Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found that a commonly prescribed diabetes drug kills tumor cells that lack a key regulatory gene called p53. Metformin activates the metabolic enzyme AMPK (AMP activated protein kinase), which exerts changes on cellular metabolism by affecting p53 function. Two observational studies already show that diabetic patients who take metformin have a lower rate of cancer diagnosis and mortality than other diabetics. The researchers found that metformin instructs cells to switch metabolic pathways. Instead of using the most energy efficient pathway – called oxidative phosphorylation – the cells are forced to use stress-related ones, which are typically used when the cell is short on oxygen, glucose or other nutrient sources. But in the absence of p53, the cells can't make the switch. The Penn team reported their findings in July in the journal Cancer Research. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have found that a commonly prescribed diabetes drug kills tumor cells that lack a key regulatory gene called p53. Results from current studies in mice may result in new therapies for a subset of human cancers that tend to be aggressive and resistant to existing treatments. Additionally, the findings open up a new avenue for targeting cancers whose hallmark is the absence of this regulatory gene. The Penn team reported their findings last month in Cancer Research. "This is the first time you can show that tumor growth is impaired by a diabetes drug," says senior author Craig B. Thompson, MD, Director of the Abramson Cancer Center and Chairman and Professor of Cancer Biology and Medicine. "It is specific for tumors that lack p53, which is the most common mutation in human cancer." More than half of all human cancers have lost the p53 gene. Yet even in an era of molecularly targeted therapies scientists have had trouble figuring out how to compensate for the absence of a gene. Unlike a genetic mutation that changes the function or activity of a gene, which can be inhibited by a well-tailored drug, loss of a gene leaves nothing for the drug to target. Thompson and his team, however, have been accumulating evidence over the last several years that p53, best known as a regulator of cell division, controls several metabolic pathways in cells. For potential cancer therapies, that means a drug that affects pathways controlled by p53 could help control p53-deficient tumors. Significantly, the regulation of metabolic pathways by p53 is also influenced by metformin, the most widely used diabetes drug. Metformin activates the metabolic enzyme AMPK (AMP activated protein kinase), which exerts changes on cellular metabolism by affecting p53 function. Two observational studies already show that diabetic patients who take metformin have a lower rate of cancer diagnosis and mortality than other diabetics. Thompson's group hypothesized that metformin may specifically slow the growth of cancers that lack p53. To find out, they injected human colon cancer cells that have normal p53 function into one side of mice and colon cancer cells that lack p53 into the other side. Four days later they started treating the animals with a daily injection of either a saline control solution or with metformin, using a dose comparable to diabetic treatment in humans. Four weeks later, the p53-deficient tumors in mice treated with metformin were half the size of the p53 deficient tumors in control mice. There was no difference in the size of the p53 normal tumors between the animals treated with metformin or saline. They concluded that metformin slowed the growth of the colon cancer cells that lack a normal p53 function. The researchers found that metformin instructs cells to switch metabolic pathways. Instead of using the most energy efficient pathway – called oxidative phosphorylation – the cells are forced to use stress-related ones, which are typically used when the cell is short on oxygen, glucose or other nutrient sources. But in the absence of p53, the cells can't make the switch. "Without p53, if we force cells to live on alternative substrates, they can't do it," explains Thompson. Thompson's team is now working with collaborators to decide how best to translate these novel observations into clinical practice. If preclinical tests continue to look promising, development of metformin as a cancer therapy may move quickly as the drug is already approved by U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in humans, the researchers surmise. The study was funded by grants from the National Cancer Institute. Monica Buzzai, a graduate student in Thompson's lab, is first author on the study. Co-authors include Russell Jones, Julian Lum, and Ralph DeBerardinis from Penn; Ravi Amaravadi and Fangping Zhao from Penn and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; and Benoit Viollet from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Inserm. ### The Abramson Cancer Center (ACC) of the University of Pennsylvania is a national leader in cancer research, patient care, and education. The pre-eminent position of the Cancer Center is reflected in its continuous designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute for 30 years, one of 39 such Centers in the United States. The ACC is dedicated to innovative and compassionate cancer care. The clinical program, comprised of a dedicated staff of physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, social workers, physical therapists, nutritionists and patient support specialists, currently sees over 50,000 outpatient visits, 3400 inpatient admissions, and provides over 25,000 chemotherapy treatments, and more than 65,000 radiation treatments annually. Not only is the ACC dedicated to providing state-of-the-art cancer care, the latest forms of cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment are available to our patients through clinical themes that developed in the relentless pursuit to eliminate the pain and suffering from cancer. In addition, the ACC is home to the 300 research scientists who work relentlessly to determine the pathogenesis of cancer. Together, the faculty is committed to improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. PENN Medicine is a $3.5 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Penn's School of Medicine is currently ranked #3 in the nation in U.S.News & World Report's survey of top research-oriented medical schools; and, according to most recent data from the National Institutes of Health, received over $379 million in NIH research funds in the 2006 fiscal year. Supporting 1,400 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine. The University of Pennsylvania Health System includes three hospitals — its flagship hospital, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, rated one of the nation's "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S.News & World Report; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center — a faculty practice plan; a primary-care provider network; two multispecialty satellite facilities; and home care and hospice.


Media coverage of the Danish cartoon crisis and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan left Westerners with a strong impression that Islam does not countenance depiction of religious imagery. Jamal J. Elias corrects this view by revealing the complexity of Islamic attitudes toward representational religious art. Aisha's Cushion emphasizes Islam's perceptual and intellectual modes and in so doing offers the reader both insight into Islamic visual culture and a unique way of seeing the world. Aisha's Cushion evaluates the controversies surrounding blasphemy and iconoclasm by exploring Islamic societies at the time of Muhammad and the birth of Islam; during early contact between Arab Muslims and Byzantine Christians; in medieval Anatolia and India; and in modern times. Elias's inquiry then goes further, to situate Islamic religious art in a global context. His comparisons with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Hindu attitudes toward religious art show them to be as contradictory as those of Islam. Contemporary theories about art's place in society inform Elias's investigation of how religious objects have been understood across time and in different cultures. Elias contends that Islamic perspectives on representation and perception should be sought not only in theological writings or aesthetic treatises but in a range of Islamic works in areas as diverse as optics, alchemy, dreaming, calligraphy, literature, vehicle and home decoration, and Sufi metaphysics. Unearthing shades of meaning in Islamic thought throughout history, Elias offers fresh insight into the relations among religion, art, and perception across a broad range of cultures.


First-hand stories about the experiences of orphan African American educators who grew up in the child welfare system are nonexistent. Typically, stories about orphans exclude African Americans and focus on male, European Americans. In cases where African Americans are not excluded from discussions on orphans, the focus tends to be on the negative rather than the positive aspects of their lives. This study investigates the positive outcomes of African American orphans who tell their own stories filtered, not through the eyes of childhood as the experiences take place, but through the mature eyes of educated adults. They narrate their own stories through first-hand knowledge about what it is like to live under the protection of child welfare. The methodology chosen for this study is narrative research. Narrative research allows the researcher to collect data by tape-recording life histories, transcribing, and analyzing the data, which I did with African American educators who were "orphans" in the 1950s and 1960s. In accordance with the theories of Kathleen Casey, Jean Clandinin, and Michael Connelly, open-ended questions were utilized so that the voices of the participants could be heard through their own words, with all the selectivities and silences that personal narratives entail without losing the richness of the stories. The six participants interviewed in this study are authors of their own narratives and they create meaning from their experiences through these narratives. Their understanding and interpretation of their orphan experiences may stand in sharp contrast to those of other researchers. My conceptual framework which incorporates narrative, resilience, and the hidden curriculum of resistance yielded important findings: success in foster care is likely to result from permanence, stability, and resilience; policymakers should assess and promote resilience in children of foster care.


Model-based diagnostic reasoning often leads to a large number of diagnostic hypotheses. The set of diagnoses can be reduced by taking into account extra observations (passive monitoring), measuring additional variables (probing) or executing additional tests (sequential diagnosis/test sequencing). In this paper we combine the above approaches with techniques from Automated Test Pattern Generation (ATPG) and Model-Based Diagnosis (MBD) into a framework called Fractal (FRamework for ACtive Testing ALgorithms). Apart from the inputs and outputs that connect a system to its environment, in active testing we consider additional input variables to which a sequence of test vectors can be supplied. We address the computationally hard problem of computing optimal control assignments (as defined in Fractal) in terms of a greedy approximation algorithm called FractalG. We compare the decrease in the number of remaining minimal cardinality diagnoses of FractalG to that of two more Fractal algorithms: FractalATPG and FractalP. FractalATPG is based on ATPG and sequential diagnosis while FractalP is based on probing and, although not an active testing algorithm, provides a baseline for comparing the lower bound on the number of reachable diagnoses for the Fractal algorithms. We empirically evaluate the trade-offs of the three Fractal algorithms by performing extensive experimentation on the ISCAS85/74XXX benchmark of combinational circuits.


