[1] A mesoscale network of 14 AERONET Sun photometers was established in the UAE and adjacent Arabian Gulf from August through September 2004 as a component of the United Arab Emirates Unified Aerosol Experiment (UAE2). These measurements allowed for spatial, temporal and spectral characterization of the complex aerosol mixtures present in this environment where coarse mode desert dust aerosols often mix with fine mode pollution aerosols largely produced by the petroleum industry. Aerosol loading was relatively high with 2-month averages of aerosol optical depth (AOD) at 500 nm (τa500) ranging from 0.40 to 0.53. A higher fine mode fraction of AOD was observed over Arabian Gulf island sites with Angstrom exponent at 440–870 nm (α440–870) of 0.77 as compared to an average of 0.64 over coastal sites and 0.50–0.57 at inland desert sites. During pollution events with α440–870 > 1 the retrieved fine mode radius was larger over an island site than a desert site probably because of hygroscopic growth over the humid marine environment. For these same pollution cases, single scattering albedo (ωo) at all wavelengths was ∼0.03 higher (less absorption) over the marine environment than over the desert, also consistent with aerosol humidification growth. At an inland desert location, the ωo at 440 nm remained relatively constant as Angstrom exponent varied since the fine mode pollution and coarse mode dust were both strong absorbers at short wavelengths. However, at longer wavelengths (675–1020 nm) the dust was much less absorbing than the pollution resulting in dynamic ωo as a function of α440–870.


" Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. "


A noteworthy but often overlooked social phenomenon in America today is the harboring of racist ideologies, conscious or unconscious, by church members who also hold to the Christian belief of love for all humankind. This paradoxical coexistence of logically contradictory ideologies is manifested in the segregation of church congregations, as well as in the personal lives of church members all over our nation, including Robeson County, North Carolina. My focus will be upon white racism, the exercise of prejudice and discrimination by white people toward people of color, particularly blacks. Certainly other types of racism exist, such as blacks toward whites, but I have chosen white racism as the object of my study in the interest of a workable topic and because of my perception of it as more pervasive and more readily observed than the other types. I became interested in this topic by observation of some white citizens of Robeson County who, while pillars of their respective churches, exhibited highly racist attitudes. I was compelled to understand how these people could justify their actions within the framework of their religious belief and commitment. Also of interest to me were the historical processes involved in producing segregated churches, particularly in the Baptist churches of Robeson County. My findings on these two issues are the main substance of this paper.


Dirac's classic theorem asserts that if ${\bf G}$ is a graph on $n$ vertices, and $\delta({\bf G})\ge n/2$, then ${\bf G}$ has a hamilton cycle. As is well known, the proof also shows that if $\deg(x)+\deg(y)\ge(n-1)$, for every pair $x$, $y$ of independent vertices in ${\bf G}$, then ${\bf G}$ has a hamilton path. More generally, S. Win has shown that if $k\ge 2$, ${\bf G}$ is connected and $\sum_{x\in I}\deg(x)\ge n-1$ whenever $I$ is a $k$-element independent set, then ${\bf G}$ has a spanning tree ${\bf T}$ with $\Delta({\bf T})\le k$. Here we are interested in the structure of spanning trees under the additional assumption that ${\bf G}$ does not have a spanning tree with maximum degree less than $k$. We show that apart from a single exceptional class of graphs, if $\sum_{x\in I}\deg(x)\ge n-1$ for every $k$-element independent set, then ${\bf G}$ has a spanning caterpillar ${\bf T}$ with maximum degree $k$. Furthermore, given a maximum path $P$ in ${\bf G}$, we may require that $P$ is the spine of ${\bf T}$ and that the set of all vertices whose degree in ${\bf T}$ is $3$ or larger is independent in ${\bf T}$.


Will brain science be used by the government to access the most private of spaces — our minds — against our wills? Such scientific tools would have tremendous privacy implications if the government suddenly used brain science to more effectively read minds during police interrogations, criminal trials, and even routine traffic stops. Pundits and scholars alike have thus explored the constitutional protections that citizens, defendants, and witnesses would require to be safe from such mind searching. Future-oriented thinking about where brain science may lead us can make for great entertainment and can also be useful for forward-thinking policy development. But only to a point. In this Article, I reconsider these concerns about the use of brain science to infer mental functioning. The primary message of this Article is straightforward: "Don't panic!" Current constitutional protections are sufficiently nimble to allow for protection against involuntary government machine-aided neuroimaging mind reading. The chief challenge emerging from advances in brain science is not the insidious collection of brain data, but how brain data is (mis)used and (mis)interpreted in legal and policy settings by the government and private actors alike. The Article proceeds in five parts. Part I reviews the use of neuroscientific information in legal settings generally, discussing both the recent rise of neurolaw as well as an often overlooked history of brain science and law that stretches back decades. Part II evaluates concerns about mental privacy and argues for distinguishing between the inferences to be drawn from the data and the methods by which the data is collected. Part III assesses current neuroscience techniques for lie detection and mind reading. Part IV then evaluates the relevant legal protections available in the criminal justice system. I argue that the weight of scholarly opinion is correct: The Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment likely both provide protections against involuntary use of machine-aided neuroimaging mind reading evidence. Part V explores other possible machine-aided neuroimaging mind reading contexts where these protections might not apply in the same way. The Article then briefly concludes.


The post-MDG agenda adopted by the global leaders in a historic UN Summit on January 01, 2016 and to be achieved by 2030, are known as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There are 17 goals focused to overcome poverty and sustainability of the planet i.e. the world. SDGs are – end poverty in all its forms everywhere; end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture; ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages; ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all; achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls; ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all; ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all; promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all; build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation; reduce inequality within and among countries; make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable; ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns; take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts; conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development; protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss; promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels; finally and strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership to achieve the above goals of sustainable development.


This thesis deals with three dynamic validation techniques : runtime verification (monitoring), runtime enforcement, and testing from property. We consider these approaches in the absence of complete behavioral specification of the system under scrutiny. Our study is done in the context of the Safety-Progress classification of properties. This framework offers several advantages for specifying properties on systems. We adapt the results on this classification, initially dedicated to infinite sequences, to take into account finite sequences. Those sequences may be considered as abstract representations of a system execution. Relying on this general framework, we study the applicability of dynamic validation methods. We characterize the classes of monitorable, enforceable, and testable properties. Then, we proposed three generic approaches for runtime verification, enforcement, and testing. We show how it is possible to obtain, from a property expressed in the Safety-Progress framework, some verification, enforcement, and testing mechanisms for the property under consideration. Finally, we propose the tools J-VETO and J-POST implementing all the aforementioned results on Java programs.


"I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came."


The use of physical scale modeling techniques for geotechnical applications is investigated. The scaling laws to relate a prototype structure to a model are developed for the centrifuge modeling technique and for the laboratory (or one-g) environment. A theory based on critical or steady state concepts for the constitutive scaling of the behavior of the soil in a one-g model is investigated. A series of one-g models of varying configurations was constructed in a laminar box and subjected to earthquake like motions on a shake table. A total of 73 tests was performed. Most tests were constructed of saturated Nevada sand placed in a loose and dense state in adjacent halves of a laminar box, and the results of these tests were compared with a similar centrifuge test (Model 3) which was performed as part of the VELACS study. Some of the one-g models were constructed with an alternate model sand and an alternate pore fluid to investigate these modeling variations. One-g models were also constructed with the sand at a uniform density throughout the laminar box.

The research indicates that there is a significant conflict between the time scaling for dynamic processes and dissipation processes in both the centrifuge and one-g techniques, which means that excess pore pressures generated in the model saturated sand by a simulated earthquake will be less than what would occur in the same sand in the real prototype. This effect is generally more severe in the centrifuge. This implies that model tests performed to investigate liquefaction, flow failure problems, and/or deformation problems in saturated sands may significantly underestimate the potential behavior of the prototype. In addition to the above, the research provides insight into the behavior of adjacent loose and dense sands and indicates the potential for high excess pore pressures to develop in the dense sand. Current practice ignores the potential for liquefaction in dense sands or the development of cyclic mobility in the assessment of the seismic performance of geotechnical structures.


Information literacy (IL), defined as the capacity to locate, evaluate and use information to create new knowledge, is a core adult life skill and an extension of the notion of functional literacy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has identified information literacy as an essential capacity for participation in the knowledge economy and has included this construct as a strategic priority in the Information for All Programme (IFAP).To support this initiative UNESCO has commissioned research to consider whether a household survey could be used to identify the extent to which people in member states are information literate in all aspects of their life, including work and lifelong learning, and in relation to their personal well-being, and in their participation in civil society. United Nations agencies use surveys to provide indications of the extent to which various agreed objectives are being achieved. These include international surveys of education and of health and well-being. This paper reports on an investigation aimed at determining whether indicators of IL could be identified by secondary analysis of existing data collected in other household surveys.It was concluded that IL has unique elements that are not encompassed in the surveys that were examined.


