Continuously improving imaging technologies allow to capture the complex spatial
geometry of particles. Consequently, methods to characterize their three
dimensional shapes must become more sophisticated, too. Our contribution to
the geometric analysis of particles based on 3d image data is to unambiguously
generalize size and shape descriptors used in 2d particle analysis to the spatial
setting.
While being defined and meaningful for arbitrary particles, the characteristics
were actually selected motivated by the application to technical cleanliness. Residual
dirt particles can seriously harm mechanical components in vehicles, machines,
or medical instruments. 3d geometric characterization based on micro-computed
tomography allows to detect dangerous particles reliably and with
high throughput. It thus enables intervention within the production line. Analogously
to the commonly agreed standards for the two dimensional case, we
show how to classify 3d particles as granules, chips and fibers on the basis of
the chosen characteristics. The application to 3d image data of dirt particles is
demonstrated.


Challenging all who are concerned about religion in today's world, J. Deotis Roberts outlines a new way of looking at the essential questions. Roberts proposes a theology concerned with concrete and specific situations that also retains a universal vision. In discussing the relationship of American black thought to African, liberation, feminist, Asian, and Euro-American theologies, he covers significant religious issues such as love, justice, power, and evil.


This piece takes up the competing concepts of property and heritage. Recent scholarship views property as a series of connections and obligations - rather than the traditional power to control, transfer or exclude. This new view of property may be safeguarding resources for future generations, but also imposes onerous obligations based on concerns over environmental protection, the protection of cultural resources, group rights, and even rights to digital property. Yet these obligations can also be imposed on subsequent generations, and certain obligations are imposed now based on the actions of past generations. This article examines the multigenerational aspects of property via a body of law which should be called heritage law. Heritage law now governs a wide range of activities some of which include: preventing destruction of works of art, preventing the theft of art and antiquities, preventing the illegal excavation of antiquities, preventing the mutilation and destruction of ancient structures and sites, creating a means for preserving sites and monuments, and even righting past wrongs. This piece justifies the new conceptualization in two ways. First, by showing that properly distinguishing property and heritage will allow us to better protect heritage with a richer, fuller understanding of the concept. And second by demonstrating how current definitions lead to imprecise analysis, which may produce troubling legal conclusions.A growing body of heritage law has extended the limitations periods for certain cultural disputes. This has shifted the calculus for the long-term control of real, movable, and even digital property. This can be acutely seen with respect to cultural repatriation claims - specifically the claims of claimants to works of art forcibly taken during World War II; or the claims by Peru to certain anthropological objects now in the possession of Yale University which were removed by Hiram Bingham in the early part of the 20th Century.


"Clinical experiences are integral to the education process in many professions. Professional socialization is one area of students' development enhanced by clinical experience. Professional socialization includes learning in the affective domain by experiencing moral, ethical and legal practice as well as developing confidence in students' clinical practice. This study examined the role of clinical experience for professional socialization in Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs (CAAHEP) accredited athletic training education programs. This was done by examining entry-level athletic trainers' perceptions of the importance of four common clinical experiences in the development of selected affective domain educational competencies. These experiences were peer practice, approved clinical instructor (ACI) instruction, practice coverage and game coverage. The affective domain competencies were chosen because they included aspects of professional socialization such as role identity and moral ethical and legal practice of athletic training. A quantitative, researcher developed, web based survey was designed and used to collect perception data from newly certified athletic trainers who had graduated from a CAAHEP accredited athletic training education program. While all four common clinical experiences were reported as important to subject mastery of the competencies, ACI instruction and practice coverage were reported to be more important than both peer practice and game coverage. These results are important to athletic training educators as they try to develop the best possible combination of classroom, laboratory and clinical experience to better prepare future generations of confident and successful practicing athletic trainers. "--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


In recent years, multiple efforts for reducing energy usage have been proposed. Especially buildings offer high potentials for energy savings. In this paper, we present a novel approach for intelligent energy control that combines a simple infrastructure using low cost sensors with the reasoning capabilities of Complex Event Processing. The key issues of the approach are a sophisticated semantic domain model and a multi-staged event processing architecture leading to an intelligent, situation-aware energy management system.


Summary A 74-year-old woman presented with progressive lethargy, confusion, poor appetite and abdominal pain. She was found to have non-PTH-mediated severe hypercalcemia with renal failure and metabolic alkalosis. Extensive workup for hypercalcemia to rule out alternate etiology was unrevealing. Upon further questioning, she was taking excess calcium carbonate (Tums) for her worsening heartburn. She was diagnosed with milk-alkali syndrome (MAS). Her hypercalcemia and alkalosis recovered completely with aggressive hydration along with improvement in her renal function. High index of suspicion should be maintained and history of drug and supplements, especially calcium ingestion, should be routinely asked in patients presenting with hypercalcemia to timely diagnose MAS and prevent unnecessary tests and treatments. Learning points: Suspect milk-alkali syndrome in patients with hypercalcemia, metabolic alkalosis and renal failure, especially in context of ingestion of excess calcium-containing supplements. Careful history of over-the-counter medications, supplements and diet is crucial to diagnose milk-alkali syndrome. Milk-alkali syndrome may cause severe hypercalcemia in up to 25–30% of cases.


This study's purpose was to investigate the college readiness of students from three concurrent enrollment programs at a North Carolina community college. Groups included participants in the Huskins dual credit program, the non-Huskins dual enrollment program, the early college high school, a non-concurrently enrolled high school comparison group, and a regularly matriculated college comparison group. Cognitive college readiness variables included the percentage of Cs or better in college transfer courses and the number of acceptances into colleges at various degrees of entrance difficulty. Non-cognitive college readiness variables included commitment to education, self- and resource-management, interpersonal and social skills, academic success skills, and career planning skills.
After controlling for age, ethnicity, gender, prior completion of college transfer courses, completion of remedial courses, and placement test scores, the Huskins and non-Huskins groups had significantly higher probabilities of Cs or better than the college comparison group. After controlling for age, ethnicity, gender, and pretest levels of the five non-cognitive college readiness variables, a combined group of Huskins and non-Huskins students had significantly higher self- and resource-management skills than the high school comparison group, and all three concurrent enrollment groups had significantly higher levels of career planning skills than the high school comparison group.


In the present thesis experimental investigation to study turbulent flame characteristics using laser based methods is presented. Combustion inside almost all technical industrial devices takes place under turbulent environment. In addition, a significant amount of effort is ongoing to improve the knowledge of turbulent combustion. This work is focussed on the turbulent-chemistry interaction, which remains to be the bottleneck problem in turbulent combustion. Combustion flames from turbulent opposed jet burner and swirl stabilized burner have been investigated using laser induced fluorescence utilizing single-point, single-scalar as well as state of the art multi-scalar, planar technique. Investigation on flames from turbulent opposed jet burner has been carried out. With the same burner set-up, flames from the partially-premixed mode to the premixed mode have been studied while varying parameters like Reynolds numbers and equivalence ratio. The results from the current work provide a detailed insight on flame physics, flame front characteristics, flame front dynamics and extinction phenomenon. Local flame area distribution results have been evaluated and used to confirm for the flame symmetry of turbulent opposed jet burner. It is found that flame stability is decreased not due to small wrinkling of the flame front but due to the total flame stretch, thus confirming the presence of "young turbulence". Young turbulence is characterized by large eddies that yet do not have decayed to smaller structures along the turbulent energy cascade due to limited residence time. In addition it is also concluded that flame extinction phenomenon is due to the large eddies rather than small eddies that disrupts the reaction zone. A technical relevant lean premixed flame from a swirled stabilized turbulent jet burner was used as another test case. Location of peak heat release rate using state of the art planar laser induced fluorescence has been studied in this flame. Single laser system has been used to simultaneously detect two molecular species namely, hydroxyl [OH] and formaldehyde [HCHO]. Snap-shot of peak heat release rate have been provided by simultaneously multiplying spatially and temporarily matched images from both detected molecule. 1000 single-shot images have been taken to build sufficient and clean statistical results. In addition to the experimental work, advanced image processing routines have been developed and applied for automatic data enhancement and analysis. Several algorithms employing filters, smoothing functions and image enhancement were tested and checked for their end results. Sensitive analysis to choose the combination of right parameters has been also done and is specific to the images evaluated in the present work. Lastly, experimental investigation from the current thesis will help in building a data bank for such flames. As the numerical models due to their limitations, requires experimental information to test for their efficacy and capabilities, these results will help to validate numerical models.


