Existing classification schemes and thesauri are lacking in well-defined semantics and structural consistency. Empowering end users in searching collections of ever increasing magnitudes with performance far exceeding plain free-text searching (as used in many Web search engines), and developing systems that not only find but also process information for action, requires far more powerful and complex knowledge organization systems (KOSs). The paper presents a conceptual structure and transition procedure to support the shift from a traditional KOS towards a full-fledged and semantically rich KOS. The proposed structure also complies with other interoperability approaches like RDFS and XML in the Web environment. AGROVOC, a traditional thesaurus developed and maintained by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, serves as a case study for exploring the reengineering of a traditional thesaurus into a fully-fledged ontology. We start the process of developing an inventory of specific relationship types with well-defined semantics for the agricultural domain and explore the rules-as-you-go approach to streamlining the reengineering process.


Long-term population performance trends of eight large herbivore species belonging to groups of disparate foraging styles were studied in the semi-arid savanna of the Kruger National Park, South Africa. Over the past century the number of bulk feeders (buffalo, waterbuck, blue wildebeest and plains zebra) had increased towards comparatively high population densities, whereas population numbers of selectively feeding antelope species (sable antelope, roan antelope, tsessebe and eland) declined progressively. Detailed analyses revealed that population numbers of buffalo and waterbuck fluctuated in association with food quantity determined by rainfall. Population performance ratings (1944–2003) of the species for which forage quality was important (blue wildebeest, zebra and selective grazers) were correlated negatively with minimum temperature and positively with dry-season rainfall. Interpretation according to a climate–vegetation response model suggested that acclimation of forage plants to increasing temperature had resulted in temperature-enhanced plant productivity, initially increasing food availability and supporting transient synchronous increases in population abundance of both blue wildebeest and zebra, and selective grazers. As acclimation of plants to concurrently rising minimum (nocturnal) temperature ( T min ) took effect, adjustments in metabolic functionality occurred involving accelerated growth activity at the cost of storage-based metabolism. Growth-linked nitrogen dilution and reduced carbon-nutrient quality of forage then resulted in phases of subsequently declining herbivore populations. Over the long term (1910–2010), progressive plant functionality shifts towards accelerated metabolic growth rather than storage priority occurred in response to T min rising faster than maximum temperature ( T max ), thereby cumulatively compromising the carbon-nutrient quality of forage, a key resource for selective grazers. The results of analyses thus revealed consistency between herbivore population trends and levels of forage quantity and quality congruent with expected plant metabolic responses to climate effects. Thus, according to the climate-vegetation response model, climate effects were implicated as the ultimate cause of large herbivore population performance in space and over time. Conservation implications: In its broadest sense, the objective of this study was to contribute towards the enhanced understanding of landscape-scale functioning of savanna systems with regard to the interplay between climate, vegetation and herbivore population dynamics.


After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—"I refute it thus." —James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson


Representing documents by vectors that are independent of language enhances machine translation and multilingual text categorization. We use discriminative training to create a projection of documents from multiple languages into a single translingual vector space. We explore two variants to create these projections: Oriented Principal Component Analysis (OPCA) and Coupled Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (CPLSA). Both of these variants start with a basic model of documents (PCA and PLSA). Each model is then made discriminative by encouraging comparable document pairs to have similar vector representations. We evaluate these algorithms on two tasks: parallel document retrieval for Wikipedia and Europarl documents, and cross-lingual text classification on Reuters. The two discriminative variants, OPCA and CPLSA, significantly outperform their corresponding baselines. The largest differences in performance are observed on the task of retrieval when the documents are only comparable and not parallel. The OPCA method is shown to perform best.


In Fall 2005, race riots in France drew attention to differences between the French and American legal regimes for remedying racial inequality and discrimination. The riots reacted to the persistence of employment discrimination against people of North African origin. French antidiscrimination law has been unable to solve such problems because of its focus on criminal punishment of racist speech and its uncompromising commitment to race-blindness. These features embody the intersection of two historical forces: the influence of Vichy memories on French legal conceptions of racism and discrimination, and the strong republican resistance to social distinctions. Understanding this history comparatively brings certain features of U.S. antidiscrimination law into sharper focus: U.S. law imposes civil, rather than criminal liability, and is more tolerant of race-conscious affirmative action, more resistant to regulating racist speech, and more reluctant to extend antidiscrimination law to a wide range of protected characteristics. These distinctive features of U.S. law are explained by the law's reaction to the history of slavery and segregation. The different evolutions of antidiscrimination law reveal how particular forms of racism - anti-Semitism and genocide in France, and the slavery and segregation of African Americans in the United States - gave rise to two very different antidiscrimination regimes. The French contrast challenges the assumptions of American antidiscrimination law, leading to greater precision about the uniquely American commitment to race-blindness in equal protection doctrine. The stricter French model of race-blindness highlights the instability and ambivalence of American race-blindness. Comparative historical inquiry reveals that the goal of eradicating group subordination does more work in U.S. antidiscrimination law than the goal of achieving a truly race-blind society based on individual merit.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate hip or knee symptoms in older persons from a longitudinal, population perspective, and to determine the impact of persistent hip or knee pain on general health status over time.

METHODS
A postal questionnaire was sent to a random sample of 5,500 individuals ages > or = 65 years containing the Short Form 36 (SF-36) general health survey, Lequesne hip and knee indices, and a hip/knee pain severity item. Respondents reporting hip or knee symptoms at baseline received an identical questionnaire 12 months later. Respondents were classified into a persistent pain group with either hip or knee pain at both baseline and followup, and a non-persistent pain group who reported hip or knee pain at baseline but no pain at followup.

RESULTS
At baseline, 1,305 (40.7%) of 3,210 eligible respondents reported hip or knee pain. At 1 year, 1,072 (82.1%) of 1,305 individuals responded, of whom 820 (76.5%) remained symptomatic (the persistent group). In multivariate analysis, baseline factors identified as strongly related to having persistent pain were maximum Lequesne score (odds ratio [OR] 1.09, P < 0.001), maximum hip/knee pain score (OR 1.61, P < 0.001), and number of painful hip and knee joints at baseline (OR 1.48, P = 0.004). Following adjustment for age, sex, and baseline score, differences in mean SF-36 change scores of the 2 groups were significant for all dimensions except for mental health.

CONCLUSION
In older persons, a symptomatic hip or knee frequently progresses in terms of worsening symptoms and accrual of other symptomatic hip or knee joints. The impact of persistent symptoms on general health is substantial.


Daewoo Shipbuilding Company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, has experienced great deal of trouble with the planning and scheduling of its production process. To solve the problems, from 1991 to 1993, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Daewoo jointly conducted the Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling (das) Project. To integrate the scheduling expert systems for shipbuilding, we used a hierarchical scheduling architecture. To automate the dynamic spatial layout of objects in various areas of the shipyard, we developed spatial scheduling expert systems. For reliable estimation of person-hour requirements, we implemented the neural network-based person-hour estimator. In addition, we developed the paneled-block assembly shop scheduler and the long-range production planner. For this large-scale project, we devised a phased development strategy consisting of three phases: (1) vision revelation, (2) data-dependent realization, and (3) prospective enhancement. The DAS systems were successfully launched in January 1994 and are actively being used as indispensable systems in the shipyard, resulting in significant improvement in productivity and visible and positive effects in many areas.


Human society faces serious environmental and social threats as a result of systemic unsustainable actions and values. This is a time of cultural self-evaluation and profound change. This study examines how 13 social and environmental change-based organizations, through network partnerships and a robust organizational knowledge-base, are responding to these challenges. A systems perspective was used as a guide to promote a holistic understanding of the actors within the system, their perceptions of success, strategies, actions and tools used to guide them toward sustainability. The results indicate that organizations seeking to scale-up their impact toward sustainability might benefit from the following success factors: 1. Collaboration with diverse partners to contribute to more effective interventions in complex systems, 2. Integrating comprehensive definitions of sustainability with organizational vision to facilitate success, 3. The application of leverage points and transparent prioritization processes to asure congruence between organizational purpose and actions, 4. Practices of dialogue and deep listening build rewarding partnerships and, 5. Metrics that support partnerships and gauge progress toward sustainability. In conclusion network partnerships have the potential to generate widespread sustained change and can be supported by complex systems science and a Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development.


