The composition 161 Glass is a 17-minute musical work with percussion, wind and brass instruments in which the intersection of mid-century architecture, and the art and culture of a dynamic city are inextricably linked. Through this paper, I explore the process of composing a musical work in relationship to the significance of site specific context. The paper begins by defining the concept of site specific art works; then reviews the discourse of the intersection of art, music and architecture. I then delve into the cultural and geographic context surrounding this project from the modern era through the present, and how those perspectives apply to the building and my piece. I reveal how the composition relates the musical ideas to the site. Finally, I describe the collaborative process between myself, the musicians and the Dallas Contemporary staff.


This chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the New Deal provides a brief overview of the major financial reform legislation passed during the first term of the Roosevelt administration. After describing the structural flaws in the pre-New Deal regulatory landscape, the chapter illustrates how the stock market crash of 1929, the onset Great Depression, and the banking crisis of 1933 helped create the climate in which financial reform could pass. In particular, it highlights the crucial role that the Senate investigation of Wall Street — commonly known as the Pecora investigation, after its chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora — played in building the clamor for financial reform. The chapter then catalogs the major banking and securities legislation adopted during the Roosevelt administration's first term and demonstrates the transient nature of the political moments that crises and scandals create. In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, reform proposals passed with little effective opposition. As the crisis receded, however, organized lobbying efforts grew more powerful and were often successful in diminishing reform proposals.


This study aim to identify the using six sigma to evaluate the administrative performance of vocational and technical training institutions in Jordan. The population of the study constitutes from all the administrators, trainers and teachers in vocational and technical training institutes in Jordan which are (758) individuals, a sample was selected in a stratified and random way, consisted of (274) individuals, with a percentage of (36%) of population of the study. Means and standard deviations were calculated, as well as analysis of variance was used to demonstrate the unilateral differences between the variables of the study and use the Scheffe' test, when there are differences of statistical significance. To achieve the goal of the study, a questionnaire has been prepared included the fields of (Support and commitment of senior leadership, human resources management, administrative information systems, mechanism of work, practical training and benefices satisfaction) depending on the relevant studies and the system and methodology of Six Sigma, the validity and reliability of the study have been confirmed, the study reached that there is a high degree of estimation for workers who apply the Six Sigma system in vocational and technical training corporations in Jordan. Upon the results of the study, the study recommends that the vocational training corporations should use Six Sigma system in the affiliated vocational and technical institutes and to work on the development of organizational culture based on principles of cooperation and to work in team spirit and maintain on the time and apply Six Sigma methodology to Solve problems and adopt it in the training operations.


Today's macroeconomics courses are built around Solow and Romerstyle growth theories, and micro-founded equilibrium macro models of the 'real business cycle' variety. Hewing to a course description with such an intellectual structure is a derogation of my personal and professional views. This short, confessional note explores the activity of teaching what one does not believe, and argues this is preference falsification writ large. The act of teaching equilibrium business cycle theories to students who take these theories out into the world and act upon them there is, I believe, socially destructive. Yet many economists engage in this public activity contra their personal preferences. One solution is judicious use of the course description, in order that a broad church be maintained.


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Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment , Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics' attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work.

In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana's and Varela's creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela's later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann's adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.

Contributors . Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe


Local flow patterns determine the uneven distribution of atherosclerotic lesions. This research aims to elucidate the mechanism of regulation of nuclear translocation of Yes-associated protein (YAP) under oscillatory shear stress (OSS) in the atheroprone phenotype of endothelial cells (ECs). We report here that OSS led to tyrosine phosphorylation and strong, continuous nuclear translocation of YAP in ECs that is dependent on integrin &agr;5&bgr;1 activation. YAP overexpression in ECs blunted the anti-atheroprone effect of an integrin &agr;5&bgr;1–blocking peptide (ATN161) in Apoe–/– mice. Activation of integrin &agr;5&bgr;1 induced tyrosine, but not serine, phosphorylation of YAP in ECs. Blockage of integrin &agr;5&bgr;1 with ATN161 abolished the phosphorylation of YAP at Y357 induced by OSS. Mechanistic studies showed that c-Abl inhibitor attenuated the integrin &agr;5&bgr;1–induced YAP tyrosine phosphorylation. Furthermore, the phosphorylation of c-Abl and YAPY357 was significantly increased in ECs in atherosclerotic vessels of mice and in human plaques versus normal vessels. Finally, bosutinib, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, markedly reduced the level of YAPY357 and the development of atherosclerosis in Apoe–/– mice. The c-Abl/YAPY357 pathway serves as a mechanism for the activation of integrin &agr;5&bgr;1 and the atherogenic phenotype of ECs in response to OSS, and provides a potential therapeutic strategy for atherogenesis.


This article makes some comparisons between the Australian corporate rescue provisions and those proposed to be adopted in South Africa in the Companies Bill 2007. By so doing it may assist in the debate in South Africa over how the legislation is framed as the experience in Australia may be useful as an indicator of issues to be considered. One of the findings of the comparison is that the aims of the Australian legislation and that proposed in South Africa are almost identical. The article identifies a clear concern in the South African proposals with the position of employees which is not apparent in Australia. On the other hand there appears to be less concern in South Africa with the position of secured creditors than is evident in the Australian provisions. The article also notes that the South African proposals do not divide the procedure clearly into a decision-making stage and the period whilst the company is operating under the rescue plan. The Australian provisions provide for a clear break between a period where the creditors have yet to make a choice about the company's future and the period once a plan (or deed of company arrangement) has been adopted. The article also finds that the South African model of rescue as proposed does cover many similar areas as identified in the Australian legislation. It therefore argues that there are sufficient similarities to suggest that much will be common in the experience if they are adopted into the legislation.


Marine calcifiers are considered to be among the most vulnerable taxa to climate-forced environmental changes occurring on continental margins with effects hypothesized to occur on microstructural, biomechanical, and geochemical properties of carbonate structures. Natural gradients in temperature, salinity, oxygen, and pH on an upwelling margin combined with the broad depth distribution (100-1100 m) of the pink fragile sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus (formerly Allocentrotus) fragilis, along the southern California shelf and slope provide an ideal system to evaluate potential effects of multiple climate variables on carbonate structures in situ. We measured for the first time trait variability across four distinct depth zones in a natural experiment to simulate species-specific implications of oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) expansion, deoxygenation and ocean acidification. Although S. fragilis may likely be tolerant of future oxygen and pH decreases predicted during the twenty-first century, we determine from adults collected across multiple depth zones that urchin size and potential reproductive fitness (gonad index) are drastically reduced in the OMZ core (450-900 m) compared to adjacent zones. Increases in porosity and mean pore size coupled with decreases in mechanical nanohardness and stiffness of the calcitic endoskeleton in individuals collected from lower pHTotal (7.57-7.59) and lower dissolved oxygen (13-42 µmol kg-1) environments suggest that S. fragilis may be potentially vulnerable to crushing predators if these conditions become more widespread in the future. In addition, elemental composition determined using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry indicates that S. fragilis has a skeleton composed of the low Mg-calcite mineral phase of calcium carbonate (mean Mg/Ca= 0.02 mol mol-1), the lowest Mg/Ca values measured in sea urchins known to date. Together these findings suggest that ongoing declines in oxygen and pH will likely affect the ecology and fitness of a dominant echinoid on the California margin.


An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformedpeople whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential."


There is ample empirical evidence documenting widespread financial illiteracy and limited pension knowledge. At the same time, the distribution of wealth is widely dispersed and many workers arrive on the verge of retirement with few or no personal assets. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between financial literacy and household net worth, relying on comprehensive measures of financial knowledge designed for a special module of the DNB (De Nederlandsche Bank) Household Survey. Our findings provide evidence of a strong positive association between financial literacy and net worth, even after controlling for many determinants of wealth. Moreover, we discuss two channels through which financial literacy might facilitate wealth accumulation. First, financial knowledge increases the likelihood of investing in the stock market, allowing individuals to benefit from the equity premium. Second, financial literacy is positively related to retirement planning, and the development of a savings plan has been shown to boost wealth. Overall, financial literacy, both directly and indirectly, is found to have a strong link to household wealth.