Texas Methodist Centennial Yearbook includes six sections. From the table of contents: Section I: This section deals with the careers of Bishop H. A. Boaz and Bishop A. Frank Smith--The early beginnings of Methodism in England under John Wesley with illustrations of his family and religious life--His experiences in America--Early days in Texas--Pioneer Methodist educational institutions along with present-day ones--Early leaders of Texas Methodism--Sketches of important events--Portraits of various clerical and lay leaders. Sections II-IV: Minutes of the North Texas, West Texas, Central Texas, Texas, and Northwest Texas Conferences including statistical tables and pictures of the ministers. Index to pictures starts on page 790; indexes to various schools, historic scenes and events and to historical sketches start on page 796.


I analyze recent federal minimum wage increases using the Current Population Survey. The relevant minimum wage increases were differentially binding across states, generating natural comparison groups. I first estimate a standard difference-in-differences model on samples restricted to relatively low-skilled individuals, as described by their ages and education levels. I also employ a triple-difference framework that utilizes continuous variation in the minimum wage's bite across skill groups. In both frameworks, estimates are robust to adopting a range of alternative strategies, including matching on the size of states' housing declines, to account for variation in the Great Recession's severity across states. My baseline estimate is that this period's full set of minimum wage increases reduced employment among individuals ages 16 to 30 with less than a high school education by 5.6 percentage points. This estimate accounts for 43 percent of the sustained, 13 percentage point decline in this skill group's employment rate and a 0.49 percentage point decline in employment across the full population ages 16 to 64.


There is a growing demand in higher education for universities to introduce teaching methods that achieve the learning outcomes of vocational education. The need for vocational educational outcomes was met in this study involving a service learning activity designed to provide basic professional auditing competencies. The details of the design and implementation of the auditing project are explained. The methodology employed in this study is qualitative in nature. Analysis was based on a survey designed to elicit feedback regarding the experience gained from participating in the audit project. The analysis indicates that the students perceived the audit project to be beneficial to their learning and development of accounting, communication and teamwork skills. Due to the limited number of participants and the qualitative methodology the results are not geralizabable. However, the results do provide support for the use of service learning activities to provide experiential learning and an awareness of community service consistent with the existing literature.


William Godwin is often cited in contemporary philosophical discussions of ethical impartiality, within which he functions as a sort of shorthand for a particularly crude and extreme act-utilitarianism, one that contains no foundational commitments other than the maximizing of some conception of the general good. This article offers a reinterpretation of Godwin's argument, by focusing closely on the ambiguous nature of its justificatory foundations. Although utilitarian political theories seem to have two possible justifications available to them – egalitarian and teleological – there has been little effort to establish which one of them Godwin's argument for impartiality relies on. This problem becomes more complicated when it is acknowledged that Godwin actually provides two different justifications for impartiality, only one of which is consequentialist. The other seems to make a case based on the recognition of moral worth and virtue. This is something confirmed through analysis of Godwin's writings on equality and suggests his political theory is more complex than most philosophers are willing to admit.


The International Law Commission was established in 1947 with a view to carrying out the responsibility of the General Assembly, under article 13(1)(a) of the Charter of the United Nations, to "initiate studies and make recommendations for the purpose of ... encouraging the progressive development of international law and its codification." Since its first session in 1949, the Commission has considered a wide-range of topics of international law and made a number of proposals for its codification and progressive development, some of which have served as the basis for the subsequent adoption of major multilateral treaties. The Yearbook of the International Law Commission contains the official records of the Commission and is an indispensable tool for the preservation of the legislative history of the documents emanating from the Commission, as well as for the teaching, study, dissemination and wider appreciation of the efforts undertaken by the Commission in the progressive development of international law and its codification. Volume II (Part One) reproduces the edited versions of the official documents considered by the Commission at the respective annual session.


Jordan, Christopher.  My First NHL® Book Series (Hockey Shapes, Hockey Colours, Hockey 123, Hockey Opposites, Hockey Animals, Hockey ABC) . Toronto: Tundra Books, 2011.  Print [Board Books]. These six volumes are board books, with thick pages that would be difficult to tear and wipe-able surfaces that will withstand sticky baby fingers.  They cover the standard content of first books for pre-readers, but using NHL® examples.  In some of the books, the NHL® examples work well.  For example in Hockey 123 , there are 2 hockey nets, 5 pairs of skates, and 11 whistles. In other books the examples seem forced and awkward. For example, in Hockey Opposites , "fast" and "slow" are illustrated by a forward and a goalie, respectively.  It would be very difficult for a child at the board-book reading stage to understand what a forward and a goalie are, much less who moves at what speed.  Moreover, I think most people would recognize that while goalies do not usually move quickly around the rink, their movements are lightning-fast and a "slow" goalie wouldn't have a job in the NHL®. With the exception of Hockey 123 , these books are too complex for pre-readers.  Most of the six books contain text which is at a Grade 6 reading level or higher.  For example, in Hockey Shapes , the description which accompanies the "leaf" shape begins, "[t]here are many different species of leaves, ranging in colour, shape, and size…".   This is one of several clues that these books are meant as much for adults who will be reading them aloud, as for children.  In Hockey ABC many of the images chosen to illustrate the alphabet will appeal more to parents than to children.  In this book, "G" is not for the obvious "goalie", but for Gretzky, whom children today will never see play.  Too often Jordan relies on photographs of players, which are complex images, for his illustrations.  In Hockey Animals , for example, instead of using just the team symbol containing the animal shape, Jordan uses full-length player shots, where the logo on the jersey is a tiny part of the image. There is a reason that board books usually contain simple shapes, bold colours and single syllable words.  It is hard to imagine sitting with a 1-year-old child on your lap reading Hockey ABC and saying, 'Now you try saying this, sweetie… "O is for Ovechkin"'. However, if you assume that these books are really for hockey-crazed parents, then they will probably find readers. Recommended with reservations:  2 out of 4 stars Reviewer:  Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines.  Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.


Conservation easements raise a number of interesting legal issues, not the least of which is whether a conservation easement is automatically extinguished pursuant to the real property law doctrine of merger if its government or nonprofit holder acquires title to the encumbered land. This article explains that merger generally should not occur in such cases because the unity of ownership that is required for the doctrine to apply typically will not be present. This article also explains that extinguishing conservation easements that continue to provide significant benefits to the public through the doctrine of merger would be contrary to the conservation and historic preservation policies that underlie the state enabling statutes and the federal and state easement purchase and tax incentive programs.


The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. He counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, Pessoa concludes, a truly dynamic network view of the brain will emerge, in which "emotion" and "cognition" may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.


What if your clothing could change color to complement your skin tone, respond to your racing heartbeat, or connect you with a loved one from afar? Welcome to the world of shoes that can dynamically shift your height, jackets that display when the next bus is coming, and neckties that can nudge your business partner from across the room. Whether it be for fashion, function, or human connectedness, wearable electronics can be used to design interactive systems that are intimate and engaging. Make: Wearable Electronics is intended for those with an interest in physical computing who are looking to create interfaces or systems that live on the body. Perfect for makers new to wearable tech, this book introduces you to the tools, materials, and techniques for creating interactive electronic circuits and embedding them in clothing and other things you can wear. Each chapter features experiments to get you comfortable with the technology and then invites you to build upon that knowledge with your own projects. Fully illustrated with step-by-step instructions and images of amazing creations made by artists and professional designers, this book offers a concrete understanding of electronic circuits and how you can use them to bring your wearable projects from concept to prototype.


The paper argues for the significance of complexity science and its role in the ethics of teaching that is not based on moral codes. Through the work of Varela on human consciousness, and the work of Newburg and his colleagues on neurotheology, the paper explores the elements of human consciousness that are relevant for characterising an ethical act. Varela's concepts of emergent self and autopoiesis as well as Newburg's concept of Absolute Unitary Being provide the necessary conditions for characterizing an ethical act as essentially unconscious. Finally the paper discusses the implication of these contentions for ethics in teaching.


Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens' Lawyers and the Courts (LATC), published in 1967, was the first major critical social history of the English legal system from the industrial revolution to modern times (1750-1965). It has proved matchless. It is the definitive book in the field, and its core arguments remain largely unchallenged more than forty years after its publication. Challenging the dominant traditions of doctrinal legal scholarship and lawyers' legal history by emphasising the importance of serious empirical research on current problems, it offered a less reverential alternative to the prevailing orthodoxies of the day and asked whether England's legal services and legal education had developed in a way that best served the public interest. This paper examines how and why LATC came to be written, its reception and its larger significance. It addresses Robert Stevens' intellectual trajectory, thereby, providing a window on the history of legal education and thought in England during the 1950's and '60's and the significance of the United States and Africa to those dissatisfied with England's dominant tradition of legal formalism. It demonstrates both the coercive structures by which the legal profession sought to silence criticism of the status quo and some of the ways in which Stevens' projects and ideas for realizing them are still important for the education of present day lawyers, scholars and law reformers. Part One begins with a brief overview of the principal arguments and concerns of LATC. Parts Two and Three seek to historicize LATC. Part Two places Stevens in the context of the personal and intellectual influences of his formative years, 1940-65, and relevant legal-political preoccupations: including the importance of history to his thinking; his disappointment with Oxford legal education; the confines of English legal scholarship, the legal profession and legal culture; the excitement of American legal education and legal practice, in particular, his postgraduate studies at Yale Law School and his encounter with Myres McDougall (1906-1998) and post-Realism; the importance of his experience of teaching at the University of East Africa in Dar es Salaam; and the vital influence of Richard Titmuss (1907–1973) and Brian Abel-Smith (1926-1996), two pioneering British social policy researchers, leading policy advisors and chroniclers of and campaigners against social injustice. Part Three links Stevens' work to England in the heady days of the early-mid 1960's, a period when change, and the possibility of effecting political, cultural and social change, was "in the air". Part Four considers LATC's controversial reception when it was published in 1967 and seeks to clarify why it encountered fierce opposition and the intellectual tradition that LATC reflected, sustained and promoted. The concluding section briefly considers LATC's impact on and significance for the fields of legal history and legal services. This essay makes extensive use of interviews with Robert Stevens and archival research and is published in a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession on the work of Robert Stevens, the other contributors being: Richard Abel, Tony Bradney, Fiona Cownie, Bill Felstiner, Alan Paterson and William Twining.


The legal origin literature documents that civil and common law traditions have different impact on rules and economic outcomes. We contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between corporate social responsibility and legal origins. Consistently with the main differences in historical and legal backgrounds and net of industry specific effects, the common law origin has a significant and positive impact on the Corporate Governance and Community Involvement domains, while the French legal tradition of civil law on the Human Resources domain. We also document that the lack of observable differences in the environmental domain can be explained by firms' progressive convergence to industry sustainability standards.


The Sanskrit Mahabharata is one of the most important texts to emerge from the Indian cultural tradition. At almost 75,000 verses it is the longest poem in the world, and throughout Indian history it has been hugely influential in shaping gender and social norms. In the context of ancient India, it is the definitive cultural narrative in the construction of masculine, feminine and alternative gender roles.

This book brings together many of the most respected scholars in the field of Mahabharata studies, as well as some of its most promising young scholars. By focusing specifically on gender constructions, some of the most innovative aspects of the Mahabharata are highlighted. Whilst taking account of feminist scholarship, the contributors see the Mahabharata as providing an opportunity to frame discussion of gender in literature not just in terms of the socio-historical roles of men and women. Instead they analyze the text in terms of the wider poetic and philosophical possibilities thrown up by the semiotics of gendering. Consequently, the book bridges a gap in text-critical methodology between the traditional philological approach and more recent trends in gender and literary theory.

Gender and Narrative in the Mahabharata will be appreciated by readers interested in South Asian studies, Hinduism, religious studies and gender studies.


This study investigates the extent to which family income is associated with an extensive range of child cognitive and behavioural outcomes in a cohort of almost 19 000 British children born between 2000 and 2001. Merging the economists' and developmental psychologists' approaches, it also attempts to identify the main mechanisms through which family economic resources translate into better developmental outcomes for children. The relative and joint relevance of three groups of mediating factors (parental stress, parental investment and other family-related pathways), identified from the recent economic and psychological literature, are examined both in a cross-sectional ('mopping-up' approach) and in a panel data (fixed effects models) context. Results indicate a weak or absent direct effect of family economic resources on child development after controlling for potential mediating mechanisms. The study also identifies key mediating factors (e.g. maternal depression, a cognitively stimulating home environment, parenting practices and length of breastfeeding) that could be targeted by government initiatives in order to effectively improve children's intellectual development and behaviour beyond what income redistribution can achieve.


Alongside famous long works such as "Beowulf", Old English poetry offers a large number of shorter compositions, many of them on explicitly Christian themes. This volume of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library presents twenty-nine of these shorter religious poems composed in Old and early Middle English between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Among the texts, which demonstrate the remarkable versatility of early English verse, are colorful allegories of the natural world, poems dedicated to Christian prayer and morality, and powerful meditations on death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Previously edited in many different places and in some instances lacking accessible translations, many of these poems have remained little known outside scholarly circles. The present volume aims to offer this important body of texts to a wider audience by bringing them together in one collection and providing all of them with up-to-date translations and explanatory notes. An introduction sets the poems in their literary-historical contexts, which are further illustrated by two appendices, including the first complete modern English translation of the so-called Old English Benedictine Office.


In their comprehensive paper, Montague Yudelman, Annu Ratta, and David Nygaard examine the key issues with regard to pest management and food production over the coming decades. They draw attention to the lack of adequate information on the magnitude and impact of pest losses; with out such information, policy makers are handicapped when devising strategies for meeting food needs. The authors address both chemical and nonchemical approaches to pest management, high lighting the importance of biotechnology. There is growing public sentiment against biotechnology but little appreciation as yet of its contributions to alleviating hunger by, among other things, controlling pest losses. The authors also adress the important subject of the roles of different actors in pest management, most notably the private sector. A world with out pests is unrealistic and probably undesirable. However, a world with severely reduced losses of food production to pests is achievable by 2020. This paper shows us how.


Telemedicine has become a method of choice for improved access to quality healthcare services world over. The technology, which has been used for decades in the developed world, is now being diffused to developing countries. However, many initiatives have not lived to their expectations. In this paper, we present some of the main hindrances to telemedicine adoption, implementation and sustainability in Uganda. Case studies were carried out in two hospitals that have attempted to use the technology. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to collect and analyze the data. Our findings indicate that the key factors affecting telemedicine in Uganda were lack of telemedicine policy, knowledge and skills and resistance to change by members of staff in the hospitals. A discussion of the findings inline with some selected technology adoption theories and models is done. We have also identified and discussed the key requirements for sustainable telemedicine in Uganda.


Copyright and Reprint Permission: Abstracting is permitted with credit to the source. Libraries are permitted to photocopy beyond the limit of U.S. copyright law, for private use of patrons, those articles in this volume that carry a code at the bottom of the first page, provided that the per-copy fee indicated in the code is paid through the


Innovative technologies and concepts will emerge as we move towards a more dynamic, service-based, market-driven infrastructure, where energy efficiency and savings can be facilitated by interactive distribution networks. A new generation of fully interactive Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure has to be developed to support the optimal exploitation of the changing, complex business processes and to enable the efficient functioning of the deregulated energy market for the benefit of citizens and businesses. The architecture of such distributed system landscapes must be designed and validated, standards need to be created and widely supported, and comprehensive, reliable IT applications will need to be implemented. The collaboration between a smart house and a smart grid is a promising approach which, with the help of ICT can fully unleash the capabilities of the smart electricity network.


The first part of the following paper deals with varying points of criticism forwarded against Ordoliberalism. Here, it is not the aim to directly falsify each argument on its own; rather, the author tries to give a precise overview of the spectrum of critique. The second section picks out one argument of critical review – namely that the ordoliberal concept of the state is somewhat elitist and grounded on intellectual experts. Based on the previous sections, the final part differentiates two kinds of genesis of norms: an evolutionary and an elitist one – both (latently) present within Ordoliberalism. In combination with the twolevel differentiation between individual and regulatory ethics, the essay allows for a distinction between individual-ethical norms based on an evolutionary genesis of norms and regulatory-ethical norms based on an elitist understanding of norms. A by-product of the author's argument is a (further) demarcation within neoliberalism.


It is striking that Justice Rufus W. Peckham has received so little scholarly attention and remains without a biography. He was, of course, the author of the Lochner v. New York (1905), one of the most famous and contested decisions in the history of the Supreme Court. Moreover, Peckham wrote important opinions dealing with contractual freedom, anti-trust law, eminent domain, dormant commerce power, and the Eleventh Amendment. He was clearly among the intellectual leaders of the Fuller Court. This paper seeks to take a fresh look at Peckham's career and assess his contributions to constitutional jurisprudence. The paper argues that Peckham, although a champion of economic liberty, was neither a doctrinaire adherent to laissez-faire principles or a one-sided defender of large-scale business interest. Instead, his overriding concern was to protect small, self-sufficient entrepreneurs from both excessive governmental regulation and exploitation by concentrated private power.


