This report presents findings from an online survey and a number of expert interviews on the perspectives of European civil society on Sustainable Development and the Green Economy in the run-up to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The survey was sent out to civil society organisations in six selected European countries to gain a better understanding of their views on specific aspects of the Green Economy concept. In addition to this, the data analysis allows us to compare respondents' answers across different groups of civil society as well as between countries.The survey questions range from the definitional aspects of what the Green Economy is and what its elements are to the conflict dimensions identified in the first part of the study as well as the risks and opportunities seen in the Green Economy. Finally, it includes the questions what role governments should take and what policy and financing instruments should be used more widely in the transition to the Green Economy.The Green Economy concept is still an open concept and civil society groups are eager to weigh-in and help define its boundaries and key aspects. With this lack of clarity come many concerns, both internationally as well as on the European level, that the Green Economy could be 'just a greened capitalism' that allows for 'greenwashing' and 'social greenwashing.'A large majority of respondents say that the concept should be based on a three-pillar approach, while questions remain concerning the extent of the social dimension of the Green Economy. Trade unions emphasize the need for better working conditions and international standards, for example by implementing social protection floors. This question in particular is connected to the European debate and the relationship between the Europe 2020 strategy and its flagship initiative on resource efficiency, and the European Sustainable Development Strategy (EUSDS). Unions and environmental groups fear that the EUSDS might be replaced by the 'narrower' Europe 2020 strategy that, in their view, lacks a strong social dimension.The social partners agree that the greening of the economy should be a consensus-based approach that includes all sectors and rejects a view that distinguishes between 'brown' and 'green' sectors of the economy. There are more diverse views on the questions of what role governments should play and what instruments they should use. Respondents agree that national governments should provide framework conditions and economic incentives to businesses and support research and development for green technologies. Beyond that, there is still disagreement within civil society sectors along with significant differences in the member states over what instruments should or should not be used. Similarly, there are differences regarding the question of how much the government should get involved in the development of the economy and if there should be an active degrowth of certain polluting sectors.What respondents generally seem to agree on is that the European Economic and Social Committee can and should play a significant role in providing a forum to bring European civil society together and build consensus, to help civil society's views be heard in EU policymaking and to work to ensure the EU acts as a role model in the transition to a Green Economy. This report aims to make a contribution to this endeavour.


investigate if and how open source retrieval engines can be deployed in a grid environment. When comparing grids to conventional distributed IR, the lack of a-priori knowledge about available nodes is one of the most significant dier- ences. On top of that, it is also unknown when a particular node has time and resources available and starts a submit- ted job. Therefore, conventional methods such as RMI are not directly usable and we propose a dierent approach, us- ing middleware designed specifically for grids. We describe GridLucene, an extension of the open source engine Lucene with grid-specific classes, based on this middleware. We report on an initial comparison between GridLucene and Lucene, and find a minor penalty (in terms of execution time) for grid-based indexing and a more serious penalty for grid-based retrieval. The used middleware can gather a set of physical resources to form a single logical resource with some abstract prop- erties. The user-definable properties can be used during indexing and retrieval to let GridLucene know which files it needs to access. By using this kind of semantic information, grid nodes can "discover" which indices exist on the grid and which particular documents need to be indexed. GridLucene is available for downloading under the same li- cense as Lucene.


This is a longitudinal study of the extent to which luxury fashion brands have struggled with the dilemma of on the one hand interacting with fans and customers online, while on the other hand retain the exclusivity, surprise, and innovation hype of the brand. We have developed a framework for assessing websites and social media sites of luxury fashion brands. We applied the framework in three empirical studies in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Our findings show that the observed luxury brands have increased their adoption of social and interactive digital Internet-based technologies since 2006. We also document some of the most interesting uses of Web 2.0 technologies fashion brands for creating an immersing and innovative environment online. While some brands like Burberry has gone "the full Monty", others like Prada has not had a functioning web-site since 2007, probably disappointed about their first attempts at "getting their feet wet" early on. The findings have theoretical relevance in the shape of the 8C framework, but it should also have relevance for practitioners, as it might function as a checklist for creators and management of fashion brand websites.


Knowledge about the seasonality of different genotypes of Coffea canephora is an important tool for this crop management, particularly with regard to irrigation and fertilisation issues. This study was conducted in Espirito Santo, Brazil and aimed at to evaluate the seasonal vegetative growth in genotypes of C. canephora , as related to climatic factors, based on the growth of groups of orthotropic and plagiotropic branches with different ages. Three groups of plagiotropic branches and one group of orthotropic branches of 14 genotypes (Ipiranga and 13 that belonged to the variety Vitoria) were selected and marked to followed along the one-year experiment. Three-year-old plants were cultivated under full-sun conditions, with a spacing of 3 m between rows and 1 m between plants. The growth rates of the orthotropic and plagiotropic branches differed among the genotypes and underwent seasonal variation during the entire year, with high correlations to the air temperature. Under the natural experimental conditions, the growth rate of the branches decreased when the minimum air temperatures were below 17.2oC for most of the genotypes studied. The plagiotropic branches presented lower vegetative growth, mainly for the coffee berries, compared to the younger branches. Presumably, the genotypes of C. canephora demanded more nutrients for growth between mid-September and the second week of May.


This paper uses the URL word breaking task as an example to elaborate what we identify as crucial in designing statistical natural language processing (NLP) algorithms for Web scale applications: (1) rudimentary multilingual capabilities to cope with the global nature of the Web, (2) multi-style modeling to handle diverse language styles seen in the Web contents, (3) fast adaptation to keep pace with the dynamic changes of the Web, (4) minimal heuristic assumptions for generalizability and robustness, and (5) possibilities of efficient implementations and minimal manual efforts for processing massive amount of data at a reasonable cost. We first show that the state-of-the-art word breaking techniques can be unified and generalized under the Bayesian minimum risk (BMR) framework that, using a Web scale N-gram, can meet the first three requirements. We discuss how the existing techniques can be viewed as introducing additional assumptions to the basic BMR framework, and describe a generic yet efficient implementation called word synchronous beam search. Testing the framework and its implementation on a series of large scale experiments reveals the following. First, the language style used to build the model plays a critical role in the word breaking task, and the most suitable for the URL word breaking task appears to be that of the document title where the best performance is obtained. Models created from other language styles, such as from document body, anchor text, and even queries, exhibit varying degrees of mismatch. Although all styles benefit from increasing modeling power which, in our experiments, corresponds to the use of a higher order N-gram, the gain is most recognizable for the title model. The heuristics proposed by the prior arts do contribute to the word breaking performance for mismatched or less powerful models, but are less effective and, in many cases, lead to poorer performance than the matched model with minimal assumptions. For the matched model based on document titles, an accuracy rate of 97.18% can already be achieved using simple trigram without any heuristics.


The earthquake model by Olami, Feder, and Christensen (OFC) is one of the most striking examples of models that are discussed in the context of self-organized criticality. A key feature of self-organized critical systems is the size distribution of avalanche-like events according to a power law, $n(s)\sim s^{-\tau}$. The OFC model gained its prominent position not at last due to the possibility to tune the degree of dissipation in the system by means of a continuous coupling parameter, $\alpha$. On the other hand, exactly this lack of a local conservation law led to an ongoing discussion, whether the model displays self-organized critical properties for all values of the coupling, and if so, whether the critical exponent $\tau$ is affected by a change in $\alpha$. Of equal interest are the transient properties of the OFC model, especially how the transient time behaves as function of the system size $L$, and whether the dependency can be described by another, possibly universal, critical exponent. Understanding the limits of small couplings $\alpha$ and large system sizes $L$ is particularly important to answer these questions. This thesis investigates the transient and stationary properties of the OFC model in one and two dimensions and answers these long-standing questions. In both cases, $d=1$ and $d=2$, the system is driven towards the stationary state by the open boundary conditions and nonlinear terms in the coupling. These two ingredients result in a synchronization effect, which is observed in an adjustment of neighboring lattice sites: a central property of the two-dimensional system is the formation of long-lived patches. In one dimension, only one or two synchronized blocks emerge, which is a result of the reduced geometry. The transient time, $T$, is shown to be linear in the system size in one dimension, while it increases in two dimensions as $T(L)\sim L^{\tilde\mu}$. The exponent $\tilde\mu$ is a rapidly increasing function as the coupling $\alpha$ decreases, and probably diverges for $\alpha\to 0$. The latter is also valid for the transient time as function of $\alpha$ in one dimension, but for not too small couplings up to the conservative case, $T(\alpha)$ shows an exponential decay with increasing $\alpha$. In the stationary state, the one-dimensional OFC systems splits into two boundary layers and a synchronized center. The size distribution of avalanches has peaks at avalanche sizes of the order of the system size and a low size regime. While these peaks are independent of the coupling and have a relative weight of the order of $\mathcal{O}(1/L)$, the exact shape of the distributions for small avalanches depends on $\alpha$, and the weight of avalanches of size 1 eventually reaches unity for $L\to\infty$. In two dimensions, the size distribution is also dominated by avalanches of size 1. In contrast to the one-dimensional case, $n(s)$ is broad and can be described by a log-normal distribution, $n(s)\sim s^{-\tau -\sigma\ln s}$. The weight of the tail decreases as $1/L$, and both the coefficients in the exponent depend on $\alpha$.


