animal models. The occurrence of malignancies among LFN-exposed humans, and of metaplastic and displastic appearances in LFN-exposed animals, clearly corroborates the mutagenic outcome of LFN exposure. The inadequacy of currently established legislation regarding noise assessments is a powerful hindrance to scientific advancement. VAD can never be fully recognized as an occupational and environmental pathology unless the agent of disease--LFN--is acknowledged and properly evaluated. The worldwide suffering of LFN-exposed individuals is staggering and it is unethical to maintain this status quo.


In this thesis, different aspects of interacting ultracold bosons in presence of inhomogeneous external potentials are studied. The first part deals with repulsively interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in speckle disorder potentials. In the Bogoliubov approach, the many-body problem is split into the Gross-Pitaevskii condensate (mean-field) and the Bogoliubov excitations, which are bosonic quasiparticles. The disorder potential causes an imprint in the condensate, which makes the Hamiltonian for the Bogoliubov excitations inhomogeneous. The inhomogeneous Bogoliubov Hamiltonian is the starting point for a diagrammatic perturbation theory that leads to the renormalized Bogoliubov dispersion relation. From this effective dispersion relation, physical quantities are derived, e.g. the mean free path and disorder corrections to the speed of sound and the density of states. The analytical results are supported by a numerical integration of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation and by an exact diagonalization of the disordered Bogoliubov problem. In the second part, Bloch oscillations of Bose-Einstein condensates in presence of time-dependent interactions are considered. In general, the interaction leads to dephasing and destroys the Bloch oscillation. Feshbach resonances allow the atom-atom interaction to be manipulated as function of time. In particular, modulations around zero are considered. Different modulations lead to very different behavior: either the wave packet evolves periodically with time or it decays rapidly. The former is explained by a periodic time-reversal argument. The decay in the other cases can be described by a dynamical instability with respect to small perturbations, which are similar to the Bogoliubov excitations in the first part.


iCamel spiders (ArachnidaiSolifugae) are one of the arachnid groups characterised by a prosomal dorsal shield composed of three distinct elements:the pro-, mesoand metapeltidium.These are associated respectively with prosomal appendages one to four, five, and six. What is less well known, although noted in the historical literature, is that the coxae of the 4^*^ and 5^^ prosomal segments (i.e. walking legs 2 and 3) of camel spiders are also separated ventrally by a distinct membranous region, which is absent between the coxae of the other legs. We suggest that this essentially ventral division of the prosoma specifically between coxae 2 and 3 is homologous with the so-called sejugal furrow (the sejugal interval sensu van der Hammen). This division constitutes a fundamental part of the body plan in acariform mites (Arachnida:Acariformes).lf homologous, this sejugal furrow could represent a further potential synapomorphy for (Solifugae -h Acariformes); a relationship with increasing morphological and molecular support. Alternatively, outgroup comparison with sea spiders (Pycnogonida) and certain early Palaeozoic fossils could imply that the sejugal furrow defines an older tagma, derived from a more basal grade of organisation. In this scenario the (still) divided prosoma of acariform mites and camel spiders would be plesiomorphic.This interpretation challenges the textbook arachnid character of a peltidium (or 'carapace') covering an undivided prosoma.


Armstrong, Kelley. The Gathering . Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011. Print. Rural Ontario-based writer Kelley Armstrong is the author of over 15 novels, mostly fantasy, including the #1 New York Times and Globe and Mail bestselling Darkest Powers young adult urban fantasy trilogy.  The Gathering is the first in her new Darkness Rising trilogy, a sequel series to Darkest Powers , and is interrelated but with a new set of characters. Sixteen-year-old Maya Delaney lives in Salmon Creek, a small Vancouver Island town of less than two-hundred people which exists solely to serve the needs of a medical research facility owned by the St. Cloud Corporation.  In fact, the St. Cloud Corporation owns the entire town including homes, the school and other world-class facilities that have been built for its resident employees and their families.  Maya has an affinity for animals and healing and enjoys spending time in the wildlife rehabilitation centre her father runs as the town's park ranger.  Adopted from birth from parents of an unknown First Nations background, Maya has a generally happy life and loving and responsible parents but is haunted by the bizarre drowning death of her best friend Serena, the captain of the swim team, a year previous. Maya's life and those of the town's close-knit residents, changes drastically after a reporter arrives and begins to ask questions about the St. Cloud Corporation and life in Salmon Creek.  Maya is led to believe that this reporter may have information on Serena's mysterious death.  Other strange occurrences such as: mountain lions gathering around her home, the appearance of the town's new 'bad boy' Rafe Martinez, and being called a 'witch' during a visit to a Nanaimo tattoo shop, cause Maya to question who she is and where she comes from. The Gathering is a quick, easy read and a good start to what looks like will be another intriguing trilogy.  The characters are believable and of note is the involvement of Maya's likeable parents in her life which is so often missing from other books in this genre.  A Native Canadian protagonist and a unique Canadian setting also make for interesting reading as does the move beyond vampires and werewolves.  Do not expect a neat and tidy ending; this trilogy is structured as one story rather than three separate stand-alone volumes and leaves you wanting more.  Readers will have to wait, however, until April 2012 when the second book in the series, currently titled The Calling , is set to release. Recommended: 3 stars out of 4 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.