This is my opening statement in a 4-part exchange between Professor Teachout and me. The test of great scholarship is that it changes the way people think and the way people live. That is also true for legal academic scholarship. But, for legal academics, perhaps, the greatest sign of scholarly achievement is judicial reliance upon our craftsmanship. By any of these measures, Professor Teachout's 2009 Cornell Law Review publication, The Anti-Corruption Principle, is a success. One short year after publication, in 2010, Anti-Corruption Principle was relied upon by Justice Stevens in his Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee dissent, just as it was cited, disapprovingly, by Justice Scalia in his concurrence. If that were not enough of an accomplishment, Anti-Corruption Principle has also been cited in practitioners' Supreme Court briefs, in other federal and state appellate and trial court briefs, and in some thirty academic articles. Finally, Anti-Corruption Principle has entered the public discourse: George Will excoriated Teachout's article in his nationally syndicated column. Now, that is an achievement. Teachout's Anti-Corruption Principle is part-and-parcel of the originalist project. It is an attempt to understand the Constitution in light of its text, drafting records, ratification debates, and general late eighteenth century history. Specifically, Teachout makes three related historical and interpretive claims. First, the Framers were "obsessed" with corruption. In other words, preventing or, at least, minimizing corruption was among the Framers' primary goals, and absent an appreciation of this purpose, one cannot understand either the Constitution's global architecture or several of its key structural provisions. Second, these separate individual anti-corruption constitutional provisions, working together, give rise to a separate or free-standing structural anti-corruption principle ("ACP"). And, third, the ACP can compete against other constitutional provisions and doctrines, thereby providing originalist foundations for upholding congressional enactments which would otherwise be struck down under competing principles. For example, Teachout points to the Foreign Emoluments Clause ("FEC"), which provides: [N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them [i.e., the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State. Teachout suggests that foreign governments which lack loyalties running to the United States, may be analogized to "wealthy corporations," whose "legal loyalties necessarily exclude patriotism." Just as Congress, under the FEC, may proscribe (at least certain) federal officers from accepting gifts from foreign governments, Congress, Teachout suggests, may also have a concomitant power under the ACP to proscribe corporate election campaign contributions and spending. The stakes here are quite high: If Teachout is correct, then much First Amendment doctrine and election-law jurisprudence will have to give way (or, at least, be seriously reexamined) in light of the newly discovered (or rediscovered) principle of constitutional interpretation. Indeed, Justice Stevens, and the three dissenters who joined him, used Citizens United as just such an occasion: The dissent sought to recast First Amendment jurisprudence in light of a competing constitutional vision – the Framers' anti-corruption principle. Other commentators have criticized Teachout in regard to the second step and third step of her analysis. My critique, by contrast, will largely focus on the first step of Teachout's analysis – her initial historical and textual claims. Teachout's historical claim is simply wrong: the Founders were not "obsessed" with corruption. Second, Teachout misunderstands the constitutional text giving rise to her purported free-standing anti-corruption principle. Even if one concedes (as, in fact, I do) the existence of a free-standing anti-corruption principle, the scope of that principle extends exclusively to appointed federal offices, not to (state or federal) elective positions. Thus, Teachout's ACP cannot inform our First Amendment analysis in regard to congressional power over state or federal election processes.This article ran on Colloquy on April 2012; it is being reprinted in Northwestern University Law Review circa December 2012.


While studying how a cell keeps its genetic material intact, scientists at Johns Hopkins got busy alternately knocking out two catalysts vital to managing a yeast cell's energy. They discovered to their complete surprise that the removal of one of them led the cell to turn off 70 percent of its 5,000 genes and die. "We were completely unprepared for such a dramatic event," says Jef Boeke, Ph.D., Sc.D., a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Hopkins and author of the study. "We've never seen anything that can turn off that many genes in a cell at once." The unexpected finding linking both gene usage and energy management machinery is "like finding out that an enzyme that breaks down food in the stomach also helps you remember telephone numbers or that preventing such digestion makesyou forget them," Boeke added. The research, published in the July 21 issue of Molecular Cell, could lead to new strategies one day to slow aging and treat cancer, events closely linked to changes in gene control and energy metabolism. Working at the High Throughput Biology Center of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at Hopkins, Boeke's team uses yeast almost exclusively for such studies because even though they are single-celled organisms, they grow quickly, are easy to analyze in the lab, and contain many genes and biological processes present in other animals, including humans. For example, like all animal cells, yeast use sugar as an energy source. To harvest the energy contained in sugar, the yeast must convert the sugar into other molecules in a series of biochemical steps helped along the way by enzymes that make each step happen faster. Focusing on two of these enzymes, closely related to each other, the research team separately removed each from the yeast cells to see if either or both were essential to the cell's survival. The researchers found that one of these enzymes - called Acs1p - which is generally inactive had little apparent impact when they removed it. "The yeast seemed relatively unscathed," said Boeke. But when they knocked out the other one - called Asc2p - the yeast cells died. That made it clear that this enzyme is critical for survival. Further analysis with high-power microscopes revealed that this second enzyme, Asc2p, was residing - unexpectedly -- in the part of the cell housing its genetic material - its chromosomes - rather than in the part of the cell - the mitochondria -- that harvests energy from sugar. But why would an enzyme involved in generating energy live in the "wrong" part of the cell? A closer look at the chromosomal and non-chromosomal parts of the cell showed that although the enzyme itself is found only in the former, the chemical made by it is found in both places. The question remained as to why the enzyme Asc2p and its chemical product, known as acetyl-CoA, are found near chromosomes. Chromosomes contain both DNA, which contains genes, and proteins around which the DNA is wrapped for storage and support. In addition to being used for energy, the acetyl part of acetyl-CoA also is used in controlling how tightly DNA is wrapped in the chromosomes. More acetyl on chromosomes leads to looser wrapped DNA. And locations along chromosomes that contain looser wrapped DNA appear to be regions where genes are turned on. When the research team removed the enzyme Asc2p that makes acetyl-CoA from yeast cells, they predicted, if they were right about why the enzyme and its chemical product are found near chromosomes, that the chromosomes would have less acetyl-CoA. Less acetyl-CoA, they reasoned, could cause DNA to be more tightly wrapped in chromosomes, and this might lead to genes being turned off. That is exactly what they found when they looked at the more than 5,000 genes in the yeast cells lacking this enzyme. More than 70 percent of them were indeed turned off. According to Boeke, other studies have shown that reducing the number of calories a yeast cell "eats" not only can affect chromosomes, but also increase lifespan, allowing the yeast to live longer, an observation that fits their findings.


The present study investigates effects of wildfire emissions on air quality in Europe during an intense fire season that occurred in summer 2003. A meso-scale chemistry transport model CHIMERE is used, together with ground based and satellite aerosol optical measurements, to assess the dispersion of fire emissions and to quantify the associated radiative effects. The model has been improved to take into account a MODIS-derived daily smoke emission inventory as well as the injection altitude of smoke particles. The simulated aerosol optical properties are put into a radiative transfer model to estimate (off-line) the effects of smoke particles on photolysis rates and atmospheric radiative forcing. We have found that the simulated wildfires generated comparable amounts of primary aerosol pollutants (130 kTons of PM 2.5 , fine particles) to anthropogenic sources during August 2003, and caused significant changes in aerosol optical properties not only close to the fire source regions, but also over a large part of Europe as a result of the long-range transport of the smoke. Including these emissions into the model significantly improved its performance in simulating observed aerosol concentrations and optical properties. Quantitative comparison with MODIS and POLDER data during the major fire event (3–8 August 2003) showed the ability of the model to reproduce high aerosol optical thickness (AOT) over Northern Europe caused by the advection of the smoke plume from the Portugal source region. Although there was a fairly good spatial agreement with satellite data (correlation coefficients ranging from 0.4 to 0.9), the temporal variability of AOT data at specific AERONET locations was not well captured by the model. Statistical analyses of model-simulated AOT data at AERONET ground stations showed a significant decrease in the model biases suggesting that wildfire emissions are responsible for a 30% enhancement in mean AOT values during the heat-wave episode. The implications for air quality over a large part of Europe are significant during this episode. First, directly, the modeled wildfire emissions caused an increase in average PM 2.5 ground concentrations from 20 to 200%. The largest enhancement in PM 2.5 concentrations stayed, however, confined within a 200 km area around the fire source locations and reached up to 40 μg/m³. Second, indirectly, the presence of elevated smoke layers over Europe significantly altered atmospheric radiative properties: the model results imply a 10 to 30% decrease in photolysis rates and an increase in atmospheric radiative forcing of 10–35 W m −2 during the period of strong fire influence throughout a large part of Europe. These results suggest that sporadic wildfire events may have significant effects on regional photochemistry and atmospheric stability, and need to be considered in current chemistry-transport models.