Western legal prehistory aims to reconstruct some of the earliest proto-legal and cultural developments that gave rise to Western legal systems and the rule of law. So construed, our understanding of Western legal prehistory is currently highly undeveloped. One reason for this fact is methodological: without the aid of written sources, reconstructions of human prehistory can prove difficult. Recent advances in a broad range of cognate fields have, however, accumulated past a critical tipping point, and we are now in a secure enough position to begin to reconstruct important aspects of Western legal prehistory.This Article draws upon and develops these contemporary findings to reconstruct the most plausible genealogical shape of Western legal prehistory. In the process, it reaches a somewhat surprising conclusion. On the traditional view, the most important traditions relevant to the rise of Western law and Western Civilization are said to have originated in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. This traditional view is, however, based primarily on historical sources, and the reconstructions in this Article suggest that important precursors of these traditions very likely emerged much earlier and much further to the East. In fact, some of the most important traditions relevant to the emergence of large-scale civilizations with the rule of law in the West would appear to represent just one branch a much richer family of traditions, which began to emerge around 4500 BC in the Eastern-Iran-Bactria-Indus-Valley region. Beginning at this early time, this region began to produce one of the very first ancient civilizations to arise within our natural history as a species (viz., the "Harappan" or "Indus Valley" Civilization), and the people in this region must have therefore developed some of the very first cultural traditions that were specifically adapted to sustaining large-scale civilizations with incipient law. I will be arguing that these ancient developments most likely had a much closer and much more intimate relationship to some of the earliest precursors of Western tradition than has commonly been recognized because these precursors of Western tradition ultimately originated closer to ancient Bactria — which is an area directly adjacent to the Indus Valley but to the east of the Caspian Sea — during this very same time period. The reconstructions developed in this Article will thus allow me to decipher what I take to be the most plausible early genealogical shape of our legal family tree, and to suggest a number of important but underappreciated relationships that obtain between our modern Western traditions and a range of other Eurasian traditions with which the West has typically been contrasted.In today's world, it is, moreover, especially important that we try to reconstruct the genealogical structure of Western legal prehistory and obtain a better understanding of our deep past. There is now an accumulating body of empirical work, which suggests that we can explain a broad range of features of modern societies in terms of the origins of their laws. This literature suggests that legal origin variables can have strong effects on issues as diverse as corporate governance structure, labor regulations, the robustness of capital markets, and even literacy and infant mortality rates. Whether and how a modern society functions best would thus appear to depend at least in part on the origins of their legal traditions. At the same time, however, both the present legal origins literature and much comparative law scholarship distinguish primarily between the civil versus common law origins of a nation's legal system, or between both of these types of Western law and various non-Western legal systems; and the findings of this literature have not yet been fully harmonized with the swath of known difficulties that many developing nations have faced in transitioning to large-scale societies with the rule of law regardless of their civil- or common-law origins. The family trees that are employed in the current literature are, moreover, typically identified from the historical record and therefore fail to detect any relevant relations that might have arisen in human prehistory. They tend to focus on a conception of law as a set of publicly stated rules and procedures that are largely exogenous to the underlying cultural traditions and psychological attitudes that tend to support flourishing legal systems. They therefore fail to detect the kinds of emergent cultural traditions (including the culturally emergent psychological attitudes) that first allowed humans to transition from hunter-gatherer forms of life into larger-scale civilizations with the rule of law.The reconstruction offered here will, by contrast, allow us to see almost half of the large-scale mega empires that have arisen throughout world history — including all those that have arisen in the modern West — as having a shared cultural origin that goes much further back in time. The tradition in question first emerged with some of our very first human forays out of hunter-gatherer living and into settled agricultural living with large-scale civilizations and incipient legal traditions. An understanding of this deeper family tree should therefore have important empirical implications. This work can, for example, be used to help explain why certain exportations of Western-style legal institutions have worked so well while others have not. This work can also be used to identify a number of important but underappreciated features of Western traditions that are shared with these broader Eurasian traditions and have been playing a critical — if underappreciated — role in helping to sustain various forms of social complexity and economic development over the course of world history. Hence, this work can help us understand better some of the full causes and conditions of our modern success in the West. Inquiries of this kind should have special urgency today, given the massive exportations of Western law and Western legal institutions to so many other parts of the world and given the increased pressures toward Westernization that are being felt around the globe.


Automotive infotainment systems now provide drivers the ability to hear incoming Short Message Service (SMS) text messages using text-to-speech. However, the question of how best to allow users to respond to these messages using speech recognition remains unsettled. In this paper, we propose a robust voice search approach to replying to SMS messages based on template matching. The templates are empirically derived from a large SMS corpus and matches are accurately retrieved using a vector space model. In evaluating SMS replies within the acoustically challenging environment of automobiles, the voice search approach consistently outperformed using just the recognition results of a statistical language model or a probabilistic context-free grammar. For SMS replies covered by our templates, the approach achieved as high as 89.7% task completion when evaluating the top five reply candidates.


This report discusses the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), a free trade agreement that includes nations on both sides of the Pacific. Original members of the TPP were Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore. The United States, Australia, Peru, and Vietnam have committed themselves to joining and expanding this group. This report discusses similar trade partnerships, the importance of Asia to U.S. trade and security interests, and U.S. participation in the TPP.


Since highly excited atoms, which contribute to the radio recombination spectra from Galactic H II regions, possess large polarizabilities, their lifetimes are influenced by ion (proton)–induced dipole collisions. It is shown that, while these ion–radiator collisional processes, if acting alone, would effectively limit the upper principal quantum number attainable for given plasma parameters, their influence is small relative to that of electron impacts within the framework of line broadening theory. The present work suggests that ion–permanent dipole interactions (Hey et al 2004 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 37 2543) would also be of minor importance in limiting the occupation of highly excited states. On the other hand, the ion–induced dipole collisions are essential for ensuring equipartition of energy between atomic and electron kinetic distributions (Hey et al 1999 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 32 3555; 2005 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 38 3517), without which Voigt profile analysis to extract impact broadening widths would not be possible. Electron densities deduced from electron impact broadening of individual lines (Griem 1967 Astrophys. J. 148 547; Watson 2006 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 39 1889) may be used to check the significance of the constraints arising from the present analysis. The spectra of Bell et al (2000 Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 112 1236; 2011 Astrophys. Space Sci. 333 377; 2011 Astrophys. Space Sci. 335 451) for Orion A and W51 in the vicinity of 6.0 and 17.6 GHz are examined in this context, and also in terms of a possible role of the background ion microfield in reducing the near-elastic contributions to the electron impact broadening below the predictions of theory (Hey 2012 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 45 065701). These spectra are analysed, subject to the constraint that calculated relative intensities of lines, arising from upper states in collisional–radiative equilibrium, should be consistent with those obtained from Voigt profile analysis. It is shown that the experimental technique yields an excellent temperature diagnostic for the H II regions. On the other hand, strong evidence is not obtained, from those spectra which satisfy the above constraint on intensity, to indicate that the electron impact broadening theory requires substantial correction. The main grounds for attempting a revision of theory to allow for the influence of the ion microfield during the scattering processes on the upper and lower states of each line thus still appear to have a stronger theoretical (Hey 2007 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 40 4077) than experimental basis.


One fundamental problem of modern physics is the search for a theory of everything able to explain the nature of space-time, what matter is and how matter interacts. There are various propositions, as Grand Unified Theory, Quantum Gravity, Supersymmetry, String and Superstring Theories, and M-Theory. However, none of them is able to consistently explain at the present and same time electromagnetism, relativity, gravitation, quantum physics and observed elementary particles. In this paper, one summarizes the content of a new book, published in English [2] and in French [3], in which it is suggested that Universe could be a massive elastic 3D-lattice, and that fundamental building blocks of Ordinary Matter could consist of topological singularities of this lattice, namely diverse dislocation loops and disclination loops. For an isotropic elastic lattice obeying Newton's law, with specific assumptions on its elastic properties, one obtains the result that the behaviours of this lattice and of its topological defects display "all" known physics, unifying electromagnetism, relativity, gravitation and quantum physics, and resolving some longstanding questions of modern cosmology. Moreover, studying lattices with axial symmetries, represented by "colored" cubic 3D-lattices, one has identified a lattice structure whose topological defect loops coincide with the complex zoology of elementary particles, which could open a very promising field of research. Here, only main steps and principal results of the new theory are presented and discussed, without showing the mathematical concepts and developments contained in the book.


