Understanding motivations in the workplace remains of utmost import as economies around the world rely on increases in labor productivity to foster sustainable economic growth. This study makes use of a unique opportunity to "look under the hood" of an organization that critically relies on worker effort and performance. By partnering with Virgin Atlantic Airways on a field experiment that includes over 40,000 unique flights covering an eight-month period, we explore how information and incentives affect captains' performance. Making use of more than 110,000 captain-level observations, we find that our set of treatments—which include performance information, personal targets, and prosocial incentives—induces captains to improve efficiency in all three key flight areas: pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight. We estimate that our treatments saved between 266,000-704,000 kg of fuel for the airline over the eight-month experimental period. These savings led to between 838,000-2.22 million kg of CO2 abated at a marginal abatement cost of negative $250 per ton of CO2 (i.e. a $250 savings per ton abated) over the eight-month experimental period. Methodologically, our approach highlights the potential usefulness of moving beyond an experimental design that focuses on short-run substitution effects, and it also suggests a new way to combat firm-level externalities: target workers rather than the firm as a whole.


The languages belonging to the group commonly known as the "Dardic languages" are on some levels insufficiently researched and have barely been subject to any comparative research on their finer grammatical structures, such as their tense and aspect systems. This comparative study analyses three Dardic languages spoken in the central Dardic speaking area (Khowar, Gawri, Palula) in view of their tense and aspect system, to find out how similar the languages are in this respect. The comparison is based on Dahl"s 1985 Tense and Aspect questionnaire, partly to have an equal, comparable data set, and partly to be able to tie the results to the greater field of language typology. The study shows that the languages studied have a common primary focus on IPFV:PFV distinction, where past tense often is a secondary implicature following perfective aspect. There are notable differences in how and if the languages mark future tense and habitual aspect. The subject merits further studies on an extended sample and with more languages from the Dardic group.


Arbitration clauses have become ubiquitous in consumer contracts. These arbitration clauses require consumers to waive the constitutional right to a civil jury, access to court, and, increasingly, the procedural remedy of class representation. Because those rights cannot be divested without consent, the validity of arbitration agreements rests on the premise of consent. Consumers who do not want to arbitrate or waive their class rights can simply decline to purchase the products or services covered by an arbitration agreement. But the premise of consent is undermined if consumers do not understand the effect on their procedural rights of clicking a box or accepting a product. This article reports on an empirical study exploring the extent to which consumers are aware of and understand the effect of arbitration clauses in consumer contracts. We conducted an online survey of 668 consumers, approximately reflecting the population of adult Americans with respect to race/ethnicity, level of education, amount of family income, and age. Respondents were shown a typical credit card contract with an arbitration clause containing a class action waiver and printed in bold and with portions in italics and ALLCAPS. Respondents were then asked questions about the sample contract as well as about a hypothetical contract containing what was described as a "properly-worded" arbitration clause. Finally, respondents were asked about their own experiences with actual consumer contracts. The survey results suggest a profound lack of understanding about the existence and effect of arbitration agreements among consumers. While 43% of the respondents recognized that the sample contract included an arbitration clause, 61% of those believed that consumers would, nevertheless, have a right to have a court decide a dispute too large for a small claims court. Less than 9% realized both that the contract had an arbitration clause and that it would prevent consumers from proceeding in court. With respect to the class waiver, four times as many respondents thought the contract did not block them from participating in a class action as realized that it did, even though the class action waiver was printed twice in bold in the sample contract, including one time in italics and ALLCAPS. Overall, of the more than 5,000 answers we recorded to questions offering right and wrong answers, only a quarter were correct. Turning to respondents' own lives, the survey asked if they had ever entered into contracts with arbitration clauses. Of the 303 respondents who claimed never to have done so and who also answered a question asking whether they had accounts with certain companies that include arbitration clauses in their contracts, 264, or 87%, did indeed have at least one account subject to an arbitration clause. These and other findings reported in this Article should cause concern among judges and policy-makers considering mandatory pre-dispute consumer arbitration agreements. Our results suggest that many citizens assume that they have a right to judicial process that they cannot lose as a result of their acquiescence in a form consumer contract. They believe that this right to judicial process will outweigh what one respondent referred to as a "whimsy little contract." Our results suggest further that citizens are giving up these rights unknowingly, either because they do not realize they have entered into an arbitration agreement or because they do not understand the legal consequences of doing so. Given the degree of misunderstanding the results demonstrate, we question whether meaningful consent is possible in the consumer arbitration context.


Charles Darwin famously concluded On the Origin of Species with a vision of "endless forms most beautiful" continually evolving. More than 150 years later many evolutionary biologists see not endless forms but the same, or very similar, forms evolving repeatedly in many independent species lineages. A porpoise's fishlike fins, for example, are not inherited from fish ancestors but are independently derived convergent traits. In this book, George McGhee describes the ubiquity of the phenomenon of convergent evolution and connects it directly to the concept of evolutionary constraint--the idea that the number of evolutionary pathways available to life are not endless, but quite limited. Convergent evolution occurs on all levels, from tiny organic molecules to entire ecosystems of species. McGhee demonstrates its ubiquity in animals, both herbivore and carnivore; in plants; in ecosystems; in molecules, including DNA, proteins, and enzymes; and even in minds, describing problem-solving behavior and group behavior as the products of convergence. For each species example, he provides an abbreviated list of the major nodes in its phylogenetic classification, allowing the reader to see the evolutionary relationship of a group of species that have independently evolved a similar trait by convergent evolution. McGhee analyzes the role of functional and developmental constraints in producing convergent evolution, and considers the scientific and philosophical implications of convergent evolution for the predictability of the evolutionary process.


When your life changes, your benefits may need to change, too. Employee Services can help you understand your options. Are you getting married? Having a baby? Is your spouse getting a new job? Events like these may affect your benefits. Your benefits elections usually remain in effect until the plan year ends on June 30. However, if you experience a qualifying life change outside of Open Enrollment, you have 31 days from the date of the change to make certain adjustments.


All papers published in this volume of IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science have been peer reviewed through processes administered by the proceedings Editors. Reviews were conducted by expert referees to the professional and scientific standards expected of a proceedings journal published by IOP Publishing.


The article considers the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concerned with poverty, education and gender (MDG 1, MDG 2 and MDG 3). Despite considerable achievements associated with the MDG approach, which entails international and national target setting and monitoring, a sharp distinction between areas of social policy is entailed. In addition the approach suggests sufficiency, for example providing a minimum level of education or gender parity, rather than a fuller notion of equality, is good enough. These processes of classification, which entail horizontal and vertical boundaries, are examined, partly drawing on Bernsteinian ideas, and partly through reflections on the concept of intersectionality. Data collected from discussions in Kenya and South Africa with administrators in national and provincial government and teachers implementing the poverty, education and gender MDGs are explored. These show a tendency to work primarily with ideas based on lines, associated with the MDG targets rather than to think more complexly about structure, agency and context in addressing inequality. Thus professionals who confront problems of poverty, gender inequality and inadequate education in day-to-day work lack appropriate resources or processes for gathering information or reflexively engaging with it. The missing resources are partly financial, in that there are not budgets of time or money to attend to making connections. But in addition they are conceptual. Ideas which take a direction to social justice. In the place of a reasoned and reflexive professional language of practice, everyday ideas that connect poverty with gender and schooling are expressed. These tend to reproduce social distance and blame. Putting intersectional ideas to work in ways that consciously and creatively challenge existing sites of exclusionary power appeal key in success or frameworks to the MDGs.


The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. "The Garlic Ballads" is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles."


This thesis is devoted to applying symbolic methods to the problems of decoding linear codes and of algebraic cryptanalysis. The paradigm we employ here is as follows. We reformulate the initial problem in terms of systems of polynomial equations over a finite field. The solution(s) of such systems should yield a way to solve the initial problem. Our main tools for handling polynomials and polynomial systems in such a paradigm is the technique of Grobner bases and normal form reductions. The first part of the thesis is devoted to formulating and solving specific polynomial systems that reduce the problem of decoding linear codes to the problem of polynomial system solving. We analyze the existing methods (mainly for the cyclic codes) and propose an original method for arbitrary linear codes that in some sense generalizes the Newton identities method widely known for cyclic codes. We investigate the structure of the underlying ideals and show how one can solve the decoding problem - both the so-called bounded decoding and more general nearest codeword decoding - by finding reduced Grobner bases of these ideals. The main feature of the method is that unlike usual methods based on Grobner bases for "finite field" situations, we do not add the so-called field equations. This tremendously simplifies the underlying ideals, thus making feasible working with quite large parameters of codes. Further we address complexity issues, by giving some insight to the Macaulay matrix of the underlying systems. By making a series of assumptions we are able to provide an upper bound for the complexity coefficient of our method. We address also finding the minimum distance and the weight distribution. We provide solid experimental material and comparisons with some of the existing methods in this area. In the second part we deal with the algebraic cryptanalysis of block iterative ciphers. Namely, we analyze the small-scale variants of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is a widely used modern block cipher. Here a cryptanalyst composes the polynomial systems which solutions should yield a secret key used by communicating parties in a symmetric cryptosystem. We analyze the systems formulated by researchers for the algebraic cryptanalysis, and identify the problem that conventional systems have many auxiliary variables that are not actually needed for the key recovery. Moreover, having many such auxiliary variables, specific to a given plaintext/ciphertext pair, complicates the use of several pairs which is common in cryptanalysis. We thus provide a new system where the auxiliary variables are eliminated via normal form reductions. The resulting system in key-variables only is then solved. We present experimental evidence that such an approach is quite good for small scaled ciphers. We investigate further our approach and employ the so-called meet-in-the-middle principle to see how far one can go in analyzing just 2-3 rounds of scaled ciphers. Additional "tuning techniques" are discussed together with experimental material. Overall, we believe that the material of this part of the thesis makes a step further in algebraic cryptanalysis of block ciphers.