The data used for this study consisted of 27 485 kid records, the progeny of 599 sires and 10 077 dams, and were collected on the 2000- to 2009-born kids of 11 Angora goat studs. Variance and covariance components and ratios pertaining to direct additive genetic variation, maternal additive genetic variation, maternal permanent environmental variation, and the relationship between direct and maternal effects for birth weight (BW; kg), weaning weight (WW; kg) and body weight at 8, 12 and 16 months (W8, W12 and W16; kg) were estimated with the ASReml program. Direct additive heritability estimates of 0.22, 0.20, 0.12, 0.34 and 0.58 were obtained for BW, WW, W8, W12 and W16, respectively. Maternal heritabilities were 0.10, 0.09, 0.03 and 0.06 for BW, WW, W8 and W12, respectively, while maternal environmental effects of 0.13, 0.11, 0.06 and 0.04 were estimated for the latter traits, respectively. An unfavourable correlation of ‐0.38 was obtained between direct and maternal genetic effects for BW. Low to medium positive direct genetic correlations were estimated between birth weight and body weights recorded at a later stage in life. High positive direct genetic correlations were estimated among WW, W8, W12 and W16. The maternal genetic correlations obtained between birth weight and the other body weights were medium to high. Phenotypic correlations among the traits ranged from low to high. Genetic trends of body weight at different ages indicate that although not many breeders use objective measurement as a selection tool, body weight increased slightly in the 11 studs over the 10-year study period. Since reproduction and body weight should be included in a selection programme for Angora goats, the relationship between the direct and maternal additive effects should be clarified. The importance of a sufficiently structured and related pedigree, especially on the part of the dams and maternal grand dams, has been highlighted in this study. As this is one of the constraints of this data set, data collection in the Angora goat industry should continue until a suitably structured data set has been built up that could be used to estimate multi-trait breeding values for the industry.


With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance -- the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage -- especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it. Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users' search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.


Consider a sequence of bits where we are trying to predict the next bit from the previous bits. Assume we are allowed to say 'predict 0' or 'predict 1', and our payoff is +1 if the prediction is correct and –1 otherwise. We will say that at each point in time the loss of an algorithm is the number of wrong predictions minus the number of right predictions so far. In this paper we are interested in algorithms that have essentially zero (expected) loss over any string at any point in time and yet have small regret with respect to always predicting 0 or always predicting 1. For a sequence of length T our algorithm has regret 14∊T and loss 2√T e−∊∊T in expectation for all strings. We show that the tradeoff between loss and regret is optimal up to constant factors.

Our techniques extend to the general setting of N experts, where the related problem of trading off regret to the best expert for regret to the 'special' expert has been studied by Even-Dar et al. (COLT'07). We obtain essentially zero loss with respect to the special expert and optimal loss/regret tradeoff, improving upon the results of Even-Dar et al and settling the main question left open in their paper. The strong loss bounds of the algorithm have some surprising consequences. First, we obtain a parameter free algorithm for the experts problem that has optimal regret bounds with respect to k-shifting optima, i.e. bounds with respect to the optimum that is allowed to change arms multiple times. Moreover, for any window of size n the regret of our algorithm to any expert never exceeds O(√n(log N + log T)), where N is the number of experts and T is the time horizon, while maintaining the essentially zero loss property.


In the following paper I share my personal journey into rhizomatic thinking. Here I illustrate how
a rhizome opened new possibilites to my previously confusing learning process. As a vehicle I ask
the question, when considering the pedagogical nature of place, how does the new facilitate
currere? I am also taking the opportunity to write in a way that is new and unfamiliar to me
because the conventional and acceptable have been unable to help me understand the meanings I
am seeking. I felt uninspired among traditional styles of academic writing until I encountered the
doctoral thesis of Warren Sellers where another way of seeing and writing is explored. This
generative experience gave me the momentum to link past learnings in new rhizomatic ways and
begin a discussion within this journal about how place and pedagogy connect. My visit to
Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul provided me the place and my reading of the texts of Warren
Sellers, Noel Gough, Chaim Soutine, Margaret Sommerville and Lloyd Rees gave me examples of
others who have searched. As I remember my physical experience of this new place, the stream
becomes the search, the bridges spanning it, the new understandings and scattered along the
banks, the rhizomes grow. A new place facilitates currere. This journal provides a forum where
possibilities are viewed as exciting (Doll, 2009, p. 71). Tentative steps into new spaces are
welcomed. Above all, conversation oils the machine, here I can share my thoughts with others who
are exploring learning in diverse ways and from non linear perspectives.


Abstract. In this paper, we examine how clouds over snow and ice affect ozone absorption and how these effects may be accounted for in satellite retrieval algorithms. Over snow and ice, the Aura Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) Raman cloud pressure algorithm derives an effective scene pressure. When this scene pressure differs appreciably from the surface pressure, the difference is assumed to be caused by a cloud that is shielding atmospheric absorption and scattering below cloud-top from satellite view. A pressure difference of 100 hPa is used as a crude threshold for the detection of clouds that significantly shield tropospheric ozone absorption. Combining the OMI effective scene pressure and the Aqua MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) cloud top pressure, we can distinguish between shielding and non-shielding clouds. To evaluate this approach, we performed radiative transfer simulations under various observing conditions. Using cloud vertical extinction profiles from the CloudSat Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR), we find that clouds over a bright surface can produce significant shielding (i.e., a reduction in the sensitivity of the top-of-the-atmosphere radiance to ozone absorption below the clouds). The amount of shielding provided by clouds depends upon the geometry (solar and satellite zenith angles) and the surface albedo as well as cloud optical thickness. We also use CloudSat observations to qualitatively evaluate our approach. The CloudSat, Aqua, and Aura satellites fly in an afternoon polar orbit constellation with ground overpass times within 15 min of each other. The current Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) total column ozone algorithm (that has also been applied to the OMI) assumes no clouds over snow and ice. This assumption leads to errors in the retrieved ozone column. We show that the use of OMI effective scene pressures over snow and ice reduces these errors and leads to a more homogeneous spatial distribution of the retrieved total ozone.


For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers its sacraments to a population that lives without rites of passage, and which regards the National Health Service rather than the National Church as its true spiritual guardian. In Our Church, Scruton argues that the Anglican Church is the forlorn trustee of an architectural and artistic inheritance that remains one of the treasures of European civilization. He contends that it is a still point in the centre of English culture and that its defining texts, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer are the sources from which much of our national identity derives. At once an elegy to a vanishing world and a clarion call to recognize Anglicanism's continuing relevance, Our Church is a graceful and persuasive book.


Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the question for what is the current state of SPI and related research? We present initial results from a systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 635 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past 25 years. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories. In particular, standard SPI models are analyzed and evaluated for applicability, especially from the perspective of SPI in small-to-medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors to aid companies in conducting SPI. This summary refers to the paper Software Process Improvement: Where Is the Evidence? [Ku15]. This paper was published as full research paper in the ICSSP'2015 proceedings.


Despite the arbitrary postulate of empty space (which was as arbitrary as the old aether ), Albert Einstein obtained through the conceptually powerful postulate of the constancy of light velocity in any reference system, the relativistic equations of motion. The kinematic basis of Special relativity was responsible of several physical paradoxes that accompanied the growing reliability of SR along the XX century. Conversely, in the Micro-quanta paradigm the particle dynamics is directly derived in dynamical conditions from Compton's collisions between particles and the isotropic flux f o of micro-waves filling the space with speed c and energy E o . When considering the proper Doppler function for waves incident forwards and behind any moving particle, the balance between the two opposite momenta gives the momentum predicted by SR and defines also the rest-mass m i of the particle, which results (equivalence mass-energy) to the energy m i c 2 = N i E o , where N i = (s i t o f o ) is the number of quanta colliding simultaneously with the particle during the interaction time t o . In the M-Q paradigm the uniform flux fills everywhere the space, so particles "measure" their effective velocity through the momentum of Compton's collisions. The old inertial frames of reference become unnecessary. Any particle moving uniformly in strait-line is shown to collide with micro-quanta without receiving any net force (Principle of inertia). When the particle velocity is not constant and uniform during the interaction time, the local energy density ' o = f o E o / c gives rise to the inertial forces. Since two particles immersed in the quantum flux always show mutual shielding, they feel a pushing force which is recognised to be the gravitational force. Thus, the concept of "gravitational mass" is discarded. This inevitably requires to re-examine the fundamentals of General relativity which appears inadequate to explain the recent observations of the accelerating universe achieved through the Ia supernovae measurements. Even the Strong nucleonic force and the Weak force on electrons at very short distances are shown to originate from mutual shielding in the M-Q paradigm. Despite micro-quanta are very small, they do not lose the fundamental characteristics of the quantum waves. The very little quantum energy E o = h o n o is coupled to a very little action constant and a very small quantum wavelength l o (of the order of the Planck's length), so that the number of quanta simultaneously incident on a nucleon is about N n »10 50 . This explains why the inertial forces were for three centuries (from Newton up to Einstein) believed to originate from the continuum of space and time, instead of from physical objects.


