Market liberalization is a major provision of the structural adjustment programme .This paper examined the nature of maize price fluctuations following the introduction of the reform .Secondary data on average monthly prices of maize covering the period 1983-2000 were sourced from various publications. Data on monthly prices were deflated by consumer price index of food items to construct real price series for maize. The econometric model, Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic in Mean (ARCH-M) was employed to determine the effect of the policy reform on the mean and volatility of maize prices. The results of the ARCH-M model show that a sharp increase was observed in the first-order autocorrelation between the pre- liberalization and post- liberalization periods for both the mean (0.02 to 0.10) and variance (0.49 to 3.96). This implies that the long term changes in the price of maize due to free marketing are different from periods of administrative pricing. The variation was lowest in the pre- liberalization period relative to the post- liberalization period while the highest variability was experienced in the short term period immediately after the reform. The price of its close substitute, sorghum, and the border parity price affects the price of maize thus allowing for informal cross border trade in the post- liberalization period. The lagged prices of maize and seasonal changes reduce volatility in the price of maize between the pre and post liberalization periods. There are also differences in the volatility of maize price across regions. Regional differences show that volatility increased in Adamawa and Niger and decreased in Akwa Ibom in the post- liberalization period. Prices became more stable in the southern agro- climatic zones in the long run but were high in the northern savannahs. Policy makers can stabilize maize prices by disseminating information on price movements and keeping stock of maize for the dry season. Present efforts to increase productivity through improved access to inputs should be strengthened and effectively monitored to ensure increased output so as to increase maize stock. The conclusion is that the reform has increased the mean prices of maize and its volatility over the years, however, other factors have also contributed to price increase since Nigeria's maize are only traded across close borders and the country is yet to be integrated into the world's maize market.


In the face of a small corn crop and high prices, there has been a great deal of debate about a partial temporary waiver of the Renewable Fuels Standards (RFS) mandate for ethanol in 2013. Our analysis of the likely impacts of such a waiver can be found here. While the headlines have focused on the shortterm implications of waiving the ethanol mandate in 2013, a potentially much larger issue looms on the horizon. Beyond 2013, there are real questions about the feasibility of meeting the ever-increasing requirements of the RFS, and this concern goes beyond the well-known difficulties with meeting the mandate for cellulosic biofuels. The purpose of this post is to show why the RFS is likely to collide with market realities in the near future.


Russia announced on August 29, 2008, that it was banning poultry imports from 19 U.S. establishments due to safety concerns, and that 29 others could lose approval if they do not improve their standards. Russian officials also signaled that they might reduce U.S. permits to import poultry and pork under that country's quota system. The economic stakes of Russian import actions are high for U.S. poultry producers - 29% of their exports went to that market in 2007 - and red meat producers, who also are experiencing strong growth in the Russian market. In Congress, any potential options likely would be reviewed within the context of the broader geopolitical situation.


Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a core element of UNESCO's Sustainable Development Goal (SDGs) Target 4.7, which seeks to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development through education for sustainable development. The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) followed suit in 2015 and launched a high scale national monitoring of the current state of ESD implementation. In this context, suitable ESD indicators should be analyzed to inform policy and research agendas. The present project is part of the national monitoring within Germany's Global Action Program (GAP) actions. The research team at the University of Education in Freiburg conducted a study to evaluate the accessibility of data and the measurability of ESD-relevant teacher training (TT). During the two-step procedure for data collection on ESD-relevant TTs in Germany, an extensive list of ESD related search terms first captured 66,935 TTs with possible ESD relevance in the evaluation period. Second, the collected data was analyzed using Mayring's qualitative content analysis. The 66,935 TTs were thereby reduced to 3818 TTs with different degrees of ESD relevance. The results of the evaluation study show that suitable ESD indicators, the FESD (formula for the ESD-indicator for TTs) (basic), FESD (basic, rated) and FESD (pro), could be developed and calculated for 15 of 16 federal states in Germany. The gathered insights show a path towards ESD monitoring in TT to clarify the needs and achievements of ESD implementation in the field of continuing education of teachers. However, the presented indicators only show a possible path for ESD indicator development. A comprehensive set of ESD indicators should also focus on the micro or output (e.g., ESD competencies) level. These insights for the future seem worth striving for not only in Germany or on the national level but also internationally to foster ESD, Target 4.7 of the SDGs and the SDGs in general.


Once upon a time, I, Chuang-tse, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chuang. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. —Chuang-tse (c. 275 b.c.)


It is well known that the performance of mobile radio systems can be significantly enhanced by the application of adaptive antennas which consist of multi-element antenna arrays plus signal processing circuitry. In the thesis the utilization of such antennas as receive antennas in the uplink of mobile radio air interfaces of the type TD-CDMA is studied. Especially, the incorporation of covariance matrices of the received interference signals into the signal processing algorithms is investigated with a view to improve the system performance as compared to state of the art adaptive antenna technology. These covariance matrices implicitly contain information on the directions of incidence of the interference signals, and this information may be exploited to reduce the effective interference power when processing the signals received by the array elements. As a basis for the investigations, first directional models of the mobile radio channels and of the interference impinging at the receiver are developed, which can be implemented on the computer at low cost. These channel models cover both outdoor and indoor environments. They are partly based on measured channel impulse responses and, therefore, allow a description of the mobile radio channels which comes sufficiently close to reality. Concerning the interference models, two cases are considered. In the one case, the interference signals arriving from different directions are correlated, and in the other case these signals are uncorrelated. After a visualization of the potential of adaptive receive antennas, data detection and channel estimation schemes for the TD-CDMA uplink are presented, which rely on such antennas under the consideration of interference covariance matrices. Of special interest is the detection scheme MSJD (Multi Step Joint Detection), which is a novel iterative approach to multi-user detection. Concerning channel estimation, the incorporation of the knowledge of the interference covariance matrix and of the correlation matrix of the channel impulse responses is enabled by an MMSE (Minimum Mean Square Error) based channel estimator. The presented signal processing concepts using covariance matrices for channel estimation and data detection are merged in order to form entire receiver structures. Important tasks to be fulfilled in such receivers are the estimation of the interference covariance matrices and the reconstruction of the received desired signals. These reconstructions are required when applying MSJD in data detection. The considered receiver structures are implemented on the computer in order to enable system simulations. The obtained simulation results show that the developed schemes are very promising in cases, where the impinging interference is highly directional, whereas in cases with the interference directions being more homogeneously distributed over the azimuth the consideration of the interference covariance matrices is of only limited benefit. The thesis can serve as a basis for practical system implementations.


This chapter describes Project MINA, an intergenerational and transnational project using a mixed-methods approach to investigate migration, nutrition, and ageing in two generations of Bangladeshi women living in the UK or Sylhet, Bangladesh. Results indicate that varied migration histories and changing family structures play an important role in influencing nutritional status, perceived and actual health status, and future health and social care needs of ageing Bangladeshis in the UK. Future research should focus on developing culturally and linguistically tailored research tools to assess dietary intake and eating behaviours within this population, and examine the complex interplay between family dynamics, cultural norms and social influences that impact the ability of older Bangladeshi adults to eat more healthfully and engage in physical and social activities that promote healthy ageing.


In this thesis work we have proposed an Adaptive Power Transmission scheme for Cognitive Radio. The proposed scheme estimates the distance between the primary user and the Cognitive Radio, using the SNR as proxy for distance, also utilizing the information of IT (Interference Temperature). On the basis of these information the Cognitive radio adaptively changes its transmit power to prevent the primary user from harmful interference. The most challenging problem of cognitive radio is the interference which occurs when a cognitive radio accesses a licensed band but fails to notice the presence of the licensed user. Another challenge is to compute the correct distance between the cognitive radio and the primary user. To allow the cognitive radio to access the same spectrum band where the primary user is operating creates a problem, in such case; the cognitive radio may interfere with the primary system, hence degrading the quality of service for the primary receiver. The Primary goal of this work is to propose Adaptive power control based on the estimated distance between the cognitive radio and primary user. We will discuss the transmit power being controlled on the basis of distance. But there is no such method to calculate the exact distance between the cognitive radio and the primary user, so that we interpret distance in terms of SNR. We will propose a method to make the CR so intelligent that it can determine the maximum level of the transmission power which does not cause any harmful interference to the primer user's quality of service.


The presented book we offer here is not kind of usual book. You know, reading now doesn't mean to handle the printed book in your hand. You can get the soft file of surgery of the hip joint in your gadget. Well, we mean that the book that we proffer is the soft file of the book. The content and all things are same. The difference is only the forms of the book, whereas, this condition will precisely be profitable.