The main purpose of this thesis is to use modern goal-oriented adaptive methods of Lie group analysis to construct the optimal sys- tem of Black-Scholes equation. We will show in this thesis how to obtain all invariant solutions by constructing what has now become so popular, optimal system of sub-algebras, the main Lie algebra admit- ted by the Black-Scholes equation. First, we obtain the commutator table of already calculated symmetries of the Black-Scholes equation. We then followed with the calculations of transformation of the gen- erators with the Lie algebra L6 which provides one-parameter group of linear transformations for the operators. Here we make use of the method of Lie equations to solve the partial di®erential equations. Next, we consider the construction of optimal systems of the Black- Scholes equation where the method requires a simpli¯cation of a vector to a general form to each of the transformations of the generators. Further, we construct the invariant solutions for each of the op- timal system. This study is motivated by the analysis of Lie groups which is being taken to another level by ALGA here in Blekinge In- stitute Technology, Sweden. We give a practical and in-depth steps and explanation of how to construct the commutator table, the calcu- lation of the transformation of the generators and the construction of the optimal system as well as their invariant solutions. Keywords: Black-Scholes Equation, commutators, commutator table, Lie equa- tions, invariant solution, optimal system, generators, Airy equation, structure constant,


Funk's High Court Case Summaries on Administrative Law , 4th contains well-prepared briefs for each major case in Funk's casebook on Administrative Law. High Court briefs are written to present the essential facts, issue, decision and rationale for each case in a clear, concise manner. While prepared briefs can never substitute for the insight gained by actually reading a case, these briefs will help readers to identify, understand, and absorb the core "take away" knowledge from each case. Moreover, these briefs are followed by a useful legal analysis, which provides extra tips and contextual background about each case, connecting the case to the broader concepts being developed throughout the casebook. This book also supplies case vocabulary, which defines new or unusual legal words found throughout the cases. Finally, to enhance the reader's recall, there is a corresponding memory graphic for each brief that portrays an entertaining visual representation of the relevant facts or law of the case.


Discover all the security risks and exploits that can threaten iOS-based mobile devicesiOS is Apple's mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad. With the introduction of iOS5, many security issues have come to light. This book explains and discusses them all. The award-winning author team, experts in Mac and iOS security, examines the vulnerabilities and the internals of iOS to show how attacks can be mitigated. The book explains how the operating system works, its overall security architecture, and the security risks associated with it, as well as exploits, rootkits, and other payloads developed for it. Covers iOS security architecture, vulnerability hunting, exploit writing, and how iOS jailbreaks workExplores iOS enterprise and encryption, code signing and memory protection, sandboxing, iPhone fuzzing, exploitation, ROP payloads, and baseband attacksAlso examines kernel debugging and exploitation Companion website includes source code and tools to facilitate your effortsiOS Hacker's Handbook arms you with the tools needed to identify, understand, and foil iOS attacks.


Corporate tax avoidance has come to be a major political and popular issue. This paper considers the evolution of the corporate tax debate; it scrutinizes the empirical claims and the calls for crackdowns on corporate tax avoidance. It focuses on two jurisdictions, the OECD and Australia, to show how international claims were reproduced in domestic political rhetoric. The paper then considers the economic function of tax competition, and examines the evidence underlying the OECD's claim that the corporate tax base is being "eroded" by "profit shifting" to lower tax jurisdictions.


The meltdown in residential real-estate prices that commenced in 2006 resulted in unprecedented mortgage delinquency rates. Until mid-2009, lenders and servicers pursued their own individual loss mitigation practices without being significantly influenced by government intervention. Using a unique dataset that precisely identifies loss mitigation actions, we study these methods—liquidation, repayment plans, loan modification, and refinancing— and analyze their effectiveness. We show that the majority of delinquent mortgages do not enter any loss mitigation program or become a part of foreclosure proceedings within 6 months of becoming distressed. We also find that it takes longer to complete foreclosures over time, potentially due to congestion. We further document large heterogeneity in practices across servicers, which is not accounted for by differences in borrower population. Consistent with the idea that securitization induces agency conflicts, we confirm that the likelihood of modification of securitized loans is up to 70% lower relative to portfolio loans. Finally, we find evidence that affordability (as opposed to strategic default due to negative equity) is the prime reason for redefault following modifications. While modification terms are more favorable for weaker borrowers, greater reductions in mortgage payments and/or interest rates are associated with lower redefault rates. Our regression estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point decline in mortgage interest rate is associated with a nearly 4 percentage point decline in default probability. This finding is consistent with the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) focus on improving mortgage affordability.


From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.


High-power pulsed lasers emitting IR and visible radiation with intensities ranging between 10^8 and 10^16 W/cm2, pulse duration from 0.4 to 9 ns and energy from 100 mJ up to 600 J, operating in single mode or in repetition rate, can be employed to produce non-equilibrium plasma in vacuum by irradiating solid targets. Such a laser-produced plasma generates highly charged and high-energy ions of various elements, as well as soft and hard X-ray radiations. Heavy ions with charge state up to 58+ and kinetic energy up to 10 MeV are detected. The plasma emits ion current densities of the order of tens of mA/cm^2. Interesting application possibilities of the generated plasmas concerning the ion implantation technique, the laser ion sources, the high intensity and resolution X-ray sources, the laser propulsion technique and the nuclear reaction of light elements are presented and discussed.


Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3. 8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.


This paper is part of an anthology on Law and Religion that will appear in volume 1 of the collection under the heading Historical Introduction to Law and Religion in the West. The editor requested an extended essay concerning religion and religious liberty in the American War of Independence and its aftermath. The paper will be juxtaposed with another on the French Revolution, providing a comparison for the role religion played in these events that continue to shape the world. In addition to the War itself, which unfolded over 1775 – 1783, changes within American Protestantism had a leveling effect on society and, during the early years of the republic, the political and religious culture exalted liberty, individualism, and the voluntary church. The Quebec Act of 1774 illustrates the degree to which American patriots reacted against Roman Catholicism. In the act Parliament preserved the established role of the Catholic Church in French Canada, including public funding and full sanction by Great Britain. British tolerance of the Catholic establishment drew harsh protests from Congress, even mention as a grievance in the revered Declaration of Independence. American sensitivity was to Old World political uses of religion. The patriots believed that a fully-empowered Catholic hierarchy to the north and west of them would bring Old World intrigues involving the Roman Church. To be an American was to be in sympathy with Protestantism, to be Protestant was to be republican, and to be republican was to oppose Catholic absolutism. Moreover, the British were departing from their constitutional commitment to representative government when they unilaterally imposed taxes and other oppressive acts on their colonial subjects. This was seen as an offense to each American's inalienable rights. The resulting breach of the Lockean social contract legitimated armed rebellion.Where American patriots might have suffered divisions due to religion, the denominations instead united in support of the Revolution. The unity of Protestants among themselves (excepting Quakers and Church of England) and with the Enlightenment-rationalists behind the War-time effort was widespread. Notwithstanding divergent theological and philosophical ideas, there was a general set of beliefs on which Protestants could agree. Rationalists, in turn, were able to join with Protestants regarding an organization of the central government which respected conscience and left authority over religion in the States. In 1783, Congress under the Articles of Confederation received a petition from the Papal Nuncio in Paris. The Catholic Church in France sought recognition of a Catholic bishop in the United States. Congress replied that such matters were not its jurisdiction, but that such power was reserved to the States. With the French scheme exposed, embarrassed Catholics in the United States contacted authorities in Rome to open an American bishopric that would deal directly with the Vatican. This is an example of Catholic intrigue that Americans abjured. The last major act of the Confederation Congress was passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. It was rushed to completion by the Ohio Company, a venture by New Englanders willing to tender cash needed by Congress to pay war debts. Consistent with the establishmentarian leanings of New Englanders, the Company wanted glebes in the territories for the support of religion. Members of Congress outside New England opposed glebes and were able to force their no-aid view into the final draft of the Ordinance. This was an early example of American continental government embracing the voluntary principle. In the federalist republic instituted in 1789, once again jurisdiction over religion was primarily reserved to the States. Disestablishment was not spurred forward by the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Rather, disestablishment was a state-law affair that had been progressing in some colonies when they first adopted constitutions in 1776, and which spread state-by-state until completed in Massachusetts in 1833. As the Revolution subsided, America witnessed a dramatic rise in Protestant expansion and influence on the broader culture. So extensive were the alterations by a more populist and personal Christianity, that this period is called the Second Great Awakening (1790s - 1820s). During this time it was voluntaryistic religion that served as a seedbed for ordinary citizens, imbuing them with the civic virtues to sustain the nascent republic.