About the book:
Colonial armies were the focal points for some of the most dramatic tensions inherent in Chinese, Japanese and Western clashes with Southeast Asia. The international team of scholars take the reader on a compelling exploration from Ming China to the present day, examining their conquests, management and decolonization.
The journey covers perennial themes such as the recruitment, loyalty, and varied impact of foreign-dominated forces. But it also ventures into unchartered waters by highlighting Asian use of 'colonial' forces to dominate other Asians. This sends the reader back in time to the fifteenth century Chinese expansion into Yunnan and Vietnam, and forwards to regional tensions in present-day Indonesia, and post-colonial issues in Malaysia and Singapore.
Drawing these strands together, the book shows how colonial armies must be located within wider patterns of demography, and within bigger systems of imperial security and power – American, British, Chinese, Dutch, French, Indonesian, and Japanese - which in turn helped to shape modern Southeast Asia.
Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia will interest scholars working on low intensity conflict, on the interaction between armed forces and society, on comparative imperialism, and on Southeast Asia.


Clinical Condition: Osteoporosis and Bone Mineral Density Variant 1: Asymptomatic BMD screening or individuals with established or clinically suspected low BMD. 1. All women age 65 years and older and men age 70 years and older (asymptomatic screening) 2. Women younger than age 65 years who have additional risk for osteoporosis, based on medical history and other findings. Additional risk factors for osteoporosis include: a. Estrogen deficiency b. A history of maternal hip fracture that occurred after the age of 50 years c. Low body mass (<127 lb or 57.6 kg) d. History of amenorrhea (>1 year before age 42 years) 3. Women younger than age 65 years or men younger than age 70 years who have additional risk factors, including: a. Current use of cigarettes b. Loss of height, thoracic kyphosis 4. Individuals of any age with bone mass osteopenia or fragility fractures on imaging studies such as radiographs, CT, or MRI 5. Individuals age 50 years and older who develop a wrist, hip, spine, or proximal humerus fracture with minimal or no trauma, excluding pathologic fractures 6. Individuals of any age who develop 1 or more insufficiency fractures 7. Individuals being considered for pharmacologic therapy for osteoporosis 8. Individuals being monitored to: a. Assess the effectiveness of osteoporosis drug therapy b. Follow up medical conditions associated with abnormal BMD


Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book†feature provides a new and exciting tool for bibliometric research. Over the last few years, a growing number of books listed on Amazon. com reference Schumpeter in some way. As of May 3, 2007, Amazon listed 8,086 books that in some way refer to Schumpeter. Of these, I currently have names and titles of 3,719 books in the Schumpeter Amazon database. Of these, I have done content-analysis for 1,176 books that make reference to Schumpeter. The main result is that a significant number of the references to Schumpeter are related to creative destruction. The percent of Schumpeter-references where the reference is related to creative destruction is significantly higher for books on business than books on economics. I believe this is a case where market demand reflects intellectual value, even if academic economics has not done much to incorporate Schumpeter's central ideas.


Researchers at Tulane University School of Medicine, led by Dr James Antoon and Dr Barbara Beckman, have characterized two drugs targeting sphingosine kinase (SK), an enzyme involved in cancer growth and metastasis. New treatments specifically attacking cancer cells, but not normal ones, are critical in the fight against cancer. The results, which appear on page 832 of this issue of Experimental Biology and Medicine, demonstrate the role of SK in drug resistance and the therapeutic potential of SK inhibitors. 'Sphingosine kinase is a relatively new molecular target,' says Dr Beckman. 'In this study, we show that overexpression of SK promotes resistance to first-line breast cancer therapies, such as tamoxifen. We further found that treatment with the sphingosine kinase inhibitors SKI-II and ABC294640 induced cell death and blocked drug-resistant tumor growth without similar effects in a model system representing relatively normal breast cells.' Molecular therapies, such as those targeting SK, have the potential to improve treatment response rates while simultaneously decreasing side effects. However, Dr Antoon cautions that 'while these results are promising, further study is needed to fully understand the benefits and risks associated with treating drug-resistant cancer with these SK inhibitors.' Dr Steven R Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Biology and Medicine said 'Dr Antoon, Dr Beckman and colleagues present exciting results indicating the need for further study of inhibitors of sphingosine kinase as promising new cancer treatments'.


Should the state permit anonymous sperm donation? Should brother-sister incest between adults be made criminal? Should individuals over the age of fifty be allowed access to re-productive technologies? Should the state fund abstinence education? One common form of justification that is offered to answer these and a myriad of other reproductive policy questions is concern for the best interests of the children that will result, absent state intervention, from these forms of reproduction. This focus on the Best Interests of the Resulting Child (BIRC) is, on the surface, quite understandable and stems from a transposition of a central organizing principle of family law justifying state intervention - the protection of the best interests of existing children - visible in areas such as adoption, child custody, and child removal. The Article demonstrates that while parallel reasoning is frequently offered (by legislatures, by courts, by commentators, by physicians) to justify state interventions that seek to influence whether, when, and with whom individuals reproduce, such justifications are problematic and misleading. The Article's aim is nothing short of re-writing our way of thinking about the regulation of reproduction.Drawing on insights from bioethics and the philosophy of identity, the Article shows why the BIRC justification, at least stated as such, is problematic both as a normative and constitutional matter: unless the state's failure to intervene would foist upon the child a "life not worth living," any attempt to alter whether, when, or with whom an individual reproduces cannot be justified on the basis that harm will come to the resulting child, since but for that intervention the child would not exist. Nevertheless, the Article shows that BIRC arguments are frequently relied upon by courts, legislatures, and scholars to justify these interventions. At a doctrinal level the Article also shows that this reliance on BIRC justifications is in tension with the implicit rejection of similar reasoning by courts unwilling to recognize wrongful life torts.After demonstrating why the BIRC argument is unworkable as stated, the Article considers three possible reformulations of the argument that would save it, including one that focuses on population welfare. It explains why none of these approaches is persuasive, including by discussing their disturbing implications as to enhancement and eugenics. The Article also briefly discusses how this analysis bears on the constitutionality of these interventions.Once the BIRC justification and its reformulations are shown to be problematic, it becomes apparent that either these forms of reproductive regulation are unjustified or quite different sorts of justifications must be relied on. I briefly plot three such theories, each of which depends on more controversial ideas that the label of "best interests" obfuscates. These theories are examined in-depth in a companion article, Beyond Best Interests, which appears in the April 2012 issue of the Minnesota Law Review and will be uploaded to SSRN soon.There are also two related papers: Rethinking Sperm-Donor Anonymity: Of Changed Selves, Non-Identity, and One-Night Stands, 100 Georgetown Law Review, Vol. 100, 2012, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1961605 and Intentional Diminishment, the Non-Identity Problem, and Legal Liability, Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 60, 2008, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1330504.


Photochemical reactions are of great interest due to their importance in chemical and biological processes. Highly sensitive IR/UV double and triple resonance spectroscopy in molecular beam experiments in combination with ab initio and DFT calculations yields information on reaction coordinates and Intersystem Crossing (ISC) processes subsequent to photoexcitation. In general, molecular beam experiments enable the investigation of isolated, cold molecules without any influence of the environment. Furthermore, small aggregates can be analyzed in a supersonic jet by gradually adding solvent molecules like water. Conclusions concerning the interactions in solution can be derived by investigating and fully understanding small systems with a defined amount of solvent molecules. In this work the first applications of combined IR/UV spectroscopy on reactive isolated molecules and triplet states in molecular beams without using any messenger molecules are presented. Special focus was on excited state proton transfer reactions, which can also be described as keto enol tautomerisms. Various molecules such as 3-hydroxyflavone, 2-(2-naphthyl)-3-hydroxychromone and 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid have been investigated with regard to this question. In the case of 3-hydroxyflavone and 2-(2-naphthyl)-3-hydroxychromone, the IR spectra have been recorded subsequent to an excited state proton transfer. Furthermore the dihydrate of 3-hydroxyflavone has been analyzed concerning a possible proton transfer in the excited state: The proton transfer reaction along the water molecules (proton wire) has to be induced by raising the excitation energy. However, photoinduced reactions involve not only singlet but also triplet states. As an archetype molecule xanthone has been analysed. After excitation to the S2 state, ISC occurs into the triplet manifold leading to a population of the T1 state. The IR spectrum of the T1 state has been recorded for the first time using the UV/IR/UV technique without using any messenger molecules. Altogether it is shown that IR/UV double and triple resonance techniques are suitable tools to analyze reaction coordinates of photochemical processes.