The Greatest show on earth has arrived. The year 2012 sees the Olympic Games coming to the UK for the third time in their history. They have been seven years in the making and it will be many years before their sporting and cultural inheritance fades.This book celebrates Britain's achievement in winning the XXX Olympiad by presenting a concise but thorough chronicle of the Games from Ancient Greece to London 2012. It is often forgotten that London previously hosted the Games in 1908 and 1948, and the progress of the Olympic dream very much matches the turbulent annals of that entire century.The book chronicles those years of international sporting achievement, particularly from London 1948 to the present day. But this account is not justabout athletic prowess. Each Olympics has had its own particular story of rivalry, infighting, political chicanery or financial disaster - and, on occasions, violent tragedy. The thrills, joys and dramas of the past are all in this concise handbook, to be used as a companion to the spectacular sporting saga being enacted in London 2012.


OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study was to investigate the change of mean blood flux in Hegu acupoint after contralateral Hegu acupoint was stimulated.

METHODS
Healthy volunteers (N=140) were placed in a temperature-controlled room as a resting state for 60 minutes. Then the measurements of skin blood flow were carried out in pre- and postacupuncture stimulation every 30 minutes over a total of 180 minutes using a Moor full-field laser perfusion imager. The change ratio of mean blood flux in Hegu acupoint was used to evaluate the contralateral stimulation effect in different groups.

RESULTS
After acupuncture of the right Hegu acupoint (AR), the change ratio of mean blood flux in the left Hegu acupoint was increased significantly compared with the control group 60 minutes after acupuncture stimulation (p<0.01). Then the blood flow in the AR group was sustained at a higher level compared with that of the control group (p<0.05). However, the change ratio of mean blood flux in the right Hegu acupoint increased significantly in the 30 minutes after contralateral acupuncture stimulation (p<0.01). From that point on, the change ratio was sustained at a higher level in the AR group than in the control group until 150 minutes after stimulation (p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS
On stimulation of either the left or right side of Hegu acupoint, the change ratio of mean blood flux was increased in the contralateral Hegu acupoint in a period from 30, 60, to 150 minutes after stimulation, respectively.


The groundbreaking book Design Driven Testing brings sanity back to the software development process by flipping around the concept of Test Driven Development (TDD)restoring the concept of using testing to verify a design instead of pretending that unit tests are a replacement for design. Anyone who feels that TDD is Too Damn Difficult will appreciate this book. Design Driven Testing shows that, by combining a forward-thinking development process with cutting-edge automation, testing can be a finely targeted, business-driven, rewarding effort. In other words, youll learn how to test smarter, not harder. Applies a feedback-driven approach to each stage of the project lifecycle. Illustrates a lightweight and effective approach using a core subset of UML. Follows a real-life example project using Java and Flex/ActionScript. Presents bonus chapters for advanced DDTers covering unit-test antipatterns (and their opposite, test-conscious design patterns), and showing how to create your own test transformation templates in Enterprise Architect. What youll learn Create unit and behavioral tests using JUnit, NUnit, FlexUnit. Generate acceptance tests for all usage paths through use case thread expansion. Generate requirement tests for functional requirements. Run complex acceptance tests across the enterprise. Isolate individual control points for self-contained unit/behavioral tests. Apply Behavior Driven Development frameworks like JBehave and NBehave Design Driven Testing should appeal to developers, project managers, testers, business analysts, architectsin fact anyone who builds software that needs to be tested. While equally applicable on both large and small projects, Design Driven Testing is especially helpful to those developers who need to verify their software against formal requirements. Such developers will benefit greatly from the rational and disciplined approach espoused by the authors.