Given integers $n$ and $m=\lfloor\beta n \rfloor$ and a probability measure $Q$ on $\{0, 1,\dots, m\}$, consider the random intersection graph on the vertex set $[n]=\{1,2,\dots, n\}$ where $i,j\in [n]$ are declared adjacent whenever $S(i)\cap S(j)\neq\emptyset$. Here $S(1),\dots, S(n)$ denote the iid random subsets of $[m]$ with the distribution $\bf{P}(S(i)=A)={{m}\choose{|A|}}^{-1}Q(|A|)$, $A\subset [m]$. For sparse random intersection graphs, we establish a first-order asymptotic as $n\to \infty$ for the order of the largest connected component $N_1=n(1-Q(0))\rho+o_P(n)$. Here $\rho$ is the average of nonextinction probabilities of a related multitype Poisson branching process.


THE TOVE JANSSON CLASSIC IN A NEW SOFTCOVER FORMAT"Due to the resounding success of the hardcover Moomin comics by Tove Jansson and Lars Jansson, D+Q is reissuing this classic comic in an all-new format. Available in an affordable kid-proof but kid-friendly flexicover, and in full color for the first time, these books are slimmer versions of the hardcovers, with one story in each volume while previous editions collected four."""""Moomin's Winter FolliesMoomin wakes up one morning to find the pond frozen over, and rather than hibernate, the family decides to brave the winter weather. At first, their wintry adventure seems to be going swimmingly, until Mr. Brisk of the Great Outdoors Club takes over and forces everyone to embrace the winter sports, whether they want to or not.


The overreliance on quantitative, numeric information and the underuse of qualitative, textual information is a common weakness in strategic management. This affects particularly the practice of competitive intelligence, which aims to provide actionable information about the company-external environment for decision making. Yet, forward-looking and insightful information about the environment often comes in qualitative form, much of it as publicly available text documents, whereas public quantitative information often arrives too late to be useful for strategic management. This thesis proposes that text visualization, and in particular, a method called collocational networks, could increase the use of textual information in competitive intelligence. Collocational networks are networks consisting of words that co-occur in a statistically significant way in a text, or in a collection of texts. They are particularly useful for discovering changes between sequences of texts of a similar nature, e.g. annual or quarterly reports. In line with design science research practice, the proposed method is also evaluated for utility. The evaluation is carried out in two stages. First, collocational networks of quarterly report texts are compared to self-organizing maps created out of the financial figures of the same reports. This evaluation shows that changes in the collocational network of a company's quarterly report are followed by a change in the position of the company in the self-organizing map in the next quarter. Second, a series of interviews with competitive intelligence practitioners are carried out, in which the interviewees are shown collocational networks created out of annual reports from telecommunications service companies during 2003-2008. This evaluation shows that the interviewees consider the networks to reflect actual developments within the industry. They also consider them to be a useful tool for discovering changes that may go unnoticed when reading the texts. In summary, the evaluations suggest that by using collocational networks, competitive intelligence practitioners could easily have access to forward-looking, qualitative information about the company-external environment to strengthen strategic management practice.


The Moore bound constitutes both an upper bound on the order of a graph of maximum degree $d$ and diameter $D=k$ and a lower bound on the order of a graph of minimum degree $d$ and odd girth $g=2k+1$. Graphs missing or exceeding the Moore bound by $\epsilon$ are called graphs with defect or excess $\epsilon$ , respectively. While Moore graphs (graphs with $\epsilon=0$) and graphs with defect or excess 1 have been characterized almost completely, graphs with defect or excess 2 represent a wide unexplored area. Graphs with defect (excess) 2 satisfy the equation $G_{d,k}(A) = J_n + B$ ($G_{d,k}(A) = J_n - B$), where $A$ denotes the adjacency matrix of the graph in question, $n$ its order, $J_n$ the $n\times n$ matrix whose entries are all 1's, $B$ the adjacency matrix of a union of vertex-disjoint cycles, and $G_{d,k}(x)$ a polynomial with integer coefficients such that the matrix $G_{d,k}(A)$ gives the number of paths of length at most $k$ joining each pair of vertices in the graph. In particular, if $B$ is the adjacency matrix of a cycle of order $n$ we call the corresponding graphs graphs with cyclic defect or excess ; these graphs are the subject of our attention in this paper. We prove the non-existence of infinitely many such graphs. As the highlight of the paper we provide the asymptotic upper bound of $O(\frac{64}3d^{3/2})$ for the number of graphs of odd degree $d\ge3$ and cyclic defect or excess. This bound is in fact quite generous, and as a way of illustration, we show the non-existence of some families of graphs of odd degree $d\ge3$ and cyclic defect or excess. Actually, we conjecture that, apart from the Mobius ladder on 8 vertices, no non-trivial graph of any degree $\ge 3$ and cyclic defect or excess exists.


"The overall purpose of this study was to explore and describe teacher/caregiver practices that may be considered supportive of toddlers learning to regulate their emotions and behaviors. Specifically two foci were examined. First, this research study explored and described practices teachers/caregivers used to create relationships with toddlers. Second, it explored and described practices and strategies teachers/caregivers used when responding to a child who was distressed, upset, or crying. Using a case study design, three lead toddler teachers/caregivers from separate classrooms (three cases) participated in the study along with the 8 to10 children enrolled in each classroom and their parents. Through teacher observation, teacher and parent interviews, and child temperament assessment, insight was gained into the patterns of practices and strategies teachers used with the toddlers to create relationships and to respond when children were upset or crying. While results indicated there were many practices teachers used with young children, there were certain patterns of teachers' practices that were high quality and may be considered to be very supportive of growth promoting relationships with young children and calming children who were upset or crying. These practices lay the foundation for toddlers learning emotion regulation and therefore, are highly influential and desirable teacher practices. Additional outcomes regarding the importance of teachers/caregivers being both physically and emotionally present with children, sitting down on the level of the children and engaging in reciprocal interactions were found. Future studies are needed on the environmental aspects of teacher practices influencing the early development of emotion regulation."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.


Debates about academic freedom have become increasingly fierce and frequent. Legislative efforts to regulate American professors proliferate across the nation. Although most American scholars desire to protect academic freedom, they have only a vague and uncertain apprehension of its basic principles and structure. This book offers a concise explanation of the history and meaning of American academic freedom and it attempts to intervene into contemporary debates by clarifying the fundamental functions and purposes of academic freedom in America. Matthew Finkin and Robert Post trace how the American conception of academic freedom was first systematically articulated in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and how this conception was in subsequent years elaborated and applied by a Committee of the AAUP. The authors discuss the four primary dimensions of academic freedom: research and publication, teaching, intramural speech, and extramural speech. They carefully distinguish academic freedom from the kind of individual free speech right that is created by the First Amendment. The authors strongly argue that academic freedom protects the capacity of a faculty to pursue the scholar's profession according to the standards of that profession.


When a memory is forgotten, is it lost forever? Our study shows that selective attention can restore forgotten items to visual short-term memory (VSTM). In our two experiments, all stimuli presented in a memory array were designed to be equally task relevant during encoding. During the retention interval, however, participants were sometimes given a cue predicting which of the memory items would be probed at the end of the delay. This shift in task relevance improved recall for that item. We found that this type of cuing improved recall for items that otherwise would have been irretrievable, providing critical evidence that attention can restore forgotten information to VSTM. Psychophysical modeling of memory performance has confirmed that restoration of information in VSTM increases the probability that the cued item is available for recall but does not improve the representational quality of the memory. We further suggest that attention can restore discrete items to VSTM.