The study of gene orders for constructing phylogenetic trees was introduced by Dobzhansky and Sturtevant in 1938. Different genomes may have homologous genes arranged in different orders. In the early 1990s, Sankoff and colleagues modelled this as ordinary (unsigned) permutations on a set of numbered genes $1,2,\ldots,n$, with biological events such as inversions modelled as operations on the permutations. Signed permutations may be used when the relative strands of the genes are known, and "circular permutations" may be used for circular genomes. We use combinatorial methods (generating functions, commutative and noncommutative formal power series, asymptotics, recursions, and enumeration formulas) to study the distributions of the number and lengths of conserved segments of genes between two or more unichromosomal genomes, including signed and unsigned genomes, and linear and circular genomes. This generalizes classical work on permutations from the 1940s–60s by Wolfowitz, Kaplansky, Riordan, Abramson, and Moser, who studied decompositions of permutations into strips of ascending or descending consecutive numbers. In our setting, their work corresponds to comparison of two unsigned genomes (known gene orders, unknown gene orientations). Maple software implementing our formulas is available at http://www.math.ucsd.edu/$\sim$gptesler/strips.


PROBLEM
Emergency surgical patients are at high risk for harm because of errors in care. Quality improvement methods that involve process redesign, such as "Lean," appear to improve service reliability and efficiency in healthcare.

DESIGN
Interrupted time series.

SETTING
The emergency general surgery ward of a university hospital in the United Kingdom.

KEY MEASURES FOR IMPROVEMENT
Seven safety relevant care processes.

STRATEGY FOR CHANGE
A Lean intervention targeting five of the seven care processes relevant to patient safety.

EFFECTS OF CHANGE
969 patients were admitted during the four month study period before the introduction of the Lean intervention (May to August 2007), and 1114 were admitted during the four month period after completion of the intervention (May to August 2008). Compliance with the five process measures targeted for Lean intervention (but not the two that were not) improved significantly (relative improvement 28% to 149%; P<0.007). Excellent compliance continued at least 10 months after active intervention ceased. The proportion of patients requiring transfer to other wards fell from 27% to 20% (P<0.000025). Rates of adverse events and potential adverse events were unchanged, except for a significant reduction in new safety events after transfer to other wards (P<0.028). Most adverse events and potential adverse events were owing to delays in investigation and treatment caused by factors outside the ward being evaluated.

LESSONS LEARNT
Lean can substantially and simultaneously improve compliance with a bundle of safety related processes. Given the interconnected nature of hospital care, this strategy might not translate into improvements in safety outcomes unless a system-wide approach is adopted to remove barriers to change.


Many quality problems in forged steel products have their origin in the ingot casting process. Defects like shrinkage, porosity, segregation, non-metallic inclusions and cracks are initiated during teeming of the liquid steel, but their position and severity are also affected by the material flow during forming operations. Process simulation tools for both casting and forming processes are available and used daily for analysing and optimizing the quality and productivity of each process. These two worlds of simulation have only rarely been brought together. There is a clear need for a through-process methodology to predict possible defects and to optimize the whole process chain, such that the best possible quality and the lowest reject rate is obtained. Here, information about the shrinkage cavity, internal porosity and macrosegregation in a cast steel ingot from casting process simulation are transferred as input for the simulation of the subsequent cogging process. The results of the cogging simulation clearly show how the forming process affects the size and shape of the ascast shrinkage and segregation or can show if internal porosity can be closed by material flow.


Acetone is one of the most abundant oxygenated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmosphere. The oceans impose a strong control on atmospheric acetone, yet the oceanic fluxes of acetone remain poorly constrained. In this work, the global budget of acetone is evaluated using two global models: CAM‐chem and GEOS‐Chem. CAM‐chem uses an online air‐sea exchange framework to calculate the bidirectional oceanic acetone fluxes, which is coupled to a data‐oriented machine‐learning approach. The machine‐learning algorithm is trained using a global suite of seawater acetone measurements. GEOS‐Chem uses a fixed surface seawater concentration of acetone to calculate the oceanic fluxes. Both model simulations are compared to airborne observations from a recent global‐scale, multiseasonal campaign, the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). We find that both CAM‐chem and GEOS‐Chem capture the measured acetone vertical distributions in the remote atmosphere reasonably well. The combined observational and modeling analysis suggests that (i) the ocean strongly regulates the atmospheric budget of acetone. The tropical and subtropical oceans are mostly a net source of acetone, while the high‐latitude oceans are a net sink. (ii) CMIP6 anthropogenic emission inventory may underestimate acetone and/or its precursors in the Northern Hemisphere. (iii) The MEGAN biogenic emissions model may overestimate acetone and/or its precursors, and/or the biogenic oxidation mechanisms may overestimate the acetone yields. (iv) The models consistently overestimate acetone in the upper troposphere‐lower stratosphere over the Southern Ocean in austral winter. (v) Acetone contributes up to 30–40% of hydroxyl radical production in the tropical upper troposphere/lower stratosphere.


"The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love to better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provacative and intensely personel, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness.As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explode th question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how profoundly she can.


Lonely Planet: The world's leading travel guide publisher With Lonely Planet's Egyptian Arabic Phrasebook, let no barriers - language or culture - get in your way. Grab this phrasebook and ride a camel around the Pyramids of Giza, visit the ancient monuments at Luxor, or take a relaxing cruise on the Nile. Our phrasebooks give you a comprehensive mix of practical and social words and phrases in more than 120 languages. Chat with the locals and discover their culture - a guaranteed way to enrich your travel experience. * Order the right meal with our menu decoder * Never get stuck for words with our 3500-word two-way dictionary * We make language easy with shortcuts, key phrases & common QA phrases for getting out and about, being social, food, safe travel, sustainable travel, and more; and two dictionaries Authors: Written and researched by Lonely Planet and Siona Jenkins. About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, as well as an award-winning website, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012 and 2013 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' -The New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' -Fairfax Media (Australia)


At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices--those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal--that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment. Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her own greatest work, Anita Shreve delivers in TESTIMONY a gripping emotional drama with the impact of a thriller. No one more compellingly" "explores the dark impulses that sway the lives of seeming innocents, the needs and fears that drive ordinary men and women into intolerable dilemmas, and the ways in which our best intentions can lead to our worst transgressions.


A major attempt of geochemical studies is the investigation of the transfer of primary produced biogenic components (e. g. organic carbon or biogenic silica) from surface waters to the deep-sea and their burial in sediments. Particle trap data and investigations of sediments and pore waters provide a suitable data set for the evaluation of such budgets. Nevertheless, these local measurements allow no direct calculation of global or basin-wide geochemical budgets. Major difficulties are the calculation of regions with irregular shape like ocean basins or continental slopes and the spatial extrapolation of flux measurements.Geographic Information Systems (GIS) combine several techniques to solve such problems. GIS allows the exact planimetry of spatial entities and the combination of different information layers like bathymetry, remote sensing data or field measurements by overlay technique. Furthermore GIS enables different geographic projections to controll an appropriate equal area calculation. Gridded ocean-wide data sets permit a cell-by-cell processing, which guarantees no loss of information. By logical queries to a GIS data base, spatial data sets are easily devided into zones of special interests.As an example for the application of GIS the geochemical budget of the organic carbon and biogenic silica fluxes through the sediment-water interface of the northern North Atlantic will be presented. By establishing an empirical relationship based on measured benthic fluxes, water depth and satellite derived primary production rates an area-wide organic carbon flux extrapolation is achieved. Using estimated sediment accumulation rates burial rates are calculated. A similar aproach is used to model biogenic silica flux. Statistical and visual analysis are performed via GIS to controll the extrapolation of data.


What is does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research. Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes -- from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire. What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense -- a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.