Colorful guide to getting more out of your Galaxy S smartphone!Now that you've got your new Galaxy S smartphone, you've got to figure out how to use it! If you're baffled by the technology and the documentation, this book can help. Written in the fun but clear and thorough For Dummies style, this book answers all your questions. You'll find out how to do all the fun stuff: texting, social networking, using the camera, how to watch movies, and more. And you'll also learn how to handle the "housekeeping": synching your phone with your PC, using business applications, downloading apps, accessing the calendar, what all the widgets mean, and much more.Helps you get up to speed on any Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, including the Fascinate, Epic, Captivate, Vibrant, and other Galaxy S phonesClarifies the basics of how to use the phone, how the technology works, how to configure everything, and how to make it totally yoursDelivers a full slate of how-tos, tricks, features, and techniques, all in full colorCovers setup and configuration, texting, e-mailing, taking and sharing pictures, playing games, buying and installing apps, personal and business apps, and moreIncludes tips on making the most of multimedia featuresgames, music, movies, photos, and moreYou'll get gobs more from your Galaxy S with the help of Samsung Galaxy S For Dummies.


Scheduling problems in manufacturing, logistics and project management have frequently been modeled using the framework of Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max). Due to the importance of these problems, providing scalable solution schedules for RCPSP/max problems is a topic of extensive research. However, all existing methods for solving RCPSP/max assume that durations of activities are known with certainty, an assumption that does not hold in real world scheduling problems where unexpected external events such as manpower availability, weather changes, etc. lead to delays or advances in completion of activities. Thus, in this paper, our focus is on providing a scalable method for solving RCPSP/max problems with durational uncertainty. To that end, we introduce the robust local search method consisting of three key ideas: (a) Introducing and studying the properties of two decision rule approximations used to compute start times of activities with respect to dynamic realizations of the durational uncertainty; (b) Deriving the expression for robust makespan of an execution strategy based on decision rule approximations; and (c) A robust local search mechanism to efficiently compute activity execution strategies that are robust against durational uncertainty. Furthermore, we also provide enhancements to local search that exploit temporal dependencies between activities. Our experimental results illustrate that robust local search is able to provide robust execution strategies efficiently.


Fully updated for Windows Server 2012 R2! Prepare for Microsoft Exam 70-410 - and help demonstrate your real-world mastery of implementing and configuring core services in Windows Server 2012 R2. Designed for experienced IT professionals ready to advance their status, Exam Ref focuses on the critical thinking and decision making acumen needed for success at the MCSA level. Focus on the expertise measured by these objectives: Install and configure servers Configure server roles and features Configure Hyper-V Deploy and configure core network services Install and administer Active Directory Create and manage Group Policy This Microsoft Exam Ref: Organizes its coverage by exam objectives. Features strategic, what-if scenarios to challenge you.


Description Policing is changing rapidly and radically. An increasingly complex array of public, private and municipal bodies - as well as public police forces - are engaged in the provision of regulation and security. Consequently, it is difficult to think of security provision primarily in terms of what the public police do, and so the terminology of 'fragmented' or 'plural' policing systems has become well-established within criminology and police science. 'Plural policing' is now a central issue within criminology and police studies throughout the world, and there is now a large and growing body of research and theory concerned with its extent, nature and governance. To date, however, this work has been dominated by Anglo-American perspectives. This volume takes a detailed comparative look at the development of plural policing, and provides the most up-to-date work of reference for scholars in this field. Edited by two of the world's leading authorities on policing, and including individual contributions from internationally recognised experts in criminology and police studies, this is the first ever volume to focus on 'plural policing' internationally, and to draw together empirical evidence on its developments in a formal comparative framework.


This paper assesses positively the important contributions which Ato Quayson and Douglas McCabe have made to the understanding of Ben Okri's The Famished Road. But it questions whether placing the novel firmly in the context of Yoruba orality, as Quayson does, or in the tradition of New Age spirituality, as McCabe does, does not diminish the work unduly. It points out that Ben Okri did not take his Yoruba material directly from traditional folklore but from secondary sources in which the myths and legends of the Yoruba have been modified and re-interpreted and in The Famished Road the original folk narratives are further transfigured by close linkage with the myths and legends of other lands. Similarly, Azaro's chanting of the soft paradisal anthems of New Age travellers does not stand in the novel unchanged; it is absorbed and transformed by the context of a novel which deals with the problems of growing up and willingly accepting the burdens of an adult life. The article concludes, after a careful re-evaluation of leading episodes in the novel, that a broad late twentieth century context of existentialist thought and postmodern fiction is the proper background for appreciating a novel in which the extravagances of African folk art are adapted to contemporary myth of the culture hero. Key words: existentialism; New Age spirituality; postmodern Nigerian fiction; Yoruba folklore.


You already know you can create amazing things with LEGO, but did you know you can also make vehicles that roll and model plans that include landing gear and flaps that actually extend and retract? You can even makefunctional robots without getting into Mindstorms and programming. In Practical LEGO Technics, Mark Rollins shows you how to use LEGO and Power Functions components like motors and remote controlsto create motorized cars, all terrain vehicles, vehicle steering, construction equipment such as cranes and forklifts, airplanes. All-in-all, you'll learn to create a wide variety of fun, unique LEGO creations. LEGO Technic is similar to Mindstorms in that you can create all sorts of cool vehicles and gadgets. But unlike Mindstorms, you don't have to learn programming. Power Functions allows you to add motors, remote control, and battery boxes to your Lego projects, no programming required. And while you could just build a LEGO Technic gadget from a boxed set, with Practical LEGO Technics, you'll learn the hows and whys of Technic project design, and pick up ideas for your own custom projects. Covers basic design for motorized vehicles that run and steer. Shows how to build headlights and more using the Power Functions Light Kit. Provides suspension design for use in building all-terrain vehicles. Helps you build construction equipment, including a crane and forklift. What youll learn Put a motor on any LEGO vehicle to bring it to life; create wheels that turn and landing gear that extends and retracts. Build asuspension system and steering mechanism for proper vehicle control. Add working lights, such as headlights and taillights, to your Technics projects Design LEGO vehicles that look and work like real construction vehicles, including cranes and forklifts. Build an airplane, complete with retractable landing gear. Who this book is for Practical LEGO Technics is the perfect book for Lego and building enthusiasts of every age and experience level who want to learn how to build creations with LEGO Technic. Table of ContentsChapter 1: Getting Started WithLEGO Technic Chapter 2: Creating a Motorized LEGO Technic Vehicle Chapter 3: Steering and Controlling YourLEGO Technic Creation Chapter 4: Light it Up With LEGO Lights! Chapter 5: Creating a LEGO Technic Vehicle for all Terrains Chapter 6: Technic Contruction Vehicles and Equipment Chapter 7: LEGO Technic Aviation: Airplanes and Helicopters Chapter 8: Appendix: Parts List


Terrestrial isopods of the Ooijpolder: part 2. ecology (Crustacea: Isopoda: Oniscidea) From 1991 up to 1998 the isopod fauna of 1464 squares of 100x100 m was sampled in the Ooijpolder. This area is situated along the river Waal, east of Nijmegen (the Netherlands), close to the German border. In part 1 (Wijnhoven 2000) the distributions and habitats of seventeen species of woodlice were discussed. In that paper the basic information on topography, methods, species list and list of first and second order habitats can be found. In this second and last part the ecological information is summarised. First the zoogeographical position of the species is indicated. This proved to be important in understanding the distribution patterns and habitats of the species in the Ooijpolder. Two species originate from the alpine region: Trichoniscoides helveticus and Hyloniscus riparius. They are rare in the western parts of our country but common and widespread in Germany. These species represent the Central-European influence on the eastern part of the country. In contrast two other species occurring in the Ooijpolder are of Western-Atlantic origin: Metatrichoniscoides leydigii and Trichoniscoides albidus. Both are regularly found in the western parts of the Netherlands, but very rarely in Germany. In figures 3-7 a cluster analysis is presented for each first order habitat. It is clear that each habitat has its own species composition. Some species were often found together, like the soil-dwelling H. mengii and T. helveticus, O. asellus and P. scaber, and T. pusillus, L. hypnorum and P. muscorum. The woodlice fauna of each first and second order habitat is discussed, represented by the figures 8 to 12 and 13 to 20. On the regularly flooded area along the river Waal only two species were found: T. rathkii and H. riparius. The clay soils were richest in species, being especially important for the soil-dwelling Trichoniscids. Roadside verges, arable fields and grasslands were poor in species, whereas woodlands on clay soils, water edges, ditches and shrubland could contain up to twelve species. The sex ratio's of the species are given in table 1. In H. mengii and T. helveticus the sex ratio of the subadults seemed to be 50% (table 2). Tables 4 and 5 demonstrate that most females of H. mengii and T. helveticus moved to the deeper levels of the soil when breeding. Especially in H. mengii these vertical migrations of the breeding females lead to a greater relative number of males near the surface layers of the soil. This may also explain the low incidence of gravid females reported for several soil-dwelling species collected by hand. Gravid females are probably particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in air humidity. For this reason they move to microsites having the most stable microclimatological conditions. Probably this behaviour can be found for other species of woodlice too. It is likely that breeding females of the soil-dwelling species as well as other species tend to stay in their shelters (table 6) for a long time. Woodlice have remarkably few natural enemies. During the Ooijpolder-survey some interesting observations were made. Numerous specimens were found infested with yeast-like organisms (fig. 31; P. scaber, O. asellus and H. danicus). Ten species were found infested with iridovirus (Wijnhoven & Berg 1999). Six species of woodlouse-flies (Diptera: Rhinophoridae) were recorded: Rhinophora lepida was the most common and widespread (fig. 21, 32). Larvae of Megaselia rufipes (Diptera: Phoridae) were regularly found scavenging on O. asellus. Records of the phoretic mite Bakerdania elliptica associated with O. asellus are presented in table 7. In March/April and November/December the percentage of O. asellus which were infested seemed higher, as well as the mean number of mites per carrier. All phoretic mites were adult females carrying eggs. It is suggested B. elliptica's phoretic behaviour is a means to find suitable microsites for its offspring. Table 9 illustrates that the distribution of woodlice largely depends on the groundwater level of the soil. Some species show a preference for the more calcareous habitats, like buildings, walls and stones: P. spinicornis and A. vulgare (fig. 38). Yet this did not coincide with the amount of calciumcarbonate in the soil (table 10). Probably T. rathkii and H. riparius prefer the more calcareous soil types. The ecology of T. rathkii is rather complex. Also in literature the ecological data on T. rathkii are somewhat confusing. The figures 3, 5 and 6 show T. rathkii is associated with different species in different habitats. On the flood plains T. rathkii was often found in shrubs and woodlands, but in the polder it avoided these habitats (fig. 38, 39), occurring in the open fields mainly. It is suggested here that the species competes with P. scaber and to some extent with O. asellus. The distribution of T. rathkii in the Ooijpolder shows a strong vicariant pattern with those of the other two species (fig. 41, 42). In figure 43 their similarity is given. Trachelipus rathkii often seems to fill in the niche left by one of the 'missing' species, but being absent where both P. scaber and O. asellus occur.