In this thesis we consider the problem of maximizing the growth rate with proportional and fixed costs in a framework with one bond and one stock, which is modeled as a jump diffusion with compound Poisson jumps. Following the approach from [1], we prove that in this framework it is optimal for an investor to follow a CB-strategy. The boundaries depend only on the parameters of the underlying stock and bond. Now it is natural to ask for the investor who follows a CB-strategy which is given by the stopping times \((\tau_i)_{i\in\mathbb N}\) and impulses \((\eta_i)_{i\in\mathbb N}\) how often he has to rebalance. In other words we want to obtain the limit of the inter trading times
\[
\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n(\tau_{i+1}-\tau_{i}).
\]
We are able to obtain this limit which is given by the expected first exit time of the risky fraction process from some interval under the invariant measure of the Markov chain \((\eta_i)_{i\in\mathbb N}\) using the Ergodic Theorem from von Neumann and Birkhoff. In general, it is difficult to obtain the expectation of the first exit time for the process with jumps. Because of the jump part, when the process crosses the boundaries of the interval an overshoot may occur which makes it difficult to obtain the distribution. Nevertheless we can obtain the first exit time if the process has only negative jumps using scale functions. The main difficulty of this approach is that the scale functions are known only up to their Laplace transforms. In [2] and [3] the closed-form expression for the scale function of the Levy process with phase-type distributed jumps is obtained. Phase-type distributions build a rich class of positive-valued distributions: the exponential, hyperexponential, Erlang, hyper-Erlang and Coxian distributions. Since the scale function is given as a function in a closed form we can differentiate to obtain the expected first exit time using the fluctuation identities explicitly.

[1] Irle, A. and Sass,J.: Optimal portfolio policies under fixed and proportional transaction costs, Advances in Applied Probability 38, 916-942.

[2] Egami, M., Yamazaki, K.: On scale functions of spectrally negative Levy processes with phase-type jumps, working paper, July 3.

[3]Egami, M., Yamazaki, K.: Precautionary measures for credit risk management in jump models, working paper, June 17.


Recent literature in copyright law has attacked the traditional theory that economic incentives motivate people to create. Although the onslaught of criticism has come from different directions, it all shares a similar goal: to move copyright law in a direction that reflects actual creative processes and motivations. This Article adds to and diverts from these accounts, arguing that creativity may be a product of memes: units of culture, analogous to genes, that replicate by human imitation. A memetic theory of creativity focuses on memes as the reference point for thinking about creativity. Under this view, the creator is a brain with limited space, where memes compete for occupancy. Like other views, memetics takes account of environmental and biological factors responsible for creativity, such as nonmonetary motivations and the creator's upbringing. But the memetic account of creativity is different from these theories in one important way: it uses memes to explain the driving force of culture and creativity. The idea that replicators play a role in cultural creation suggests, among other things, that copyright's originality requirement should be heightened; that the derivate right should be loosened; that fair use should be retained; and that moral rights should be discarded or substantially revised.


From the Publisher:
Using Samba, which has been officially adopted by the Samba Team and is under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL), is a comprehensive guide to Samba administration. The current edition focuses on Samba 2.2 and covers the most important features of 3.0, which was under development as this book went to print. Samba is a cross-platform triumph: it turns a Unix or Linux system into a file and print server for Microsoft Windows network clients. Samba is so robust, flexible, fast, and secure that many people are choosing it over Windows NT/2000/XP for their file and print services. Samba is also free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. This book will help you make file and print sharing as robust, powerful, and efficient as possible. The authors delve into the internals of the Windows activities and protocols to an unprecedented degree, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each feature in Windows domains and in Samba itself. Using Samba takes you from basic installation and configuration -- on both the client and server side, for a wide range of systems -- to subtle details of security, cross-platform compatibility, and resource discovery that make the difference between whether a user sees the folder they expect or a cryptic error message. The range of this book knows few bounds. Wondering how to integrate Samba's authentication with that of a Windows PDC? How to get Samba to serve Microsoft Dfs shares? How to share files on Mac OS X? These and a dozen other issues of interest to system administrators are covered. A whole chapter is dedicated to troubleshooting. Whether you're playing on one note or a full three-octave range, on your personal computer or an enterprise network, Using Samba will give you an efficient and secure server.


This essay is an invited contribution to a symposium hosted by the New England Law Review in celebration of Stuart Green's important book 13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle. As we note, Professor Green's argument is so reasonable and executed in such elegant prose, there is little call for anything other than praise. Nevertheless, in the spirit of academic exchange, we challenge Professor Green's skepticism of specialized theft statutes. Relying on retributivist theories of criminal punishment, we argue that specialized theft statutes have an important role to play in contemporary criminal law by educating the public about the necessary commitments that must be maintained in order to facilitate emerging fields of art, technology, and commerce and by guarding the boundaries of those enterprises. In the process, we propose an "enterprise theory" of theft that justifies criminal prohibition as a tool to defend vulnerable social enterprises ranging from retail sales to copyright.


The Mediterranean is the world's number one tourist destination and the biggest tourism region in the world, which has been visited by 260 million tourists in 1990 and what is more, it is expected that this number will increase to 655 million by the year 2025. In the last 10 years Croatia and Turkey became two of the most popular Mediterranean destinations, and joined the trend of a growing number of European cities that are promoting the development of tourism in order to overcome the post-industrial crisis, or as in the case of Croatia, the post-war crisis. Consequently, today both countries see tourism as their economic future. However, to achieve continuous and sustainable development of tourism, three interrelated aspects should be taken into consideration: economic, social, and environmental. The main question that we tried to answer is in what ways tourism is contributing to the sustainable development of the local community - based on the case studies of Alanya in Turkey, and Dubrovnik in Croatia. Both communities have experienced rapid development of the tourism sector in the last 10 years, which still seems to rise continuously. As a result, various impacts have occurred. Some of them are positive and there is an obvious contribution to sustainable development, while some of the impacts have negative influence on sustainability. Alanya is characterized by the 3S or mass tourism, while Dubrovnik is a world heritage city, which is offering cultural tourism. Notably, mass tourism in Alanya and cultural tourism in Dubrovnik have different impacts on a place. Although Alanya has the opportunity to diversify their tourism, mass tourism is still the main tourism activity. Since mass tourism generally involves a large number of people visiting a small area, it can change an area dramatically. What is interesting about Dubrovnik is that its tourism has suffered a series of devastating events throughout history, such as a major earthquake in 1979 and war between 1991 and 1995, which has left the local tourist economy in tatters. However, cultural tourism in Dubrovnik has been proven as a more sustainable type of tourism than the mass tourism in Alanya, which can be mostly seen through the environmental impacts. In Dubrovnik, tourism is used to increase environmental awareness of the local population, and moreover, the city has recognized the financial values of cultural sites, which are used for the protection and preservation of the heritage.While Dubrovnik is putting a lot of effort to preserve its culture and heritage, Alanya's main aim is to attract more tourists. For that reason, Alanya is much more sensitive than Dubrovnik concerning the possible threats to become an overdeveloped and overcrowded destination. The rich cultural and historical heritage make Dubrovnik a special and unique tourist destination, and therefore it is facing less risk than Alanya that it will be replaced by the other destinations in the near future. What is important for both communities is to be aware that positive consequences of tourism can arise only if, and when tourism is carried out and developed in a sustainable way. In order to achieve positive correlation between tourism and the local community, an involvement of the local population is essential. In Dubrovnik, the local population has been already involved in the implementation of the tourism, but the potential is still not completely used and there is much more to be done. On the other hand, the priority for Alanya perhaps should be a development of the alternative types of tourism with the special focus on the cultural tourism, which would enable Alanya to become a year-round tourist destination and provide more jobs for the local population, as well as greater income for the community. Moreover, earned money could be used for the protection of the environment and cultural heritage, and involvement of the local population in the planning process would arguably lead to more sustainable tourism.


During the last two decades, many police departments substantially undercounted reported rapes creating "paper" reductions in crime. Media investigations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Louis found that police eliminated rape complaints from official counts because of cultural hostility to rape complaints and to create the illusion of success in fighting violent crime. The undercounting cities used three difficult-to-detect methods to remove rape complaints from official records: designating a complaint as "unfounded" with little or no investigation; classifying an incident as a lesser offense; and, failing to create a written report that a victim made a rape complaint. This study addresses how widespread the practice of undercounting rape is in police departments across the country. Because identifying fraudulent and incorrect data is essentially the task of distinguishing highly unusual data patterns, I apply a statistical outlier detection technique to determine which jurisdictions have substantial anomalies in their data. Using this novel method to determine if other municipalities likely failed to report the true number of rape complaints made, I find significant undercounting of rape incidents by police departments across the country. The results indicate that approximately 22% of the 210 studied police departments responsible for populations of at least 100,000 persons have substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data indicating considerable undercounting from 1995 to 2012. Notably, the number of undercounting jurisdictions has increased by over 61% during the eighteen years studied. Correcting the data to remove police undercounting by imputing data from highly correlated murder rates, the study conservatively estimates that 796,213 to 1,145,309 complaints of forcible vaginal rapes of female victims nationwide disappeared from the official records from 1995 to 2012. Further, the corrected data reveal that the study period includes fifteen to eighteen of the highest rates of rape since tracking of the data began in 1930. Instead of experiencing the widely reported "great decline" in rape, America is in the midst of a hidden rape crisis. Further, the techniques that conceal rape complaints deprioritize those cases so that police conduct little or no investigation. Consequently, police leave serial rapists, who constitute the overwhelming majority of rapists, free to attack more victims. Based upon the findings of this study, governments at all levels must revitalize efforts to combat the cloaked rise in sexual violence and the federal government must exercise greater oversight of the crime reporting process to ensure accuracy of the data provided.