Derived from Sam W. Wiesel's four-volume Operative Techniques in Orthopaedic Surgery, this single-volume resource contains the user-friendly, step-by-step information you need to confidently perform the full range of sports medicine surgical procedures. In one convenient place, you'll find the entire Sports Medicine section, as well as relevant chapters from the Shoulder and Elbow; Pediatrics; Hand, Wrist, and Forearm; Adult Reconstruction; and Foot and Ankle sections of Operative Techniques in Orthopaedic Surgery. Superb full-color illustrations and step-by-step explanations help you master surgical techniques, select the best procedure, avoid complications, and anticipate outcomes. Written by global experts from leading institutions, Operative Techniques in Sports Medicine Surgery, 2nd Edition, provides authoritative, easy-to-follow guidance to both the novice trainee or experienced surgeon. Key Features * Updated chapters, new illustrations, and additional content on pediatrics and the shoulder make this edition even more useful in your practice.* Step-by-step procedures are illustrated with outstanding full-color intraoperative photographs and drawings that demonstrate how to perform each technique.* Each clinical problem is discussed in the same concise format: definition, anatomy, physical exams, pathogenesis, natural history, physical findings, imaging and diagnostic studies, differential diagnosis, non-operative management, surgical management, pearls and pitfalls, postoperative care, outcomes, and complications.* Detailed descriptions of surgical anatomy help you master even the most challenging and highly technical procedures.* Extensive use of bullet points and a highly templated format allow for quick and easy reference.* Ideal for quick preoperative review of the steps of a procedure, whether a familiar standard or a new and evolving technique.Now with the print edition, enjoy the bundled interactive eBook edition, which can be downloaded to your tablet and smartphone or accessed online and includes features like:*Complete content with enhanced navigation*Powerful search tools and smart navigation cross-links that pull results from content in the book, your notes, and even the web*Cross-linked pages, references, and more for easy navigation*Highlighting tool for easier reference of key content throughout the text* Ability to take and share notes with friends and colleagues*Quick reference tabbing to save your favorite content for future use


Calculating effective heat conductivity for a class of industrial problems is discussed. The considered composite materials are glass and metal foams, fibrous materials, and the like, used in isolation or in advanced heat exchangers. These materials are characterized by a very complex internal structure, by low volume fraction of the higher conductive material (glass or metal), and by a large volume fraction of the air. The homogenization theory (when applicable), allows to calculate the effective heat conductivity of composite media by postprocessing the solution of special cell problems for representative elementary volumes (REV). Different formulations of such cell problems are considered and compared here. Furthermore, the size of the REV is studied numerically for some typical materials. Fast algorithms for solving the cell problems for this class of problems, are presented and discussed.


It may sound crazy to pay people an income whether or not they are working or looking for work. But the idea of providing an unconditional basic income to every individual, rich or poor, active or inactive, has been advocated by such major thinkers as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and John Kenneth Galbraith. For a long time, it was hardly noticed and never taken seriously. Today, with the traditional welfare state creaking under pressure, it has become one of the most widely debated social policy proposals in the world. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght present the most comprehensive defense of this radical idea so far, advocating it as our most realistic hope for addressing economic insecurity and social exclusion in the twenty-first century. The authors seamlessly combine philosophy, politics, and economics as they compare the idea of a basic income with rival ideas past and present for guarding against poverty and unemployment. They trace its history, tackle the economic and ethical objections against an unconditional income--including its alleged tendency to sap incentives and foster free riding--and lay out how such an apparently implausible idea might be viable financially and achievable politically. Finally, they consider the relevance of the proposal in an increasingly globalized economy. In an age of growing inequality and divided politics, when old answers to enduring social problems no longer inspire confidence, Basic Income presents fresh reasons to hope that we might yet achieve a free society and a sane economy.


Description: The Hudhud consists of narrative chants traditionally performed by the Ifugao community, which is well known for its rice terraces extending over the highlands of the northern island of the Philippine archipelago. It is practised during the rice sowing season, at harvest time and at funeral wakes and rituals. Thought to have originated before the seventh century, the Hudhud comprises more than 200 chants, each divided into 40 episodes. A complete recitation may last several days. Since the Ifugaos culture is matrilineal, the wife generally takes the main part in the chants, and her brother occupies a higher position than her husband. The language of the stories abounds in figurative expressions and repetitions and employs metonymy, metaphor and onomatopoeia, rendering transcription very difficult. Thus, there are very few written expressions of this tradition. The chant tells about ancestral heroes, customary law, religious beliefs and traditional practices, and reflects the importance of rice cultivation. The narrators, mainly elderly women, hold a key position in the community, both as historians and preachers. The Hudhud epic is chanted alternately by the first narrator and a choir, employing a single melody for all the verses. The conversion of the Ifugao to Catholicism has weakened their traditional culture. Furthermore, the Hudhud is linked to the manual harvesting of rice, which is now mechanized. Although the rice terraces are listed as a World Heritage Site, the number of growers has been in constant decline.The few remaining narrators, who are already very old, need to be supported in their efforts to transmit their knowledge and to raise awareness among young people. Country(ies): Philippines


The redistribution of HNO3 via uptake and sedimentation by cirrus cloud particles is considered an important term in the upper tropospheric budget of reactive nitrogen. Numerous cirrus cloud encounters by the NASA WB-57F high-altitude research aircraft during CRYSTAL-FACE were accompanied by the observation of condensed-phase HNO3 with the NOAA chemical ionization mass spectrometer. The instrument measures HNO3 with two independent channels of detection connected to separate forward- and downward-facing inlets that allow a determination of the amount of HNO3 condensed on ice particles. Subtropical cirrus clouds, as indicated by the presence of ice particles, were observed coincident with condensed-phase HNO3 at temperatures of 197 K - 224 K and pressures of 122 hPa - 224 hPa. Maximum levels of condensed-phase HNO3 approached the gas-phase equivalent of 0.8 ppbv. Ice particle surface coverages as high as 1.4- 10(exp 14) molecules/sq cm were observed. A dissociative Langmuir adsorption model, when using an empirically derived HNO3 adsorption enthalpy of -11.0 kcal/mol, effectively describes the observed molecular coverages to within a factor of 5. The percentage of total HNO3 in the condensed phase ranged from near zero to 100% in the observed cirrus clouds. With volume-weighted mean particle diameters up to 700 pm and particle fall velocities up to 10 m/s, some observed clouds have significant potential to redistribute HNO3 in the upper troposphere.


A series of provocative discussions on everything from individual authors to contemporary religious thinking, Against Interpretation and Other Essays is the definitive collection of Susan Sontag's best known and important works published in Penguin Modern Classics. Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between 'high' and 'low' art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces 'Notes on Camp' and 'Against Interpretation'. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought. Originally published in 1966, this collection has never gone out of print and has been a major influence on generations of readers, and the field of cultural criticism, ever since. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) was born in Manhattan and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels - The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America, which won the 2000 US National Book Award for fiction - a collection of stories, several plays, and six books of essays, among them Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Her books are translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001 she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work, and in 2003 she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. If you enjoyed Against Interpretation and Other Essays, you might like Sontag's On Photography, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A dazzling intellectual performance' Vogue 'Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times


The purpose of this study was to extend the understanding of contextual factors that are associated with children's motivational development in early childhood. The study examined the relations between family social class, maternal values of self-direction and conformity, and child persistence in accomplishing a challenging task, which was conceptualized as one of the component processes of motivation. Two hundred thirty one mothers and their 3.5-year-old children participated in the study. Consistent with Kohn's (1979) theoretical perspective, the findings indicated that middle-class mothers valued self-direction in their children more and conformity less than mothers of the working class. Children of mothers who valued self-direction more than conformity showed higher levels of persistence. The study also tested a model in which maternal values served as a mediator between family social class and child persistence. No direct association between family social class and child persistence was found, thus the mediational model was not supported. Implications for developmental programs and directions for future research are stated.


A sorting network is a shortest path from $12\cdots n$ to $n\cdots21$ in the Cayley graph of $S_n$ generated by nearest-neighbor swaps. For $m\leq n$, consider the random $m$-particle sorting network obtained by choosing an $n$-particle sorting network uniformly at random and then observing only the relative order of $m$ particles chosen uniformly at random. We prove that the expected number of swaps in location $j$ in the subnetwork does not depend on $n$, and we provide a formula for it. Our proof is probabilistic, and involves a Polya urn with non-integer numbers of balls. From the case $m=4$ we obtain a proof of a conjecture of Warrington. Our result is consistent with a conjectural limiting law of the subnetwork as $n\to\infty$ implied by the great circle conjecture of Angel, Holroyd, Romik and Virag.