Background: Early diagnosis of septic arthritis (SA) and osteomyelitis (OM) in children is essential to prevent long-term sequelae. The diagnosis for these orthopaedic emergencies can be difficult and challenging especially in infants. Standard blood tests used for diagnosis have a low specificity. Procalcitonin (PCT) is significantly elevated in bacterial infections and remains low in viral infections and inflammatory conditions. Good positive predictive values for PCT have been obtained in various studies used in paediatric infections but limited studies have examined the role in orthopaedic infections. Method: All children under 14 years of age presenting with signs and symptoms of SA or OM from 1 June 2009 to 31 June 2010 were subjected to standard blood tests with the addition of PCT. The definitive diagnosis was made by clinical, surgical and microbiologic data obtained. A cut-off level of 0.2 ng/mL was used. Results: Thirty-three patients were included from which 12 were subdivided into the SA/OM group and 21 into an Other diagnosis group which acted as a control. Of the 12 patients in the SA/OM group, eight patients were diagnosed with SA and four with OM. In the SA/OM group, 11 from 12 patients had an increased PCT level compared to four in the Other diagnosis group. The calculated sensitivity of PCT was 92% with a confidence interval of 62–100%; the specificity was 81% with a confidence interval of 58–95%. In this study the sensitivity of CRP was 100% while the specificity 26%. The positive predictive value for PCT in this study was 73% and the negative predictive value was 94%. The accuracy for PCT in SA and OM in this study was 85%. Conclusions: The calculated sensitivity and specificity in this study has proved that PCT testing can aid in the diagnosis of SA/OM in children by using 0.2 ng/mL as cut-off level. PCT is also more specific for bacterial infections in this study compared to CRP. Staphylococcus aureus is the most common organism isolated in this series with no resistant organisms seen. Further research is needed with larger numbers to conclusively prove that this specific cut-off for PCT is significant.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the prevalence of prostatitis on histopathological evaluation of prostatic tissue in men without urinary retention.

DESIGN, SETTING AND SUBJECTS
The clinical data and histopathology reports of men seen from January 1999 through March 2009 at our institution were analysed using Student's t-test, the Mann-Whitney test and Fisher's exact test where appropriate. Values were expressed as means, medians and ranges (p<0.05 accepted as statistically significant).

OUTCOME MEASURES
Data collected included patient age, duration of lower urinary tract symptoms and hospitalisation, findings on digital rectal examination, prostate volume, haemoglobin concentration, serum creatinine and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels, and histological findings.

RESULTS
Prostatic tissue of 385 men without urinary retention at presentation was obtained via biopsy (48.3% of cases), transurethral prostatectomy (62.9%), retropubic prostatectomy (6.8%) or radical prostatectomy (28.3%). On histological examination, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) was found to be present in 213 patients (55.3%) and adenocarcinoma of the prostate (ACP) in 172 (44.7%). Histological prostatitis was present in 130 patients (61.0%) with BPH and 51 (29.7%) with ACP (p<0.001). A previous study of 405 men presenting with urinary retention at our institution showed histological prostatitis in 98/204 (48.0%) with BPH and in 51/201 (25.4%) with ACP. The group of men with BPH alone had a significantly lower mean serum PSA at presentation (4.5 ng/ml, range 0.3 - 20.8 ng/ml) compared with the group with BPH and prostatitis (11.2 ng/ml, range 0.2 - 145 ng/ml, p=0.011). The mean PSA level at presentation did not differ significantly between the group with ACP only (40.9 ng/ml, range 0 - 255 ng/ml) and the group with ACP plus prostatitis (1 672 ng/ml, range 0.3 - 38 169 ng/ml, p=0.076).

CONCLUSIONS
Among men presenting without urinary retention, histological prostatitis was significantly more prevalent in those with BPH than in those with ACP (61% v. 30%), similar to the previous study of men presenting with retention at our institution, in which histological prostatitis was significantly more prevalent in BPH than in ACP (48% v. 25%). This finding suggests that histological prostatitis is not significantly associated with the causation of ACP or urinary retention. Serum PSA at presentation was significantly higher in the group with BPH plus prostatitis compared with BPH alone, but not in the group with ACP plus prostatitis compared with ACP alone.


Americans have been inundated with financial scandals at large corporations during the past two years. In many cases, unethical behavior and poor oversight of corporate management are to blame. But a deeper look reveals that the flawed structure of the corporate income tax has been a key driver of corporate waste and inefficiency. The tax code distorts financial and investment decisions and spurs executives to hunt for tax shelters.Three fundamental flaws in the corporate income tax are behind the distortions and tax shelters. The first flaw is that the corporate income tax rate is very high. Currently, the U.S. statutory corporate rate is the second highest among the 30 major industrial countries. That high rate reduces investment, encourages firms to move profits abroad, and provides incentives to push the legal margins of the tax code.The second flaw is that the corporate tax base of net income or profits is inherently complex because it relies on concepts such as capital gains and capitalization of long-lived assets that are difficult to consistently account for in a tax system. Costs of capitalized assets are deducted through depreciation, amortization, and other rules. The tax rules for capitalized assets and capital gains are repeatedly exploited in corporate tax shelters. These rules also cause economic distortions as they interfere with capital investment, business reorganizations, and other decisions. Capital gains taxation and capitalization would be eliminated under a replacement "cash-flow" tax system.The third flaw is the gratuitous inconsistency of the tax code. Examples include the different tax treatment given to debt and equity and the different rules imposed on corporations and the half dozen other types of businesses. Such inconsistencies played a key role in the tax shelters exploited by Enron and other firms. Worse, they have created large costs to the economy by distorting capital markets and channeling investment into less productive uses. A cash-flow tax would eliminate these distortions and put all businesses and investments on an equal footing.This study discusses the most serious corporate tax distortions and examines fundamental reforms to fix them. One option examined is a full repeal of the corporate tax. Another option is replacing the corporate income tax with a cash-flow tax. The study concludes that implementing a cash-flow business tax would build on President Bush's tax cuts, help prevent future Enron-style scandals, and permanently boost the economy.


The notion that the immune system can prevent the emergence and growth of cancer is a century old. Despite considerable evidence in animal models that "cancer vaccines" induce effective immunological responses against tumors, the development of efficacious vaccines to treat cancer in humans has been much slower and far less promising. In the past decade, however, several vaccine strategies have made considerable clinical advancement, renewing the interest and confidence that a human cancer vaccine will be successfully launched. This article highlights several vaccines that have advanced to later stages of clinical and commercial development. Emphasis is on the development of vaccines using the cancer patient's own autologous antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Mature APCs play a pivotal role in initiating an immune response, especially T-cell mediated immunity, which is critical for the effective killing of tumor cells. Employing APCs in a vaccine to present tumor-associated antigens and stimulate cytotoxic T-cells will enhance the clinical efficacy of the cancer vaccine. As personalized therapeutic products, autologous APC vaccines pose interesting clinical development, regulatory approval, and commercial manufacturing and distribution challenges. Strategies to address some of these challenges are discussed.


From methodological approaches adapted from Newman and Webb (1994) the co-researchers set out to test Garrison's (1992) critical theory and self-directed learning, which models the process through problem identification, definition, exploration, evaluation/applicability and integration. Critical thinking in the co-researcher's enquiry was understood to mean thinking as a rational response to questions that cannot be answered definitively or for which all relevant information may be unavailable. It seeks to arrive at the best possible justifiable hypothesis or conclusions.

Learning through taught case studies was compared to gaming and simulation. A sample of ninety student learners responded to a questionnaire comprising seventeen questions structured on a 5 point Likert scale. The responses were then analysed using SPSS principal component factor analysis to identify relationships and establish how far they correspond to Garrison's stages of self-directed learning.

It was found that there was a preference for gaming and simulation. The respondents had a perception of case study learning that resulted in low scores for the critical thinking stages of problem integration and problem description. The impact of the two mediums has other ramifications in that the study gave support to the view described by McHardy (2000) that learning from case studies can be thought of as "facts gleaned from yesterday's problems". A game in comparison can provide a variety of learning outcomes. Participants can therefore learn about the quality of their decisions directly and see how these decisions can impact on the constraints imposed on future decisions.

This self generated outcome orientation and learner perception of control could provide an explanation why virtual environments better supported problem description and problem integration stages of critical thinking, that is 'intrinsic motivation' in the learning process.