Should our tort law serve as a model for other nations? The answer depends in part on what one understands it to be. Since the mid-Twentieth Century, progressives have favored 'thin' accounts that treat tort law as having but two dimensions: forum and function. Tort, they say, provides a general forum for grievances and, by doing so, performs certain governmental functions, such as deterrence of anti-social conduct, compensation of injury victims, and the bringing to light of abuses of power. Progressives have favored thin accounts mainly because those accounts emphasize the extent to which tort law enables courts to achieve social goods. Unfortunately, the very thinness of progressive accounts has left tort law highly vulnerable to the conservative criticism that tort is an irrational and illegitimate mode of regulation. As a result, tort law today tends to comes off as an unstable, unprincipled combination of certain plaintiff-friendly features that are said to serve salutary regulatory objectives and certain defendant-friendly features that are said to be necessary to ward off undesirable regulation. In fact, tort law's "bipolar" appearance is an unfortunate byproduct of the inadequacies of two-dimensional accounts, whether progressive or conservative. Simply put, tort will inevitably appear arbitrary and mysterious until one appreciates its third dimension – its fill, or substance. Seen in "3D," tort law emerges as a relatively coherent body of law, yet still one that progressives have reason to embrace. Indeed, with tort law in full view, one might even believe that it can profitably be emulated elsewhere.


The focus of this study was to identify and describe bryophyte-environment
relationships in wetland swamp forests of the Northeast Cape Fear River, southeastern
North Carolina. A total of 44 genera consisting of 39 moss species and 21 liverwort
species were identified. There was one new liverwort recorded not previously described
from North Carolina, Cololejeunea setiloba. The diversity of bryophytes in the swamps
of the Northeast Cape Fear River was higher than expected observations.
Bryophyte densities and species richness were compared to flood depth relative to
the swamp surface, salinity, and elevation of the swamp surface for three sites each with
six substations within a transect from riverbank to upland edge. There was a general
trend of an increase in bryophyte density and species richness as flood depth and salinity
decreased from river to upland.
Principal component analysis used 13 environmental variables, ranging from
transect distance upriver, substation distance from river's edge to base of upland,
hydrology, elevation, duration of flooding, and salinity. These environmental variables
accounted for much of the variation in the abundance of bryophyte species. A principal
component biplot showed clustering between species of bryophytes with correlation
between certain species and their tolerance for specific stress-related environmental
variables.
The majority of the bryophytes sampled were not common in the study system
and have narrow habitat specificity. Although bryophytes may form a major part of
several vegetation types and ecosystems, in this study, relatively few bryophyte species were ecologically abundant or dominant. Isopterygium tenerum is one occurring
commonly and over a wide range of habitats.
Fontinalis sullivantii, a facultative aquatic bryophyte, in the Northeast Cape Fear
River can clearly tolerate low salinity water. It occurs along exposed roots and bases of
trees, such as bald cypress. It is submerged at rising and high tide and partially exposed
at low tide therefore exposing it to varying salinity as well as desiccation. High salinity,
in the range between 5 and 15 ppt, significantly reduced photosynthetic efficiency of the
moss species, Fontinalis sullivantii, on the short time scale, followed by some recovery.
Desiccation after approximately 3 hours also reduced photosynthetic efficiency.
However, observed physical changes in the disappearance of Fontinalis sullivantii due to
a major drought suggests a strong relationship between increasing salinity and
disappearance of this species.
Long term implications of the current study are that bryophyte data will be used to
assess future impacts due to current dredging projects in the Cape Fear River estuary.


Stillbirth is a confounding event, a reproductive moment that at once combines birth and death. This Article discusses the complications of this simultaneity as a social experience and as a matter of law. Traditionally, stillbirth didn't count for much on either score. Legally, a dead infant was nothing for purposes of descent; culturally, stillbirths were regarded as insignificant; after all, what was lost? This is no longer the case. Familiarity with fetal life through obstetric ultrasound throughout pregnancy has transformed stillborn children into participating members of their families long before birth. This in turn has led to a novel demand on law.Dissatisfied with the issuance of a stillborn death certificate, bereaved parents have successfully lobbied state legislatures nationwide to issue stillborn birth certificates under newly enacted "Missing Angel Acts." Missing Angel Acts raise a perplexing set of questions. Acknowledging the desire of grieving parents to have their child acknowledged, just what is being certified in the name of the larger community? How is it that issuing birth certificates to babies who never lived has come to seem a reasonable rather than an eccentric legislative gesture?This Article discusses the history, meaning, and politics of stillborn birth certificates. Recognizing that Missing Angel Acts may seem a harmless and compassionate use of law, I tell a more complicated story. Investigating law's relationship to social practices in the difficult circumstances of stillbirth raises important and unnoticed issues concerning modern identity documentation, the affective authority of law, and the civic desirability of lines between private and public responses to death. The Article explores whether the certificates are an acceptable form of legal fiction and what their implications are for other areas of law involving prenatal death, particular the regulation of abortion.


This thesis provides a fully automatic translation from synchronous programs to parallel software for different architectures, in particular, shared memory processing (SMP) and distributed memory systems. Thereby, we exploit characteristics of the synchronous model of computation (MoC) to reduce communication and to improve available parallelism and load-balancing by out-of-order (OOO) execution and data speculation.
Manual programming of parallel software requires the developers to partition a system into tasks and to add synchronization and communication. The model-based approach of development abstracts from details of the target architecture and allows to make decisions about the target architecture as late as possible. The synchronous MoC supports this approach by abstracting from time and providing implicit parallelism and synchronization. Existing compilation techniques translate synchronous programs into synchronous guarded actions (SGAs) which are an intermediate format abstracting from semantic problems in synchronous languages. Compilers for SGAs analyze causality problems, ensure logical correctness and the absence of schizophrenia problems. Hence, SGAs are a simplified and general starting point and keep the synchronous MoC at the same time. The instantaneous feedback in the synchronous MoC makes the mapping of these systems to parallel software a non-trivial task. In contrast, other MoCs such as data-flow processing networks (DPNs) directly match with parallel architectures. We translate the SGAs into DPNs,which represent a commonly used model to create parallel software. DPNs have been proposed as a programming model for distributed parallel systems that have communication paths with unpredictable latencies. The purely data-driven execution of DPNs does not require a global coordination and therefore DPNs can be easily mapped to parallel software for architectures with distributed memory. The generation of efficient parallel code from DPNs challenges compiler design with two issues: To perfectly utilize a parallel system, the communication and synchronization has to be kept low, and the utilization of the computational units has to be balanced. The variety of hardware architectures and dynamic execution techniques in processing units of these systems make a statically balanced distributed execution impossible.
The synchronous MoC is still reflected in our generated DPNs, which exhibits characteristics that allow optimizations concerning the previously mentioned issues. In particular, we apply a general communication reduction and OOO execution to achieve a dynamically balanced execution which is inspired from hardware design.


Introduction The Official Medical College of Barcelona (OMCB) is a centennial corporation created to defend the interests of the medical profession and ensure that it adheres to ethical and scientific norms in order to offer the best healthcare services to society. The Internet has the capacity to transmit a volume of information that is both difficult to control and widely available. The OMCB emphasizes the necessity to contribute to the accreditation of medical/healthcare information diffused through the network, and the importance of offering support and assistance, whenever necessary, to physicians and medical institutions who wish to access this information and be present within the Internet. Objective The promotion from Official Medical College of Barcelona-Metges on line (OMCB) in Spain of an accredited medical web Seal (now called WMA of METGES on line) to give a reference guidelines of high quality based on Ethical Standards of the HON Code and the OMCB itself. Method Through a registration form the person in charge of the website asks for the accreditation web seal by accepting the rules proposed (Code of Conduct, Accreditation, Identification, Confidentiality, Control and validation, Advertising and other sources of financing, Non-compliance and responsibilities) . Then a peer-review of experts assesses the content, the site ownership, date of posting, revising, and updating and other characteristics defined in the guidelines. Later, the peer-reviewer sends a mail to explain the acceptance or not acceptance and the improvement necessary to receive the web seal in a second review. This is a free process. The accredited website will carry the medical seal on the homepage. Results At the moment there are 76 webs accredited (Biomedical Associations, Patient Associations, Medical Institutions, Training, Scientific Societies, NGOs of Development, Conferences). Only 30% were initially accepted before the modifications needed to get the web seal were made. The main reason for not acceptance are: the dates that content is posted, revised, and updated are not clearly indicated and the source for specific content is not clearly identified (ie, author, organizational, institutional, or commercial provider/producer). There are 30 websites waiting for accreditation and everyday the OCMB is receiving new requests. Conclusions There is a big interest by all webs with medical contents to be accredited by a medical official institution as OMCB. The differences of contents and guidance of the websites make it difficult to use only one set of criteria to accredit these webs and makes it necessary to modify our Code to be able to assess their heterogeneousness. It would be necessary to have a system of different types of web seal to accredit the webs to guide professional and patient consumers and it would be very interesting to create an intelligent web data system to aid the peer-review the websites.