Courts often hold legislation unconstitutional, but nearly always only part of the statute offends. The problem of partial unconstitutionality is therefore pervasive and persistent. Yet the exclusive doctrinal tool for dealing with this problem—severability doctrine—is deeply flawed. To make matters worse, severability doctrine is purportedly necessary for any workable system of judicial review. The accepted view is that severance saves: A court faced with a partially unconstitutional law must sever and excise the unconstitutional provisions or applications so that the constitutional remainder can be enforced going forward. Absent severance and excision, a law must fall in its entirety. This excision-based understanding of judicial review is supposedly traceable to Marbury v. Madison. In fact, this attribution is anachronistic. Moreover, the prevailing view is wrong about the distinctive function of modern severability doctrine, which is not to save, but to destroy. This Article retrieves the original approach to partial unconstitutionality and develops a proposal for implementing a version of that approach. The proposal, displacement without inferred fallback law, is simultaneously ambitious and modest. It is ambitious because it proposes a shift in the general framework for judicial review in every case; it is modest because the proposed shift would change case outcomes in only a small set of highly consequential cases.


The semantics of natural language plurals poses a number of intricate problems – both from a formal and a computational perspective. In this thesis I investigate problems of representing, disambiguating and reasoning with plurals from a computational perspective. The work defines a computationally suitable representation for important plural constructions, proposes a tractable resolution algorithm for semantic plural ambiguities, and integrates an automatic reasoning component for plurals.

My solution combines insights from formal semantics, computational linguistics and automated theorem proving and is based on the following main ideas. Whereas many existing approaches to plural semantics work on a model-theoretic basis using higher-order representation languages I propose a proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics based on a flat first-order semantic representation language thus showing that a trade-off between expressive power and logical tractability can be found. The problem of automatic disambiguation of plurals is tackled by a deliberate decision to drastically reduce recourse to contextual knowledge for disambiguation but rely instead on structurally available and thus computationally manageable information. A further central aspect of the solution lies in carefully drawing the borderline between real ambiguity and mere indeterminacy in the interpretation of plural noun phrases. As a practical result of my computational proof-theoretic approach to plural semantics I can use my methods to perform automated reasoning with plurals by applying advanced first-order theorem provers and model-generators available off-the shelf.

The results are prototypically implemented within the two logic-oriented natural language understanding applications DRoPs and Attempto. DRoPs provides an automatic plural disambiguation component for uncontrolled natural language whereas Attempto works with a constructive disambiguation strategy for controlled natural language. Both systems provide tools for the automated analysis of technical texts allowing users for example to automatically detect inconsistencies, to perform question answering, to check whether a conjecture follows from a text or to find equivalences and redundancies.


NASA Earth science research utilizes both spaceborne and airborne real time observations in the planning and operations of its field campaigns. The coordination of air and space components is critical to achieve the goals and objectives and ensure the success of an experiment. Spaceborne imagery provides regular and continual coverage of the Earth and it is a significant component in all NASA field experiments. Real time visible and infrared geostationary images from GOES satellites and multi-spectral data from the many elements of the NASA suite of instruments aboard the TRMM, Terra, Aqua, Aura, and other NASA satellites have become norm. Similarly, the NASA Airborne Science Program draws upon a rich pool of instrumented aircraft. The NASA McDonnell Douglas DC-8, Lockheed P3 Orion, DeHavilland Twin Otter, King Air B200, Gulfstream-III are all staples of a NASA's well-stocked, versatile hangar. A key component in many field campaigns is coordinating the aircraft with satellite overpasses, other airplanes and the constantly evolving, dynamic weather conditions. Given the variables involved, developing a good flight plan that meets the objectives of the field experiment can be a challenging and time consuming task. Planning a research aircraft mission within the context of meeting the science objectives is complex task because it is much more than flying from point A to B. Flight plans typically consist of flying a series of transects or involve dynamic path changes when "chasing" a hurricane or forest fire. These aircraft flight plans are typically designed by the mission scientists then verified and implemented by the navigator or pilot. Flight planning can be an arduous task requiring frequent sanity checks by the flight crew. This requires real time situational awareness of the weather conditions that affect the aircraft track. Scientists at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center developed the Waypoint Planning Tool, an interactive software tool, that enables scientists to develop their own flight plans (also known as waypoints) with point-and-click mouse capabilities on a digital map draped with real time satellite imagery. The Waypoint Planning Tool has further advanced to include satellite orbit predictions and seamlessly interfaces with the Real Time Mission Monitor which tracks the aircraft s position when the planes are flying. This presentation will describe the capabilities and features of the Waypoint Planning Tool highlighting the real time aspect, interactive nature and the resultant benefits to the airborne science community.


When the nuclear-powered submarine USS "Triton" was commissioned in November 1959, its commanding officer, Captain Edward L. Beach, planned a routine shakedown cruise in the North Atlantic. Two weeks before the scheduled cruise, however, Beach was summoned to Washington and told of the immediate necessity to prove the reliability of the Rickover-conceived submarine. His new secret orders were to take the Triton around the world, entirely submerged the total distance.This is Beach's gripping firsthand account of what went on during the 36,000 nautical-mile voyage whose record for speed and endurance still stands today. It brings to life the many tense events in the historic journey: the malfunction of the essential fathometer that indicated the location of undersea mountains and shallow waters, the sudden agonizing illness of a senior petty officer, and the serious problems with the ship's main hydraulic oil system. Intensely dramatic, Beach's chronicle also describes the psychological stresses of the journey and some touching moments shared by the crew. A skillful story teller, he recounts the experience in such detail that readers feel they have been along for the ride of a lifetime.


Front:
Text describes action on various war fronts: Russia, Central Italy, Italy, Azores, Air offensive, Norway, Southwest Pacific, Wake.

Large world map shows United Nations, Axis and Axis occupied areas, countries with Axis relations broken, and neutral countries. Includes inset maps: Eastern Europe, Roads to Rome, the globe, Scene of combined operations in the southwest Pacific.

Photographs: Burma bombing campaign, Modern road to Rome, Wake Island, Tailgunner Sergt. Harris Goldberg of Brookline, Mass.

Back: Photographic view of the world with the center at Tokyo, Japan. Includes instructions for using a detachable scale that, when centered on Tokyo, measures distances along any line running through Tokyo.


"Moby-Dick" is perhaps the greatest of the Great American Novels, yet its length and esoteric subject matter create an aura of difficulty that too often keeps readers at bay. Fortunately, one unabashed fan wants passionately to give Melville's masterpiece the broad contemporary audience it deserves. In his National Book Award-winning bestseller, "In the Heart of the Sea", Nathaniel Philbrick captivatingly unpacked the story of the wreck of the whaleship Essex, the real-life incident that inspired Melville to write "Moby-Dick". Now, he sets his sights on the fiction itself, offering a cabin master's tour of a spellbinding novel rich with adventure and history. Philbrick skillfully navigates Melville's world and illuminates the book's humor and unforgettable characters-finding the thread that binds Ishmael and Ahab to our own time and, indeed, to all times. A perfect match between author and subject, "Why Read Moby-Dick?" gives us a renewed appreciation of both Melville and the proud seaman's town of Nantucket that Philbrick himself calls home. Like Alain de Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life", this remarkable little book will start conversations, inspire arguments, and, best of all, bring a new wave of readers to a classic tale waiting to be discovered anew.


Based upon the preliminary historical and jurisprudent sources, this paper tries to shed light on the scientific and cultural movement in Mecca during the 9 th century A.H./15 th century woman's AD. It also tries to highlight basic notes on the woman's role in general and her situation in Mecca's society during this period which has been described by modern historians as an age of collection, explanation and interpretation and not that of creativity or invention, as mental and political stagnation prevailed. The paper concentrates on the female scholar of jurisprudence in Mecca and sheds light on its scientific movement, as well as the role played by the woman, whether scholar or learner, in the field of Jurisprudence and Hadith "speech of the prophet". It highlights the female scholar of jurisprudence's learning sources as well as the learning and licensing method, whether from man to woman, from woman to woman or from woman to man. The research also refers to the jurisprudent doctrines which were dominant in Mecca during the study period, with an attempt to shed light on woman's journey to seek knowledge during this period. The paper makes use of the biographies of the female scholars of jurisprudence to explain the number of scholars who lived during the same period and mention biographies of Female scholars of jurisprudence in Mecca, as the researcher has mentioned two hundred and seventy women scholars, with a biography for each, including the most significant scientific achievements.


IN OUR ARTICLE WITH FREDERICK DE WORKEN-ELEY III IN THE April 2005 issue of this Journal, we documented the decline in critical commentary (i.e., comments, replies, rejoinders) that occurred between 1963 and 2004 in the top general interest journals in economics. Explaining the decline was not our focus, although we lamented the decline because it makes the journals less valuable as forums for discussion.


