Cognitive Radio (CR) has been proposed as a promising and effective technology to improve radio spectrum utilization. It can change its transmitter parameters depending on the environment in which it operate based on interaction. In CR, a number of different methods of spectrum sensing are used to identify the presence of signal transmission. Among them, the multitaper method (MTM), has been investigated in this thesis paper at the same time with other sensing methods, recently seems to be the best choice for spectrum sensing CR because of its accurate identification and estimation, quick computation, and regularization. This thesis paper is examining how CR can be utilized in short range systems based on Ultra-Wideband (UWB). UWB is a promising technology in wireless communication use for high speed data transmission with low power utilization or long distance localization in both military, radar, sensor, data collection, tracking or commercial application. UWB has the ability to move between very low data rate or very high data rate, short range distance or long range distance applications. Impulse radio UWB (IR-UWB) shows some impressive characteristics in short-range communication systems with varieties of throughput option including high data rates. The strong synergy between the aims of CR and features of IR-UWB has been shown in this thesis. Our key objective is to understand how CR can be applied to UWB systems.


Perhaps, the 1990's will be the decade of constitution writing. With many European States gaining their independence or reshaping their contours, new constitutions will be drawn up. Recent advances in the economic analysis of law can help to make this difficult task more feasible. This essay starts by giving an introduction into the economic analysis of constitutional law. Part I contains an analysis of constitutional guarantees of basic (individual) rights and procedures, illustrated with three constitutions, the American constitution of 1789 as amended in 1792, the German Basic Law of 1949 and the Dutch Basic Law of 1983. Although constitutions are meant to be permanent, they continuously change without amendment. Part II offers an analysis of constitutional change without amendment. Whoever wants to draft a constitution needs to know how the basic guarantees work, how procedural rules interconnect basic guarantees and decision takers, and what chances there are that the meaning of a constitutional provision can be turned upside down. Economic analysis of constitutions speaks to these three problems.


Aerosol vertical profiles are valuable inputs for the evaluation of aerosol transport models, in order to improve the understanding of aerosol pollution ventilation processes which drive the dispersion of pollutants in mountainous regions. With the aim of providing high-accuracy vertical distributions of particle mass concentration for the study of aerosol dispersion in small-scale valleys, vertical profiles of aerosol mass concentration for aerosols from different sources (including Saharan dust and local biomass burning events) were investigated over the Vipava valley, Slovenia, a representative hot-spot for complex mixtures of different aerosol types of both anthropogenic and natural origin. The analysis was based on datasets taken between 1–30 April 2016. In-situ measurements of aerosol size, absorption, and mass concentration were combined with lidar remote sensing, where vertical profiles of aerosol concentration were retrieved. Aerosol samples were characterized by SEM-EDX, to obtain aerosol morphology and chemical composition. Two cases with expected dominant presence of different specific aerosol types (mineral dust and biomass-burning aerosols) show significantly different aerosol properties and distributions within the valley. In the mineral dust case, we observed a decrease of the elevated aerosol layer height and subsequent spreading of mineral dust within the valley, while in the biomass-burning case we observed the lifting of aerosols above the planetary boundary layer (PBL). All uncertainties of size and assumed optical properties, combined, amount to the total uncertainty of aerosol mass concentrations below 30% within the valley. We have also identified the most indicative in-situ parameters for identification of aerosol type.


This paper investigates the determinants of the pattern of Islamic bank diffusion around the world using country-level data for 1992 - 2006. The analysis illustrates that income per capita, share of Muslims in the population and status as an oil producer are linked to the development of Islamic banking, as are economic integration with Middle Eastern countries and proximity to Islamic financial centers. Interest rates have a negative impact on Islamic banking, reflecting the implicit benchmark for Islamic banks. The quality of institutions does not matter, probably because the often higher hurdle set by Shariah law trumps the quality of local institutions in most countries. The 9/11 attacks were not important to the diffusion of Islamic banking; but they coincided with rising oil prices, which are a significant factor in the diffusion of Islamic banking. Islamic banks also appear to be complements to, rather than substitutes for, conventional banks.


A protein that was thought to simply turn genes on and off now looks to be more like a cellular "dimmer switch," researchers from Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, report in the July 1, 2005, issue of the journal Science. The scientists showed for the first time that when certain parts of a protein molecule are modified - flexible, randomly structured regions believed to be only minor players in the protein world - they become important in turning genes on and off, but in a way that resembles a dimmer switch rather than an on-off switch. Genes carry the code that produces proteins to carry out almost all functions in a living organism. But some of these proteins also help control when and where genes do their jobs. The new study deals with how one such protein, named Ets-1, turns genes on or off. Huntsman Cancer Institute scientists, led by Barbara Graves, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Oncological Sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine, and doctoral student Miles Pufall, studied Ets-1, a protein known as a transcription factor that helps read genetic information. This factor serves as a cell's librarian, helping find the right genetic instructions. How much information the librarian provides, and how accurate that information is, must be tightly controlled. Without the right information, cells can't behave properly, and may, as in the case of cancer, grow out of control. The connection between factors such as Ets-1 and a number of cancers prompted the study of how it works. One way proteins are controlled occurs after a cell creates a protein. Graves illustrates this process by comparing protein structure with beads on a string. "After the protein is made, it can acquire what we call post-translational modifications, which are like decorations on a beaded necklace. In this analogy, one person creates a necklace using similar beads and then a committee comes along and decorates it, putting a gold star here and a diamond there. These modifications give the protein different properties." The "decorations" that were studied were phosphate molecules, which previously had been shown to build up on proteins until a certain number accumulated. The result, according to the study, has been described in the past as a sharp on-off switch of protein activity. "What we found was that each time we added a phosphate to a particular unstructured region of Ets-1, there was an effect on the protein's ability to bind to a gene. Binding was weakened, but it was a gradual weakening. That isn't typical," Graves says. "Instead of acting like an on-off switch, it behaved the way a dimmer switch does to regulate lighting in a gradual manner." In studying how this fine-tuning worked, they also discovered that conventional wisdom failed to fully describe how proteins function. It was known that proteins have regions with parts that are fixed in space, with a definite structure, and parts that are randomly positioned in space, like spaghetti strands. It was thought that the structured regions did most of the work, while the unstructured regions served only minor roles, such as tethering parts together. "Scientists understand how a molecule works in part because we understand the shape or structure," Graves explains. "But what we discovered takes us beyond knowing the structure. Our data were about features that are not fixed in space, but that are flexible and changing." The team used a nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, which allows scientists to observe how the atoms of a molecule behave inside a magnetic field. The Graves team found that unstructured regions of the Ets-1 protein were affecting the structured regions in the work of controlling genes. "In fact," Graves reports, "the region's unstructured nature appears to be an essential requirement." NMR showed that phosphate addition to this unstructured region caused a gradual decline in DNA binding, gradually turning a gene off. "One thing we didn't get was why Ets-1 worked differently before and after phosphorylation [the addition of phosphate]," says Pufall, "because as far as we could tell, the overall shape of the molecule didn't change." "A protein molecule is not like a rock. It's more like Jell-O: it has structure, it has shape, but it jiggles," explains Graves. "We didn't discover jiggling, but we were able to determine that the amount of internal motion within a protein corresponds to the ability of a protein to do its work." Phosphorylation was found to decrease the internal motion of Ets-1, reducing its activity. According to Pufall, "Ets-1 provides a remarkable illustration of how elegantly proteins are put together - forming a distinct shape, but with the versatility to respond to the changing needs of the cell, however subtle." The findings have long-term implications for the study of all proteins, because, according to Graves, any protein has the potential to be organized this way, with structured and unstructured regions that work together. Graves and Pufall conducted the study with doctoral student Mary L. Nelson, also of the Huntsman Cancer Institute; Gregory M. Lee, Hyun-Seo Kang and Lawrence P. McIntosh at the University of British Columbia; and Algirdas Velyvis and Lewis E. Kay at the University of Toronto. The National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Energy and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation funded the study. Huntsman Cancer InstituteDepartment of Communication and Public Affairs2000 Circle of Hope, Room 5160, Salt Lake City, UT 84112http://www.hci.utah.edu/aboutHCI/media/intro.jsp


This article examines the life and work of South African journalist Nat Nakasa (1937-1965), a writer for the popular news magazine Drum, the first black columnist for the Johannesburg newspaper the Rand Daily Mail, and the founding editor of the African literary journal The Classic. He has long lurked on the fringes of South African historiography, never playing more than a bit part in studies of early apartheid-era journalism, literature and intellectual culture. Indeed, the specifics of his life have been overshadowed in both popular memory and academic study by the potent symbolism of his death, frequently evoked as a marker of the destruction wrought on black intellectuals by National Party rule. Nakasa committed suicide in exile in the United States at the age of only 28. Drawing on interviews, newspapers and magazines, memoirs, government surveillance documents, and personal papers, this article aims to fill in but also to complicate this legacy. In a broader sense, it also seeks to show how biographical narrative can be employed to cut across time periods, movements, perspectives, and geography, providing an important reminder that every history is peopled by the sprawled and frequently contradictory lives of individuals.