Writing recently in this journal, two of Canada's veteran adult educators contemplated the "death" of the Canadian adult education movement. I disagree and argue that adult education in Canada is as vital an activity as ever and one that still fully justifies being called a movement. Specifically, Selman and Selman (2009) list five trends that they assert have brought about the adult education movement's demise: a general retreat from collaborative activities and collective action; a concern about "missionary" activities; the structure, values, and rewards within universities and other institutions of higher education; a shift toward "lifelong learning" as an organizing concept; and the movement somehow becoming less Canadian. In this paper, I consider each trend in some detail and provide examples to counter the Selmans' analysis. Instead, I show that adult education continues to be a critical and vital movement in Canadian society and one very far from dead.


A central question in the literature on mortgage default is at what point underwater homeowners walk away from their homes even if they can afford to pay. We study borrowers from Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada who purchased homes in 2006 using non-prime mortgages with 100 percent financing. Almost 80 percent of these borrowers default by the end of the observation period in September 2009. After distinguishing between defaults induced by job losses and other income shocks from those induced purely by negative equity, we find that the median borrower does not strategically default until equity falls to -62 percent of their home's value. This result suggests that borrowers face high default and transaction costs. Our estimates show that about 80 percent of defaults in our sample are the result of income shocks combined with negative equity. However, when equity falls below -50 percent, half of the defaults are driven purely by negative equity. Therefore, our findings lend support to both the "double-trigger" theory of default and the view that mortgage borrowers exercise the implicit put option when it is in their interest.


OBJECT
Stereotactic radiosurgery is an alternative to conventional surgery for the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia. The authors conducted a prospective evaluation of the safety and efficacy of this method in a large series of patients.

METHODS
A total of 100 patients presenting with trigeminal neuralgia were treated and followed up for a minimum of 12 months. The mean age was 68.2 years; 54 patients were male, and 46 were female. Seven had a history of multiple sclerosis, and 42 had already received conventional surgical treatment for trigeminal neuralgia. The intervention consisted of gamma knife surgery to the retrogasserian cisternal portion of the fifth cranial nerve. The median dose used at the maximum was 85 Gy (range 70-90 Gy). The number and intensity of pain attacks were recorded by the patient from 3 months before radiosurgery to a minimum of 12 months after treatment. Before and a minimum of 12 months after treatment, the patient completed a quality-of-life questionnaire. Neurological examination and quantitative sensory testing to evaluate sensory perception were performed by an independent neurologist over this same time period. At the last visit 83 of 100 patients were reported to be pain free. Fifty-eight of these 83 patients had stopped taking medication during the study. All quality-of-life parameters were improved (p < 0.001). Six patients reported facial paresthesia, and four patients reported hypesthesia. These symptoms were classified as mild. None of the complications reported for other techniques were observed.

CONCLUSIONS
Radiosurgery is a safe and effective alternative treatment for trigeminal neuralgia and is associated with a particularly low rate of hypesthesia.


This forthcoming essay argues that there is not one constitutionally recognized right to counsel, but two. There is a right to legal counsel and a right to extralegal counsel. The right to legal counsel applies principally to the formal domain of the criminal trial; the right to extralegal counsel applies exclusively to the informal domains of the plea bargain and guilty plea. To understand the distinction, consider the Court's recent decisions in Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye. An underappreciated feature of these rulings is the manner by which the Court has encouraged (and perhaps even constitutionally required) counsel to bargain "creatively" around substantive law. Specifically, the Court has signaled that prosecutors and defense attorneys — not legislators — are the system's real policy makers, and that, accordingly, effective assistance of counsel ought to be measured against their conception of the "sound administration of criminal justice." In the process, the Court has almost re-conceptualized the right to counsel as a constitutional entitlement to skirt legislative command — an entitlement that Justice Scalia derisively has termed a threat to the legality principle. It does not follow, however, that the Court's two-track jurisprudential approach is misguided. Whereas the approach continues a troubling trend away from legislative and lay influence over criminal justice and toward professional executive control, it also may constitute the pragmatic (and even normatively compelled) best course in a second-best system of criminal justice that depends procedurally on horse trading and substantively on mandatory sentencing statutes that ill serve any defensible conception of proportionality or crime control.


#1 bestselling author and radio host Glenn Beck exposes the real truth behind the roots of Islamic extremism in Muslim teachings in this sharply insightful handbook that debunks commonly held assumptions about Islam and the dream of a renewed caliphate. From the barbarians of ISIS to the terror tactics of Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, to the impending threat of a nuclear Iran, those motivated by extreme fundamentalist Islamic faith have the power to endanger and kill millions. The conflict with them will not end until we face the truth about those who find their inspiration and justification in the religion itself. Drawing on quotes from the Koran and the hadith, as well as from leaders of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Glenn Beck seeks to expose the true origins of Islamic extremism as well as the deadly theological motivations behind these agencies of destruction. Using the same unique no-holds-barred style from his bestselling books "Control" and "Conform," Glenn Beck offers straight facts and history about the fundamental beliefs that inspire so many to kill.


Computer Vision (CV) problems, such as image classification and segmentation, have traditionally been solved by manual construction of feature hierarchies or incorporation of other prior knowledge. However, noisy images, varying viewpoints and lighting conditions of images, and clutters in real-world images make the problem challenging. Such tasks cannot be efficiently solved without learning from data. Therefore, many Deep Learning (DL) approaches have recently been successful for various CV tasks, for instance, image classification, object recognition and detection, action recognition, video classification, and scene labeling. The main focus of this thesis is to investigate a purely learning-based approach, particularly, Multi-Dimensional LSTM (MD-LSTM) recurrent neural networks to tackle the challenging CV tasks, classification and segmentation on 2D and 3D image data. Due to the structural nature of MD-LSTM, the network learns directly from raw pixel values and takes the complex spatial dependencies of each pixel into account. This thesis provides several key contributions in the field of CV and DL.

Several MD-LSTM network architectural options are suggested based on the type of input and output, as well as the requiring tasks. Including the main layers, which are an input layer, a hidden layer, and an output layer, several additional layers can be added such as a collapse layer and a fully connected layer. First, a single Two Dimensional LSTM (2D-LSTM) is directly applied on texture images for segmentation and show improvement over other texture segmentation methods. Besides, a 2D-LSTM layer with a collapse layer is applied for image classification on texture and scene images and have provided an accurate classification results. In addition, a deeper model with a fully connected layer is introduced to deal with more complex images for scene labeling and outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods including the deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Here, several input and output representation techniques are introduced to achieve the robust classification. Randomly sampled windows as input are transformed in scaling and rotation, which are integrated to get the final classification. To achieve multi-class image classification on scene images, several pruning techniques are introduced. This framework provides a good results in automatic web-image tagging. The next contribution is an investigation of 3D data with MD-LSTM. The traditional cuboid order of computations in Multi-Dimensional LSTM (MD-LSTM) is re-arranged in pyramidal fashion. The resulting Pyramidal Multi-Dimensional LSTM (PyraMiD-LSTM) is easy to parallelize, especially for 3D data such as stacks of brain slice images. PyraMiD-LSTM was tested on 3D biomedical volumetric images and achieved best known pixel-wise brain image segmentation results and competitive results on Electron Microscopy (EM) data for membrane segmentation.

To validate the framework, several challenging databases for classification and segmentation are proposed to overcome the limitations of current databases. First, scene images are randomly collected from the web and used for scene understanding, i.e., the web-scene image dataset for multi-class image classification. To achieve multi-class image classification, the training and testing images are generated in a different setting. For training, images belong to a single pre-defined category which are trained as a regular single-class image classification. However, for testing, images containing multi-classes are randomly collected by web-image search engine by querying the categories. All scene images include noise, background clutter, unrelated contents, and also diverse in quality and resolution. This setting can make the database possible to evaluate for real-world applications. Secondly, an automated blob-mosaics texture dataset generator is introduced for segmentation. Random 2D Gaussian blobs are generated and filled with random material textures. These textures contain diverse changes in illumination, scale, rotation, and viewpoint. The generated images are very challenging since they are even visually hard to separate the related regions.

Overall, the contributions in this thesis are major advancements in the direction of solving image analysis problems with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) without the need of any extra processing or manually designed steps. We aim at improving the presented framework to achieve the ultimate goal of accurate fine-grained image analysis and human-like understanding of images by machines.


There are several kinds of mechanical systems that are under event-triggered conditions. For the dynamic analysis of such mechanical systems, a dynamics kernel that can generate equations of motion for mutibody systems in the simulation program was developed. For complex multibody systems, a multibody dynamics kernel was developed to generate the equations of motion for multibody systems. To generate the equations of motion, the recursive formulation method was used. Using the developed dynamics kernel, the dynamic responses of multibody systems can be carried out. For the dynamic response analysis, an external force calculation module was developed. The developed module calculates the hydrostatic force considering the nonlinear effects and the linearized hydrodynamic force by using the 3D Rankine panel method for the forces exerted on the floating crane. The kernel can also be used for the dynamic response analysis of a general multibody system operating in ocean waves. With the use of the dynamics kernel developed in this paper, a dynamic response simulation of lunching process of the ship using two floating crane was carried out.