A globally integrated carbon observation and analysis system is needed to improve the fundamental understanding of the global carbon cycle, to improve our ability to project future changes, and to verify the effectiveness of policies aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. Building an integrated carbon observation system requires transformational advances from the existing sparse, exploratory framework towards a dense, robust, and sustained system in all components: anthropogenic emissions, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the terrestrial biosphere. The paper is addressed to scientists, policymakers, and funding agencies who need to have a global picture of the current state of the (diverse) carbon observations. We identify the current state of carbon observations, and the needs and notional requirements for a global integrated carbon observation system that can be built in the next decade. A key conclusion is the substantial expansion of the ground-based observation networks required to reach the high spatial resolution for CO2 and CH4 fluxes, and for carbon stocks for addressing policy-relevant objectives, and attributing flux changes to underlying processes in each region. In order to establish flux and stock diagnostics over areas such as the southern oceans, tropical forests, and the Arctic, in situ observations will have to be complemented with remote-sensing measurements. Remote sensing offers the advantage of dense spatial coverage and frequent revisit. A key challenge is to bring remote-sensing measurements to a level of long-term consistency and accuracy so that they can be efficiently combined in models to reduce uncertainties, in synergy with ground-based data. Bringing tight observational constraints on fossil fuel and land use change emissions will be the biggest challenge for deployment of a policy-relevant integrated carbon observation system. This will require in situ and remotely sensed data at much higher resolution and density than currently achieved for natural fluxes, although over a small land area (cities, industrial sites, power plants), as well as the inclusion of fossil fuel CO2 proxy measurements such as radiocarbon in CO2 and carbon-fuel combustion tracers. Additionally, a policy-relevant carbon monitoring system should also provide mechanisms for reconciling regional top-down (atmosphere-based) and bottom-up (surface-based) flux estimates across the range of spatial and temporal scales relevant to mitigation policies. In addition, uncertainties for each observation data-stream should be assessed. The success of the system will rely on long-term commitments to monitoring, on improved international collaboration to fill gaps in the current observations, on sustained efforts to improve access to the different data streams and make databases interoperable, and on the calibration of each component of the system to agreed-upon international scales.


We present the first large-scale analysis of hardware failure rates on a million consumer PCs. We find that many failures are neither transient nor independent. Instead, a large portion of hardware induced failures are recurrent: a machine that crashes from a fault in hardware is up to two orders of magnitude more likely to crash a second time. For example, machines with at least 30 days of accumulated CPU time over an 8 month period had a 1 in 190 chance of crashing due to a CPU subsystem fault. Further, machines that crashed once had a probability of 1 in 3.3 of crashing a second time. Our study examines failures due to faults within the CPU, DRAM and disk subsystems. Our analysis spans desktops and laptops, CPU vendor, overclocking, underclocking, generic vs. brand name, and characteristics such as machine speed and calendar age. Among our many results, we find that CPU fault rates are correlated with the number of cycles executed, underclocked machines are significantly more reliable than machines running at their rated speed, and laptops are more reliable than desktops.


Groundnut is an important oilseed crop predominantly grown in Rajasthan, India and has suffered a 55 to 85 percent root rot disease caused by multiple pathogen complex mainly Aspergillus niger, Apergillus flavus, Sclerotium rolfsii, Thievaliopsis basicola, Rhizoctonia solani and Pythium aphanidermatum perennating in soil and seed. Trichoderma harzianum (Th3) was used against Groundnut varieties (GG-10, GG-20, M-13 and Local varieties) to reduce the yield loss by root rot disease during the year 2009 and 2010 in farmers' fields in twelve villages in the Jaipur district of Rajasthan. The field trials were conducted by the application of Trichoderma harzianum in the form of powder and liquid bio-formulation. Trials were conducted by treating the soil, seed and foliage with powdered bio-formulation (Th3 SD, SA) at 5 g per kg seed/soil followed by spray treatment with liquid bio-formulation (Th3 FS) at 5 ml/l along with recommended IPM practices. The crops under farmer practice were significantly lower in yields with the diagnostic blackening symptoms travelling from roots to stem affecting the vascular system followed by shredding at root-stem internodes resulting in complete wilting and plant death while in Th3 treated crop blackening reduced and the root vascular system was free of disease. Maximum values of yield (39.17 Q/ha), R.C. Index (0.15), C.F.U. (38.5 x 10 6 ), and lowest root rot incidence (14.03%) was recorded in the Th3 treated groundnut crops. Increase in annual income also encouraged farmers to use the Trichoderma technology. Participatory approach and interaction between researcher and farmers helped in quick adoption and dissemination of use of biocontrol agents for groundnut growers in Rajasthan state, India.


Knowing where to start reverse engineering a large software system, when no information other than the system's source code itself is available, is a daunting task. Having the history of the code (i.e., the versions) could be of help if this would not imply analyzing a huge amount of data. We present an approach for identifying candidate classes for reverse engineering and reengineering efforts. Our solution is based on summarizing the changes in the evolution of object-oriented software systems by defining history measurements. Our approach, named Yesterday's Weather, is an analysis based on the retrospective empirical observation that classes which changed the most in the recent past also suffer important changes in the near future. We apply this approach on two case studies and show how we can obtain an overview of the evolution of a system and pinpoint its classes that might change in the next versions.


In patients with early Alzheimer's disease, disruptions in brain networks emerge about the same time as chemical markers of the disease appear in the spinal fluid, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown. While two chemical markers in the spinal fluid are regarded as reliable indicators of early disease, the new study, published in JAMA Neurology, is among the first to show that scans of brain networks may be an equally effective and less invasive way to detect early disease. ''Tracking damage to these brain networks may also help us formulate a more detailed understanding of what happens to the brain before the onset of dementia,'' said senior author Beau Ances, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and of biomedical engineering. Diagnosing Alzheimer's early is a top priority for physicians, many of whom believe that treating patients long before dementia starts greatly improves the chances of success. Ances and his colleagues studied 207 older but cognitively normal research volunteers at the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Washington University. Over several years, spinal fluids from the volunteers were sampled multiple times and analyzed for two markers of early Alzheimer's: changes in amyloid beta, the principal ingredient of Alzheimer's brain plaques, and in tau protein, a structural component of nerve cells. The volunteers were also scanned repeatedly using a technique called resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This scan tracks the rise and fall of blood flow in different brain regions as patients rest in the scanner. Scientists use the resulting data to assess the integrity of the default mode network, a set of connections between different brain regions that becomes active when the mind is at rest. Earlier studies by Ances and other researchers have shown that Alzheimer's damages connections in the default mode network and other brain networks. The new study revealed that this damage became detectable at about the same time that amyloid beta levels began to fall and tau levels started to rise in spinal fluid. The part of the default mode network most harmed by the onset of Alzheimer's disease was the connection between two brain areas associated with memory, the posterior cingulate and medial temporal regions. The researchers are continuing to study the connections between brain network damage and the progress of early Alzheimer's disease in normal volunteers and in patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's-associated dementia.(Source: EurekAlert! A service of AAAS and theWashington University School of Medicine).


The network security framework VisITMeta allows the visual evaluation and management of security event detection policies. By means of a "what-if" simulation the sensitivity of policies to specific events can be tested and adjusted. This paper presents the results of a user study for testing the usability of the approach by measuring the correct completion of given tasks as well as the user satisfaction by means of the system usability scale.


Thanks to the availability of the MEDITS survey data, a standardized picture of the occurrence and abundance of demersal Chondrichthyes in the northern Mediterranean has been obtained. During the spring-summer period between 2012 and 2015, 41 Chondrichthyes, including 18 sharks (5 orders and 11 families), 22 batoids (3 orders and 4 families) and 1 chimaera, were detected from several geographical sub-areas (GSAs) established by the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean. Batoids had a preferential distribution on the continental shelf (10-200 m depth), while shark species were more frequent on the slope (200-800 m depth). Only three species, the Carcharhiniformes Galeus melastomus and Scyliorhinus canicula and the Torpediniformes Torpedo marmorata were caught in all GSAs studied. On the continental shelf, the Rajidae family was the most abundant, being represented in primis by Raja clavata and then by R. miraletus, R. polystigma and R. asterias. The slope was characterized by the prevalence of G. melastomus in all GSAs, followed by S. canicula, E. spinax and Squalus blainville. Areas under higher fishing pressure, such as the Adriatic Sea and the Spanish coast (with the exception of the Balearic Islands), show a low abundance of chondrichthyans, but other areas with a high level of fishing pressure, such as southwestern Sicily, show a high abundance, suggesting that other environmental drivers work together with fishing pressure to shape their distribution. Results of generalized additive models highlighted that depth is one of the most important environmental drivers influencing the distribution of both batoid and shark species, although temperature also showed a significant influence on their distribution. The approach explored in this work shows the possibility of producing maps modelling the distribution of demersal chondrichthyans in the Mediterranean that are useful for the management and conservation of these species at a regional scale. However, because of the vulnerability of these species to fishing exploitation, fishing pressure should be further incorporated in these models in addition to these environmental drivers.


