Background. Mapping disease-specific instruments into generic health outcomes or utility values is an expanding field of interest in health economics. This article constructs an algorithm to translate the modified Rankin scale (mRS) into EQ-5D utility values. Methods. mRS and EQ-5D information was derived from stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) patients identified as part of the Oxford Vascular study (OXVASC). Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to predict UK EQ-5D tariffs from mRS scores. An alternative method, using multinomial logistic regression with a Monte Carlo simulation approach (MLogit) to predict responses to each EQ-5D question, was also explored. The performance of the models was compared according to the magnitude of their predicted-to-actual mean EQ-5D tariff difference, their mean absolute and mean squared errors (MAE and MSE), and associated 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Out-of-sample validation was carried out in a subset of coronary disease and peripheral vascular disease (PVD) patients also identified as part of OXVASC but not used in the original estimation. Results. The OLS and MLogit yielded similar MAE and MSE in the internal and external validation data sets. Both approaches also underestimated the uncertainty around the actual mean EQ-5D tariff producing tighter 95% CIs in both data sets. Conclusions. The choice of algorithm will be dependent on the study aim. Individuals outside the United Kingdom may find it more useful to use the multinomial results, which can be used with different country-specific tariff valuations. However, these algorithms should not replace prospective collection of utility data.


This paper presents a system aimed at mobile robot operations in space: we discuss an interface which receives and analyzes images sent by a rover operating in a distant environment. We are particularly interested in long-duration space missions, where rovers interact with human operators on Earth. The position estimates are presented to the operator so as to increase situational awareness and prevent loss of orientation. The system detects mountains in images and automatically searches for mountain peaks in a given topographic map. We introduce our mountain detector algorithm and present a large number of illustrative results from images collected on Earth and on the Moon (by the Apollo 17 mission). We present an algorithm for position estimation which uses statistical descriptions of measurements to produce estimates, and discuss results for the Pittsburgh East and Dromedary Peak areas. The implemented system achieves better estimation performance than any competing method due to our quantitative approach and better time performance due to our pre-compilation of relevant data.


Abstract Measurement of growth performances in fish is carried out in stressful and unnatural environment. The purpose of the present investigation was to compare the effect of four different water-borne anesthetic agents. The fish (Ave. wt. 400.3±7.12 g) were divided into four groups in the glass tanks (80×48×30 cm) containing 80 L of dechlorinated bore water. For the first group we used clove oil (CO) and anesthetic agents used for other three groups were as follows: second group- lidocaine 1% (LC), III groupisoflourane (IF), IV group-halothane (HT). During experiment, water quality parameters (to, pH, О2, and NO3) were recorded. The desired concentration of anesthetics was established andinduction time, maintenance and recovery time were recorded. In two groups out of four (LC and HT) time of induction was longer approximately with 1 minute and time of recovery was shorter with 30 seconds in comparison with other two groups (CO and IF) where the time for both was 3 minutes. It could be concluded that the anesthetic time for each of the protocols used was about 4-5 minutes and allowed to measure the growth performance. An effective and safe agent is 1% lidocaine used as a water-based anesthetic at 100 mg.L-1. Isoflurane can be used with caution in small carp because there is a risk of overdose. We recommend the anesthetic clove oil protocol.


This demonstration highlights some emerging capabilities for incremental speech understanding and processing in virtual human dialogue systems. This work is part of an ongoing effort that aims to enable realistic spoken dialogue with virtual humans in multi-party negotiation scenarios (Pluss et al., 2011; Traum et al., 2008b). These scenarios are designed to allow trainees to practice their negotiation skills by engaging in face-to-face spoken negotiation with one or more virtual humans.


Discontinuities can appear in different fields of mechanics. Some examples where discontinuities arise are more obvious such as the formation of cracks. Other sources of discontinuities are less apparent such as interfaces between different materials. Furthermore continuous fields with steep gradients can also be considered as discontinuous fields. This work aims at the inclusion of arbitrary discontinuities within the finite element method. Although the finite element method is the most sophisticated numerical tool in modern engineering, the inclusion of discontinuities is still a challenging task. Traditionally within finite the framework of FE methods discontinuities are modeled explicitely by the construction of the mesh. Thus, when a fixed mesh is used, the position of the discontinuity is prescribed by the location of interelement boundaries and not by the physical situation. The simulation of crack growth requires a frequent adaption of the mesh and that can be a difficult and computationally expensive task. Thus a more flexible numerical approach is needed which leads to the mesh-independent representation of the discontinuity. A challenging field where the accurate description of discontinuities is of vital importance is the modeling of failure in engineering materials. The load capacity of a structure is limited by the material strength. If the load limit is exceeded failure zones arise and increase. Representative examples of failure mechanisms are are cracks in brittle materials or shear bands in metals or soils. Failure processes are often accompanied by a strain softening material behaviour (decreasing load carrying capacity with increasing strain at a material point). It is known that the inclusion of strain softening material behaviour within a continuum description requires regularization techniques to preserve the well- posedness of the governing equations. One possibility is the consideration of non-local or gradient terms in the constitutive equations but these approaches require a sufficiently fine discretization in the localization zone, which leads to a high numerical effort. If the extent of the failure zone and the failure process to the point of the development of discrete cracks is considered it seems reasonable to include strong discontinuities. In the framework of fracture mechanics the inclusion of displacement jumps is intuitively comprehensible. However, the modeling of localized failure processes demands the consideration of inelastic material behaviour. Cohesive zone models represent an approach which is especially suited for the incorporation within the finite element framework. It is supposed that cohesive tractions are transmitted between the discontinuity surfaces. These tractions are constitutively prescribed by a phenomenological traction separation law and thus allow for the modeling of different inelastic mechanisms, like micro-crack evolution, initiation of voids, plastic flow or crack bridging. The incorporation of a displacement discontinuity in combination with a cohesive traction separation law leads to a sound model to describe failure processes and crack propagation. Another area where the existence of discontinuities is not as obvious is the occurence of material interfaces, inclusions or holes. The accurate modeling of such internal interfaces is important to predict the mechanical behaviour of components. The present discontinuity is of different nature: the displacement field is continuous but there is a jump in the strains, which is denoted by the expression weak discontinuity. Usually in FE methods material interfaces are taken into account by the mesh construction. But if the structure exhibits multiple inclusions of complex geometry it can be advantageous if the interface does not have to be meshed. And when we look at at problems where the interface moves with time, e. g. phase transformation, the mesh-independent modeling of the weak discontinuities naturally holds major advantages. The greatest challenge in the modeling of discontinuities is their incorporation into numerical methods. The focus of the present work is the development, analysis and application of a finite element approach to model mesh-independent discontinuities. The method shall be robust and flexible to be applicable to both, strong and weak discontinuities.


Finite Mathematics and Calculus with Applications, Tenth Edition by Lial, Greenwell, and Ritchey, is our most applied text to date, making the math relevant and accessible for students of business, life science, and social sciences. Current applications, many using real data, are incorporated in numerous forms throughout the book, preparing students for success in their professional careers. With this edition, students will find new ways to help them learn the material, such as Warm-Up Exercises and added "help text" within examples. NOTE: Before purchasing, check with your instructor to ensure you select the correct ISBN. Several versions of Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products exist for each title, and registrations are not transferable. To register for and use Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products, you may also need a Course ID, which your instructor will provide. Used books, rentals, and purchases made outside of Pearson If purchasing or renting from companies other than Pearson, the access codes for Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products may not be included, may be incorrect, or may be previously redeemed. Check with the seller before completing your purchase. Note: You are purchasing a standalone product; MyMathLab does not come packaged with this content. MyMathLab is not a self-paced technology and should only be purchased when required by an instructor. Students, if interested in purchasing this title with MyMathLab, ask your instructor for the correct package ISBN and Course ID. Instructors, contact your Pearson representative for more information. If you would like to purchase both the physical text and MyMathLab, search for: 013398107X / 9780133981070 Finite Mathematics and Calculus with Applications Plus MyMathLab with Pearson eText -Access Card Package Package consists of: 0321431308 / 9780321431301 MyMathLab -Glue-in Access Card 0321654064 / 9780321654069 MyMathLab Inside Star Sticker 0321979400 / 9780321979407 Finite Mathematics and Calculus with Applications


We present a new Bayesian skill rating system which can be viewed as a generalisation of the Elo system used in Chess. The new system tracks the uncertainty about player skills, explicitly models draws, can deal with any number of competing entities and can infer individual skills from team results. Inference is performed by approximate message passing on a factor graph representation of the model. We present experimental evidence on the increased accuracy and convergence speed of the system compared to Elo and report on our experience with the new rating system running in a large-scale commercial online gaming service under the name of TrueSkill.


aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of obesity. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of obesity.