Adjusted analysis: when groups differ on baseline characteristics (eg, age), analyses of outcome data are statistically modified to account for these differences. Blinding (masking): in an experimental study, refers to whether patients, clinicians providing an intervention, and people assessing outcomes are aware of the group to which patients have been assigned. If the patients, clinicians, and outcome assessors are all unaware of patient group assignment, a study is called "triple blind"; if 2 of the parties are blinded, a study is called "double blind"; and if only 1 of the parties is blinded, the study is called "single blind". If all parties are aware of group assignment, the study is considered to be "unblinded." Concealed randomisation: in a randomised controlled trial, the process whereby patients and researchers have no foreknowledge of, and therefore no control over, the group to which a patient may be allocated. When randomisation is concealed (eg, patient allocation by an off site or central registry), it is not possible for the patient or researcher to change the group assignment. However, if randomisation is not concealed (eg, patient assignments are in unsealed, transparent envelopes), either the patient or researcher could, potentially, decide to select another envelope if the desired allocation is not obtained. Consensus dialogue: multiple concepts are analysed simultaneously, drawing on the scientific and clinical expertise of more than one individual through extensive discourse. Confidence interval (CI): quantifies the uncertainty in measurement; usually reported as 95% CI, which is the range of values within which we can be 95% sure that the true value for the whole population lies. Covariate: a potentially confounding variable that is controlled for in an analysis of covariance. Diagnostic (gold or criterion) standard: the current best available measure of an outcome; used for assessing properties of a new diagnostic or screening test. The results from a new test are compared with the results from the diagnostic standard to assess the usefulness of the new test (ie, its sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios). Discourse analysis: a qualitative method of investigation focused on the representation and creation of meaning through language and visual imagery. A discourse is defined as a patterned way of representing phenomena in social and material worlds. Ethnography (ethnographic study): an approach to inquiry that focuses on the culture or subculture of a group of people, with an effort to understand the world view of those under study. Heterogeneity: the degree to which the effect estimates of individual studies in a meta-analysis differ significantly. Intention to treat analysis (ITT): all patients are analysed in the groups to which they were randomised, even if they failed to complete the intervention or received the wrong intervention. Interpretative anthropology: a qualitative method that yields "thick description" and allows discovery and interpretation of shared meaning as they evolve through social interaction. Likelihood ratio (for positive and negative results): a way of summarising the findings of a study of diagnostic test for use in clinical situations where there may be differences in the prevalence of the disease. The likelihood ratio for a positive test is the likelihood that a positive test result comes from a person that really does have the disorder rather than one that does not have the disorder (sensitivity/1-specificity). The likelihood ratio for a negative test is the likelihood that a negative test result comes from a person with the disorder rather than one without the disorder (1-sensitivity/specificity). Logistic regression: a statistical technique that predicts the probability of a dichotomous dependent variable (eg, dead or alive) using typically, a combination of continuous and categorical independent variables. It is similar to multiple regression except that the dependent variable is categorical. Median: the values of the middle observation in a sample. That is, if the data from 99 people were ordered from high to low, the median would be the value of the 50th observation. Meta-analysis: a method for combining the results of several independent studies that measure the same outcomes so that an overall summary statistic can be calculated. Naturalistic inquiry: the goal of this research is to understand how individuals construct reality within their own natural setting and context. Number needed to treat (NNT): number of patients who need to be treated to prevent 1 additional negative event (or to promote 1 additional positive event); this is calculated as 1/absolute risk reduction (rounded to the next whole number), accompanied by the 95% confidence interval. Odds ratio (OR): describes the odds of a patient in the experimental group having an event divided by the odds of a patient in the control group having the event or the odds that a patient was exposed to a given risk factor divided by the odds that a control patient was exposed to the risk factor. Phenomenology: an approach to inquiry that emphasises the complexity of human experience and the need to understand that experience holistically as it is actually lived. Purposeful (purposive) sampling: a type of non-probability sampling in which the researcher selects study participants on the basis of personal judgment about which ones will be most representative of a specific population. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve: an analysis used to assess the clinical usefulness of a diagnostic or screening test. It yields a score that has the highest rates of both sensitivity and specificity with respect to a diagnosis—that is, a score that will give the maximum rate of accurate classifications. Relative risk (RR): risk of adverse effects with a treatment relative to risk for those who do not receive treatment. Relative risk reduction (RRR): the proportional reduction in the rates of bad events between experimental and control participants; it is reported as a percentage (%). Sensitivity: a measure of a diagnostic test's ability to detect correctly a disorder when it is present in a sample of people. Specificity: a measure of a diagnostic test's ability to identify correctly the absence of a disorder in a sample of people who do not have the disorder. Standard error: standard deviation of the mean values computed from repeated samples drawn from the same population; ie, it is the error associated with the calculated mean. Stratified randomisation: used in trials to ensure that equal numbers of participants with a particular characteristic (eg, age) are allocated to each comparison group. Weighted: statistical analysis accounts for differences in certain important variables.


Trichoderma has been widely studied for their biocontrol ability, but their use as biocontrol agents in agriculture is limited due to the unpredictable efficiency which is affected by biotic and abiotic factors in soil. Isolates of Trichoderma from Embu soils were evaluated for their ability to control Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. phaseoli ., in vitro and promote seedling growth in the greenhouse. Bioassays were run using dual cultures and diffusible compound production analysis. The Trichoderma isolates significantly (p 0.01) reduced the mycelial growth of the pathogen. The principle mechanisms of niche competition, mycoparasitism, and antibiosis were observed in growth of the pathogen mycelium in the presence of Trichoderma spp. , through development of inhibition zones. There was coiling of hyphae around the pathogen mycelium coupled by lysising of cell wall Trichoderma spp. , where T. reesei and T. koningii were the most effective isolates. Studies were indicative of the synergistic ability of Trichoderma spp ., being an effective biocontrol of bean seedlings against Fusarium wilt while also promoting plant growth.


One of this century's most popular psychology scholars, Robert A.Johnson was among the first to present Carl Jung's rich but complex theories with simple elegance and grace, opening them to an entirely new and hungry audience. His masterful works--including the best selling" He, She, Inner Work, " and "Owning Your Own Shadow" -are known and loved as much for their beautiful retellings of timeless myths and folktales as for their deep wisdom and profound insight. "Balancing Heaven and Earth" reveals, for the first time, Johnson's own fascinating and mystical life-from his near-death experience at the age of eleven to the lifelong soul journey that has informed his writing and taught him how to live a spiritual life in the endlessly challenging modern world. Full of compelling, humorous, and surprising stories of encounters with an assortment of "sages, saints, and sinners, " it lays bare Johnson's own inner world and its dazzeling landscape of powerful dreams, mystical visions, and synchronistic events.Beginnning with a vivid retelling of the childhood accident that claimed the lower part of his right leg, Johnson describes the life-defining moment when he was transported by a mystical vision to a realm that exists just beyond ordinary consciousness-a realm he calls the "Golden World." With this experience, described as "both my curse and my blessing, " Johnson is launched on a spiritual quest that leads him in search of Eastern wisdom, to encounters with such wise men as J. Krishnamurti and D.T. Suzuki, and finally to Carl Jung, who shows him his destiny revealed in a dream. Johnson's experiences lead him to a unique understanding and acceptance of the slender connecting threads at work in all our lives, guiding us and shaping who we are-"call it fate, destiny, or the hand of God." As much a personal guide as a memoir, " Balancing Heaven and Earth" teaches us to follow, as Johnson has, the subtle influences of dreams, visions, and even our deepest sufferings in order to live attuned to our spiritual selves. A pure delight for Johnson's many fans and a splendid example of his trademark blend of illustrative myth and psychological insight, this is a work of incomparable beauty and inspiration showcasing the wisdom of a lifetime.


With the increasing popularity of location tracking services such as GPS, more and more mobile data are being accumulated. Based on such data, a potentially useful service is to make timely and targeted recommendations for users on places where they might be interested to go and activities that they are likely to conduct. For example, a user arriving in Beijing might wonder where to visit and what she can do around the Forbidden City. A key challenge for such recommendation problems is that the data we have on each individual user might be very limited, while to make useful and accurate recommendations, we need extensive annotated location and activity information from user trace data. In this paper, we present a new approach, known as user-centered collaborative location and activity filtering (UCLAF), to pull many users' data together and apply collaborative filtering to find like-minded users and like-patterned activities at different locations. We model the userlocation- activity relations with a tensor representation, and propose a regularized tensor and matrix decomposition solution which can better address the sparse data problem in mobile information retrieval. We empirically evaluate UCLAF using a real-world GPS dataset collected from 164 users over 2.5 years, and showed that our system can outperform several state-of-the-art solutions to the problem.