A thrilling, exclusive expose of the hacker collectives Anonymous and LulzSec. WE ARE ANONYMOUS is the first full account of how a loosely assembled group of hackers scattered across the globe formed a new kind of insurgency, seized headlines, and tortured the feds-and the ultimate betrayal that would eventually bring them down. Parmy Olson goes behind the headlines and into the world of Anonymous and LulzSec with unprecedented access, drawing upon hundreds of conversations with the hackers themselves, including exclusive interviews with all six core members of LulzSec. In late 2010, thousands of hacktivists joined a mass digital assault on the websites of VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal to protest their treatment of WikiLeaks. Other targets were wide ranging-the websites of corporations from Sony Entertainment and Fox to the Vatican and the Church of Scientology were hacked, defaced, and embarrassed-and the message was that no one was safe. Thousands of user accounts from pornography websites were released, exposing government employees and military personnel.Although some attacks were perpetrated by masses of users who were rallied on the message boards of 4Chan, many others were masterminded by a small, tight-knit group of hackers who formed a splinter group of Anonymous called LulzSec. The legend of Anonymous and LulzSec grew in the wake of each ambitious hack. But how were they penetrating intricate corporate security systems? Were they anarchists or activists? Teams or lone wolves? A cabal of skilled hackers or a disorganized bunch of kids?WE ARE ANONYMOUS delves deep into the internet's underbelly to tell the incredible full story of the global cyber insurgency movement, and its implications for the future of computer security.


"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " --from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care? Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West." The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more. And here's a taste of what you'll find in Hackers & Painters: "In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel. Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now. Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium." Andy Hertzfeld, co-creator of the Macintosh computer, says about Hackers & Painters: "Paul Graham is a hacker, painter and a terrific writer. His lucid, humorous prose is brimming with contrarian insight and practical wisdom on writing great code at the intersection of art, science and commerce." Paul Graham, designer of the new Arc language, was the creator of Yahoo Store, the first web-based application. In addition to his PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, Graham also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.


Engineers of the research project "Digital Product Life-Cycle" are using a graph-based design language to model all aspects of the product they are working on. This abstract model is the base for all further investigations, developments and implementations. In particular at early stages of development, collaborative decision making is very important. We propose a semantic augmented knowledge space by means of mixed reality technology, to support engineering teams. Therefore we present an interaction prototype consisting of a pico projector and a camera. In our usage scenario engineers are augmenting different artefacts in a virtual working environment. The concept of our prototype contains both an interaction and a technical concept. To realise implicit and natural interactions, we conducted two prototype tests: (1) A test with a low-fidelity prototype and (2) a test by using the method Wizard of Oz. As a result, we present a prototype with interaction selection using augmentation spotlighting and an interaction zoom as a semantic zoom.


Blue Bottle Coffee Company has quickly become one of America's most celebrated roasters. Famous for its complex and flavorful coffees, Blue Bottle delights its devoted patrons with exquisite pour-overs, delicious espressi, and specialized brewing methods.

Yet as coffee production becomes more sophisticated with specialized extraction techniques and Japanese coffee gadgets, the new artisan coffees can seem out of reach. The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee explains this new world from farm to cup, exploring the bounty of beans available and the intricate steps that go into sourcing raw coffee from around the globe. Blue Bottle founder James Freeman coaches you through brewing the perfect cup of coffee, using methods as diverse as French press, nel drip, siphon, and more to produce the best flavor.

For coffee lovers who want to roll up their sleeves and go deeper, Freeman explains step by step how to roast beans at home using standard kitchen tools just like he did when starting out. The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee also introduces a home technique for cupping, the industry method of tasting coffees for quality control, so you can hone your taste and share your meticulously roasted coffee with friends.

Rounding out the book are more than thirty inventive recipes from Blue Bottle pastry chef and former Miette bakery owner Caitlin Freeman that incorporate coffee or just taste particularly good with coffee, such as Saffron Vanilla Snickerdoodles, Stout Coffee Cake with Pecan-Caraway Streusel, Affogato with Smoky Almond Ice Cream, Coffee Panna Cotta, and more.

With more than one hundred stunning photographs showing coffee's journey from just-harvested cherry to perfect drink, this distinctive and deep guide to the new breed of amazing coffees from one of the top artisan coffee makers will change the way you think about and drink coffee.


Abstract Due to a beneficial balance of computational cost and accuracy, real-time time-dependent density-functional theory has emerged as a promising first-principles framework to describe electron real-time dynamics. Here we discuss recent implementations around this approach, in particular in the context of complex, extended systems. Results include an analysis of the computational cost associated with numerical propagation and when using absorbing boundary conditions. We extensively explore the shortcomings for describing electron–electron scattering in real time and compare to many-body perturbation theory. Modern improvements of the description of exchange and correlation are reviewed. In this work, we specifically focus on the Qb@ll code, which we have mainly used for these types of simulations over the last years, and we conclude by pointing to further progress needed going forward. Graphical abstract


For most of the 400 years of the Bodleian Library's existence, users have had to travel to Oxford to use its collections. In recent years, Oxford has undertaken a number of focused, 'boutique' digitisation projects. Now, as a partner in the Google Library Project, an immense range of scholarly and other 19th-century out-of-copyright library materials from the Bodleian's collections will be digitised en masse and will be made freely available over the internet to anyone who has web access. Millions of books and journals will be scanned in the course of the Project and the author contends that digitisation on such a scale represents a revolution in the dissemination of information that parallels the impact of the invention of printing from moveable type in the 15 th century.


The shackling of pregnant women prisoners during labor and childbirth is endemic within women's penal institutions in the United States. This article interrogates the factors that account for the pervasiveness of this practice and suggests doctrinal innovations that may be leveraged to prevent its continuation. At a general level, it asserts that we cannot understand the persistence of shackling without understanding how historical constructions of race and gender operate structurally to both motivate and mask its use. More specifically, this article contends that the shackling of pregnant prisoners during labor and childbirth can best be understood through an analysis that centers Black women and foregrounds the historical devaluation, regulation and punishment of Black women's exercise of reproductive capacity in the context of slavery, convict leasing and chain gangs in the South. The regulation and punishment of Black women within these oppressive systems reinforced and reproduced stereotypes of Black women as deviant and dangerous, and these images in turn animate harsh practices against all women prisoners. Moreover, this article asserts that current jurisprudence concerning the Eighth Amendment, which is the primary constitutional vehicle for challenging conditions of confinement, is insufficient to combat this problem at the structural level. This is so because of its focus on the subjective intentions of prison officials at the individual level and because of its omission of any consideration of how race underlies institutional practices. Instead, this article suggests an expanded reading of the Eighth Amendment and the 'evolving standards of decency' language that undergirds the 'cruel and unusual punishments' clause. This expanded reading, which this article refers to as the 'antisubordination approach,' draws upon Justice Harlan's oft-cited dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson and his underappreciated reading of the Thirteenth Amendment therein to argue that conditions of confinement which result from or are related to repudiated mechanisms of racial domination should be deemed cruel and unusual punishment.


New forms of data storage and transfer as well as new methods to communicate, collaborate and exchange knowledge at diminishing transaction costs over the world-wide-web have revolutionised networking, knowledge creation and innovation processes in the knowledge era. Virtual embeddedness signifies the possibility to draw upon pay-per-use computing resources and a variety of customised web services and applications. The facilitated utilisation of Software-as-a-Service and in particular social media (SM) applications enables effective networking on platforms and in virtual communities in social as well as in business terms. Such networking processes lead to the accumulation of social, relational and intellectual capital, as they facilitate information and knowledge exchange, integration and creation. Since information and knowledge sharing, collaboration and socialising take virtual dimensions, opportunities and threats arise for enterprises regarding relational capital management (RCM) as well as knowledge and value creation. Most new ventures are keen on utilising SM for internal and external communication and collaboration purposes. In this context, the question of how new ventures can improve their RCM through the utilisation of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT) and SM arises. To answer this question, ventures have to grasp the potential of web technologies and SM and to assess their appropriability to achieve relationship-specific goals. They need to be aware of SM risks in order to exploit chances and avert threats which arise through SM use. In this paper, the question of how to exploit the benefits of virtual embeddedness and Web 2.0 in order to optimise the RCM of new ventures is discussed. To provide a basis for this discussion, the qualities of social and relational capital and the different forms of physical and virtual embeddedness are analysed. The utilisation of SM for RCM purposes and the implementation of a SM strategy are exemplified in the case study of a German eCommerce venture that took advantage of web technologies to build up and manage its relational capital in virtual and physical dimensions. Finally, a conceptual model describing the contribution of virtual embeddedness and SM to knowledge, value and reputation creation is proposed and illustrated by means of the case study.