Proteomic profiles of myocardial tissue in two different etiologies of heart failure were investigated using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)/Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS). Right atrial appendages from 10 patients with hemodynamically significant isolated aortic valve disease and from 10 patients with isolated symptomatic coronary heart disease were collected during elective cardiac surgery. As presented in an earlier study by our group (Baykut et al., 2006), both disease forms showed clearly different pattern distribution characteristics. Interesting enough, the classification patterns could be used for correctly sorting unknown test samples in their correct categories. However, in order to fully exploit and also validate these findings there is a definite need for unambiguous identification of the differences between different etiologies at molecular level. In this study, samples representative for the aortic valve disease and coronary heart disease were prepared, tryptically digested, and analyzed using an FT-ICR MS that allowed collision-induced dissociation (CID) of selected classifier masses. By using the fragment spectra, proteins were identified by database searches. For comparison and further validation, classifier masses were also fragmented and analyzed using HPLC-/Matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight/time-of-flight (TOF/TOF) mass spectrometry. Desmin and lumican precursor were examples of proteins found in aortic samples at higher abundances than in coronary samples. Similarly, adenylate kinase isoenzyme was found in coronary samples at a higher abundance. The described methodology could also be feasible in search for specific biomarkers in plasma or serum for diagnostic purposes.


"The Dietary Guidelines for Americans identify dietary recommendations designed to prevent and/or manage chronic disease among all persons two years of age and older. This study sought to determine dietary adherence among a convenience sample of community living older adults in central North Carolina to the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Selected variables of the Assessment of Dietary Intake, Health Status, and Biomarkers of Nutritional Status of Older Adults study (n = 101), a study that assessed nutritional status among older community living adults in central North Carolina, were evaluated. Eighty-eight participants met the study inclusion criteria (mean age 73.6+6.3 years). A food frequency questionnaire assessed dietary intake. Specific nutrient and dietary component recommendations outlined in the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were compared with calculated dietary intake data to determine percent of sample adherences to and percent of recommended intakes consumed by this sample. The majority of the sample was female (84%) and Caucasian (74%), obtained a high school education or its equivalent (GED) (78%), reported a monthly income that was above the poverty threshold (78%), was overweight/obese (70%), reported being food secure (85%), and reported themselves as being more highly physically active (52%). Sixty-nine percent of this sample reported at least one nutrition-related chronic condition and 42% at least two. Total sample percent of sample adherences to daily dietary recommendations of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans were lowest for whole grain (6%) and potassium (6%) recommendations, and highest for fat-related recommendations [total fat (58%), saturated fat (58%), and cholesterol (94%)]. Weekly vegetable subgroup percent of sample adherences were lowest for legumes (1%), orange (17%), and dark green (24%) vegetables, and highest for starchy (43%) and "other" vegetables (63%). This research indicates nutrition education efforts should target the need for community living older adults in central North Carolina to increase whole grain intake, improve vegetable variety, and decrease sodium intake to improve dietary adherence to the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Other messages are needed to emphasize the need for older adults in central North Carolina to further decrease their total fat and saturated fat intakes."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


Our large brain, long life span and high fertility are key elements of human evolutionary success and are often thought to have evolved in interplay with tool use, carnivory and hunting. However, the specific impact of carnivory on human evolution, life history and development remains controversial. Here we show in quantitative terms that dietary profile is a key factor influencing time to weaning across a wide taxonomic range of mammals, including humans. In a model encompassing a total of 67 species and genera from 12 mammalian orders, adult brain mass and two dichotomous variables reflecting species differences regarding limb biomechanics and dietary profile, accounted for 75.5%, 10.3% and 3.4% of variance in time to weaning, respectively, together capturing 89.2% of total variance. Crucially, carnivory predicted the time point of early weaning in humans with remarkable precision, yielding a prediction error of less than 5% with a sample of forty-six human natural fertility societies as reference. Hence, carnivory appears to provide both a necessary and sufficient explanation as to why humans wean so much earlier than the great apes. While early weaning is regarded as essentially differentiating the genus Homo from the great apes, its timing seems to be determined by the same limited set of factors in humans as in mammals in general, despite some 90 million years of evolution. Our analysis emphasizes the high degree of similarity of relative time scales in mammalian development and life history across 67 genera from 12 mammalian orders and shows that the impact of carnivory on time to weaning in humans is quantifiable, and critical. Since early weaning yields shorter interbirth intervals and higher rates of reproduction, with profound effects on population dynamics, our findings highlight the emergence of carnivory as a process fundamentally determining human evolution.


Pakistan is the fourth largest cotton producing country. Cotton and cotton products contribute about 3.2% to GDP and 60-65 % to foreign exchange earnings of the country. In this dissertation three important aspects of cotton production and marketing are focused, i.e. adoption and impact of Bt cotton, land rights' influence on farmers' decision to invest in land improvement measures and efficiency level, and cotton farmers' market participation. Cross sectional data was collected from 325 cotton farmers in Pakistan during 2007. The Propensity score matching approach was employed to estimate the adoption and impact of Bt cotton technology. The empirical results indicate that Bt cotton adopter farmers were getting 50-60 kgs per acre higher yields, household income was higher in the range of Rupees 16500-17000, while the demand for pesticide was less in the range of 0.62-0.68 liters. The probability of adopters being poor was found to be lower by 13-14%. The land rights results indicate that owner cultivated lands exhibit the higher levels of technical, allocative and economic efficiency compared to fixed-renters and sharecroppers. The net returns are positive and significant for the farmers selling at market compared to farmers selling at farm gate. From the empirical results it can be concluded that targeting the small scale farmers with Bt cotton technology can help them a way out of poverty, as well as land reforms in favour of tenants and small scale farmers can help them increase their efficiency level. Similarly, regarding farmers' market participation, small-scale farmers can be linked to the markets by investing in human capital, improving the village infrastructure and readdressing the formal credit programme.


Artificial intelligence (AI) will have profound societal effects. It promises potential benefits (and may also pose risks) in education, defense, business, law and science. In this article we explore how AI is likely to affect employment and the distribution of income. We argue that AI will indeed reduce drastically the need of human toil. We also note that some people fear the automation of work by machines and the resulting of unemployment. Yet, since the majority of us probably would rather use our time for activities other than our present jobs, we ought thus to greet the work-eliminating consequences of AI enthusiastically. The paper discusses two reasons, one economic and one psychological, for this paradoxical apprehension. We conclude with discussion of problems of moving toward the kind of economy that will be enabled by developments in AI.


The Winter 2013-14 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.Dedicated to Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), a former guest editor, this issue of Ploughshares features a short remembrance of the Irish master by the poet Joyce Peseroff. The prose has a particularly international flavor, from Andrew Foster Altschul's story "Embarazada," about a fraught relationship between a Peruvian waitress and an American tourist, to "498," about a soldier caught in the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. Robert Anthony Seigel's Plan B essay describes his years as a tour guide for Japanese visitors to New York, and Jennifer Acker celebrates the work of the Australian writer Shirley Hazzard.The Winter issue also features poetry by Kevin Young, Linda Bamber, Michael Mlekoday, and Carl Dennis, among many others; a newly discovered poem by Alan Dugan; and the winners of the Emerging Writer's Contest.


A management research project submitted in
fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of
Master of Business Administration, (MBA), School Of
Business, University Of Nairobi


Buildings consume more than one third of the world?s total primary energy. Weather plays a unique and significant role as it directly affects the thermal loads and thus energy performance of buildings. The traditional simulated energy performance using Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) weather data represents the building performance for a typical year, but not necessarily the average or typical long-term performance as buildings with different energy systems and designs respond differently to weather changes. Furthermore, the single-year TMY simulations do not provide a range of results that capture yearly variations due to changing weather, which is important for building energy management, and for performing risk assessments of energy efficiency investments. This paper employs large-scale building simulation (a total of 3162 runs) to study the weather impact on peak electricity demand and energy use with the 30-year (1980 to 2009) Actual Meteorological Year (AMY) weather data for three types of office buildings at two design efficiency levels, across all 17 ASHRAE climate zones. The simulated results using the AMY data are compared to those from the TMY3 data to determine and analyze the differences. Besides further demonstration, as done by other studies, that actual weather has a significant impact on both the peak electricity demand and energy use of buildings, the main findings from the current study include: 1) annual weather variation has a greater impact on the peak electricity demand than it does on energy use in buildings; 2) the simulated energy use using the TMY3 weather data is not necessarily representative of the average energy use over a long period, and the TMY3 results can be significantly higher or lower than those from the AMY data; 3) the weather impact is greater for buildings in colder climates than warmer climates; 4) the weather impact on the medium-sized office building was the greatest, followed by the large office and then the


This article examines the current public discourse on sexual assault in the military through the complementary lenses of behavioral economics and the law. The article evaluates the "crisis" narrative central to this discourse and suggests it is not supportable by the best available data. Moreover, the article suggests that in driving potentially counterproductive public policy initiatives, this narrative is harmful to victims of sexual assault. The article recommends several practical steps the Department of Defense might take in the near-term to expose and rebut this harmful narrative and forestall these potentially counterproductive public policy initiatives. These steps include a reappraisal of the rhetoric senior DoD officials employ when speaking publically about the very real problem of sexual assault in the military, as well as advocating for a "whole of government" approach to gathering data on sexual assault and its victims. The article suggests the evidence-based prevention and response solutions impelled by these data hold out the best hope for reducing the incidence of sexual assault in the military.