Abstract. To examine the calibration performance of the Meteosat-8/9 Spinning Enhanced Visible Infra-Red Imager (SEVIRI) 0.640-μm and the Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT)-1R 0.724-μm channels, three calibration methods are employed. Total eight months during the 2004–2007 period are used for SEVIRI, and total seven months during the 2007–2008 period are used for MTSAT-1R. First, a ray-matching technique is used to compare Meteosat-8/9 and MTSAT-1R visible channel reflectances with the well-calibrated Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) 0.646-μm channel reflectances. Spectral differences of the response function between the two channels of interest are taken into account for the comparison. Second, collocated MODIS cloud products are used as inputs to a radiative transfer model (RTM) to calculate Meteosat-8/9 and MTSAT-1R visible channel reflectances. In the simulation, cloud three-dimensional (3-D) radiative effect associated with subgrid variations is taken into account using the lognormal-independent column approximation (LN-ICA) to minimize the simulation bias caused by the plane-parallel homogeneous assumption. Third, an independent method uses the typical optical properties of deep convective clouds (DCCs) to simulate reflectances of selected DCC targets. Although all three methods are not in perfect agreement, the results suggest that calibration coefficients of Meteosat-8/9 0.640-μm channels are underestimated by 6–7%. On the other hand, the calibration accuracy of MTSAT-1R visible channel appears to be variable with the target reflectance itself because of an underestimate of calibration coefficient (up to 20%) and a non-zero space offset. The results further suggest that the solar channel calibration scheme combining the three methods in this paper can be used as a tool to monitor the calibration performance of visible sensors that are particularly not equipped with an onboard calibration system.


My art work has evolved with a special interest in exploring gender roles. I want
to push social boundaries with dynamic interactions between objects, images and
viewers.
"The Exposing Stitch: Personal Fears of Childbearing" is an inquiry into my
apprehension about pregnancy. My investigation of this subject is manifested through
the craft of functional garment making and embroidery. I create aprons, which are
generally used to protect and conceal the body, and use them to expose each of my
unspoken fears related to reproduction. Muslin has become a metaphor for my own skin
and embroidery, a cathartic experience. I have used the monotonous process of stitching
as a way to discharge the emotional tensions caused by my fears. I correlate the time
spent laboring through this process to the gestation period of pregnancy.
It is my intention not only to analyze myself through "The Exposing Stitch:
Personal Fears of Childbearing" but to encourage the viewer to investigate his or her
unspoken fears.


In Silico simulation of biological systems is an important sub area of computational biology (system biology), and becomes more and more an inherent part for research. Therefore, different kinds of software tools are required. At present, a multitude of tools for several areas exists, but the problem is that most of the tools are essentially application specific and cannot be combined. For instance, a software tool for the simulation of biochemical processes is not able to interact with tools for the morphology simulation and vice versa. In order to obtain realistic results with computer-aided simulations it is important to regard the biological system in its entirety. The objective is to develop a software framework, which provides an interface structure to combine existing simulation tools, and to offer an interaction between all affiliated systems. Consequently, it is possible to re-use existing models and simulation programs. Additionally, dependencies between those can be defined. The system is designed to interoperate as an extendable architecture for various tools. The thesis shows the usability and applicability of the software and discusses potential improvements.


Independence is a basic concept of probability theory and statistics. In a lot of elds of sciences, dependency of di erent variables is gained lots of attention from scientists. A measure, named information dependency, is proposed to express the dependency of a group of random variables. This measure is de ned as the Kullback-Leibler divergence of a joint distribution with respect to a product-marginal distribution of these random variables. In the bivariate case, this measure is known as mutual information of two random variables. Thus, the measure information dependency has a strong relationship with the Information Theory. The thesis aims to give a thorough study of the information dependency from both mathematical and practical viewpoints. Concretely, we would like to research three following problems: i. Proving that the information dependency is a useful tool to express the dependency of a group of random variables by comparing it with other measures of dependency. ii. Studying the methods to estimate the information dependency based on the samples of a group of random variables. iii. Investigating how the Independent Component Analysis problem, an interesting problem in statistics, can be solved using information dependency.