Nowadays, the increasing demand for ever more customizable products has emphasized the need for more flexible and fast-changing manufacturing systems. In this environment, simulation has become a strategic tool for the design, development, and implementation of such systems. Simulation represents a relatively low-cost and risk-free alternative for testing the impact and effectiveness of changes in different aspects of manufacturing systems.
Systems that deal with this kind of data for its use in decision making processes are known as Simulation-Based Decision Support Systems (SB-DSS). Although most SB-DSS provide a powerful variety of tools for the automatic and semi-automatic analysis of simulations, visual and interactive alternatives for the manual exploration of the results are still open to further development.
The work in this dissertation is focused on enhancing decision makers' analysis capabilities by making simulation data more accessible through the incorporation of visualization and analysis techniques. To demonstrate how this goal can be achieved, two systems were developed. The first system, viPhos – standing for visualization of Phos: Greek for light –, is a system that supports lighting design in factory layout planning. viPhos combines simulation, analysis, and visualization tools and techniques to facilitate the global and local (overall factory or single workstations, respectively) interactive exploration and comparison of lighting design alternatives.
The second system, STRAD - standing for Spatio-Temporal Radar -, is a web-based systems that considers the spatio/attribute-temporal analysis of event data. Since decision making processes in manufacturing also involve the monitoring of the systems over time, STRAD enables the multilevel exploration of event data (e.g., simulated or historical registers of the status of machines or results of quality control processes).
A set of four case studies and one proof of concept prepared for both systems demonstrate the suitability of the visualization and analysis strategies adopted for supporting decision making processes in diverse application domains. The results of these case studies indicate that both, the systems as well as the techniques included in the systems can be generalized and extended to support the analysis of different tasks and scenarios.


Cryptography is now ubiquitous moving beyond the traditional environments, such as government communications and banking systems, we see cryptographic techniques realized in Web browsers, e-mail programs, cell phones, manufacturing systems, embedded software, smart buildings, cars, and even medical implants. Today's designers need a comprehensive understanding of applied cryptography. After an introduction to cryptography and data security, the authors explain the main techniques in modern cryptography, with chapters addressing stream ciphers, the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and 3DES, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), block ciphers, the RSA cryptosystem, public-key cryptosystems based on the discrete logarithm problem, elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC), digital signatures, hash functions, Message Authentication Codes (MACs), and methods for key establishment, including certificates and public-key infrastructure (PKI). Throughout the book, the authors focus on communicating the essentials and keeping the mathematics to a minimum, and they move quickly from explaining the foundations to describing practical implementations, including recent topics such as lightweight ciphers for RFIDs and mobile devices, and current key-length recommendations. The authors have considerable experience teaching applied cryptography to engineering and computer science students and to professionals, and they make extensive use of examples, problems, and chapter reviews, while the books website offers slides, projects and links to further resources. This is a suitable textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses and also for self-study by engineers.


Objective: Attempts have been made to model the contribution of concomitant chemotherapy to radiotherapy in terms of biological effective dose (BED) for the major squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) sub-sites. Despite SCC's sharing common aetiology, different concomitant chemoradiotherapy regimens are used in clinical practice. This study aims to compare the contribution of chemotherapy to radiotherapy in terms of BED across the major SCC sub-sites using two different radiobiological models; the intuitive and Poisson methods for its calculation. Methods: Phase 3 trials of radiotherapy versus chemoradiotherapy using conventional fractionation in SCC of the head and neck, lung, cervix, oesophagus and anus were identified. The contribution of chemotherapy (tBEDc) was modeled using both the intuitive and the Poisson model to give a weighted BED in Gray. Results: Weighted tBEDc using the intuitive model were 8.6 Gy10 for head and neck, 6.3 Gy10 for lung, 6.3 Gy10 for cervix and 7.8 Gy10 for anus. The weighted tBEDc using the Poisson model were 1.8 Gy10 for head and neck, 0.9 Gy10 for cervix and 2.1 Gy10 for anus. Conclusion: There is a striking similarity for the value of tBEDc across SCC sub-sites within both models. In head and neck cancer tBEDc derived from the Poisson model is not associated with the same biological effect as the same BED administered as radiotherapy alone. Therefore at this sub-site, where there is good data on radiotherapy dose response in the curative dose range, the Poisson model may be of limited value. However, it may be preferred for sub-sites where such data is lacking.


A protocol is provided in this standard that enables precise synchronization of clocks in measurement and control systems implemented with technologies such as network communication, local computing, and distributed objects. The protocol is applicable to systems communicating via packet networks. Heterogeneous systems are enabled that include clocks of various inherent precision, resolution, and stability to synchronize. System-wide synchronization accuracy and precision in the sub-microsecond range are supported with minimal network and local clock computing resources. Simple systems are installed and operated without requiring the management attention of users because the default behavior of the protocol allows for it.


The planning competition has become a regular part of the biennial Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) conferences. AIPS'98 featured the very first competition, and for AIPS'00, we built on this foundation to run the second competition. The 2000 competition featured a much larger group of participants and a wide variety of different approaches to planning. Some of these approaches were refinements of known techniques, and others were quite different from anything that had been tried before. Besides the dramatic increase in participation, the 2000 competition demonstrated that planning technology has taken a giant leap forward in performance since 1998. The 2000 competition featured planning systems that were orders of magnitude faster than the planners of just two years prior. This article presents an overview of the competition and reviews the main results.


Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspects Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics, by John McCormick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 288 pp.Machiavelli in Tumult. The Discourses on Livy and the Origins of Political Conflictualism, by Gabriele Pedullà. Translated by Patricia Gaborik and Richard Nybakken. Revised and updated by the author. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xix + 284 pp.Machiavelli and the Orders of Violence, by Yves Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 230 pp.


This book is suitable for those who work with automated text and image design. It shows examples of working correctly on a conceptual level. Exact directions for using all of the grid systems presented (8 to 32 grid fields) are given to the user. These can be used for the most varied of projects. The three-dimensional grid is treated as well. Put simply: a guidebook from the profession for the profession. The development of organisational systems in visual communication was the service and the accomplishment of the representatives of simple and functional typography and graphic design. In the 1920s in Europe, works already arose in the areas of typography, graphic design and photography with objectified conception and rigid composition. In 1961 a brief presentation of the grid with text and illustrations appeared for the first time in an earlier book by the author. Articles published mainly in trade journals then followed. This book now attempts to close a gap by giving examples and exact directions to the professional concerning all grid problems that can occur. The author, a world-renowned professional, thus offers his colleagues the tools to solve problems more easily.


We study the transitions between the ground and excited Wannier states induced by a weak ac field. Because the upper Wannier states are several orders of magnitude less stable than the ground states, these transitions decrease the global stability of the system characterized by the rate of probability leakage or decay rate. Using non-Hermitian resonant perturbation theory we obtain an analytical expression for this induced decay rate. The analytical results are compared with exact numerical calculations of the system decay rate.


"Biology: Life on Earth with Physiology, " Tenth Edition continues this book s tradition of engaging non-majors biology students with real-world applications and inquiry-based pedagogy that fosters a lifetime of discovery and scientific literacy. "Biology: Life on Earth with Physiology, " Tenth Edition maintains the friendly writing style the book is known for and continues to incorporate true and relevant stories in every chapter in the form of the Case Study, Case Study Continued, and Case Study Revisited features. New to the Tenth Edition are Learning Goals and Check Your Learning, both of which help students to assess their understanding of the core concepts in biology. This new edition includes an increased focus on health science: Health Watch essays are included throughout units, and more anatomy & physiology content has been incorporated into the main narrative. Several of the popular, inquiry-based features, including Consider This and Have You Ever Wondered?, are new or refreshed. With this Tenth Edition, the authors continue to emphasize application with new or revised essays in Earth Watch, Science in Action, In Greater Depth, and Links to Everyday Life features. For coverage of plant and animal anatomy & physiology, an alternate edition "Biology: Life on Earth with Physiology, " Tenth Edition is also available. "


Homebuilders are exploring more cost effective combined space and water heating systems (combo systems) with major water heater manufacturers that are offering pre-engineered forced air space heating combo systems. In this project, unlike standardized tests, laboratory tests were conducted that subjected condensing tankless and storage water heater based combo systems to realistic, coincidental space and domestic hot water loads with the following key findings: 1) The tankless combo system maintained more stable DHW and space heating temperatures than the storage combo system. 2) The tankless combo system consistently achieved better daily efficiencies (i.e. 84%-93%) than the storage combo system (i.e. 81%- 91%) when the air handler was sized adequately and adjusted properly to achieve significant condensing operation. When condensing operation was not achieved, both systems performed with lower (i.e. 75%-88%), but similar efficiencies. 3) Air handlers currently packaged with combo systems are not designed to optimize condensing operation. More research is needed to develop air handlers specifically designed for condensing water heaters. 4) System efficiencies greater than 90% were achieved only on days where continual and steady space heating loads were required with significant condensing operation. For days where heating was more intermittent, the system efficiencies fell below 90%.