Since 2003 the History Department of the University of the Free State (UFS) has been offering a third-year module on oral history. From the time of its inception this module has aimed at providing a balance between oral history theory and methodology, thus enabling students to master and apply the oral history technique in practice. Students are taught how to manage an oral history project from start to finish. The teaching approach is resourcebased with a stronger emphasis on learning than on teaching, which is in line with a current international trend towards constructivism. During the past nine years it has become clear to the authors that apart from the theoretical knowledge gained by the students, various skills are also taught and developed in the practical session of this module. This is clearly revealed when the questionnaires, interviews and student evaluation forms are assessed and analysed. The main purpose of this article is to identify and interpret certain trends and patterns regarding skills development as both a direct and an indirect outcome of this oral history module by using data obtained from the mentioned questionnaires, interviews and evaluation forms. The article addresses certain questions which are crucial for understanding the potential and many possibilities of oral history as a tool for skills development in a transforming society. It is argued that oral history's potential creates new methodological approaches for developing a diversity of new skills required by a changing social environment. Understanding this potential and its possibilities provides a basis for further developing oral history as a skills development tool, which may also lead to the improvement and expansion of existing oral history courses offered at tertiary level.


New discoveries in materials on the nanometer- length scale are expected to play an important role in addressing ongoing and future challenges in the field of communication. Devices and systems for ultra-high-speed short- and long-range communication links, portable and power-efficient computing devices, high-density memory and logics, ultra-fast interconnects, and autonomous and robust energy scavenging devices for accessing ambient intelligence and needed information will critically depend on the success of next-generation emerging nanomaterials and devices. This article presents some exciting recent developments in nanomaterials that have the potential to play a critical role in the development and transformation of future intelligent communication networks.


Born in 1932 to Croatian American farmers in the Santa Clara Valley town of Cupertino, Betty Van Dyke saw her fertile home ground transformed, in a few decades, from seemingly endless orchards to unrelenting urban sprawl. As the energetic matriarch of a popular family-run fruit-growing business, she has since participated in the region's organic agricultural renaissance, overseeing one of the first California operations to grow and dry fruit organically (becoming certified in 1986), and playing an active role in the early days of California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF). And as a member of one of the region's noted surfing families, she built this thriving business while sustaining her love affair with Pacific ocean waves. Van Dyke Ranch sits at the base of the Gavilan Mountains in Gilroy, Santa Clara County, on a southern exposure perfectly suited for growing sweet, flavorful Blenheim apricots and Bing cherries. The ranch produces fresh fruit in season and dried apricots, cherries, nectarines, peaches, pears, and persimmons throughout the year. (A rarer delicacy available to a few farmers'-market patrons are home-grown capers, the pickled flower buds of plants propagated from a thirty-year-old bush planted by Betty's mother.) Betty Van Dyke and her three sons took over from her father in the mid-1970s. While son Peter and various grandchildren now carry most of the day-to-day responsibility for the ranch, Betty still holds down two weekly farmers'-market booths, and commutes frequently to Gilroy from her Santa Cruz home to help with ranch work during busy seasons. Sarah Rabkin interviewed Betty Van Dyke at Rabkin's Soquel home on April 16, 2008. A lively storyteller with an easy smile, Van Dyke shared memories of picking apricots on her grandfather's farm as a small child, working and playing alongside migrant dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma and Arkansas, discovering surfing as a college student in the 1950s, and running an evolving Van Dyke Ranch.


The need to protect national critical infrastructure has led to the development of a threat analysis framework. The threat analysis framework can be used to identify the elements required to quantify threats against critical infrastructure assets and provide a means of distributing actionable threat information to critical infrastructure entities for the protection of infrastructure assets. This document identifies and describes five key elements needed to perform a comprehensive analysis of threat: the identification of an adversary, the development of generic threat profiles, the identification of generic attack paths, the discovery of adversary intent, and the identification of mitigation strategies. Threat Analysis Framework 4 INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK


We present some related families of orthogonal polynomials of a discrete variable and survey some of their applications in the study of (distance-regular) graphs and (completely regular) codes. One of the main peculiarities of such orthogonal systems is their non-standard normalization condition, requiring that the square norm of each polynomial must equal its value at a given point of the mesh. For instance, when they are defined from the spectrum of a graph, one of these families is the system of the predistance polynomials which, in the case of distance-regular graphs, turns out to be the sequence of distance polynomials. The applications range from (quasi-spectral) characterizations of distance-regular graphs, walk-regular graphs, local distance-regularity and completely regular codes, to some results on representation theory.


Research universities fill a variety of roles within contemporary society (Goldstein et al., 1995). Arguably the most important role has been providing advanced education to a segment of the population so that they have the requisite know-how to enter the professions. A second has been to generate knowledge through research that leads to scientific progress over time and indirectly often leads to productivity growth in the economy. These have been the traditional missions of research universities since their founding in the late nineteenth century.


In a 2003 report, International Evidence on Food Consumption Patterns, ERS economists estimated income and price elasticities of demand for broad consumption categories and food categories across 114 countries using 1996 International Comparison Program (ICP) data. This report updates that analysis with an estimated two-stage demand system across 144 countries using 2005 ICP data. Advances in ICP data collection since 1996 led to better results and more accurate income and price elasticity estimates. Low-income countries spend a greater portion of their budget on necessities, such as food, while richer countries spend a greater proportion of their income on luxuries, such as recreation. Low-value staples, such as cereals, account for a larger share of the food budget in poorer countries, while high-value food items are a larger share of the food budget in richer countries. Overall, low-income countries are more responsive to changes in income and food prices and, therefore, make larger adjustments to their food consumption pattern when incomes and prices change. However, adjustments to price and income changes are not uniform across all food categories. Staple food consumption changes the least, while consumption of higher-value food items changes the most.


This report presents a review and comparison (commonality and differences) of three cross-sector cyber security standards and an internationally recognized information technology standard. The comparison identifies the security areas covered by each standard and reveals where the standards differ in emphasis. By identifying differences in the standards, the user can evaluate which standard best meets their needs. For this report, only cross-sector standards were reviewed.


Dataset shift is a common problem in predictive modeling that occurs when the joint distribution of inputs and outputs differs between training and test stages. Covariate shift, a particular case of dataset shift, occurs when only the input distribution changes. Dataset shift is present in most practical applications, for reasons ranging from the bias introduced by experimental design to the irreproducibility of the testing conditions at training time. (An example is -email spam filtering, which may fail to recognize spam that differs in form from the spam the automatic filter has been built on.) Despite this, and despite the attention given to the apparently similar problems of semi-supervised learning and active learning, dataset shift has received relatively little attention in the machine learning community until recently. This volume offers an overview of current efforts to deal with dataset and covariate shift. The chapters offer a mathematical and philosophical introduction to the problem, place dataset shift in relationship to transfer learning, transduction, local learning, active learning, and semi-supervised learning, provide theoretical views of dataset and covariate shift (including decision theoretic and Bayesian perspectives), and present algorithms for covariate shift. Contributors [cut for catalog if necessary]Shai Ben-David, Steffen Bickel, Karsten Borgwardt, Michael BrA?ckner, David Corfield, Amir Globerson, Arthur Gretton, Lars Kai Hansen, Matthias Hein, Jiayuan Huang, Choon Hui Teo, Takafumi Kanamori, Klaus-Robert MA?ller, Sam Roweis, Neil Rubens, Tobias Scheffer, Marcel Schmittfull, Bernhard SchA¶lkopf Hidetoshi Shimodaira, Alex Smola, Amos Storkey, Masashi Sugiyama


The authors present a methodological review of empirical program evaluation research in the area of intimate partner violence prevention. The authors adapted and utilized criterion-based rating forms to standardize the evaluation of the methodological strengths and weaknesses of each study. The findings indicate that the limited amount of empirical research related to intimate partner violence prevention demonstrates some consistent methodological strengths and limitations. The authors conclude with a presentation of recommendations for further research in the area of intimate partner violence prevention.


Regular physical exercise has beneficial effects in many human disease states, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and depression. Exercise training of genetically modified mouse models may provide insight into the molecular mechanisms that underlie the beneficial effects of exercise. Presently, there is relatively little understanding of the normal physiology of mouse exercise. In this paper, we describe a novel computerized voluntary wheel-running system capable of recording and analyzing individual wheel rotations. Using this system, we demonstrate that C57BL/6 mice run considerable distances during the night in short bouts and at a preferred speed: the cruising speed. We find that the vast majority of running occurs around this cruising speed, which is close to the maximum speed at which the animal can run but is significantly higher than the average speeds recorded by simple digital odometers. We describe how these parameters vary with exercise training and demonstrate marked sex differences in the patterns of voluntary exercise. The results of this study have important implications for the design and interpretation of both voluntary and forced exercise experiments in mouse models. The novel parameters described provide more physiological quantitative measures of voluntary exercise activity and training and will extend the physiological utility of exercise training as a phenotyping tool in genetic mouse models.