Automated shading and daylighting control systems have been commercially available for decades. The new challenge is to provide a fully functional and integrated facade and lighting system that operates appropriately for all environmental conditions and meets a range of occupant subjective desires and objective performance requirements. These rigorous performance goals must be achieved with solutions that are cost effective and can operate over long periods with minimal maintenance. It will take time and effort to change the marketplace for these technologies and practices, particularly in building a series of documented success stories, and driving costs and risks to much lower levels at which their use becomes the norm. In recent years, the architectural trend toward highly-transparent allglass buildings presents a unique challenge and opportunity to advance the market for emerging, smart, dynamic window and dimmable daylighting control technologies. We believe it is possible to accelerate product market transformation by developing projects where technical advances and the interests of motivated manufacturers and innovative owners converge. In this paper we present a case study example that explains a building owner's decision-making process to use dynamic window and dimmable daylighting controls. The case study project undertaken by a major building owner in partnership with a buildings R&D group was designed explicitly to use field test data in conjunction with the market influence of a major landmark building project in New York City to stimulate change in manufacturers' product offerings. Preliminary observations on the performance of these systems are made. A cost model that was developed with the building owner is explained.


By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (Authorized Version, Psalm 137:1-9)


OBJECTIVE Metformin is the first-line oral medication recommended for glycemic control in patients with type 2 diabetes. We reviewed the literature to quantify the effect of metformin treatment on glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels in all types of diabetes and examine the impact of differing doses on glycemic control. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Library were searched from 1950 to June 2010 for trials of at least 12 weeks' duration in which diabetic patients were treated with either metformin monotherapy or as an add-on therapy. Data on change in HbA1c were pooled in a meta-analysis. Data from dose-comparison trials were separately pooled. RESULTS A total of 35 trials were identified for the main analysis and 7 for the dose-comparison analysis. Metformin monotherapy lowered HbA1c by 1.12% (95% CI 0.92–1.32; I2 = 80%) versus placebo, metformin added to oral therapy lowered HbA1c by 0.95% (0.77–1.13; I2 = 77%) versus placebo added to oral therapy, and metformin added to insulin therapy lowered HbA1c by 0.60% (0.30–0.91; I2 = 79.8%) versus insulin only. There was a significantly greater reduction in HbA1c using higher doses of metformin compared with lower doses of metformin with no significant increase in side effects. CONCLUSIONS Evidence supports the effectiveness of metformin therapy in a clinically important lowering of HbA1c used as monotherapy and in combination with other therapeutic agents. There is potential for using higher doses of metformin to maximize glycemic control in diabetic patients without increasing gastrointestinal effects.


The purpose of this qualitative research study was to investigate the relationship between eight preservice teachers' participation and beliefs about their role as teachers in a reform-based mathematics methods course and the ways they performed, believed, and imagined themselves as teachers of mathematics in their internships and student teaching. The study was conducted in two schools in an urban setting. Data sources included lesson observations, field notes, interviews, and written reflections. Data analysis performed included domain analysis, grounded theory, and non-parametric statistical analysis. Results of a background study indicated that preservice teachers participated as students during mathematics methods in ways that resisted, acknowledged, embraced, and created the complexity of reformed-based teaching. Scores on a performance observation framework and other qualitative data indicated that the preservice teachers in the four groups from mathematics methods performed as teachers in internships and student teaching in ways that were significantly different from each other. In addition, they perceived their role as teachers of mathematics differently. The preservice teachers imagined themselves differently in relation to the classroom context, but no discernible patterns existed between the four groups and contextual factors. The findings suggest that preservice teachers make their own meanings of their participation in common experiences in mathematics methods and teach in ways that reflect those meanings. The different meanings preservice teachers make can be understood as different entry points into the practice of reform-based teaching. Knowing the entry points and the paths to which they lead has practical implications for teacher educators as they make instructional decisions in methods courses and policy implications for the structure of teacher education courses. Future research should help identify these paths and the experiences that help preservice teachers move along them.


This essay argues that discussions of educational reform in U.S. law schools have suffered from a fundamental misconception: that the education provided in all of the American Bar Association-accredited schools is roughly the same. A better description of the educational opportunities provided by ABA-accredited law schools would group the schools into three rough clusters: the "elite" law schools, the modal (most frequently occurring) law schools, and the precarious law schools. Because the elite law schools do not need much "reforming," the better focus of reform would concentrate on the modal and precarious schools; however, both elite and modal law schools could benefit from some changes to help law students move from understanding the theoretical underpinnings of law to understanding how to translate those underpinnings into practice. "Practice" itself is a complex concept, requiring both an understanding of the law and an understanding of how to relate well to others. Because law students may not understand how to relate well to those with different backgrounds from their own, law schools should do more to explain how one's perspective is both limiting and mutable. Too many law schools suggest that students can "see" different perspectives by, essentially, merely thinking harder. The essay concludes with some suggestions regarding possible reforms of U.S. legal education, focusing primarily on the modal law schools.


The world's foremost expert on pricing strategy shows how this mysterious process works and how to maximize value through pricing to company and customer.

In all walks of life, we constantly make decisions about whether something is worth our money or our time, or try to convince others to part with their money or their time. Price is the place where value and money meet. From the global release of the latest electronic gadget to the bewildering gyrations of oil futures to markdowns at the bargain store, price is the most powerful and pervasive economic force in our day-to-day lives and one of the least understood.

The recipe for successful pricing often sounds like an exotic cocktail, with equal parts psychology, economics, strategy, tools and incentives stirred up together, usually with just enough math to sour the taste. That leads managers to water down the drink with hunches and rules of thumb, or leave out the parts with which they don't feel comfortable. While this makes for a sweeter drink, it often lacks the punch to have an impact on the customer or on the business.

It doesn't have to be that way, though, as Hermann Simon illustrates through dozens of stories collected over four decades in the trenches and behind the scenes. A world-renowned speaker on pricing and a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives, Simon's lifelong journey has taken him from rural farmers' markets, to a distinguished academic career, to a long second career as a

n entrepreneur and management consultant to companies large and small throughout the world. Along the way, he has learned from Nobel Prize winners and leading management gurus, and helped countless managers and executives use pricing as a way to create new markets, grow their businesses and gain a sustained competitive advantage. He also learned some tough personal lessons about value, how people perceive it, and how people profit from it.
In this engaging and practical narrative, Simon leaves nothing out of the pricing cocktail, but still makes it go down smoothly and leaves you wanting to learn more and do more―as a consumer or as a business person. You will never look at pricing the same way again.


One of America's leading public health experts finds a host of ills in this country's health care system: * The United States spends nearly twice as much on health care as the rest of the developed world, yet has higher infant mortality rates and shorter longevity than most nations.* We have access to many different drugs that accomplish the same end at varying costs, and nearly all are cheaper abroad.* Our life span had doubled over the past century before we developed effective drugs to treat most diseases or even considered altering the human genome.* The benefits of almost all newly developed treatments are marginal, while their costs are high. In his blunt assessment of the state of public health in America, Alfred Sommer argues that human behavior has a stronger effect on wellness than almost any other factor. Despite exciting advances in genomic research and cutting-edge medicine, Sommer explains, most illness can be avoided or managed with simple, low-tech habits such as proper hand washing, regular exercise, a balanced diet, and not smoking. But, as he also shows, this is easier said than done. Sommer finds that our fascination with medical advances sometimes keeps us from taking responsibility for our individual well-being. Instead of focusing on prevention, we wait for medical science to cure us once we become sick. Humorous, sometimes acerbic, and always well informed, Sommer's thought-provoking book will change the way you look at health care in America.


Questions

(1) How do seres differ with respect to vegetation changes? (2) What are the directions of succession? (3) How do species numbers change? (4) How do target species, i.e. those typical of natural and semi-natural vegetation, participate in succession? (5) Are spontaneously developed successional stages acceptable from the point of view of ecosystem restoration?

Location

Extracted peatlands, bulldozed sites in forests destroyed by air pollution, an emerged bottom of a water reservoir, corridors of former Iron Curtain, artificial fishpond islands and barriers, sedimentary basins, spoil heaps from mining, stone quarries, forest clearings, road verges, sand and gravel-sand pits, ruderal urban sites, river gravel bars and abandoned arable fields, located in various parts of the Czech Republic in Central Europe.

Methods

Phytosociological releves were recorded in 10–25 m2 plots located in the centre of representative successional stages defined by their age, ranging from 1 to 100 yrs. In total, we obtained 2392 vegetation samples containing 951 species. We performed DCA ordination to compare 19 seres. Desirable target species were considered as those representing (semi)-natural vegetation and all Red List species.

Results

The seres studied are more similar in their species composition in the initial and early stages, in which synathropic species prevail, than in the later stages when the vegetation differentiates. This divergence is driven mainly by local moisture conditions. In most cases, succession led to woodland, which usually established after ca. 20 yrs. In very dry or wet places (with limited presence of woody species) open vegetation developed, often highly valuable from the restoration and conservation point of view. The total number of species and the number of target species increased in the majority of seres with successional age.

Conclusions

The vegetation in the sites studied formed a continuum along a moisture gradient and by successional age. The individual seres largely overlapped in their species composition; the sere identity was not significant. Spontaneous succession usually proceeded towards woodland, except at very dry or wet sites, and generally appeared to be an ecologically suitable way of ecosystem restoration of disturbed sites because target species became dominant over time.


The remains of 12 Neandertal individuals have been found at the El Sidrón site (Asturias, Spain), consisting of six adults, three adolescents, two juveniles, and one infant. Archaeological, paleontological, and geological evidence indicates that these individuals represent all or part of a contemporaneous social group of Neandertals, who died at around the same time and later were buried together as a result of a collapse of an underground karst. We sequenced phylogenetically informative positions of mtDNA hypervariable regions 1 and 2 from each of the remains. Our results show that the 12 individuals stem from three different maternal lineages, accounting for seven, four, and one individual(s), respectively. Using a Y-chromosome assay to confirm the morphological determination of sex for each individual, we found that, although the three adult males carried the same mtDNA lineage, each of the three adult females carried different mtDNA lineages. These findings provide evidence to indicate that Neandertal groups not only were small and characterized by low genetic diversity but also were likely to have practiced patrilocal mating behavior.


In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.


This COST Action undertakes coordinated research collaboration, at European level, in 3D multimedia creation, encoding, delivery and reception of services and applications over future networking technologies. A scientific framework is devised to integrate the main elements of the delivery chain, such as 3D content creation and encoding evolution, transmission across heterogeneous networks and user consumption, taking perceived quality as an overall key performance factor. Several individual R&D efforts are currently running across Europe, targeted at 3D technologies. This Action aims at beyond this trend by tightening closer together scattered efforts and integrating all technological elements with user 3D quality perception. To reach this goal, this Action fuels cooperation between researchers and industry experts, envisaging production of technical and scientific deliverables for researchers, scientists, engineers and managers, new business model recommendations for content and service providers through joint meetings across academia and industry, plus documentation and multimedia presentations to promote 3D technology in the society. The benefits include increased relevancy of European research, contribution to the development and sustainability of new and better 3D multimedia communications technology and provision of a platform for faster launching and adoption of related new products and services across Europe for end users' beneficiary.


The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to examine male competitive figure skaters' experiences of weight pressure in sport. Specifically, male skaters' perceptions of the ideal skating body, sources of weight pressure in elite figure skating, and the perceived role of their sport in shaping body image, athletic performance, eating, and exercise behaviors were explored. Through a social constructivist lens, an inductive thematic analysis was used to examine the contextual influences of the skating environment. Thirteen male figure skaters ages 16–24 (M = 18.53, SD = 3.33) with an average 10.38 years of skating experience (SD = 4.05) were interviewed. Skaters identified the parameters for the ideal body in skating along with specific weight pressures, body image concerns, and weight management strategies. Similar to female skaters, male skaters perceived that body image affected psychological factors that influence sport performance. Sport psychologists and consultants should be attentive to the skating environment and how specific performance and appearance demands may influence an athlete's mindset.


Under the pervasive influence of United States First Amendment jurisprudence, adult gender-specific sexually explicit (or 'pornographic') material is conceptualized, and thus protected in the 'marketplace of ideas', as a particular mode of expression; to be viewed as part of the fabric of an open, free and democratic society. The values which free expression are seen to promote center upon the advancement of political debate and promotion of personal self-fulfilment and autonomy. Attempts to conceptualize sexually explicit material within a gender-specific human rights framework present distinct challenges which, in a patriarchal legal and political design, appear to be near insurmountable. These challenges seem to be related to the enduring impact of the common law conception of obscenity (with its strong moralistic overtones) on the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, coupled with a subjective libertarian-inspired test, and the Supreme Court's general reluctance (also echoed by the South African Constitutional Court) to consider a gender-specific conception of harm emanating from feminist arguments premised upon women's constitutional interests in human dignity, equality and bodily integrity. The social revolution of the 1960s, coupled with the women's liberation movement, called for a distinct departure from the traditional conception of sexually explicit material as a mode of constitutionally defendable free speech and expression, a conception which unavoidably calls for a moralistic approach, separating acceptable forms of expression from those not deemed worthy of (constitutional) protection (termed 'obscenity', specifically created to satisfy the 'prurient interest'). The Supreme Court's obscenity jurisprudence is characterized by two key features. First, the court subscribes to an abstract concept of free speech, which proceeds from the assumption that all speech is of equal value, and thereby surmises that 'non-obscene' sexually explicit material has social value, as do esteemed works of literature and art. Secondly, the court assumes that all individuals have equal access to the means of expression and dissemination of ideas and thus fails to acknowledge substantive (and gendered) structural inequalities. A closer inspection reveals that the Supreme Court's justification of why freedom of expression is such a fundamental freedom in a constitutional democracy (and the reason that 'non-obscene' sexually explicit material consequently enjoys constitutional protection) is highly suspect, both intellectually and philosophically. And yet the South African Constitutional Court has explicitly recognized the same philosophical justification as the basis for free speech and expression. The Constitutional Court has, in fact, both supported and emphasized the idea that freedom of expression stands central to the concepts of democracy and political transformation through participation, and has expressly confirmed the association between freedom of expression and the political rights safeguarded under the Bill of Rights. Moreover, the Constitutional Court has also endorsed the conception of adult gender-specific sexually explicit material as a form of free expression. And yet by embracing a moralistic, libertarian model of free expression, the very ideal of a free, democratic and equal society, one in which women can live secure from the threat of harm, is put at risk. A moralistic, libertarian model is simply not capable of conceptualizing sexually explicit material as a possible violation of women's fundamental interests in equality, dignity and physical integrity.This article has a two-fold objective. The first is to critically examine the dominant discourse on adult gender-specific sexually explicit material emanating from United States jurisprudence (and its resonance in South African constitutional thought), and secondly, to assess whether this particular conception is sensitive to the possible constitutional harm which may result from an abstract liberal-inspired accommodation of sexually explicit material in an imagined free and open democratic society, such as the one presented by the South African legal and constitutional contexts.


Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours sometimes even minutesno matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the deployment pipeline, an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the ecosystem needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance. The authors introduce state-of-the-art techniques, including automated infrastructure management and data migration, and the use of virtualization. For each, they review key issues, identify best practices, and demonstrate how to mitigate risks. Coverage includes Automating all facets of building, integrating, testing, and deploying software Implementing deployment pipelines at team and organizational levels Improving collaboration between developers, testers, and operations Developing features incrementally on large and distributed teams Implementing an effective configuration management strategy Automating acceptance testing, from analysis to implementation Testing capacity and other non-functional requirements Implementing continuous deployment and zero-downtime releases Managing infrastructure, data, components and dependencies Navigating risk management, compliance, and auditing Whether youre a developer, systems administrator, tester, or manager, this book will help your organization move from idea to release faster than everso you can deliver value to your business rapidly and reliably.


Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become increasingly important to the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A positive relationship between the CSR activities of SMEs and their enhanced competitiveness exists, at least if a long-term perspective is adopted (European Competitiveness Report, 2008:106; Mandl & Dorr, 2007:2). Despite the widespread practical and academic interest in CSR and its impact on the competitiveness of SMEs, few theoretical and empirical contributions could be found. The primary objective of this study was to identify and empirically test the CSR factors influencing the competitiveness of SMEs in Uganda. The outcomes of this study will assist SMEs to effectively and responsibly manage their activities to increase their competitiveness. A structured, self-administered questionnaire was distributed to 750 potential SME respondents. The respondents were identified by means of a purposive sampling technique, and the data were collected from 383 usable questionnaires. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out, and Cronbach's alpha coefficients calculated to determine the discriminant validity and reliability of the measuring instrument. Correlations were assessed using structural equation modeling. The empirical results of this study indicate that workforce-oriented CSR activities, society-oriented CSR activities, market-oriented CSR activities and regulated CSR activities significantly influence the competitiveness of SMEs.