With this video book, you'll learn how to instantly find any picture in your library, fix common photography problems, clean up your images, add pop to boring pictures, retouch portraits, make gorgeous prints, create photo books, and even edit your home videos. Tony goes beyond teaching you how to use Lightroom. Tony shows you why and when to use each feature to create stunning, natural photos. When Lightroom isn t the best tool, Tony suggests better alternatives. Combining the benefits of video training and book learning, this video book gives you over 14 hours of video and dozens of free presets and raw images to practice with. If you learn better with video, watch the video training and refer to the book for quick reference. If you prefer reading, the book is concise and practical, and each chapter links to relevant videos when you want to understand a topic more deeply or see it used in the real world. Tony covers every aspect of Lightroom in-depth, but structures his teaching so that both beginner and advanced photographers can learn as efficiently as possible. If you just want a quick start, you can watch the first video or read the first chapter and you'll be organizing and editing your pictures in less than an hour. If you want to know more about a specific feature, switch to that video or jump to that chapter in the ebook. If you want to know everything about Lightroom, watch the videos and read the book from start to finish.


Recent empirical work shows that a better legal environment leads to lower expected rates of return in an international cross-section of countries. This paper investigates whether differences in firm-specific corporate governance also help to explain expected returns in a cross-section of firms within a single jurisdiction. Constructing a corporate governance rating (CGR) for German firms, we document a positive relationship between the CGR and firm value. In addition, there is strong evidence that expected returns are negatively correlated with the CGR, if dividend yields and price-earnings ratios are used as proxies for the cost of capital. Most results are robust for endogeneity, with causation running from corporate governance practices to firm fundamentals. Finally, an investment strategy that bought high-CGR firms and shorted low-CGR firms would have earned abnormal returns of around 12 percent on an annual basis during the sample period. We rationalize the empirical evidence with lower agency costs and/or the removal of certain governance malfunctions for the high-CGR firms.


Trade theory has long argued that while it may be in the best interests of large a country to pursue reciprocal trade agreement to escape from a terms-of-trade driven prisoners' dilemma, the best course of action for a small country is always unilateral trade liberalization. This prediction is inconsistent with the growing number of reciprocal agreements involving a small country and large country/region. Using simulation results from a quantitative trade model of North America I am able to shed light on why small and large countries pursue reciprocal trade agreements. I show that the non-cooperative and cooperative payoffs implicit in recent North American trade agreements between a small country and a large country/region (that is, the CFTA and NAFTA) take on the form of the well-known prisoners' dilemma. In particular, I find that irrespective of country size unilateral liberalization makes the liberalizing country worse off, while making its regional trading partner better off, and that cooperative agreements make all liberalizing partners better off. JEL Classification: F13; F41.


Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In 13 eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope - that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary mens movements.


The United States currently incarcerates its residents at a rate that is greater than every other country in the world. Aggregating the state and federal prison populations as well as inmates in local jails, there were 737 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2005 (International Centre for Prison Studies 2007). This compares with a world average of 166 per 100,000 and an average among European Community member states of 135. Of the approximately 2.1 million U.S. residents incarcerated in 2005, roughly 65 percent were inmates in state and federal prisons while the remaining 35 percent resided in local jails. Moreover, current U.S. incarceration rates are unusually high relative to historical figures for the U.S. itself. For the fifty-year period spanning the 1920s through the mid-1970s, the number of state and federal prisoners per 100,000 varied within a 10to 20-unit band around a rate of approximately 110. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, state prison populations grew at an unprecedented rate, nearly quadrupling between the mid-1970s and the present. Concurrently, the rate of incarceration in local jails more than tripled.


Forest and forestry are strategic factors, because the forest existence in Indonesia as the world lung and it can maintain ecosystem equilibrium. A destruction in Indonesian's forest can also affect and result in destruction in living environment. The forestry of Indonesia is in fact, especially in Borneo region has largely reduced and destructed. Its biological heterogenity has substantially been eliminated, too. This instance is, among other, caused by people's shifting cultivation, illegal cuttings by local peoples, illegal cutting and logging by the Forest Managing Rights  and its slash and burn.  This article is written from literature research findings presented in analytical descriptive form. The objective of this article presentation is to provide an illustration and true condition about the Indonesian's forest as an important strategic factor, where the forest itself and forestry has valuable role and serve as medium for maintaining the ecosystem equilibrium and preserve the world environmental life, especially in Indonesia itself and the most important objective of this research may be contribute a valuable benefit for entire scientific world and especially for the science of law. For preventing of the continuous forestry destruction and its recovery, it is important to make protective steps through legal instruments by appropriate and fair sanction enforcement, pursuant to the 41 Act of 1999 about Forestry, formulation of legal offense and the forestry criminal acts contained in Article 50. The heaviest sanction is 15 years in jail punishment and its highest fine is Rp. 10 billions and rehabilitation by reforestration.


This chapter for Criminal Law Stories (Robert Weisberg & Donna Coker eds., 2013), tells the story of State v. Rusk through the lens of rape law reform. Beginning in the 1970s, under the influence of feminism, some prevailing attitudes and expectations about sex between men and women started to change. Edward Rusk, like many guys, didn't think he just had to stop because a girl who seemed interested said she didn't want to have sex. He was convicted of rape at the cusp of legal transformation, when sexual behavior that had been socially commonplace was rapidly in the midst of being recast as criminal. Drawing on many interviews with lawyers, judges, and other people involved in the case, I tell the story of when and how a set of social norms of sex and dating became unacceptable. This is a story of the legal role and consequences of that social change.


A less familiar view of "power" is emerging from our inquiries into high level bureaucracies and other settings of social influence, conducted largely under the auspices of the Global Foresight Project based at Stockholm University under the leadership of Christina Garsten. Rather than assuming the existence of power and concerning ourselves with mechanisms for its temperance, we have been studying power as expressed in various "present situations" by public or private officials whose offices are believed to be more or less legitimate if hardly infallible.

In diverse settings increasingly studied by ethnographers, plausible (and desirable or objectionable) futures are brought into the present by being mapped or otherwise represented. The future made present is also performative and in that sense subjective. We speak of "anticipatory knowledge," of things that organizations come to know about that which, somewhat bewilderingly, has yet to come to be. The future is thus made tractable, or at least made to appear to be tractable, in important present situations such the Bank of England, Google, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the World Economic Forum ("Davos"), air security worldwide, and elsewhere. From these and other conversations, more nuanced understandings of how officials think in time, and hence official power itself, emerge. By exploring a few concerns of officials, i.e., those who wield power over modern life, we find power both quantitatively less and qualitatively different from what is often assumed. Concerns include knowledge/uncertainty; jurisdictions/competition; the public and other audiences; and the socialization/path dependency imposed by the passage of time.

If this depiction fairly portrays some important aspects of our world, then a different posture for the academic concerned with power appears to be in order, at least in some circumstances. What would constitute responsible power? Rather than revisiting the tropes of liberalism or indulge an anarchic conservatism, the paper proposes a teleological approach, both sympathetic and critical, to the work of bureaucratic institutions as they attempt to confront the future and thereby shape our worlds.


"Imagine a world where your phone is too big for your hand, where your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body, where in a car accident you are 47% more likely to be seriously injured, where every week the countless hours of work you do are not recognised or valued. If any of this sounds familiar, chances are that you're a woman. Invisible Women shows us how, in a world largely built for and by men, we are systematically ignoring half the population. It exposes the gender data gap – a gap in our knowledge that is at the root of perpetual, systemic discrimination against women, and that has created a pervasive but invisible bias with a profound effect on women's lives. From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, urban planning and the media, Invisible Women reveals the biased data that excludes women. Award-winning campaigner and writer Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the impact this has on their health and well-being. In making the case for change, this powerful and provocative book will make you see the world anew."


In this dissertation, two interrelated problems of service-based systems (SBS) are addressed: protecting users' data confidentiality from service providers, and managing performance of multiple workflows in SBS. Current SBSs pose serious limitations to protecting users' data confidentiality. Since users' sensitive data is sent in unencrypted forms to remote machines owned and operated by third-party service providers, there are risks of unauthorized use of the users' sensitive data by service providers. Although there are many techniques for protecting users' data from outside attackers, currently there is no effective way to protect users' sensitive data from service providers. In this dissertation, an approach is presented to protecting the confidentiality of users' data from service providers, and ensuring that service providers cannot collect users' confidential data while the data is processed or stored in cloud computing systems. The approach has four major features: (1) separation of software service providers and infrastructure service providers, (2) hiding the information of the owners of data, (3) data obfuscation, and (4) software module decomposition and distributed execution.
Since the approach to protecting users' data confidentiality includes software module decomposition and distributed execution, it is very important to effectively allocate the resource of servers in SBS to each of the software module to manage the overall performance of workflows in SBS. An approach is presented to resource allocation for SBS to adaptively allocating the system resources of servers to their software modules in runtime in order to satisfy the performance requirements of multiple workflows in SBS. Experimental results show that the dynamic resource allocation approach can substantially increase the throughput of a SBS and the optimal resource allocation can be found in polynomial time.