In an information society, wealth and power are increasingly linked to access to knowledge and control over telecommunications media. Struggles over access to digital media in particular are presenting uniquely contentious First Amendment problems. The creation of about 200 million blogs worldwide has triggered legal action and legislative reform aimed at alleged trademark infringement by bloggers and cybersquatters. Authors and publishers seek expanded rights to curtail unauthorized digital uses for which they are not being compensated, and have sued Google for digitizing and indexing tens of millions of the world's books and periodicals. Finally, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other Internet and e-commerce firms are trying to beat back plans by the nation's cable and telephone companies to finance upgrades to their networks by levying discriminatory fees on search engines, as well as on Internet content providers and aggregators. Internet users have often been on the losing side of these controversies, as the economic model increasingly adopted by the Supreme Court is that in order to reward corporations for collecting or disseminating information, its free flow in print and electronic form must often be impeded, and its cost to the user increased. This model threatens to empower broadband companies, copyright holders, and trademark owners to restrict the right of the public to utilize digital media for purposes of free speech. This Article argues that digital media such as the broadband Internet, the World Wide Web, and the blogosphere should be at least as free as the press was at the time that the First Amendment was ratified in 1791. In other words, bloggers could not be enjoined or fined for tarnishing the trademarks or goodwill of their employers or other corporations, for trademark law did not prohibit trademark dilution or other non-competitive uses in 1791. Similarly, Web sites and search engines such as Google could not be restrained from digitizing, indexing, and providing short previews of books and periodicals, for copyright law in 1791 permitted abridgements, adaptations, reviews, and other value-added uses of copyrighted work. Finally, the cable and telephone companies would not be at liberty to levy discriminatory access fees upon digital media outlets, for their ability to monopolize local telecommunications networks is a legacy of anticompetitive state and federal exclusion of new entrants over the past century in violation of the First Amendment. The framers of the First Amendment would no more have countenanced an attempt by Congress and the federal courts to allow private entities enjoying the fruits of past official monopolies to restrain the freedom of speech over an essential facility such as the Internet than they would have endorsed the creation of a series of local book publishing or newspaper monopolies. The framers presumed that information would flow freely and cheaply to citizens and consumers, enabling them to ascertain their true interests without difficulty, and to make decisions accordingly. As Congress considered ratifying the First Amendment, Madison declared that by it the liberty of the press is expressly declared to be beyond the reach of this Government. The Supreme Court has construed most of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights to provide at least as much protection against infringement as existed under the common law in 1791. Opponents of net neutrality requirements have opined that the First Amendment rights of corporate owners of telecommunications infrastructure should trump the First Amendment rights of individual speakers and users of telecommunications media. Under this view, the foremost free speech interests on the Internet are those of broadband infrastructure owners, rather than the senders and recipients of Internet speech such as Web content, blogs, eBooks, or online videos. This line of argument misconceives both the distinctive character of the Internet and the purposes for which the First Amendment was enacted. The Internet and its principal applications such as the World Wide Web grew as rapidly as they did because they were designed to be open, flexible, and uninhibited by gatekeeper control. The high degree of concentration in the broadband market, the inability of many consumers to switch broadband carriers, and plans by broadband providers to discriminate among different sources of Internet content combine to threaten the Internet as an open, decentralized, low-cost communications platform. The First Amendment is not offended by regulations designed to ensure that firms awarded local telecommunications monopolies by the government exercise their power to restrict mass communication in a manner consistent with the public interest. The overriding purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure that readers, listeners, and viewers of public debates obtain access to a wide variety of facts and opinions so as to be able to discern the truth as best they can. Even privileging the speaker's perspective, surely the First Amendment interests of the creators, editors, and aggregators of Web sites, blogs, and online videos - rather than the supposed speech interests of the owners of the wires along which content travels - should prevail in the event of a conflict.


The Asian Journal of Comparative Law (AsJCL) is the leading forum for research and discussion of the law and legal systems of Asia. It embraces work that is theoretical, empirical, socio-legal, doctrinal, or comparative that relates to one or more Asian legal systems, as well as work that compares one or more Asian legal systems with non-Asian systems. The Journal seeks articles which display an intimate knowledge of Asian legal systems, and thus provide a window into the way they work in practice. The AsJCL is an initiative of the Asian Law Institute (ASLI), an association established by 13 leading law schools in Asia and with a rapidly expanding membership base across Asia and in other regions around the world.


In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as "adverbial" modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and postnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language families. Cinque argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in favor of XP-raising--a conclusion also supported by evidence from other language families. After developing this framework for analyzing the syntax of adjectives, Cinque applies it to the syntax of English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two sources of adjectives.


Peanut is gaining importance more for its confectionery and nutritive values than for its oil content around the world. Improving confectionery qualities is an added advantage for farming community. Hence, in the present study, multivariate analytical tools were used to identify parents with complementary traits for using them in breeding programme. PCA revealed contribution of pod yield, 100-seed weight, oil content, and O/L ratio towards variance. Pod yield was positively associated with 100-seed weight, oil and protein contents. Oil content had weak association with protein content, oleic acid and O/L ratio. UPGMA clustering revealed grouping of cultivars based on origin and its area recommendation. Cultivars superior for yield (GPBD-4, M-28-2 and JL 24) and confectionery traits (S-230 and Dh-8) were identified. Strong positive relation of yield with confectionery traits indicates possibility of breeding high yielding confectionery grade cultivars. Multivariate analytical tools could be used to identify parents for location specific breeding for improvement of Confectionary traits.


The monochromatic tree partition number of an $r$-edge-colored graph $G$, denoted by $t_r(G)$, is the minimum integer $k$ such that whenever the edges of $G$ are colored with $r$ colors, the vertices of $G$ can be covered by at most $k$ vertex-disjoint monochromatic trees. In general, to determine this number is very difficult. For 2-edge-colored complete multipartite graph, Kaneko, Kano, and Suzuki gave the exact value of $t_2(K(n_1,n_2,\cdots,n_k))$. In this paper, we prove that if $n\geq 3$, and $K(n,n)$ is 3-edge-colored such that every vertex has color degree 3, then $t_3(K(n,n))=3$.


Justice Roger J. Traynor is best known for his judicial innovations in the fields of conflict of laws, product liability, and civil procedure. However, few would trace Traynor's roots to the field of tax law. In the late 1930's Traynor collaborated with Stanley S. Surrey, our nation's foremost authorities on federal tax law, and together they called for a substantial transformation of existing mechanisms for settling tax disputes. At that crucial time in history, high marginal tax rates intensified the friction between taxpayers and the government, boosted litigation and multiplied the number of tax controversies. Traynor and Surrey developed the idea of "preventive tax policy" aimed at preventing controversies from arising, and where they cannot be prevented, reducing the area in which they occur. This paper explores the joint project of these extraordinary men in its historical context and its implementation in Justice Traynor's understanding of tax adjudication. Their proposal serves as proxy for the evolution of tax avoidance in a time when tax acts became complex followed by frequent tax revisions enacted in response to tax evasion. It offers valuable guidance for reducing the complexity and vagueness inherent in our tax system, and for improving the relationship between taxpayers and government. Some of today's most important mechanisms to prevent tax avoidance originated in Traynor & Surrey's proposal, such as private letter ruling and advanced pricing agreements. Their proposition for a single court of tax appeals continues to be deliberated.


No doubt: Mathematics has become a technology in its own right, maybe even a key technology. Technology may be defined as the application of science to the problems of commerce and industry. And science? Science maybe defined as developing, testing and improving models for the prediction of system behavior; the language used to describe these models is mathematics and mathematics provides methods to evaluate these models. Here we are! Why has mathematics become a technology only recently? Since it got a tool, a tool to evaluate complex, "near to reality" models: Computer! The model may be quite old - Navier-Stokes equations describe flow behavior rather well, but to solve these equations for realistic geometry and higher Reynolds numbers with sufficient precision is even for powerful parallel computing a real challenge. Make the models as simple as possible, as complex as necessary - and then evaluate them with the help of efficient and reliable algorithms: These are genuine mathematical tasks.


In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.