Book Two in the V&A's groundbreaking new series presents 17 patterns for garments and accessories from a seventeenth-century woman's wardrobe. It includes patterns for a loose gown, a jacket, a pair of stays and a boned bodice, ivory and wooden busks, shoes, a hat, a stomacher, linen bands and supporters, a bag and a knife case. It also features a description of the stay-making process. Full step-by-step drawings of the construction sequence are given for each garment to enable the reader to accurately reconstruct them. There are scale patterns and diagrams for making linen and metal thread laces and embroidery designs. Multiple photographs of the objects, close-up construction details and X-ray photography reveal the hidden elements of the clothes, the precise number of layers and the stitches used inside.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the market potential in the German outdoor apparel industry by focusing on sustainable production in terms of environmental and human health. A literature study of the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) design concept is provided, as it represents a solution for pollution, waste and environmental destruction caused by the current industrial design and waste management. The data for the subsequent market- and competitive analysis of the German outdoor apparel industry was collected through secondary research in order to identify several key market indicators for the assessment of the market potential. The outcome of this research is the identification of a positioning strategy for outdoor apparel according to the C2C design concept. The results show stagnant growth rates in recent years in the German outdoor apparel market and strong rivalry among the competitors. However, a significant market potential was calculated and beneficial trends for sustainable outdoor brands were recognised. These findings reveal the existence of a market potential for an outdoor apparel brand according to the C2C design concept. By following a positioning strategy of transparency and full commitment to a sustainable production, the company might be able to gain market shares from its competitors, as future predictions indicate slow growth rates in the market. The results of this analysis can be of great interest for entrepreneurs that plan to enter the German outdoor apparel industry.


The Interpreting Biblical Texts series presents a concise edition covering the seven undisputed epistles of Paul. In this volume, Charles Cousar is primarily concerned not with the man Paul and his life and work, but with his surviving letters. Part 1 introduces methods in reading the Pauline letters. Part 2 attends to the critical themes emerging in the letters--the decisiveness of Jesus Christ and old versus new life. Part 3 discusses the other six letters bearing Paul's name that appear in the New Testament.


This festschrift article describes two projects inspired by Morton Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Transformation I). Both projects tell the story of the transformation of Transformation I, as it migrated to non-American legal contexts and as its historiographical questions and interpretations were transformed due to the encounter with non-American materials. One project examines the history of the judicial law making in a colonial context - that of British-ruled Palestine in the early 20th century, and the other is a comparative examination of the history of tax avoidance decisions in the UK, the United States and Israel in the early and middle parts of the 20th century. Both projects described in the article attempt to answer the question what factors influence judicial decisions? Both seek to show that class and economic interests, at least in some contexts, are not the major factor that shaped the case-law. The article is thus an opportunity for me to look back on more than a decade of work and reflect on how my work has been, to a large extent, an attempt to revisit the Horwitz thesis outlined in Transformation I, taking some explicit and implicit questions that Horwitz posed in that book, shifting their focus from legal doctrines and their economic effects to judicial minds and their relationship to culture and public opinion, and examining them in a number of non-American contexts. The ultimate lesson of this experience, I will conclude, is that the Horwitzian journey, a journey which seeks to study the links between politics and judge-made doctrines, is at once an inconclusive yet also a rewarding pursuit.


With the aim of better understanding for query reformulation behavior in Information Retrieval (IR), this study is to investigate searcher's perceptions for query reformulation behavior in information search process on the Web using Google search engine as a tested in exploring what factors might affect searcher's query reformulation behavior. The study employed two survey questionnaires and a search task. Twenty seven subjects were recruited to participate in this study. Based on the findings, precision and relevance seem to be two key factors for subjects to reformulate previous queries as well as to compare between search results. Interestingly, search satisfaction and confidence might be other factors for subjects when considering query reformulations. Query reformulations might have not only broadened the search depending upon the quality of query reformulations, but may also have provided opportunities to learn and come up with new ideas. The findings of this study expect to promote understanding of searcher's query reformulation behavior in order to be of better assistance to both searchers and system developers.


Greater Magadha, roughly the eastern part of the Gangetic plain of northern India, has so far been looked upon as deeply indebted to Brahmanical culture. Religions such as Buddhism and Jainism are thought of as derived, in one way or another, from Vedic religion. This belief is defective in various respects. This book argues for the importance and independence of Greater Magadha as a cultural area until a date close to the beginning of the Common Era. In order to correct the incorrect notions, two types of questions are dealt with: questions pertaining to cultural and religious dependencies, and questions relating to chronology. As a result a modified picture arises that also has a bearing on the further development of Indian culture.


Alice is seven months pregnant, and the pregnancy threatens her life. She has a constitutional right to save her life by hiring a doctor to abort the viable fetus. A person breaks into Katherine's home and seems about to try to kill her (or perhaps seriously injure, rape, or kidnap her). Katherine may protect her life by killing the attacker, even if the attacker isn't morally culpable, for instance if he is insane, and even though recognizing this right may let some people use false claims of self-defense to get away with killing the innocent. Ellen is terminally ill. Under Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Eschenbach, decided in 2006 by the D.C. Circuit, Ellen has a constitutional right to try to save her life by hiring a doctor to administer some kinds of experimental drugs, even though federal law generally bars the use of such drugs. Olivia is dying of kidney failure. A kidney transplant would likely save her life, just as an abortion would save Alice's, lethal self-defense may save Katherine's, and an experimental treatment may save Ellen's. But the federal ban on payment for organs sharply limits the availability of kidneys, so Olivia will likely die if she must wait for a donated kidney (just as Alice, Ellen, and Katherine would be in jeopardy if abortions, experimental treatments, and weapons could only be provided for free). My claim is that all four cases involve the exercise of a person's presumptive right to self-defense - lethal self-defense in Katherine's case, and what I call medical self-defense in the others. This is a constitutional right: Roe and Casey secure not just a pre-viability right to abortion as reproductive choice, but also a separate post-viability right to abortion as medical self-defense when pregnancy threatens a woman's life. And given that Alice has such a right to defend herself by getting an abortion, Ellen and Olivia should have the same right to defend themselves through other medical procedures. It can't be that a woman has a constitutional right to protect her life using medical procedures, but only when doing so kills a viable fetus. And the right is also supported by the long-recognized right to lethal self-defense: the right to protect your life against attack even if it means killing the attacker. The right has constitutional foundations, in substantive due process, state constitutional rights to defend life and to bear arms, and maybe the Second Amendment. But even if it's treated as just a common-law and statutory right, our accepting it should lead us to accept a similar common-law or statutory right to defend one's life against medical threats as well as against human or animal threats. The right of medical self-defense thus offers an extra foundation for the Abigail Alliance holding that there is a constitutional right to use experimental therapies to protect one's life. And it makes the organ sales ban presumptively improper and unconstitutional when the organs are needed to protect people's lives; some concerns about organ markets may justify regulations of such markets, but not prohibition.


Satisfaction of household requirements and profit maximization has been the main goals of subsistence small-holder farmers in the rural communities of Nigeria. This necessitated the practice of multiple/mixed cropping of arable crops. On the contrary, a part of the National food security agenda of the Federal government is the raising of maize sole to meet the need of local consumers as well as export market. The need to chat a middle course for meeting the requirements of all the parties concerned calls for this study. Data used were obtained from well organized and supervised rural farmers in south-western Nigeria and analyzed by using budgeting and linear programming. Results obtained from the use of Linear programming techniques have demonstrated that mixed cropping involving maize/cocoyam, maize/cassava/yam and cassava/yam are more rewarding in terms of profits and satisfaction of subsistence goals on small-holder farms in south western Nigeria. This contrasts diametrically with sole cropping of maize which has been the priority of the agricultural extension departments of the ministries of agriculture in tune with government programme. The use of parametric programming suggests that increase in farm size, introduction of labour-enhancing technologies and improved production techniques would raise returns from sole cropping of maize to a competitive level and thus resolve the empirical conflict.


Recently, a new Quicksort variant due to Yaroslavskiy was chosen as standard sorting
method for Oracle's Java 7 runtime library. The decision for the change was based on
empirical studies showing that on average, the new algorithm is faster than the formerly
used classic Quicksort. Surprisingly, the improvement was achieved by using a dual pivot
approach — an idea that was considered not promising by several theoretical studies in the
past. In this thesis, I try to find the reason for this unexpected success.
My focus is on the precise and detailed average case analysis, aiming at the flavor of
Knuth's series "The Art of Computer Programming". In particular, I go beyond abstract
measures like counting key comparisons, and try to understand the efficiency of the
algorithms at different levels of abstraction. Whenever possible, precise expected values are
preferred to asymptotic approximations. This rigor ensures that (a) the sorting methods
discussed here are actually usable in practice and (b) that the analysis results contribute to
a sound comparison of the Quicksort variants.


"The purpose of this study was to depict the mental models high school students, ages 14-18, hold of zoos. This study also examined how students define conservation and the role of zoos in conservation. This study examined the differences in mental models of 84 students 1) 21 students who had visited a zoo with their teacher in the same semester in which the study was conducted 2) 21 students who had visited a zoo during another school year with their teacher 3) 21 students who had visited the zoo without a teacher, and 4) 21 students who had never visited a zoo. It also examined the mental models of students of different ethnicities and examined differences in mental models of young men and women. This study was conducted and the data analyzed using a qualitative methodology research design. All 84 students completed a demographic questionnaire, a concept map, and a ranking concepts exercise. Twenty-four students were interviewed. The findings indicated that: 1) students who had visited a zoo have a richer mental model of zoos than students who have never visited a zoo, 2) students who had visited a zoo with their teacher provided a deeper richer understanding of the roles of zoos in conservation and education, 3) students who have never visited a zoo do have mental models of zoos, 4) students do not mention conservation with respect to zoos unless specifically asked about the role of zoos in conservation, 5) students did not mention the zoo's connection to species survival nor did they view zoos as a source of information for conservation-related topics. The data indicated that the mental models student hold of zoos consist of seven themes: 1) organisms, 2) people, 3) amenities, 4) descriptive terms, 5) habitats, 6) education, and 7) conservation. The seven themes were defined and used to create the Zoo Acuity Model. The central constructs of the Zoo Acuity Model are the Observation Framework, the Interaction Framework, and the Information Framework. Most important to this study is the development of the Information Framework, which described the information students knew about zoos."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


Before the twentieth century, personal debt resided on the fringes of the American economy, the province of small-time criminals and struggling merchants. By the end of the century, however, the most profitable corporations and banks in the country lent money to millions of American debtors. How did this happen? The first book to follow the history of personal debt in modern America, Debtor Nation traces the evolution of debt over the course of the twentieth century, following its transformation from fringe to mainstream--thanks to federal policy, financial innovation, and retail competition. How did banks begin making personal loans to consumers during the Great Depression? Why did the government invent mortgage-backed securities? Why was all consumer credit, not just mortgages, tax deductible until 1986? Who invented the credit card? Examining the intersection of government and business in everyday life, Louis Hyman takes the reader behind the scenes of the institutions that made modern lending possible: the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of multinationals, and the back rooms of loan sharks. America's newfound indebtedness resulted not from a culture in decline, but from changes in the larger structure of American capitalism that were created, in part, by the choices of the powerful--choices that made lending money to facilitate consumption more profitable than lending to invest in expanded production. From the origins of car financing to the creation of subprime lending, Debtor Nation presents a nuanced history of consumer credit practices in the United States and shows how little loans became big business.


This paper examines the empirical question of whether systematic equity risk of U.S. firms as measured by beta from the Capital Asset Pricing Model reflects the risk of their pension plans. There are a number of reasons to suspect that it might not. Chief among them is the opaque set of accounting rules used to report pension assets, liabilities, and expenses. Pension plan assets and liabilities are off-balance sheet, and are often viewed as segregated from the rest of the firm, with its own trustees. Pension accounting rules are complicated. Furthermore, the role of Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation further clouds the real relation between pension plan risk and firm equity risk. The empirical findings in this paper are consistent with the hypothesis that equity risk does reflect the risk of the firm's pension plan despite arcane accounting rules for pensions. This finding is consistent with informational efficiency of the capital markets. It also has implications for corporate finance practice in the determination of the cost of capital for capital budgeting. Standard procedure uses de-leveraged equity return betas to infer the cost of capital for operating assets. But the de-leveraged betas are not adjusted for the risk of the pension assets and liabilities. Failure to make this adjustment will typically bias upwards estimates of the discount rate for capital budgeting. The magnitude of the bias is shown here to be large for a number of well-known U.S. companies. This bias can result in positive net-present-value projects being rejected.


This article analyzes the complex interplay between adoption (traditionally a matter reserved to state family law) and the federal Indian Child Welfare Act in the context of adoptions by gays and lesbians. As a federal statute that partially preempts state law for the benefit of Native Americans, ICWA implicates three sovereigns: the United States, the state where the adoption petition is brought, and the tribe whose child is the focus of the proceeding. This interplay of sovereigns in itself makes Indian child welfare law complicated and interesting. Beyond these sovereign interests, also to be considered are the interests and rights of individuals: the child, the birth parents, and the prospective adoptive parent(s). In cases where the petitioner's sexual orientation is an issue, an Indian child adoption proceeding also holds the potential to become a clash of cultures. A tribe with a tradition of tolerance toward sexual or gender diversity might find its members in the courts of a state with a public policy that disapproves of gays and lesbians as adoptive parents. Or the opposite may occur: a tribe might object based on its cultural beliefs to a child's placement in a gay or lesbian household, even though the state supports adoption equality. Prospective parents who are required to bring a petition in tribal court may find themselves in a legal world that subordinates their interests to those of the child or the tribe, operates by informal rules, and looks to cultural traditions in rendering legal judgments. These scenarios all arise at the tangled intersection of traditional state family law, Indian culture, federal Indian policy, and evolving principles of gay/lesbian equality. They implicate both practical and doctrinal puzzles, but so far scholars have had little or nothing to say about them.When an adoption petitioner's sexual orientation becomes an issue in an adoption proceeding under ICWA, the question will arise: do the federal policies embedded in ICWA ever determine, or at least influence, whether or not such an adoption must be granted or subsequently recognized as valid, taking into account the petitioner's sexual orientation? Even though ICWA makes no mention of sexual orientation and, ostensibly, has nothing to do with gay/lesbian adoption, I explain the answer is yes: where a prospective parent's sexual orientation is an issue in the adoption of an Indian child, sometimes ICWA will make a difference in whether the adoption is granted or recognized. Under certain circumstances, ICWA's requirements might lead to a gay or lesbian individual or couple being denied an adoption in tribal court that they could have obtained in state court. In other circumstances, ICWA will require a state to recognize a gay/lesbian adoption finalized in tribal court even though that state would not have granted the placement itself.I also discuss whether ICWA gives decisive leverage in a state-court adoption proceeding to a tribe's views on homosexuality; I conclude it does not. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, I argue that ICWA should override a state's anti-gay adoption policy if such a law would present a roadblock to the placement of an Indian child in an Indian home.


Flow is a desirable state of consciousness and absorption in an optimally challenging activity. Prior research has investigated individual differences in flow. The present study investigates flow by contrasting physical versus mental activities, using a mixed-methods, sequential explanatory design. The sample from the quantitative phase included 205 undergraduate university students assessed on measures of personality, difficulties in emotion regulation, and flow. The big-five traits intellect and conscientiousness, as well as the emotion regulation subscale 'lack of emotional clarity' predicted flow during mental activities, but unexpectedly no variables significantly predicted physical flow activities. The second phase used semi-structured interviews with 10 participants. Analyses of the interviews helped further explain the statistical findings, revealing four main themes: role of stress, source of guilt, presence of others, and satisfaction and fulfillment. We conclude that flow is especially relevant...