This short paper will be presented at a panel on "Legal Positivism: For and Against?" at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools in New Orleans, January 9, 2010. It attempts to identify the theoretical considerations that explain why legal positivism is the dominant view among legal philosophers. Three are identified: (1) positivism gives the best account of the ordinary understanding of law; (2) its account of law is the one deployed fruitfully in all empirical social science; and (3) it does not involve incredible or controversial metaphysical commitments. The paper concludes by noting that the competitors to legal positivism have narrowed considerably in recent years. American Legal Realism (as I have argued elsewhere) depends on a positivist theory of law, rather than being in competition with it. The most sophisticiated version of natural law theory, that of John Finnis, has conceded the main points in dispute to the legal positivists, and simply proposes changing the subject. And Dworkin's theory fails along the three dimensions of theoretical adequacy noted. The paper concludes that the appeal of Dworkin's theory to constitutional lawyers in the Anglophone world and elsewhere is due entirely to the (correct) perception that his theory makes moral considerations relevant to the resolution of momentous constitutional questions. Unfortunately, so do the positivist theories of Hart and Raz. Only atrocious public relations for legal positivism--aided and abetted by decades of misrepresentations by Dworkin – has led so many casual consumers of the jurisprudential literature to think otherwise. Thinking morality relevant to constitutional adjudication is no reason not to be a legal positivist.


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—This paper presents the results of empirical research conducted during March to September 2009. The study focused on the influence of virtual research and development (R&D) teams within Malaysian manufacturing small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The specific objective of the study is better understanding of the application of collaborative technologies in business, to find the effective factors to assist SMEs to remain competitive in the future. The paper stresses to find an answer for a question " Is there any relationship between company size, Internet connection facility and virtuality? ". The survey data shows SMEs are now technologically capable of performing the virtual collaborative team, but the infrastructure usage is less. SMEs now have the necessary technology to begin the implementation process of collaboration tools to reduce research and development (R&D) time, costs and increase productivity. So, the manager of R&D should take the potentials of virtual teams into account.


The Complexity of Robot Motion Planning makes original contributions both to robotics and to the analysis of algorithms. In this groundbreaking monograph John Canny resolves long-standing problems concerning the complexity of motion planning and, for the central problem of finding a collision free path for a jointed robot in the presence of obstacles, obtains exponential speedups over existing algorithms by applying high-powered new mathematical techniques.Canny's new algorithm for this "generalized movers' problem," the most-studied and basic robot motion planning problem, has a single exponential running time, and is polynomial for any given robot. The algorithm has an optimal running time exponent and is based on the notion of roadmaps - one-dimensional subsets of the robot's configuration space. In deriving the single exponential bound, Canny introduces and reveals the power of two tools that have not been previously used in geometric algorithms: the generalized (multivariable) resultant for a system of polynomials and Whitney's notion of stratified sets. He has also developed a novel representation of object orientation based on unnormalized quaternions which reduces the complexity of the algorithms and enhances their practical applicability.After dealing with the movers' problem, the book next attacks and derives several lower bounds on extensions of the problem: finding the shortest path among polyhedral obstacles, planning with velocity limits, and compliant motion planning with uncertainty. It introduces a clever technique, "path encoding," that allows a proof of NP-hardness for the first two problems and then shows that the general form of compliant motion planning, a problem that is the focus of a great deal of recent work in robotics, is non-deterministic exponential time hard. Canny proves this result using a highly original construction.John Canny received his doctorate from MIT And is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. The Complexity of Robot Motion Planning is the winner of the 1987 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.


6 Jump down to document THE ARTS CHILD POLICY CIVIL JUSTICE EDUCATION ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS NATIONAL SECURITY POPULATION AND AGING PUBLIC SAFETY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SUBSTANCE ABUSE TERRORISM AND HOMELAND SECURITY TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE WORKFORCE AND WORKPLACE The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world.


Markovian processes have long been used to model stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning has emerged as a framework to solve sequential planning and decision-making problems in such environments. In recent years, attempts were made to apply methods from reinforcement learning to construct decision support systems for action selection in Markovian environments. Although conventional methods in reinforcement learning have proved to be useful in problems concerning sequential decision-making, they cannot be applied in their current form to decision support systems, such as those in medical domains, as they suggest policies that are often highly prescriptive and leave little room for the user's input. Without the ability to provide flexible guidelines, it is unlikely that these methods can gain ground with users of such systems.

This paper introduces the new concept of non-deterministic policies to allow more flexibility in the user's decision-making process, while constraining decisions to remain near optimal solutions. We provide two algorithms to compute non-deterministic policies in discrete domains. We study the output and running time of these method on a set of synthetic and real-world problems. In an experiment with human subjects, we show that humans assisted by hints based on non-deterministic policies outperform both human-only and computer-only agents in a web navigation task.


With the flair for narrative and the meticulous research that readers have come to expect, Andrew Marr turns his attention to the monarch - and to the monarchy, chronicling the Queen's pivotal role at the centre of the state, which is largely hidden from the public gaze, and making a strong case for the institution itself. Arranged thematically, rather than chronologically, Marr dissects the Queen's political relationships, crucially those with her Prime Ministers; he examines her role as Head of the Commonwealth, and her deep commitment to that Commonwealth of nations; he looks at the drastic changes in the media since her accession in 1952 and how the monarchy - and the monarch - have had to change and adapt as a result. Indeed he argues that under her watchful eye, the monarchy has been thoroughly modernized and made as fit for purpose in the twenty-first century as it was when she came to the throne and a 'new Elizabethan age' was ushered in.


Sheet music for "By What Lost Campfire," for mezzo soprano. The poem is written by Arthur Sampley and the music is by George Minter. The lyrics are "By what lost camp fire/ what lone height did deserts streching [sic] far, what/ comrades faces framed in light guide western star./ Up slopes I shall not/ climb again down trails the grasses hide, past/ camps where sleeping friends have lain too late to/ ride. to one dark peak a-/ gainst the sky on which the faint trail ends./ guide star and camp fire till I spy those fire lit friends."


This paper provides the first comprehensive assessment of the Federal Judicial Center's long-anticipated study of motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim after Iqbal v. Ashcroft. Three primary assessments are made of the FJC's study. First, there are reasons to be concerned that the study may be providing an incomplete picture of actual Rule 12(b)(6) activity. Even if the failure to capture all relevant motion activity was a non-biased error, the inclusiveness problem is consequential. Because the study was designed to compare over time the filing and grant rate of Rule 12(b)(6) motions, the size of the effect of the Court's cases turns on the amount of activity found. Second, even if concerns are set aside that the collected data may be incomplete, it misreads of the FJC's findings to conclude that the Court's decisions are having no effect on dismissal practice. The FJC found that after Iqbal, a plaintiff is twice as likely to face a motion to dismiss. This sizeable increase in rate of Rule 12(b)(6) motion activity represents a marked departure from the steady filing rate observed over the last several decades and means, among other consequences, added costs for plaintiffs who have to defend more frequently against these motions. The data regarding orders resolving dismissal motions even more dramatically shows the consequential impacts of the Court's cases. There were more orders granting dismissal with and without leave to amend, and for every case category examined. Moreover, the data show that after Iqbal it was much more likely that a motion to dismiss would be granted with leave to amend (as compared to being denied) both overall and in the three largest case categories examined (Civil Rights, Financial Instruments and Other). Employment Discrimination, Contract and Torts all show a trend of increasing grant rates. In sum, in every case type studied there was a higher likelihood after Iqbal that a motion to dismiss would be granted. Third, because of inherent limitations in doing empirical work of this nature, the cases may be having effects that the FJC researchers were unable to detect. Comparing how many motions were filed and granted pre-Twombly to post-Iqbal cannot tell us whether the Court's cases are deterring some claims from being brought, whether they have increased dismissals of complaints on factual sufficiency grounds, or how many meritorious cases have been dismissed as a result of the Court's stricter pleading filter. Ultimately, perhaps the most important lesson to take away from this last assessment of the FJC's report is that empirical study cannot resolve all of the policy questions that Twombly and Iqbal raise.