In the coming years the Second Amendment will face a historical crossroads. Following the Supreme Court's decisions in McDonald v. City of Chicago and District of Columbia v. Heller, it is settled, as a matter of constitutional jurisprudence, that the Second Amendment protects armed self-defense in the home with a handgun, and applies equally to the federal and state governments. In both opinions, the majority was guided by a historical theory dubbed the Standard Model right to arms. Under this Model, the Second Amendment provides an individual right to possess and use arms, divorced from government sanctioned militias, as a means to (1) check government tyranny through an armed citizenry, (2) provide the means to repel force with force should one be assailed in private or public, and (3) provide for the common defense. Indeed, the history supporting an "individual right" to arms is vast and undeniable. However, the historical evidence supporting the Standard Model theory is circumstantial at best, leaving the future of Second Amendment history at a critical juncture. Which end of the historical spectrum is to guide future opinions? Does the evidence have to gain the support of the historical community? Does it have to be clear and convincing, or does it merely have to be circumstantial and plausible through hypothetical word association? In Part I, this Article exposes the Standard Model for what it is not — an objective and thoroughly researched history. It identifies four unquestioned historical methodologies to which the Model has failed to adhere and how one poor account has been built upon another, which ultimately has made the "modern" Second Amendment unrecognizable to the founding generation. Part II then summarizes why historians view the Standard Model as nothing short of a historical embarrassment. In particular, Part II focuses on the rise and fall of Joyce Lee Malcolm's work on the right to arms. It then illustrates the interpretative consequences that Malcolm and other Standard Model accounts have had on the Anglo-American understanding of the right to arms. Lastly, Part III discusses the prudential reasons for reevaluating the Standard Model. In particular, it weighs three historical options that the Supreme Court could adopt for adjudicating future Second Amendment cases and controversies. It then concludes that there is a simple and reasonable construct available to the Court when weighing history. Known as a "historical guidepost" approach, the construct not only ensures the preservation of our history in context, but also allows for constitutional jurisprudence to evolve in the process.


As microblogging grows in popularity, services like Twitter are coming to support information gathering needs above and beyond their traditional roles as social networks. But most users' interaction with Twitter is still primarily focused on their social graphs, forcing the often inappropriate conflation of "people I follow" with "stuff I want to read." We characterize some information needs that the current Twitter interface fails to support, and argue for better representations of content for solving these challenges. We present a scalable implementation of a partially supervised learning model (Labeled LDA) that maps the content of the Twitter feed into dimensions. These dimensions correspond roughly to substance, style, status, and social characteristics of posts. We characterize users and tweets using this model, and present results on two information consumption oriented tasks.


Mention the name Bill Phillips to any of the people he's helped transform and you will see their faces light up with appreciation and respect. These people include: Hundreds of thousands of men and women who read his magazine for guidance and straightforward information about exercise, nutrition, and living with strength. Elite professional athletes, among them John Elway, Karl Malone, Mike Piazza, and Terrell Davis ?ho have turned to Phillips for clear-cut information to enhance their energy and performance. People once plagued by obesity, alcoholism, and life-threatening ailments who accepted a personal challenge from Bill Phillips and, with his help, have regained control of their bodies and their lives. When you begin to apply the information in this book, you will be proving to yourself that astounding changes are within your grasp too. And, you will discover Body-for-LIFEis much more than a book about physical fitness ?t's a gateway to a new and better life, a life of rewarding and fulfilling moments, perhaps more spectacular than you've ever dared to dream before. Within 12 weeks, you too are going to know ?ot believe, but know: that the transformation you've created with your body is merely an example of the power you have to transform everything else in your world. In language that is vivid and down-to-earth, Bill Phillips guides you, step by step, through the integrated Body-for-LIFE Program, which reveals: How to lose fat and increase your strength by exercising less, not more; How to tap into an endless source of energy by living with the Power MindsetTM; How to create more time for everything meaningful in your life; How to trade hours of aerobics for minutes of weight training ?ith dramatic results; How to make continual progress by using the High-Point TechniqueTM; How to feed your muscles while starving fat with the Nutrition-for-LIFE MethodTM; How thousands of ordinary people have now become extraordinary and how you can, too; How to gain control of your body and life, once and for all. The principles of the Body-for-LIFEProgram are surprisingly simple but remarkably powerful. So allow yourself to experience the force of the information in this book, allow yourself to take your mind, your body, your life to a higher point than you may have ever dreamed you could. All in as little as 12 weeks.


Dental hygiene is an occupation that is beginning to assume the status of a profession. The research reported in this paper focuses on the perceptions of education as it relates to the professional status of dental hygienists, as well as on some aspects of their continuing education needs. It is taken from a study of dental hygienists and dentists in Alberta, which investigated the perceptions of both groups of the status of dental hygiene as a profession. Data for the study was collected from focus groups of dental hygienists and questionnaires administered to both dentists and hygienists in Alberta. While the study showed support among dental hygienists as a group for further education, as well as for the notion of mandated continuing education, there was uncertainty about what forms it should take and whether it would in fact be needed by the majority of hygienists engaged in traditional practice, views that were shared by the dentists in the study. Of particular interest in the study were the views of the respondents on the baccalaureate in dental hygiene, which is seen by Dental Hygienists' Associations as being an important step in the evolution of dental hygiene as a profession. The respondents in the study were quite sharply divided over the need for the degree: dental hygienists in nontraditional careers were supportive of the idea, while those engaged in traditional practice, as well as the dentists, were less so. The findings of this study, which indicate a division within the ranks of dental hygienists, have considerable importance for those who are charged with charting the future of dental hygiene.


In this article we focus on sixty South African primary schoolgirls' experiences of male violence and bullying. Rejecting outmoded constructions of schoolgirls as passive, we examine how girls draw on different forms of femininity to manage and address violence at school. These femininities are non-normative in their advancing of violence to stop violence but are also imbued with culturally relevant meanings about care, forgiveness, and humanity based on the African principle of ubuntu. Moving away from the discursive production of girls' victimhood, we show how girls construct their own agency as they actively participate in multiple forms of femininity advocating both violence and forgiveness. Given the absence of teacher and parental support for girls' safety, we conclude with a call to address interventions contextually, from schoolgirls' own perspectives.


Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness -- his metaphorical "total darkness" -- primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists -- Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L -- stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture. The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able -- and black artists less willing -- to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.


Diseases caused by gene haploinsufficiency in humans commonly lack a phenotype in mice that are heterozygous for the orthologous factor, impeding the study of complex phenotypes and critically limiting the discovery of therapeutics. Laboratory mice have longer telomeres relative to humans, potentially protecting against age-related disease caused by haploinsufficiency. Here, we demonstrate that telomere shortening in NOTCH1-haploinsufficient mice is sufficient to elicit age-dependent cardiovascular disease involving premature calcification of the aortic valve, a phenotype that closely mimics human disease caused by NOTCH1 haploinsufficiency. Furthermore, progressive telomere shortening correlated with severity of disease, causing cardiac valve and septal disease in the neonate that was similar to the range of valve disease observed within human families. Genes that were dysregulated due to NOTCH1 haploinsufficiency in mice with shortened telomeres were concordant with proosteoblast and proinflammatory gene network alterations in human NOTCH1 heterozygous endothelial cells. These dysregulated genes were enriched for telomere-contacting promoters, suggesting a potential mechanism for telomere-dependent regulation of homeostatic gene expression. These findings reveal a critical role for telomere length in a mouse model of age-dependent human disease and provide an in vivo model in which to test therapeutic candidates targeting the progression of aortic valve disease.


In this paper we investigate reachability relations on the vertices of digraphs. If $W$ is a walk in a digraph $D$, then the height of $W$ is equal to the number of edges traversed in the direction coinciding with their orientation, minus the number of edges traversed opposite to their orientation. Two vertices $u,v\in V(D)$ are $R_{a,b}$-related if there exists a walk of height $0$ between $u$ and $v$ such that the height of every subwalk of $W$, starting at $u$, is contained in the interval $[a,b]$, where $a$ ia a non-positive integer or $a=-\infty$ and $b$ is a non-negative integer or $b=\infty$. Of course the relations $R_{a,b}$ are equivalence relations on $V(D)$. Factorising digraphs by $R_{a,\infty}$ and $R_{-\infty,b}$, respectively, we can only obtain a few different digraphs. Depending upon these factor graphs with respect to $R_{-\infty,b}$ and $R_{a,\infty}$ it is possible to define five different "basic relation-properties" for $R_{-\infty,b}$ and $R_{a,\infty}$, respectively. Besides proving general properties of the relations $R_{a,b}$, we investigate the question which of the "basic relation-properties" with respect to $R_{-\infty,b}$ and $R_{a,\infty}$ can occur simultaneously in locally finite connected transitive digraphs. Furthermore we investigate these properties for some particular subclasses of locally finite connected transitive digraphs such as Cayley digraphs, digraphs with one, with two or with infinitely many ends, digraphs containing or not containing certain directed subtrees, and highly arc transitive digraphs.


A translation contract is a binary predicate corrTransl(S,T) for source programs S and target programs T. It precisely specifies when T is considered to be a correct translation of S. A certifying compiler generates --in addittion to the target T-- a proof for corrTransl(S,T). Certifying compilers are important for the development of safety critical systems to establish the behavioral equivalence of high-level programs with their compiled assembler code. In this paper, we report on a certifying compiler, its proof techniques, and the underlying formal framework developed within the proof assistent Isabelle/HOL. The compiler uses a tiny C-like language as input, has an optimization phase, and generates MIPS code. The underlying translation contract is based on a trace semantics. We investigate design alternatives and discuss our experiences.