Part One: Theoretical and methodological issues ~ Community research: opportunities and challenges ~ Lisa Goodson and Jenny Phillimore A critical communicative perspective on community research: Reflections on experiences working with Roma in Spain ~ Aitor Gomez and Terese Sorde Marti Authenticity and validity in community research: Looking at age discrimination and urban social interactions in the UK ~ Andrew Clark, Caroline Holland and Richard Ward Community research with Gypsies and Travellers in the UK: Highlighting and negotiating compromises to reliability and validity ~ Philip Brown, Lisa Scullion and Pat Niner Involving community researchers in refugee research in the UK~ Gaby Atfield, Kavita Brahmbhatt, Hameed Hakimi and Therese O'Toole Universities as agents in the empowerment of local communities in Germany, Finland and Russia ~ Patricia Bell, Melinda Madew, Tony Addy and Sakari Kainulainen Data analysis and community research: Capturing reality on housing estates in Bradford, UK ~ Heather Blakey, EJ Milne and Louise Kilburn Participation in community research: Experiences of community researchers in HIV/AIDS research in South Africa ~ Maretha Visser Part Two: Ethics, power and emotion ~ Power and participation in community research: Community profilinh in Italy ~ Terri Mannarini The pedagogy of community research: Moving out of the ivory tower and into community organisations in Canada ~ Karen Schwartz, Adje van de Sande and Ann Marie O'Brien Engaging community researchers in evaluation: Looking at the experiences of community partners in school based projects in the US ~ Jenifer Cartland, Holly Ruch-Ross and Maryann Mason Are we recovery orientated? An Australian encounter of learning from people with lived experience ~ Lisa Brophy, Melissa Petrakis, Liam Buckley, Matthew Scott, Jayne Lewis, Nadine Cocks, Michael Stylianou and Kieran Halloran Ethics in community research: Reflections from ethnographic research with First Nations people in the US ~ Barbara Kawulich and Tamra Ogletree Avoiding best being the enemy of good: using peer interviewer methods for community research in place-based settings in Australia ~ Deborah Warr, Rosey Mann and Richard Williams Part Three: Managing the research process ~ Mental health service users and carers as researchers: reflections on a qualitative study of citizens' experiences of compulsory mental health laws in Northern Ireland ~ Damien Kavanagh, Gavin Davidson, Jim Campbell, Martin Daly and Moira Harper Community organisation and community research: Women's struggle for food security in India ~ Janki Andharia Community researchers in an adolescent risk reduction intervention in Botswana: Challenges and opportunities ~ Bagele Chilisa and Rapelang Chilisa Recruitment and capacity building challenges in participatory research involving young people in Northern Ireland ~ Claire McCartan, Dirk Schubotz and Stephanie Burns Translating lives: Cross language community research with Polish migrants in the UK ~ Bogusia Temple and Katarzyna Koterba Mentoring refugee community researchers in the UK: An empowerment tool? ~ Patricia A. Jones and Ricky Joseph.


Smarter Tools STGP 2300 uses an adapter that makes it possible to operate an engine on three different fuels Propane, Natural Gas, and Gasoline.


Wharton, Thomas. The Fathomless Fire . Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2012. Print. In the first book of The Perilous Realm fantasy trilogy for young adults, The Shadow of Malabron (2010), Will Lightfoot travels to the city of Fable in the land of Story and he is told that it "is not just a world with stories in it,… this world is story" (60).  In this place, Will learns about his own special talents and discovers that he must play his part in the story that is unfolding around him if there is to be any chance of averting catastrophe.  Together with his friend Rowen, her loremaster grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake, and a wolf named Shade, Will undertakes a perilous journey in the hopes that he can help his new friends and find his own way home. The second book of the trilogy, The Fathomless Fire (2012) , picks up the adventures of Will, Rowen, and Shade where The Shadow of Malabron left off.  Will returns to the land of Story only to discover that his past exploits have become the stuff of legend, but that the land of Story is imperilled because one story is growing so powerful that it is changing and warping everything, even the past, and there is now a very real risk that this dark story will become the only story "everywhere and for ever.  No one will remember that there was ever anything else before, or imagine that things might be different" (325). This novel is recommended for young adults (16+).  This is an intriguing book for those who are interested in the idea that we are each, as individuals, the product of the stories (or histories) that we tell ourselves and others, and that we have the power to change the narrative.  Thomas Wharton has imagined a complex world of adventure, but one in which meanings can be both unfathomable and unstable.  Like many of the books in this category, "The Perilous Realm" series can be understood by young adult readers but will offer greater depth to moremature and knowledgeable readers. Follow the links below to view my interview with Thomas Wharton videotaped for The Deakin Review of Children's Literature in December 2012 . In this interview, the author discusses two of his earlier novels – Icefields (1995) and The Logogryph (2004) – before turning to the first two books in his The Perilous Realm trilogy: The Shadow of Malabron (2010) and The Fathomless Fire (2012). ¤ Access the interview here:  http://youtu.be/aRUVHma7ZS4 Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Linda Quirk Linda taught courses in Multicultural Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become the Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta.  Her favourite children's book to teach is Hana's Suitcase, not only because Hana's story is so compelling, but because the format of this non-fiction book teaches students of all ages about historical investigation and reveals that it is possible to recover the stories of those who have been forgotten by history. For another perspective on this novel, please see the review by Lissa Davies in The Deakin Review of Children's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2012).


WINNER OF THE 2015 EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes. In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the perk and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy. Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands. "Mr. Mercedes" is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable."


In the last two decades Latin America has experienced a significant resurgence of democracy, yet efforts to strengthen the independence of the judiciary, largely focused on institutional reforms of the judiciary itself, have been disappointing. It is apparently not enough to construct appropriate judicial machinery. How can one keep the nation's politicians from trying to control the judges? Through a wide-ranging historical and comparative method that starts with the debate in ancient China over law and morality, builds on insights from observations of contemporary Islamic courts, and surveys the development of institutional protections for judicial independence in the United States, France, and England, this article seeks to explore the culture of judicial independence by asking what the political and social logic in favor of and opposed to judicial independence is. This article seeks to contribute to the cultural approach, first by understanding the enduring strength of the opposing culture, the culture supporting political control over the courts, and second, by exploring the argument that a belief in law's ability to transform society characterizes cultures supporting reasonable levels of judicial independence. If belief in transformative law is an important feature of the culture of judicial independence, then perhaps that belief can be deployed against the perennial claims for political control. Strategies designed to strengthen belief in transformative law by improving the effectiveness of laws intended to be transformative, it is argued, could be promising ways of supplementing institutional reforms by increasing cultural support for judicial independence.


With the increase use of portable devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), laptops, voice and data integrated cell phones and many more, there is a need of wireless communication method using air as the medium to transmit and receive information between terminals. Radio waves propagate from transmitting antenna and travel through free space undergoing reflections, diffractions and scattering. They are greatly affected by ground terrain, the atmosphere and the objects in their path like buildings, bridges, hills etc. Nowadays, the existence of a direct line of sight path between the transmitter and the receiver is unlikely. These multiple phenomena are responsible for most of the characteristic features like the quality of the received signal. In the above case propagation is mainly due to reflection and cattering from the buildings and by diffraction. So, in practice the transmitted signal arrives at the receiver via several paths with different time delays creating a multi path situation at the receiver, these multipath waves with randomly distributed amplitudes and phases combine to give a resultant signal that fluctuates in time and space. This phenomenon of random fluctuations in received signal level is termed as fading. The existing demodulation techniques like FM, AM will determine the signal from the received signal based on the mean distance method, which cannot provide the desired level of BER, which fails in proper estimation under high fading and high Doppler-Shift effect. SOLUTION: This project provides the implementation of an enhancement to the demodulation technique using Bayesian approach for the physical layer simulation of a General Packet Radio System (GPRS) considering variable Rician fading and variable Doppler-Shift effect for an AWGN channel. The system performance is evaluated based on Bit Error Rate (BER) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for the realized GPRS system. Matlab platform is used for the implementation, analysis of the proposed system with for functional verification in terms of BER and SNR. We have showed the comparative difference between the theoretical calculation of QPSK signal and to the values obtained by our program. The values show difference up to 0.4 db for a 1000 bit random vector. Moreover, we also compared with QAM demodulation technique in MATLAB code to show difference up to 1.4 db for a 1000 bit vector. These results signify better performance of the system as it has saved bandwidth.


In an increasing globalized society, the number of professionals, including teachers working in foreign countries has increased. Additionally, the growing diversity in U.S. schools today and the added challenge of equipping students with 21st century skills has necessitated the recruitment of international teachers in U.S. public schools. Although state agencies use the recruitment of international teachers as a way to enhance the global awareness of high school graduates and specifically their knowledge of other cultures, little is known about international teachers' transition to teaching in the U.S. This study aims at enhancing an understanding of the experiences of international teachers in U.S. public schools in order to interrogate transitional challenges and ruminate on implications for educational leadership. Using a narrative research design eight teachers narrate their stories of transition, adjustment and negotiation. These stories inform the reader about the different identity transitional resources that international teachers utilize as they negotiate who they are as teachers in a foreign space.


In December 2012, the exuberant video "Gangnam Style" became the first YouTube clip to be viewed more than one billion times. Thousands of its viewers responded by creating and posting their own variations of the video--"Mitt Romney Style," "NASA Johnson Style," "Egyptian Style," and many others. "Gangnam Style" (and its attendant parodies, imitations, and derivations) is one of the most famous examples of an Internet meme: a piece of digital content that spreads quickly around the web in various iterations and becomes a shared cultural experience. In this book, Limor Shifman investigates Internet memes and what they tell us about digital culture. Shifman discusses a series of well-known Internet memes -- including "Leave Britney Alone," the pepper-spraying cop, LOLCats, Scumbag Steve, and Occupy Wall Street's "We Are the 99 Percent." She offers a novel definition of Internet memes: digital content units with common characteristics, created with awareness of each other, and circulated, imitated, and transformed via the Internet by many users. She differentiates memes from virals; analyzes what makes memes and virals successful; describes popular meme genres; discusses memes as new modes of political participation in democratic and nondemocratic regimes; and examines memes as agents of globalization. Memes, Shifman argues, encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general and of the participatory Web 2.0 culture in particular. Internet memes may be entertaining, but in this book Limor Shifman makes a compelling argument for taking them seriously.