A numerical model of the ocean circulation coupled with a sediment transport model is proposed to reconstruct the currents evolution in the south of South Africa. This area is an important gateway for the interocean exchange of water masses from the Atlantic, Indian and Southern Oceans. Three major water masses involved are: the warm and saline water of the Agulhas Current at the surface, the cold and saline North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) in larger depth and the cold Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) near the bottom. The development of the oceanic currents can be inferred from the record of sediment drifts, because the current system drives the sedimentary system of erosion transport and deposition in oceanic basin. Hence the characteristics of sediment drifts provide the information of the regional paleocirulation patterns. Seismic reflection and refraction data in the region of the Agulhas Drift in the southwest Indian Ocean were measured during the RV SONNE cruise SO-182. It is concluded that the Agulhas Drift formed in mid-Miocene. Based on the Agulhas Drift, we plan to develop a model to simulate the evolution of current system and sediment transport since mid-Miocene times in the selected period in this region. The model will be validated and improved by comparing the results computed from the model with the geological and oceanographic features indicated from the measurements. Within the wide range of numerical models available, the Regional Oceanic Modelling System (ROMS) is selected, because it is an advanced open-source model with high resolution, and the sediment transport algorithms have been incorporated.


The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.


Long-standing disagreements over the meaning of property as a matter of legal theory present a special problem in constitutional la. The Due Process and Takings Clauses set forth individual rights that can only be asserted if "property" is at stake. Yet the leading cases interpreting constitutional property doctrines have never managed to articulate a coherent general view of property and in some instances reach opposite conclusions about its meaning. Most notably, government benefits are considered "property" for purposes of due process but not takings doctrines, a conflict the cases acknowledge but do not attempt to explain. This Article offers a way to bring order to the confused treatment of property in constitutional law. It shows how a single definition of property can be adopted for all of the major constitutional property doctrines without the calamitous results that many seem to fear. It begins by arguing that property is best understood as the right to have some measure of legal control over the way a particular item is used, control that comes at the expense of all other people. It then argues that legal rights are a kind of private property and that, while courts and commentators are correct that legal entitlements to government benefits — so-called "new property" — should receive constitutional protection, they mistakenly believe the property at issue is the good that a recipient has a right to receive, rather than the legal right to receive it. The Article proceeds to show that legal rights are the only kind of things whose existence government can altogether extinguish and therefore that ownership of legal rights is the only kind of property right government can terminate without conferring equivalent property rights on others. The Article further argues that while due process protection should be read to apply whenever a person is denied an asserted property right (a deprivation), takings protection should only come into play when property rights are transferred from one party to another (a taking). Combining these observations, the Article concludes that termination not only of "new property" rights but also of old-fashioned in personam legal rights should trigger due process but not takings protection. This analysis provides theoretical coherence to constitutional doctrine that has thus far been lacking and it sheds light on the essential characteristics of property rights as a general matter, helping theoreticians understand more clearly the core structures of property law.


With the emergence of the Internet and of the World Wide Web, the Web site has become a key communication channel in organizations. To satisfy the objectives of the Web site and of its target audience, adapting the Web site content to the users' expectations has become a major concern. In this context, Web usage mining, a relatively new research area, and Web analytics, a part of Web usage mining that has most emerged in the corporate world, offer many Web communication analysis techniques. These techniques include prediction of the user's behaviour within the site, comparison between expected and actual Web site usage, adjustment of the Web site with respect to the users' interests, and mining and analyzing Web usage data to discover interesting metrics and usage patterns. However, Web usage mining and Web analytics suffer from significant drawbacks when it comes to support the decision-making process at the higher levels in the organization.Indeed, according to organizations theory, the higher levels in the organizations need summarized and conceptual information to take fast, high-level, and effective decisions. For Web sites, these levels include the organization managers and the Web site chief editors. At these levels, the results produced by Web analytics tools are mostly useless. Indeed, most of these results target Web designers and Web developers. Summary reports like the number of visitors and the number of page views can be of some interest to the organization manager but these results are poor. Finally, page-group and directory hits give the Web site chief editor conceptual results, but these are limited by several problems like page synonymy (several pages contain the same topic), page polysemy (a page contains several topics), page temporality, and page volatility.Web usage mining research projects on their part have mostly left aside Web analytics and its limitations and have focused on other research paths. Examples of these paths are usage pattern analysis, personalization, system improvement, site structure modification, marketing business intelligence, and usage characterization. A potential contribution to Web analytics can be found in research about reverse clustering analysis, a technique based on self-organizing feature maps. This technique integrates Web usage mining and Web content mining in order to rank the Web site pages according to an original popularity score. However, the algorithm is not scalable and does not answer the page-polysemy, page-synonymy, page-temporality, and page-volatility problems. As a consequence, these approaches fail at delivering summarized and conceptual results. An interesting attempt to obtain such results has been the Information Scent algorithm, which produces a list of term vectors representing the visitors' needs. These vectors provide a semantic representation of the visitors' needs and can be easily interpreted. Unfortunately, the results suffer from term polysemy and term synonymy, are visit-centric rather than site-centric, and are not scalable to produce. Finally, according to a recent survey, no Web usage mining research project has proposed a satisfying solution to provide site-wide summarized and conceptual audience metrics. In this dissertation, we present our solution to answer the need for summarized and conceptual audience metrics in Web analytics. We first described several methods for mining the Web pages output by Web servers. These methods include content journaling, script parsing, server monitoring, network monitoring, and client-side mining. These techniques can be used alone or in combination to mine the Web pages output by any Web site. Then, the occurrences of taxonomy terms in these pages can be aggregated to provide concept-based audience metrics. To evaluate the results, we implement a prototype and run a number of test cases with real Web sites. According to the first experiments with our prototype and SQL Server OLAP Analysis Service, concept-based metrics prove extremely summarized and much more intuitive than page-based metrics. As a consequence, concept-based metrics can be exploited at higher levels in the organization. For example, organization managers can redefine the organization strategy according to the visitors' interests. Concept-based metrics also give an intuitive view of the messages delivered through the Web site and allow to adapt the Web site communication to the organization objectives. The Web site chief editor on his part can interpret the metrics to redefine the publishing orders and redefine the sub-editors' writing tasks. As decisions at higher levels in the organization should be more effective, concept-based metrics should significantly contribute to Web usage mining and Web analytics.


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The existing network of over 2,500 bilateral double tax treaties (DTTs) represents an important part of international law. The current DTTs are all based on two models, the OECD and UN model DTTs, which in turn are based on models developed by the League of Nations between 1927 and 1946. Despite some differences that will be discussed below, all DTTs are remarkably similar in the topics covered (even the order of articles is always the same) and in their language. About 75% of the actual words of any given DTT are identical with the words of any other DTT. Thus, the DTT network is the most important element of the international tax regime, i.e., the generally applicable rules governing income taxation of cross-border transactions. Indeed, I have argued that given the similarities among all DTTs, certain rules embodied in them (such as the requirement to prevent double taxation by granting an exemption or a foreign tax credit) have become part of customary international law, and therefore may be binding even in the absence of a DTT.


At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile--the Volkswagen Beetle--was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle's success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar "economic miracle" and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People's Car presents an international cast of characters--executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers--who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle's improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.