The issue of rebranding institutions of higher education has attracted little attention in scholarly publications. However, intense competition in the higher education market has forced institutions to modify elements of their brands. The current study seeks to shed light on the challenges of undertaking a rebranding exercise in an institution of higher education in Botswana, a context which is under researched. The purpose of the current study is to establish the perceptions of students of the University of Botswana regarding its brand equity following the rebranding exercise. A structured questionnaire was administered to a sample of 336 University students majoring in business. Overall, the results showed that the brand equity of the new logo was lower than that of the old logo. The results of the paired t-tests revealed that students tend to recall and recognize the old logo more than the new logo. Students are also attracted, affectionate and attached to the old logo more than the new one. Since rebranding can erode some of the important aspects of an existing brand, it has to be implemented cautiously. Importantly, effective communication is critical to inspire students to embrace the new logo and their perceptions need to be tracked periodically in order to establish whether the desired brand image has been generated.


This rich collection of writings by pioneering digital artist Mark Amerika mixes (and remixes) personal memoir, net art theory, fictional narrative, satirical reportage, scholarly history, and network-infused language art. META/DATA is a playful, improvisatory, multitrack "digital sampling" of Amerika's writing from 1993 to 2005 that tells the early history of a net art world "gone wild" while simultaneously constructing a parallel poetics of net art that complements Amerika's own artistic practice. Unlike other new media artists who may create art to justify their theories, Amerika documents the emergence of new media art forms while he creates them. Presenting a multifaceted view of the digital art scene on subjects ranging from interactive storytelling to net art, live VJing, online curating, and Web publishing, Amerika gives us "Spontaneous Theories," "Distributed Fictions" (including his groundbreaking GRAMMATRON, the helpful "Insider's Guide to Avant-Garde Capitalism," and others), the more scholarly "Academic Remixes," "Net Dialogues" (peer-to-peer theoretical explorations with other artists and writers), and the digital salvos of "Amerika Online" (among them, "Surf-Sample-Manipulate: Playgiarism on the Net," "The Private Life of a Network Publisher," and satirical thoughts on "Writing as Hactivism"). META/DATA also features a section of full-color images, including some of Amerika's most well-known and influential works. Provocative, digressive, nomadic, and fun to read, Amerika's texts call to mind the cadences of Gertrude Stein, the Beats, cyberpunk fiction, and even The Daily Show more than they do the usual new media theorizing. META/DATA maps the world of net culture with Amerika as guide and resident artist. A Leonardo Book


The past is prologue, writes Shakespeare in The Tempest. And there seems no better expression to capture the theme of my essay on searching the future of kinesiology in its recent past through my lens as a motor development scholar. Using the developmental metaphor of climbing a mountain amidst a range of mountains, the progressing stages of my development and that of kinesiology are recounted. Over the five-plus decades of my growth as an academic and that of kinesiology, I look for the antecedents and the constraints that shape our change and may shape the future of the field of motor development and kinesiology.


This study looked at differences in homework experiences (i.e., stress, problems, difficulty, and parental involvement) of fourth and fifth grades based on sex and diagnosis of learning disability. The differences in primary and secondary homework helper and their frustration and time spent on activities after school were also explored. Qualitative analyses were conducted for students with a learning disability and their parents, and MANOVA and Chi-square analyses were conducted for males and females without a learning disability and their mothers. Results indicated that males experience more stress during homework than females; males play more minutes of video games after school than females; and females read (not assigned as homework) after school more than males. No significant differences were found based on homework experiences (i.e., problems, difficulty, and parental involvement), primary and secondary homework helper and their frustration, and time spent on activities after school (i.e., homework, watching television, playing video games, reading, playing sports, and playing outside).


Retaining all the beloved qualities of Huston Smith's classic "The Religions of Man" and the current fully revised and updated "The World's Religions," this stunning pictorial presentation refines the text to its wonderful essentials. In detailed, absorbing, richly illustrated, and highly readable chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and primal religions, we find refreshing and fascinating presentations of both the differences and the similarities among the worldwide religious traditions. The approach is at once classic and contemporary, retaining all the empathy, eloquence and erudition that millions of readers love about the earlier editions, while being edited and designed for a contemporary general readership. This delightful marriage of winsome text and remarkable pictures vividly brings to life the scope and vision of Huston Smith's expertise and insight.


The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence held its 2001 Fall Symposium Series November 2-4, 2001 at the Sea Crest Conference Center in North Falmouth, Massachusetts. The topics of the five symposia in the 2001 Fall Symposia Series were (1) Anchoring Symbols to Sensor Data in Single and Multiple Robot Systems, (2) Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition, (3) Intent Inference for Collaborative Tasks, (4) Negotiation Methods for Autonomous Cooperative Systems, and (5) Using Uncertainty within Computation. This article contains brief reports of those five symposia.


Abstract. We have used the Global Modeling Initiative chemistry and transport model to simulate the radionuclides radon-222 and lead-210 using three different sets of input meteorological information: 1. Output from the Goddard Space Flight Center Global Modeling and Assimilation Office GEOS-STRAT assimilation; 2. Output from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies GISS II' general circulation model; and 3. Output from the National Center for Atmospheric Research MACCM3 general circulation model. We intercompare these simulations with observations to determine the variability resulting from the different meteorological data used to drive the model, and to assess the agreement of the simulations with observations at the surface and in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere region. The observational datasets we use are primarily climatologies developed from multiple years of observations. In the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere region, climatological distributions of lead-210 were constructed from ~25 years of aircraft and balloon observations compiled into the US Environmental Measurements Laboratory RANDAB database. Taken as a whole, no simulation stands out as superior to the others. However, the simulation driven by the NCAR MACCM3 meteorological data compares better with lead-210 observations in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere region. Comparisons of simulations made with and without convection show that the role played by convective transport and scavenging in the three simulations differs substantially. These differences may have implications for evaluation of the importance of very short-lived halogen-containing species on stratospheric halogen budgets.


As the complexity of embedded systems continuously rises, their development becomes more and more challenging. One technique to cope with this complexity is the employment of virtual prototypes. The virtual prototypes are intended to represent the embedded system's properties on different levels of detail like register transfer level or transaction level. Virtual prototypes can be used for different tasks throughout the development process. They can act as executable specification, can be used for architecture exploration, can ease system integration, and allow for pre- and post-silicon software development and verification. The optimization objectives for virtual prototypes and their creation process are manifold. Finding an appropriate trade-off between the simulation accuracy, the simulation performance, and the implementation effort is a major challenge, as these requirements are contradictory.
In this work, two new and complementary techniques for the efficient creation of accurate and high-performance SystemC based virtual prototypes are proposed: Advanced Temporal Decoupling (ATD) and Transparent Transaction Level Modeling (TTLM). The suitability for industrial environments is assured by the employment of common standards like SystemC TLM-2.0 and IP-XACT.
Advanced Temporal Decoupling enhances the simulation accuracy while retaining high simulation performance by allowing for cycle accurate simulation in the context of SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupling. This is achieved by exploiting the local time warp arising in SystemC TLM-2.0 temporal decoupled models to support the computation of resource contention effects. In ATD, accesses to shared resource are managed by Temporal Decoupled Semaphores (TDSems) which are integrated into the modeled shared resources. The set of TDSems assures the correct execution order of shared resource accesses and incorporates timing effects resulting from shared resource access execution and resource conflicts. This is done by dynamically varying the data granularity of resource accesses based on information gathered from the local time warp. ATD facilitates modeling of a wide range of resource and resource access properties like preemptable and non-preemptable accesses, synchronous and asynchronous accesses, multiport resources, dynamic access priorities, interacting and cascaded resources, and user specified schedulers prioritizing simultaneous resource accesses.
Transparent Transaction Level Modeling focuses on the efficient creation of virtual prototypes by reducing the implementation effort and consists of a library and a code generator. The TTLM library adds a layer of convenience functions to ATD comprising various application programming interfaces for inter module communication, virtual prototype configuration and run time information extraction. The TTLM generator is used to automatically generate the structural code of the virtual prototype from the formal hardware specification language IP-XACT.
The applicability and benefits of the presented techniques are demonstrated using an image processing centric automotive application. Compared to an existing cycle accurate SystemC model, the implementation effort can be reduced by approximately 50% using TTLM. Applying ATD, the simulation performance can be increased by a factor of up to five while retaining cycle accuracy.