Learn the latest principles and certification objectives in The PMBOK® Guide, 4th edition , in a unique and inspiring way with Head First PMP . The second edition of this book helps you prepare for the PMP certification exam using a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works. You'll find a full-length sample exam included inside the book. More than just passing a test, a PMP certification means that you have the knowledge to solve most common project problems. But studying for a difficult four-hour exam on project management isn't easy, even for experienced project managers. Drawing on the latest research in neurobiology, cognitive science, and learning theory, Head First PMP offers you a multi-sensory experience that helps the material stick, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep. This book will help you: Learn PMP's underlying concepts to help you understand the PMBOK principles and pass the certification exam with flying colors Get 100% coverage of the latest principles and certification objectives in The PMBOK® Guide, 4th edition , including two new processes: Collect Requirements and Identify Stakeholders Make use of a thorough and effective preparation guide with hundreds of practice questions and exam strategies Explore the material through puzzles, games, problems, and exercises that make learning easy and entertaining Head First PMP puts project management principles into context to help you understand, remember, and apply them -- not just on the exam, but also on the job.


The panel will discuss tagging of documents in the context of social networks. This discussion will include to what extent and in what manner users, consciously or unconsciously, take into account their communities when assigning tags. Likewise, the panel will investigate to what extent the community influences tagging behavior, and if this influence helps or hinders search and retrieval or affects the context of the tags generated. The topic areas proposed for this conference panel are: Context of Social Network Metadata: Do users tag for the group(s) of people they associate with? Metadata use: Do small communities have a stable use of terminology? Search and retrieval: How do tags relate to metadata searches and contextual retrievals? Social Network Architecture: To what extent, if any, does community membership influence tagging behavior? Questions that will be discussed among panelists and with the audience will focus on the social network part of the difficulty of dealing with tags. Within a community, is it possible to decide whether to interpret a tag or just treat it as a primary key or keyword?


Recording of presentation given by Mark Engel and Christopher Hugo-Hamman with title 'Research think-tank: What is needed in CHD research in Africa', presented on Friday, 15 March 2019 as part of the Inaugural PROTEA (Partnerships for Children with Heart Disease in Africa) Workshop in Cape Town, South Africa.The 13th-16th March 2019 marked the Inaugural PROTEA (Partnerships for Children with Heart Disease in Africa) Workshop hosted by the Children's Heart Disease Research Unit under the directorship of A/Prof Liesl Zuhlke and in conjunction with the Paediatric Cardiology Service of the Western Cape. A first in Africa, this workshop combined four events: a research methods workshop, a basic echocardiography (echo) workshop, two days of advanced echo as well as a rheumatic heart disease research think-tank. 130 delegates from 19 different countries representing all six continents attended the event, making it truly global and giving attendees the opportunity to meet and network with experts in the fields of rheumatic and congenital heart disease.


Recently, several planners have been designed that can create conditionally branching plans to solve problems which involve uncertainty. These planners represent an important step in broadening the applicability of AI planning techniques, but they typically must search a larger space than non-branching planners, since they must produce valid plans for each branch considered. In the worst case this can produce an exponential increase in the complexity of planning. If conditional planners are to become usable in real-world domains, this complexity must be controlled by sharing planning effort among branches. Analogical plan reuse should playa fundamental role in this process. We have implemented a conditional probabilistic planner that uses analogical plan replay to derive the maximum benefit from previously solved branches of the plan. This approach provides valuable guidance for when and how to merge different branches of the plan and exploits the high similarity between the different branches in a conditional plan, which have the same goal and typically a very similar state. We present experimental data in which analogical plan replay significantly reduces the complexity of conditional planning. Analogical replay can be applied to a variety of conditional planners, complementing the plan sharing that they may perform naturally.


Certain devices aimed at magnetic confinement of thermonuclear plasma rely on the steady flow of an electric current in the plasma. In view of the dominant place it occupies in both the world magnetic-confinement fusion effort and the author's own activity, the tokamak toroidal configuration is selected as prototype for discussing the question of how such a current can be maintained. Tokamaks require a stationary toroidal plasma current, this being traditionally provided by a pulsed magnetic induction which drives the plasma ring as the secondary of a transformer. Since this mechanism is essentially transient, and steady-state fusion reactor operation has manifold advantages, significant effort is now devoted to developing alternate steady-state means of generating toroidal current. These methods are classed under the global heading of "noninductive current drive" or simply "current drive", generally, though not exclusively, employing the injection of waves and/or toroidally directed particle beams. In what follows we highlight the physical mechanisms underlying surprisingly various approaches to driving current in a tokamak, downplaying a number of practical and technical issues. When a significant data base exists for a given method, its experimental current drive efficiency and future prospects are detailed.


Accurate tectonic reconstructions provide an essential framework for evaluating and modelling long-term palaeoenvironmental data. Reconstructions of large parts of the Pacific Ocean for mid-Cenozoic and earlier times are particularly difficult to constrain because it is almost encircled by subduction zones. However, in the southernmost Pacific the conjugate passive margins offshore from New Zealand and Marie Byrd Land provide an opportunity to produce well-constrained reconstructions from the Late Cretaceous onwards. In addition to providing a framework for studying palaeoenvironmental evolution of the Southern Ocean, reconstructions of this region are also the key link in the global plate circuit tying plate motions in the Pacific Ocean basin to the rest of the world (Cande et al., 1995). Until recently, however, the scarcity of marine geophysical data from the remote area off Marie Byrd Land has placed a severe limitation on the reliability of such reconstructions. We present a new animated reconstruction showing South Pacific plate kinematics since 90 Ma (Eagles et al., 2004). In this reconstruction sections of the modern marine free-air gravity field are rotated with the tectonic plates. Reconstruction of gridded data limits the problem of subjective interpretation of features used in reconstructionsto identification of plate boundaries. Animation of reconstructions is a useful way of illustrating kinematic evolution, and of exposing inconsistencies in tectonic scenarios depicted by static reconstructions. The combination of these two techniques provides a powerful new tool for considering the spatial and temporal context of palaeoenvironmentaldata. Future work will include integration of this reconstruction with reconstructions of the Tasman and Drake Passage gateways that flank the studied region, and production of gridded palaeobathymetric reconstructions for use in palaeoclimate modelling.


There are many reasons for scholars to investigate empathy. Empathy plays a crucial role in human social interaction at all stages of life; it is thought to help motivate positive social behavior, inhibit aggression, and provide the affective and motivational bases for moral development; it is a necessary component of psychotherapy and patient-physician interactions. This volume covers a wide range of topics in empathy theory, research, and applications, helping to integrate perspectives as varied as anthropology and neuroscience. The contributors discuss the evolution of empathy within the mammalian brain and the development of empathy in infants and children; the relationships among empathy, social behavior, compassion, and altruism; the neural underpinnings of empathy; cognitive versus emotional empathy in clinical practice; and the cost of empathy. Taken together, the contributions significantly broaden the interdisciplinary scope of empathy studies, reporting on current knowledge of the evolutionary, social, developmental, cognitive, and neurobiological aspects of empathy and linking this capacity to human communication, including in clinical practice and medical education.


Objectives To evaluate the blood pressure-dependent and independent effects of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI) and angiotensin receptor blockers (ARB) on major cardiovascular events. Methods Using data from 26 large-scale trials comparing an ACEI or an ARB with placebo or another drug class, meta-regression analyses were conducted in which treatment-specific relative risks for major cause-specific outcomes [stroke, major coronary heart disease (CHD) events and heart failure] were regressed against follow-up blood pressure differences. Results From a total of 146 838 individuals with high blood pressure or an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, 22 666 major cardiovascular events were documented during follow-up. The analyses showed comparable blood pressure-dependent reductions in risk with ACEI and ARB (P ≥ 0.3 for all three outcomes). The analyses also showed that ACEI produced a blood pressure-independent reduction in the relative risk of CHD of approximately 9% (95% confidence interval 3–14%). No similar effect was detected for ARB, and there was some evidence of a difference between ACEI and ARB in this regard (P = 0.002). For both stroke and heart failure there was no evidence of any blood pressure-independent effects of either ACEI or ARB. Conclusion There are similar blood pressure-dependent effects of ACEI and ARB for the risks of stroke, CHD and heart failure. For ACEI, but not ARB, there is evidence of blood pressure-independent effects on the risk of major coronary disease events.