Preventative carePreventative Care MedicalA routine health care check-up that will include tests or exams, flu and routine shots, and patient counseling to prevent or discover illness, disease or other health problems. All recommended preventive services would be covered as required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and applicable state law. [2] is fully covered: no deductibleDeductibleAn amount that you are required to pay before the plan will begin to reimburse for covered services. [3], no copayCopayment (copay)A fixed-dollar amount that you must pay out of your pocket at the time of service to a provider or a facility for a specific health covered service. Copays do not apply to the deductible requirement. For example, an office visit may have a copay of $30 under the Exclusive Plan and $40 under the Extended. You must pay the amount at the time of service. [4]. Zero. Zip. Zilch. All plans will also provide one no-cost preventative mental health visit per plan year beginning on July 1, 2022. Learn more about your mental health benefit options on our Mental Health Resources page [5]. Emergencies are never planned. That's why all urgentUrgent CareCare for an illness, injury or condition serious enough that a reasonable person would seek care right away, but not so severe as to require emergency room care [6] and emergency careEmergency CareA medical or behavioral health condition that must be treated at the emergency department of a hospital due to an illness, injury, symptom or condition severe enough to risk serious danger to your health (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of her unborn child) if you didn't get medical attention. See where and when to get care. [7] is covered (copaysCopayment (copay)A fixed-dollar amount that you must pay out of your pocket at the time of service to a provider or a facility for a specific health covered service. Copays do not apply to the deductible requirement. For example, an office visit may have a copay of $30 under the Exclusive Plan and $40 under the Extended. You must pay the amount at the time of service. [4] may apply), both in and outside the U.S. Decide where you should go to receive care here [8]. Affordable prescription drug prices from CVS Caremark [9] and Kaiser Permanente [10].


Hennessy, B G. Because of You: A Book of Kindness . Illus. Hiroe Nakata. Somerville, Mass: Candlewick Press, 2011. Print. Because Of You was originally published in 2005 and was the second collaboration between author B. G. Hennessy and illustrator Hiroe Nakata. The popular book has now been issued in a smaller hardcover edition that preserves the layout of the original in a compact size that would be useful to parents who want to stow the book in a bag for use on the go. The book uses simple but effective means to introduce the idea of kindness and link it to the related concepts of friendship, world peace and personal responsibility. Watercolour illustrations by Nakata convey a gentleness and warmth that match the message of the text. The first half of the book enumerates different ways of showing kindness: loving, caring, learning, sharing and helping. The text follows a pattern for each example that asks the young reader first to consider the benefits he or she has received from that type of kindness, and then to imagine the opportunity he or she has to reciprocate. The second half of the book begins by summing up the examples in order to define them as kindness, and then figures friendship as mutual kindness between two people, and world peace as a species of friendship. The book concludes by linking the enormous task of achieving world peace to the power of "something small and precious" that the young reader can contribute. In the final illustration, a child, holding a globe, literally has 'the whole world in his hands.' The text does a good job of presenting abstract concepts like kindness and world peace in terms that a child can understand. Throughout the book, the repeated phrase "because of you" is used to address the young reader and personalize the message, while the phrase "there is one more person who can..." emphasizes the impact a single individual can have. Kindness is never characterized as an imperative or a responsibility, but rather as a choice one is free to make. The subtext is that kindness means more because it is chosen. Kindness may be the currency of friendship, but it relies on personal commitment, not on debts and accounts. Once or twice the text feels a bit laboured, such as the phrase "and there is one more person who can share feelings and ideas, as well as things," which mixes the abstract and the concrete, or metaphorical and literal sharing. The patterns of repetition in the text do not achieve the regularity of a meter, so each sentence relies on its own internal structure for rhythm. In spite of the linear, cumulative nature of the message, the text works best aurally when spoken at a slow pace that sets off each sentence and gives individual words ample room. Unfortunately, the smaller size of the reissued text does not naturally lead the reader to choose that pace, at least not quite like the larger format edition does. This is, however, a small complaint of an otherwise excellent book. Interested libraries might consider acquiring the original edition. Reviewer: John Huck Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars John is a metadata and cataloguing librarian at the University of Alberta. He holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and maintains a special interest in the spoken word. He is also a classical musician and has sung semi-professionally for many years.


Remote measurements of the cardiac pulse can provide comfortable physiological assessment without electrodes. However, attempts so far are non-automated, susceptible to motion artifacts and typically expensive. In this paper, we introduce a new methodology that overcomes these problems. This novel approach can be applied to color video recordings of the human face and is based on automatic face tracking along with blind source separation of the color channels into independent components. Using Bland-Altman and correlation analysis, we compared the cardiac pulse rate extracted from videos recorded by a basic webcam to an FDA-approved finger blood volume pulse (BVP) sensor and achieved high accuracy and correlation even in the presence of movement artifacts. Furthermore, we applied this technique to perform heart rate measurements from three participants simultaneously. This is the first demonstration of a low-cost accurate video-based method for contact-free heart rate measurements that is automated, motion-tolerant and capable of performing concomitant measurements on more than one person at a time.


Cottonseed protein has shown great potential as a biodegradable and renewable resource for industrial processes such as the manufacture of wood adhesives. To improve the recovery of the protein from cottonseed flour, we tested the effects of vigorous blending on the extraction efficiency and recovery yield of one- and two-step procedures for isolation of cottonseed protein. For comparison, the effects on one-step soy protein isolation were also examined. Our data indicated that vigorous blending improved the protein recovery from cottonseed and soy flour as much as 40-60%, compared to mild agitation in the extraction phase. The improvement was likely due to the enhanced solid (flour)-liquid (extracting solvent) interaction, and the increased extraction temperature of the vigorous blending process. Similarities in the protein content, molecular mass distribution pattern, and secondary structure of each type of protein isolates processed under different blending treatments indicated that quality of the isolates was not altered by vigorous blending. However, dissimilarities in molecular mass distribution patterns and secondary structures were identified between the different types of isolates (i. e. total, water soluble, and alkali soluble cottonseed proteins, and total soy protein). These differences will enable us to explore in future work the correlations between cottonseed protein structures and industrial use characteristics (such as adhesive properties).


A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process The Single-Source, Comprehensive Guide to Scrum for All Team Members, Managers, and Executives If you want to use Scrum to develop innovative products and services that delight your customers, Essential Scrum is the complete, single-source reference youve been searching for. Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubins experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrums roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.


This study is one of the first attempts to investigate the effect of schema-based general English teaching and testing on English language learning in an Iranian academic context. A total of 90 undergraduate theology students studying general English at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) were assigned to an experimental and a control group. For the same course book two instructional approaches were adopted during an academic semester; schema-based instruction (SBI) for experimental and translation-based instruction (TBI) for control groups. At the semester's commencement a schema-based cloze multiple choice item test (MCIT) was developed on the textbook and administered as a pre-test to ensure that the experimental group did not differ significantly from the control group. The same test was administered again at the semester's termination along with an unseen reading comprehension test (URCT) to find out which approach was more effective.  Final results showed that the performance of the experimental group was superior to the control group on both MCIT and URCT.  The implications of the findings are discussed in the light of teaching English as a foreign language within an academic context.


Abstract The question how the real and the financial side of a capitalist economy relate to each other has been a frequently recurring topic in the history of economic thought. Our paper addresses this question from the viewpoint that capital ultimately seeks returns from its perpetual reallocation and essentially faces two choices: it can either be "entrepreneurially" allocated to real economic activity, or it can be "financially" invested in legal claims against such activity. Adopting such a perspective, we study here how real and financial returns relate to each other over the past fifteen years, both within and across countries, by considering more than 30,000 publicly traded firms in more than forty countries that stand for 70% of the global population and about 90% of world income. We compare the average rates of return to both types of investment and their respective volatilities. While average returns, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, turn out to be roughly equal across the two domains, the volatility of financial returns exceeds 'real volatility' by an order of magnitude. From a systemic point of view, these findings raise the question why capital would seek out financial investments in the first place.


Despite widespread plans of big companies like Amazon and Google to develop unmanned delivery drones, scholarly research in this field is scarce, especially in the information systems field. From technical and legal perspectives, drone delivery in last-mile scenarios is in a quite mature state. However, estimates of user acceptance are varying between high skepticism and exaggerated optimism. This research follows a mixed method approach consisting both qualitative and quantitative research, to identify and test determinants of consumer delivery drone service adoption. The qualitative part rests on ten interviews among average consumers, who use delivery services on a regular basis. Insights gained from the qualitative part were used to develop an online survey and to assess the influence of associated risks on adoption intentions. The quantitative results show that especially financial and physical risks impede drone delivery service adoption. Delivery companies who are currently thinking about providing a delivery drone service may find these results useful when evaluating usage behaviors in the future market for delivery drones.