This Article is divided into five parts. In Part II, we summarize the development of concepts of privacy and confidentiality, and examine how legal and statistical communities have reacted to two major changes in the privacy landscape of the last twenty years. The first is the challenge brought by new online and potentially privacy invasive technologies. The second is the privacy and security effects of September 11th. We argue that law's innovations, perhaps reactive to overwrought public concerns regarding privacy and the aftershocks of September 11th, represent real challenges to traditional notions of data access, confidentiality, and respondent trust. Finally, we review statistical societies' quick condemnation of many of the privacy- and trust-erosive measures contained in post-September 11th legislation and their lobbying to overturn the most egregious of these. In Part III, we provide a basic framework for enacting future privacy legislation to govern federal statistical agencies. We argue that federal agencies, and the laws that govern their conduct, should be framed with three broad principles in mind: (i) a commitment to bureaucratic justice; (ii) a level of regulatory coherence that justifies choices made; and (iii) a flexibility that allows anticipation of, rather than merely post hoc response to, challenges posed by future technology and methods. In so doing, we note that law's previous attempts to maneuver between these principles have often resulted in second-best solutions, changing with shifting public opinions that are, themselves, based on various cognitive processes that result in consistent and recognizable errors. We argue that laws that fail to consider methods available in computer science and statistics often underestimate the privacy threats posed by seemingly nonindividually identifiable data disclosures. Such laws also overlook, to the detriment of the trust-based statistical regime that has proven so successful for two centuries, the importance of statistical associations' ethical standards for determining appropriate disclosures. In Part IV, we set out various statistical methods that have been, and could be, employed to protect the confidentiality of data released to the public or government agencies. In describing these options, we discuss the limitations inherent in each and note the law's continuing role in enforcing these measures. Finally, in Part V, we conclude that increased dialogue between our disciplines can, and should, result in a better privacy regime that combines sound statistical methods designed to protect anonymity where appropriate, with legal enactments that promote legitimate sharing yet punish abuses. In so doing, we provide some specific approaches for legislating privacy that account for the trust needed to make statistical programs successful and for the data access and disclosure so important for the challenges currently facing this country.


Alkali-aggregate reaction (AAR) is only one of the many factors that might be fully or partly responsible for the deterioration and premature loss in serviceability of concrete infrastructure. Two types of AAR reaction are currently recognized depending on the nature of the reactive mineral; alkali-silica reaction (ASR) involves various types of reactive silica (SiO2) minerals and alkali-carbonate reaction (ACR) involves certain types of dolomitic rocks (CaMg(CO3)2). Both types of reaction can result in expansion and cracking of concrete elements, leading to a reduction in the service life of concrete structures. This document describes an approach for the diagnosis and prognosis of alkali-aggregate reactivity in transportation structures. A preliminary investigation program is first proposed to allow for the early detection of ASR, followed by an assessment (diagnosis) of ASR completed by a sampling program and petrographic examination of a limited number of cores collected from selected structural members. In the case of structures showing evidence of ASR that justifies further investigations, this report also provides an integrated approach involving the quantification of the contribution of critical parameters with regards to ASR.


Scientific papers from all disciplines contain many abbreviations and acronyms. In many cases these acronyms are ambiguous. We present a method to choose the contextual correct definition of an acronym that does not require training for each acronym and thus can be applied to a large number of different acronyms with only few instances. We constructed a set of 19,954 examples of 4,365 ambiguous acronyms from image captions in scientific papers along with their contextually correct definition from different domains. We learn word embeddings for all words in the corpus and compare the averaged context vector of the words in the expansion of an acronym with the weighted average vector of the words in the context of the acronym. We show that this method clearly outperforms (classical) cosine similarity. Furthermore, we show that word embeddings learned from a 1 billion word corpus of scientific texts outperform word embeddings learned on much large general corpora.


This article discusses on the remedies available to the injured employees under the Employees' Social Security Act 1969 (ESSA 1969) (Note 1). Remedies are the means given by the law for the recovery of a right, or of compensation for the infringement thereof (Note 2). Since employees covered by ESSA 1969 are not eligible for workmen's compensation, they are only eligible for benefits administered by the Social Security Organisation (SOCSO) (Note 3). The relevant issues in this article pertain to the curtailment of the employees' rights to a claim under SOCSO as once an employee is injured, the employee must know what to do, what are the benefits and remedies available, the laws applicable, how to withdraw the contributions and so on. The article introduces a discussion on ESSA 1969, that is, the purpose of the Act, the requirements for eligibility of the benefits and the contributions. As the object of ESSA 1969 is to provide, through SOCSO, social security to employees and their dependants in the event of injury or death arising in the course of employment under the employment injury insurance scheme and the invalidity pension scheme, the study then examines the two SOCSO's schemes. This article also discusses the various benefits available under the insurance schemes focusing on benefits that are directly related to employees.


The protected Mediterranean woodland habitats in Israel are undergoing tree encroachment, resulting in loss of open patches with herbaceous vegetation. We suggested that this process results in a ground spider community dominated by shade-loving species. At three Mediterranean woodland sites located along a rainfall gradient, we examined the effects on the ground-spider community of experimental removal of the woody vege- tation in 1000 m 2 plots by cutting and overall plant biomass reduction by grazing and browsing by livestock. Pitfall traps were placed in replicated plots of four treatments (control, cutting, grazing/browsing, and cutting together with grazing/browsing) and in two different habitat patch types (open, woody). ANOVA and multivariate analyses were performed on family abundance by treatment and habitat patch type. Tree-cutting reduced the number of families in plots at two of the three sites. Grazing did not have a significant effect on the number of families or on the ground spider community composition. The spider community of cut-woody patches was more similar to that of open patches than to that of uncut woody patches. Most spider families separated along an axis of open versus woody patches, with woody habitat families predominating at all sites. Families typical of open habitats were positively associated with cut-woody patches as well. The overall effect on ground spider diversity of such manipulations may depend on the scale of habitat changes.


Embedded systems found their way into all areas of technology and everyday life, from transport systems, facility management, health care, to hand-held computers and cell phones as well as television sets and electric cookers. Modern fabrication techniques enable the integration of such complex sophisticated systems on a single chip (System-on-Chip, SoC). In many cases, a high processing power is required at predetermined, often limited energy budgets. To adjust the processing power even more specifically to application needs while meeting the energy budget, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be employed as energy-conserving configurable logic devices. Beyond their well-known flexibility, recent FPGAs offer sufficient capacity to accommodate entire SoCs. These reconfigurable SoCs (rSoCs) can serve as a basis for Reconfigurable Computing Platforms (RCPs). Here, a suitable part of the application program is compiled into hardware (HW) to increase efficiency, while the remainder is executed in software (SW). Beyond the logic circuits themselves, RCPs require an infrastructure for platform and application design, program execution, and application data storage to accommodate the increasing complexity of modern embedded systems. Hence, this work defines four Columns supporting the RCP. As the first Column, this thesis presents an execution model orchestrating the fine-grained interaction of a conventional general purpose processor (GPP) and a high-speed reconfigurable hardware accelerator (HA), the latter having full direct access to memory. The resulting requirements are realized efficiently in a custom computer architecture by a number of solutions on both the hardware as well as operating system levels. One of these measures is a low-latency HA-to-GPP signalling scheme that reduces the response time by up to a factor of 23x even on a relatively slow embedded processor. Another one is a high-bandwidth shared memory interface that does not interfere with time-critical operating system functions executing on the GPP, but still makes 89% of the theoretical memory bandwidth available to the HA. Two schemes of allowing the HA access to protected virtual memory complement the physical interface, differing in their use of an MMU, and their flexibility / performance trade-offs. All of the techniques and their interactions are then evaluated at the system level using the full-scale virtual memory variant of the Linux operating system. The second Column is formed by the description of static RCP characteristics. Complex embedded systems often comprise large system-specific parameter sets that span a wide range of possible combinations, not all of them legal. On the one hand, the RCP description is important as a well-defined target for EDA tools and compilers. On the other hand, intellectual property (IP) cores targeted at (r)SoCs expect a specific system environment, certain resources, or address windows to map their registers. Hence, an RCP management system is presented for describing static component properties, interfaces, and bus systems. To this end, the RCP management not only considers individual components and their configuration parameters, but presents a homogeneous view of the entire system. However, the static RCP description does not suffice to serve as a compiler target. In addition, a powerful RCP resource and component management is defined, which enables compile-time reservation of resources requested by IP cores. Moreover, an algorithm for automatic RCP composition is specified, which relies on the RCP description and interacts closely with the resource management to instantiate RCP components and connect them via bus systems. A description of dynamic RCP characteristics is further required to embed complex IP cores from high-level languages into automatically generated datapaths, and forms the third Column supporting the RCP. The resulting multitude of possible interface combinations requires the exploration of a large design space when manually developing the system. To compose IP cores tightly coupled with the datapath from an ANSI C description into a system, and subsequently interact with them, a HW/SW interface description was developed. It establishes an automatic design flow presenting convenient, simple C interfaces (function prototypes) to a SW developer. The description consists of rules for an idiomatic C programming style, and the interface control semantics of an IP core. Correspondingly, it defines a data model and human-readable description language for the characteristics of individual IP cores. The interplay of these components is evaluated on an rSoC using a real-world example. Sourcing and draining the data volume of a large embedded system without latency while intelligently exploiting the limited memory bandwidth can be challenging. Hence, a distributed speculative memory system is presented as the fourth Column supporting the RCP. By exploiting the reconfigurability of the RCP, the highly parameterized memory system can be adapted to the specific needs of each application. Customizable characteristics include the number of parallel memory ports to support the spatially distributed computation model of HAs. In contrast to the temporally distributed one of an SPP, each memory operator can be connected to a dedicated port here. Efficient speculative execution of the HA datapath is enabled by a dynamic prioritization scheme for arbitrating access to shared memory. The prioritization depends on per-port control speculation statistics collected at run-time, preferably serving accesses with a higher execution probability. This scheme, inspired by the branch prediction of conventional GPPs, additionally employs speculative prefetching to make very probably required data available in the cache in time before the actual access. System-level measurements on an rSoC show speed-ups of up to 1.65x at only low resource usage for typical applications.