As a large lake of natural endowment, most of African countries still have small and poorly developed domestic markets and must rely on foreign markets for the sale of their excess production. This study examined the factors that influence agricultural exports with specific reference to Cocoa and rubber. Secondary data was used for this study. Ordinary Least Squares regression (OLS) was used in analyzing the relevant data. The OLS findings revealed that rubber export is influenced significantly (p < 0.05) by domestic rubber production (?= 68124.857), producer price (?= 10741.503), exchange rate (?= -17078.957), domestic consumption (?= -27094.147) and interest rate (?= 14991.565). For cocoa, the OLS shows that cocoa output (?=0.847), domestic consumption (?=-0.850) and rainfall (?=44.074) significantly (p <0.05) influence cocoa export. It is recommended that there should be value addition in respect of the cocoa being exported.


"What matters is not so much that Zizek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief."--John Milbank"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank."--Slavoj ZizekIn this corner, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "Radical Orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Zizek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event--God becoming human. For the first time since Zizek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Zizek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Zizek and Milbank.


The soundness of device drivers generally cannot be verified in isolation, but has to take into account the reactions of the hardware devices. In critical embedded systems, interfaces often were simple "volatile" variables, and the interface specification typically a list of bounds on these variables. Some newer systems use "intelligent" controllers that handle dynamic worklists in shared memory and perform direct memory accesses, all asynchronously from the main processor. Thus, it is impossible to truly verify the device driver without taking the intelligent device into account, because incorrect programming of the device can lead to dire consequences, such as memory zones being erased.
 We have successfully verified a device driver extracted from a critical industrial system, asynchronously combined with a model for a USB OHCI controller. This paper studies this case, as well as introduces a model and analysis techniques for this asynchronous composition.


There is growing international concern about the necessity to re-think the university so that it might remain relevant in a modern society. In the traditional task division at universities, knowledge is the main resource. Universities make use of both the cognitive and the informational approach. It was expected that universities use each approach to improve overall university performance. To effectively use the informational approach, universities should apply the tools from knowledge management. To effectively use the cognitive approach, universities must update their teaching-learning strategies to incorporate some of the recent advances in neuroscience and biology of knowledge, specifically from neurobiology and autopoiesis. With this frame, the main contribution of this work is the result of merging pedagogy and biology, towards an ideal future university. This goal was achieved through an exploratory study conducted to identify opportunities and difficulties in improving the teaching-learning process for the future of higher education in Honduras. The Delphi Study was used as a predictive method. Nineteen Honduran experts participated in this study, and two rounds were necessary to achieve consensus.
The multi-disciplinary approach of this research addresses three different fields whose core element is knowledge. First, input from the present field of higher education is used to speak about the future. Second, input is taken from the biology of knowledge, and its contributions from neurobiology and autopoiesis that allow modifying and completing the already existing learning theories with a biological basis. Third, input is taken from the knowledge process, which is traditionally used as an organizational tool and know is translated to the individual level. The exploration shows that experts are concerned about all the missions and responsibilities of universities, but they agree that changes should primarily take place in the teaching dimension. Even though they are not aware of the possible contributions of biology, they suggest new forms of teaching that more favor skills development, promotes values, pertinent knowledge, and personal development over short-term contents. The resulting BRAIN Model encompasses the ideal future of higher education regarding teaching and learning, according to experts' answers. It provides a useful guide that any reform in teaching should take into account for a holistic, integral, and therefore more efficient learning task.


This report deals with the issues, or rather, with the responses to the 2012 food crisis in the Sahel, from a gender perspective. The field research, which was conducted in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, builds on past work and reflects the statements made by local people. The report finds that household resilience is inconceivable without rural women. And further, households in which women have a greater stake in decision making regarding food are that much more resilient. With continued food insecurity, the perception of the role of women in Sahelian society is evolving, with the concept of an ideal woman as one who has a greater involvement in taking care of household needs. The image of the woman who expects her husband to provide for everything seems to be increasingly a thing of the past.


This article uses a calibrated general-equilibrium model of lending from the wealthy to the middle class to evaluate the effects of tightening household lending standards. The authors simulate a rise in down payment and amortization rates from their average values in the late 1990s and early 2000s to levels more typical of the era before the financial deregulation of the early 1980s. Their results show a drop in loan demand. This substantially lowers interest rates for an extended period. Counterintuitively, tightening lending standards makes borrowers better off.


The sustainable development of a software product depends on a number of groups working together to achieve a common goal. However, each of the groups interacts with the product in different ways, and can have conflicting aims and objectives. For example, developers trying to correct issues in the software architecture, which will impact future releases of the product, can be stopped by a project manager who is charged with delivering a release on time and within budget. While the functional requirements of a software product are usually documented, there are a number of other investments in software development that are not always as explicitly agreed upon but are still essential to a product's long-term success. The major investment types include software product quality -- a main control variable in software development, and intellectual capital (IC) -- being the key input and tool used in software development. As management requires measurement, it is necessary understand the priorities placed on investment options by the various groups involved in the development of a software product. The objective of this thesis is to develop a method capable of both determining the priorities of different groups, and the level of alignment between these groups in terms of their priorities. Evolving the method from a study into the values used to select requirements for a release of software, Ericsson supported the development of a methodology to determine and compare the priorities of different groups for software product quality, and IC. The method elicited the required information from a series of case studies to build up a picture of the priorities placed on major investment options and constraints -- features, quality, IC, time and cost. The results highlight strengths, and areas for improvement -- through the identification of differing priorities and ambiguities in management of different aspects studied. In conducting this research, systematic biases in the selection of requirements appear to be occurring, adding an objective to understand how bias impacts decision making in a requirements engineering context. This thesis provides a method that determines the priorities on the level of investment on different options in the development of software products. It is concluded that people involved in the development of software need to be aligned on issues of software product quality as these priorities set expectations. The same was not found true for issues of IC, where groups can complete tasks without negatively impacting others, as long as the organisation works effectively as a single entity. On the issue of biases in the prioritisation of these aspects, prospect theory is found to apply to requirements selection in an academic experiment -- suggesting people will prefer functionality over software product quality, and to meet the known requirements of customers over predicting general market requirements.


What happened in the Finnish society affected Finnish teacher training significantly. Teacher training was seen as the means and channel of influencing the whole nation. This study makes an interesting example of how macro level processes and procedures influence on a singular profession and how it was performed in practice. Simultaneously, it functions as an example of a national importance of professions. This study focused on teacher training during the war years in Finland and the change that took place in teacher training and consequently in teacher profession. This was a historical research aiming at drawing as a picture of the contemporary reality in the light of various data: archival sources and former student teachers' (N=9) interviews and memoirs who were student teachers of the teacher training college of Tornio during the Second World War. As results, a practical description of the change is described and discussed. What makes teachers' profession interesting, is that teachers were seen the professional educators of the whole nation, the future workforce, and by setting the example, they educated families, too. How the national purposes influenced teacher training and the contents of teachers' professionalism are discussed.


Balanced edge partition has emerged as a new approach to partition an input graph data for the purpose of scaling out parallel computations, which is of interest for several modern data analytics computation platforms, including platforms for iterative computations, machine learning problems, and graph databases. This new approach stands in a stark contrast to the traditional approach of balanced vertex partition, where for given number of partitions, the problem is to minimize the number of edges cut subject to balancing the vertex cardinality of partitions. In this paper, we first characterize the expected costs of vertex and edge partitions with and without aggregation of messages, for the commonly deployed policy of placing a vertex or an edge uniformly at random to one of the partitions. We then obtain the first approximation algorithms for the balanced edge-partition problem which for the case of no aggregation matches the best known approximation ratio for the balanced vertex-partition problem, and show that this remains to hold for the case with aggregation up to factor that is equal to the maximum in-degree of a vertex. We report results of an extensive empirical evaluation on a set of real-world graphs, which quantifies the benefits of edge- vs. vertex-partition, and demonstrates efficiency of natural greedy online assignments for the balanced edge-partition problem with and with no aggregation.


I demonstrate here how Aristotle's teleological conception of nature has been largely misunderstood in the scientific age and I consider what his view might offer us with regard to the environmental challenges we face in the 21st century. I suggest that in terms of coming to an ethical understanding of the creatures and things that constitute the ecosystem, Aristotle offers a welcome alternative to the rather instrumental conception of the natural world and low estimation of subjective experience our contemporary techno-scientific culture espouses. Among other things, I consider how his conception of orexis and eudaimonia (happiness or, as I prefer here, "the flourishing life") might be extended to include the eco-system itself, thus allowing us to better understand the moral meaning of nature. I conclude with a look at the way in which modern phenomenology re-addresses the fundamental Greek concern with ontology, meaning and human authenticity. I consider the ways in which phenomenology reasserts the value of direct human experience that was so important to Aristotle; and I consider how this view, and that of Deep ecology, may help us to experience nature - and all of Being for that matter - in a more authentic, meaningful and altogether ethical light.