Written during the winter of 1857-8, the "Grundrisse" was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory. A collection of seven notebooks on capital and money, it both develops the arguments outlined in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and explores the themes and theses that were to dominate his great later work "Capital". Here, for the first time, Marx set out his own version of Hegel's dialectics and developed his mature views on labour, surplus value and profit, offering many fresh insights into alienation, automation and the dangers of capitalist society. Yet while the theories in "Grundrisse" make it a vital precursor to "Capital", it also provides invaluable descriptions of Marx's wider-ranging philosophy, making it a unique insight into his beliefs and hopes for the foundation of a communist state.


Saint) Paul gave sport a key role in both personal achievement and control: Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27


This paper will describe the efforts and findings of the JISC Data Management Skills Support Initiative ('DaMSSI'). DaMSSI was co-funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme and the Research Information Network (RIN), in partnership with the Digital Curation Centre, to review, synthesise and augment the training offerings of the JISC Research Data Management Training Materials ('RDMTrain') projects. DaMSSI tested the effectiveness of the Society of College, National and University Libraries' Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model (SCONUL, 2011), and Vitae's Researcher Development Framework ('Vitae RDF') for consistently describing research data management ('RDM') skills and skills development paths in UK HEI postgraduate courses. With the collaboration of the RDMTrain projects, we mapped individual course modules to these two models and identified basic generic data management skills alongside discipline-specific requirements. A synthesis of the training outputs of the projects was then carried out, which further investigated the generic versus discipline-specific considerations and other successful approaches to training that had been identified as a result of the projects' work. In addition we produced a series of career profiles to help illustrate the fact that data management is an essential component – in obvious and not-so-obvious ways – of a wide range of professions. We found that both models had potential for consistently and coherently describing data management skills training and embedding this within broader institutional postgraduate curricula. However, we feel that additional discipline-specific references to data management skills could also be beneficial for effective use of these models. Our synthesis work identified that the majority of core skills were generic across disciplines at the postgraduate level, with the discipline-specific approach showing its value in engaging the audience and providing context for the generic principles. Findings were fed back to SCONUL and Vitae to help in the refinement of their respective models, and we are working with a number of other projects, such as the DCC and the EC-funded Digital Curator Vocational Education Europe (DigCurV2) initiative, to investigate ways to take forward the training profiling work we have begun.


This paper presents recent advances in the development and validation of the two-phase flow topology models implemented in CFD-BWR, an advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) computer code that allows the detailed analysis of the two-phase flow and heat transfer phenomena in Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) fuel assemblies under various operating conditions. The local inter-phase surface topology plays a central role in determining the mass, momentum, and energy exchanges between the liquid and vapor phases and between the two-phase coolant and the fuel pin cladding. The paper describes the topology map used to determine the local inter-phase surface topology and the role of the local topology in determining the inter-phase mass, momentum, and energy transfer. It discusses the relationship between the local interphase surface topology and the traditional channel flow regimes and presents results of experiment analyses in which computed local topologies are aggregated into flow regimes and compared with experimental observations.Copyright © 2008 by ASME and UChicago Argonne, LLC, Operator of Argonne National Laboratory


Analyzing historical information can show how a software system evolved into its current state, which parts of the system are stable and which have changed more. However, historical analysis implies processing a vast amount of information making the interpretation of the results difficult. To address this issue, we introduce the notion of the history of source code artifacts as a first class entity and define measurements, which summarize the evolution of such entities. We use these measurements to define rules by which to detect different characteristics of the evolution of class hierarchies. Furthermore, we discuss the results we obtained by visualizing them using a polymetric view. We apply our approach on two large open source case studies and classify their class hierarchies based on their history.


Adoption and diffusion of agricultural innovations are essential to technological change, agricultural growth and poverty reduction in the developing countries. However, the low rates of technology adoption by smallholder farmers in the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is worrisome. The present study employed cross-sectional data collected from 380 rice producing households to investigate determinants and impact of technology adoption. The technology considered in the study is New Rice for Africa (NERICA), reputed to be a major breakthrough in agricultural research in the SSA. Although, a number of studies have been carried out on determinants of technology adoption behavior amongst smallholder producers, the present study employed state of the art econometric procedures to provide answers on reasons why the rates of technology adoption by smallholder producers have been very slow. On the other hand, competitive production and market orientation are essential in transforming the SSA's traditional agriculture into a more productive sector in order to achieve the multifaceted roles of accelerating GDP growth, reducing poverty and narrowing rural-urban income disparities ascribed to agricultural growth by the development economists in the contemporary times


Improving the long-term life outcomes of disadvantaged youth remains a top policy priority in the United States, although identifying successful interventions for adolescents - particularly males - has proven challenging. This paper reports results from a large randomized controlled trial of an intervention for disadvantaged male youth grades 7-10 from high-crime Chicago neighborhoods. The intervention was delivered by two local non-profits and included regular interactions with a pro-social adult, after-school programming, and - perhaps the most novel ingredient - in-school programming designed to reduce common judgment and decision-making problems related to automatic behavior and biased beliefs, or what psychologists call cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). We randomly assigned 2,740 youth to programming or to a control group; about half those offered programming participated, with the average participant attending 13 sessions. Program participation reduced violent-crime arrests during the program year by 8.1 per 100 youth (a 44 percent reduction). It also generated sustained gains in schooling outcomes equal to 0.14 standard deviations during the program year and 0.19 standard deviations during the follow-up year, which we estimate could lead to higher graduation rates of 3-10 percentage points (7-22 percent). Depending on how one monetizes the social costs of crime, the benefit-cost ratio may be as high as 30:1 from reductions in criminal activity alone.


Scheduling and location models are often used to tackle problems in production, logistics, and supply chain management. Instead of treating these models independent of each other, as is usually done in the literature, we consider in this paper an integrated model in which the locations of machines define release times for jobs. Polynomial solution algorithms are presented for single machine problems in which the scheduling part can be solved by the earliest release time rule.


Photothermal therapy through Gold Nanorods (GNRs) is a new approach for the minimally invasive treatment of cancerous tissue. In order to design the proper settings, it is important to study the thermal effect that are induced close to the nanoparticle (nanoscale model), in the close vicinity and in the cancerous tissue (microscale model). A temperature dependent 2D-model of this particular lightmatter interaction was designed. The expected absorption cross section of the GNRs were used to calculate the optical absorption of the GNR. The bioheat equation then enabled to describe the photothermal effect within the GNRs and the environment. The postprocessing results may be used to evaluate a safe and feasible temperature range and treatment time, in order to destroy the tumor volume.


Distributed business component computing--the assembling of business components into electronic business processes, which interact via the Internet--caters to a new breed of enterprise systems that are flexible, relatively easy to maintain and upgrade to accommodate new business processes, and relatively simple to integrate with other enterprise systems. Companies with unwieldy, large, and heterogeneous inherited information systems--known as legacy systems--find it extremely difficult to align their old systems with novel business processes. Legacy systems are not only tightly intertwined with existing business processes and procedures but also have a brittle architecture after years of ad-hoc fixes and offer limited openness to other systems. In this book, Willem-Jan van den Heuvel provides a methodological framework that offers pragmatic techniques for aligning component-based business processes and legacy systems.Van den Heuvel's methodology is based on three building blocks: reverse engineering, which allows legacy systems to be componentized; forward engineering, which derives a set of business components from requirements of the new business processes; and alignment of new business processes and componentized legacy systems. Van den Heuvel provides a theoretical foundation for these, with chapters that discuss component-based development, introduce a case study that is used throughout the book to illustrate the methodology, and assess methods and technologies for legacy integration, component adaptation, and process alignment. He describes the methodological framework itself and its techniques to align new business processes with legacy systems by adopting a meet-in-the-middle strategy. Drawing on topics from a wide range of disciplines, including component-based development, distributed computing, business process modeling, and others, Aligning Modern Business Processes and Legacy Systems offers theoretically grounded practical methodology that has been explored and tested in a variety of experiments as well as some real-world projects.