District of Columbia v. Heller was a Second Amendment test case, brought by a group of libertarian lawyers on behalf of plaintiffs with respectable backgrounds and appealing reasons for seeking relief from the District of Columbia's extremely restrictive gun control regulations. Heller turned out to be a test case in a different sense as well. With almost no relevant precedent to constrain its analysis, the Supreme Court was given the opportunity to apply a jurisprudence of original meaning to the Second Amendment's manifestly puzzling text. The Chief Justice ensured that this would be a pretty fair test of originalism when he assigned the majority opinion to Justice Scalia. In Heller, the lawyers who initiated the litigation won their test case. Justice Scalia and his colleagues, however, flunked their test. This was a near perfect opportunity for the Court to demonstrate that original meaning jurisprudence is not just "living constitutionalism for conservatives," and it would been perfectly feasible to provide that demonstration. Instead, Justice Scalia's majority opinion makes a great show of being committed to the Constitution's original meaning, but fails to carry through on that commitment. In a narrow sense, the Constitution was vindicated in Heller because the Court reached an easily defensible originalist result. But the Court's reasoning is at critical points so defective-and so transparently defective in some respects-that Heller should be seen as an embarrassment for those who joined the majority opinion. I fear that it may also be widely (though unfairly) seen as an embarrassment for the interpretive approach that the Court purported to employ. Originalism deserved better from its judicial defenders.


Scholars from different fields have joined forces to reexamine every aspect of the Hebrew Bible. Their research, carried out in universities and seminaries in Europe and America, has revolutionized our understanding of almost every chapter and verse. But have they killed the Bible in the process? In "How to Read the Bible, " Harvard professor James Kugel leads the reader chapter by chapter through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, showing time and again how radically the interpretations of today's researchers differ from what people have always thought. The story of Adam and Eve, it turns out, was not originally about the "Fall of Man," but about the move from a primitive, hunter-gatherer society to a settled, agricultural one. As for the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob and Esau, these narratives were not, at their origin, about individual people at all but, rather, explanations of some feature of Israelite society as it existed centuries after these figures were said to have lived. Dinah was never raped -- her story was created by an editor to solve a certain problem in Genesis. In the earliest version of the Exodus story, Moses probably did not divide the Red Sea in half; instead, the Egyptians perished in a storm at sea. Whatever the original Ten Commandments might have been, scholars are quite sure they were different from the ones we have today. What's more, the people long supposed to have written various books of the Bible were not, in the current consensus, their real authors: David did not write the Psalms, Solomon did not write Proverbs or Ecclesiastes; indeed, there is scarcely a book in the Bible that is not the product of different, anonymous authors and editors working in different periods.Such findings pose a serious problem for adherents of traditional, Bible-based faiths. Hiding from the discoveries of modern scholars seems dishonest, but accepting them means undermining much of the Bible's reliability and authority as the word of God. What to do? In his search for a solution, Kugel leads the reader back to a group of ancient biblical interpreters who flourished at the end of the biblical period. Far from naive, these interpreters consciously set out to depart from the original meaning of the Bible's various stories, laws, and prophecies -- and they, Kugel argues, hold the key to solving the dilemma of reading the Bible today. "How to Read the Bible is, " quite simply, the best, most original book about the Bible in decades. It offers an unflinching, insider's look at the work of today's scholars, together with a sustained consideration of what the Bible was for most of its history -- before the rise of modern scholarship. Readable, clear, often funny but deeply serious in its purpose, this is a book for Christians and Jews, believers and secularists alike. It offers nothing less than a whole new way of thinking about sacred Scripture.


'My new favourite book of all time' Bill Gates TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.


Data visualization is the process of representing data as pictures to support reasoning about the underlying data. For the interpretation to be as easy as possible, we need to be as close as possible to the original data. As most visualization tools have an internal meta-model, which is different from the one for the presented data, they usually need to duplicate the original data to conform to their meta-model. This leads to an increase in the resources needed, increase which is not always justified. In this work we argue for the need of having an engine that is as close as possible to the data and we present our solution of moving the visualization tool to the data, instead of moving the data to the visualization tool. Our solution also emphasizes the necessity of reusing basic blocks to express complex visualizations and allowing the programmer to script the visualization using his preferred tools, rather than a third party format. As a validation of the expressiveness of our framework, we show how we express several already published visualizations and describe the pros and cons of the approach.


Monogenic functions play a role in quaternion analysis similarly to that of holomorphic functions in complex analysis. A holomorphic function with nonvanishing complex derivative is a conformal mapping. It is well-known that in Rn+1, n ≥ 2 the set of conformal mappings is restricted to the set of Mobius transformations only and that the Mobius transformations are not monogenic. The paper deals with a locally geometric mapping property of a subset of monogenic functions with nonvanishing hypercomplex derivatives (named M-conformal mappings). It is proved that M-conformal mappings orthogonal to all monogenic constants admit a certain change of solid angles and vice versa, that change can characterize such mappings. In addition, we determine planes in which those mappings behave like conformal mappings in the complex plane.


An essential volume for generations of writers young and old, Bird by Bird is a modern classic. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott's hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne's father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title: "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"


We show for $k \geq 2$ that if $q\geq 3$ and $n \geq 2k+1$, or $q=2$ and $n \geq 2k+2$, then any intersecting family ${\cal F}$ of $k$-subspaces of an $n$-dimensional vector space over $GF(q)$ with $\bigcap_{F \in {\cal F}} F=0$ has size at most $\left[{n-1\atop k-1}\right]-q^{k(k-1)}\left[{n-k-1\atop k-1}\right]+q^k$. This bound is sharp as is shown by Hilton-Milner type families. As an application of this result, we determine the chromatic number of the corresponding $q$-Kneser graphs.


This case study article describes the iterative design process of an adaptive, mixed-initiative calendaring tool with embedded artificial intelligence.  We establish the specific types of assistance in which the target user population expressed interest, and we highlight our findings regarding the scheduling practices and the reminding preferences of these users.  These findings motivated the redesign and enhancement of our intelligent system.  Lessons learned from the study—namely, highlighting the merits of usability toward widespread adoption and retention, and that simple problems that perhaps do not necessitate complex AI-based solutions should not go unattended merely due to their inherent simplicity—conclude the article, along with a discussion of the importance of the iterative design process for any user adaptive system.


Volumes have been written — both by courts and commentators — about the so-called independent agencies. These agencies are thought of as distinct from executive branch agencies and constitutionally insulated from presidential influence. Yet few have taken the time to ask even the most basic question: What features make an agency "independent" as opposed to "executive?" This Article is the first to systematically survey the administrative agencies for a broad set of indicia of independence — removal protection, multi-member structure, partisan balance requirements, budget and congressional communication authority, litigation authority, and adjudication authority — to answer that question. It also examines the functional differences between independent and executive agencies. As it turns out, there is no single feature, structural or functional, that every agency commonly thought of as independent shares, not even the for-cause removal provision commonly associated with independence. We therefore reject the binary distinction between independent and executive agencies. Instead all agencies should be regarded as executive and seen as falling on a spectrum from more independent to less independent. From this new understanding of administrative agencies flows a new and simpler theory of presidential control of agencies: A President can take an action with respect to an agency (assuming it is within his Article II powers) unless Congress has prohibited that action by statute. There is no tenable argument to justify any additional constitutional barrier to presidential interaction with agencies, and the dicta in Humphrey's Executor suggesting otherwise is incorrect and should be abandoned. Most importantly, we believe there is no statutory or constitutional barrier to the extension of the regulatory review executive orders to all administrative agencies. These executive orders have long exempted "independent agencies." As a result those agencies perform shoddy cost-benefit analysis when promulgating regulations, when they do so at all. The Dodd-Frank reform bill requires financial agencies, almost all of which are considered independent, to promulgate over 300 regulations. This upcoming flood of regulations underscores what has been obvious for decades that independent agencies impose massive regulatory costs, just like executive agencies. This Article aims to make it clear there is no legal barrier to the extension of the regulatory review executive orders in the hopes of emboldening a future President to overcome the political barriers to doing so.