The porous walled resonating chamber, a type of breakwater, is investigated as a means of reducing reflected waves from structures subjected to random wind generated waves in deep water. Extending laboratory monochromatic studies to a full-scale apparatus appended to a floating bridge allows assessment of scale factors and the effects of random waves on the predicted performance of the device as a linear damped oscillator. The full-scale device is shown to be frequency selective at a frequency precisely corresponding to the predicted resonance of the system. The forces, measured on the porous wall, are lower than predicted and the device completely eliminates the problem of wave runup into the bridge roadway. The method of evaluating the energy attenuation by the breakwater incorporates spectral analysis of digitized data recorded at fixed locations equidistant in front of the chamber and at a remote station away from the influence of the breakwater. Analysis demonstrates that the time average energy density at a fixed location where incident and reflected waves co-exist is influenced not only by the wave amplitudes, as expected, but also by the product of the amplitudes and a function of the phase angle. The chamber effects a change in the random phase angle during reflection, producing a different effective distance of wave travel to the fixed location and thus negating quantitative analysis of the energy dissipation.


Conventional wisdom treats biodiversity and biotechnology as rivalrous values. The global south is home to most of earth's vanishing species, while the global north holds the capital and technology needed to develop this natural wealth. The south argues that intellectual property laws enable the industrialized north to commit biopiracy. By contrast, the United States has characterized calls for profit-sharing as a threat to the global life sciences industry. Both sides magnify the dispute, on the apparent consensus that commercial exploitation of genetic resources holds the key to biodiversity conservation. Both sides of this debate misunderstand the relationship between biodiversity and biotechnology. Both sides have overstated the significance of bioprospecting. It is misleading to frame the issue as whether intellectual property can coexist with the international legal framework for preserving biodiversity. Any lawyer can reconfigure intellectual property to embrace all of the intangible assets at stake, including raw genetic resources, advanced agricultural and pharmaceutical research, and ethnobiological knowledge. The real challenge lies in directing biodiversity conservation and intellectual property toward appropriate preservation and exploitation of the biosphere. Commercial development aids biodiversity primarily by overcoming perverse economic incentives to consume scarce natural resources that may turn out to have greater global, long-term value. We continue to debate these issues not because we are rational, but precisely because we are not. Indeed, legal approaches to biodiversity and to biotechnology are so twisted that they represent an extreme application of prospect theory. Losing supposedly hurts worse than winning feels good. The law of biodiversity and biotechnology appears to reverse this presumption. Biodiversity loss is staggering and undeniable. Humans are responsible for the sixth great extinction spasm of the Phanerozoic Eon. By contrast, gains from bioprospecting are highly speculative. Even if they are ever realized, they will be extremely concentrated. There is no defensible basis for treating ethnobiological knowledge as the foundation of a coherent approach to global economic development. In spite of these realities, the global community continues to spend its extremely small and fragile storehouse of political capital on this contentious corner of international environmental law. Global economic diplomacy should be made of saner stuff. The fact that it is not invites us to treat the entire charade as a distinct branch of behavioral law and economics: bioprospect theory.


A mixed hypergraph $H$ is a triple $(V,{\cal C},{\cal D})$ where $V$ is its vertex set and ${\cal C}$ and ${\cal D}$ are families of subsets of $V$, ${\cal C}$–edges and ${\cal D}$–edges. A mixed hypergraph is a bihypergraph iff ${\cal C}={\cal D}$. A hypergraph is planar if its bipartite incidence graph is planar. A vertex coloring of $H$ is proper if each ${\cal C}$–edge contains two vertices with the same color and each ${\cal D}$–edge contains two vertices with different colors. The set of all $k$'s for which there exists a proper coloring using exactly $k$ colors is the feasible set of $H$; the feasible set is called gap-free if it is an interval. The minimum (maximum) number of the feasible set is called a lower (upper) chromatic number. We prove that the feasible set of any planar mixed hypergraph without edges of size two and with an edge of size at least four is gap-free. We further prove that a planar mixed hypergraph with at most two ${\cal D}$–edges of size two is two-colorable. We describe a polynomial-time algorithm to decide whether the lower chromatic number of a planar mixed hypergraph equals two. We prove that it is NP-complete to find the upper chromatic number of a mixed hypergraph even for 3-uniform planar bihypergraphs. In order to prove the latter statement, we prove that it is NP-complete to determine whether a planar 3-regular bridgeless graph contains a $2$-factor with at least a given number of components.


Over the past decade, the Government of Malaysia has become increasing aware of the significant contribution of small medium enterprises (SMEs) to the national economy. A number of Government programmes and incentives were offered to the SMEs in the past years but with limited impact. This lecture touches on the nature and contribution of the Malaysian SMEs in the first five years of the 21 st century. An attempt was made to identify the success factors and weaknesses of SMEs from official reports of Government agencies, and findings of research studies on the subject. Recognising the challenges posed by globalisation and trade liberalisation on the Malaysian SMEs, the Government revamped its policies, programmes, incentives, and approaches which are currently implemented in the Ninth Malaysian Plan and the Third Industrial Master Plan. The objective is to enhance the SMEs' capacity and capabilities through continuous product development, knowledge and technology acquisition to empower them to compete with other global players offering high quality products and services at competitive prices.


Oilseed flax (Linum usitatssimum L.) has been recognized as a functional food in recent times. Functional foods deliver a health boost beyond what is expected from their traditional nutrient content. Flax fits this description perfectly because it is rich in omega-3 fatty acid and phytochemicals. Flax also provides dietary fiber and protein. We conducted an experiment in which ground wholeseed flax was consumed by 26 volunteers during 2009. A blood sample before start of consumption and one after completion of the experiment was collected and analyzed for various blood traits. Results indicated that consumption of wholeseed flax significantly increased carbon dioxide (24.23 vs. 23.03 mmol/L), lowered total serum protein (7.17 vs. 7.02 d/dl) and total Globulin (2.99 vs. 2.78g/dl) in the blood. Flax consumption did not affect overall cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations in human blood. However, comparisons of groups of study volunteers based on three categories: those whose blood traits remained unchanged, those whose blood profile values increased upon wholeseed flax consumption, and those whose blood profile values decreased upon wholeseed flax consumption revealed that consumption of 45g of wholeseed flax daily for twelve weeks decreased the concentration of total cholesterol in 9 females and 5 males, increased the concentration 5 females and 1 male, and did not affect the concentration in 2 females and 4 males. Flax consumption decreased the concentration of triglycerides in 9 females and 4 males, increased the concentration in 6 females and 4 male, and did not affect the concentration in 1 female and 2 males. These results point to the possibility that consumption of wholeseed ground flax may be helpful in reducing total cholesterol and triglycerides in females as compared to males. It was also observed that changes in concentrations of total cholesterol and triglycerides were influenced by each other – in 9 subjects concentrations of both traits were reduced, increased in 4 subjects, and remained the same in 2 subjects. We speculated that consumption of wholeseed flax for reduction of cholesterol and triglycerides in human blood may be considerably influenced by heredity.


This article presents the results of the process analysis of the evaluation of the Project NetWork demonstration, a Federal demonstration undertaken by the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 1991 to test alternative methods of providing rehabilitation and employment services to SSA's Disability Insurance beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income disabled and blind applicants and recipients. The major findings are: (1) from an operational standpoint, it is feasible to expand access to vocational rehabilitation (VR) services to a broad spectrum of SSA beneficiaries, and (2) roughly similar results are achieved, in terms of client intake and provision of services, when case management services are provided by SSA staff, contracted out to State VR agencies, or contracted with private VR providers. Later evaluation reports will trace demonstration impacts on earnings and disability benefits and report the overall benefits and costs of return-to-work services for this population.


Analysis and empirical study with the experimental method has been widely applied to study of a variety of disciplines as a common one. In the past few years, quite a lot of researchers expert in the visual convey theory have also introduced this method into the study field of graphic design. In this regard, what has the most research achievements is study on influences of design tool on formation of originality. This paper resorts to the experimental method based on the hand-printed way and the digital way to analyze the path dependence problem of originality formation. This paper is a retrial of the experiment by Stone and Candice (2007) and comes up with conclusions different from conclusions by Stone and Candice (2007) by a comparative analysis of the number of design solutions obtained in the retrial of the experiment. These different conclusions also originate from differences of design tasks and differences of originality in addition to differences of the screening method of originality.