Poor rural households in developing countries lack adequate access to credit. Many development professionals believe that this lack of credit has negative consequences for poor people's agricultural productivity, food security, health, and overall household welfare. Improved access to credit, they argue, will help poor rural households engage in more productive income-generating activities both on and off the farm and raise their living standards. Community and member-based microfinance programs have thus enjoyed considerable political and financial support during the 1990s. Yet in Access to Credit and Its Impact on Welfare in Malawi, Aliou Diagne and Manfred Zeller argue that access to microcredit may not be an effective way of alleviating poverty if the necessary infrastructure and socioeconomic environment are lacking.


Regulatory entry barriers to hospital service markets, namely Certificate of Need (CON) regulations, are enforced in many states; although no longer federally mandated, policy makers in other states are considering reinstating CON policies in tandem with service expansions mandated under the Affordable Care Act. While numerous studies have examined the impacts of CON on hospital volumes, demand responses to actual hospital entry into local hospital markets are not well understood. In this paper, we empirically examine the demand-augmenting, demand-redistribution, and risk-allocation effects of hospital entry by studying the cardiac revascularization markets in Pennsylvania, a state in which dynamic market entry occurred after repeal of CON in 1996. Our findings with respect to demand-augmentation are mixed: we find robust evidence that high entrant market share mitigated the declining incidence of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), but it had no significant effect on the rising trend in percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures, among patients with coronary artery disease. Consequently, incumbent hospitals experienced a decrease in the likelihood of PCI due to entry, thereby indicating a shift in demand away from incumbents to entrants, namely business-stealing. Results of our analyses further indicate that entry by new cardiac surgery centers tended to sort high-severity patients into the more invasive CABG procedure and low-severity patients into the less invasive PCI procedures. Thus, from a welfare perspective our results are mixed: on the one hand, free-entry may lead to improved access rather than business stealing for CABG procedures; on the other hand, the empirical evidence is in favor of business-stealing for PCI procedures. Moreover, free-entry improves the match between underlying medical risk and treatment intensity. These findings underscore the importance of considering market-level strategic responses by hospitals when regulatory barriers to entry are rescinded. Suhui Li Assistant Professor Department of Health Policy George Washington University 2021 K Street, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20037 email@example.com Avi Dor Professor George Washington University 2021 K street NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20037 and NBER firstname.lastname@example.com


What assumptions and methods allow us to turn observations into causal knowledge, and how can even incomplete causal knowledge be used in planning and prediction to influence and control our environment? In this book Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines address these questions using the formalism of Bayes networks, with results that have been applied in diverse areas of research in the social, behavioral, and physical sciences. The authors show that although experimental and observational study designs may not always permit the same inferences, they are subject to uniform principles. They axiomatize the connection between causal structure and probabilistic independence, explore several varieties of causal indistinguishability, formulate a theory of manipulation, and develop asymptotically reliable procedures for searching over equivalence classes of causal models, including models of categorical data and structural equation models with and without latent variables. The authors show that the relationship between causality and probability can also help to clarify such diverse topics in statistics as the comparative power of experimentation versus observation, Simpson's paradox, errors in regression models, retrospective versus prospective sampling, and variable selection. The second edition contains a new introduction and an extensive survey of advances and applications that have appeared since the first edition was published in 1993.


This pathbreaking study examines the radical Left in Puerto Rico from the final years of Spanish colonial rule into the 1920s. Positioning Puerto Rico within the context of a regional anarchist network that stretched from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Tampa, Florida, and New York City, Kirwin R. Shaffer illustrates how anarchists linked their struggle to the broader international anarchist struggles against religion, governments, and industrial capitalism. Their groups, speeches, and press accounts--as well as the newspapers that they published--were central in helping to develop an anarchist vision for Puerto Ricans at a time when the island was a political no-man's-land, neither an official U.S. colony or state nor an independent country. Exploring the rise of artisan and worker-based centers to develop class consciousness, Shaffer follows the island's anarchists as they cautiously joined the AFL-linked Federaci\u00f3n Libre de Trabajadores, the largest labor organization in Puerto Rico. Critiquing the union from within, anarchists worked with reformers while continuing to pursue a more radical agenda achieved by direct action rather than parliamentary politics. Shaffer also traces anarchists' alliances with freethinkers seeking to reform education, progressive factions engaged in attacking the Church and organized religion, and the emerging Socialist movement on the island in the 1910s. The most successful anarchist organization to emerge in Puerto Rico, the Bayam\u00f3n bloc founded El Comunista, the longest-running, most financially successful anarchist newspaper in the island's history. Stridently attacking U.S. militarism and interventionism in the Caribbean Basin, the newspaper found growing distribution throughout and financial backing from Spanish-speaking anarchist groups in the United States. Shaffer demonstrates how the U.S. government targeted the Bayam\u00f3n anarchists during the Red Scare and forced the closure of their newspaper in 1921, effectively unraveling the anarchist movement on the island.


MUST WE AGE? A long life in a healthy, vigorous, youthful body has always been one of humanity's greatest dreams. Recent progress in genetic manipulations and calorie-restricted diets in laboratory animals hold forth the promise that someday science will enable us to exert total control over our own biological aging. Nearly all scientists who study the biology of aging agree that we will someday be able to substantially slow down the aging process, extending our productive, youthful lives. Dr. Aubrey de Grey is perhaps the most bullish of all such researchers. As has been reported in media outlets ranging from "60 Minutes" to "The New York Times, " Dr. de Grey believes that the key biomedical technology required to eliminate aging-derived debilitation and death entirely--technology that would not only slow but periodically "reverse" age-related physiological decay, leaving us biologically young into an indefinite future--is now within reach. In "Ending Aging, " Dr. de Grey and his research assistant Michael Rae describe the details of this biotechnology. They explain that the aging of the human body, just like the aging of man-made machines, results from an accumulation of various types of damage. As with man-made machines, this damage can periodically be repaired, leading to indefinite extension of the machine's fully functional lifetime, just as is routinely done with classic cars. We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.


MMS-enabled terminals on the market today are very complicated to use. It takes several steps to create a multi-slide MMS-message with images and text. This discourages users from using it. To increase usage of MMS, several companies provide web-based or stand-alone programs that allow users to create and send MMS-messages from a regular computer. However these editors have many limitations and are not user-friendly. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a user-friendly web-based MMS-portal where users can create, edit and send MMS-messages. The portal is integrated into Densitet's system for development of mobile services. Conclusions that can be draw from this work are that problems with MMS interoperability have mostly the poor standardization to blame. Different terminals support different types of images and sound formats, and to make the MMS-portal user-friendly, format conversions of uploaded content had to be implemented. Also the MMS-portal only supports basic MMS-functionality. If the MMS-specification includes more audio and image formats and if the MMS-terminals are upgraded to handle these formats, sending MMS-messages will be easier and mobile messaging will continue to grow.


There are only a handful of Supreme Court decisions in the past 50 years that can be said to have transformed the operation of the criminal justice system. Padilla v. Kentucky may be such a case. In Padilla, the Court ruled that criminal defense lawyers must advise their non-citizen clients considering a guilty plea that they are likely to be deported as a result. It is the first time the Court extended the Sixth Amendment right to counsel to a consequence of conviction that is not part of the court-imposed punishment. The decision represents an important first step toward imposing constitutional discipline on the plea bargaining process. As a practical matter, the decision will affect how all participants in a criminal case conduct themselves, not just defense counsel. Padilla offers important protections for non-citizens who are in the criminal justice system. But it has broader implications. In requiring consideration of indirect as well as direct consequences of conviction in connection with bargaining over the appropriate penalty, the decision implicates the concept of truth in sentencing itself. Yet it is less surprising that the Court should extend the right to counsel to collateral consequences at the plea stage, than that it took so long to do so. This essay places Padilla in the larger framework of modern criminal justice to understand its justifications and implications in policy terms. It argues that the logic of the Padilla decision is not confined to deportation but extends to other severe and certain collateral consequences of conviction. It reviews the reasons given for treating collateral consequences differently from other important consequences of conviction, and concludes that there is no principled basis for that distinction. Imposing collateral consequences has become an increasingly important function of the criminal justice system, so that they have to all intents and purposes become part and parcel of the criminal case. Accordingly, an expanded duty of counsel represents sound public policy, based on considerations of safety and efficiency, judicial integrity, and fairness to individuals. Finally, the essay describes efforts underway by the ABA and the Uniform Law Commission to make it possible for criminal defense attorneys to offer adequate advice about collateral consequences without unreasonable expense or delay.


RNA turnover plays an important role in both virulence and adaptation to stress in the Gram-positive human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. However, the molecular players and mechanisms involved in these processes are poorly understood. Here, we explored the functions of S. aureus endoribonuclease III (RNase III), a member of the ubiquitous family of double-strand-specific endoribonucleases. To define genomic transcripts that are bound and processed by RNase III, we performed deep sequencing on cDNA libraries generated from RNAs that were co-immunoprecipitated with wild-type RNase III or two different cleavage-defective mutant variants in vivo. Several newly identified RNase III targets were validated by independent experimental methods. We identified various classes of structured RNAs as RNase III substrates and demonstrated that this enzyme is involved in the maturation of rRNAs and tRNAs, regulates the turnover of mRNAs and non-coding RNAs, and autoregulates its synthesis by cleaving within the coding region of its own mRNA. Moreover, we identified a positive effect of RNase III on protein synthesis based on novel mechanisms. RNase III–mediated cleavage in the 5′ untranslated region (5′UTR) enhanced the stability and translation of cspA mRNA, which encodes the major cold-shock protein. Furthermore, RNase III cleaved overlapping 5′UTRs of divergently transcribed genes to generate leaderless mRNAs, which constitutes a novel way to co-regulate neighboring genes. In agreement with recent findings, low abundance antisense RNAs covering 44% of the annotated genes were captured by co-immunoprecipitation with RNase III mutant proteins. Thus, in addition to gene regulation, RNase III is associated with RNA quality control of pervasive transcription. Overall, this study illustrates the complexity of post-transcriptional regulation mediated by RNase III.


In this article, we point to mental health as a new sorting mechanism in higher education (HE), working through categories informed by psychological and psychiatric knowledge, which currently permeate the field of education. The significant increase in young people, for example students
 in HE, with mental health problems such as stress, anxiety and depression seems to be a general development in Western countries over the past decade. The focus on mental health sets in motion a broad range of wellbeing discussions and initiatives in terms of mental illness and/or psychiatric
 diagnoses, rather than in terms of learning, pedagogy or participation and inequalities in education. This directs attention to particular kinds of students rather than to educational relations, cultures and contexts. Against this background, we set out to discuss how certain categorisations
 and understandings of students' wellbeing and everyday problems, inspired by the psy-sciences, intertwine with neoliberal traits in educational institutions, and come to mediate students' emotional experience of and coping with psychosocial problems and their participation in HE.


The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex--and so ambivalent. Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.


This experiment explored the effects of ability and effort attributional feedback given during subtraction competency development on children's perceived self-efficacy and achievement. Children who were deficient in subtraction skills received training on subtraction operations and engaged in problem solving, during which they periodically received ability attributional feedback for their progress, effort feedback, ability + effort feedback, or no attributional feedback. Children given only ability feedback demonstrated the highest subtraction skill and self-efficacy; the effort and ability + effort conditions did not differ, but each outperformed the no-feedback condition. Future research should examine in greater detail how children process attributional information and its effects on achievement outcomes.


In 2013 the Editor of Journal of Vibration and Control and SAGE became aware of a peer review ring involving assumed and fabricated identities that appeared to centre around Peter Chen at National Pingtung University of Education, Taiwan (NPUE). SAGE and the Editor then began a complex investigation into the case during the rest of 2013 and 2014. Following an unsatisfactory response from Peter Chen, NPUE was notified. NPUE were serious in addressing the Journal and SAGE's concerns. NPUE confirmed that the institution was investigating Peter Chen. SAGE subsequently uncovered a citation ring involving the above mentioned author and others. We regret that individual authors have compromised the academic record by perverting the peer review process and apologise to readers. On uncovering problems with peer review and citation SAGE immediately put steps in place to avoid similar vulnerability of the Journal to exploitation in the future. More information may be found at www.sagepub.co.uk/JVC_Statement_2014. The Journal and SAGE understand from NPUE that Peter Chen has resigned his post at NPUE. The following articles are retracted because after thorough investigation evidence points towards them having at least one author or being reviewed by at least one reviewer who has been implicated in the peer review ring and/or citation ring. All authors have had an opportunity to respond to the allegations and proposed actions. OnlineFirst articles (these articles will not be published in an issue) Chen CY, Chen T-H, Chen Y-H, Yu S-E and Chung P-Y (2013) Information technology system modeling an integrated C-TAM-TPB model to the validation of ocean tidal analyses Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 7 May 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312472924 Chang R-F, Chen CY, Su F-P and Lin H-C (2013) A two-step approach for broadband digital signal processing technique Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 26 April 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312472925 Chen TH, Chang CJ, Yu SE, Chung PY and Liu C-K (2013) Nonlinear information analysis and system management technique: the influence of design experience and control complexity Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 12 April 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312473321 Chen CY, Shih BY, Chen YH, Yu SE and Liu YC (2013) The exploration of a 3T flow model using vibrating NXT: II. Model validation Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 10 April 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312470481 Chen CY, Shih BY, Chen YH, Yu SE and Liu YC (2013) The exploration of 3T flow model using vibrating NXT: I. model formulation Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 6 February 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312467360 Lin M-L and Chen C-W (2013) Stability analysis of fuzzy-based NN modeling for ecosystems using fuzzy Lyapunov methods Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 6 February 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312466687 Chen CY, Chen TH, Chen YH and Chiu J (2012) A multi-stage method for deterministic-statistical analysis: a mathematical case and measurement studies Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 20 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312466579 Shih BY, Lin MC and Chen CY (2012) Autonomous navigation system for radiofrequency identification mobile robot e-book reader Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 13 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312466578 Chang RF, Chen CY, Su FP, Lin HC and Lu C-K (2012) Multiphase SUMO robot based on an agile modeling-driven process for a small mobile robot Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 13 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464993 Shih B-Y, Lin Y-K, Cheng M-H, Chen C-Y and Chiu C-P (2012) The development of an application program interactive game-based information system Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 12 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464682 Chen C-Y, Chang C-J and Lin C-H (2012) On dynamic access control in web 2.0 and cloud interactive information hub: technologies Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 12 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464992 Shin BY, Chen CY and Hsu KH (2012) Robot cross platform system using innovative interactive theory and selection algorithms for Android application Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 13 November 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312463757 Articles published in an issue Chen C-W (2014) Applications of neural-network-based fuzzy logic control to a nonlinear time-delay chaotic system Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (4): 589-605. Epub ahead of print 5 November 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312461370 Chen C-W (2014) A review of intelligent algorithm approaches and neural-fuzzy stability criteria for time-delay tension leg platform systems Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (4): 561-575. Epub ahead of print 5 November 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312463759 Chen C-Y, Chang C-J and Lin C-H (2014) On dynamic access control in web 2.0 and cloud interactive information hub: trends and theories Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (4): 548-560. Epub ahead of print 5 November 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312463762 Lin M-L and Chen C-W (2014) Stability conditions for ecosystem modeling using the fuzzy Lyapunov method Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (2): 290-302. Epub ahead of print 23 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312451301 Chen C-H, Kuo C-M, Hsieh S-H and Chen C-Y (2014) Highly efficient very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation of probabilistic neural network image interpolator Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (2): 218-224. Epub ahead of print 22 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312458822 Chen C-Y (2014) Wave vibration and simulation in dissipative media described by irregular boundary surfaces: a mathematical formulation Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (2): 191-203. Epub ahead of print 22 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464258 Chen C-H, Yao T-K, Dai J-H and Chen C-Y (2014) A pipelined multiprocessor system- on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology for streaming signal processing Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (2): 163-178. Epub ahead of print 16 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312458821 Lin M-L and Chen C-W (2014) Fuzzy neural modeling for n-degree ecosystems using the linear matrix inequality approach Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (1): 82-93. Epub ahead of print 8 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312458533 Chen C-H, Wu W-X and Chen C-Y (2013) Ant-inspired collective problem-solving systems Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (16): 2481-2490. Epub ahead of print 18 September 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312456231 Chen C-H, Yao T-K, Kuo C-M and Chen C-Y (2013) Evolutionary design of constructive multilayer feedforward neural network Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (16): 2413-2420. Epub ahead of print 12 September 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312456726 Chen C-W (2013) Applications of the fuzzy-neural Lyapunov criterion to multiple time-delay systems Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (13): 2054-2067. Epub ahead of print 16 August 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312451034 Chung P-Y, Chen Y-H, Walter L and Chen C-Y (2013) Influence and dynamics of a mobile robot control on mechanical components Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (13): 1923-1935. Epub ahead of print 20 July 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312452184 Chen C-W (2013) Neural network-based fuzzy logic parallel distributed compensation controller for structural system Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (11): 1709-1727. Epub ahead of print 22 June 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312442233 Chen C-W, Yeh K, Yang H-C, Liu KFR and Liu C-C (2013) A critical review of structural system control by the large-scaled neural network linear-deferential-inclusion-based criterion Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (11): 1658-1673. Epub ahead of print 18 June 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312443377 Chen C-H, Kuo C-M, Chen C-Y and Dai J-H (2013) The design and synthesis using hierarchical robotic discrete-event modeling Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (11): 1603-1613. Epub ahead of print 27 June 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312449645 Chang CJ, Chen CY and Chou I-T (2013) The design of information and communication technologies: telecom MOD strength machines Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (10): 1499-1513. Epub ahead of print 27 June 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312449644 Shih B-Y, Chen C-Y, Li K-H, Wu T-Y, Chen G-Y (2013) A novel NXT control method for implementing force sensing and recycling in a training robot Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (10): 1443-1459. Epub ahead of print 1 June 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312446361 Chen C-W, Chen P-C and Chiang W-L (2013) Modified intelligent genetic algorithm-based adaptive neural network control for uncertain structural systems Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (9): 1333-1347. Epub ahead of print 31 May 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312442232 Chen C-Y, Shih B-Y, Shih C-H and Wang L-H (2013) Enhancing robust and stability control of a humanoid biped robot: system identification approach. Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (8): 1199-1207. Epub ahead of print 26 April 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312442947 Chang C-J, Chen C-Y and Huang C-W (2013) Applications for medical recovery using wireless control of a bluetooth ball with a hybrid G-sensor and human-computer interface technology Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (8): 1139-1151. Epub ahead of print 24 April 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312442948 Hsu W-K, Chiou D-J, Chen C-W, Liu M-Y, Chiang W-L and Huang P-C (2013) Sensitivity of initial damage detection for steel structures using the Hilbert-Huang transform method Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (6): 857-878. Epub ahead of print 29 February 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546311434794 Chen C-Y, Shih B-Y, Shih C-H and Wang L-H (2013) Human–machine interface for the motion control of humanoid biped robots using a graphical user interface Motion Editor Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (6): 814-820. Epub ahead of print 23 February 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312437804 Chen C-Y (201