New Edition of Best Selling Official Cert Guide plus the Online Interactive Learning tool myITcertifications labs: Updated Content, New Exercises, and Expanded Coverage -- PLUS includes CCNA Network Simulator Lite Edition. The new edition of bestselling CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 Official Cert Guide by Wendell Odom has been updated to refresh the content, add new exercises, and enhance certain topics that are key to understanding for success on the CCENT and CCNA exams. The IP addressing topics have been rewritten and re-organized to mirror proven techniques to learn both the concepts and the specific pieces of the subnetting puzzle. In addition, the TCP/IP and OSI Networking Models chapter was also completely updated and rewritten. Learn, prepare, and practice for exam success * Master CCENT/CCNA ICND1exam topics * Assess your knowledge with chapter-opening quizzes * Review key concepts with exam preparation tasks * Practice with realistic exam questions on the DVD * Learn from 60 minutes of Video mentoring * Apply concepts within Network Simulator lab exercises CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 Official Cert Guide, Third Edition is a best of breed Cisco exam study guide. Best-selling author and expert instructor Wendell Odom shares preparation hints and test-taking tips, helping you identify areas of weakness and improve both your conceptual knowledge and hands-on skills. The book presents you with an organized test preparation routine through the use of proven series elements and techniques. The master table of exam topics makes referencing easy. "Do I Know This Already?" quizzes open each chapter and enable you to decide how much time you need to spend on each section. Chapter-ending Exam Preparation Tasks help you drill on key concepts you must know thoroughly. A final preparation chapter guides you through tools and resources to help you craft your final study plan. Special troubleshooting sections help you master the complex scenarios you will face on the exam. The companion DVD contains the powerful Pearson IT Certification Practice Test engine, complete with hundreds of well-reviewed, exam-realistic questions. The assessment engine offers you a wealth of customization options and reporting features, laying out a complete assessment of your knowledge to help you focus your study where it is needed most. This new edition also includes a free copy of the CCNA ICND1 640-822 Network Simulator, Lite Edition, complete with meaningful lab exercises, which help you hone your hands-on skills with the Cisco user interface for routers and switches. The DVD also contains more than 60 minutes of personal video mentoring from the author focused on subnetting. Well-regarded for its level of detail, assessment features, and challenging review questions and exercises, this official study guide helps you master the concepts and techniques that will enable you to succeed on the exam the first time. CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 Official Cert Guide, Third Edition is part of a recommended learning path from Cisco that includes simulation and hands-on training from authorized Cisco Learning Partners and self-study products from Cisco Press. To find out more about instructor-led training, e-learning, and hands-on instruction offered by authorized Cisco Learning Partners worldwide, please visit www.cisco.com/go/authorizedtraining. Wendell Odom, CCIE No. 1624, is the most respected author of Cisco networking books in the world. His past titles include books on the entry-level Cisco certifications (CCENT and CCNA), the more advanced CCNP, and the industry-renowned CCIE. His books are known for their technical depth and accuracy. Wendell has worked as a network engineer, consultant, instructor, course developer, and book author, and he has produced videos, software, and blogs related to Cisco certifications. His website with links to various study tools and resources is at www.certskills.com. The official study guide helps you master all the topics on the CCENT/CCNA ICND1 exam, including * TCP/IP and OSI networking models* Operating Cisco routers and LAN switches* Ethernet switch configuration and troubleshooting* Wireless LANs* IP addressing and subnetting* Routing protocols* Router configuration and troubleshooting* Network security* WAN concepts and configuration Companion DVD The DVD contains two free, complete ICND1 practice exams and two free, full CCNA practice exams, CCNA ICND1 Network Simulator, Lite Edition, and 60 minutes of video training. Includes Exclusive Offer for 70% Off Premium Edition eBook and Practice Test. Pearson IT Certification Practice Test minimum system requirements: Windows XP (SP3), Windows Vista (SP2), or Windows 7; Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Client; Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0; Pentium class 1GHz processor (or equivalent); 512 MB RAM; 650 MB disc space plus 50 MB for each downloaded practice exam. myITcertificationlabs: CCENT-CCNA ICND1 is an easy-to-use exam preparation service that tests your readiness and teaches you what you need to know to pass the Cisco CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 exam. The web-based service assesses your knowledge with brief, objective-specific quizzes, and then it provides feedback in areas where you need further study within each objective. You are also provided with the actual study materials you need to learn in the form of PDFs from CCENT/CCNA ICND1 640-822 Official Cert Guide, Third Edition, as well as other visual learning tools. After reviewing the learning materials you take another test to be sure you understand those objective concepts and that you are ready for the actual exam. When you have completed all the objectives, you can take up to two full-length practice exams, providing you a measurement on your exam readiness and helping you fully prepare for the real Cisco CCENT/CCNA ICND1 exam experience.


In the present work, magnetic moments of isolated Single Molecule Magnets (SMMs) and transition
metal clusters were investigated. Gas phase X‐ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism (XMCD) in
combination with sum rule analysis served to separate the total magnetic moments of the
investigated species into their spin and orbital contributions. Two different mass spectrometry based
setups were used for the presented investigations on transition metal clusters (GAMBIT‐setup) and
on single molecule magnets (NanoClusterTrap). Both experiments were coupled to the UE52‐PGM
beamline at the BESSY II synchrotron facility (Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin) which provided the
necessary polarized X‐ray photons. The investigation of the given compounds as isolated molecules
in the gas phase enabled a determination of their intrinsic magnetic properties void of any influences
of e.g. a surrounding bulk or supporting surface


BACKGROUND
One potentially important antecedent of experiencing problems with condom use during penile-vaginal sex is the amount of time that men (and perhaps women) allow for condom application. To examine whether men reporting that ample time was available to apply a male condom (the last time a condom was used for penile-vaginal sex) were also less likely to report problems with condom use such as breakage, slippage and erection difficulties during that sexual event.

METHODS
A convenience sample of men (n = 440) was recruited via advertisements in newspapers (two urban and one small town) and a blog on the website of a condom sales company. Men completed a questionnaire posted on the website of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Inclusion criteria were that participants were: at least 18 years old; used condoms for penile-vaginal intercourse in the past 3 months; and able to read English.

RESULTS
In controlled, event-specific analyses, men reporting that they did not have sufficient time for condom application were ~three times more likely to report breakage and approximately 2.4 times more likely to report slippage. In addition, men who reported that they lacked time for condom application were approximately 2.4 times more likely to experience any of nine sexual problems, 3.4 times more likely to report difficulty with erection, 2.1 times more likely to report reduced sexual pleasure, 2.2 times more likely to report reduced sexual pleasure of their female partner and 2.6 times more likely to report that the condom irritated their partner's vagina.

CONCLUSIONS
This is the first study using an event-specific analysis to examine the effect of not having enough time for condom application on condom breakage, slippage and several outcomes related to sexual pleasure. Sexually transmissible infections and pregnancy prevention messages should include recommendations to men to take their time applying condoms.


This paper utilizes the Kalman filter approach to examine the impact of the Iraq war on the country betas of 11 equity markets in the MENA region. The Kalman filter model allows the country beta to vary over time conditional on the interaction with Iraq war dummy in the transition equation. The results show that the Iraq war has a positive impact on the country betas of all the MENA countries under study but statistically significant for Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Kuwait. The Iraq war has created a sudden shift in the time paths of the country betas, which reflected in a significant structural break and a dramatic increase of these equity market risks in the region. Although the impact of this geopolitical event is found to be limited to four markets in the region, the results correspond to the impact of the geopolitical events like the Iraq war on equity markets.