We introduce splines for the approximation of harmonic functions on a 3–dimensional ball. Those splines are combined with a multiresolution concept. More precisely, at each step of improving the approximation we add more data and, at the same time, reduce the hat–width of the used spline basis functions. Finally, a convergence theorem is proved. One possible application, that is discussed in detail, is the reconstruction of the Earth's density distribution from gravitational data obtained at a satellite orbit. This is an exponentially ill–posed problem where only the harmonic part of the density can be recovered since its orthogonal complement has the potential 0. Whereas classical approaches use a truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) with the well–known disadvantages like the non–localizing character of the used spherical harmonics and the bandlimitedness of the solution, modern regularization techniques use wavelets allowing a localized reconstruction via convolutions with kernels that are only essentially large in the region of interest. The essential remaining drawback of a TSVD and the wavelet approaches is that the integrals (i.e. the inner product in case of a TSVD and the convolution in case of wavelets) are calculated on a spherical orbit, which is not given in reality. Thus, simplifying modelling assumptions, that certainly include a modelling error, have to be made. The splines introduced here have the important advantage, that the given data need not be located on a sphere but may be (almost) arbitrarily distributed in the outer space of the Earth. This includes, in particular, the possibility to mix data from different satellite missions (different orbits, different derivatives of the gravitational potential) in the calculation of the Earth's density distribution. Moreover, the approximating splines can be calculated at varying resolution scales, where the differences for increasing the resolution can be computed with the introduced spline–wavelet technique.


Identifying and specifying user requirements is an integral part of information systems design and is critical for the project success. More than 50% of the reasons for the project failure presented in the CHAOS report [36] and study of a US Air Force project by Sheldon et al. [33] are related to requirements. The goal of this paper is to assess the relevant user and software requirements which are the basis for an electronic quality management system selection in medical device companies. This paper describes the structured evaluation and selection process of different quality management software tools that shall support business processes. The purpose of this paper is to help the small to medium size medical device companies to choose the right quality management software which meets the company's business needs.


The Workshop on Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence (LBAI) was held in Washington, D.C., on 13 to 15 June 1999. The workshop was organized by Jack Minker and John McCarthy. Its purpose was to bring together researchers who use logic as a fundamental tool in AI to permit them to review accomplishments, assess future directions, and share their research in LBAI.


This study assumes several overarching goals. The first is to bring the social work profession firmly to the table in the discourse on fathering. A second goal of this study is to place the study of fathering in a theoretical framework that aptly acknowledges and accommodates the complexities of the subject. Applying Bronfenbrenner's (1995) Process-Person-Context-Time model, a third major goal of this study is to examine more closely what fathers themselves say about fathers and fathering and the implications of their perceptions. This study utilizes a subsample of fathers from a large nationally representative data set to test and expand what we have learned from several smaller qualitative studies of fathers. The findings in this study are convergent with those of previous studies, indicating that time together, communication, and affection appear to be important in determining the quality of the father-child relationship.


Introduction. Part I: The Basics of Cleaning Your System. Chapter 1: First Things First: Why You Should Clean. Chapter 2: Determining What to Clean and When. Part II: Programs and Data. Chapter 3: Identifying What You Have. Chapter 4: Making Your Programs Run Faster. Chapter 5: Getting Rid of Old Programs. Chapter 6: Data, Data Everywhere. Chapter 7: Organizing and Archiving Data. Part III: E-Mail and the Internet. Chapter 8: Tackling E-Mail Overload. Chapter 9: Organizing Your E-Mail. Chapter 10: Banishing Internet Villains. Chapter 11: Managing Internet Information. Part IV: The Operating System. Chapter 12: Cleaning Up the User Interface. Chapter 13: Streamlining Windows. Chapter 14: Speeding Up the File System. Chapter 15: Managing Windows Updates. Chapter 16: Getting a New System. Part V: Advanced Cleaning for the Truly Brave. Chapter 17: Memory and Storage. Chapter 18: Becoming Security Conscious. Chapter 19: Cleaning House in a Networked Environment. Chapter 20: Jumping Into the Registry. Chapter 21: Wiping the Slate Clean. Part VI: The Part of Tens. Chapter 22: Ten Troubleshooting Ideas. Chapter 23: Ten Software Cleaning Tools. Chapter 24: Ten Online Resources. Chapter 25: Ten Cool Things in XP Service Pack 2. Index.


The Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio was one of the most influential figures that the field of architecture has ever produced. For classical architects, the term Palladian stands for a vocabulary of architectural forms embodying perfection and beauty. Of even greater significance than Palladios buildings is his treatise I quattro libri dellarchitettura (The Four Books On Architecture), the most successful architectural treatise of the Renaissance and one of the two or three most important books in the literature of architecture. First published in Italian in 1570, it has been translated into every major Western language. This is the first English translation of Palladio in over 250 years, making it the only translation available in modern English. Until now, English-language readers have had to rely mostly on a facsimile of Isaac Wares 1738 translation and the eighteenth-century engravings prepared for that text. This new translation by Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield contains Palladios original woodcuts, reproduced in facsimile and positioned correctly, adjacent to the text. The book also contains a glossary that explains technical terms in their original context, a bibliography of recent Palladio research, and an introduction to Palladio and his times. The First Book discusses building materials and techniques, as well as the five orders of architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. Palladio describes the characteristics of each order and illustrates them. The Second Book discusses private town houses and country estates, almost all designed by Palladio. The Third Book discusses streets, bridges, piazzas, and basilicas, most of ancient Roman origin. The Fourth Book discusses ancient Roman temples, including the Pantheon.


This Essay examines some of the hard data available for today's legal market and develops very basic forecasts and hypotheses about what the future will bring for the U.S. legal profession during the next decades. In conclusion, it projects that recent law school graduates and current and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country — a legal market which will grow, exist for, and coincide with, their entire professional careers. Using admittedly back-of-the-envelope math based on current trends affecting the legal market (in particular, lawyer retirements, population growth, and additional demand for legal services driven by increased volume and complexity), the Essay estimates over 840,000 new employment opportunities for lawyers between 2010 and 2030 alone. In other words, the Essay projects that, statistically, the legal profession market is moving into the direction of close-to-guaranteed legal employment for all law school graduates over the course of the next two decades.


In this paper, a two-dimensional Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model is developed to simulate the shoaling, breaking and overtopping of a solitary wave over a vertical breakwater. Turbulence intensity is described by using a k- turbulence closure model and the free surface configuration is tracked by Volume Of Fluid (VOF) technique. To validate the numerical model the simulation results is compared with the Xie (1981) experimental data and a very good agreement between them is observed. The results revealed that wave height and wave energy decrease considerably during the reflection from vertical wall, which illustrates a considerable energy lost during the impaction and wave overtopping process. The turbulence production during the broken wave interaction with vertical breakwater is very significant; consequently the vertical breakwater undergoes sever turbulent and dynamic drag force.


Edited by Forensic Architecture
With contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Nabil Ahmed, Maayan Amir, Hisham Ashkar & Emily Dische-Becker, Ryan Bishop, Jacob Burns, Howard Caygill, Gabriel Cuellar, Eitan Diamond, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Anselm Franke, Grupa Spomenik, Ayesha Hameed, Charles Heller, Helene Kazan, Thomas Keenan, Steffen Kramer, Adrian Lahoud, Armin Linke, Jonathan Littell, Modelling Kivalina, Model Court, Working Group Four Faces of Omarska, Gerald Nestler, Godofredo Pereira, Nicola Perugini, Alessandro Petti, Lorenzo Pezzani, Cesare P. Romano, Susan Schuppli, Francesco Sebregondi, Michael Sfard, Shela Sheikh, SITU Research, Caroline Sturdy Colls, John Palmesino & Ann Sofi Ronnskog / Territorial Agency, Paulo Tavares, Fusun Turetken, Robert Jan van Pelt, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss / NAO, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, Chris Woods

Forensics originated from the term "forensis" which is Latin for "pertaining to the forum." The Roman forum was a multidimensional space of negotiation and truth-finding in which humans as well as objects participated in politics, law, and the economy. With the advent of modernity, forensics shifted to refer exclusively to the courts of law and to the use of medicine, and today as a science in service to the law. The present use of forensics, along with its popular representations have become increasingly central to the modes by which states police and govern their subjects.

By returning to forensis this book seeks to unlock forensics' original potential as a political practice and reorient it. Inverting the direction of the forensic gaze it designates a field of action in which individuals and organizations detect and confront state violations.

The condition of forensis is one in which new technologies for mediating the "testimony" of material objects—bones, ruins, toxic substances, landscapes, and the contemporary medias in which they are captured and represented—are mobilized in order to engage with struggles for justice, systemic violence, and environmental transformations across the frontiers of contemporary conflict.

This book presents the work of the architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theorists who participated directly in the "Forensic Architecture" project in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, as well as the work of associates and guests. It includes forensic investigations undertaken by the project and its collaborators aimed at producing new kinds of evidence for use by international prosecutorial teams, political organizations, NGOs, and the UN. It also brings together research and essays that situate contemporary forensic practices within broader political, historical, and aesthetic discourse.

Copublished with Forensic Architecture
Design by Zak Group


Hailed as a great success, welfare reform resulted in a dramatic decline in the welfare rolls--from 4.4 million families in 1996 to 2.1 million in 2001. But what does this "success" look like to the welfare mothers and welfare caseworkers who experienced it? In Flat Broke, With Children, Sharon Hays tells us the story of welfare reform from inside the welfare office and inside the lives of welfare mothers, describing the challenges that welfare recipients face in managing their work, their families, and the rules and regulations of welfare reform. Welfare reform, experienced on the ground, is not a rosy picture. The majority of adult welfare clients are mothers--over 90 percent--and the time limits imposed by welfare reform throw millions of these mostly unmarried, desperate women into the labor market, where they must accept low wages, the most menial work, the poorest hours, with no benefits, and little flexibility. Hays provides a vivid portrait of their lives--debunking many of the stereotypes we have of welfare recipients--but she also steps back to explore what welfare reform reveals about the meaning of work and family life in our society. In particular, she argues that an inherent contradiction lies at the heart of welfare policy, which emphasizes traditional family values even as its ethic of "personal responsibility" requires women to work and leave their children in childcare or at home alone all day long. Hays devoted three years to visiting welfare clients and two welfare offices, one in a medium-sized town in the Southeast, another in a large, metropolitan area in the West. Drawing on this hands-on research, Flat Broke, With Children is the first book to explore the impact of recent welfare reform on motherhood, marriage, and work in women's lives, and the first book to offer us a portrait of how welfare reform plays out in thousands of local welfare offices and in millions of homes across the nation.


The combination of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is challenging due to the different natures of both concepts. SDN describes networks with homogeneous, static and centralized controlled topologies. In contrast, a WMN is characterized by a dynamic and distributed network control, and adds new challenges with respect to time-critical operation. However, SDN and WMN are both associated with decreasing the operational costs for communication networks which is especially beneficial for internet provisioning in rural areas. This work surveys the current status for Software-Defined Wireless Mesh Networking. Besides a general overview in the domain of wireless SDN, this work focuses especially on different identified aspects: representing and controlling wireless interfaces, control-plane connection and topology discovery, modulation and coding, routing and load-balancing and client handling. A complete overview of surveyed solutions, open issues and new research directions is provided with regard to each aspect.


The purpose of this study was to develop and pre-test culturally appropriate, theoretically-based nutrition education materials targeting low-income Latina immigrant caretakers in Guilford County, North Carolina. Six focus groups and three household interviews were held with low-income Latina caretakers (N=20 women total) to identify key areas of interest, preferences, and concerns regarding their family's diet. Sessions were conducted by a bicultural, bilingual community interviewer using a semi-structured question guide. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, tape recorded, transcribed and translated. Content analysis identified common themes. A response was considered a "theme" if mentioned greater than five times by different participants. Many women reported they cannot identify healthy foods when shopping and wanted tips about how to do so. The most common challenge reported was persuading children to eat vegetables. Most requested healthy recipes that are child-friendly and include serving size information. Spanish translated, colorful recipe cards or brochures were the most requested materials. Many wanted healthier recipes for traditional Hispanic dishes. These findings indicate that this low income group is very interested in providing healthy foods to their families and want the skills to do so. Thus, results were used to develop nutrition education messages and materials based on the Social Cognitive Theory. Materials were pretested with the target audience (N= 6) and revised accordingly. This project was funded by the NC Agricultural Research Service.


ASP.NET MVC (Model View Framework) allows you to use ready-to-use MVC code so you can develop Web applications faster. This book?s cut-to-the-chase approach gets you up to speed on the new ASP.NET MVC without getting bogging you down in learning or re-learning ASP.NET itself. You?ll receive straightforward instruction on concepts, backed by real-world case studies and examples that offer practical solutions. Topics include test-driven development and unit testing, the principles of the MVC pattern, how to implement it, how to move from traditional ASP.NET Webforms to ASP.NET MVC, and much more.


This dictionary covers thousands of important terms and concepts used in dentistry today. Entries are written in clear and concise English without the use of unnecessary dental or medical jargon, and many entries are supplemented by detailed line drawings or colour photographs.
 The dictionary defines terms in a broad range of dental specialist areas. In this edition expanded coverage has been given in particular to topics that include oral surgery, oral medicine, special care dentistry, anaesthesia, restorative dentistry, paediatric dentistry, anatomy, and orthodontics.
 An essential guide for dental practitioners and dental students, it is also an invaluable reference source for all members of the dental team, medical practitioners, lawyers involved with members of the dental profession, and the general reader.


In this paper we report on two surveys and offer an introductory plan that librarians may use to begin implementing mobile access to selected library databases and services. Results from the first survey helped us to gain insight into where students at Utah State University (USU) in Logan, Utah, stand regarding their use of mobile devices for academic activities in general and their desire for access to library services and resources in particular. A second survey, conducted with librarians, gave us an idea of the extent to which responding libraries offer mobile access, their future plans for mobile implementation, and their opinions about whether and how mobile technologies may be useful to library patrons. In the last segment of the paper, we outline steps librarians can take as they "go mobile."


This essay concerns the current intersection of national security and public health in the United States. It argues that over the course of the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on the threat of infectious disease has coalesced: for public health and national security officials, the problem of infectious disease is no longer only one of prevention, but also—and perhaps even more—one of preparedness. The essay describes the process through which a norm of preparedness came to structure thought about threats to public health, and how a certain set of responses to these threats became possible. The story is a complex one, involving the migration of techniques initially developed in the military and civil defense to other areas of governmental intervention. The analysis is centered not on widespread public discussion of biological threats but, rather, on particular sites of expertise where a novel way of understanding and intervening in threats was developed and deployed. It focuses in particular on one technique, the scenario-based exercise, arguing that this technique served two important functions: first, to generate an affect of urgency in the absence of the event itself; and second, to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities in response capability that could then guide intervention. More broadly, the scenario-based exercise is exemplary of the rationality underlying the contemporary articulation of national security and public health.


Readers can take their PHP skills to the next level with this fully revised and updated PHP Advanced: Visual QuickPro Guide, Third Edition! Filled with fourteen chapters of step-by-step content and written by bestselling author and PHP programmer Larry Ullman, this guide teaches specific topics in direct, focused segments, shows how PHP is used in real-world applications. The book teaches developing web applications using advanced PHP techniques and advanced database concepts, and this edition offers several chapters devoted to object-oriented programming and all-new chapters on debugging, testing, and performance and using the Zend framework. Author hosts a popular companion website at www.larryullman.com, where readers can freely download code used in the book, access a user forum and book updates, and get advice directly from the author.


A global target of stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations at between 450 and 550 parts per million carbon-dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2e) has proven robust to recent developments in the science and economics of climate change. Retrospective analysis of the Stern Review (2007) suggests that the risks were underestimated, indicating a stabilization target closer to 450 ppm CO2e. Climate policy at the international level is now moving rapidly towards agreeing an emissions pathway, and distributing responsibilities between countries. A feasible framework can be constructed in which each country takes on its own responsibilities and targets, based on a shared understanding of the risks and the need for action and collaboration on climate change. The global deal should contain six key features: (i) a pathway to achieve the world target of 50 per cent reductions by 2050, where rich countries contribute at least 75 per cent of the reductions; (ii) global emissions trading to reduce costs; (iii) reform of the clean development mechanism to scale up emission reductions on a sectoral or benchmark level; (iv) scaling up of RD (v) an agreement on deforestation; and (vi) adaptation finance.


The call for environmentally compatible and economical vehicles, still satisfying demands for high performance, necessitates immense efforts to develop innovative engine concepts. Whereas direct injection gasoline engines promise considerable fuel savings, they are prone to large variations in the flow and mixing field which may lead to incomplete combustion. Modern internal combustion (IC) engine concepts like the Gasoline Direct Injection offer a great chance to meet current and future emission standards. Especially air-guided direct injection systems used to instantiate stratified charge at part load allow for an optimised fuel consumption and a low level of emissions. During this crucial process, the engine is very sensitive to cycle-to-cycle variations of the flow and mixing field. While numerous experimental and RANS-based numerical investigations concentrated on the way to gain insight into the behavior of the spray in IC-Engines, LES may help in delivering detailed unsteady information needed to understand better the strongly transient phenomena ongoing in the combustor. The present study is dedicated to the detailed investigation of the phenomena of cycle-to-cycle variations in a realistic IC-engine using LES in order to achieve a better understanding of their nature, origin and their influence on the flow and mixing field in a combustion chamber, and also in order to create a base for future improvements. The configuration investigated represents the "BMBF" generic four-stroke direct fuel injection engine with variable charge motion system. This is a realistic IC-Engine with four canted valves with asymmetric cylinder head and asymmetric bowl. The well-known KIVA-3V code extended to LES which is capable of simulating two-phase engine flows was used. A relatively fine computational mesh reflecting all geometrical features of the "BMBF" IC-engine has been created and tested. In order to characterize the cycle-to-cycle variations LES calculations coupled with a suitable parallelization strategy have been used to simulate for 50 full engine cycles. Phase-averaged statistics have been presented for characteristic crank angles. Investigations of the cyclic fluctuations have shown that the cycle-to-cycle phenomena are directly linked to the turbulence and can not be considered separately from each other. In the case of single-phase flow, the maximal intensity of cycle-to-cycle velocity variations in the combustion chamber is reached during the intake, mainly at the tip of the intake jet, and during compression, mainly at the center of the tumble motion. At the end of compression stroke the highest intensity of cyclic fluctuations is found at the center of the in-cylinder tumble motion which is roughly located near the spark plug close to the ignition point. At the same time examination of the expansion and exhaust strokes shows relatively low intensity of the cycle-to-cycle velocity fluctuations. The quality of the LES simulations applied to complex engine configurations has been assessed. Numerical and statistical errors have been analyzed. As a general guideline a mesh with grid size seems to be the minimum requirement to represent the flow field with reasonable accuracy. In order to control statistical errors it can be recommended to perform roughly 25 engine cycles in order to get mean velocities right and 50 cycles to ensure a good prediction of cyclic fluctuations. In the case of two-phase flow the flow field in the combustion chamber is defined by a superposition of in-cylinder charge motion and injected fuel spray jet. This interaction results in a considerable increase of the intensity of cyclic velocity fluctuations at the center of the tumble motion. The analysis has shown a great impact of velocity cyclic variations on the air-fuel mixing processes as well as fuel jet penetration and forming of fuel vapor cloud in the area near the spark plug. A lean fuel mixture is mostly found at the spark plug location for the considered ignition points under the given operating condition. Inflammable air-fuel mixtures lead to engine misfires which directly affect the work output and the vehicle driveability. These effects have to be considered in the development of modern DISI IC-engines.