You see why I tell you I ain't want to be no damn juror. Some dude just come by my house and tell me he going pay me money to say not guilty. Now I don't know what to do, because if I tell the judge they're going to know it's me. I know, right. Now I scared because I don't want them to do anything to me or [my daughter][. . .] * * *The above were text messages sent by a juror to her sister after Ikim Blackett allegedly threatened and then tried to bribe her in an attempt to convince her to find one of several defendants "not guilty" of various drug crimes. At Blackett's ensuing trial for jury bribery, the juror testified that, while she was on her front porch, Blackett approached her and mentioned the word "nitroglycerin." The juror then "asked Blackett what 'nitroglycerin' meant and he responded 'not guilty.'" When this threat fell on deaf ears, Blackett offered the juror $1,500 in exchange for her vote. After again declining, the juror went to her bedroom and sent the above text messages.Should the text messages have been admissible because the juror took the witness stand and testified at trial? If the juror were "unavailable" at trial, should the text messages have been admissible? According to Professor Jeffrey Bellin's article, eHearsay, the answer to both questions is "yes" as he crafts hearsay rules that cover both situations. This paper agrees with Professor Bellin on the first question but disagrees with him on the second.


Spatial hypertext programs typically display a portion of a larger flat space in which items can be arranged, grouped, and manipulated. In terms of an old philosophical dispute, the space of spatial hypertext is a Newtonian absolute space rather than the Leibnizian relational space created by web pages and other node-and-link hypertexts. After discussing this difference, this essay proposes other spaces, including topologically complex spaces and an Aristotelian space that is polarized and oriented. These offer new possibilities for information triage and meaningful spatial configurations.


We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling.Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines--including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others--Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects.


Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge and skills to navigate this new financial environment. To better understand financial literacy and its relation to financial decision-making, we have devised two special modules for the DNB Household Survey. We have designed questions to measure numeracy and basic knowledge related to the working of inflation and interest rates, as well as questions to measure more advanced financial knowledge related to financial market instruments (stocks, bonds, and mutual funds). We evaluate the importance of financial literacy by studying its relation to the stock market: Are more financially knowledgeable individuals more likely to hold stocks? To assess the direction of causality, we make use of questions measuring financial knowledge before investing in the stock market. We find that, while the understanding of basic economic concepts related to inflation and interest rate compounding is far from perfect, it outperforms the limited knowledge of stocks and bonds, the concept of risk diversification, and the working of financial markets. We also find that the measurement of financial literacy is very sensitive to the wording of survey questions. This provides additional evidence for limited financial knowledge. Finally, we report evidence of an independent effect of financial literacy on stock market participation: Those who have low financial literacy are significantly less likely to invest in stocks.


Stephen Hawking's worldwide bestseller, A Brief History of Time, has been a landmark volume in scientific writing. Its author's engaging voice is one reason, and the compelling subjects he addresses is another: the nature of space and time, the role of God in creation, the history and future of the universe. But it is also true that in the years since its publication, readers have repeatedly told Professor Hawking of their great difficulty in understanding some of the book's most important concepts. This is the origin of and the reason for A Briefer History of Time: its author's wish to make its content accessible to readers -- as well as to bring it up-to-date with the latest scientific observations and findings. Although this book is literally somewhat 'briefer', it actually expands on the great subjects of the original. Purely technical concepts, such as the mathematics of chaotic boundary conditions, are gone. Conversely, subjects of wide interest that were difficult to follow because they were interspersed throughout the book have now been given entire chapters of their own, including relativity, curved space, and quantum theory. This reorganization has allowed the authors to expand areas of special interest and recent progress, from the latest developments in string theory to exciting developments in the search for a complete, unified theory of all the forces of physics. Like prior editions of the book--but even more so -- A Briefer History of Time will guide nonscientists everywhere in the ongoing search for the tantalizing secrets at the heart of time and space. Thirty-eight full-colour illustrations enhance the text and make A Briefer History of Time an exhilarating addition in its own right to the literature of science.


The current project addressed two major weak points of the existing Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) ramp control system. One weak point in the system is the fact that it reacts to the problem (congestion), rather than preventing the problem. The other weak point in the system is its reliance on detector data that may be in error. Both of these problems can be minimized by developing methods to accurately predict short-term traffic data. By predicting the onset of congestion early enough, the ramp metering system can act to prevent or delay occurrence of the problem. Also, if a detector has failed or is malfunctioning, the data from the detector can be estimated from short-term predictions based on neighboring detectors. At the beginning of the current project, the researchers had hoped that the same model would provide a basis for both forecasting congestion (for predictive ramp control) and replacing erroneous data (predicting actual values). However, the best congestion or breakdown flow forecaster (the pattern recognition method) does not provide a basis for data prediction. The best method for filling in missing detector data turned out to be multivariate time series analysis. Several pattern recognition and time series models were tested for further development. In both cases, the simpler models turned out to be the best choices, and in both cases, further model testing and development were recommended. The research on both model types continues in follow-up studies that are expected to lead to incorporation of these models in the new TSMC computer system.


A novel thin-?lm composite (TFC) reverse osmosis (RO) membrane was developed by the interfacial polymerization (IP) of trimesoyl chloride (TMC) and m-phenylene diamine (MPD) on the hollow fibre ultrafiltration polysulphone (PS) membrane. The performance of the TFC membrane was optimized by studying the preparation parameters, which included monomer TMC concentration, monomer MPD concentration and alcohol additive in aqueous solution. The reverse osmosis performance of the resulting membrane was evaluated through permeation experiment with 1000 ppm NaCl at 0.7 MPa. The results showed that the optimum concentration of MPD and TMC were 0.5wt% and 3g/L, respectively. To improve flux, alcohol was added to the aqueous phase, when certain concentration of alcohol was added to the aqueous solution, the flux of the prepared membrane increased from 5.0 to 9.1 L /(m 2 ·h) without loss in salt rejection. The properties and structures of skin layer of RO composite membranes were characterized by AFM. It was found that IP had occurred and the separation layer was formed, and the novel reverse osmosis membrane appears to comprise a thicker, smoother and less cross-linking film structure. Additionally, the TFC membrane exhibits good long-term stability.