This Article interrogates the sexual morality of Equal Protection. Gender equality jurisprudence reveals the unacknowledged influence of a traditional, heteronormative conception of sexual morality – the sexual double standard – that often sets the parameters of gender equality. Where the Supreme Court frames a gendered law as limiting participation in education, the workplace, or civic life, it tends to apply a demanding form of heightened scrutiny which few gendered laws can survive. Where, on the other hand, it frames a gendered law as governing the consequences of illicit sex, it tends apply what I call the sex discount, replacing the rigorous scrutiny mandated by its public equality cases with an unacknowledged, but much more deferential form of equal protection review. The Court invokes biological differences between men and women to justify this deference. But the sex discount does not genuinely accommodate gender differences regarding pregnancy, sexuality, or parenthood. Courts tend to reject reproductive justifications for inequality in public life; they tend to assume that biological differences are irrelevant when a heterosexual couple is married; they have applied the sex discount to gendered laws that serve no interest in protecting fetal life; and they apply a sex discount in cases of antigay discrimination that do not involve reproductive or sexual behavior. Rather, the sex discount authorizes governments to use gendered laws to enforce traditional gender norms about the morality of sex: to discourage abortion, to allow antigay discrimination, and to "incentivize" heterosexual marriage.


Very often in practice, the problems in software engineering projects seem to have their origins in knowledge sharing difficulties. This creates a need to understand knowledge sharing in the software engineering field better and to find ways to support it. Through an improved understanding of knowledge sharing and especially the problems in it, the targets for support can be determined. By supporting knowledge sharing the maturity of software development processes can be significantly raised. This thesis presents new approaches and offers tools to understand and support knowledge sharing. The main results are the Knowledge Sharing Framework (KSF) as a tool for understanding and the Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language as a tool for supporting knowledge sharing. The purpose of the KSF is to help to identify the current knowledge sharing situation in an organization. This creates the basis for improvement actions in an organization. In this thesis the KSF is utilized in an empirical case study as well as a being framework for understanding differences in knowledge sharing approaches in different software development methods. KSF profiles are used to describe the results of KSF analyses in an illustrative way. After gaining more understanding through defining and using the KSF, the focus is transferred to how to support knowledge sharing. A technique, knowledge sharing patterns, is proposed here to improve existing software development processes with better knowledge sharing properties. Knowledge sharing patterns describe solutions to problems frequently related to the difficulties in knowledge sharing and offer a light-weight mechanism to introduce knowledge sharing sensitive practices in development processes. The knowledge sharing patterns form the Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language that covers several important knowledge sharing practices in a software development organization. The process for creating and evaluating Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language is one of the results. It is a process of creating an organizational pattern language that is applicable also in other contexts. The resulting Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language never will be complete. A pattern language needs to mature and be improved constantly in real-life use. This makes the process of creating a pattern language important. The validation of the KSF was made in industrial case studies. The resulting Knowledge Sharing Pattern Language was validated through justifying the single patterns separately, evaluating the coverage of the language and evaluating the applicability of the Pattern language in an evaluation workshop.


The term 'mash-up' refers to websites that weave data from different sources into new Web services. The key to a successful Web service is to gather and use large datasets and harness the scale of the Internet through what is known as network effects. This means that data sources are just as important as the software that 'mashes' them, and one of the most profound pieces of data that a user has at any one time is his or her location. In the past this was a somewhat fuzzy concept, perhaps as vague as a verbal reference to being in a particular shop or cafe or an actual street address. Recent events, however, have changed this. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton's policy decision to open up military GPS satellite technology for 'dual-use' (military and civilian) resulted in a whole new generation of location-aware devices. Around the same time, cartography and GIScience were also undergoing dramatic, Internet-induced changes. Traditional, resource intensive processes and established organizations, in both the public and private sectors, were being challenged by new, lightweight methods. The upshot has been that map making, geospatial analysis and related activities are undergoing a process of profound change. New players have entered established markets and disrupted routes to knowledge and, as we have already seen with Web 2.0, newly empowered amateurs are part of these processes. Volunteers are quite literally grabbing a GPS unit and hitting the streets of their local town to help create crowdsourced datasets that are uploaded to both open source and proprietary databases. The upshot is an evolving landscape which Tim O'Reilly, proponent of Web 2.0 and always ready with a handy moniker, has labelled Where 2.0. Others prefer the GeoWeb, Spatial Data Infrastructure, Location Infrastructure, or perhaps just location based services. Whatever one might call it, there are a number of reasons why its development should be of interest to those in higher and further education. Firstly, since a person's location is such a profound unit of information and of such value to, for example, the process of targeting advertising, there has been considerable investment in Web 2.0-style services that make use of it. Understanding these developments may provide useful insights for how other forms of data might be used. Secondly, education, particularly research, is beginning to realize the huge potential of the data mash-up concept. As Government, too, begins to get involved, it is likely that education will be expected to take advantage of, and indeed come to relish, the new opportunities for working with data. This TechWatch report describes the context for the changes that are taking place and explains why the education community needs to understand the issues around how to open up data, how to create mash-ups that do not compromise accuracy and quality and how to deal with issues such as privacy and working with commercial and non-profit third parties. It also shows how data mash-ups in education and research are part of an emerging, richer information environment with greater integration of mobile applications, sensor platforms, e-science, mixed reality, and semantic, machine-computable data and speculates on how this is likely to develop in the future.


Abstract While the number of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is expanding rapidly, there currently are relatively few transport projects in the global CDM portfolio. This article examines existing CDM transport projects and explores whether sectoral approaches to the CDM may provide a better framework for transport than the current project‐based CDM. We ask: Would a sectoral approach to the CDM promote the structural change and integrated policymaking needed to achieve sustainable transport policy, making it hence more desirable than the framework of the current project‐based CDM? We conclude that it is possible to design sectoral transport activities within clear project boundaries that fit into a framework of a programmatic or policy‐based CDM. Although we are able to ascertain that transport policy research yields several modelling tools to address the methodological requirements of the CDM, it becomes apparent that sectoral approaches will accentuate transport projects' problems regarding high complexity and related uncertainties. The CDM may need new rules to manage these risks. Nonetheless, sectoral approaches allow the scaling up of activities to a level that affects long‐term structural change.


Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Selected by "The New York Times Book Review" as a Notable Book of the Year Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind. In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the "Long Telegram" and the "X Article," which set forward the strategy of containment that would define U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a prizewinning historian, and would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics, and culture during the last half of the twentieth century. Now the full scope of Kennan's long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today's most important Cold War scholars.Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost thirty years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan's death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.We see Kennan's insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.


The time when "fashion" was defined by French designers whose clothes could be afforded only by elite has ended. Now designers take their cues from mainstream consumers and creativity is channeled more into mass-marketing clothes than into designing them. Indeed, one need look no further than the Gap to see proof of this. In The End of Fashion, Wall Street Journal, reporter Teri Agins astutely explores this seminal change, laying bare all aspects of the fashion industry from manufacturing, retailing, anmd licensing to image making and financing. Here as well are fascinating insider vignettes that show Donna Karan fighting with financiers, the rivalry between Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, and the commitment to haute conture that sent Isaac Mizrahi's business spiraling.


Purpose: This study was conducted to audit
prophylactic antibiotic use and to quantify the rate of wound infection. Methods:
Across-sectional prospective study was conducted in the Obstetrics and
Gynecology Department in Khartoum Teaching Hospital, Sudan during March 1st
to 31st October 2010. All Patients (aged >18 years) were included. Results:
Overall 725 patients were included. The performed surgical procedures were 751;
of these 578 (76.9%) were Caesarean sections. Overall rate of wound infection was
7.8%. The rate of wound infection among patients operated on for caesarean section
and abdominal hysterectomy was 8.3%, and 9.2%, respectively. Multivariate
logistic analysis showed that body mass index [BMI] ≥ 30 kg/m2 OR
2.1, 95% CI (1.1 - 4.0), (P = 0.019) was the major independent risk factor for
occurrence of wound infection. Evaluation of prescriptions' parameters against the
stated criteria showed that 113 (15.8%) patients were given antibiotics with
adequate spectrum of activity, 611 (85.3%) given sub-dose/s, 83 (11.6%)
received the first preoperative dose/s in a proper time window, and 716 (100%)
had prophylaxis for extended duration. Overall conformity to the stated criteria
for the evaluation of prescription's parameters was not achieved in all
prescriptions. Conclusions: In this setting, antibiotics were irrationally used
and wound infection rate was high, and the situation calls for multiple
interventions to correct the situation, through the activation of the infection
control committee in the hospital and development of antimicrobial subcommittee
to develop policies for the use and auditing of prophylactic antibiotics.


Nowadays, accounting, charging and billing users' network resource consumption are commonly used for the purpose of facilitating reasonable network usage, controlling congestion, allocating cost, gaining revenue, etc. In traditional IP traffic accounting systems, IP addresses are used to identify the corresponding consumers of the network resources. However, there are some situations in which IP addresses cannot be used to identify users uniquely, for example, in multi-user systems. In these cases, network resource consumption can only be ascribed to the owners of these hosts instead of corresponding real users who have consumed the network resources. Therefore, accurate accountability in these systems is practically impossible. This is a flaw of the traditional IP address based IP traffic accounting technique. This dissertation proposes a user based IP traffic accounting model which can facilitate collecting network resource usage information on the basis of users. With user based IP traffic accounting, IP traffic can be distinguished not only by IP addresses but also by users. In this dissertation, three different schemes, which can achieve the user based IP traffic accounting mechanism, are discussed in detail. The in-band scheme utilizes the IP header to convey the user information of the corresponding IP packet. The Accounting Agent residing in the measured host intercepts IP packets passing through it. Then it identifies the users of these IP packets and inserts user inforation into the IP packets. With this mechanism, a m eter located in a key position of the network can intercept the IP packets tagged with user information, extract not only statistic information, but also IP addresses and user information from the IP packets to generate accounting records with user information. The out-of-band scheme is a contrast scheme to the in-band scheme. It also uses an Accounting Agent to intercept IP packets and identify the users of IP traffic. However, the user information is transferred through a separated channel, which is different from the corresponding IP packets' transmission. The Multi-IP scheme provides a different solution for identifying users of IP traffic. It assigns each user in a measured host a unique IP address. Through that, an IP address can be used to identify a user uniquely without ambiguity. This way, traditional IP address based accounting techniques can be applied to achieve the goal of user based IP traffic accounting. In this dissertation, a user based IP traffic accounting prototype system developed according to the out-of-band scheme is also introduced. The application of user based IP traffic accounting model in the distributed computing environment is also discussed. 2 A model for user based IP traffic accounting


Recent action in Congress to reauthorize the U.S. federal nanotechnology research program offers the chance to address the social and ethical issues concerning the emerging scientific field, experts say.

"It is crucial to address social and ethical issues now as we consider both the substantial potential risks of nanotechnology and its possible significant contributions to our well-being and environmental sustainability," says Ronald Sandler, Northeastern University philosophy professor and author of a new report funded by the Project and the National Science Foundation.

The report emphasizes ways in which such topics intersect with governmental functions and responsibilities, including science and technology policy, as well as research funding, regulation and work on public engagement.


A new strabomantid frog of the genus Pristimantis Jiménez de la Espada, 1871 is described from the Eastern Pantepui Region, Guiana Shield, northern South America. The new species, Pristimantis aureoventris sp. nov., is known so far from two neighbouring tepuis, namely Wei Assipu Tepui (type locality) at the border between Guyana and Brazil and Mount Roraima in Guyana, and occurs between 2210–2305 m elevation. The new taxon is distinguished from all known congeners by the following combination of characters: Finger I < II; tympanum distinct; basal webbing between Toes IVV; broad lateral fringes on fingers and toes; ventral skin areolate; vocal slits absent in male; two non-spinous whitish nuptial pads and vocal sac present in male; high degree of pattern polymorphism; throat, chest, and belly golden yellow, usually with reddish brown to dark brown mottling; internal organs little or not visible through the ventral skin in life. The call of the new species consists of bouts of a single amplitude-modulated (decreasing to the end) note repeated at a rate of ca. 18 notes/min with a dominant frequency ranging from 2180 to 2430 Hz.


I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to deathMost like a monumental statue set In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go.


101 Recording of Absences (Attendance) [2] [rev. Oct 1999] 102 Hours of Work [3] [rev. Oct 1999] 103 Vacation Leave [4] [rev. Aug 2004] 105 Membership Fees [5] [rev. Oct 1999] 106 Termination [6] [rev. Oct 1999] 107 Acting Pay [7] [rev. Nov 1999] 108 Flexible Spending Credits [8] [rev. 2017] 109 Self-Funded Leave, see Policy 501Leave of Absence [9] [rev. Feb 2000] 110 On-Call [10] [new Oct 2000] 111 Extra Workload [11] [new Jan 2003]


The present thesis deals with a novel air interface concept for beyond 3G mobile radio systems. Signals received at a certain reference cell in a cellular system which originate in neighboring cells of the same cellular system are undesired and constitute the intercell interference. Due to intercell interference, the spectrum capacity of cellular systems is limited and therefore the reduction of intercell interference is an important goal in the design of future mobile radio systems. In the present thesis, a novel service area based air interface concept is investigated in which interference is combated by joint detection and joint transmission, providing an increased spectrum capacity as compared to state-of-the-art cellular systems. Various algorithms are studied, with the aid of which intra service area interference can be combated. In the uplink transmission, by optimum joint detection the probability of erroneous decision is minimized. Alternatively, suboptimum joint detection algorithms can be applied offering reduced complexity. By linear receive zero-forcing joint detection interference in a service area is eliminated, while by linear minimum mean square error joint detection a trade-off is performed between interference elimination and noise enhancement. Moreover, iterative joint detection is investigated and it is shown that convergence of the data estimates of iterative joint detection without data estimate refinement towards the data estimates of linear joint detection can be achieved. Iterative joint detection can be further enhanced by the refinement of the data estimates in each iteration. For the downlink transmission, the reciprocity of uplink and downlink channels is used by joint transmission eliminating the need for channel estimation and therefore allowing for simple mobile terminals. A novel algorithm for optimum joint transmission is presented and it is shown how transmit signals can be designed which result in the minimum possible average bit error probability at the mobile terminals. By linear transmit zero-forcing joint transmission interference in the downlink transmission is eliminated, whereas by iterative joint transmission transmit signals are constructed in an iterative manner. In a next step, the performance of joint detection and joint transmission in service area based systems is investigated. It is shown that the price to be paid for the interference suppression in service area based systems is the suboptimum use of the receive energy in the uplink transmission and of the transmit energy in the downlink transmission, with respect to the single user reference system. In the case of receive zero-forcing joint detection in the uplink and transmit zero-forcing joint transmission in the downlink, i.e., in the case of linear unbiased data transmission, it is shown that the same price, quantified by the energy efficiency, has to be paid for interference elimination in both uplink and downlink. Finally it is shown that if the system load is fixed, the number of active mobile terminals in a SA and hence the spectrum capacity can be increased without any significant reduction in the average energy efficiency of the data transmission.


Author(s): Xue, Yongkang | Abstract: The Sahel of Africa has been identified as having the strongest land–atmosphere (L/A) interactions on Earth. The Sahelian L/A interaction studies started in the late 1970s. However, due to controversies surrounding the early studies, in which only a single land parameter was considered in L/A interactions, the credibility of land-surface effects on the Sahel's climate has long been challenged. Using general circulation models and regional climate models coupled with biogeophysical and dynamic vegetation models as well as applying analyses of satellite-derived data, field measurements, and assimilation data, the effects of land-surface processes on West African monsoon variability, which dominates the Sahel climate system at intraseasonal, seasonal, interannual, and decadal scales, as well as mesoscale, have been extensively investigated to realistically explore the Sahel L/A interaction: its effects and the mechanisms involved. The Sahel suffered the longest and most severe drought on the planet in the 20th century. The devastating environmental and socioeconomic consequences resulting from drought-induced famines in the Sahel have provided strong motivation for the scientific community and society to understand the causes of the drought and its impact. It was controversial and under debate whether the drought was a natural process, mainly induced by sea-surface temperature variability, or was affected by anthropogenic activities. Diagnostic and modeling studies of the sea-surface temperature have consistently demonstrated it exerts great influence on the Sahel climate system, but sea-surface temperature is unable to explain the full scope of the Sahel climate variability and the later 20th century's drought. The effect of land-surface processes, especially land-cover and land-use change, on the drought have also been extensively investigated. The results with more realistic land-surface models suggest land processes are a first-order contributor to the Sahel climate and to its drought during the later 1960s to the 1980s, comparable to sea surface temperature effects. The issues that caused controversies in the early studies have been properly addressed in the studies with state-of-the-art models and available data. The mechanisms through which land processes affect the atmosphere are also elucidated in a number of studies. Land-surface processes not only affect vertical transfer of radiative fluxes and heat fluxes but also affect horizontal advections through their effect on the atmospheric heating rate and moisture flux convergence/divergence as well as horizontal temperature gradients.