Studies have shown that wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluents are the major pathways of organic and inorganic chemicals of anthropogenic use (=micropollutants) into aquatic environments. There, micropollutants can be transferred to ground water bodies - and may finally end up in drinking water - or cause various effects in aquatic organisms like multiple resistances of bacteria. Hence, the upgrading of WWTPs with the aim to reduce the load of those micropollutants is currently under discussion.
Therefore, the primary objective of this thesis was to assess ecotoxicological effects of wastewater ozonation, a tertiary treatment method, using specifically developed toxicity tests with Gammarus fossarum (Koch) at various levels of ecological complexity. Several studies were designed in the laboratory and under semi-field conditions to cope with this primary objective. Prior to the investigations with ozone treated wastewater, the ecotoxicity of secondary treated (=non-ozone treated) wastewater from WWTP Wueri, Switzerland, for the test species was assessed by a four-week experiment. This experiment displayed statistically significant impairments in feeding, assimilation and physiological endpoints related to population development and reproduction. The first experiment investigating ecotoxicological implications of ozone application in wastewater from the same WWTP displayed a preference of G. fossarum for leaf discs conditioned in ozone treated wastewater when offered together with leaf discs conditioned in non-ozone treated wastewater. This effect seems to be mainly driven by an alteration in the leaf associated microbial community. Another series of laboratory experiments conducted also with wastewater from WWTP Wueri treated with ozone at the lab- or full-scale, revealed significantly increased feeding rates of G. fossarum exposed to ozone treated wastewater compared to non-ozone treated wastewater. These laboratory experiments also indicated that any alteration in the organic matrix potentially caused by ozone treatment is not related to the effects in feeding as this endpoint showed only negligible deviation in secondary treated wastewater, which contained hardly any (micro)pollutants (i.e. pharmaceuticals), from the same wastewater additionally treated with ozone. Moreover, it was shown that shifts in the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) profile do not affect the feeding rate of gammarids. In situ bioassays conducted in the receiving stream of the WWTP Wueri confirmed the results of the laboratory experiments by displaying significantly reduced feeding rates of G. fossarum exposed below the WWTP effluent if non-ozone treated wastewater was released. However, at the time the ozonation was operating, no adverse effects in feeding rates were observed below the effluent compared to the unaffected upstream sites. Also population studies in on-site flow-through stream microcosms displayed an increased feeding and a statistically significantly higher population size after ten weeks when exposed to ozone treated wastewater compared to non-ozone treated wastewater.
In conclusion, the present thesis documents that ozonation might be a suitable tool to reduce both the load of micropollutants as well as the ecotoxicity of wastewaters. Thus, this technology may help to meet the requirements of the Water Framework Directive also under predicted climate change scenarios, which may lead to elevated proportions of wastewater in the receiving stream during summer discharge. However, as ozone application may also produce by-products with a higher toxicity than their parent compounds, the implementation of this technique should be assessed further both via chemical analysis and ecotoxicological bioassays.


Summary Hereditary hypophosphatemic rickets with hypercalciuria (HHRH) is a rare, autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the SLC34A3 gene that encodes the renal sodium-dependent phosphate cotransporter 2c (NaPi-IIc). It may present as intermittent mild hypercalcemia which may attract initial diagnostic attention but appreciation of concomitant hypophosphatemia is critical for consideration of the necessary diagnostic approach. A 21-year-old woman was assessed by adult endocrinology for low bone mass. She initially presented age two with short stature, nephrocalcinosis and mild intermittent hypercalcemia with hypercalciuria. She had no evidence of medullary sponge kidney or Fanconi syndrome and no bone deformities, pain or fractures. She had recurrent episodes of nephrolithiasis. In childhood, she was treated with hydrochlorothiazide to reduce urinary calcium. Upon review of prior investigations, she had persistent hypophosphatemia with phosphaturia, low PTH and a high-normal calcitriol. A diagnosis of HHRH was suspected and genetic testing confirmed a homozygous c.1483G>A (p.G495R) missense mutation of the SLC34A3 gene. She was started on oral phosphate replacement which normalized her serum phosphate, serum calcium and urine calcium levels over the subsequent 5 years. HHRH is an autosomal recessive condition that causes decreased renal reabsorption of phosphate, leading to hyperphosphaturia, hypophosphatemia and PTH-independent hypercalcemia due to the physiologic increase in calcitriol which also promotes hypercalciuria. Classically, patients present in childhood with bone pain, vitamin D-independent rickets and growth delay. This case of a SLC34A3 mutation illustrates the importance of investigating chronic hypophosphatemia even in the presence of other more common electrolyte abnormalities. Learning points: Hypophosphatemia is an important diagnostic clue that should not be ignored, even in the face of more common electrolyte disorders. HHRH is a cause of PTH-independent hypophosphatemia that may also show hypercalcemia. HHRH is a cause of hypophosphatemic nephrocalcinosis that should not be treated with calcitriol, unlike other congenital phosphate wasting syndromes. Some congenital phosphate wasting disorders may not present until adolescence or early adulthood.


All real estate advertising in this newspaper is subject to the Fair Housing Act which makes it illegal to advertise "any preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin, or an intention to make any such preference, limitation or discrimination." Familial status includes children under the age of 18 living with parents or legal custodians, pregnant women and people securing custody of children under 18. This newspaper will not knowingly accept any advertising for real estate which is in violation of the law. Our readers are hereby informed that all dwellings advertised in this newspaper are available on an equal opportunity basis. To complain of discrimination, call HUD toll-free at 1-800-669-9777. The toll-free telephone number for the hearing impaired is 1-800-927-9275.


The biodiesel industry in the United States has realized significant growth over the past decade through large increases in annual production and production capacity and a transition from smaller batch plants to larger-scale continuous producers. The larger, continuous-flow plants provide operating cost advantages over the smaller batch plants through their ability to capture co-products and reuse certain components in the production process. This paper uses a simple capital budgeting model developed by the authors along with production data supplied by industry sources to estimate production costs, return-on-investment levels, and break-even conditions for two common plant sizes (30 and 60 million gallon annual capacities) over a range of biodiesel and feedstock price levels. The analysis shows that the larger plant realizes returns to scale in both labor and capital costs, enabling the larger plant to pay up to $0.015 more per pound for the feedstock to achieve equivalent return levels as the smaller plant under the same conditions. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the biodiesel industry by using the most current conversion rates for the production technology and current price levels to estimate biodiesel production costs and potential plant performance, providing a useful follow-up to previous studies.


The promotion of economic welfare as the lodestar of antitrust law -- to the exclusion of social, political, and protectionist goals -- transformed and gave intellectual coherence to a body of law Robert Bork had famously described as paradoxical. Welfare-based standards have benefitted consumers and the economy and have led to greater predictability in judicial and agency decision making. In the latest of numerous challenges to the welfarist understanding of antitrust, Neil Averitt and Robert Lande propose their "consumer choice" standard as an alternative they claim takes better account of the nonprice dimensions of the competitive process. Adoption of the consumer choice framework would have seriously detrimental consequences for consumers, however. Both economic theory and empirical evidence are replete with examples of business conduct that simultaneously reduces choice and increases consumer welfare through lower prices, increased innovation, or higher quality products and services. Moreover, the welfarist approach already incorporates the tradeoffs between price and quality that consumers face. The flaw of the choice standard is that it altogether rejects the economic approach to dealing with those tradeoffs and instead imposes a structural presumption that the number of firms or brands in competition is directly correlated with consumer welfare. Shifting to defendants the burden of justifying any reduction in consumer choice would be merely a revival of the long ago repudiated inhospitality tradition in antitrust that should and likely will be rejected by the enforcement agencies and the courts.


Studies of mammary gland biology are essential in the fight against breast cancer. Moreover, the mammary gland represents an excellent model system for investigation of physiological and pathological processes that occur throughout the body. The branching morphogenesis that occurs during puberty and the alveogenesis processes during pregnancy, for example, recapitulate steps that occur in many tissues during embryogenesis and are also relevant to tumor invasion and metastasis. Similarly, analyses of breast cancer progression and the cell types that contribute to it yield findings applicable not only to breast cancer but widely to other cancers as well. Written and edited by experts in the field, this collection from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology reviews our understanding of mammary gland development, physiology, and tumor formation, emphasizing the value of the organ as a model system. The contributors examine the roles of hormones, growth factors, oncogenes, and the extracellular matrix in normal development and cancer. In addition, they discuss the nature of the mammary gland stem cell population and review the gene expression programs activated and chromatin modifications that occur as the different cell lineages present differentiate. The book also contains chapters covering the many experimental approaches that have been used in this field, including transplantation, genetic engineering, RNA interference and genomics, three dimensional culture models, and live cell imaging. It will thus be of interest to all researchers working in cell, developmental, and cancer biology, as well as those focused specifically on mammary gland biology and breast cancer.