And how this book will influence you to do better future? It will relate to how the readers will get the lessons that are coming. As known, commonly many people will believe that reading can be an entrance to enter the new perception. The perception will influence how you step you life. Even that is difficult enough; people with high sprit may not feel bored or give up realizing that concept. It's what just be yourself will give the thoughts for you.


Introduction . Daniel Kelly and Faith Gibson. A Young Person's Experience : Life Before Treatment . Becky Lofts. 1. Cancer in Adolescence: Incidence and Policy Issues . Jeremy Whelan and Lorna Fern. Introduction. Incidence of cancer in young people. Types of cancer affecting TYAs. Adolescent cancer incidence in England. Adolescent cancer incidence in Europe. Changes in incidence in Europe. Gender differences. Outcomes of treatment. Delivery of care. Influence of protocols. Long-term issues. National health policy in the UK. Development of specialist services. Young people and the national cancer policy. Current level of implementation. Summary. 2. The Physical and Emotional Impact of Cancer in. Adolescents and Young Adults . Daniel Kelly. Introduction. A unique time of life. A period of transition and change. A life interrupted. Confronting a diagnosis of cancer. The 'problem' of adolescence. The 'reality' of adolescence. The culture of care. The context of care. The importance of coping. Emotional support. Support needs of young people. The importance of the body in adolescent cancer. Recurrence of disease and the body in adolescent cancer. Body work in cancer care. Looking forward. 3. The Impact of Cancer on Parents and Families . Anne Grinyer. Introduction. Making this research possible. The research approach. Renegotiating relationships within the family. Fluctuating dependence and independence. Taking control of their body. Sharing intimate moments. Financial dependence. Relationships within the family. Parenting roles. Place of death. Negotiating relationships outside the family. Consultations with professionals. Family social networks. The implications for policy. Final thoughts. 4. The Impact of Adolescent Cancer on Healthcare Professionals . Susie Pearce. Introduction. Cultural meanings of care, cancer, and adolescent cancer care. Theories of stress, burnout, and coping. Emotions and care work. The 'emotional self'. Unconscious feelings in adolescent cancer work. Mastering intense feelings. Maintaining boundaries. Multidisciplinary team working. Care and support. Concluding thoughts. A Young Person's Experience : Life During Treatment . Kelly Denver. 5. Supportive Care for Adolescents and Young Adults. During Cancer Treatment . J Neale Hanvey and Alison Finch. Introduction. Supportive care: how is it defined?. Defining supportive care. The young person and cancer. Adolescence and transitions. Beyond adolescence. Supporting the tasks of adolescence: forming a clear identity. Accommodating a changing or new body image. The significance of symptom management on body image. and self-concept. Negotiating a new relationship with parents. The emerging independent self. Trying to reconcile the situation. The ethics of supportive care. Developing a personal value system. Consent. Ethical theories. Achieving financial and social independence. Developing relationships. Peer relationships. Romantic relationships. Fertility. Developing cognitive skills and the ability to think abstractly. Controlling their future. Developing the ability to control behaviour according to. social norms and taking responsibility. Meeting the challenges of supportive care in reality. Team working. The importance of a working philosophy and physical. environment. Summary. Concluding thoughts. 6. Getting on With Life During Treatment . Roberta Woodgate. Introduction. Challenges facing adolescents with cancer. Body image and sense of self challenges. Peer relation challenges. Family relation challenges. Sexual health challenges. Education and employment challenges. Getting on with life. Hoping for the best. Having the right attitude. Knowing what to expect. Making some sense out of a bad situation. Taking one day at a time. Taking time for yourself. Staying connected. Implications for health professionals. Conclusion. 7. End of Treatment Issues: Looking to the Future . Nelia Langeveld and Julia Arbuckle. Introduction. The ongoing support needs of young people finishing. cancer treatment. Trajectory of need. Re-establishing an individual, social, and sexual identity. Establishing a new identity. Sexual identity. Renegotiating relationships with family and friends. Family. Friends. Illustration of negotiating relationships. Re-engaging with life after treatment by occupying time. with meaningful activity. Coping with the after-effects of treatment. Facing mortality. Being a cancer survivor. The need for aftercare. Models of follow-up care. The transition process. Conclusion. A Young Person's Experience : Life After Treatment. or Chemotherapy Saves the Lost Boy . Alan Pitcairn. 8. Long-term Effects of Cancer Treatment . Gill Levitt and Debra Eshelman. Introduction. Long-term survival. Long-term sequelae. Physical late effects. Pubertal development and fertility. Cardiac effects. SMNs. Radiation and SMNs. Chemotherapy and SMNs. Genetic factors and SMNs. Osteopenia/Osteoporosis. Obesity. Neurocognitive effects. Psychosocial late effects. Body image. Sexuality. Fatigue. Post-traumatic stress. Health behaviours. Smoking. Alcohol use. Illicit drug use. Occupational and insurance status. Delivery of care. Patient education. Conclusion. 9. Palliation and End of Life Care Issues . Maggie Bisset, Sue Hutton, and Daniel Kelly. Introduction. The importance of experience. Constructions of palliative care. Defining palliative care. Palliative care for whom?. What we mean by palliative care. The search for meaning. Working with the search for meaning. Practice and challenges in palliative care. 'Why me man?'. 'Don't tell him he's dying'. 'My pain's no better ... you're rubbish you are!'. Near the end of life. Recognising when death is likely. Place of death. Decision making. Fundamental aspects of care. Is there meaning in bereavement?. Common occurrences in bereavement. Having a hiding place. Completing the construction of palliative care. Summary. 10. Building a Culture of Participation: Young People's Involvement. in Research . Faith Gibson. Setting the scene. Drivers towards increased participation of young people. Why participation is important. Levels of participation. Young people as partners in research. Consulting with young people. Young people as collaborators in research. User-controlled research. Methodologies used to facilitate participation in research. Evaluating participation. Conclusion. 11. Developing an Integrated Approach to the Care of Adolescents. and Young Adults with Cancer . Daniel Kelly and Faith Gibson. Introduction. Putting service developments into context. Contributing to the evidence base. Issues around diagnosis. Delay in diagnosis. Impact of a cancer diagnosis. Impact on the family. Supporting young people at diagnosis. Delivering appropriate care. The treatment phase. Where should care be delivered?. Helpful and unhelpful ways of communicating. Creating the right environment for care. Supporting young people during treatment. Role and significance of family members. Beyond treatment. The need for continuing care. Supporting young people after treatment. Towards an integrated approach to TYA cancer care. Useful Contacts . Index


In this absorbing story of the changing life of a community, the authors of "Deaf in America" reveal historical events and forces that have shaped the ways that Deaf people define themselves today. "Inside Deaf Culture" relates Deaf people's search for a voice of their own, and their proud self-discovery and self-description as a flourishing culture. Padden and Humphries show how the nineteenth-century schools for the deaf, with their denigration of sign language and their insistence on oralist teaching, shaped the lives of Deaf people for generations to come. They describe how Deaf culture and art thrived in mid-twentieth century Deaf clubs and Deaf theatre, and profile controversial contemporary technologies. Most triumphant is the story of the survival of the rich and complex language American Sign Language, long misunderstood but finally recently recognized by a hearing world that could not conceive of language in a form other than speech. In a moving conclusion, the authors describe their own very different pathways into the Deaf community, and reveal the confidence and anxiety of the people of this tenuous community as it faces the future. "Inside Deaf Culture" celebrates the experience of a minority culture--its common past, present debates, and promise for the future. From these pages emerge clear and bold voices, speaking out from inside this once silenced community.


In this paper, we present an approach to support distributed planning and scheduling, as well as the subsequent (also distributed) plan execution, in one system. The system will support the distributed planners and schedulers by providing task agendas for them, stating who needs to plan which tasks, and sending change notifications and warnings, if a planning or scheduling decision needs to be updated. The plan built using these mechanisms is then enacted by a workflow engine in the same system. This approach enables us to support interleaved planning and plan enactment, allowing the user to change the plan and schedule while the project is already under way. Deviations of the actual project enactment from the plan and schedule can automatically be detected, and necessary notifications will be sent to the concerned planner(s). This again facilitates the task of keeping the plan up to date, avoiding the complete invalidation of the plan as is often the case in conventional projects soon after enactment has started.


Findings may lead to development of drugs to fight cancer Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine researchers have discovered a new role for the bioactive lipid messenger, sphingosine-1-phosphate, or S1P, that is abundant in our blood - a finding that could lead to a new generation of drugs to fight cancer and inflammatory disease. In the Sept. 4, 2009 issue of the journal Science, a team led by Sarah Spiegel, Ph.D., professor and chair in the VCU Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biologyand co-leader of the VCU Massey Cancer Center's cancer cell biology program, reported that the cell nucleus, which contains the DNA that codes for all of our genes, also contains and produces S1P that is important for the regulation of certain genes. Researchers have known that the nucleus contains several kinds of lipids, but their functions have remained unknown until now. The team identified the mechanisms by which cancer cells produce S1P in the nucleus and uncovered its new function there to regulate gene expression. Spiegel, who is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on new lipid mediators that regulate cell growth and cell death, and her colleagues first discovered the role of S1P in cell growth regulation nearly a decade ago. In this study, the team demonstrated that S1P, produced by type 2 sphingosine kinase in the nucleus, regulates genes by acting like a widely used type of cancer chemotherapeutic drug known as histone deacetylase inhibitors. Histone deacetylases are a family of enzymes that regulate expression of numerous genes that code for proteins involved in cancer and many other human diseases. Although several types of histone deacetylase inhibitors are now in clinical trials, the physiological regulators of these important enzymes were not known. "Our work shows that S1P is a physiologically important regulator of histone deacetylases," said lead author Spiegel. "We believe that our studies will help in the development of a new class of histone deacetylase inhibitors that might be useful for treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases," she said. According to Spiegel, previous investigations have shown that increased levels of type 1 sphingosine kinase, one of the two enzymes that produce S1P inside cells, but not in their nucleus, correlates with poor outcome in many types of human cancers. Spiegel and her team have previously developed a specific inhibitor of this type 1 sphingosine kinase and showed that it was effective in mice against growth of human leukemia and brain cancer tumors. This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Spiegel collaborated with VCU researchers Nitai C. Hait, Ph.D., Jeremy Allegood, Ph.D., Michael Maceyka, Ph.D., Graham M. Strub, Ph.D., Kuzhuvelil B. Harikumar, Ph.D., Sandeep K. Singh, Ph.D., and Tomasz Kordula, Ph.D. Also contributing to this work were Cheng Luo, Ph.D., from the University of Pennsylvania and Chinese Academy of Sciences; Ronen Marmorstein, Ph.D., with the University of Pennsylvania; and Sheldon Milstien, Ph.D., a neuroscientist with the National Institute of Mental Health. About VCU and the VCU Medical Center:Virginia Commonwealth University is the largest university in Virginia with national and international rankings in sponsored research. Located on two downtown campuses in Richmond, VCU enrolls 32,000 students in 205 certificate and degree programs in the arts, sciences and humanities. Sixty-five of the programs are unique in Virginia, many of them crossing the disciplines of VCU's 15 schools and one college. MCV Hospitals and the health sciences schools of Virginia Commonwealth University compose the VCU Medical Center, one of the nation's leading academic medical centers. For more, see www.vcu.edu.


The uncertainty existing in the construction industry is bigger than in other industries. Consequently, most construction projects do not go totally as planned. The project management plan needs therefore to be adapted repeatedly within the project lifecycle to suit the actual project conditions. Generally, the risks of change in the project management plan are difficult to be identified in advance, especially if these risks are caused by unexpected events such as human errors or changes in the client preferences. The knowledge acquired from different resources (past projects, experts etc.) is essential to identify the probable deviations as well as to find proper proactive/reactive solutions to the faced change risks. Hence, it is necessary to have a knowledge base that contains known solutions for the common exceptional cases that may cause changes in each construction domain. The ongoing research work presented in this paper uses the process modeling technique of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) to describe different patterns of structure changes in the schedule networks. This results in several so called "change templates". Under each template different types of change risk/ response pairs can be categorized and stored in a knowledge base. This knowledge base is described as an ontology model populated with reference construction process data. The implementation of the developed approach can be seen as an iterative scheduling cycle that will be repeated within the project lifecycle as new change risks surface. This can help to check the availability of ready solutions in the knowledge base for the situation at hand. Moreover, if the solution is adopted, CPSP, "Change Project Schedule Plan "a prototype developed for the purpose of this research work, will be used to make the structure changes of the schedule network automatically based on the change template. What-If scenarios can be implemented using the CPSP prototype in the planning phase to study the effect of specific situations without endangering the success of the project objectives. Hence, better designed and more maintainable project schedules can be achieved.


The latest update of Robin Williams bestselling guide will have you working miracles in no time with Mac OS X Lion. With this book, you can learn in your own way, whether it's working through the lessons from start to finish, jumping straight to step-by-step exercises about new features, or looking up just what you need to know at that moment. There are hundreds of exciting tools and hidden gems in your Mac. And with the gentle, yet expert, hand of Robin Williams guiding you along the way, you will learn to take full advantage of all that OS X Lion has to offer. If you are new to Mac OS X, you'll learn to use your Mac with help from a world-renowned teacher. From there, you can move on to customize it to suit the way you work. And if you've been using Mac OS X already, you'll learn to use all of the new features in OS X Lion including Multi-Touch Gestures, Launchpad, Mission Control, the App Store, Mail, and much more.


This image is from the Finding My Voice Series. These images were about the destruction of my voice by fungus, the damage to my vocal folds which needed surgery in order to save them. It is also about the sounds made to recover the voice and the drugs taken to insure total destruction of fungus in the body. These works represent the journey to healing which is only possible through commitment to healing one's self through vocal exercises. The healing process toward near total recovery took 18 months.


We focus on the random generation of SAT instances that have computational properties that are similar to real-world instances. It is known that industrial instances, even with a great number of variables, can be solved by a clever solver in a reasonable amount of time. This is not possible, in general, with classical randomly generated instances. We provide different generation models of SAT instances, extending the uniform and regular 3-CNF models. They are based on the use of nonuniform probability distributions to select variables. Our last model also uses a mechanism to produce clauses of different lengths as in industrial instances. We show the existence of the phase transition phenomena for our models and we study the hardness of the generated instances as a function of the parameters of the probability distributions. We prove that, with these parameters we can adjust the difficulty of the problems in the phase transition point. We measure hardness in terms of the performance of different solvers. We show how these models will allow us to generate random instances similar to industrial instances, of interest for testing purposes. Source URL: https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/node/55279 Links [1] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/carlos-ans%C3%B3tegui [2] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/mar%C3%ADa-luisa-bonet [3] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/staff/jordi-levy [4] https://www.iiia.csic.es/en/bibliography?f[keyword]=665


The Neal Report, which was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson and published in 1967, is rightfully criticized for representing the past rather than the future of antitrust. Its authors completely embraced a theory of competition and industrial organization that had dominated American economic thinking for forty years, but was just in the process of coming to an end. The structure-conduct-performance (S-C-P) paradigm that the Neal Report embodied had in fact been one of the most elegant and most tested theories of industrial organization. The theory represented the high point of structuralism in industrial organization economics, resting on the proposition that certain market structures were highly concentrated and experienced high barriers to entry, making certain types of conduct inevitable. Under the very strong Cournot assumptions of the day oligopolists simply could not avoid setting prices above costs and continuously and excessively differentiating their products. The result was high short-run profits, excessive investment in product differentiation and advertising, reluctance to cut price in order to grow market share, and general stagnation.The Neal Report's fate lay in the fact that the S-C-P paradigm was coming under withering attack by the late 1960s. The Report's simple and uncritical acceptance of the S-C-P paradigm as gospel inspired many young academics in the United States to align themselves with the competing Stigler Report, commission by President Johnson's successor Richard M. Nixon. The conflicts that erupted largely defined the views of some of the 1970s most important antitrust scholars - namely Richard A. Posner, Robert H. Bork, and William F. Baxter.


What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone? The Long Tail is a powerful new force i n our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google. However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.


In 1998 a project was started in the Netherlands, which aimed to increase the coverage of specialised publications in the humanities. Seven academic libraries participate in the project. The project has been made possible by financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. The article is built up in four paragraphs: 1. The background to the project. 2. A brief description of its main purposes. 3. The results of an intermediate evaluation, which took place in 2004. 4. The immediate future of the project and reviews the factors that have made it successful.


The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the relationships between public stigma, self-stigma, and mental health help-seeking attitudes in college studentathletes, and (b) test whether referral source would have an impact on student-athletes' willingness to seek mental health help. Participating college student-athletes (n = 43) completed an online survey including measures of stigma (public and self), attitudes, and willingness to seek mental health help. The results indicated that public stigma and self-stigma predicted a significant proportion of variance in attitudes (66%) above and beyond gender and treatment-use history. In addition, student-athletes were more willing to seek help when referred by a family member compared with a coach (d = 0.89), a teammate (d = 1.05), or oneself (d = 1.28). The results have important implications for helping student-athletes seek mental health help when there is a need.