The primary revolution in automated planning in the last decade has been the very impressive scale-up in planner performance. A large part of the credit for this can be attributed squarely to the invention and deployment of powerful reachability heuristics. Most, if not all, modern reachability heuristics are based on a remarkably extensible data structure called the planning graph, which made its debut as a bit player in the success of GraphPlan, but quickly grew in prominence to occupy the center stage. Planning graphs are a cheap means to obtain informative look-ahead heuristics for search and have become ubiquitous in state-of-the-art heuristic search planners. We present the foundations of planning graph heuristics in classical planning and explain how their flexibility lets them adapt to more expressive scenarios that consider action costs, goal utility, numeric resources, time, and uncertainty.


The #1 "New York Times "bestseller from the queen of royal fiction ("USA TODAY") Philippa Gregory is a rich, compelling novel of love, sex, ambition, and intrigue surrounding the Tudor court of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the infamous Boleyn family. When Mary Boleyn comes to court as an innocent girl of fourteen, she catches the eye of the handsome and charming Henry VIII. Dazzled by the king, Mary falls in love with both her golden prince and her growing role as unofficial queen. However, she soon realizes just how much she is a pawn in her family s ambitious plots as the king s interest begins to wane, and soon she is forced to step aside for her best friend and rival: her sister, Anne. With her own destiny suddenly unknown, Mary realizes that she must defy her family and take fate into her own hands. With more than one million copies in print and adapted for the big screen, " The Other Boleyn Girl" is a riveting historical drama. It brings to light a woman of extraordinary determination and desire who lived at the heart of the most exciting and glamorous court in Europe, and survived a treacherous political landscape by following her heart."


Hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology have become increasingly popular as research methodologies, yet confusion still exists about the unique aspects of these two methodologies. This article provides a discussion of the essential similarities and differences between hermeneutic phenomenology and phenomenology from historical and methodological perspectives. Consideration is given to the philosophical bases, assumptions, focus of research and research outcomes that differentiate these approaches.


Photograph of Matlock Rose riding the quarter horse Buster Waggoner in an outdoor arena. Rose is "cutting" the calf on the right side of the photograph. There is a cowboy sitting on the top rail of the metal fence on the far left. Automobiles parked outside of arena near the fence. Two people are sitting on the front fender of an automobile near center background. A man is riding a white horse behind that same vehicle. Printed in white near bottom center of photograph: "Buster Waggoner, AQHA: 8336 Champion :Breckenridge NCHA, 4-30-49. Ridden by: Matlock Rose Owner: Lester Goodson J3 Ranch, Magnolia, Texas". Stamped on back of photo in red: " A James Cathey Photograph Photographer of the nation's leading Rodeos. Photographs taken of Parades, Horses, Personalities and Western Wear. James Cathey Western Photography - Phone 6-9225 'In the heart of the livestock industry" Ft. Worth Livestock Exchange Bldg. Reorder Prints By # [in pencil] 4-30-8". And in pencil "4-30-8"


This is the first concise book of essential Welch-isms, abridged from the bestselling "Get Better or Get Beaten". Jack Welch built a career out of fighting waste. "29 Leadership Secrets from Jack Welch" follows in Welch's footsteps, boiling the legendary CEO's leadership successes down to 29 strategies that made GE the world's most competitive company - and Welch the world's most successful and admired CEO. This all-in-one Welch reference updates material from Robert Slater's bestselling "Get Better or Get Beaten", and is today's ultimate fast-paced, no-nonsense handbook on the ways of Jack Welch. It taps into the heart of Welch's courage, innovation, and leadership success by examining simple leadership secrets that include: Managing less is managing better; Make quality the job of every employee; and Have global brains and vision.


In this thesis we propose an efficient method to compute the automorphism group of an arbitrary hyperelliptic function field over a given constant field of odd characteristic as well as over its algebraic extensions. Beside theoretical applications, knowing the automorphism group also is useful in cryptography: The Jacobians of hyperelliptic curves have been suggested by Koblitz as groups for cryptographic purposes, because the discrete logarithm is believed to be hard in this kind of groups. In order to obtain "secure" Jacobians, it is necessary to prevent attacks like Pohlig/Hellman's and Duursma/Gaudry/Morain's. The latter is only feasible, if the corresponding function field has an automorphism of large order. According to a theorem by Madan, automorphisms seem to allow the Pohlig/Hellman attack, too. Hence, the function field of a secure Jacobian will most likely have trivial automorphism group. In other words: Computing the automorphism group of a hyperelliptic function field promises to be a quick test for insecure Jacobians. Let us outline our algorithm for computing the automorphism group Aut(F/k) of a hyperelliptic function field F/k. It is well known that Aut(F/k) is finite. For each possible subgroup U of Aut(F/k), Rolf Brandt has given a normal form for F if k is algebraically closed. Hence our problem reduces to deciding, whether a given hyperelliptic function field F=k(x,y), y^2=D_x has a defining equation of the form given by Brandt. This question can be answered using theorem III.18: We have F=k(t,u), u^2=D_t iff x is a fraction of linear polynomials in t and y=pu, where the factor p is a rational function w.r.t. t which can be determined explicitly from the coefficients of x. This condition can be checked efficiently using Grobner basis techniques. With additional effort, it is also possible to compute Aut(F/k) if k is not algebraically closed. Investigating a huge number of examples one gets the impression that the above motivation of getting a quick test for insecure Jacobians is partially fulfilled: The computation of automorphism groups is quite fast using the suggested algorithm. Furthermore, fields with nontrivial automorphism groups seem to have insecure Jacobians. Only fields of small characteristic seem to have a reasonable chance of having nontrivial automorphisms. Hence, from a cryptographic point of view, computing Aut(F/k) seems to make sense whenever k has small characteristic.


Diabetes mellitus is commonly associated with systolic/diastolic hypertension, and a wealth of epidemiological data suggest that this association is independent of age and obesity. Much evidence indicates that the link between diabetes and essential hypertension is hyperinsulinemia. Thus, when hypertensive patients, whether obese or of normal body weight, are compared with age- and weight-matched normotensive control subjects, a heightened plasma insulin response to a glucose challenge is consistently found. A state of cellular resistance to insulin action subtends the observed hyperinsulinism. With the insulin/glucose-clamp technique, in combination with tracer glucose infusion and indirect calorimetry, it has been demonstrated that the insulin resistance of essential hypertension is located in peripheral tissues (muscle), is limited to nonoxidative pathways of glucose disposal (glycogen synthesis), and correlates directly with the severity of hypertension. The reasons for the association of insulin resistance and essential hypertension can be sought in at least four general types of mechanisms: Na+ retention, sympathetic nervous system overactivity, disturbed membrane ion transport, and proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells. Physiological maneuvers, such as calorie restriction (in the overweight patient) and regular physical exercise, can improve tissue sensitivity to insulin; evidence indicates that these maneuvers can also lower blood pressure in both normotensive and hypertensive individuals. Insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia are also associated with an atherogenic plasma lipid profile. Elevated plasma insulin concentrations enhance very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) synthesis, leading to hypertriglyceridemia. Progressive elimination of lipid and apolipoproteins from the VLDL particle leads to an increased formation of intermediate-density and low-density lipoproteins, both of which are atherogenic. Last, insulin, independent of its effects on blood pressure and plasma lipids, is known to be atherogenic. The hormone enhances cholesterol transport into arteriolar smooth muscle cells and increases endogenous lipid synthesis by these cells. Insulin also stimulates the proliferation of arteriolar smooth muscle cells, augments collagen synthesis in the vascular wall, increases the formation of and decreases the regression of lipid plaques, and stimulates the production of various growth factors. In summary, insulin resistance appears to be a syndrome that is associated with a clustering of metabolic disorders, including non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, obesity, hypertension, lipid abnormalities, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.