1 Modeling studies show that the darkening of snow and ice by black carbon 2 deposition is a major factor for the rapid disappearance of arctic sea ice, mountain 3 glaciers and snow packs. This study provides one of the first direct measurements for the 4 efficient removal of black carbon from the atmosphere by snow and its subsequent 5 deposition on the snow packs of California. The early melting of the snow packs in the 6 Sierras is one of the contributing factors to the severe water problems in California. BC 7 concentrations in falling snow were measured at two mountain locations and in rain at a 8 coastal site. All three stations reveal large BC concentrations in precipitation, ranging 9 from 1.7 ng/g to 12.9 ng/g. The BC concentrations in the air after the snow fall were 10 negligible suggesting an extremely efficient removal of BC by snow. The data suggest 11 that below cloud scavenging, rather than ice nuclei, was the dominant source of BC in the 12 snow. A five-year comparison of BC, dust, and total fine aerosol mass concentrations at 13 multiple sites reveals that the measurements made at the sampling sites were 14 representative of large scale deposition in the Sierra Nevada. The relative concentration 15 of iron and calcium in the mountain aerosol indicates that one-quarter to one-third of the 16 BC may have been transported from Asia.


The role of the composition of surface‐coating materials in controlling trace metal adsorption in aquatic environments was investigated using natural biofilms that developed on glass slides in three New York State lakes and a water𠄃supply well. Adsorption isotherms were obtained for Pb binding to each of the biofilms in solutions with defined Pb speciation at 25°C and pH 6.0, with Pb concentrations ranging from 0.2 to 2.0 μM. Adsorption isotherms for Pb binding to laboratory‐derived metal oxides and surrogate organic materials were determined under the same conditions. These isotherms, combined with characterization of natural biofilm composition, were used to estimate the relative contributions of the organic and metal oxide surface‐coating constituents by assuming additivity of adsorption to discrete adsorbing phases. Cells of a diatom (Navicula peliculosa), a green alga (Chlorella vulgaris), the bacterium Leptothrix discophora, and extracellular polymer of the bacterium Burkholdaria cepacia were tested as laboratory analogs for the organic phase of the biofilms. Amorphous Fe oxyhydroxide, γAl2O3, and a laboratory‐derived biogenic Mn oxyhydroxide were used as laboratory surrogates for biofilm minerals. The sum total of predicted Pb binding to the defined surrogates accounted for at least 90% of the total observed Pb binding in the three lake biofilms and 60% of that observed for the well biofilms. For the lake biofilms, Pb adsorption to Fe and Mn oxides was significantly greater than that estimated for organic materials. The use of biogenic Mn oxide as a model component resulted in an estimated Pb adsorption to Mn oxyhydroxides in the lake biofilms up to four times greater than that estimated for Fe oxyhydroxide. Estimated Pb binding by Al oxide was negligible for all four biofilms. These results suggest that Fe and biogenic Mn oxides exert the greatest influence on Pb adsorption in oxic freshwater environments at pH 6.0.


This handbook contains information and guidance that supports all of the topics of the ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer (CSQE) Body of Knowledge (BoK). Armed with the knowledge presented in this handbook to compliment the required years of actual work experience, qualified software quality practitioners may feel confident they have taken appropriate steps in preparation for the CSQE exam. This invaluable handbook also goes well beyond being simply an exam preparation guide. It is designed to be a resource not only for software quality engineers, but also for software development practitioners, project managers, organizational managers, other quality practitioners, and other professionals who need to understand the aspects of software quality that impact their work. It can also be used by readers to benchmark their (or their organization s) understanding and application of software quality principles and practices against what is considered a cross-industry good practice baseline. New software quality engineers can use this handbook to gain an understanding of their chosen profession, while experienced software quality engineers can use this handbook as a reference when performing their daily work. Trainers and educators can use the book to help propagate software quality engineering knowledge to future software practitioners and managers. Among all its varied audiences, this handbook will establish a common vocabulary to communicate about software and quality, thus increasing the professionalism of the industry and eliminating the wastes that can result from ambiguity and misunderstandings.


Before striking down laws increasing copyright's domain, judges and legislators are asking for evidence that information products will be created even if copyright protection is not provided. The future of Internet technology depends on locating this evidence in time to limit expansive copyright. United States law, however, already protects information products under copyright. Hence, this counterfactual evidence that judges request cannot be generated in the United States. In response to the demand for data, American legal scholars have attempted to mine evidence from open software and other non-commercial endeavors on the Internet. However, these endeavors have been dismissed as exceptions or "cults,�? unrelated to mainstream industry needs. This Article, for the first time, provides evidence of growth in the commercial software industry without intellectual property protection. Between 1993 and 2010, the software industry in India emerged as the fastest growing in the world, accounting for $76 billion in revenues by 2010. In the same time period, the software industry in India remained unaffected by changes in intellectual property protection for software. By demonstrating industry growth without strong intellectual property protections, the Indian data fills the critical gap in American literature. Moreover, the comparative data from India enables scholars to separate causality from outcomes in specific empirical and analytical studies emerging out of the United States. In the case study of California's Silicon Valley, for instance, there is a risk that causality may be extrapolated to alternative California statutes, giving rise to errors of second order. The comparative analysis checks this potential inaccuracy. The industry in India also provides illuminating data from contracting practices — decisive evidence of the legal infrastructure firms need and will create by contract, if not found in a priori law. This study equips policy-makers to go beyond the "historic accident�? explanation to understand why the software industry flourishes where it does.


While Chinese law occupies a sui generis position according to the classification formulated by learned legal comparativists, namely, East Asian law, it is generally acknowledged that Chinese law comfortably wears the dress of civil-law. The Chinese civil law tradition finds its historical roots in the late Qing Dynasty (1902-1911). Long before Alan Watson's magisterial book on the legal transplant, China experimented with importing foreign law. More to the point, the newly enacted Chinese Property Code, in effect for more than a year still has this feature. With closer scrutiny, the Chinese property code of 2007 is found to be based largely on civil law models, particularly the German and Swiss ones. This constitutes a solid step towards the finalization of a Chinese civil code. The formalization and entrenchment of individual property rights can scarcely be overestimated for not only it is of great interest to Chinese jurists but also it has attracted the attention of international lawyers with a comparative perspective. The new property code is an evolution rather than a revolution, since in bringing it up to date it is meeting new social and economic needs. That said, it is little more than an organic development of the existing law. Consequently, one would expect to find in the new legislation many traces of its past history. It is worth noting that any legal development is not a complete break with its past. Chinese law is no exception. A historical perspective exploring the origin of the traditions of civil law is both necessary and useful for it can shed light on the direction of the future development of Chinese private law.


This work proposes an efficient hardware Implementation of sequential stack decoding of binary block codes. The decoder can be applied for soft input decoding for generalized concatenated (GC) codes. The GC codes are constructed from inner nested binary Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes and outer Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. In order to enable soft input decoding for the inner BCH block codes, a sequential stack decoding algorithm is used.


see, a quarterly journal published by The Friends of Photography, presents striking photography and fine writing that explore the impact of lens-based images on contemporary culture. see places the medium of photography within the broad discourse of visual culture, including art, advertising, mass media, and literature. Unlike conventional photography-related journals, see lets photographers speak for themselves about their work and gives writers the freedom to address visual issues across a broad spectrum of concerns. Photographs ranging from contemporary to historical, as well as images from lens-based media amd new electronic environments, are featured in tandem with fiction, poetry, essays, and critical commentary that respond to our image-dominated surroundings. In addition to beautifully reproduced portfolios of photographs and insightful, provocative writings, each volume of see includes a section of artist's pages, reviews of current exhibitions, books, and multimedia titles; and regular columns that address the formative and functional aspects of visual culture.