Abstract Polygenetic monazite grains in diverse Precambrian crystalline rocks from the Black Hills, South Dakota, have been analyzed in situ by ion and electron microprobe methods (SHRIMP and EMP), to evaluate the accuracy and precision of EMP ages determined using a new analytical protocol that incorporates improved background acquisition and interference corrections. Parallel evaluations were conducted by comparing EMP chemical and SHRIMP isotopic ages at regional-, rock-, and grainscales. The monazite data set includes 354 EMP chemical analyses from 26 grains in six metamorphic rocks, which resolve into 54 age-composition domains, and 31 SHRIMP isotopic ages from 13 grains in one of the rocks, with six grains microanalyzed in common by the two methods. The data set also includes monazite-bearing garnets in two of the rocks, whose isotopic compositions were analyzed using Pb stepwise-leaching (PbSL) methods. Both the EMP and SHRIMP data sets reveal a continuum of apparent monazite ages spanning a ~1790.1680 Ma timeframe, with a relatively high probability of ages at ~1755 and ~1715 Ma that correspond spatially to core and rim domains. PbSL ages of ~1742 and ~1734 Ma obtained from monazite-bearing garnet in two rocks are intermediate compared to the corresponding EMP ages, and are thereby interpreted as mixed ages. EMP data for two grains in the structurally deepest of the six rocks record ~1785 and ~1755 Ma ages in the cores and (higher-Y and lower-Th) rims, respectively, and these results are duplicated by SHRIMP ages in these and/or other grains from the same rock. Overall, the EMP, SHRIMP, and PbSL ages are internally consistent at the various scales of observation, which serves to validate EMP chemical dating as an accurate and precise method of discerning monazite age populations in polymetamorphic terrains. The EMP data set is interpreted geologically as reflecting multiple episodes of monazite growth that are provisionally related to known metamorphic events in the Black Hills. Taking the most precise EMP data at face value, it is possible to resolve the timing of the two older events at ≤1784 ± 4 Ma (or ≤1786 ± 6 Ma) and 1756 ± 3 Ma (or 1753 ± 4 Ma), with 95% confidence. These events are considered to be related to sequential episodes of N-directed thrusting and ~E-W compression associated with Paleoproterozoic crustal assembly in the mid-continent. A younger metamorphism, related to granite intrusion known to have occurred at 1715 ± 3 Ma, is dated independently at 1717 ± 2 Ma from the EMP monazite ages.


The children of the forest live deep in the roots of an old pine tree. They collect wild mushrooms and blueberries and shelter under toadstools when it rains. They play with the squirrels and frogs, and when autumn comes, they collect and prepare food to see them through the long winter, until the warm spring breeze starts to blow.


Data Analytics is progressively gaining traction as a viable resource to improve forecasts and reserve estimations in most prospective US shale plays. Part of those learnings has been tested for the reserves and resources estimation of the next worldwide top-class shale play, Vaca Muerta formation in Argentina. In this work, we rely on advanced artificial intelligence methods to automate workflows for production forecasting and reserve estimation in the Vaca Muerta formation. To achieve this goal, we develop a computational platform capable of integrating several sequential operations into a single automated workflow: (1) data gathering; (2) data preparation; (3) model fitting and forecasting and, (4) EUR estimation. As new data becomes available, each of these steps is performed automatically. The proposed platform also integrates with advanced business intelligence tools that aid at facilitating graphical interpretation and communication among specialists and decision makers. Hence, the suggested workflow can deliver production forecasts several magnitudes faster than traditional workflows while maintaining accurate and engineering sound results. Having fast and reliable forecast turnarounds allow for timely tracking key differences and commonalities among multiple shale plays to facilitate informed decision strategies in unconventional field evaluation and development.


This quantitative content analysis investigated the hookup culture in U.S. and Dutch teen girl magazines. Using Hofstede's cultural dimension of masculinity/femininity, the hookup culture (i.e., the relational context of sex, emotional context of sex, specific sexual activities, and contraceptives) was examined in 2,496 stories from all 2006 through 2008 issues of the three most popular U.S. (i.e., Seventeen, CosmoGirl! U.S. edition, and Teen) and Dutch teen girl magazines (i.e., Fancy, CosmoGirl! Netherlands edition, and Girlz!). Regarding the relational context of sex, stories about casual sex occurred more often in U.S. magazines, and Dutch magazines focused more on committed sex. Dutch magazines also emphasized sex within the emotional context of love more often than did U.S. magazines. In terms of sexual activities, coital sex was mentioned more often in U.S. coverage, while petting was mentioned more frequently in Dutch coverage. Condoms were covered more positively in U.S. magazines than in Dutch magazines. Overall, the hookup culture seems to be more visible in U.S. magazines for the occurrence of casual sex and lack of love stories, whereas it does not emerge in Dutch magazines due to the presence of committed sex and love-related articles.


The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated!) by an all-star team: David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository. Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell, which has been expanded and revised to become this book. why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire. This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules. The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.


In the early twentieth century, people prophesied that technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks and driving flying cars. Instead, something curious happened. Not only have the flying cars not materialised, but average working hours have increased rather than decreased. And now, across the developed world, three-quarters of all jobs are in services, finance or admin: jobs that don't seem to contribute anything to society. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber explores how this phenomenon - one more associated with the Soviet Union, but which capitalism was supposed to eliminate - has happened. In doing so, he looks at how, rather than producing anything, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it. This book is for anyone whose heart has sunk at the sight of a whiteboard, who believes 'workshops' should only be for making things, or who just suspects that there might be a better way to run our world.


Let $\alpha \in (0,1), l \ge 2$ and let ${\cal H}_n$ be an $l$-graph on $n$ vertices. ${\cal H}_n$ is $(\alpha, \xi)$-uniform if every $\xi n$ vertices of ${\cal H}_n$ span $(\alpha \pm\xi) {\xi n\choose l}$ edges. Our main result is the following. For all $\widetilde{\delta}$, there exist $\delta, r, n_0$ such that, if $n>n_0$ and ${\cal H}_n^{(l)}$ is $(\alpha, \delta)$-uniform, then all but $\exp\{-r^{1/l}/20\}{n\choose r}$ $r$-sets of vertices induce a subhypergraph that is $(\alpha,\widetilde{\delta})$-uniform. We also present the following application. Let ${\cal F}$ be a fixed $l$-graph, and $c>0$. Then there is an $n_0$ and $r'$ such that: If ${\cal H}$ is an $n$ vertex $l$-graph ($n>n_0$) such that the deletion of any $c n^l$ edges of ${\cal H}$ leaves an $l$-graph that admits no homomorphism into ${\cal F}$, then there exists ${\cal H}' \subset {\cal H}$ on $r'$ vertices, that also admits no homomorphism into ${\cal F}$. This extends a recent result of Alon and Shapira, who proved it when ${\cal F}$ is a complete graph.


On the American stages of politics and journalism in the mid-nineteenth century, few men were more influential than Abraham Lincoln and his sometime adversary, sometime ally, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. In this compelling new volume, author Gregory A. Borchard explores the intricate relationship between these two vibrant figures, both titans of the press during one of the most tumultuous political eras in American history. Packed with insightful analysis and painstaking research, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley offers a fresh perspective on these luminaries and their legacies. Borchard begins with an overview of the lives of both Lincoln and Greeley, delving particularly into their mutual belief in Henry Clay's much-debated American System, and investigating the myriad similarities between the two political giants, including their comparable paths to power and their statuses as self-made men, their reputations as committed reformers, and their shared dedication to social order and developing a national infrastructure. Also detailed are Lincoln's and Greeley's personal quests to end slavery in the United States, as well as their staunch support of free-soil homesteads in the West. Yet despite their ability to work together productively, both men periodically found themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Their by turns harmonious and antagonistic relationship often played out on the front pages of Greeley's influential newspaper, the New York Tribune. Drawing upon historical gems from the Tribune, as well as the personal papers of both Lincoln and Greeley, Borchard explores in depth the impact the two men had on their times and on each other, and how, as Lincoln's and Greeley's paths often crossed--and sometimes diverged--they personified the complexities, virtues, contradictions, and faults of their eras. Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley goes beyond tracing each man's personal and political evolution to offer a new perspective on the history-changing events of the times, including the decline of the Whig Party and the rise of the Republicans, the drive to extend American borders into the West; and the bloody years of the Civil War. Borchard finishes with reflections on the deaths of Lincoln and Greeley and how the two men have been remembered by subsequent generations. Sure to become an essential volume in the annals of political history and journalism, Abraham Lincoln and Horace Greeley is a compelling testament to the indelible mark these men left on both their contemporaries and the face of America's future.


Photograph of a large tent standing in the middle of a large grassy field. The tent is surrounded by trees and brush. The photograph is mounted on a dark board, and there is a typed note in Spanish underneath the photograph that translates to read, "Camp Meeting in Sabinal, Texas in the year 1914".


In this Article, I take the most extensive look to date at pro-prosecution judges and ultimately advance the following, slightly scandalous claim: Particularly in our post-Caperton, political-realist world, "tough on crime" elective judges should recuse themselves from all criminal cases. The contextual parts to this claim are, in the main, a threefold description: (i) the "groundbreaking" Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal decision, its predecessors, and its progeny; (ii) the judicial ethics of disqualification; and (iii) empirical and anecdotal evidence of pro-prosecution (commonly called "tough on crime") campaigns and attendant electoral pressures. Building on this description and the work of empiricists, this Article bridges the gap between these tough-on-crime campaign promises and subsequent tough-on-crime adjudications. And in the final analysis, the thesis -- namely, that tough-on-crime judges should recuse themselves in most, and probably all, criminal cases in light of personal and systemic biases -- is corroborated not just by Supreme Court reasoning and language, but even more importantly (at least from my perspective as an ethics professor), by the rules of judicial ethics. Thus, pro-prosecution judges and their not-too-sophisticated message -- "me tough on crime, you soft on crime" -- should cease and desist or be ceased and desisted. Part I briefly describes elective judicial selection systems and thoroughly describes "tough-on-crime" judges, their messages, and their motivations. Part II, the core of the analysis, runs tough-on-crime judges through the constitutional, ethical, and other-legal frameworks of disqualification. All of these frameworks -- some four or five different legal and ethical barriers, depending on one's jurisprudential view -- ultimately lead to the same place, mandatory disqualification. Part III critically appraises elective systems, the theoretical and economical costs that those systems impose on judges and litigants, and the alternatives, including broadly or narrowly targeted disqualification, public financing, and forced silence. By the Conclusion, the analysis has pointed strongly toward a broad-based, mandatory-disqualification remedy.


It is proved that, if $G$ is a $K_4$-minor-free graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 4$, then $G$ is totally $(\Delta+1)$-choosable; that is, if every element (vertex or edge) of $G$ is assigned a list of $\Delta+1$ colours, then every element can be coloured with a colour from its own list in such a way that every two adjacent or incident elements are coloured with different colours. Together with other known results, this shows that the List-Total-Colouring Conjecture, that ${\rm ch}"(G) = \chi"(G)$ for every graph $G$, is true for all $K_4$-minor-free graphs. The List-Edge-Colouring Conjecture is also known to be true for these graphs. As a fairly straightforward consequence, it is proved that both conjectures hold also for all $K_{2,3}$-minor free graphs and all $(\bar K_2 + (K_1 \cup K_2))$-minor-free graphs.


With the advent of increasingly larger parallel machines, debugging is becoming more and more challenging. In particular, applications at this scale tend to behave non-deterministically, leading to race condition bugs. Furthermore, gaining access to these large machines for long debugging sessions is generally infeasible. In this paper, we present a 3-step algorithm to perform what we call "processor extraction": a procedure to record the execution of a set of processors from a parallel application, and replay any of them in a controlled environment. Our technique generates very low interference in the recorded program thanks to the separation between non-determinism elimination, and detailed processor recording. In order to improve robustness and accuracy, we further augmented our algorithm with a self-correction mechanism.


Animals by far outperform current technology when reacting to visual stimuli in low processing requirements, demonstrating astonishingly fast reaction times to changes. Current real-time vision based robotic control approaches, in contrast, typically require high computational resources to extract relevant information from sequences of images provided by a video camera. Most of the information contained in consecutive images is redundant, which often turns the vision processing algorithms into a limiting factor in high-speed robot control. As an example, robotic pole balancing with large objects is a well known exercise in current robotics research, but balancing arbitrary small poles (such as a pencil, which is too small for a human to balance) has not yet been achieved due to limitations in vision processing.

At the Institute of Neuroinformatics we developed an analog silicon retina (http://siliconretina.ini.uzh.ch), which, in contrast to current video cameras, only reports individual events ("spikes") from individual pixels when the illumination changes within the pixel's field of view. Transmitting only the "on" and "off" spike events, instead of transmitting full vision frames, drastically reduces the amount of data processing required to react to environmental changes. This information encoding is directly inspired by the spike based information transfer from the human eye to visual cortex.

In our demonstration, we address the challanging problem of balancing an arbitrary standard pencil, based solely on visual information. A stereo pair of silicon retinas reports vision events caused by the moving pencil, which is standing on its tip on an actuated table. Then our processing algorithm extracts the pencil position and angle without ever using a "full scene" visual representation, but simply by processing only the spikes relevant to the pencil's motion.

Our system uses neurally inspired hardware and a neurally inspired form of communication to achieve a difficult goal.


Obtaining ground-truth motion for arbitrary, real-world video sequences is a challenging but important task for both algorithm evaluation and model design. Existing ground-truth databases are either synthetic, such as the Yosemite sequence, or limited to indoor, experimental setups, such as the database developed by Baker et al (2007). We propose a human-in-loop methodology to create a ground-truth motion database for the videos taken with ordinary cameras in both indoor and outdoor scenes, using the fact that human beings are experts at segmenting objects and inspecting the match between two frames. We designed an interactive computer vision system to allow a user to efficiently annotate motion. Our methodology is cross-validated by showing that human annotated motion is repeatable, consistent across annotators, and close to the ground truth obtained by Baker et al (2007). Using our system, we collected and annotated 10 indoor and outdoor real-world videos to form a ground-truth motion database. The source code, annotation tool and database is online for public evaluation and benchmarking.


In the research area of writing development, an increasing number of researchers suggest that graphomotor skills could be much more important than they appear to be (Christensen, 2009). Few researchers have studied the link between handwriting and teaching practices, despite the fact that some studies indicate its importance (Graham, 2010). The general objective of this study is to explore the relationship between different handwriting styles and the development of writing skills among 715 children in Grade 2. Generally, our results show that the three handwriting styles (manuscript/cursive, manuscript, and cursive) have different effects on writing development (speed, quality, word production, and text production).


Domestic violence is no longer a private matter confined within the four walls of the home. The shift from private to public is connected with marked progress within the legal system, which strives to protect victims and hold batterers accountable through a myriad of specific responses that have ranged from attitudinal and logistical shifts from law enforcement to increased attention within legal education to a general acknowledgment of the impact of domestic violence on individual victims, children, families, and the broader community to the passage of federal and state legislation. The state legislative landscape has historically centered around a very narrow subset of laws that mandate or encourage arrest and criminalize domestic violence-related acts. Research demonstrates both compelling support for and against the effectiveness of these laws, making it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about their actual impact. Scholars and advocates have also expressed diverging opinions about the desirability of this response. This article takes a different approach to exploring the criminalization of domestic violence by transcending the pervasive either/or dichotomy that dominates the field. It builds on my previous body of work that examines how mandatory arrest laws are often incorrectly categorized into a uniform classification scheme, leading to a complexity of problems like different research outcomes. Despite the actual variance in these laws, however, there remains a problematic uniformity that is characteristic of the current approach: many of the existing laws, policies, and practices tend to impose a "one size fits all" solution to a problem that is incredibly complex. The current singular approach might be necessary as a matter of practicality and public welfare, but it does not adequately respond to all of a particular victim's needs or to the needs of all victims. Many never become engaged with the criminal justice system in the first place. Others, who do, still face tremendous barriers that compromise their safety and/or impede their ability to leave their abuser. Reconciling these competing ideas has proved challenging.Through analysis of recent state-based legislative and policy innovations focused on two areas that are particularly relevant for victims — housing and victim safety as it relates to improving the effectiveness of orders of protection — this article proposes a new conceptual framework. Using these victim-centered state laws and policies as a starting place, this article illustrates how the existence of a myriad of strategies and innovations can ultimately transcend the limitations inherent in the existing one size fits all response of the criminal law.