This paper outlines the changes in the demographics and business environment in the U.S. that are increasing the demand for more skilled, higher educated workers. The literature around the returns to education is then reviewed, looking specifically for evidence of returns to businesses from investing in sub-baccalaureate post-secondary credentials. Four benefits to businesses from investing are explored: (1) increased labor productivity, (2) improved selection and retention, (3) expanding markets, and (4) improved communities. For each of the four arguments, there is substantial evidence that increasing educational attainment or training produces positive outcomes. However, much of the evidence pertains to baccalaureate degrees relative to high school diplomas; there is scant evidence focusing specifically on sub-baccalaureate post-secondary credentials.


No one would dispute that for most of U.S. history, nonmarital children suffered significant legal and societal discrimination. Although many individuals believe that the legal disadvantages attached to "illegitimate" status has disappeared in the last forty years, this Article demonstrates that the law continues to discriminate against nonmarital children in a number of areas, including intestate succession, citizenship, and child support. Societal biases against nonmarital children also remain. A majority of Americans believe that the increase in nonmarital births is a significant societal problem and almost 50% believe that unmarried women should not have children. Some courts are aware of societal biases against nonmarital children and have tried to protect children from the "stigma of illegitimacy." However, legislative and executive efforts to promote marriage and reduce nonmarital births, along with some courts' rejection of same-sex marriage on the ground that the state's goal in creating civil marriage is to discourage nonmarital childbearing, have signaled that nonmarital families are deviant. These messages may serve to strengthen existing societal disapproval of nonmarital families and their children.The state has an interest in supporting family forms that further children's well-being, such as stable marriages. The state also has a duty to protect children from the economic, social, and psychic harms caused by legal discrimination. This Article proposes a model statute that would eliminate remaining legal discrimination against nonmarital children. It also suggests ways lawmakers can alter their messages suggesting that nonmarital families are inherently inferior. The reforms suggested in this Article may reduce societal biases against nonmarital children while allowing the state to support all children without regard to birth status.


Public electronic procurement (eProcurement), here electronic sourcing (eSourcing) in particular, is almost certainly on the agenda when eGovernment experts meet. Not surprisingly is eProcurement the first high-impact service to be addressed in the European Union- recent Action Plan. This is mainly dedicated to the fact that public procurement makes out almost 20% of Europe- GDP and therefore holds a huge saving potential. To some extent this potential lies in the common European market, since effective cross-boarder eSourcing solutions can open many doors, both for buyers and suppliers. To achieve this, systems and processes and tools, need to be adoptable, transferable as well as be able to communicate with each other. In one word, they need to be interoperable. In many relevant domains, interoperability has reached a very positive level, standards have been established, workflows been put in place. In other domains however, there is still a long road ahead. As a consequence it is crucial to define requirements for such interoperable eSourcing systems and to identify the progress in research and practice.


This essay argues that digital technologies alter the social conditions of speech and therefore should change the focus of free speech theory from a Meiklejohnian or republican concern with protecting democratic process and democratic deliberation to a larger concern with protecting and promoting a democratic culture. A democratic culture is a culture in which individuals have a fair opportunity to participate in the forms of meaning - making that constitute them as individuals. Democratic culture is about individual liberty as well as collective self-governance; it concerns each individual's ability to participate in the production and distribution of culture. The essay argues that Meiklejohn and his followers were influenced by the social conditions of speech produced by the rise of mass media in the twentieth century, in which only a relative few could broadcast to large numbers of people. Republican or progressivist theories of free speech also tend to downplay the importance of nonpolitical expression, popular culture, and individual liberty. The limitations of this approach have become increasingly apparent in the age of the Internet. By changing the social conditions of speech, digital technologies lead to new social conflicts over the ownership and control of informational capital. The free speech principle is the battleground over many of these conflicts. For example, media companies have interpreted the free speech principle broadly to combat regulation of digital networks and narrowly in order to protect and expand their intellectual property rights. The digital age greatly expands the possibilities for individual participation in the growth and spread of culture, and thus greatly expands the possibilities for the realization of a truly democratic culture. But the same technologies also produce new methods of control that can limit democratic cultural participation. Therefore, free speech values - interactivity, mass participation, and the ability to modify and transform culture - must be protected through technological design and through administrative and legislative regulation of technology, as well as through the more traditional method of judicial creation and recognition of constitutional rights. Increasingly, freedom of speech will depend on the design of the technological infrastructure that supports the system of free expression and secures widespread democratic participation. Institutional limitations of courts will prevent them from reaching the most important questions about how that infrastructure is designed and implemented. Safeguarding freedom of speech will increasingly fall to legislatures, administrative agencies, and technologists.


Nearly one out of every three adults in America is obese and tens of millions of people in the United States are dieting at any one time. This has resulted in a weight-loss industry worth billions of dollars a year and growing. What are the long-term results of weight-loss programs? How can people sort through the many programs available and select one that is right for them? Weighing the Options strives to answer these questions. Despite widespread public concern about weight, few studies have examined the long-term results of weight-loss programs. One reason that evaluating obesity management is difficult is that no other treatment depends so much on an individual's own initiative and state of mind. Now, a distinguished group of experts assembled by the Institute of Medicine addresses this compelling issue. Weighing the Options presents criteria for evaluating treatment programs for obesity and explores what these criteria mean--to health care providers, program designers, researchers, and even overweight people seeking help. In presenting its criteria the authors offer a wealth of information about weight loss: how obesity is on the rise, what types of weight-loss programs are available, how to define obesity, how well we maintain weight loss, and what approaches and practices appear to be most successful. Information about weight-loss programs--their clients, staff qualifications, services, and success rates--necessary to make wise program choices is discussed in detail. The book examines how client demographics and characteristics--including health status, knowledge of weight-loss issues, and attitude toward weight and body image--affect which programs clients choose, how successful they are likely to be with their choices, and what this means for outcome measurement. Short- and long-term safety consequences of weight loss are discussed as well as clinical assessment of individual patients. The authors document the health risks of being overweight, summarizing data indicating that even a small weight loss reduces the risk of disease and depression and increases self-esteem. At the same time, weight loss has been associated with some poor outcomes, and the book discusses the implications for program evaluation. Prevention can be even more important than treatment. In Weighing the Options, programs for population groups, efforts targeted to specific groups at high risk for obesity, and prevention of further weight gain in obese individuals get special attention. This book provides detailed guidance on how the weight-loss industry can improve its programs to help people be more successful at long-term weight loss. And it provides consumers with tips on selecting a program that will improve their chances of permanently losing excess weight.


Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) such as isoprene constitute a large proportion of the global atmospheric oxidant sink. Their reactions in the atmosphere contribute to processes such as ozone production and secondary organic aerosol formation. However, over the tropical rainforest, where 50 % of the global emissions of BVOCs are believed to occur, atmospheric chemistry models have been unable to simulate concurrently the measured daytime concentration of isoprene and that of its principal oxidant, hydroxyl (OH). One reason for this model-measurement discrepancy may be incomplete mixing of isoprene within the convective boundary layer, leading to patchiness or segregation in isoprene and OH mixing ratios and average concentrations that appear to be incompatible with each other. One way of capturing this effect in models of atmospheric chemistry is to use a reduced effective rate constant for their reaction. Recent studies comparing atmospheric chemistry global/box models with field measurements have suggested that this effective rate reduction may be as large as 50 %; which is at the upper limit of that calculated using large eddy simulation models. To date there has only been one field campaign worldwide that has reported co-located measurements of isoprene and OH at the necessary temporal resolution to calculate the segregation of these compounds. However many campaigns have recorded sufficiently high resolution isoprene measurements to capture the small-scale fluctuations in its concentration. Assuming uniform distributions of other OH production and loss processes, we use a box model of atmospheric chemistry, constrained by the spectrum of isoprene concentrations measured, as a virtual instrument, to estimate the variability in OH at a point and hence, to estimate the segregation intensity of isoprene and OH from high-frequency isoprene time series. The method successfully reproduces the only directly observed segregation, using measurements made in a deciduous forest in Germany. The effective rate constant reduction for the reaction of isoprene and OH over a South-East Asian rainforest is calculated to be typically <15 %. Although there are many unconstrained uncertainties, the likely nature of those processes suggests that this value represents an upper limit. The estimate is not sensitive to heterogeneities in NO at this remote site, unless they are correlated with those of isoprene, or to OH-recycling schemes in the isoprene oxidation mechanism, unless the recycling happens in the first reaction step. Segregation alone is therefore unlikely to be the sole cause of model-measurement discrepancies for isoprene and OH above a rainforest.