Just as the previous generation was raised in front of televisions, adolescents at the turn of the 21st century are being raised in an internet-enabled world where blogs, social networking, and instant messaging are competing with face-to-face and telephone communication as the dominant means through which personal interaction takes place. Unfortunately, a small but growing proportion of our youth are being exposed online to interpersonal violence, aggression, and harassment via cyberbullying. The mission of this book is to explore the many critical issues surrounding this new phenomenon. Key features include the following. Comprehensive The book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date look at the major issues that teachers, school administrators, counsellors, social workers, and parents need to be aware of with respect to cyberbullying identification, prevention, and response. Practical While the information is informed by research, it is written in an accessible way that all adults will be able to understand and apply. Expertise Justin W. Patchin and Sameer Hinduja are Co-Directors of the Cyberbullying Research Center (www.cyberbullying.us). Chapter authors represent a carefully selected group of contributors who have demonstrated both topical expertise and an ability to write about the topic in clear, easily accessible language. This book is appropriate for teachers, administrators, parents and others seeking research-based guidance on how to deal with the rising tide of cyberbullying issues. It is also appropriate for a variety of college level courses dealing with school violence and educational administration.


This paper concerns a stock jobbing scandal involving the French Company of the Indies on the eve of the French Revolution. Speculative trading in the company's shares on the Paris stock market triggered a credit crisis that brought down the king's chief minister, Calonne, and ushered in the immediate chain of events that led to the collapse of the Old Regime and the beginning of the French Revolution. The episode witnessed the emergence of the modern French notion of "public credit" as a method of protecting the royal finances from the putatively corrupting influences of speculative capitalists. Two dynamics informed this broader development. First, the enterprise of speculative finance was linked to the worst excesses of Old Regime privileges generally. Second, the crisis of 1785-1787 served to displace the traditional notion of "royal credit" as the asset that required protection from the dangers of financial capitalism, making way for a more abstract, less personalized idea of public credit as an instrument and reflection of the financial power of the nation as a whole. That notion of public credit was, in principle, compatible with a monarchical form of government, but did not require a king to make it work.


The existence of maximum entropy solutions for a wide class of reduced moment problems on arbitrary open subsets of ℝd is considered. In particular, new results for the case of unbounded domains are obtained. A precise condition is presented under which solvability of the moment problem implies existence of a maximum entropy solution.


The symptom spectrum of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) was first detailed in 1959 and later operationalised into a diagnostic protocol (Melvin Ramsey). In 1988 the Holmes case definition coined the term chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Fukuda's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria are very heterogeneous and comprise patients with milder symptoms than the Holmes case definition. The CDC Empirical Criteria for CFS lack sensitivity and/or specificity. Other CFS definitions, e.g. the Oxford criteria, delineate people with idiopathic fatigue. Some authors make the clinical CFS diagnosis when slightly increased self-rated fatigue scores are present. In 2011, Carruthers' International Consensus Criteria attempted to restore the focus on selecting people who suffer from ME. Cognitive bias in criteria construction, patient selection, data collection and interpretation has led to the current state of epistemological chaos with ME, CFS, CFS/ME and ME/CFS, and CF being used interchangeably. Moreover, none of the above mentioned classifications meet statistically based criteria for validation. Diagnostic criteria should be based on statistical methods rather than consensus declarations. Ongoing discussions about which case definition to employ miss the point that the criteria did not pass appropriate external validation. In 2012, Maes et al. performed pattern recognition methods and concluded that CFS patients (according to Fukuda's criteria) should be divided into those with CFS or ME, on the basis that people with ME display a worsening of their illness following increases in physical or cognitive activity. Both ME and CFS are complex disorders that share neuro-immune disturbances, which are more severe in ME than in CFS. This paper expands on that strategy and details a range of objective tests, which confirm that a person with ME or CFS has a neuro-immune disease. By means of pattern recognition methods future research should refine the Maes' case definitions for ME and CFS by including well-scaled symptoms, staging characteristics and neuro-immune biomarkers, including immune-inflammatory assays, bioenergetic markers and brain imaging.


Ohio is among the twenty-two states that have no enabling legislation for development impact fees. But in a 2000 ruling, Homebuilders Association of Dayton and the Miami Valley, et. al. v. City of Beavercreek, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled that municipalities could lawfully enact impact fees under their police and "home rule" powers, provided that the fees could pass constitutional muster under a "dual rational nexus test." On May 31, 2012, however, the Court ruled in Drees Company, et. al. v. Hamilton Township, that a development impact fee enacted by an Ohio township with "limited home rule" powers was an unconstitutional tax. The Court's unanimous opinion in Hamilton Township was authored by Justice Paul Pfeiffer, who, twelve years before, had authored the main dissenting opinion in the Beavercreek case. This article faults the Court's opinion invalidating the impact fees in Hamilton Township, arguing that the Court, rather than engaging in a fair-handed analysis, chose instead to rely on very limited authority to support a conclusion that appears to have been pre-determined. In particular, the article demonstrates that the Court failed even to acknowledge, let alone distinguish: (1) its earlier ruling upholding impact fees in Beavercreek and (2) the state supreme court decisions that had rejected the reasoning of the Iowa and Mississippi courts upon which the Court relied in part. The article notes that the Court's ruling leaves Ohio with a bifurcated approach to impact fees that is perverse because it makes impact fees most defensible in municipalities, in many of which there is little new development, and thus the need for impact fees is less, and effectively prohibits their use in rapidly-developing townships where they are needed most. The article concludes that the time is long-past for the legislature to examine the policy debate on impact fees and make a decision about adopting enabling legislation for impact fees, and that the decision should be to join the majority of states that have enacted such legislation.


Tax policy and scholarship generally assume that income has declining marginal utility (that is, that the next dollar is worth less to a wealthier person than to a poorer person). This assumption provides an easy justification for redistributive taxation. But the legal literature provides no firm grounding for the assumption of declining marginal utility. The Article shows that while some evidence does support declining marginal utility, other evidence suggests that a significant number of people actually experience increasing marginal utility, at least over some range of wealth. If some people's marginal utility increases, a non-egalitarian welfarist analysis still supports redistribution, but not, or at least not only, from the rich to the poor: it also supports redistribution from (some) less wealthy people to (certain) wealthier people. A welfarist who finds poor-to-rich redistribution unpalatable could explicitly incorporate equality into his analysis (by, for example, adopting a social welfare function that somehow incorporates equality). Or he could continue to use a nonegalitarian approach and assume declining marginal utility, but also acknowledge that declining marginal utility is not a fact about the world, but rather a normative judgment: a rich person should value his next dollar less than a poorer person values her next dollar, whether or not he actually values it less.


Secondary school teachers occupy the most critical and crucial position in the entire education system (Suleman, et al, 2011a). The purpose of the study was to compare the performance of online and directly selected secondary school teachers regarding teaching proficiency and classroom Management. All the students at secondary school level in Kohat Division, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) constituted the population of the study. Only 600 students studying at secondary school level in Kohat Division were selected as sample randomly. The study was delimited to only male students at secondary school level. The study was descriptive type and questionnaire was used as research instrument. Data was collected through personal visits. After the collection of data, it was organized, tabulated, analyzed and interpreted. The statistical tools i.e. means, standard deviation and differences of means were computed for each variable. Significance of difference between the mean values of the responses of students about online and directlly selected secondary school teachers were tested at 0.05 levels by applying t-test. After statisitcal analysis of the data, the researchers conclduded that the overall performance of the directly selected secondary school teachers was better and satisfactory. They were found to have the knowledge of teaching methods and the ability to control classroom disruptive behaviour. Conversely, the overall performance of the online selected secondary school teachers was poor and unsatisfactory. They have no knowledge of teaching methodologies and subject mastery. They were found unable to manage classroom disruptive behaviour and other related activities. Based on findings, it was strongly recommended that a special professional training programme should be arranged to the existing online selected SSTs in teaching methodologies and classroom management to equip them with the modern teaching methods and techniques of managing classroom behaviour so that they become able to perform their duties effectively.


Background: The main etiologic agent of toxic shock syndrome is the toxic shock syndrome toxin-1 (TSST-1) protein secreted by Staphylococcus aureus. Diagnosis of toxic shock syndrome is difficult and is significantly underdiagnosed in young children with burns due to the nonspecific presentation coupled with a rapid deterioration in patient condition. Methods: The lytic and cytolytic activity of a number of clinical and laboratory TSST-1–positive strains of methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (101, 253, 279 and RN4282, respectively) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 strain were tested in vitro using an assay designed to assess the relative exotoxin activity of bacteria using phospholipid vesicles and a T cell toxicity assay. In addition, the activity of lytic exotoxins such as &dgr; -toxin and the secretion of nonlytic TSST-1 toxin from S. aureus was measured using the vesicle assay and Western blotting over the 20-hour growth of TSST-1–positive S. aureus culture. Results: Both the vesicle and T cell assays suggest a lytic exotoxin-mediated mechanism of vesicle rupture and T cell death, with high levels of vesicle lysis and T cell toxicity. It is important to note that the clinical TSST-1–positive methicillin-susceptible S. aureus strains exhibited lytic exotoxin production as well as TSST-1 expression as confirmed by Western blot. Conclusion: We suggest that there is no correlation between the expression of TSST-1 and lack of exotoxin production. We also suggest that apurulence in an S. aureus–infected burn wound in a child should not be used to rule out toxic shock syndrome.