Naila's conservative immigrant parents have always said the same thing: She may choose what to study, how to wear her hair, and what to be when she grows up—but they will choose her husband. Following their cultural tradition, they will plan an arranged marriage for her. And until then, dating—even friendship with a boy—is forbidden. When Naila breaks their rule by falling in love with Saif, her parents are livid. Convinced she has forgotten who she truly is, they travel to Pakistan to visit relatives and explore their roots. But Naila's vacation turns into a nightmare when she learns that plans have changed—her parents have found her a husband and they want her to marry him, now! Despite her greatest efforts, Naila is aghast to find herself cut off from everything and everyone she once knew. Her only hope of escape is Saif . . . if he can find her before it's too late.


This paper presents a discussion on knowledge production in higher education, policies and practices in Nigeria. At the introduction, the overall objectives of higher education are highlighted and the concepts of policies explained. The paper therefore identifies some factors as the major challenges to knowledge production; some of the factors are lecturers or research fellows, money, governance and public policy support. It is the belief of the authors that these inputs should be deployed in adequate proportions both in quality and quantity as no knowledge produced can rise above the quality of those who produce it. Some recommendations made include that government should allocate adequate funds to higher education to enable her improve the quality of her teaching and research in line with international standards. Nigeria should have working policies guiding higher education which are monitored and evaluated annually.


3D printing technology is rapidly maturing and becoming ubiquitous. One of the remaining obstacles to wide-scale adoption is that the object to be printed must fit into the working volume of the 3D printer. We propose a framework, called Chopper, to decompose a large 3D object into smaller parts so that each part fits into the printing volume. These parts can then be assembled to form the original object. We formulate a number of desirable criteria for the partition, including assemblability, having few components, unobtrusiveness of the seams, and structural soundness. Chopper optimizes these criteria and generates a partition either automatically or with user guidance. Our prototype outputs the final decomposed parts with customized connectors on the interfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Chopper on a variety of non-trivial real-world objects.


Value iteration is a powerful yet inefficient algorithm for Markov decision processes (MDPs) because it puts the majority of its effort into backing up the entire state space, which turns out to be unnecessary in many cases. In order to overcome this problem, many approaches have been proposed. Among them, ILAO* and variants of RTDP are state-of-the-art ones. These methods use reachability analysis and heuristic search to avoid some unnecessary backups. However, none of these approaches build the graphical structure of the state transitions in a pre-processing step or use the structural information to systematically decompose a problem, whereby generating an intelligent backup sequence of the state space. In this paper, we present two optimal MDP algorithms. The first algorithm, topological value iteration (TVI), detects the structure of MDPs and backs up states based on topological sequences. It (1) divides an MDP into strongly-connected components (SCCs), and (2) solves these components sequentially. TVI outperforms VI and other state-of-the-art algorithms vastly when an MDP has multiple, close-to-equal-sized SCCs. The second algorithm, focused topological value iteration (FTVI), is an extension of TVI. FTVI restricts its attention to connected components that are relevant for solving the MDP. Specifically, it uses a small amount of heuristic search to eliminate provably sub-optimal actions; this pruning allows FTVI to find smaller connected components, thus running faster. We demonstrate that FTVI outperforms TVI by an order of magnitude, averaged across several domains. Surprisingly, FTVI also significantly outperforms popular 'heuristically-informed' MDP algorithms such as ILAO*, LRTDP, BRTDP and Bayesian-RTDP in many domains, sometimes by as much as two orders of magnitude. Finally, we characterize the type of domains where FTVI excels -- suggesting a way to an informed choice of solver.


This article presents the findings of a study that explored the role and impact of continuing education on rural revitalization. A community development approach, academic expertise, and a university's resources were used to assist the citizens of Montmartre, Saskatchewan, to establish Centre 48, an arts and continuing education centre. Courses provided by Centre 48 gave townspeople and people from the surrounding area opportunities to explore new interests and to develop new social networks; in turn, the social capital gained by establishing and operating Centre 48 gave rise to new economic ventures. The results of this study illustrate how university continuing education units can contribute to capacity building in rural communities and how such social capital-building projects can serve as a catalyst for economic development.


One of the most important use cases of ontologies is the calculation of similarity scores between a query and items annotated with classes of an ontology. The hierarchical structure of an ontology does not necessarily reflect all relevant aspects of the domain it is modelling, and this can reduce the performance of ontology-based search algorithms. For instance, the classes of phenotype ontologies may be arranged according to anatomical criteria, but individual phenotypic features may affect anatomic entities in opposite ways. Thus, "opposite" classes may be located in close proximity in an ontology; for example enlarged liver and small liver are grouped under abnormal liver size. Using standard similarity measures, these would be scored as being similar, despite in fact being opposites. In this paper, we use information about opposite ontology classes to extend two large phenotype ontologies, the human and the mammalian phenotype ontology. We also show that this information can be used to improve rankings based on similarity measures that incorporate this information. In particular, cosine similarity based measures show large improvements. We hypothesize this is due to the natural embedding of opposite phenotypes in vector space. We support the idea that the expressivity of semantic web technologies should be explored more extensively in biomedical ontologies and that similarity measures should be extended to incorporate more than the pure graph structure defined by the subclass or part-of relationships of the underlying ontologies.


A Resilient Overlay Network (RON) is an architecture that allows distributed Internet applications to detect and recover from path outages and periods of degraded performance within several seconds, improving over today's wide-area routing protocols that take at least several minutes to recover. A RON is an application-layer overlay on top of the existing Internet routing substrate. The RON nodes monitor the functioning and quality of the Internet paths among themselves, and use this information to decide whether to route packets directly over the Internet or by way of other RON nodes, optimizing application-specific routing metrics. Results from two sets of measurements of a working RON deployed at sites scattered across the Internet demonstrate the benefits of our architecture. For instance, over a 64-hour sampling period in March 2001 across a twelve-node RON, there were 32 significant outages, each lasting over thirty minutes, over the 132 measured paths. RON's routing mechanism was able to detect, recover, and route around all of them, in less than twenty seconds on average, showing that its methods for fault detection and recovery work well at discovering alternate paths in the Internet. Furthermore, RON was able to improve the loss rate, latency, or throughput perceived by data transfers; for example, about 5% of the transfers doubled their TCP throughput and 5% of our transfers saw their loss probability reduced by 0.05. We found that forwarding packets via at most one intermediate RON node is sufficient to overcome faults and improve performance in most cases. These improvements, particularly in the area of fault detection and recovery, demonstrate the benefits of moving some of the control over routing into the hands of end-systems.


The idea that human history is approaching a "singularity" -- that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both -- has moved from the realm of science fiction to serious debate. Some singularity theorists predict that if the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to develop at its current dizzying rate, the singularity could come about in the middle of the present century. Murray Shanahan offers an introduction to the idea of the singularity and considers the ramifications of such a potentially seismic event. Shanahan's aim is not to make predictions but rather to investigate a range of scenarios. Whether we believe that singularity is near or far, likely or impossible, apocalypse or utopia, the very idea raises crucial philosophical and pragmatic questions, forcing us to think seriously about what we want as a species. Shanahan describes technological advances in AI, both biologically inspired and engineered from scratch. Once human-level AI -- theoretically possible, but difficult to accomplish -- has been achieved, he explains, the transition to superintelligent AI could be very rapid. Shanahan considers what the existence of superintelligent machines could mean for such matters as personhood, responsibility, rights, and identity. Some superhuman AI agents might be created to benefit humankind; some might go rogue. (Is Siri the template, or HAL?) The singularity presents both an existential threat to humanity and an existential opportunity for humanity to transcend its limitations. Shanahan makes it clear that we need to imagine both possibilities if we want to bring about the better outcome.


Aging is associated with biomechanical and physiological changes in several organ systems, including neural changes of voluntary movement. One manifestation of age-related changes in neural control of gait is the increased activation of muscles that are antagonist to the prim movers during the stance phase of gait. Another age-related adaptation is the increased metabolic cost of locomotion. Several studies have attempted to link gait mechanics to the increased cost of transport, but none of the mechanical gait variables accounted for the age-related increase in oxygen uptake. Here we hypothesized that the related increase in metabolic cost during gait is mediated by increased antagonist muscle coactivation. EMG and oxygen consumption data were collected during treadmill walking to determine the levels of antagonist muscle coactivation and metabolic cost. The data revealed that old subjects experienced significantly greater levels of both coactivation and metabolic cost. Old subjects had 4-17% greater levels of metabolic cost of gait than young subjects, and 53-61% greater levels of total antagonist muscle coactivation than young subjects. Regression analyses showed that there was a strong association between the level of antagonist muscle coactivation and metabolic cost of gait, suggesting that neural factors contribute to the age-related metabolic adaptations in gait.


Linux is the fastest-growing Java development platform because it saves money and time by serving as a platform for both development and deployment. But developers face significant platform-specific challenges when managing and deploying Java applications in a controlled production environment.Written for Java and Linux developers alike, Java™ Application Development on Linux®is the hands-on guide to the full Java application development lifecycle on Linux.Determined to spare other developers hours of trial and error, Albing and Schwarz demonstrate the platform, tools, and application development by showing realistic, easy-to-follow examples. After a simple command-line application introduces basic tools, this program leads readers through business-logic object analysis, database design, Java servlet UIs, Java Server Pages (JSP) UIs, Swing GUIs, and Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) GUIs. Scaling up to the enterprise level provides the opportunity to use both the JBoss Application Server and the Apache Geronimo Application Servers, and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB).Readers learn how to Use development tools available on Linux, such as the GNU Compiler for Java (gcj), Ant, the NetBeans IDE, IBM's Eclipse Java IDE, JUnit, and SunONE Studio Develop business logic layers using Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) Add a Web interface using servlets and JSPs Add a GUI using Sun's Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and IBM's SWT Deploy EJBs in LinuxThe authors conclude by demonstrating how a hierarchy of budgets can be created, tracked, and shared with Concurrent Versions System (CVS).A companion Website includes all source code and a link to each tool described.Java™ Application Development on Linux® can propel you from a standing start to the full-speed development and deployment of Java applications on Linux.


India's Renewable Energy Sector and Green Energy Index Unaffected by Global Economic Slowdown. November 21, Bangalore: The global slowdown can be a tempting excuse for most to put ecological concerns on the furlough. But India is moving purposefully towards sustainable development, understanding the fierce urgency for economically sound, socially equitable and environmentally responsible progress. At a time when renewables comprise just 11.5% of energy source in the United States, India stands tall with renewables accounting for 32% of total electricity generation capacity. Even China and Japan trail behind India at 21 and 20 per cent respectively. Recent reports suggest the share of renewables in the Indian electricity basket is expected to rise to 15 per cent by 2030 from less than five per cent currently. For developing countries like India, the global slowdown is an avenue for replacing archaic infrastructures and upgrading and building transportation, communication, energy and water systems in a sustainable manner. "The flip side of the coin is the enormous economic, social and environmental benefits likely to arise from combating climate change and re-investing in natural infrastructure - benefits ranging from new green jobs in clean tech and clean energy businesses up to ones in sustainable agriculture and conservation-based enterprises," says UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner, in a bid to offer up a sustainable solution for the current global crisis. Former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore agrees. In a recent article in the New York Times, Al Gore is quoted as saying, "The bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis". And India is listening. The massive opportunity India offers to deploy finance and technologies to create clean energy products and services, which can leapfrog those employed in Western countries, has not gone unnoticed by the investor and business community and the government, says Dilip Thomas, Steering Committee Member/Program Chair & CEO of Saltmarch Media, the organizers of Green Energy Summit, India's first and biggest forum for Green Energy, Clean Technology and Renewable Energy stakeholders. The Indian state of Karnataka, for instance, has set itself a target of generating 5,450 Mw of renewable energy resources in the state by 2012 and 11700 Mw by 2018. K Jairaj, Principal Secretary of the State's Energy Department, and a member of the Green Energy Summit organizing team, has said plans are on to unveil a new renewable energy policy in early 2009, to boost energy production and consumption in the state. Jairaj says the policy aims at creating appropriate channels to collaborate with industry, supporting innovative technology, production and services, providing decentralised energy supply to agriculture, industry and households, strengthening the grid system and creating SEZs to promote renewable energy. The oft-repeated statement that subsidy-dependent Renewable Energy Technologies (RETs) are not sustainable for the long term have lessened. Tulsi R Tanti, chairman and managing director, Suzlon Energy, recently noted that innovation and technology are rapidly reducing development costs. Two years ago Suzlon was producing power [wind] at Rs. 5 per Kwh. In 2008 the cost has come down to Rs 3.5 per Kwh and it is set to come down by another rupee if the rate of progress continues. Barack Obama's election as the president of the United States is also expected to give a fillip to India's renewable energy plans. The 44th US President believes the US should be involved in partnerships with developing countries, such as India and China, to provide funding and access to intellectual property that they need and desire. The President-elect understands that tackling the global challenge of climate change requires US leadership, and has reconfirmed his campaign promise to invest $15 billion a year in low-carbon energy, including solar, wind, nuclear and next-generation biofuels. India has many RE laurels to its credit, says Dr. Arcot Ramachandran, chairperson of Green Energy Summit 2009 and Former UN Under Secretary General. It has the world's largest decentralized solar energy program, ranks second in the global renewable energy "Attractiveness Index" poll, operates the world's 2nd largest biogas program, ranks 4th as a global 'Wind Super Power' and fifth in the world in terms of exploitable hydro electricity generation. With the Indian market heating up while others worlwide freeze over, be seen, be heard and be noticed in India's first summit completely focused on what going green can do for you and your organisation. Green Energy Summit 2009 is a world-class forum for varied stakeholders from solar, wind, biomass, IT, transport, biofuels, construction, aviation, nanotechnology and biotechnology to make their presence felt and attract attention that matters. The summit will be held March 3-7 2009 in Bangalore, India. GES 2009 is supported by Govt. of India (DST), MNRE, WCRE, IREDA, BEE, Govt. of Karnataka and several other governmental and bi-lateral agencies. Confirmed speakers include Jairam Ramesh (Minister of State for Commerce and Industry and Minister of State for Power, Government of India), Dr. R K Pachauri, Dr. Hermann Scheer (President, World Council for Renewable Energy (WCRE) and EUROSOLAR), Dr. Jamshed J. Irani (Director, TATA Sons Limited), Pramod Deo (Chairperson, Central Electricity Regulatory Commission), Dr. Dan Arvizu (Director, NREL), Michael T. Eckhart (President, ACORE), H.E. Clini Corrado (Director General, Ministry for the Environment Land and Sea, Italy and Chair, Global Bioenergy Partnership), Christopher Flavin (President, World Watch Institute), Marianne Osterkorn (REEEP - Director General), Mohamed El Ashry (Chairman REN21), Dr. Yogi Goswami (Former President, ISES) and Thomas B. Johansson (Director, IIIEE & Co-recipient, Nobel Peace Prize, 2007).


A nonlocal stochastic model for intra- and extracellular proton dynamics in a tumor is proposed.
The intracellular dynamics is governed by an SDE coupled to a reaction-diffusion
equation for the extracellular proton concentration on the macroscale. In a more general context
the existence and uniqueness of solutions for local and nonlocal
SDE-PDE systems are established allowing, in particular, to analyze the proton dynamics model both,
in its local version and the case with nonlocal path dependence.
Numerical simulations are performed
to illustrate the behavior of solutions, providing some insights into the effects of randomness on tumor acidity.


We present a newly designed Compact Cloud and Aerosol LIDAR (ComCAL) that was built for the deployment in field campaigns on ground and on mobile platforms like aboard the research vessel Polarstern. The automated system is particularly suited for tropospheric aerosol research within the altitude range from 0.7 to 20 km. As emitter it uses a frequency doubled and tripled Nd:YAG laser. It measures elastic backscatter and the depolarization at 532 nm and 355 nm as well as inelastic scattering with a 32-channel spectrograph. Recently, it was shown that biomass burning aerosol fluoresces when irradiated by a UV laser beam while other aerosol types do not fluoresce [1]. Beside the detection of N2 and H2O Raman scattering, fluorescence of aerosols can be detected by the new optical set-up of our lidar system. The measurement of wavelengths dependent backscatter, extinction, depolarization,and fluorescence makes a detailed study of atmospheric aerosols possible. The new lidar system determines optical properties of aerosols and their vertical distribution. The aerosol types, their origins and abundancecan be deduced from that data. These are important parameters for the study of the effect of natural and anthropogenic aerosols on the earths climate.


This course focuses on one particular aspect of the history of computing: the use of the computer as a scientific instrument. The electronic digital computer was invented to do science, and its applications range from physics to mathematics to biology to the humanities. What has been the impact of computing on the practice of science? Is the computer different from other scientific instruments? Is computer simulation a valid form of scientific experiment? Can computer models be viewed as surrogate theories? How does the computer change the way scientists approach the notions of proof, expertise, and discovery? No comprehensive history of scientific computing has yet been written. This seminar examines scientific articles, participants' memoirs, and works by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to provide multiple perspectives on the use of computers in diverse fields of physical, biological, and social sciences and the humanities. We explore how the computer transformed scientific practice, and how the culture of computing was influenced, in turn, by scientific applications.


In the KonSens Project, sensor systems are developed, validated, and operated in form of functional models for the application areas Structure Integrated Sensors and Mobile Multi-gas Sensors. Key aspects are the detection and evaluation of corrosion processes in reinforced concrete structures as well as the detection and quantification of very low concentrations of toxic gases in air. The adaption of sensor principles from the lab into real-life application including appropriate communication techniques is a major task.
In recent years, Structural Health Monitoring have gained in importance, since growing age of buildings and infrastructure as well as increasing load requirements demand for reliable surveillance methods. In this regard, the project follows two strategies: First, the development and implementation of completely embedded sensor systems consisting of RFID-tag and in situ sensors, and their further application potential (e.g. for precast concrete elements, roadways, wind power plants, and maritime structures). Secondly, the development of a long-term stable, miniaturized, fiber optic sensor for a ratiometric and referenced measurement of the pH-value in concrete based on fluorescence detection as an indicator for carbonation and corrosion.
Environmental pollution through emission of toxic gases becomes an increasing problem not only in agriculture (e.g. biogas plants) and industry but also in urban areas. This leads to increasing demand to monitor environmental emissions as well as ambient air and industrial air components in many scenarios and in even lower concentrations than nowadays. The selectivity of luminescence-based sensors is enabled by the combination of the sensing dye and the material, which is used as accumulation medium for concentration of the analyte. This principle allows for developing gas sensors with high selectivity and sensitivity of defined substances. Additional benefits, particularly of fluorescence-based sensors, are their capability for miniaturization and potential multiplex mode. Objective is the development and implementation of sensors based on fluorescence detection for defined toxic gases (ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, ozone, and benzene) with sensitivity in the low ppm or even ppb range. Additionally, the integration of such sensors in mobile sensor devices is addressed.


The Bauhaus Archiv Museum of Design in Berlin holds the most important collection on the Bauhaus today. Documents, workshop products from all areas of design, studies sketches in the classroom, and architectural plans and models are all part of its comprehensive inventory. "The Bauhaus Archiv" is dedicated to the study and presentation of the history of the Bauhaus, including the new Bauhaus in Chicago and the Hochschule fur Gestaltung (Institute of Design) in Ulm. This book, drawn from the Archiv's extensive collection, traces this monumental movement in art and architecture via the work of its most important proponents, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.


The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, was pleased to present the 2009 Spring Symposium Series, held Monday through Wednesday, March 23–25, 2009 at Stanford University. The titles of the nine symposia were Agents that Learn from Human Teachers, Benchmarking of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems, Experimental Design for Real-World Systems, Human Behavior Modeling, Intelligent Event Processing, Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, Learning by Reading and Learning to Read, Social Semantic Web: Where Web 2.0 Meets Web 3.0, and Technosocial Predictive Analytics. The goal of the Agents that Learn from Human Teachers was to investigate how we can enable software and robotics agents to learn from real-time interaction with an everyday human partner. The aim of the Benchmarking of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems symposium was to initiate the development of a problem repository in the field of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning and identify a graded set of challenges for future midterm and long-term research. The Experimental Design symposium discussed the challenges of evaluating AI systems. The Human Behavior Modeling symposium explored reasoning methods for understanding various aspects of human behavior, especially in the context of designing intelligent systems that interact with humans. The Intelligent Event Processing symposium discussed the need for more AI-based approaches in event processing and defined a kind of research agenda for the field, coined as intelligent complex event processing (iCEP). The Intelligent Narrative Technologies II AAAI symposium discussed innovations, progress, and novel techniques in the research domain. The Learning by Reading and Learning to Read symposium explored two aspects of making natural language texts semantically accessible to, and processable by, machines. The Social Semantic Web symposium focused on the real-world grand challenges in this area. Finally, the Technosocial Predictive Analytics symposium explored new methods for anticipatory analytical thinking that provide decision advantage through the integration of human and physical models.


Buchwitz, M., Witzmann, F., Voigt, S. and Golubev, V. 2012. Osteoderm microstructure indicates the presence of a crocodylian-like trunk bracing system in a group of armoured basal tetrapods. —Acta Zoologica (Stockholm) 93: 260–280.

The microstructure of dorsal osteoderms referred to the chroniosuchid taxa Chroniosuchus, Chroniosaurus, Madygenerpeton and cf. Uralerpeton is compared to existing data on the bystrowianid chroniosuchian Bystrowiella and further tetrapods. Chroniosuchid osteoderms are marked by thin internal and relatively thick external cortices that consist of lowly vascularised parallel-fibred bone. They are structured by growth marks and, in case of Madygenerpeton, by lines of arrested growth. The cancellous middle region is marked by a high degree of remodelling and a primary bone matrix of parallel-fibred bone that may include domains of interwoven structural fibres. Whereas the convergence of Bystrowiella and chroniosuchid osteoderms is not confirmed by our observations, the internal cortex of the latter displays a significant peculiarity: It contains distinct bundles of shallowly dipping Sharpey's fibres with a cranio- or caudoventral orientation. We interpret this feature as indicative for the attachment of epaxial muscles which spanned several vertebral segments between the medioventral surface of the osteoderms and the transversal processes of the thoracic vertebrae. This finding endorses the hypothesis that the chroniosuchid osteoderm series was part of a crocodylian-like trunk bracing system that supported terrestrial locomotion. According to the measured range of osteoderm bone compactness, some chroniosuchian species may have had a more aquatic lifestyle than others.


"What makes us the "w"ay "w"e are? "Some say it's the genes we inherit at conception. Others are sure it's the environment we experience in childhood. But could it be that many of our individual characteristics--our health, our intelligence, our temperaments--are influenced by the conditions we encountered before birth? That's the claim of an exciting and provocative field known as fetal origins. Over the past twenty years, scientists have been developing a radically new understanding of our very earliest experiences and how they exert lasting effects on us from infancy well into adulthood. Their research offers a bold new view of pregnancy as a crucial staging ground for our health, ability, and well-being throughout life. Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul ventures into the laboratories of fetal researchers, interviews experts from around the world, and delves into the rich history of ideas about how we're shaped before birth. She discovers dramatic stories: how individuals gestated during the Nazi siege of Holland in World War II are still feeling its consequences decades later; how pregnant women who experienced the 9/11 attacks passed their trauma on to their offspring in the womb; how a lab accident led to the discovery of a common household chemical that can harm the developing fetus; how the study of a century-old flu pandemic reveals the high personal and societal costs of poor prenatal experience. "Origins "also brings to light astonishing scientific findings: how a single exposure to an environmental toxin may produce damage that is passed on to multiple generations; how conditions as varied as diabetes, heart disease, and mental illness may get their start in utero; why the womb is medicine's latest target for the promotion of lifelong health, from preventing cancer to reducing obesity. The fetus is not an inert being, but an active and dynamic creature, responding and adapting as it readies itself for life in the particular world it will enter. The pregnant woman is not merely a source of potential harm to her fetus, as she is so often reminded, but a source of influence on her future child that is far more powerful and positive than we ever knew. And pregnancy is not a nine-month wait for the big event of birth, but a momentous period unto itself, a cradle of individual strength and wellness and a crucible of public health and social equality. With the intimacy of a personal memoir and the sweep of a scientific revolution, "Origins "presents a stunning new vision of our beginnings that will change the way you think about yourself, your children, and human nature itself.


- Special Introductory Price! Tony Chu is a detective with a secret. A weird secret. Tony Chu is Cibopathic, which means he gets psychic impressions from whatever he eats. It also means he's a hell of a detective, as long as he doesn't mind nibbling on the corpse of a murder victim to figure out whodunit, and why. He's been brought on by the Special Crimes Division of the FDA, the most powerful law enforcement agency on the planet, to investigate their strangest, sickest, and most bizarre cases. - Collects CHEW #1-5.