Until the appearance, in 1970, of the American crayfish Orconectes limosus (Rafinesque, 1817) in the Netherlands, only a single species of crayfish was known here: Astacus astacus (Linnaeus, 1758). Geelen (1978a, b) provided an extensive discussion on the distribution of the two species.
On 13.vi.1980 the Rijksinstituut voor Visserijonderzoek of IJmuiden (National Institution for fishery Research, RIVO) presented the RMNH a freshwater crayfish with a request for identification. The specimen was caught by a fisherman in a freshwaterpond (named IJ) near Spaarndam, NW of Haarlem, province of Noord-Holland. The pond has an open connection with the Noorzeekanaal, the mostly brackish canal that connects Amsterdam with the North Sea. The crayfish, a male with a carapace length of 49.8 mm (total length 103.6 mm) proved to belong to Astacus leptodactylus Eschscholz, 1823 (pl. 1).
A month later a second specimen of the same species was caught with hook and line in the small port of Moerdijk, on the Hollands Diep, province of NoordBrabant, by Mr. A. van As of Roosendaal. This capture was reported upon in the daily newspaper Brabants Nieuwsblad of 18.vii.1980 in which also a photograph of the specimen was published. The specimen shown in the picture was definitely neither A. astacus nor O. limosus. Mr. van As, who kept the specimen alive in his aquarium, was kind enough to allow me to examine it, and there can be no doubt that it likewise belongs to A. leptodactylus.
Dr. J. F. M. Geelen, University of Nijmegen, confirmed (in litt., 12.viii.1980) that these were the first records of A. leptodactylus for the Netherlands; she had expected that it would appear here sooner or later.
A. leptodactylus inhabits eastern Europe (Rumenia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czecho-Slovakia, East-Germany, Poland and Russia). In many countries, for


This article discusses some of international law's contributions to international security, focusing primarily on the United Nations Charter and related doctrines that emphasize the importance of national territorial sovereignty. I analyze the Charter system's promise and limitations in dealing with certain persistent international security problems, including the existence of noncompliant states, threatening non-state actors, and normative challenges to expansive conceptions of national territorial sovereignty. I report data indicating that the United Nations framework - initially designed primarily to prevent aggressive war - has largely failed to contain violent international crises or to grapple with increases in the prevalence and intensity of civil war. To assess the importance of dealing with internal civil conflict in addition to aggressive war, I estimate the average length and intensity of civil wars taking place during several periods in history. The length of an average civil war has increased from just over 20 months in the 1901-1950 period to about 60 months in the period from 1951-1992, and intensity (measured by the number of battle deaths per hundred thousand people in the population of the country in question) has increased from under 3 (in the 1901-1950 period) to over 6 (1951-1992). I then review theories supporting the claim that international law can contribute to security despite the continuing extent of global conflict and violence, and conclude by discussing strategies to reform the United Nations system and enhance international law's contributions to peace in light of those theories. In particular, I emphasize the importance of two issues that affect international law's contributions but have not received sufficient attention. The first is the need for more empirical analysis of when domestic political bargains become sensitive to international law. The second issue concerns how international law should structure the choice between imposing collective sanctions on the people of a nation-state and using targeted remedies even if they involve incursions into a nation's territorial sovereignty. To address both of these issues, international law scholars may have to further reexamine assumptions about national territorial sovereignty long identified with international law.


The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) conducts research into the effect of underwater explosions on maritime structures and equipment. One of the parameters that are required to be measured to a large degree of accuracy is the shock wave velocity in close proximity (10-120 charge radii) of the explosion, without having to revert to the streak photography method. This distance is in the region where the near field crosses over to the far field, and it would be expected that the distance-time curve would not be linear. The streak photography method produces accuracy in the very near field of the explosion, but is not recommended for accurate measurements at distances beyond 20 charge radii. We investigated the response of an optical sensor constructed to measure the light flash of an underwater blast to determine the moment of explosion. By measurement of the time taken between this moment and the time when the shock wave reaches the pressure sensors, accurate measurements of the distance-time history (and hence shock wave velocity) could be calculated. Twelve general purpose phototransistors were used in a parallel configuration to enhance the sensitivity of the sensor. These transistors were connected directly to a conditioning amplifier which formed the interface between the transistors and the data acquisition equipment. The results that were obtained confirmed that the light intensity of the flash of the explosion increased to a maximum within several microseconds. Measurements of the average velocity of the shock wave propagation, based on the flash measurement as a marker, correlated to within 0.1%, meaning that this method of marking the moment of explosion to within several microseconds had been successful. This method can therefore be used in similar underwater blast measurement applications when a measurement marker of the moment of explosion is required. : underwater explosions, underwater blast, optical sensor, light sensor, shock wave propagation velocity measure- ment, distance-time measurements ,


The recent run-ups in oil and other commodity prices and their implications for inflation and monetary policy have grabbed the attention of many commentators in the media. Clearly, higher prices of food and energy end up in the broadest measures of consumer price inflation, such as the Consumer Price Index. Since the mid-1980s, however, sharp increases and decreases in commodity prices have had little, if any, impact on core inflation, the measure that excludes food and energy prices.


Chloride concentrations at the Greenbrook well ...eld in Kitchener, Ontario, have been steadily increasing over the past several decades and may soon pose a threat to drinking water quality. Drinking water limits at some wells have already been exceeded. The Regional Municipality of Waterloo (RMOW) relies mainly on local groundwater resources for its drinking water supply, and the Greenbrook well ...eld is the oldest of 50 municipal well ...elds contributing to this supply. Urban growth and the expansion of city limits over the years has surrounded the well ...eld, placing it in a high risk area in need of protection. As such, protection of this water supply is essential until alternative sources can be found. Road salt has been identi...ed as the prime source of the chloride contamination, and various management alternatives and remediation strategies are currently being studied. In order to characterize the behaviour of chloride in the subsurface, an understanding of the mechanisms that control travel of chloride to the water table and through the groundwater system is needed. For the ...rst phase of this work, a 2-D variably-saturated ‡ow and transport model (SWMS-2D) was used to evaluate the e¤ect of seasonal ‡uctuation in chloride loading to a generic aquifer system. Chloride was applied over the surface of the model in seasonal pulses that correlated with temperature and precipitation. The model showed a dampening of the seasonal response with depth that lead to the conclusion that long-term transport models can neglect seasonal changes in solute loading. For the second phase of this work, a proven 3D ...nite element transport model (Waterloo Transport Code: WTC) was used to simulate road salt impacts to the well ...eld. Road salt was applied over selected roads throughout the steady-state capture zone via a type 3 (Cauchy) boundary that varies both temporally and spatially with road type and location. After calibrating the model from 1945 to 2002 to chloride concentrations using the weighted average of 5 Greenbrook production wells, the model was run to the year 2041 to assess future implications. Remediation strategies were also investigated via 6 predictive scenarios in which chloride applications were reduced by varying degrees. The results of this phase will be used by the RMOW in cost-bene...t analyses of alternative de-icing approaches versus de-chlorination treatment of the well water.


Elizabeth A. Armstrong is a sociologist with research interests in the areas of sexuality, gender, culture, organizations, social movements, and higher education. Professor Armstrong joined the Department of Sociology and the Organizational Studies Program at the University of Michigan in 2009. Before that, she held a faculty appointment in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. in Sociology and Computer Science from the University of Michigan.


This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium (a tax riot) where households underreport their incomes, precisely because other households are expected to do so as well. We then consider three alternative approaches to designing a tax scheme when one is worried about bad equilibria.


The natural inclination of writers is toward mindlessness or inattention to the present moment despite the benefits understanding the present can bring to writing. Although temporal consciousness is apparent in notions of writing as a process or of writing as situated in a rhetorical context, these ideas largely overlook the present. Buddhist Mindfulness can help with the development of kairotic or present-moment specific practice by including impermanence in the rhetorical context, by emphasizing real time in composing, and by providing access to intrapersonal rhetoric. Increased understanding of the temporal factors of writing calls for an Eastern-mind progymnasmata in rhetorical praxis.