The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (hereafter GASB or Board) was established in April 1984 as the authoritative accounting standard‐setting body for United States state and local governmental entities. There are over 87,000 state and local entities in the country, and for the most part these entities are required to comply with the generally accepted accounting principles established by the GASB; hence, the work of the GASB is significant. On 30 June 2009, the GASB completed its twenty‐fifth year of standard setting. Because of the Board's influence and the importance of its mission, an increased understanding of the GASB and its accomplishments during its first 25 years of existence is important. This is the first of two papers which together provide a complete sequential treatment of the GASB's operational history through the end of its first quarter century. This first paper begins with an historical perspective about municipal accounting issues from colonial times to 1934. The origin of professional self‐determining standards is the feature of the next section, identifying standard‐setting bodies that contributed to municipal accounting from 1934 to 1984. The early activities of the Board are then reviewed. Two appendices are provided to detail the composition of the Board during its first quarter century, along with biographical information about the early Board members and later Chair and Vice Chair personnel. This segment concludes with a review of the relationship of other governmental standard setting bodies at the federal level and the international level.


Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological "readiness potentials" (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about —550 ms. Such RPs were used to indicate the minimum onset times for the cerebral activity that precedes a fully endogenous voluntary act. The time of conscious intention to act was obtained from the subject's recall of the spatial clock position of a revolving spot at the time of his initial awareness of intending or wanting to move (W). W occurred at about -200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event. For spontaneous voluntary acts, RP onset preceded the uncorrected Ws by about 350 ms and the Ws corrected for S by about 400 ms. The direction of this difference was consistent and significant throughout, regardless of which of several measures of RP onset or W were used. It was concluded that cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act begins unconsciously. However, it was found that the final decision to act could still be consciously controlled during the 150 ms or so remaining after the specific conscious intention appears. Subjects can in fact "veto" motor performance during a 100-200-ms period before a prearranged time to act. The role of conscious will would be not to initiate a specific voluntary act but rather to select and control volitional outcome. It is proposed that conscious will can function in a permissive fashion, either to permit or to prevent the motor implementation of the intention to act that arises unconsciously. Alternatively, there may be the need for a conscious activation or triggering, without which the final motor output would not follow the unconscious cerebral initiating and preparatory processes.


Could a preemptive federal incorporation law today assume the enabling character of traditional state corporation law, instead of the mandatory flavor typical of much federal securities regulation? Does global competition mean that the US should both preempt state corporation law and adopt a flexible, principles-oriented approach to business regulation? This essay, commenting on Robert Ahdieh's Trapped in a Metaphor: The Limited Implications of Federalism for Corporate Governance, shows how this surprising approach is plausible and may be desirable but also that it is not politically likely in the current environment. The intellectual basis for a preemptive, enabling, and flexible federal corporation law appears in the Treasury Department's March 2008 blueprint for financial regulation reform. The blueprint would consolidate regulatory power in Washington over securities, futures, banking and insurance, then delegate that power to self-regulatory organizations. The logic extends readily to traditional corporation law. That means federal preemption plus delegation to stock exchanges, who take over the role that US law traditionally gives to states. US stock exchanges then compete with stock exchanges elsewhere, wielding a broad range of tools, including jurisdiction to resolve disputes, usually handled by states. The result would promote US competiveness in global capital markets. Intellectually, the domestic corporate law competition debate gets replayed as an international securities law debate which, of course, already is underway, highlighted by issuer choice proposals. Market forces dominate the form and content of resulting corporate law and governance. Political realities likely put these developments out into the future however. Instead, there is a good chance that federal preemption of state corporation law may soon come, covering corporations of systemic significance and imposing on them strict, mandatory corporation law rules, ranging from board composition, executive compensation, shareholder voting procedures, and interests of other constituencies.


The problem of online coloring an unknown graph is known to be hard. Here we consider the problem of online coloring in the relaxed situation where the input must be isomorphic to a given known graph. All that foils a computationally powerful player is that it is not known to which sections of the graph the vertices to be colored belong. We show that the performance ratio of any online coloring algorithm with advance knowledge of the input graph is at least $\Omega(N/\log^2 N)$, where $N$ is the number of vertices. This matches and generalizes the bound for the case of an unknown input graph. We also show that any online independent set algorithm has a performance ratio at least $N/8$.


USP # 6,506,148 (January 14, 2003) Nervous System Manipulation by EM Fields from Monitors Loos, Hendricus Abstract: Physiological effects have been observed in a human subject in response to stimulation of the skin with weak electromagnetic fields that are pulsed with certain frequencies near 1/2 Hz or 2.4 Hz, such as to excite a sensory resonance. Many computer monitors and TV tubes, when displaying pulsed images, emit pulsed electromagnetic fields of sufficient amplitudes to cause such excitation. It is therefore possible to manipulate the nervous system of a subject by pulsing images displayed on a nearby computer monitor or TV set. For the latter, the image pulsing may be imbedded in the program material, or it may be overlaid by modulating a video stream, either as an RF signal or as a video signal. The image displayed on a computer monitor may be pulsed effectively by a simple computer program. For certain monitors, pulsed electromagnetic fields capable of exciting sensory resonances in nearby subjects may be generated even as the displayed images are pulsed with subliminal intensity.


Cochrane Reviews have recently started including the quantity I 2 to help readers assess the consistency of the results of studies in meta-analyses. What does this new quantity mean, and why is assessment of heterogeneity so important to clinical practice?

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses can provide convincing and reliable evidence relevant to many aspects of medicine and health care.1 Their value is especially clear when the results of the studies they include show clinically important effects of similar magnitude. However, the conclusions are less clear when the included studies have differing results. In an attempt to establish whether studies are consistent, reports of meta-analyses commonly present a statistical test of heterogeneity. The test seeks to determine whether there are genuine differences underlying the results of the studies (heterogeneity), or whether the variation in findings is compatible with chance alone (homogeneity). However, the test is susceptible to the number of trials included in the meta-analysis. We have developed a new quantity, I 2, which we believe gives a better measure of the consistency between trials in a meta-analysis.

Assessment of the consistency of effects across studies is an essential part of meta-analysis. Unless we know how consistent the results of studies are, we cannot determine the generalisability of the findings of the meta-analysis. Indeed, several hierarchical systems for grading evidence state that the results of studies must be consistent or homogeneous to obtain the highest grading.2–4

Tests for heterogeneity are commonly used to decide on methods for combining studies and for concluding consistency or inconsistency of findings.5 6 But what does the test achieve in practice, and how should the resulting P values be interpreted?

A test for heterogeneity examines the null hypothesis that all studies are evaluating the same effect. The usual test statistic …


Although the relationship between students' perceptions of quality of teaching and student satisfaction may seem self-evident, the interaction between these concepts and related methods of assessment is rarely examined. The findings reveal that the perceived teaching quality categorization emerges as a concept with multiple facets centered on learning, enthusiasm, interaction and student engagement, communications, and practical relevance. The authors note significant links among students' satisfaction, their feeling reactions on various levels, and their evaluations of teaching and instructors under various assessment schemes.


"The Price of Politics "chronicles the inside story of how President Obama and the U.S. Congress tried, and failed, to restore the American economy and set it on a course to fiscal stability. It spans the three and a half tumultuous years beginning just before Obama's inauguration in early 2009 and lasting through the summer of 2012. Woodward pierces the secretive world of Washington policymaking once again, with a close-up story crafted from meeting notes, documents, working papers and interviews with key players, including President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. At the center of "The Price of Politics "is a high-stakes personal and political struggle between the president and the speaker. "The Price of Politics "takes the reader through the electric 44 days during the summer of 2011 with day-by-day, often hour-by-hour, accounts as the two attempt a "grand bargain" to cut entitlement spending and increase tax revenue. As they struggled through the most intense moments of the crisis, each contended with powerful conflicts in his own party. At the prospect of serious budget cuts, Obama told Woodward, "Our friends on the left would howl and act as if we had dismantled the New Deal." In the House, Boehner was looking over his shoulder, worrying that his second-in-command, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, was undermining him in concert with extreme conservative House members and others with ties to the anti-tax Tea Party. At the same time, Boehner described the president as "moaning and groaning and whining and demanding. Threatening. He was pretty desperate." "The Price of Politics "shows why the grand bargain was never reached, and how the president, the speaker and the Congress settled for stopgap measures that delayed any serious deficit reduction until 2013. With extensive documentation and firsthand accounts, Woodward reveals how the broken relationship between the White House and Capitol Hill drove the U.S. economy to the edge of the fiscal cliff, where it remains.