In the last two decades, many cities have faced changes in their economic basis and therefore adopted an entrepreneurial approach in the municipal administration accompanied by city marketing strategies. Brazilian cities have also adopted this approach, like the case of Florianopolis. Florianopolis has promoted advertising campaigns on the natural resources of the Island of Santa Catarina as well as on its quality of life in comparison to other cities. However, due also to such campaigns, it has experienced a great demographic growth and, consequently, infrastructural and social problems. Nevertheless, it seems to have a good image within the national urban scenario and has been commonly considered an "urban consumption dream" for many Brazilians. This paradoxical situation is the reason why it has been chosen as the research object in this dissertation. Thus, the questions of this research are: is there a gap between the promise and the performance of the city of Florianopolis? If so, can tourists and residents recognize it? And finally, how can this gap be demonstrated? Accordingly, the main objective of this research is to propose a conformity assessment approach applicable to cities, by which the content of city advertisement campaigns can be compared to its performance indicators and satisfaction degree of its consumers. Therefore, this approach is composed by different methods: literature and legislation reviews, semi-structured and structured interviews with experts and inhabitants, an urban centrality development analysis, a qualitative discourse analysis of advertising material (including images), a qualitative content analysis of newspaper reports and a questionnaire survey. Finally, the theses are: yes, there is a gap between promise and performance of Florianopolis; this promise is a result of city marketing campaigns which advertise its natural features and at the same time hiding its urban aspects, supported by some political and private actors, mainly interested in the development of tourism and real estate market in the city; this gap has been already recognized by tourists and more intensively by residents; the selected methods worked as a kind of conformity assessment for cities and tourist destinations; and last but not least, since there is a gap, it designates the practice of "make-up urbanism". Research limitations are the short time frame covered by this analysis and small and non-representative samples. However, its relevance lies in the attempt to fill in two disciplinary lacunas: a conformity assessment approach for cities and the creation of knowledge about Florianopolis and its further presentation at an international level, on the one hand. On the other hand, the transfer of this approach to other cities would help explaining a (common) contemporary urban phenomenon and appeal for more ethical conduct and transparency in the practices of city marketing.


Detect fraud earlier to mitigate loss and prevent cascading damage Fraud Analytics Using Descriptive, Predictive, and Social Network Techniquesis an authoritative guidebook for setting up a comprehensive fraud detection analytics solution. Early detection is a key factor in mitigating fraud damage, but it involves more specialized techniques than detecting fraud at the more advanced stages. This invaluable guide details both the theory and technical aspects of these techniques, and provides expert insight into streamlining implementation. Coverage includes data gathering, preprocessing, model building, and post-implementation, with comprehensive guidance on various learning techniques and the data types utilized by each. These techniques are effective for fraud detection across industry boundaries, including applications in insurance fraud, credit card fraud, anti-money laundering, healthcare fraud, telecommunications fraud, click fraud, tax evasion, and more, giving you a highly practical framework for fraud prevention. It is estimated that a typical organization loses about 5% of its revenue to fraud every year. More effective fraud detection is possible, and this book describes the various analytical techniques your organization must implement to put a stop to the revenue leak. Examine fraud patterns in historical data Utilize labeled, unlabeled, and networked data Detect fraud before the damage cascades Reduce losses, increase recovery, and tighten security The longer fraud is allowed to go on, the more harm it causes. It expands exponentially, sending ripples of damage throughout the organization, and becomes more and more complex to track, stop, and reverse. Fraud prevention relies on early and effective fraud detection, enabled by the techniques discussed here. Fraud Analytics Using Descriptive, Predictive, and Social Network Techniques helps you stop fraud in its tracks, and eliminate the opportunities for future occurrence.


This paper: Obtains measures of intellectual capital performance for quoted banks in selected European countries (Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden) during the 2004-2007 period; Investigates empirically the relationship between (i) the efficiency of value creation and (ii) bank market valuation and financial performance; Tests the effects of intellectual capital performance on profitability and evaluates whether or not intellectual capital can be considered a decision-making factor for investors. Using data drawn from public annual reports and Ante Pulic's Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) as a measure of the efficiency of capital employed and intellectual capital, the study uses regression models to examine the relationship between corporate value-creation efficiency and a firms' market-to-book value ratios and corporate value-creation efficiency. Some important findings include: The determination of correlation, if any, between the financial performance of the banks and their VAIC. The determination of the Italian bank efficiency in the use of intellectual capital in relation to some other European competitors. The validation of the assumption as to whether or not investors place higher value on firms with greater intellectual capital. The research limitations/implications include: The failure of the study to consider all banks operating in the countries analyzed (due to insufficient data, mainly for unlisted banks) and the limited time period of three years. Practical implications of the analysis include: The results can assist the managers of the respective banks in benchmarking their positions regarding intellectual capital. The study might also assist policymakers in formulating and implementing policy regarding intellectual capital development, while it may also aid investors in modifying investment strategies.


On December 18, 1999, Julia Butterfly Hill's feet touched the ground for the first time in over two years, as she descended from "Luna," a thousandyear-old redwood in Humboldt County, California. Hill had climbed 180 feet up into the tree high on a mountain on December 10, 1997, for what she thought would be a two- to three-week-long "tree-sit." The action was intended to stop Pacific Lumber, a division of the Maxxam Corporation, from the environmentally destructive process of clear-cutting the ancient redwood and the trees around it. The area immediately next to Luna had already been stripped and, because, as many believed, nothing was left to hold the soil to the mountain, a huge part of the hill had slid into the town of Stafford, wiping out many homes. Over the course of what turned into an historic civil action, Hill endured El Nino storms, helicopter harassment, a ten-day siege by company security guards, and the tremendous sorrow brought about by an old-growth forest's destruction. This story--written while she lived on a tiny platform eighteen stories off the ground--is one that only she can tell. Twenty-five-year-old Julia Butterfly Hill never planned to become what some have called her--the Rosa Parks of the environmental movement. Shenever expected to be honored as one of Good Housekeeping's "Most Admired Women of 1998" and George magazine's "20 Most Interesting Women in Politics," to be featured in People magazine's "25 Most Intriguing People of the Year" issue, or to receive hundreds of letters weekly from young people around the world. Indeed, when she first climbed into Luna, she had no way of knowing the harrowing weather conditions and the attacks on her and her cause. She had no idea of the loneliness she would face or that her feet wouldn't touch ground for more than two years. She couldn't predict the pain of being an eyewitness to the attempted destruction of one of the last ancient redwood forests in the world, nor could she anticipate the immeasurable strength she would gain or the life lessons she would learn from Luna. Although her brave vigil and indomitable spirit have made her a heroine in the eyes of many, Julia's story is a simple, heartening tale of love, conviction, and the profound courage she has summoned to fight for our earth's legacy.


We study the ability of banks and merchants to influence the consumer's payment instrument choice. Consumers participate in payment card networks to insure themselves against three types of shocks| income, theft, and their merchant match. Merchants choose which payment instruments to accept based on their production costs and increased profit opportunities. Our key results can be summarized as follows. The structure of prices is determined by the level of the bank's cost to provide payment services including the level of aggregate credit loss, the probability of theft, and the timing of income flows. We also identify equilibria where the bank finds it profitable to offer one or both payment cards. Our model predicts that when merchants are restricted to charging a uniform price for goods that they sell, the bank benefits while consumers and merchants are worse off. Finally, we compare welfare-maximizing price structures to those that result from the bank's profit-maximizing price structure.


This paper reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is an industry in severe decline. We find that a careful reading of the evidence does not justify this conclusion. It is true that on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure overstates any drop in banking, for three reasons. First, it ignores the rapid growth in commercial banks' off-balance sheet activities. Second, it fails to take account of the substantial growth in off-shore C&I lending by foreign banks. Third, it ignores the fact that over the last several decades financial intermediation has grown rapidly relative to the rest of the economy. We find that after adjusting the measure of bank assets to account for these considerations there is no clear evidence of secular decline. To corroborate these findings, we also construct an alternative measure of the importance of banking, using data from the national income accounts. Again, we find no clear evidence of a sustained decline. At most the industry may have suffered a slight loss of market share over the last decade. But as we discuss, this loss may reflect a transitory response to a series of adverse shocks and the phasing in of new regulatory requirements, rather than the beginning of a permanent decline.


What is giant cell arteritis? Giant cell arteritis causes the arteries of the scalp and neck to become red, hot, swollen, or painful. The arteries most affected are those in the temples on either side of the head. These arteries narrow, so not enough blood can pass through. It is important that you get treatment right away. Otherwise, the arteries could be permanently damaged. There is also a risk of blindness or stroke. If you have giant cell arteritis, your doctor should also look for signs of another disorder, polymyalgia rheumatica. These conditions often occur together.


This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters.


Context-dependent deep neural network hidden Markov model (CD-DNN-HMM) is a recently proposed acoustic model that significantly outperformed Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-HMM systems in many large vocabulary speech recognition (LVSR) tasks. In this paper we present our strategy of using mixed-bandwidth training data to improve wideband speech recognition accuracy in the CD-DNN-HMM framework. We show that DNNs provide the flexibility of using arbitrary features. By using the Mel-scale log-filter bank features we not only achieve higher recognition accuracy than using MFCCs, but also can formulate the mixed-bandwidth training problem as a missing feature problem, in which several feature dimensions have no value when narrowband speech is presented. This treatment makes training CD-DNN-HMMs with mixed-bandwidth data an easy task since no bandwidth extension is needed. Our experiments on voice search data indicate that the proposed solution not only provides higher recognition accuracy for the wideband speech but also allows the same CD-DNN-HMM to recognize mixed-bandwidth speech. By exploiting mixed-bandwidth training data CD-DNN-HMM outperforms fMPE+BMMI trained GMM-HMM, which cannot benefit from using narrowband data, by 18.4%.