When working directly with trauma survivors, healthcare professionals are likely to become attached and involved with clients and their lived experience. Due to the cumulative exposure to clients' traumatic stories, healthcare professionals often experience a phenomenon known as vicarious trauma. For this study I conducted six one-to-one, semi-structured qualitative interviews, ranging in length from fifteen to thirty minutes. The research findings indicated five major themes: background, experience with vicarious trauma, feelings and emotions, coping techniques and implications for future  students. Findings suggest that vicarious trauma is common among healthcare practitioners who work with trauma survivors. Unfortunately, currently there is a limited amount of research regarding why vicarious trauma is such an unrepresented aspect of the profession. Findings from this research study suggest a need to add self-care and trauma training to educational programs for healthcare students. Early prevention of vicarious trauma will prepare more resilient healthcare professionals. In turn, these professionals will be able to provide better care for clients in the future.


Abstract. We use the EMAC (ECHAM/MESSy Atmospheric Chemistry) global model with the aerosol module MADE (Modal Aerosol Dynamics model for Europe, adapted for global applications) to quantify the impact of transport emissions (land transport, shipping and aviation) on the global aerosol. We consider a present-day (2000) scenario according to the CMIP5 (Climate Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) emission data set developed in support of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Fifth Assessment Report. The model takes into account particle mass and number emissions: The latter are derived from mass emissions under different assumptions on the size distribution of particles emitted by the three transport sectors. Additional sensitivity experiments are performed to quantify the effects of the uncertainties behind such assumptions. The model simulations show that the impact of the transport sectors closely matches the emission patterns. Land transport is the most important source of black carbon (BC) pollution in the USA, Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, contributing up to 60–70% of the total surface-level BC concentration in these regions. Shipping contributes about 40–60% of the total aerosol sulfate surface-level concentration along the most-traveled routes of the northern Atlantic and northern Pacific oceans, with a significant impact (~ 10–20%) along the coastlines. Aviation mostly affects aerosol number, contributing about 30–40% of the particle number concentration in the northern midlatitudes' upper troposphere (7–12 km), although significant effects are also simulated at the ground, due to the emissions from landing and take-off cycles. The transport-induced perturbations to the particle number concentrations are very sensitive to the assumptions on the size distribution of emitted particles, with the largest uncertainties (about one order of magnitude) obtained for the land transport sector. The simulated climate impacts, due to aerosol direct and indirect effects, are strongest for the shipping sector, in the range of −222.0 to −153.3 mW m −2 , as a consequence of the large impact of sulfate aerosol on low marine clouds and their optical properties.


Traffic signal control was first invented in 1868 in Great Britain. Then, it has quickly spread across many other countries, what are now usually developed countries. Therefore, during a long history of development, traffic signals usually have been dealing with traffic in which four-wheel vehicles play an important role in motorised traffic. However, as a result of an unequal development among countries, many Motorcycle Dependent Cities (MDCs) nowadays still exist mostly in the developing countries such as: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), New Delhi (India), Taipei (Taiwan), Bangkok (Thailand), etc. In these cities, motorcycles play an important role in motorised traffic. Because motorised traffic dominated by motorcycles was born later than car traffic, the complete application of traffic signals from developed countries, which usually deals with four-wheel vehicles, to these specific traffic conditions of two-wheel vehicles is usually ineffective. In practice, it has been causing many traffic problems at traffic signals. To solve problems at traffic signals in MDCs, this study analysed the applicability of the German standard "Guidelines for Traffic Signals" (RiLSA, edition 2009) to establish a draft of Guidelines for Traffic Signals in MDCs. In order to achieve the goals and objectives, some contents of RiLSA needed to be modified, in which the minor modifications are directly written in the draft of Guidelines for Traffic Signals in MDCs. This study, therefore, focuses on the major modifications of the intersection layout engineering design, the signal program design, and the traffic signal control strategies. However, the four criteria: (i) traffic safety, (ii) traffic flow quality, (iii) environmental impacts, and (iv) economics are always considered when modifying any content of RiLSA, in which the first two criteria play an important role in MDCs. And overall, the traffic regulation at traffic signals has to obey the following priority in order: (i) pedestrians, (ii) cyclists, (iii) public transport, and (iv) motorised traffic. For the intersection layout engineering design, it is necessary to take not only motorised traffic but also public transport, pedestrian traffic, and cycle traffic into account as a whole. However, the layouts for cycle traffic and pedestrian traffic can be applied from RiLSA. Therefore, some modifications on the intersection layouts are implemented for motorised traffic and public transport, in which the major aim is firstly to give priority to public transport, and secondly to give priority to motorcycles in motorised traffic. For the signal program elements, unlike some available researches that consider only the equivalent factor converting motorcycles into passenger car units, this study has dealt with a series of the signal program elements such as cycle time, green time, amber time, intergreen time, etc., in which a new concept of saturation flow was used. This concept results from the homogeneous motorcycle traffic saturation flow and the homogeneous car traffic saturation flow, and of course this saturation flow depends on the motorcycle traffic volume as well as car traffic volume on the approach. It means that the saturation flow is not fixed as the homogeneous car or motorcycle saturation flow, but it varies depending on the proportion of motorcycles and cars in the traffic flow. From this new concept of the saturation flow, the formulas calculating the cycle time and the green time were formed. For the last two signal program elements, the amber time and the intergreen time were calculated based on the German method in which the positions of the stop-lines, the speeds as well as the deceleration rate of vehicles are taken into account. For the traffic signal control strategies, according to RiLSA, there are three macroscopic control levels and three microscopic control levels, in which the microscopic control levels are activated from the macroscopic control levels. However, in MDCs, counting the number of vehicles requires too much effort or it seems to be impossible with conventional technologies. Therefore, only the macroscopic control level "time-dependent signal program selection (A1)" can be applied to MDCs. From this macroscopic control level, two microscopic control levels (fixed-time signal program (B1), and signal program adaption including green time adjustment (B2), phase swapping (B3), demand phase (B4), and time-offset adjustment (B5)) are activated in MDCs because the fixed-time signal program is always easily implemented, and the signal program adaption does not require efforts in counting the number of vehicles. Instead, it only requires detecting vehicles, and this is possible for two-wheel vehicles. The last microscopic control level, the signal program formation (B6), should not be applied to MDCs because it requires much effort in collecting traffic data online. After having the results for some modifications, a draft of new "Guidelines for Traffic Signal in MDCs" was compiled. It includes six chapters: (0) Introduction, (1) Basic Principles, (2) Signal Program Design, (3) Interrelationships between Traffic Signal Control and Road Engineering Design, (4) Control Strategies, (5) Technical Design. Besides, it also has three annexes: Annex 1: Details on the Traffic Load, Annex 2: Traffic Flow Quality, and Annex 3: Traffic Engineering Calculation. After testing this study at some signalised intersections in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, these guidelines will be considered to be a foundation for establishing a Vietnamese Standard for Traffic Signals. The necessary "Formal Right Agreement" between the German Forschungsgesellschaft fur Strasen- und Verkehrswesen FGSV (Road and Transport Research Association) and the Vietnamese Ministry of Transport is in the approval process. Finally, also other MDCs, might consider applying this standard.


This paper studies the behavior of recoveries from recessions across 59 advanced and emerging market economies over the past 40 years. Focusing specifically on the performance of output after the recession trough, we find little or no difference in the pace of output growth across types of recessions. In particular, banking and financial crisis do not affect the strength of the economic rebound, although these recessions are more severe, implying a sizable output loss. However, recovery does change with some characteristics of recession. Recoveries tend to be faster following deeper recessions, especially in emerging markets, and tend to be slower following long recessions. Most recessions are associated with a slowing, if not outright decline in house prices, but recessions with large declines in house prices also tend to have slower recoveries. Long recessions and those associated with poor housing-market outcomes can lead to sustained output losses relative to pre-crisis trends. Consistent with microeconomic studies showing permanent income loss to job-losing workers during recessions, we find that the sustained deviation in output from trend is associated with a reduction in labor input, especially linked to declines in employment and labor-force participation following recessions. On net, our results imply that the output/employment gap following a severe, long recessions is considerably smaller than is typically assumed by standard macro models, which in turn may have substantial implications for macroeconomic policy during recoveries.