This Article investigates whether one of the most intractable problems in trial procedure can be ameliorated through the use of one of the most striking discoveries in recent social science. The intractable problem is selecting a fair jury. Current doctrine fails to address the fact that jurors harbor not only explicit, or conscious, bias, but also implicit, or unconscious, bias. The discovery is the Implicit Association Test ("IAT"), an online test that aims to reveal implicit bias.This Article conducts the first comparison of proposals that the IAT be used to address jury bias. They fall into two groups. The first group would use the IAT to "screen" potential jurors for implicit bias; the second group would use the IAT to educate jurors about implicit bias. These proposals merit deeper consideration. Implicit bias is pervasive, and affects crucial juror functions: evaluation of evidence, recall of facts, and judgment of guilt. Juries are generally told nothing about implicit bias. The judiciary has expressed concern about implicit juror bias, and sought help from the academy in addressing the problem.This Article provides what these two groups of proposals lack: critique and context. It shows that using the IAT to screen jurors is misguided. However, the Article contends that the educational project has merit because implicit bias can be countered through knowledge of its existence and motivation to address it. To refine the project, this Article identifies two vital issues that distinguish the proposals: when jurors should learn about implicit bias, and how they should learn about it.On the issue of when, this Article argues that the education should begin while the jurors are still being oriented. Orientation is not only universal, but, as research into "priming" and "framing" suggests, a crucial period for the forming of first impressions. On the issue of how, this Article argues that those proposals that would include the jurors taking an IAT are superior to those that would simply instruct jurors on what the IAT shows. In an area fraught with denial, mere instruction would likely be dismissed as irrelevant. This Article uses pedagogical theory to show that experiential learning about bias is more likely to be effective.Finally, this Article brings when and how together, proposing a model that would include the use of the IAT as an experiential learning tool during orientation. This model would harness the civic energy of jurors to an educational purpose, rather than letting it morph into boredom; by putting jurors in an active mindset, it would enhance their satisfaction with the process, and their ability to perform optimally. As for potential jurors who are never selected, their participation would honor the long-standing educational function of jury service.


Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose.

 Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life.

 While there are many books on standard game theory that address the way ideally rational actors operate, Behavioral Game Theory stands alone in blending experimental evidence and psychology in a mathematical theory of normal strategic behavior. It is must reading for anyone who seeks a more complete understanding of strategic thinking, from professional economists to scholars and students of economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, and biology.


The Real/Expr package is a C++ project to support the precision-driven approach to exact computation of geometric algorithms. The package is built on top of the class Real that encompasses a variety of numerical representations. The class Expr captures a set of algebraic expressions on which any comparison can be done precisely. The software libraries described here are available via the Web page http://simulation.nyu.edu/projects/exact/.


This study utilizes methods to follow a measles epidemic in New France, where cause of death information is lacking. We fit a series of splines to estimate mortality and trace the origin, spread, duration and severity of the epidemic, which originated in the region of Montreal during the 2nd quarter of 1714. By the 3rd quarter, the epidemic had spread throughout the colony and had run its course by the second quarter of 1715. Overall, the measles death rate was 52.8 per 1,000 for children under age 15 and females were more likely than males to have died from the virus.


Applying multi-level modelling techniques to 2003 Canadian General Social Survey and 2001 Census Profile data , this study investigates the influence of individual income, contextual poverty and income inequality on voluntary association membership in Canada. Both individual and contextual effects on membership are uncovered, in addition to a significant cross-level interaction between individual income and area level income inequality. As individual income increases so do the odds of voluntary association membership, an effect that is fairly consistent between areas. Increases in area level poverty are associated with decreases in the odds of membership. While no main effect is found for area level income inequality, cross-level interactions indicate that the relationship between individual income and membership is moderated by area income inequality. The study findings support claims about the negative social effects of individual and contextual economic disadvantage and confirms the importance of examining contextual influences on social outcomes.


ABSTRACT On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to fight the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Between August 1982 and February 1984, the US, France, Britain and Italy deployed a Multinational Force (MNF) to Beirut. Its task was to act as an interposition force to bolster the government and to bring peace to the people. The mission is often forgotten or merely remembered in context with the bombing of US Marines' barracks. However, an analysis of the Italian contingent shows that the MNF was not doomed to fail and could accomplish its task when operational and diplomatic efforts were coordinated. The Italian commander in Beirut, General Franco Angioni, followed a successful approach that sustained neutrality, respectful behaviour and minimal force, which resulted in a qualified success of the Italian efforts.


This paper is concerned with algorithms for prediction of discrete sequences over a finite alphabet, using variable order Markov models. The class of such algorithms is large and in principle includes any lossless compression algorithm. We focus on six prominent prediction algorithms, including Context Tree Weighting (CTW), Prediction by Partial Match (PPM) and Probabilistic Suffix Trees (PSTs). We discuss the properties of these algorithms and compare their performance using real life sequences from three domains: proteins, English text and music pieces. The comparison is made with respect to prediction quality as measured by the average log-loss. We also compare classification algorithms based on these predictors with respect to a number of large protein classification tasks. Our results indicate that a "decomposed" CTW (a variant of the CTW algorithm) and PPM outperform all other algorithms in sequence prediction tasks. Somewhat surprisingly, a different algorithm, which is a modification of the Lempel-Ziv compression algorithm, significantly outperforms all algorithms on the protein classification problems.


In 2010, Espresso commissioned an academically-based and fully independent evaluation study to explore outcomes of uses of its online resources in primary schools. The aims of the study were to explore how Espresso resources are used to support teaching and learning, to assess cost and associated benefits arising, and to explore whether levels or types of use in schools might be associated with measures of pupil achievement and school performance. The evaluation that was undertaken drew on a range of different forms of evidence, analysed in ways to match the needs of the specific aims being explored. In order to make the full report of the study and its findings more easily accessible, and to enable the reader to focus on selected aspects of specific interest, the entire report has been divided into four sections. Section 1 Summary – this section contains two main elements, Report Headlines and an Executive Summary. Section 2 School Uses and Learning Impacts – this includes an introduction and background to the study, details of the structure of the study relating to school uses and learning impacts, descriptions of schools providing evidence, details of how Espresso resources are used in schools and learning outcomes related to these, the pedagogies that teachers adopt when using the resources, and key aspects of learning that are impacted by uses of Espresso resources. Section 3 Management, Time and Cost Benefits – this includes an introduction and background to the study, details of the structure of the study relating to management, time and cost benefits, details of benefits arising, and how these are calculated at school and wider levels. Section 4 Attainment and Usage Levels – this includes an introduction and background to the study, details of the structure of the study relating to attainment, performance and usage levels, the forms of data that were gathered and used for this element of the study, and the forms of analysis that were undertaken, together with a range of detailed statistical findings.


In Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a four-Justice plurality endorsed a novel theory that would make the Takings Clause applicable to a wide collection of state court interpretations of state property law. Writing for the plurality, Justice Scalia declared that a state court's opinion finding that an "established" property right "no longer exists" may amount to an unconstitutional taking. The opinion draws on two fundamental threads of Justice Scalia's property jurisprudence: the first is the notion of property as a pre-political, immutable partition between individual interests and permissible government action; the second is a general distrust for the state courts that are tasked with declaring these individual property rights. This Article has two primary purposes. First, it compares the judicial takings standard established by the plurality to previous discussions of federal constitutional review of state court property declarations, both in prior judicial decisions and in the academic literature. Second, it considers whether the plurality's standard could be interpreted as applicable not only to state court decisions that allegedly result in a private-to-public reassignment of property, as the petitioners in Stop the Beach Renourishment claimed, but also to two additional instances: (i) adjudications of property disputes between two private parties or (ii) any allegedly improper judicial change in non-property areas of law where damages would serve as the remedy. The Article concludes that the plurality's judicial takings standard arguably is inclusive of more state court rulings than any standard presented by earlier courts and commentators. Depending upon the breadth of its reach, this standard could serve to chill the ordinary operation of the common law system as responsive to changing conditions.


This paper examines preservice teachers' understandings of critical media literacy as they designed critical media literacy lessons in an initial teacher education language and literacy course for K-6 teachers. The teachers reflected on their initial understandings about social justice, designed several pre-tasks, designed and taught critical media literacy lessons, and then reflected on teaching critical media literacy to elementary school students.  The results of this two-year study indicate that while the preservice teachers seemed willing to address social justice issues and they used digital literacies in interesting and engaging ways, some of them faced challenges articulating and focusing their own understandings in media literacy lessons.


The overarching purpose of the current article was to examine the status of sport psychology as a profession in 4 ways. First, the author characterizes the profession of sport psychology as an illusion because there is so little demand for sport psychology services and because there are so few full-time practicing sport psychologists. Second, paradoxically, it appears that many people assume that applied sport psychology is a healthy and viable profession, so the author comments on why this is the case. Sidestepping the lack of jobs does a disservice to graduate students who believe they can easily become practicing sport psychologists. Third, it is clear that few athletes or teams want to pay for sport psychology services, so some reasons why this is the case are presented. Fourth, the author speculates about the future of the sport psychology profession, followed by some recommendations that would rectify his claim that the field's relative silence on this issue does a disservice to students.