Grapevines (Vitis vinifera L.) represent one of the most important crops in the world in terms of both production and economic importance. Grapevines are exposed to many types of abiotic stresses (e.g., drought, flooding, low and high temperature, salinity) and biotic stresses (e.g., viruses, bacteria, phytoplasma, fungal disease) during their life-cycle. Therefore, grapevines elicit the appropriate defence mechanisms.
In the first part of this study, we monitored the occurrence of Grapevine fanleaf virus (GFLV) infection, which causes progressive decline of infected grapevines and lowers their yield. Grapevines were also tested for the presence of other viruses important for grapevines: Arabis mosaic virus (ArMV), Grapevine leafroll associated virus (GLRaV)-1, -2, -3, -4, -9, Grapevine virus A (GVA), Grapevine fleck virus (GFkV) in this study; and by Cigoj (2015): Grapevine virus B (GVB), Tomato black ring virus (TBRV), Grapevine chrome mosaic virus (GCMV), Tomato ringspot virus (ToRSV), Raspberry ringspot virus (RpRSV), Strawberry latent ringspot virus (SLRSV), and Tobacco ringspot virus (TRSV). Using ELISA, the presence of the following grapevine viruses were detected: GFLV, (GFkV), (GVA), and Grapevine leafroll associated viruses- 1, -2, -3,.
A wide range of GFLV symptoms caused by grapevine fanleaf disease in naturally infected vineyards were observed, including leaf, shoot and cluster malformations and leaf yellowing. GFLV is disseminated by its biological vector X. index, and through vegetative propagation of virus-infected material. The spread of GFLV in the vineyards was investigated here.
We constructed a spatio-temporal study of the GFLV titres during the seasons and throughout the grapevine, for its distribution in different grapevine organs through the season. This study shows that young leaves have high virus titres through the whole vegetative period, while mature leaves, tendrils and flower/ berry clusters only have high titres at the beginning of the vegetative period. The seeds retain high virus titres after berry colouring. Phloem scrapings were shown to contain lower virus titres during the vegetative period, with an increase outside and at the beginning of the vegetative period. In flower/ berry clusters, mature leaves and tendrils, the GFLV titres decrease significantly over the vegetative period. Additionally, different GFLV titres were shown in five different cultivars, and different combinations of mixed infections with other grapevine viruses influenced the GFLV titre differently. Finally, correlation between the magnitude of symptom appearance and GFLV titres was analysed.
Grapevines adapt to abiotic stresses and biotic stresses by the expression of a wide range of stress-responsive genes, which are thought to have key roles in stress tolerance and survival.
SWP of the infected grapevines through the season was lower than SWP measured for healthy grapevines. For both seasons, there were significant differences in SWP measurements between healthy and GFLV-infected grapevines of 'Schioppettino' trained using the single Guyot training system.
SWP and RHC of the GFLV-infected grapevines were reduced compared to the healthy controls. The water deficit triggered the production of ABA, which induced the expression of the stress-related gene RD22. Additionally, this study shows that the WRKY gene that is involved in the ABA signalling network is regulated by water deficit. Plant defence responses to water stress also included up-regulation of the F3H2 and LDOX genes, which are involved in anthocyanins synthesis. GFLV infection significant impacted upon the expression of genes involves in ABA biosynthesis, as NCED1 and NCED2, and upon two genes involved in the early stages of anthocyanins synthesis, as CHS2 and F3H1. We also showed that the combination of grapevine cultivar, training system, and environmental conditions impacts on gene expression


The fascinating untold story of digital cash and its creators from experiments in the 1970s to the mania over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

 Bitcoin may appear to be a revolutionary form of digital cash without precedent or prehistory. In fact, it is only the best-known recent experiment in a long line of similar efforts going back to the 1970s. But the story behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and its blockchain technology has largely been untold?until now. In Digital Cash, Finn Brunton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future: protecting privacy or bringing down governments, preparing for apocalypse or launching a civilization of innovation and abundance that would make its creators immortal.

 The incredible story of the pioneers of cryptocurrency takes us from autonomous zones on the high seas to the world's most valuable dump, from bank runs to idea coupons, from time travelers in a San Francisco bar to the pattern securing every twenty-dollar bill, and from marketplaces for dangerous secrets to a tank of frozen heads awaiting revival in the far future. Along the way, Digital Cash explores the hard questions and challenges that these innovators faced: How do we learn to trust and use different kinds of money? What makes digital objects valuable? How does currency prove itself as real to us? What would it take to make a digital equivalent to cash, something that could be created but not forged, exchanged but not copied, and which reveals nothing about its users?

 Filled with marvelous characters, stories, and ideas, Digital Cash is an engaging and accessible account of the strange origins and remarkable technologies behind today's cryptocurrency explosion.


The distinguishing number $\Delta(X)$ of a graph $X$ is the least positive integer $n$ for which there exists a function $f:V(X)\to\{0,1,2,\cdots,n-1\}$ such that no nonidentity element of $\hbox{Aut}(X)$ fixes (setwise) every inverse image $f^{-1}(k)$, $k\in\{0,1,2,\cdots,n-1\}$. All infinite, locally finite trees without pendant vertices are shown to be 2-distinguishable. A proof is indicated that extends 2-distinguishability to locally countable trees without pendant vertices. It is shown that every infinite, locally finite tree $T$ with finite distinguishing number contains a finite subtree $J$ such that $\Delta(J)=\Delta(T)$. Analogous results are obtained for the distinguishing chromatic number , namely the least positive integer $n$ such that the function $f$ is also a proper vertex-coloring.


A provocative manifesto, Whipping Girl tells the powerful story of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist. Serano shares her experiences and observations both pre- and post-transition to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole. Serano's well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this "feminine" weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire. In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity in all of its wondrous forms. "


Web browsers ostensibly provide strong isolation for the client-side components of web applications. Unfortunately, this isolation is weak in practice; as browsers add increasingly rich APIs to please developers, these complex interfaces bloat the trusted computing base and erode cross-app isolation boundaries. We reenvision the web interface based on the notion of a pico-datacenter, the client-side version of a shared server datacenter. Mutually untrusting vendors run their code on the user's computer in low-level native code containers that communicate with the outside world only via IP. Just as in the cloud datacenter, the simple semantics makes isolation tractable, yet native code gives vendors the freedom to run any software stack. Since the datacenter model is designed to be robust to malicious tenants, it is never dangerous for the user to click a link and invite a possibly-hostile party onto the client.


[1] Forest disturbances greatly alter the carbon cycle at various spatial and temporal scales. It is critical to understand disturbance regimes and their impacts to better quantify regional and global carbon dynamics. This review of the status and major challenges in representing the impacts of disturbances in modeling the carbon dynamics across North America revealed some major advances and challenges. First, significant advances have been made in representation, scaling, and characterization of disturbances that should be included in regional modeling efforts. Second, there is a need to develop effective and comprehensive process‐based procedures and algorithms to quantify the immediate and long‐term impacts of disturbances on ecosystem succession, soils, microclimate, and cycles of carbon, water, and nutrients. Third, our capability to simulate the occurrences and severity of disturbances is very limited. Fourth, scaling issues have rarely been addressed in continental scale model applications. It is not fully understood which finer scale processes and properties need to be scaled to coarser spatial and temporal scales. Fifth, there are inadequate databases on disturbances at the continental scale to support the quantification of their effects on the carbon balance in North America. Finally, procedures are needed to quantify the uncertainty of model inputs, model parameters, and model structures, and thus to estimate their impacts on overall model uncertainty. Working together, the scientific community interested in disturbance and its impacts can identify the most uncertain issues surrounding the role of disturbance in the North American carbon budget and develop working hypotheses to reduce the uncertainty.


This paper is a based on an extensive study of the available textual and visual data on a collection of didactic paintings employed by the Manichaeans throughout the 1400-year history of their religion. Known as Mani's Picture or Picture-Book, these paintings were originally created in mid-third century Mesopotamia with direct involvement from Mani (216-276 CE) and remained preserved by being adapted to a wide variety of artistic and cultural norms as the religion spread across the Asian continent. The evidence on Manichaean didactic art fits well with the pan-Asiatic phenomenon of, what Victor Mair calls in his 1998 monograph, "picture-recitation," or "story-telling with images." Nevertheless, more than any other religion, the Manichaeans made use of images by attributing canonical status to them. This assured their preservation. By situating the Manichaean data in a broader art historical context, this lecture brings together evidence on the same phenomenon by other contemporaneous religious traditions (such as Eastern Christianity, Judaism, and most importantly Buddhism) in third-eighth century West Asia, eighth-twelfth century Central Asia and eighth-seventeenth century East Asia.


The permanent-determinant method and its generalization, the Hafnian-Pfaffian method, are methods to enumerate perfect matchings of plane graphs that were discovered by P. W. Kasteleyn. We present several new techniques and arguments related to the permanent-determinant with consequences in enumerative combinatorics. Here are some of the results that follow from these techniques: 1. If a bipartite graph on the sphere with $4n$ vertices is invariant under the antipodal map, the number of matchings is the square of the number of matchings of the quotient graph. 2. The number of matchings of the edge graph of a graph with vertices of degree at most 3 is a power of 2. 3. The three Carlitz matrices whose determinants count $a \times b \times c$ plane partitions all have the same cokernel. 4. Two symmetry classes of plane partitions can be enumerated with almost no calculation.