To study seismic performance of concrete-encased composite columns with T-shaped steel cross-section, twelve half-scale columns were tested under quasi-stastic cyclic loading. The result indicates that concrete-encased composite columns with Tshaped steel section possess good seismic performance. The failure modes include bending failure, shear-bond failure, shear compression failure and shear-composition failure. Unsymmetrical phenomenon of positive and negative hysteresis loop was shown evidently. Span ratio has a great influence on failure mode. The ductility performance decreases with increasing of axial compression level. As stirrup ratio increases, ductility and bearing capacity of columns are improved greatly, and energy dissipation capacity after yielding is enhanced. Cross tie can enhance ultimate bearing capacity, and lower strength attenuation and stiffness degradation on the later loading stage.


Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion in Shelby County v Holder, holding unconstitutional a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, purports to be a modest decision written with reluctance and humility. The Court struck the coverage formula in Section 4 of the VRA used to determine which states and local governments must submit any proposed voting changes for federal approval (or "preclearance") under Section 5. According to the majority, by failing to amend the VRA to update the coverage formula after the Court raised constitutional doubts about preclearance in the 2009 NAMUDNO case, Congress "leaves us today with no choice." "Striking an Act of Congress 'is the gravest and most delicate duty that this Court is called on to perform.'" The majority held that the coverage formula renewed by Congress without change in 2006 failed to take into account "current conditions" of discrimination in covered jurisdictions and failed to treat states with the "equal sovereignty" they deserved under the Tenth Amendment. Rather than strike down section 5, as Justice Thomas would have done, the Court "issue[d] no holding on § 5 itself, only on the coverage formula. Congress may draft another formula based on current conditions." The short opinion for the five most conservative Justices on the Court - only two-thirds the size of Justice Ginsburg's dissent for the four most liberal Justices - casts itself as adhering to precedent, reaching a result compelled by stare decisis and inevitably flowing from NAMUDNO. The majority ostensibly stands ready for Congress's next step. Despite the projected judicial modesty, the Shelby County Court was doing much more than calling balls and strikes and applying settled precedent to uncontested facts. Shelby County is an audacious opinion which ignores history, declines to engage the dissent's powerful argument that the VRA's bailout provisions solve any constitutional problem, and rejects the Roberts Court's stated commitment to judicial minimalism in its treatment of facial challenges and severability. It pretends it is not overturning section 5 yet it sets a standard under which any new coverage formula will likely fail a constitutional test. The opinion disregards the pervasive polarization in the current Congress which dooms agreement on a new coverage formula and it seems to reject any replacement coverage formula. But the opinion is minimalist in a difference important sense as well: its brevity seeks to mask major doctrinal and jurisprudential change. By writing a very short opinion and avoiding a discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment's history and how the Court silently resolved a dispute over the applicable standard of review, the Court tried to hide the major jurisprudential hurdles it jumped to reach a political decision. The opinion, relying on a new and unjustified "equal sovereignty" principle, demeans the strength of Congress's power to eradicate racial discrimination in voting, sidestepping a key standard of review question raised but not resolved in NAMUDNO regarding how much deference the Court owes Congress acting under its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement powers. The opinion's brevity is an insult, not an act of modesty. As Justice Ginsburg remarked in dissent, "Hubris is a fit word for today's demolition of the VRA." Yet the dissenters offer their own incomplete history of the VRA's renewal, failing to grapple with the more complex record of the congressional reenactment. To hear the dissenters' story, Congress in 2006 was nearly universally behind the 25-year renewal of section 5 using the old coverage formula, and Congress would have had no idea that the continuing use of the same coverage formula could have doomed its constitutionality. In fact, it was a less happy story. Congress willfully ignored the problems with the coverage formula which legal scholars brought to Congress's attention, and which were amply covered by a Senate report written by Republican committee staffers who were deeply skeptical of the Act's continuing constitutionality. While the Shelby County majority minimized the audaciousness of its own holding, the dissenters minimized the difficult constitutional questions before Congress and before the Court. Part I briefly describes the background of the Shelby County case, and in particular the questions left open in NAMUDNO. Part II analyzes the majority opinion, and explains the opinion as an act of false minimalism. Part III analyzes the dissenting opinion, and explains the dissent as one willfully silent about difficult constitutional questions. In the end, the dissenters had the better argument about the Act's constitutionality, but the dissent would have been stronger had it described and grappled more forthrightly with the struggles over the VRA's renewal and the dangers of political avoidance. Shelby County is important not just for the loss of preclearance, but the diminution of congressional power over voting rights in the future.


What is the purpose of the international law on armed conflict, and why would opponents bent on destroying each other's capabilities commit to and obey rules designed to limit their choice of targets, weapons and tactics? Traditionally, answers to this question have been offered on the one hand by moralists who regard the law as being inspired by morality, and on the other by realists who explain this branch of law on the basis of reciprocity. Neither side's answers withstand close scrutiny. In this Article we develop an alternative explanation which is based on the principal-agent model of domestic governance. We pry open the black box of "the state," and examine the complex interaction between the civilian and military apparatuses seething beneath the veil of sovereignty. Our point of departure is that military conflicts raise significant intra-state conflicts of interest that result from the delegation of authority to engage in combat: between civil society and elected officials, between elected officials and military commanders, and within the military chain of command. We submit that the most effective way to reduce domestic agency costs prevalent in war is by relying on external resources to monitor and discipline the agents. Even though it may be costly, and reciprocity is not assured, principals who worry that agency slack may harm them or their nations' interests are likely to prefer that warfare be regulated by international norms. The Article expounds the theory and uses it to explain the evolution of the law and its specific doctrines, and outlines the normative implications of this new understanding of the purpose of the law. Ultimately, our analysis suggests that, as a practical matter, international law enhances the ability of states to amass huge armies, because it lowers the costs of controlling them. Therefore, although at times compliance with the law may prove costly in the short run, in the long run it strengthens the state against its enemies.


Building on previous research concerning the archaeological narratives of Greek history textbooks, this study investigates the impact of these studies on schoolchildren's historical ideas. In the context of these narratives, the article addresses two significant landmarks of Greek antiquity, namely the Mycenaean civilization and the Acropolis of Athens. It is a small scale sample survey that draws its data from a set of 120 twelve-year-old individuals who were asked to complete the survey at the beginning and end of the first year of secondary school. The results relativize the implicit or explicit assumption that history textbooks have a decisive influence on or even shape students' historical ideas and interpretations. Rather, history textbooks primarily facilitate the acquisition of specific information.


The Massachusetts Limited Liability Company Act (LLC Act) and Registered Limited Liability Partnership Act (LLP Act) link Massachusetts to a national movement proliferating new unincorporated business entities with corporate-styled liability shields. Limited liability companies (LLCs) and limited liability partnerships (LLPs) offer business owners a unique combination of business entity features not available in any other business entity - a corporate-styled liability shield and partnership tax status in which profits are passed through the entity and taxed directly to the business owners. The availability of these new business organizations in Massachusetts generates several new and important issues. For example, most existing corporations will not convert from their corporate form to one of these new forms because of the tax cost associated with liquidating a corporation. These new forms are not practical for businesses with publicly-traded ownership interests. Because more states have adopted LLCs than LLPs and limited liability limited partnerships (LLLPs), firms with interstate business activity may prefer the LLC form. Each new business form generates a host of drafting considerations unique to that particular business form. LLCs, LLPs, and LLLPs with at least two owners may be formed by filing a simple LLC certificate or LLP registration with the state secretary. Although simple to create, these new business forms are taxed like partnerships because they resemble partnerships rather than corporations. However, just as a partnership should never be formed without a written partnership agreement setting forth the terms of the business arrangement among the partners, these new business organizations should not be created without a similar agreement.


Why should states matter and how do relations between fellow-citizens affect what is owed to distant strangers? How, if at all, can demanding egalitarian principles inform political action in the real world? This book proposes a novel solution through the concept of avant-garde political agency. Ypi grounds egalitarian principles on claims arising from conflicts over the distribution of global positional goods, and illustrates the role of avant-garde agents in shaping these conflicts and promoting democratic political transformations in response to them. Against statists, she defends the global scope of equality, and derives remedial cosmopolitan principles from global responsibilities to relieve absolute deprivation. Against cosmopolitans, she shows that associative political relations play an essential role and that blanket condemnation of the state is unnecessary and ill-directed. Advocating an approach to global justice whereby domestic avant-garde agents intervene politically so as to constrain and motivate fellow-citizens to support cosmopolitan transformations, this book offers a fresh and nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the contemporary debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account illustrates how principles and agency can genuinely interact.