Future wireless communication systems are expected to reliably provide data services with rate requirements ranging from a few kbit/s up to some Mbits/s and, due to the high costs of frequency spectrum, these systems also need to be extremely efficient in terms of the spectrum usage. In particular, the application of transmission schemes based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and on Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) is considered as a promising solution to meet these requirements. On the one hand, MIMO-OFDMA systems are flexible and spectrally efficient. On the other hand, the considerably large number of subcarriers and the inclusion of the space dimension make the Resource Allocation (RA) in such systems very complex. In fact, the optimum RA that maximizes the sum rate of the system is often too complex for practical application and, consequently, suboptimal rather efficient and low-complexity RA strategies are required in order to allocate the frequency, time, and space resources of the system to the Mobile Stations (MSs). This thesis deals with suboptimal RA strategies in the downlink of MIMO-OFDMA systems aiming at the maximization of the sum rate. In order to solve the problem of maximizing the sum rate with affordable complexity, a new formulation for the problem is proposed which divides it into four subproblems, namely the Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) grouping problem, the precoding problem, the power allocation problem, and the resource assignment problem. For each subproblem, several existing or newly proposed algorithms are applied, which are also oriented towards the maximization of the sum rate of the system. Through the combination of these algorithms, new suboptimal rather efficient RA strategies are obtained. For the SDMA grouping problem, four new SDMA algorithms are proposed: one algorithm based on convex optimization and three greedy algorithms based on simple heuristics. The proposed algorithms build the SDMA groups based only on the spatial correlation and channel gain of the MSs and depend neither on precoding nor on power allocation. The proposed algorithms are shown to perform as good as some existing SDMA algorithms in terms of the achieved average sum rate and to have considerably lower computational complexity than the existing ones. For the precoding problem, two existing algorithms are adopted. For the power allocation problem, a new iterative Soft Dropping Algorithm (SDA) is proposed, which is subsequently combined with Generalized Eigen-Precoding (GEP) into a new iterative joint precoding and power allocation algorithm. Moreover, the proof for the convergence of the joint precoding and power allocation algorithm is provided. In particular, the SDA and, consequently, the joint precoding and power allocation algorithm can pursue either the maximization of the sum rate or the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) to the MS by means of a simple parameter setting. Also as part of the precoding and power allocation algorithm, a new Sequential Removal Algorithm (SRA) is proposed, which might remove MSs from SDMA groups as to enhance the sum rate. For the resource assignment problem, algorithms performing either separated or joint SDMA grouping and resource assignment are proposed and compared. For the maximization of the sum rate of the system, it is shown that a sequential assignment of resources to SDMA groups performs as good as assignment algorithms performing joint SDMA grouping and resource assignment while being considerably more simple. Moreover, different criteria to prioritize MS or SDMA groups are considered by the assignment algorithms, and it is shown that by adopting a suitable priority criterion the throughput fairness among the MSs can be considerably improved at the expense of only small reductions of the average sum rate of the system. The new suboptimal RA strategies that result from the combination of the proposed algorithms are shown to obtain a considerable fraction of the maximum achievable sum rate of the system with computational costs considerably lower than that of an optimum RA. Indeed, the proposed RA strategies achieve over 90% of the average sum rate obtained by an RA strategy performing an Exhaustive Search (ES) for the SDMA group that maximizes the sum rate.


Traditions & Encounters offers an inclusive vision of the global past one that is meaningful and appropriate for the interdependent world of contemporary times. Given the diversity of human societies, gathering and organizing the sheer mass of information in a meaningful way is a daunting challenge for any world history survey course. The seven-part chronological organization enables students to understand the development of the world through time, while also exploring broader, big-picture thematic issues in world history. Through new and revised chapter-level and part-level features, the hallmark twin themes of traditions and encounters emerge in greater clarity than ever before in this sixth edition. As a result, students have resources that enable them to move beyond the facts of history and examine the past critically, analyze causes and effects, and recognize similarities and differences across world regions and time periods. By digging deeper into the implications of world history s stories not just the who, the what, and the where, but also the why and the how students can make sense of the human past. Connect is the only integrated learning system that empowers students by continuously adapting to deliver precisely what they need, when they need it, and how they need it, so that your class time is more engaging and effective."


DSLRs are now routinely used for measuring the V magnitude of stars through their G channel output. This requires a transformation to Johnson V, using a correction based on the catalogue (B–V) color indices of the stars. This paper reviews the responses of the involved passbands and proposes an alternate solution using a synthetic filter made by combining the three RGB DSLR channels. The assessment of the two techniques through experimentation being uncertain, we have chosen to use a computer simulation instead. This simulation combines the measured spectral responses of the DSLR channels, the atmospheric reddening, and star spectra from the Pickles library.


Introductory calculus-based physics classes at the University of Colorado Boulder were significantly transformed beginning in 2004. They now regularly include: interactive engagement using clickers in large lecture settings, Tutorials in Introductory Physics with use of undergraduate Learning Assistants in recitation sections, and a staffed help-room setting where students work on personalized CAPA homework. We compile and summarize conceptual (FMCE and BEMA) pre- and post-data from over 9,000 unique students after 16 semesters of both Physics 1 and 2. Within a single institution with stable pre-test scores, we reproduce results of Hake's 1998 study that demonstrate the positive impacts of interactive engagement on student performance. We link the degree of faculty's use of interactive engagement techniques and their experience levels on student outcomes, and argue for the role of such systematic data collection in sustained course and institutional transformations.