In the knowledge-driven economy, a rapid and holistic understanding of business is more crucial than ever before, on account of the new rules of competition and the greater complexity and speed of change. This dissertation focuses on the phenomenon called business intelligence (BI), which is an approach to process and enrich business information in the managerial context. The main focus of BI is on providing management with the information and insight necessary to understand a company's most crucial business possibilities and risks and how the company should position itself in light of potential changes. The main idea of BI addresses very old management problems, and BI has its roots in various traditional disciplines. Even if the phenomenon is widely known and used in the business world and the consultancy literature, there is no precise or universally shared concept of what BI is. The dissertation examines BI as a tool for managing business information in large Finnish companies. The thesis starts with definition of the doctrine of BI and its positioning at the level of BI-related concepts. The latter is also the main theoretical objective of the thesis. Another theoretical objective is to confirm the theoretical framework for BI and increase understanding of this young field of research. The empirical objective of the dissertation is to improve on the general knowledge of BI and its evolution, state, and usage in large Finnish companies. In addition, the dissertation examines methods for measuring BI, integration of a BI process into strategic management, and utilization of human-source intelligence. The thesis relies on three sources of data: single-case studies with interviews and observations, surveys, and literature-based research. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on the traditional management literature and the more contemporary BI and information management literature. The results presented in the dissertation suggest that the role of BI in Finland has expanded since the 1990s. The use of BI increased in the top 50 Finnish companies in the time span under examination, and BI is likely becoming an integral part of these companies' activities. Large Finnish companies view BI not only as a defensive tool to ward off perceived threats and changes but also as a proactive management tool for uncovering new business opportunities, trends, and weak signals in the business environment. Most of the top 50 companies utilize their own resources for BI and have an information system dedicated to BI. However, they feel that BI is currently not systematic enough. On the basis of the research, one may cite as possible reasons for the disaffection with BI, e.g., the lack of BI metrics and the fact that the bulk of BI investments have focused on technical details at the expense of human elements.


Despite the attention given to the anticompetitive effects of gerrymandering on national and state elections, little notice is paid to the least competitive legislative elections in America: its city council elections. In cities with partisan elections, individual competitive seats are rarer than at the national level and there is almost never competition for partisan control of councils. Nonpartisan city council elections are even worse, with virtually undefeatable incumbents and no policy competition of any kind. The dominant explanation in the political science literature for this phenomenon is that the lack of partisan competition in local elections is a result of the issues at play in local politics. Local politics, the argument goes, is not ideological - it is only about the competence with which public goods are provided and the allocation of these goods to different groups. This claim cannot stand up to scrutiny. Debates over issues like policing strategy and urban development are ideological, and voters do have beliefs about them, but there is still no partisan competition.This paper argues that the explanation for the lack of partisan competition in city council elections lies in the laws governing these elections. Several laws - by my definition "unitary party rules" - serve to ensure that the national parties are on the ballot in local elections and that candidates, activists and voters do not defect from dominant national parties during local elections. When combined with the little information available about individual council candidates, the existence of the national party heuristic on local ballots crowds out other information and the laws create severe barriers to entry for potential local parties. The result is that the vote in city council elections directly tracks the vote in national elections, despite strong empirical evidence that voters have very different beliefs about local and national issues. In cities in which one party dominates at the national level, there is no competition. Thus, local legislatures are extremely unrepresentative of voter preferences and have little democratic legitimacy. Repealing the unitary party rules would spur a rearrangement of the two-party system at the local level and create party competition at the local level.


Pluripotent stem cells, such as Embryonic Stem cells, have the extraordinary ability to give rise to all cell types of the body, and hold great potential for regenerative medicine. Pluripotent stem cells are derived from in vitro culture of early embryos or by over-expression of specific transcription factors in somatic cells. In recent years great progress has been made towards understanding the molecular basis of pluripotency. The transcriptomes of various pluripotent stem cell lines have been examined in order to identify molecular mechanisms that control self-renewal and pluripotency. These studies have begun to reveal the components and architecture of the transcriptional regulatory networks of pluripotency, and suggest that transcription factors maintain the pluripotent state in the backdrop of a loose, accessible chromatin. Such a chromatin state may allow for increased global transcription, resulting in the expression of many novel and as yet uncharacterized transcripts. Fluctuations in the transcriptional networks may alternate pluripotent stem cells between states with distinct probabilities for self-renewal or differentiation. In this chapter, we review studies of the transcriptome of pluripotent stem cells, highlight intriguing transcriptional similarities between pluripotent stem cells, cancer cells and the germline, and discuss future avenues of research.


JRSM Open is an online-only, peer-reviewed, open access companion journal to JRSM. JRSM Open was launched in June 2010 and is rapidly developing into a leading international online resource of clinical papers, reviews and case reports on all aspects of improving patient care. As with other open access journals, authors are required to pay a small fee for published articles to cover the production costs and ensure that their article is freely available to readers. Articles published in JRSM Open are included in PubMed, PubMed Central and Google Scholar. You can find JRSM Open on the Internet at http:// jro.sagepub.com. To submit a clinical paper or case report to JRSM Open, visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/shorts. For submission inquiries, contact Dr Kamran Abbasi, editor of JRSM and JRSM Open, by email at email@example.com. Articles published in JRSM Open will also be mentioned in the print edition of JRSM. Here are the articles published in JRSM Open in December 2015:


"The purpose of this research was to explore the historical, cultural, and political background behind the visual representation of Muslim women in the West in the post-September 11th era and to create pedagogy based on contemporary art that can engage and unsettle stereotypes and assumptions. The history of European colonialism in traditionally Muslim countries has led to a complex and problematic centering of the covering or uncovering of Muslim women's bodies. The current influences of globalization provide a means to theorize two types of identity creation: inclusive identity that is based on a global sense of community, and exclusive identity that is predicated on the creation of concrete borders that separate "us" from "them". The exclusive identity has been central to the discourse of an impending clash between Islam/West, evil/good, and the visual representation of difference is vital to maintaining these false binaries. Historically, the West has created a visual fantasy of the Muslim woman that involved the uncovering and exposing of the forbidden, veiled woman. Contemporary artists who cross cultural geographic borders between traditionally Muslim countries and the West offer ways of constructing inclusive identities that do not break down into easy binaries. Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, Mona Hatoum, and Emily Jacir create artwork that is diverse in its medium and meaning, but all address personal experiences of movement between cultures and the shifting cultural codes that have been negotiated. Their work uses many of the visual codes of Orientalism in order to question and subvert assumed meanings. I propose a postcolonial pragmatic pedagogy based in the work of these artists. The Visual Orientalist discourse that has created the image of the oppressed, veiled Muslim woman in American public imagination must be analyzed through a critical visual pedagogy. Once assumptions are acknowledged, the work of contemporary artists can be examined and evaluated in order to pragmatically dislodge Eurocentric notions of Muslim women. The unequal relationships of power that produce Orientalism must be at the foundation of a postcolonial pedagogy that re-imagines how difference is engaged and multicultural education is created."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


She can be funny and sharp-tongued, warm and blunt, empathic and demanding. Who is the woman Barack Obama calls "the boss"? In "Michelle, Washington Post" writer Liza Mundy paints a revealing and intimate portrait, taking us inside the marriage of the most dynamic couple in politics today. She shows how well they complement each other: Michelle, the highly organized, sometimes intimidating, list-making pragmatist; Barack, the introspective political charmer who won't pick up his socks but shoots for the stars. Their relationship, like those of many couples with two careers and two children, has been so strained at times that he has had to persuade her to support his climb up the political ladder. And you can't blame her for occasionally regretting it: In this campaign, it is Michelle who has absorbed much of the skepticism from voters about Obama. One conservative magazine put her on the cover under the headline "Mrs. Grievance." Michelle's story carries with it all the extraordinary achievements and lingering pain of America in the post-civil rights era. She grew up on the south side of Chicago, the daughter of a city worker and a stay-at-home mom in a neighborhood rocked by white flight. She was admitted to Princeton amid an angry debate about affirmative action and went on to Harvard Law School, where she was more comfortable doing pro-bono work for the poor than gunning for awards with the rest of her peers. She became a corporate lawyer, then left to train community leaders. She is modern in her tastes but likes to watch reruns of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Brady Bunch." In this carefully reported biography, drawing upon interviews with more than one hundred people, including one with Michelle herself, Mundy captures the complexity of this remarkable woman and the remarkable life she has lived.


Address-space randomization is a technique used to fortify systems against buffer overflow attacks. The idea is to introduce artificial diversity by randomizing the memory location of certain system components. This mechanism is available for both Linux (via PaX ASLR) and OpenBSD. We study the effectiveness of address-space randomization and find that its utility on 32-bit architectures is limited by the number of bits available for address randomization. In particular, we demonstrate a <i>derandomization attack</i> that will convert any standard buffer-overflow exploit into an exploit that works against systems protected by address-space randomization. The resulting exploit is as effective as the original exploit, although it takes a little longer to compromise a target machine: on average 216 seconds to compromise Apache running on a Linux PaX ASLR system. The attack does not require running code on the stack.
 We also explore various ways of strengthening address-space randomization and point out weaknesses in each. Surprisingly, increasing the frequency of re-randomizations adds at most 1 bit of security. Furthermore, compile-time randomization appears to be more effective than runtime randomization. We conclude that, on 32-bit architectures, the only benefit of PaX-like address-space randomization is a small slowdown in worm propagation speed. The cost of randomization is extra complexity in system support.


We present an application of our framework for 3-D object- centered change detection to combined satellite and aerial imagery. In this framework, geometry is compared to geometry, allowing us to compare image sets with different acquisition conditions and even different sensors. By working in this framework, we do not encounter the restrictions and short-comings of conventional image-based change detection, which requires that the images being compared have similar acquisition geometry, photometry, scene illumination, and so forth. The contributions of our framework are: (1) using a geometric basis for change detection, allowing image sets acquired under different conditions to be compared; (2) explicit modeling of image geometry to be able to numerically characterize significant and insignificant change. The contributions of this paper are: (1) the algorithms are embedded in an integrated cartographic modeling and image processing system, which can ingest and make use of a variety of government and commercial imagery and geospatial data products; (2) experimentation with a variety of imagery and scene content. Modifications to the algorithm specific to their use with satellite imagery are discussed and the results from several experiments with both aerial and satellite images urban domains are described and analyzed.


What people are saying about Building iPhone Apps w/ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript "The future of mobile development is clearly web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Jonathan Stark shows you how to leverage your existing web development skills to build native iPhone applications using these technologies." --John Allsopp, author and founder of Web Directions "Jonathan's book is the most comprehensive documentation available for developing web applications for mobile Safari. Not just great tech coverage, this book is an easy read of purely fascinating mobile tidbits in a fun colloquial style. Must have for all PhoneGap developers." -- Brian LeRoux, Nitobi SoftwareIt's a fact: if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this book, you'll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch on the platform of your choice-without using Objective-C or Cocoa. Device-agnostic mobile apps are the wave of the future, and this book shows you how to create one product for several platforms. You'll find guidelines for converting your product into a native iPhone app using the free PhoneGap framework. And you'll learn why releasing your product as a web app first helps you find, fix, and test bugs much faster than if you went straight to the App Store with a product built with Apple's tools. Build iPhone apps with tools you already know how to use Learn how to make an existing website look and behave like an iPhone app Add native-looking animations to your web app using jQTouch Take advantage of client-side data storage with apps that run even when the iPhone is offline Hook into advanced iPhone features -- including the accelerometer, geolocation, and vibration -- with JavaScript Submit your applications to the App Store with Xcode This book received valuable community input through O'Reilly's Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS). Learn more at http://labs.oreilly.com/ofps.html.


This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society.By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely dispersed throughout China and books were found even in isolated locales. Adding a dynamic element to our earlier understanding of the publishing industry, Dennis tracks the movements of manuscripts to printers and print labor to production sites. By reconstructing printer business zones, he demonstrates that publishers operated across long distances in trans-regional markets. He also creates the first substantial data set on publishing costs in early modern China a foundational breakthrough in understanding the world of Chinese books. Dennis s work reveals areas for future research on newly-identified regional publishing centers and the economics of book production."


A cardinal axiom of international human rights law is that the prohibition against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment is absolute in the sense that no exception can be accepted, defended, justified, or tolerated in any circumstance whatever. Yet, for several reasons this is deeply problematic. For a start, since absoluteness is not an express, inherent, self-evident, or necessary feature of the provisions in question, this status is a matter of attribution rather than, as the orthodoxy holds, inherent legal necessity. Other non-absolute interpretations are not only possible, but expressly underpin similar prohibitions in some celebrated national human rights instruments. It does not follow either, because the term 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment' is typically included in the same clauses which prohibit torture, that each of these very different types of harmful conduct must necessarily share the same status. The much-repeated claim that the prohibition is absolute in principle but relative in application is also unconvincing. Finally, it is not merely morally or legally, but also logically impossible for each of two competing instances of any 'absolute' right to be equally 'absolute' in any meaningful sense. The prohibition against torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in international human rights law can, at best therefore, only be 'virtually', rather than strictly, absolute. It applies, in other words, in all but the rarest circumstances but not, as the received wisdom maintains, to the exclusion of every possible justification, exoneration, excuse, or mitigation.


The right of publicity is a legal theory which enables individuals to protect themselves from unauthorized, commercial appropriations of their personas. Although the right of privacy and the right of publicity are similar in that both doctrines are aimed at controlling the extent to which one party can use the details of the life of another, they nonetheless have come to represent distinct legal theories. Publicity actions typically are regarded as the means of achieving compensation for the loss of financial gain associated with a defendant's unauthorized appropriation. In contrast, the right of privacy continues to be regarded as the predicate for actions based on hurt feelings. The reasons for this distinction are partially attributable to the particular fact patterns in seminal cases as well as the result of the legal system's failure to embrace a cohesive legal doctrine that affords individuals the ability to redress unauthorized appropriations of their identities involving both economic and reputational damage. Allowing the unauthorized use of an individual's persona potentially poses the maximum harm when the persona is being appropriated in an objectionable context or for an objectionable purpose. In these instances, neither an award of injunctive relief nor monetary damages will erase the damage to human dignity which the persona perceives as having already been inflicted by virtue of the user's unauthorized appropriation. No judicially mandated relief can eliminate the prior effects of the user's objectionable public exposure of the persona. These are situations involving dignity based, as opposed to economically based, objections to the use. Notwithstanding the confusion between privacy and publicity, and between commercial and personal interests, the reality is that both celebrities and non-celebrities can bring actions based on the unauthorized use of their personas that involve dignity as well as economically based harms. Moreover, in the age of 'reality television' the line between celebrity and non-celebrity has become especially fuzzy. Today more so than ever before, an increasing number of ordinary people have the opportunity to garner their so-called 'fifteen minutes' of fame. Although there may be positive benefits to be derived by individuals from this exposure, one downside is that these 'short-term' celebrities also suffer an increased likelihood of being the subject of right of publicity violations generally and dignity based harms in particular. Much ink has been spilled over the intersection between the right of publicity and the First Amendment generally. To date, however, neither courts nor commentators have focused specifically on how the existence of a dignity based harm should impact the analysis in these cases and so this Essay attempts to open a dialogue on this point. For purposes of this work, I accept the right of publicity's existence as a given, and therefore do not argue for or against the right. Instead, I propose a way of thinking about those publicity cases where damage to human dignity is a prime - or even the prime - concern of the plaintiff. Part I of this Essay initially examines the relationship between causes of action such as privacy, defamation and the right of publicity that can involve harm to the plaintiff's dignity. It then explores how conflict can arise in connection with these types of claims and the First Amendment. Part II illuminates the current tests courts have used to determine how the right of publicity specifically should co-exist with the First Amendment, and concludes that none of these tests are suitable in the context of publicity claims involving dignity harms. Part III develops a more suitable framework for evaluating such claims.