Two studies were conducted to investigate if demand characteristics could explain the relation between increased guilty verdicts and negative pretrial publicity. The purpose of study 1 is to show that when we keep demand characteristics constant between levels of pretrial publicity, but vary the degree of pretrial publicity, guilt judgments differ between the control and negative pretrial publicity groups, but the two levels of negative pretrial publicity do not differ. A total of 172 university undergraduates participated in this study and were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Participants read a mock trial transcript, along with mock newspaper articles, and rendered verdicts, beliefs about study intent and completed Gudjonsson's Compliance Scale. The results indicated, contrary to what was hypothesized, guilt judgments did not vary according to a demand characteristics model. That is, the two NPTP groups did not differ significantly from the control group on guilt judgments.
The purpose of study 2 was to show that if we keep negative pretrial publicity constant but vary the demand characteristics, guilt judgments will vary across conditions. A total of 192 university undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (control, NPTP, DC Guilty, DC not guilty). Participants read the identical trial transcript as study 1, as well as the weak NPTP condition mock newspaper articles in study 1 (for all conditions but control). In addition, participants completed Gudjonsson's measure of compliance and rendered verdicts along with study intent ratings. The results again revealed findings inconsistent with a demand characteristics model. Here, none of the four groups differed significantly from one another


One crucial assumption of continuous financial mathematics is that the portfolio can be rebalanced continuously and that there are no transaction costs. In reality, this of course does not work. On the one hand, continuous rebalancing is impossible, on the other hand, each transaction causes costs which have to be subtracted from the wealth. Therefore, we focus on trading strategies which are based on discrete rebalancing - in random or equidistant times - and where transaction costs are considered. These strategies are considered for various utility functions and are compared with the optimal ones of continuous trading.


Gauge invariance was discovered in the development of classical electromagnetism and was required when the latter was formulated in terms of the scalar and vector potentials. It is now considered to be a fundamental principle of nature, stating that different forms of these potentials yield the same physical description: they describe the same electromagnetic field as long as they are related to each other by gauge transformations. Gauge invariance can also be included into the quantum description of matter interacting with an electromagnetic field by assuming that the wavefunction transforms under a given local unitary transformation. The result of this procedure is a quantum theory describing the coupling of electrons, nuclei and photons. Therefore, it is a very important concept: it is used in almost every field of physics and it has been generalized to describe electroweak and strong interactions in the standard model of particles. A review of quantum mechanical gauge invariance and general unitary transformations is presented for atoms and molecules in interaction with intense short laser pulses, spanning the perturbative to highly nonlinear non-perturbative interaction regimes. Various unitary transformations for a single spinless particle time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) are shown to correspond to different time-dependent Hamiltonians and wavefunctions. Accuracy of approximation methods involved in solutions of TDSEs such as perturbation theory and popular numerical methods depend on gauge or representation choices which can be more convenient due to faster convergence criteria. We focus on three main representations: length and velocity gauges, in addition to the acceleration form which is not a gauge, to describe perturbative and non-perturbative radiative interactions. Numerical schemes for solving TDSEs in different representations are also discussed. A final brief discussion of these issues for the relativistic time-dependent Dirac equation for future super-intense laser field problems is presented.


"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.


Abstract. Much uncertainty in the value of the imaginary part of the refractive index of mineral dust contributes to uncertainty in the radiative effect of mineral dust in the atmosphere. A synthesis of optical, chemical and physical in-situ aircraft measurements from the DODO experiments during February and August 2006 are used to calculate the refractive index mineral dust encountered over West Africa. Radiative transfer modeling and measurements of broadband shortwave irradiance at a range of altitudes are used to test and validate these calculations for a specific dust event on 23 August 2006 over Mauritania. Two techniques are used to determine the refractive index: firstly a method combining measurements of scattering, absorption, size distributions and Mie code simulations, and secondly a method using composition measured on filter samples to apportion the content of internally mixed quartz, calcite and iron oxide-clay aggregates, where the iron oxide is represented by either hematite or goethite and clay by either illite or kaolinite. The imaginary part of the refractive index at 550 nm (ni550) is found to range between 0.0001 i to 0.0046 i, and where filter samples are available, agreement between methods is found depending on mineral combination assumed. The refractive indices are also found to agree well with AERONET data where comparisons are possible. ni550 is found to vary with dust source, which is investigated with the NAME model for each case. The relationship between both size distribution and ni550 on the accumulation mode single scattering albedo at 550 nm (ω0550) are examined and size distribution is found to have no correlation to ω0550, while ni550 shows a strong linear relationship with ω0550. Radiative transfer modeling was performed with different models (Mie-derived refractive indices, but also filter sampling composition assuming both internal and external mixing). Our calculations indicate that Mie-derived values of ni550 and the externally mixed dust where the iron oxide-clay aggregate corresponds to the goethite-kaolinite combination result in the best agreement with irradiance measurements. The radiative effect of the dust is found to be very sensitive to the mineral combination (and hence refractive index) assumed, and to whether the dust is assumed to be internally or externally mixed.


We present a method for estimating monthly burned area globally at 1 spatial resolution using Terra MODIS data and ancillary vegetation cover information. Us- ing regression trees constructed for 14 different global re- gions, MODIS active fire observations were calibrated to burned area estimates derived from 500-m MODIS imagery based on the assumption that burned area is proportional to counts of fire pixels. Unlike earlier methods, we al- low the constant of proportionality to vary as a function of tree and herbaceous vegetation cover, and the mean size of monthly cumulative fire-pixel clusters. In areas undergoing active deforestation, we implemented a subsequent correc- tion based on tree cover information and a simple measure of fire persistence. Regions showing good agreement be- tween predicted and observed burned area included Boreal Asia, Central Asia, Europe, and Temperate North Amer- ica, where the estimates produced by the regression trees were relatively accurate and precise. Poorest agreement was found for southern-hemisphere South America, where pre- dicted values of burned area are both inaccurate and im- precise; this is most likely a consequence of multiple fac- tors that include extremely persistent cloud cover, and lower quality of the 500-m burned area maps used for calibration. Application of our approach to the nine remaining regions yielded comparatively accurate, but less precise, estimates of monthly burned area. We applied the regional regres- sion trees to the entire archive of Terra MODIS fire data to produce a monthly global burned area data set spanning late 2000 through mid-2005. Annual totals derived from this approach showed good agreement with independent annual estimates available for nine Canadian provinces, the United States, and Russia. With our data set we estimate the global


Cliff Jolly developed a causal model of human origins in his paper "The Seed‐Eaters," published in 1970. He was one of the first to attempt this, and the paper has since become a classic. I do not have such grand goals; instead, I seek to understand a major difference between the living great apes and humans. More than 50 years ago, Maynard Smith and Savage (1956) showed that the musculoskeletal systems of mammals can be adapted for strength at one extreme and speed at the other but not both. Great apes are adapted for strength—chimpanzees have been shown to be about four times as strong as fit young humans when normalized for body size. The corresponding speed that human limb systems gain at the expense of power is critical for effective human activities such as running, throwing, and manipulation, including tool making. The fossil record can shed light on when the change from power to speed occurred. I outline a hypothesis that suggests that the difference in muscular performance between the two species is caused by chimpanzees having many fewer small motor units than humans, which leads them, in turn, to contract more muscle fibers earlier in any particular task. I outline a histological test of this hypothesis.


A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem.


SYNOPSIS Following the peaceful Rose Revolution in November 2003, Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili and State Minister for Reform Coordination Kakha Bendukidze sought to overhaul the country's Soviet-style bureaucracy, which had become the target of public anger. Borrowing ideas from libertarian, free-market think tanks and the New Public Management model, Bendukidze recruited a staff, eliminated redundant functions in the executive arm of government, consolidated ministries and slashed the size of the civil service. Bendukidze's vision of limited government complemented Saakashvili's goal of eliminating corruption by reducing opportunities for bribe taking. Although Bendukidze was instrumental in developing many of the reform policies, his office left the implementation of reforms to individual ministries. This case chronicles the steps that the Georgian government took to reorganize and consolidate its operations, capitalizing on public support in order to make rapid and bold changes.


"The piccolo is an auxiliary member of the flute family. A diversity of opinion exists among college flute teachers as to the importance and method of piccolo study as part of a flute curriculum. This author conducted a study to outline some current pedagogical trends among college flute teachers. This document presents information gathered via electronic survey from college flute instructors at schools accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music. The survey questions pertained to background information of respondents, studio size, studio requirements, instruments and pedagogical material, and pedagogy. Sixty-five teachers responded to the survey, and the results are published in this document. "--Abstract from author supplied metadata.