A heartwarming and inspirational Christmas novel in the tradition of "The Christmas Box, Grace, The Gift," and "Finding Noel." The "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Christmas Box "and The Walk" "series returns with a holiday novel of hope, love, and redemption. Dear Reader, When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Johnson, gave our class the intriguing (if somewhat macabre) assignment of writing our own obituaries. Oddly, I don't remember much of what I wrote about my life, but I do remember how I died: in first place on the final lap of the Daytona 500. At the time, I hadn't considered writing as an occupation, a field with a remarkably low on-the-job casualty rate. What intrigues me most about Mrs. Johnson's assignment is the opportunity she gave us to confront our own legacy. How do we want to be remembered? That question has motivated our species since the beginning of time: from building pyramids to putting our names on skyscrapers. As I began to write this book, I had two objectives: First, I wanted to explore what could happen if someone read their obituary before they died and saw, firsthand, what the world really thought of them. Their legacy. Second, I wanted to write a Christmas story of true redemption. One of my family's holiday traditions is to see a local production of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." I don't know how many times I've seen it (perhaps a dozen), but it still thrills me to see the change that comes over Ebenezer Scrooge as he transforms from a dull, tight-fisted miser into a penitent, "giddy-as-aschoolboy" man with love in his heart. I always leave the show with a smile on my face and a resolve to be a better person. That's what I wanted to share with you, my dear readers, this Christmas -- a holiday tale to warm your season, your homes, and your hearts. Merry Christmas


High levels of ecto-5'-nucleotidase (CD73) have been implicated in immune suppression and tumor progression, and have also been observed in cancer patients who progress on anti-PD-1 immunotherapy. While regulatory T cells can express CD73 and inhibit T cell responses via the production of adenosine, less is known about CD73 expression in other immune cell populations. We found that tumor-infiltrating NK cells upregulate CD73 expression and the frequency of these CD73+ NK cells correlated with larger tumor size in breast cancer patients. In addition, the expression of multiple alternative immune checkpoint receptors including LAG-3, VISTA, PD-1, and PD-L1 was significantly higher in CD73 positive NK cells than in CD73 negative NK cells. Mechanistically, NK cells transport CD73 in intracellular vesicles to the cell surface and the extracellular space via actin polymerization-dependent exocytosis upon engagement of 4-1BBL on tumor cells. These CD73 positive NK cells undergo transcriptional reprogramming and upregulate IL10 production via STAT3 transcriptional activity, suppressing CD4 T cell proliferation and IFN-ɣ production. Taken together, our results support that tumors can hijack NK cells as a means to escape immunity and that CD73 expression defines an inducible population of NK cells with immune regulatory properties within the tumor microenvironment. .


This policy brief outlines various options for distributing greenhouse gas emission allowances under a cap-and-trade program. Allowances represent a significant source of value and can be used to compensate firms or individuals affected by climate change policy or to raise funds for other socially desirable policy objectives. The basic allocation decision involves whether to freely allocate emission allowances, and if so, to whom, and whether to auction allowances, and if so, how to distribute the revenues. A number of recent cap-and-trade proposals begin with a combined approach that provides some allowances for free and auctions the rest, with the share of auctioned allowances rising over time. If free allocation is chosen, the basis for distribution must be determined. Options include granting allowances based on historical emissions ("grandfathering"), on levels of an output or input, or on an environmental performance "benchmark;" each has implications in terms of who benefits from the value of the allowances. If allowances are auctioned, in addition to deciding how the revenue generated by the auction will be used, policymakers will need to determine the type and frequency of the auction. Many of the same objectives can be met using either auction revenues or free allocation, including easing transition for affected firms and consumers and supporting new technologies. However, allocation decisions will sometimes entail trade-offs among the competing goals of achieving an equitable distribution of economic impacts, ensuring political feasibility, and minimizing overall program cost. Allowance allocation presents both a challenge and an opportunity: no allocation formula will satisfy everyone, yet allocation decisions can be made in ways that ease the transition to a low-carbon economy and enhance the likelihood of meaningful action on climate change. Congressional Policy Brief


Sequential decision-making problems with multiple objectives arise naturally in practice and pose unique challenges for research in decision-theoretic planning and learning, which has largely focused on single-objective settings. This article surveys algorithms designed for sequential decision-making problems with multiple objectives. Though there is a growing body of literature on this subject, little of it makes explicit under what circumstances special methods are needed to solve multi-objective problems. Therefore, we identify three distinct scenarios in which converting such a problem to a single-objective one is impossible, infeasible, or undesirable. Furthermore, we propose a taxonomy that classifies multi-objective methods according to the applicable scenario, the nature of the scalarization function (which projects multi-objective values to scalar ones), and the type of policies considered. We show how these factors determine the nature of an optimal solution, which can be a single policy, a convex hull, or a Pareto front. Using this taxonomy, we survey the literature on multi-objective methods for planning and learning. Finally, we discuss key applications of such methods and outline opportunities for future work.


For most of the past fifty years, attending Harvard Law School was a miserable experience. Though students were happy to obtain a Harvard degree, they regretted the great personal cost of earning it. Harvard Law School was widely viewed as irreparable because the obstacles to changing the culture of the hide-bound, ivy-covered walls of an elite law school seemed too great. Student anomie at Harvard appeared to be structural, an inevitable by-product of admitting more than 550 law students each year and pitting them in a three-year competition for grades, elite law review membership, and, ultimately, jobs in fancy law firms. While a handful of students reaped vast rewards, others were scarred for life. A person looking for a challenge could scarcely have found a greater one in the Harvard deanship. During Elena Kagan's tenure as dean, a miracle occurred. Harvard Law School was transformed. Today, students embrace the institution. The professors engage with one another. And the school's widely discussed dysfunctions are distant memories. Kagan accomplished this miracle by modeling two important and traditional American values: hard work and community. Kagan was known for walking the halls tirelessly to learn the views of her bright and independent colleagues and to seek consensus. She broke the gridlock between faculty political factions that had atrophied the academic life of the institution. Even more importantly, she transformed the student experience. This essay seeks to describe Kagan's transformational leadership and provide insight as to the specific changes Kagan made to accomplish the miracle.


In March 2010 the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on-board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered for the first time >100 MeV gamma-ray emission from a nova within our galaxy, V407 Cyg. The high-energy spectrum and light curve was explained as a consequence of shock acceleration in the nova shell as it interacts with the local ambient medium. It was suspected that the necessary conditions for high-energy emission from novae would be rare. In June 2012 the LAT detected a new flaring source, Fermi J1750-3243, that is spatially coincident and contemporaneous with a new nova, Nova Sco 2012. We report on the exciting discovery of this new 'gamma-ray' nova and present a detailed analysis of its high-energy properties.


This paper describes computer crash simulations performed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) under the current research and testing activities on large school bus safety restraints. The simulations of a frontal rigid barrier test and comparative dynamic sled testing for compartmentalization, lap belt, and lap/shoulder belt restraint strategies are presented. School bus transportation is one of the safest forms of transportation in the United States. School age children transported in school buses are safer than children transported in motor vehicles of any other type. Large school buses provide protection because of their size and weight. Further, they must meet minimum Federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSSs) mandating compartmentalized seating, improved emergency exits, stronger roof structures and fuel systems, and better bus body joint strength.


We report on the simulation of the energy performance of prototype holographic glazings in commercial office buildings in a California climate. These prototype glazings, installed above conventional side windows, are designed to diffract the transmitted solar radiation and reflect it off the ceiling, providing adequate daylight illumination for typical office tasks up to 10m from the window. In this study, we experimentally determined a comprehensive set of solar-optical properties and characterized the contribution of the prototype holographic glazings to workplane illuminance in a scale model of a typical office space. We then used the scale model measurements to simulate the energy performance of the holographic glazings over the course of an entire year for four window orientations (North, East, South and West) for the inland Los Angeles climate, using the DOE-2.lD building energy analysis computer program. The results of our experimental analyses indicate that these prototype holographic glazings diffract only a small fraction of the incident light. The results of this study indicate that these prototype holographic glazings will not save energy in commercial office buildings. Their performance is very similar to that of clear glass, which, through side windows, cannot efficiently illuminate more than a 4m - 6m depthmore » of a building`s perimeter, because the cooling penalties due to solar heat gain are greater than the electric lighting savings due to daylighting.« less


That there is no Milton Friedman today is not a mystery; the mystery is how Milton Friedman could have been. The facts of Friedman's biography make him unique among twentieth-century public figures. He had extensive knowledge and expertise in mathematics and statistics. Yet he became a critic of 'formal' theory, exemplified by mathematical economics, that failed to engage with real-world facts and data, and of econometric modeling that presumed more knowledge of economic structure than Friedman thought economists had. He was trained by a leading American Progressive, but became the leading critic of Progressive and New Deal institutions and programs. Having little prior interest in politics and political philosophy, he emerged in the 1950s as the foremost advocate of classical liberalism. He was looked on by the intelligentsia as a public enemy, but he repaid calumny with good will. Will there be another Milton Friedman? Not likely in today's intellectual and political culture.