Abstract. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 has been on orbit since 2014, and its global coverage holds the potential to reveal new information about the carbon cycle through the use of top-down atmospheric inversion methods combined with column average CO2 retrievals. We employ a large ensemble of atmospheric inversions utilizing different transport models, data assimilation techniques, and prior flux distributions in order to quantify the satellite-informed fluxes from OCO-2 Version 7r land observations and their uncertainties at continental scales. Additionally, we use in situ measurements to provide a baseline against which to compare the satellite-constrained results. We find that within the ensemble spread, in situ observations, and satellite retrievals constrain a similar global total carbon sink of 3.7±0.5 PgC yr−1, and 1.5±0.6 PgC yr−1 for global land, for the 2015–2016 annual mean. This agreement breaks down in smaller regions, and we discuss the differences between the experiments. Of particular interest is the difference between the different assimilation constraints in the tropics, with the largest differences occurring in tropical Africa, which could be an indication of the global perturbation from the 2015–2016 El Niño. Evaluation of posterior concentrations using TCCON and aircraft observations gives some limited insight into the quality of the different assimilation constraints, but the lack of such data in the tropics inhibits our ability to make strong conclusions there.


We present findings from a study of Tokens of Search, a system comprising physical RFID "tokens" that point to web content, and a wooden tray fixed to a small screen, which can be used to access that content. Three families lived with the system for a month, as an exploration of how tokens might be used as resources for practical action. Our findings highlight existing web practices and their individual and collective nuances; tokens were employed in the creation of short-term collections and long-lasting mementos, their physicality giving bookmarking a visibility that could be used to attract attention, serve as reminders, and make observable progress through tasks. However, while all families saw the potential for shared use, only one used it this way in earnest. We reflect on design choices that were expected to encourage collaboration, and the need to support key users such as parents when establishing joint practices.


Neubau Forst Catalogue is the 432-page print catalogue of a digital collection of tree silhouettes and sculptures seen at different seasons. Working by hand, the Neubau designers digitally removed the trees from their original Berlin surroundings and thereby crafted a body of visual material whose scope, outstanding quality of detail and excellent image resolution sets it clearly apart from conventional tree libraries compiled with autotracing tools. The trees, which were systematically photographed in summer and winter over several years, assume a timeless validity through Neubau's process of selection and are thus universally applicable for future visualisations.

From the existing stand-alone tree objects, which can be placed against both dark and light backgrounds of all kinds, Neubau has furthermore derived individual "tree modules". These modules can be combined with the ready-to-use trees in an endless number of ways. Alongside detailed information about tree species, size, location, year of planting and file format, the catalogue contains also numerous impressive examples of how these images can be used.

The corresponding Neubau Forst Archive, consisting of 683 individual elements, is the digital library of which architects, designers, graphic designers and illustrators have previously only dreamed. Each book contains an individual download code that guarantees you an exclusive discount of 25% on purchases from the data archive in the standard image (TIFF) and vector (EPS) format.

24 x 28 x 4.7 cm, 9.5 x 11 x 1.98 in, 432 pages, 765 full-color illustrations (315 HD-bitmap tree masks, 327 HD-bitmap tree modules, 40 HD vector trees, 72 illus. of bark, 144 documentary illus.), paperback (2014)


Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history.

 Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.


DIY hardware hacking...easy as Pi ! Raspberry Pi is taking off like a rocket! You can use this amazing, dirt-cheap, credit card-sized computer to learn powerful hardware hacking techniques as you build incredibly creative and useful projects! This complete, full-color guide requires absolutely no experience with either hardware hacking or computer programming. Colorful photos guide you through each project, and the step-by-step instructions are stunningly clear and easy! 1. Start with the absolute basics: Discover why millions of people are so passionate about the Pi! Tour the hardware, including storage, connections, and networking Install and run Raspbian, Raspberry Pis Linux-based operating system Manage devices and configuration files Network Raspberry Pi and add Wi-Fi Program Raspberry Pi using Python, Scratch, XHTML, PHP, and MySQL 2. Next, build all these great projects: Media Center Retro Console Video Game Station Minecraft Server Web Server Portable Webcam Security & Privacy Device 3. Then, master all these cutting-edge techniques: Overclock Raspberry Pi for better performance Link Raspberry Pi to the Arduino and Arduino clones, including the AlaMode and the Gertboard Use the Pi to build electronics prototypes using a breadboard


The paper describes the methodology and experimental results for revealing similarities in thermal dependencies of biases of accelerometers and gyroscopes from 250 inertial MEMS chips (MPU-9250). Temperature profiles were measured on an experimental setup with a Peltier element for temperature control. Classification of temperature curves was carried out with machine learning approach. A perfect sensor should not have thermal dependency at all. Thus, only sensors inside the clusters with smaller dependency (smaller total temperature slopes) might be pre-selected for production of high accuracy inertial navigation modules. It was found that no unified thermal profile ("family" curve) exists for all sensors in a production batch. However, obviously, sensors might be grouped according to their parameters. Therefore, the temperature compensation profiles might be regressed for each group. 12 slope coefficients on 5 degrees temperature intervals from 0C to +60C were used as the features for the k-means++ clustering algorithm. The minimum number of clusters for all sensors to be well separated from each other by bias thermal profiles in our case is 6. It was found by applying the elbow method. For each cluster a regression curve can be obtained.


When asked to talk to students at Broome Community College in upstate New York in the spring of 2011, Austin Kleon wrote a simple list often things he wished he'd heard when he was their age: 'Steal like an artist; Don't wait until you know who you are to start making things; Write the book you want to read; Use your hands; Side projects are important; Do good work and put it where people can see it; Geography is no longer our master; Be nice (the world is a small town.); Be boring (it's the only way to get work done.); and, Creativity is subtraction.' After giving the speech, he posted the text and slides to his popular blog, where it quickly went viral. Now Kleon has expanded his original manifesto into an illustrated guide to the creative life for writers, artists, entrepreneurs, designers, photographers, musicians, and anyone attempting to make things - art, a career, a life - in the digital age. Brief, direct, and visually interactive, the book includes illustrative anecdotes and mini-exercise sections calling out practical actions readers can take to unleash their own creative spirits.


This study investigates the influence of manager and department variables on budget characteristics in private Jordanian universities. This paper aims to study the relationship between the departments' heads characteristics and department features with the budget participation, information sharing, budget adequacy, goal clarity, and budget feedback in private universities in Jordan. It draws on relevant prior studies in the management accounting particularly budget issues to formulate the research questions and implementing survey method with seventy seven functional managers in five private Jordanian universities to shed light upon the perceptions of proposed budget participants. The results indicate that there is no such a relation between the department type and size with the budget characteristics, and no significant association between most of the manager related variables and budget characteristics. In contrast, the results indicate that the experience earned in the university has a significant strong relation with budget characteristics and weak relation has been found between manager budget experience and budget characteristics. The data suggest that the department factors and the manager factors except the experience earned in the university and the budget experience have no impact on budget characteristics. Hence, the budget characteristics may influence other factors such as the management style, departmental autonomy.


This article analyzes divisions within Belarusian protest communities byfocusing on a particular group: the professional protesters. In Belarus, this group occupies a crucial position in between the international structures of democracy promotion and the internal attempts of political mobilization against the politics of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka. Performativity as an analytical perspective is employed to define positionality of professional protesters in relation to other political subjects and within the system of democracy promotion. The article shows implications of neoliberal rationality for social and political changes for protest communities in Belarus. It argues that the financial assistance obtained by protest professionals, as well as nondemocratic leader ship style of the oppositional leaders, fills the Belarusian protest field with suspicions and accusations, add to a hierarchical and exclusionary way of participation in decision-making, and alienate activists from protest politics.


What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time.Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods are subjected to market principles, social life is threatened and major crises ensue.Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civic and social life. Because politics entails coercion and unsatisfying compromises among groups with deep conflicts, the wish to narrow its scope is understandable. But like Marx's theory that communism will lead to a "withering away of the State," the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous.