Acrylonitrile is an important industrial chemical used in large quantities for, for example, the production of acrylic fibers (1). More than 100 000 workers in the United States and Europe are potentially exposed. Whether occupational exposure to acrylonitrile causes increased risk for cancer in humans has been under debate for a long time. The proceedings from a workshop on this matter were recently published as a supplement to the Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment & Health (2). The reason for the debate has been the apparent contradiction between experimental animal data and epidemiologic results. Two papers in this issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Work Environment & Health add interesting information to this discussion (3, 4).

Animal experiments clearly show that acrylonitrile is carcinogenic (1). A high incidence of astrocytomas in the brain and spinal cord was the most consistent finding. In a 2-year inhalation study (6 hours/day, 5 days/week) on rats, the lowest dose associated with an increased incidence of astrocytomas was 20 ppm (5). Acrylonitrile can readily be taken up in the body by inhalation and metabolized to a reactive epoxide, cyanoethylene oxide, mainly by the cytochrome P450 isozyme CYP2E1 (6). Cyanoethylene oxide, which is thought to play an important role in the carcinogenic properties of acrylonitrile, is detoxified by glutathione conjugation in rodents, whereas in humans detoxification via epoxide hydrolase plays an important role. Hemoglobin adducts of acrylonitrile can be used as toxicologically relevant biomarkers of exposure (7).

Acrylonitrile has been the subject of a large number of epidemiologic studies of workers. Three large cohort studies provided exposure estimates for acrylonitrile (8-10). Current operations in the production of acrylonitrile have exposure levels of ≤0.5 ppm for an 8-hour time-weighted average, whereas past exposures have sometimes exceeded 20 ppm (11). A meta-analysis of 25 studies of acrylonitrile workers indicated essentially null findings for lung, brain, and prostate cancer. In the cohort study by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Poisson regression analyses showed, however, an excess of lung cancer (relative risk 1.5) in the highest quintile of cumulative exposure for acrylonitrile (8).

In this issue Marsh et al (3) present a reanalysis of the NCI-NIOSH cohort, for which standardized mortality ratios (SMR) are calculated for workers exposed and unexposed to acrylonitrile using national and regional comparison rates for the general population in the United States. The SMR value for lung cancer in the quintile of the most highly exposed workers was only 0.9. With the use of external rates, the lower risk estimate was due to a significant 30% deficit in lung cancer deaths for the unexposed workers. No plausible reason for this deficit is proposed. The authors of the original publication were very cautious in their interpretation of the data: " . . . analyses of exposure-response do not provide strong or consistent evidence for a causal association [p 25]" (8). The result of the reanalysis supports their cautiousness.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has recently changed its evaluation of acrylonitrile from probably (2A) to possibly (2B) carcinogenic, due to the fact that there is inadequate evidence for carcinogenicity in humans, despite sufficient evidence with respect to experimental animals (1). According to the paper by Schulz et al in this issue, the cancer potency of acrylonitrile in the central nervous system (CNS), estimated from the best available animal inhalation study, is not inconsistent with observed deaths in the epidemiologic studies (4). This result differs from that of earlier animal-based risk models, from which larger human risks were derived (12-13). The model used by Schulz et al differs in several important aspects from the previous ones. First, adjustment for less-than-lifetime follow-up was more realistic because it took into account increasing CNS cancer rates with age. Second, the exposure assessments developed specifically for each cohort were applied in the model. Third, the CNS cancer potency factor derived from a rat inhalation study (5) was 18 times smaller than the potency factor derived from an ingestion bioassay used for earlier models. The conversion of acrylonitrile potency from animals to humans depends on the exposure metric chosen. Schulz et al (4) used preferably average continuous lifetime exposure rather than lifetime cumulative exposure, the result being lower human risk estimates.

Altogether 24 incident cases of CNS cancer deaths were observed in the 3 cohorts with exposure data as compared with 25.9 expected (4), which corresponds to an SMR of 0.93 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.60-1.40]. The prediction derived from the bioassay-based model by Schulz et al (4) was 28.9 deaths, which corresponds to an SMR of 1.11 (95% CI 0.76-1.62). The authors conclude that "The CNS cancer potencies estimated from the best available inhalation bioassay was consistent with the observed deaths in the epidemiologic studies . . . [p 14]" (4). This is a reasonable conclusion, but it should be added that a lack of association cannot be excluded either. It is extremely difficult to verify or falsify low risk increases for rare diseases in occupational cohort studies. The observed number of deaths from CNS cancer in the 3 cohort studies has to increase more than 10-fold before the lower 95% CI limit for an SMR of 1.11 exceeds unity. Therefore, it is not realistic that an excess risk for CNS cancer deaths due to occupational acrylonitrile exposure, predicted from the rat inhalation bioassay-model, can ever be evaluated against empirical data from epidemiologic studies.

One limitation of the bioassay model for risk estimation used by Schulz et al (4) is that, for both rats and humans, it is based on airborne exposure levels, and not on biologically effective biomarkers of dose, such as hemoglobin adducts. Adduct studies are also needed to clarify whether genetic polymorphisms for CYP2E1 or epoxide hydrolase modifies the formation and detoxification of cyanoethylene oxide in acrylonitrile-exposed humans.

In conclusion it can be said that results from epidemiology and the bioassay model make it obvious that the excess risk for the acrylonitrile-exposed workers cannot have been large. Decision making and the regulation of exposure to acrylonitrile not only has to rely on cancer epidemiology data, but also on other considerations.


Recent molecular phylogenetic work on allodapine bees (Apidae, Xylocopinae), reported elsewhere, has shown that the tropical African genus Macrogalea is the most basal genus in the tribe Allodapini, and studies on this genus are likely to provide important insights into social evolution in the xylocopine bees. A new species, Macrogalea magenge from Pemba Island, Tanzania, and the previously unrecorded male of M. zanzibarica are described. Genetic divergence data, from one nuclear and two mitochondrial gene fragments, for M. candida, M. zanzibarica and M. magenge are compared with intra-generic pairwise distances of other allodapine taxa.


One of the most serious challenges facing South Africa as a developing country is the number of homeless people who currently do not have access to housing opportunities. The institutionalized policy of apartheid in South Africa during the period 1948 to 1994 created not only segregation based upon race, but also inequalities and inefficiencies in terms of access to economic opportunities. This has no doubt had as a consequence the high rate of unemployment that South Africa is currently experiencing. Many people are reliant on Government assistance in order to obtain access to housing. Such assistance either takes the form of receiving free give-away housing or subsidized funding provided by the Government. A high percentage of South Africais annual budget is spent on housing programmes. Most of South Africais housing programmes focus on encouraging people to own their own freehold property. Community based housing schemes sponsored by government in South Africa, like social housing, have largely failed, unlike in many European countries and countries like the US. Although one can naturally understand Governmentis vision of eventually eradicating homelessness, the question that needs to be posed is whether or not South Africa as a country can afford both financially and politically to continue its pursuit of current housing policies. The research for this paper was undertaken in order to: i Provide an overview of the South African Governmentis current housing policy; i Research the views and perceptions of a sample of people who would be the beneficiaries of Governmentis policy; i Apply the principles that have made social housing schemes in European countries successful to the South African environment; i Suggest alternative tenure options available to Government to house people other than providing access to the ownership of freehold property.


The kinetic oxidation study of acetophenone by N-bromosaccharin in aqueous acetic acid medium and in presence of Hg(II) acetate was investigated in the presence of both cationic and anionic micelles. The reaction obeys first order kinetics in oxidant both in the presence as well as absence of micelle. The kinetic results for dependence on substrate concentration indicate intermediate complex formation between oxidant and substrate species. The reactions are acid catalysed and follow both acid dependent and independent path. Change in polarity of the medium, effect of addition of saccharin and Hg(II) acetate have also been investigated. Both type of micelles catalyses the oxidation. Binding parameters have been calculated by analyzing the data using the model suggested by Piszkiewicz. On the basis of kinetic results probable mechanism is proposed.


This article explores the need for Treaty-based local governance, raised to national prominence by the 2014 outrage against New Plymouth Mayor Andrew Judd, who advocated a Māori ward for 2016. The Treaty of Waitangi influenced the creation of Māori seats in Parliament in the nineteenth century, and a provision for Māori seats in local councils in 2001. There has been limited uptake of the latter and Māori remain significantly underrepresented. Innovations in governing arrangements have allowed non-elected Māori to take up advisory roles and, in some cases, decision-making roles. We argue that these do not ensure fair and effective Māori representation. Ad hoc and unpredictable structures have failed to deliver fair and effective representation to all New Zealanders. There is a pressing need for a New Zealand constitutional debate – a conversation among Māori and nonMāori – to devise a governance model that addresses the Treaty of Waitangi as New Zealand's founding document. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 7 December 2016 Accepted 16 June 2017


We present the results of an experimental investigation of fluid drops impacting an inclined rigid surface covered with a thin layer of high viscosity fluid. We deduce the conditions under which droplet bouncing, splitting, and merger arise. Particular attention is given to rationalizing the observed contact time and coefficients of restitution, the latter of which require a detailed consideration of the drop energetics.


The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce its 2019 Conference and Media Arts Festival, hosted by University College Cork. The conference and exhibition will be held from July 15-17, 2019, on UCC's campus in the heart of Cork city, Ireland. The theme for ELO2019 #ELOcork is "peripheries": delegates are invited to explore the edges of literary and digital culture, including emerging traditions, indeterminate structures and processes, fringe communities of praxis, effaced forms and genres, marginalised bodies, and perceptual failings. ELO2019 #ELOcork will mark the first time that the ELO conference has been hosted by an Irish institution: join us for this momentous gathering!


This thesis studies the motion control of wheeled mobile robots. Its focus is set on high speed control on challenging terrain. Additionally, it deals with the general problem of path following, as well as path planning and obstacle avoidance in difficult conditions. First, it proposes a heuristic longitudinal control for any wheeled mobile robot, and evaluates it on different kinematic configurations and in different conditions, including laboratory experiments and participation in a robotic competition. Being the focus of the thesis, high speed control on uneven terrain is thoroughly studied, and a novel control law is proposed, based on a new model representation of skidsteered vehicles, and comprising of nonlinear lateral and longitudinal control. The lateral control part is based on the Lyapunov theory, and the convergence of the vehicle to the geometric reference path is proven. The longitudinal control is designed for high speeds, taking actuator saturation and the vehicle properties into account. The complete solution is experimentally tested on two different vehicles on several different terrain types, reaching the speeds of ≈ 6m s−1, and compared against two state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, a novel path planning and obstacle avoidance system is proposed, together with an extension of the proposed high speed control, which builds up a navigation system capable of autonomous outdoor person following. This system is experimentally compared against two classical obstacle avoidance methods, and evaluated by following a human jogger in outdoor environments, with both static and dynamic obstacles. All the proposed methods, together with various different state-of-the-art control approaches, are unified into one framework. The proposed framework can be used to control any wheeled mobile robot, both indoors and outdoors, at low or high speeds, avoiding all the obstacles on the way. The entire work is released as open-source software.


This thesis is concerned with Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), a technique by which
a platform can estimate its trajectory with greater accuracy than odometry alone, especially when the
trajectory incorporates loops. We discuss some of the shortcomings of the "classical" SLAM approach
(in particular EKF-SLAM), which assumes that no information is known about the environment a priori.
We argue that in general this assumption is needlessly stringent; for most environments, such as
cities some prior information is known. We introduce an initial Bayesian probabilistic framework which
considers the world as a hierarchy of structures, and maps (such as those produced by SLAM systems)
as consisting of features derived from them. Common underlying structure between features in maps
allows one to express and thus exploit geometric relations between them to improve their estimates.
We apply the framework to EKF-SLAM for the case of a vehicle equipped with a range-bearing sensor
operating in an urban environment, building up a metric map of point features, and using a prior map
consisting of line segments representing building footprints. We develop a novel method called the Dual
Representation, which allows us to use information from the prior map to not only improve the SLAM
estimate, but also reduce the severity of errors associated with the EKF. Using the Dual Representation,
we investigate the effect of varying the accuracy of the prior map for the case where the underlying
structures and thus relations between the SLAM map and prior map are known. We then generalise to
the more realistic case, where there is "clutter" - features in the environment that do not relate with the
prior map. This involves forming a hypothesis for whether a pair of features in the SLAMstate and prior
map were derived from the same structure, and evaluating this based on a geometric likelihood model.
Initially we try an incrementalMultiple Hypothesis SLAM(MHSLAM) approach to resolve hypotheses,
developing a novel method called the Common State Filter (CSF) to reduce the exponential growth in
computational complexity inherent in this approach. This allows us to use information from the prior
map immediately, thus reducing linearisation and EKF errors. However we find that MHSLAM is still
too inefficient, even with the CSF, so we use a strategy that delays applying relations until we can infer
whether they apply; we defer applying information from structure hypotheses until their probability of
holding exceeds a threshold. Using this method we investigate the effect of varying degrees of "clutter"
on the performance of SLAM.


We propose a biophysical modelling approach to separately investigate the impact of right and left atrial (RA/LA) electrical heterogeneity on atrial fibrillation (AF) perpetuation. The baseline AF substrate was based on a 4:1 anisotropy ratio and uniform membrane properties. AF was initiated by a ramp-pacing protocol applied in the pulmonary veins region. Once AF was observed, random patchy heterogeneities in action potential duration (shorter duration inside the patches) were introduced in the cellular model for the subsequent simulation of AF. The effect of tissue heterogeneity on AF perpetuation was quantified by the duration of AF episodes (an AF episode lasting more than 50 s was considered as sustained). For high percentages of heterogeneities, the mean AF episode duration and the number of non-terminated AF episodes were significantly higher for the RA compared to the LA. This could be indicative of a very probable involvement of the RA substrate into the persistent AF process in this model. A direct link between the spatial localization of tissue heterogeneity and AF duration was also observed.


The valuable role technology could play in literacy acquisition and instruction, especially for primary grade learners, is a promising area of research. This article describes a study about how strategy instruction taught through a blend of technology and more traditional teaching methods can aid reading comprehension.
The study, which involved four grade 6 classes from two different schools in the Western Cape, focuses on three perceived needs: (1) a need for the improvement of reading comprehension in second-language learners, (2) a need for strategy instruction in teaching reading comprehension, and finally (3) a need for a blended-learning approach to strategy instruction. The discussion of the research results also highlights the main obstacles in the way of the effective use of a blended-learning approach.


This report discusses the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which was created by Title I of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (P.L. 103-322). The mission of the COPS program is to advance community policing in all jurisdictions across the United States. Legislation introduced in the 111th Congress would reauthorize the COPS program through FY2014 and reestablish COPS as a multi-grant program. This report provides an overview and analysis of issues Congress might choose to consider when taking up legislation to reauthorize the COPS program.


Title of dissertation: COMPILER-BASED PRE-EXECUTION Dongkeun Kim, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Donald Yeung Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Pre-execution is a novel latency-tolerance technique where one or more helper threads run in front of the main computation and trigger long-latency delinquent events early so that the main thread makes forward progress without experiencing stalls. The most important issue in pre-execution is how to construct effective helper threads that quickly get ahead and compute the delinquent events accurately. Since the manual construction of helper threads is error-prone and cumbersome for a programmer, automation of such an onerous task is inevitable for pre-execution to be widely used for a variety of real-world workloads. In this thesis, we study compiler-based pre-execution to construct prefetching helper threads using a source-level compiler. We first introduce various compiler algorithms to optimize the helper threads; program slicing removes noncritical code unnecessary to compute the delinquent loads, prefetch conversion reduces blocking in the helper threads by converting delinquent loads into nonblocking prefetches, and loop parallelization speculatively parallelizes the targeted code region so that more memory accesses are overlapped simultaneously. In addition to these algorithms to expedite the helper threads, we also propose several important algorithms to select the right loops for pre-execution regions and pick up the best thread initiation scheme to invoke helper threads. We implement all these algorithms in the Stanford University Intermediate Format (SUIF) compiler infrastructure to automatically generate effective helper threads at the program source level. Furthermore, we replace the external tools to perform program slicing and offline profiling in our most aggressive compiler framework with static algorithms to reduce the complexity of compiler implementation. We conduct thorough evaluation of the compiler-generated helper threads using a simulator that models the research SMT processor. Our experimental results show compiler-based pre-execution effectively eliminates the cache misses and improves the performance of a program. In order to verify whether prefetching helper threads provide wall-clock speedup even in real silicon, we apply compiler-based pre-execution in a real physical system with the Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading Technology. To generate helper threads, we use the pre-execution optimization module in the Intel research compiler infrastructure and propose three helper threading scenarios to invoke and synchronize the helper threads. Our physical experimentation results prove prefetching helper threads indeed improve the performance of selected benchmarks. Moreover, to achieve even more speedup in real silicon, we observe several issues need to be addressed a priori. Unlike the research SMT processor where most processor resources are shared or replicated, some critical hardware structures in the hyper-threaded processor are hard-partitioned in the multithreading mode. Therefore, the resource contention is more intricate, and thus helper threads must be invoked very judiciously. In addition, the program behavior dynamically changes during execution and the helper threads should adapt to it to maximize the benefit from pre-execution. Hence we implement user-level library routines to monitor the dynamic program behavior with little overhead and show the potential of having a runtime mechanism to dynamically throttle helper threads. Furthermore, in order to activate and deactivate the helper threads at a very fine granularity, having light-weight thread synchronization mechanisms is very crucial. Finally, we apply compiler-based pre-execution to multiprogrammed workloads. When introducing helper threads in a multiprogramming environment, multiple main threads compete with each other to acquire enough hardware contexts to launch helper threads. In order to address such a resource contention problem, we propose a mechanism to arbitrate the main threads. Our simulation-based experiment shows pre-execution also helps to boost the throughput of a multiprogrammed workload by reducing the latencies in the individual applications. Moreover, when the helper thread occupancy of each main thread in the workload is not too high, multiple main threads effectively share the hardware contexts for helper threads and utilize the processor resources in the SMT processor. COMPILER-BASED PRE-EXECUTION


What has dependent type theory done for Haskell? In this talk, I will discuss the influence of dependent types on the design of programming languages and on the practice of functional programmers. Over the past ten years, the Glasgow Haskell compiler has adopted several type system features inspired by dependent type theory. However, this process has not been a direct translation; working in the context of an existing language has lead us to new designs in the semantics of dependent types. I will take a close look at what we have achieved in GHC and discuss what we have learned from this experiment: what works now, what doesn't work yet, and what has surprised us along the way.


A variational method was applied to find the wave function of a transverse-electric whispering gallery mode (WGM) in a spheroidal resonator of a uniform refractive index (RI). It was found that the electric field is tangential to the resonator surface as in the sphere, up to the linear order of the ellipticity. Using the wave function, the resonance shift due to adsorption of a thin, uniform dielectric layer onto the surface and the shift by a uniform RI change in the surroundings were evaluated in the perturbation theory. The shift by the RI change is not affected by the ellipticity, but the shift by the layer adsorption now depends on the meridional order. However, the correction is not large unless the ellipticity is large and the meridional order is away from the one for the equatorial mode of WGM.


Abstract The idea of using sport for social, cultural and community development has been promoted for decades; however, only limited empirical research can be found that analyses the strategic potential of sport projects in contributing to conflict resolution, reconciliation and peace building in deeply divided societies. This study concentrates upon the experiences of a number of Football for Peace (F4P) projects operating in Israel in 2009. It identifies and investigates the inter-community sport management strategies employed in a particular project that featured Jewish, Arab, and Circassian communities in Northern Israel. The article focuses on and assesses the role played by external change agents in facilitating project delivery and development. Following an interpretive mode of enquiry, observations and focus group discussions with key project facilitators and sport coaches were conducted exploring participant experiences and using this information to develop practical recommendations for social development through sport. The following six strategic dimensions were elicited as critical elements for promoting positive inter-community relations, building local capacity and enhancing overall social development: greater emphasis on training for all volunteers; the provision of role model support; the development of local commitment and leadership; improvement of sport programming; the facilitation of wider community involvement; and project augmentation and extension. We argue that these practical suggestions have transferable implications for other grassroots organisations and NGOs that use sport projects in divided and/or disadvantaged communities elsewhere in the world.


Physical activity is associated with slower physical and cognitive decline with aging. However, there are many barriers to physical activity among community-dwelling older adults. Retirement living may facilitate physical activity by reducing health, social, and environmental barriers for seniors. The purpose of this thesis was to: (1) quantify changes in physical activity and physical function over the transition to retirement living; (2) examine the relationship between participant characteristics and physical activity in retirement living; and (3) describe the relationship between change in physical activity and change in physical and cognitive function. Older adults on the wait-lists for or living in retirement living were recruited. Physical activity was assessed with the Actigraph activity monitor and the CHAMPS activity questionnaire. Physical function was measured with the Senior Fitness Test. Cognitive function was assessed with a 45-minute test battery that assessed a variety of cognitive domains. In this study, objectively measured physical activity decreased with the transition to retirement living; however, it appeared that intentional exercise increased while activities of daily living (ADLs) decreased. Additionally, endurance, agility, and strength improved after the transition. In retirement living, physical activity was positively associated with endurance, agility, and strength, as well as balance confidence, memory and executive function. However, change in physical activity over the transition to retirement living was not positively correlated with changes in physical or cognitive function. The results from this study, the first to prospectively follow older adults over the transition to retirement living, indicate that physical activity decreases due to a large drop in ADLs with the transition, though physical function appeared to improve. Future studies should expand the timeline used in this thesis to better understand


Anthony Swofford's "Jarhead" is the first Gulf War memoir by a frontline infantry marine, and it is a searing, unforgettable narrative.When the marines -- or "jarheads," as they call themselves -- were sent in 1990 to Saudi Arabia to fight the Iraqis, Swofford was there, with a hundred-pound pack on his shoulders and a sniper's rifle in his hands. It was one misery upon another. He lived in sand for six months, his girlfriend back home betrayed him for a scrawny hotel clerk, he was punished by boredom and fear, he considered suicide, he pulled a gun on one of his fellow marines, and he was shot at by both Iraqis and Americans. At the end of the war, Swofford hiked for miles through a landscape of incinerated Iraqi soldiers and later was nearly killed in a booby-trapped Iraqi bunker.Swofford weaves this experience of war with vivid accounts of boot camp (which included physical abuse by his drill instructor), reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family. As engagement with the Iraqis draws closer, he is forced to consider what it is to be an American, a soldier, a son of a soldier, and a man.Unlike the real-time print and television coverage of the Gulf War, which was highly scripted by the Pentagon, Swofford's account subverts the conventional wisdom that U.S. military interventions are now merely surgical insertions of superior forces that result in few American casualties. "Jarhead" insists we remember the Americans who are in fact wounded or killed, the fields of smoking enemy corpses left behind, and the continuing difficulty that American soldiers have reentering civilian life.A harrowing yet inspiring portrait of atormented consciousness struggling for inner peace, "Jarhead" will elbow for room on that short shelf of American war classics that includes Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," and be admired not only for the raw beauty of its prose but also for the depth of its pained heart.


As network information resources grow in size, it is often most efficient to process queries and updates at the site where the data is located. This processing can be accomplished by using a traditional client-server network interface, which constrains the client to the set of queries supported by the server, or requires the server to send all data to the client for processing. The former is inflexible; the latter is inefficient. Transportable agents, which support the movement of the client computation to the location of the remote resource, have the potential to be more flexible and more efficient. Transportable agents are capable of suspending their execution, transporting themselves to another host on a network, and resuming execution from the point at which they were suspended. Transportable agents consume fewer network resources and can support systems that do not have permanent network connections, such as mobile computers and personal digital assistants. We describe a prototype transportable-agent implementation that facilitates research in this area. Agents are written in a script language that supports agent relocation, and the language is processed at each host by an agent interpreter. Electronic mail and UNIX remote shell (rsh) are the two current transport mechanisms and we plan to explore others. We present a technical-report searching agent as a demonstration of the capabilities of our prototype implementation.


Abstract. We examined CH4 variability over different regions of India and the surrounding oceanic regions derived from thermal infrared (TIR) band observations by the Thermal And Near-infrared Sensor for carbon Observation-Fourier Transform Spectrometer (TANSO-FTS) onboard the Greenhouse gases Observation SATellite (GOSAT) and simulated by the updated MIROC4.0-based Atmospheric Chemistry Tracer Model (MIROC4-ACTM) for the period 2009–2014. This study attempts to understand the sensitivity of the vertical profile retrievals at different layers of the troposphere and lower stratosphere, arising from the averaging kernels and a priori assumptions. We stress that this is of particular importance when the satellite derived products are analyzed using a different ACTMs from that is used as retrieval a priori. A comparison of modeled and retrieved CH4 vertical profiles shows the 22 vertical levels of GOSAT/TANSO-FTS TIR retrievals provide critical information about transport from the top of the boundary layer to the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere in a consistent manner. The mean model-GOSAT TIR CH4 mismatch is within 50 ppb, excepting 150 hPa and upward, where the sensitivity of GOSAT/TANSO-FTS TIR observations becomes very low. Convolution of the modeled profiles with GOSAT/TANSO-FTS TIR averaging kernels reduce the mismatch to below uncertainty. Distinct seasonal variations of CH4 have been observed at the upper atmospheric boundary layer (800 hPa), free troposphere (500 hPa), and upper troposphere (200 hPa) levels over northern and southern regions of India corresponding to the southwesterly monsoon (July–September) and post-monsoon (October–December) seasons. Analysis of the transport and emission contributions to CH4 suggests that the CH4 seasonal cycle over the Indian subcontinent is governed by both the heterogeneous distributions of surface emissions and the influence of the global monsoon divergent wind circulations. GOSAT/TANSO-FTS TIR observations provide additional information about CH4 observations in this region compared to what is known from in situ data, which is important for improving the accuracy of emission flux optimization. Based on two emission sensitivity simulations, we suggest that the emissions of CH4 from the India region is 51.2 ± 1.6 Tg yr−1 during the period of 2009–2014.


We experimentally demonstrate a fiber-optic programmable optical pulse shaper based on time-domain binary phase-only linear filtering, which is capable of switching picosecond pulse shapes at unprecedented sub-GHz rates by simply updating the binary signal driving an electro-optic phase-modulator (EO-PM). The required binary phase-filtering functions are computed using a genetic algorithm (GA). One limitation of the binary phase-filtering approach is the inherent symmetry of the output temporal shapes. To generate fully arbitrary time-domain intensity profiles (including asymmetric temporal waveforms) we must employ a multi-level phase-filtering function. However, the size of the solution-space and complexity of the computation multiplies to manifolds as the number of levels in the phase-filtering function increases. Here we numerically demonstrate a simple strategy, by combining the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm (GSA) and GA, for the fast computation of multi-level phase-filtering functions. The performance of this approach is numerically proven by generating different asymmetric pulse shapes of practical interest, assuming experimentally feasible design parameters.


A particularly controversial topic in current education policy is the expansion of the charter school sector. This paper analyzes the spillover effects of charter schools on traditional public school (TPS) students in New York City. I exploit variation in both the timing of charter school entry and distance to the nearest charter school to obtain credibly causal estimates of the impacts of charter schools on TPS student performance, and I am among the first to estimate the impacts of charter school co-location. I further add to the literature by exploring potential mechanisms for these findings with school-level data on per pupil expenditures (PPE), and parent and teacher perceptions of schools. Briefly, I find charter schools significantly increase TPS student performance in both English Language Arts and math, and decrease the probability of grade retention. Effects increase with charter school proximity and are largest in TPSs co-located with charter schools. Potential explanations for improved performance include increased PPE, academic expectations, student engagement, and a more respectful and safe school environment after charter entry. The findings suggest that more charter schools in New York City may be beneficial at the margin, and co-location may be mutually beneficial for charter and traditional public schools.


David Marsden was the most outstanding UK clinical neuroscientist of his generation, making key discoveries in the neurophysiology, neurochemistry and clinical aspects of diseases of the basal ganglia, and their normal function. His legacies are the establishment, with Stanley Fahn in the USA, of movement disorders as a subspecialty within neurology, of the international Movement Disorder Society, and of the journal Movement Disorders; his ex-students and fellows around the globe; and his research and teaching output embodied in his extraordinarily prolific publication record of more than 1360 papers, books and chapters, culminating in the posthumous completion and publication in December 2011 of Marsden's book of movement disorders, a project he had started in 1984. All of these were achieved through the combination of his intellect and drive, his communication skills, and his forceful and charismatic personality.


Laboratory tests were conducted to simultaneously measure soil water content and salinity using a four-electrode Wenner array sensor. The sensor was modified to enhance the capacitive effect. Soil bulk density and the depth to which the electrodes penetrate into the soil were strictly controlled during the experiments. Sinusoidal current signals with a constant amplitude and frequencies ranging from 1 Hz to 15 MHz were sent to the outer electrodes of the Wenner array, whereas voltage outputs were measured from the inner electrodes. Frequency-response data were analyzed using the partial least-squares method to establish calibration models for simultaneously predicting water content and salinity from the frequency-response patterns. The R 2 values for predicting water content and salinity at the 30-mm penetration depth reached 0.89 and 0.91, respectively, whereas the root-mean-square errors for the volumetric water content and salinity measurements were 0.019 m 3 m -3 and 0.173 cmol kg -1 , respectively. Test results showed that, in general, the calibration models predicted the water content more accurately than salinity. The depth to which the sensor penetrates into the soil has a strong effect on the measurement accuracy. This study has demonstrated that the modified Wenner array sensor and the frequency-response method have a potential for simultaneously measuring soil capacitive and conductive properties. However, numerous difficulties, including contact resistance, depth control, and the effect of soil type, will need to be addressed to improve the measurement accuracy.


We present a dual-probe homodyne quadrature laser interferometer for the measurements of displacement at two separate spatial locations. This is a coupled homodyne interferometer with inverted polarity of probe signals featuring a wide dynamic range and constant sensitivity. As an application of this dual-probe interferometer, we demonstrate how to locate the pulsed-laser interaction site on a plate without knowing the propagation velocities of the laser-induced mechanical waves.


The success of the four core freedoms of the EU has created fertile ground for transnational organised crime. Innovative, transnational legal weapons are therefore required by national authorities. The availability of data on criminal convictions is at the forefront of the debate. But which mechanism for availability can be effectively while at the same time respecting an increasingly higher level of data protection at a national level? In the luid, post-'Reform Treat' environment, the EU is moving towards the creation of a European Criminal Record which will ultimately secure availability of criminal data beyond the weaknesses of Mutual legal Assistance menchanisms. Examinig the concept of a Rueopan criminal Record in its legal, political and data protection dimensions, this multidisciplinary study is an indispensable exploration of a major initiative in European Criminal Law which is set to monopolise the debate on EU judicial cooperation and enforcement.


The security of almost all public-key cryptography is based on some computationally hard problem. Most prominent are the problems of factoring integers into primes and computing discrete logarithms in finite groups. However, in the last two decades, several new public-key schemes have emerged that base their security on completely different problems. One such promising proposal is to base the security of public-key cryptography schemes on the difficulty of solving large systems of multivariate quadratic polynomial equations. A major challenge in designing these public-key systems is to embed an efficient trapdoor into the set of equations. Recently, a novel approach towards this problem was suggested by Gligoroski et al. cite{Gligoroski:2008:MQT}, using the concept of quasigroup string transformations. In this thesis we describe a methodology for identifying strong and weak keys in the newly introduced multivariate public-key signature scheme MQQ-SIG, which is based on this idea. We have conducted a large number of experiments based on Grobner basis attacks, in order to classify the various parameters that determine the keys in MQQ-SIG. Our findings show that there are big differences in the importance of these parameters. The methodology consists of a classification of different parameters in the scheme, together with an introduction of concrete criteria on which keys to avoid and which to use. Additionally, we identified an unnecessary requirement in the original specification that required the quasigroups to fulfill a certain condition. Removing this restriction can potentially speed up the key generation process by a large factor. Having all this, we propose a new enhanced key generation algorithm for MQQ-SIG that will generate stronger keys and be more efficient than the original key generation method.


Neoclassical tearing modes are one of the most serious concerns for operation on a next-step tokamak device. The modes occur on present tokamaks at normalized pressure (βN) values comparable to those envisaged for baseline scenarios in future devices, such as ITER-FEAT. Further, empirical scalings based on data from many of the present machines point to much lower thresholds on a larger device. However, physics-based models indicate an important role for the seed island mechanisms, which may in fact give rise to increased stability on larger devices - i.e. if the seed island width (required to trigger the NTM) falls below the critical levels required. Fits based on these models suggest this is the case, but are too badly constrained at present to make reliable predictions, and the physics is complex, making quantitative theoretical calculation difficult. Further experiments are required to examine the scaling of the seed, as well as to identify the role and relative sizes of the stabilizing terms that set the critical size for mode growth. In the event that the modes are unavoidable, promising feedback stabilization techniques are being developed with the use of localized RF current drive to change the stability properties of the plasma. Further work is needed to demonstrate sustained access to higher βN and provide data to refine models. This paper reviews the underlying physics and key issues, commenting on the present status of understanding and further work required.


We give the first complete analysis that the complexity of finding and maintaining rigid components of planar bar-and-joint frameworks and arbitrary d-dimensional body-and-bar frameworks, using a family of algorithms called pebble games, is O(n). To this end, we introduce a new data structure problem called union pairfind, which maintains disjoint edge sets and supports pair-find queries of whether two vertices are spanned by a set. We present solutions that apply to generalizations of the pebble game algorithms, beyond the original rigidity motivation.


A novel direct writing technique using submicron-diameter fibers is presented. This technique adopts contact mode in the process of writing, and submicron lines with different widths have been obtained. Experimental results demonstrate that the resolution of this technique can be smaller than the exposure wavelength of 442 nm, and 380-nm-wide line is achieved. In addition, the distribution of light fields in the photoresist layer is analyzed by finite-difference time-domain method.


The Photo-triage application is meant to be an essential part of the digital photography lifestyle. It can fit as a component wherever photo management is done (shell, picture-it, media-center, etc.). The central idea is to facilitate rapid, convenient categorization of one's personal photos into at least the following categories: hidden/private, majority, highlights, best and/or representative. See figure 1. This application is meant to fill an empty niche in the usage of digital photos: that is, there's no easy way add metadata to photos to mark them for printing, for sharing, or for slideshows without creating separate versions of the photos and copying into separate folders. We propose a sorting metaphor that will add implicit metadata when one first goes through the photos.


Background Capacity building (CB) is an essential element for guideline adaptation in the context of LMIC. Objectives To describe the approach and results from a CB process for guidelines adaptation implemented by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in Argentina between 2005 and 2012. Methods The CB process is described on the basis of the matrix of capacity-building strategies. Duration, objectives, entities targeted and results through the different stages of the CB process are provided. Results The CB process has been supported on a "learning by doing" approach, and comprised 2 stages: a local capacity development stage (2005–2008) and a knowledge transfer (KT) stage (2008–2012). As a result of the 1st stage, 120 health professionals were involved during the adaptation process; 3 guidelines were produced and a guide to adapt guidelines was published. KT started in 2008 and was initially performed through e-learning courses targeted to individuals. In 2009, a strategy based on continuous online support through a virtual campus and workshops and targeted to institutions was adopted. Four institutions were involved: 1 did not progress; 1 completed the whole process and published an evidence-based guideline and 2 are ongoing. Implications for Guideline Developers/Users In the context of LMIC, CB processes based on the "learning by doing" approach and focused to institutions seem to be more appropriate although challenging: not only technical capacities have to be built, but also those related to human resources management, group-working and use of Internet resources. Different level of achievement of these capacities could explain the results observed alongside the CB process implemented by NAM.


Did Darwin see evolution as progressive, directed toward producing ever more advanced forms of life? Most contemporary scholars say no. In this challenge to prevailing views, Robert J. Richards says yes--and argues that current perspectives on Darwin and his theory are both ideologically motivated and scientifically unsound.This provocative new reading of Darwin goes directly to the origins of evolutionary theory. Unlike most contemporary biologists or historians and philosophers of science, Richards holds that Darwin did concern himself with the idea of progress, or telos, as he constructed his theory. Richards maintains that Darwin drew on the traditional embryological meanings of the terms "evolution" and "descent with modification." In the 1600s and 1700s, "evolution" referred to the embryological theory of preformation, the idea that the embryo exists as a miniature adult of its own species that simply grows, or evolves, during gestation. By the early 1800s, however, the idea of preformation had become the concept of evolutionary recapitulation, the idea that during its development an embryo passes through a series of stages, each the adult form of an ancestor species.Richards demonstrates that, for Darwin, embryological recapitulation provided a graphic model of how species evolve. If an embryo could be seen as successively taking the structures and forms of its ancestral species, then one could see the evolution of life itself as a succession of species, each transformed from its ancestor. Richards works with the "Origin" and other published and archival material to show that these embryological models were much on Darwin's mind as he considered the evidence for descentwith modification.Why do so many modern researchers find these embryological roots of Darwin's theory so problematic? Richards argues that the current tendency to see evolution as a process that is not progressive and not teleological imposes perspectives on Darwin that incorrectly deny the clearly progressive heart of his embryological models and his evolutionary theory.


It is shown that the Euclidean group of translations, when treated as a Lie group, generates translations not only in Euclidean space but on any space, curved or not. Translations are then not necessarily vectors (straight lines); they can be any curve compatible with the parameterization of the considered space. In particular, attention is drawn to the fact that one and only one finite and free module of the Lie algebra of the group of translations can generate both modulated and non-modulated lattices, the modulated character being given only by the parameterization of the space in which the lattice is generated. Moreover, it is shown that the diffraction pattern of a structure is directly linked to the action of that free and finite module. In the Fourier transform of a whole structure, the Fourier transform of the electron density of one unit cell (i.e. the structure factor) appears concretely, whether the structure is modulated or not. Thus, there exists a neat separation: the geometrical aspect on the one hand and the action of the group on the other, without requiring additional dimensions.


This qualitative study examined how homeless individuals with mental illness experience pathways into homelessness. Study participants were enrolled in the At Home/Chez Soi project, a Pan-Canadian Randomized Controlled Trial comparing the Housing First approach with Treatment as Usual for homeless individuals. This inquiry is grounded in social ecological perspective, which considers interactions between individual and structural factors. Findings from consumer narrative interviews (n = 219) revealed that individual factors, such as substance abuse, relationship conflicts and mental health issues significantly contributed to homelessness, in addition to structural transitions from foster care and institutional settings into the community. Additional structural factors entrenched participants in unsafe communities, created obstacles to exiting homelessness and amplified individual risk factors. The study findings confirm the role of individual risk factors in pathways into homelessness, but underscore the need for policies and interventions to address structural factors that worsen individual risks and create barriers to exiting homelessness.


In recent years, two new theoretical perspectives on poverty in modern welfare societies have emerged: the perspective of 'cumulative disadvantage' and poverty individualisation. Both perspectives challenge traditional class-based poverty definitions. This article notes certain limitations that pertain to the relatively few empirical tests that have been performed to support these theories. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate that the results obtained depend largely on the type of poverty definition applied (income or deprivation), the actual data used (national or comparative) and the extent to which these data represent an observation period that is long enough to provide a reliable basis for testing the theories in question. The article concludes that because only few Danes experience long-term poverty and social exclusion, the combination of class and individual biography is important. In other words, structural conditions and, to a lesser degree, group risks drive individuals to the social margin.


Grammar Express is an intermediate to high-intermediate text that features four-page units that present and practice key grammar points. The text's concise, easy-to-follow format is organized into 76 thematic units featuring: * A cartoon or piece of realia presenting the target grammar in a meaningful context to raise student interest and involvement. * Clear grammar charts presenting the target grammar in all its forms. * Quick, self-access activities allowing students to discover the target grammar and manipulate its forms before they start studying its uses. * Concise grammar explanations and multiple examples focusing on the meaning and uses of the target grammar. * Two full pages of controlled practice exercises, including fill-ins, matching, multiple choice, and writing/editing skill builders. In addition, the text features: * Fifteen SelfTests (one at the end of each part) offering additional opportunities for review and practice. * A complete Answer Key to all self-check activities, practice exercises, and SelfTests. A dual platform CD-ROM (for PC and Macintosh) contains additional editing practice for in-class or self-study. The exercises include sentence-level and paragraph-level error correction correlated to every grammar point in the Student Book. Grammar Express has self-contained units that may be used in any order with any grammar course. It may be used as a classroom text or as a self-study handbook. This two-volume series combines a concise, easy-to-follow format- two pages of presentation followed by two pages to practice - to quickly bring English language learners up to speed.


Investigation of the ways in which "real" human minds and fictional minds are similar and different is an important undertaking for literary critics, psychologists and neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers. Thankfully, this investigation has begun in earnest and in the spirit of collaboration. Clearly no single effort is likely to unite the diversity of knowledge and method necessary for a thorough understanding of the mechanisms that connect brain function, and perhaps structure, psychological factors, and the workings of narrative. Information provided by single-minded research and the rational processes of construction and evaluation reach far beyond the boundaries of a single disciplinary pursuit. Palmer's concepts of "fictional minds" and "social minds" provide significant pathways to understand the psychosocial function of reading, particularly of reading fiction. The essential assertion of cognitive theory underlying other theoretical frameworks from which to visit literature demands further pursuit of the meaning and function of cognition, particularly in the process of reading, and perhaps writing, literature. As this pursuit ensues, freedom from disciplinary limitations expands the possibilities for understanding. The structural components and processes of thinking require broader ranges of investigation than can be contained in a single set of theories and methods. The psychological contribution to literary studies essentially has been dominated by psychoanalytic theory. Freud's own delving into literature as either explanatory of his theory or examples of the sources of the theory established a strong precedent for literary criticism based on psychological principles. Discussion of the drives and motives of characters, and sometimes authors, provides rich interpretation of the thinking and behavior of characters that infuse plots with meaning. As Holland points out, there are three people involved in the process of psychoanalytic literary criticism: the author, the audience, anda character in the text. In the construction of the "social mind," Palmer broadens the "character" in the novel to the cast of characters, which includes both the individuals and the relationships that are contained in the narrative. By highlighting both internal and external positions with regard to the narrative, he includes the reader and asserts the importance of the relationship between the cognitive processes of the reader and those that characterize the narrative. The range of interpretation is expanded to include a system of relationships that may be involved in the process of understanding and interpretating narrative. This shift of focus broadens the psychological interpretation of literature beyond that which may be addressed by psychoanalytic theory. Palmer's recognition of the use of the "hard" neurological sciences by literary critics and his call for greater attention to the "soft" sciences, in which he includes social psychology, invites recognition of the system of relationships that is the object of study. Knapp and Womack bring the principles of family psychotherapy, a relatively recent development in the history of psychological approaches to treatment of behavioral and emotional maladies, to the study of literature. This volume features 13 alternative, broader interpretations of specific literature, successfully, in my view, establishing systems theories as promising perspectives for literary study. Knapp and Womack demonstrated the breadth of systems theories in communications studies, psychiatry, and psychology. Shiff narrowed the scope from the range of systems theories to one specific, natural systems theory in her treatment of the work of Philip Roth: Bowen Family Systems Theory. Pointing out that psychoanalytic theory is essentially individual in its orientation and is highly subjective, she offered Bowen theory as a more objective alternative, visualizing the individual human organism as a part of its environment, particularly the relationship systems of which it is a part. …


Many scholars and political leaders denounce racism as the cause of disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. All players in this system have been blamed including the legislators who enact laws that disproportionately harm blacks, police who unevenly arrest blacks, prosecutors who overcharge blacks, and judges that fail to release and oversentence black Americans. Some scholars have blamed the police and judges who make arrest and release decisions based on predictions of whether defendants will commit future crimes. They claim that prediction leads to minorities being treated unfairly. Others complain that racism results from misused discretion. This article explores where racial bias enters the criminal justice system through an empirical analysis that considers the impact of discretion and prediction. With a close look at the numbers and consideration of factors ignored by others, this article confirms some conventional wisdom but also makes several surprising findings. This article confirms what many commentators have suspected — that police arrest black defendants more often for drug crimes than white defendants. It also finds, contrary to popular belief, that there is little evidence to support the belief that drugs are linked to violent crime. Also, judges actually detain white defendants more than similarly-situated black defendants for all types of crimes. The important and surprising findings in this article challenge long-held conventions of race and help mitigate racial disparity in criminal justice.


In this paper we develop and analyse a direct method, based on the so called reciprocity gap functional, for retrieving the location of an elastic inclusion. The method requires a pair of displacement (imposed) and traction (measured) data, on an accessible part of the boundary. We provide a criterion for the choice of displacement that, in one hand, provides more accurate results and on the other, does not require the Lame parameters of background medium. We use this property to develop a two boundary measurements direct method for retrieving both Lame parameters. Several numerical examples are presented in order to illustrate the accuracy and stability of the proposed methods.


ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. Ann Arbor, Mich.: ProQuest Information and Learning, 2002. www.il.proquest.com. Pricing based on FTE for academic libraries and population served for public libraries. Libraries either subscribe to the entire database and pay an annual fee or purchase the out-of-copyright years 1851-1925 and subscribe to the remaining time period. The database covers the years 1851-1999. Speak to a ProQuest representative for further pricing information. Requirements: At least a 486/66 MHz PC with 8 MB RAM and an Internet connection at 28.8 Kbps or greater. The minimum browser version supported is Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x or Netscape 4.08. Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher or Netscape 4.5 or higher are recommended for best performance. Netscape Navigator 6.0 is not supported at all. To access the database with a Macintosh, use OS 8.6 or higher with Netscape 4.x or higher or Internet Explorer 5.x or higher. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times is a remarkable product because of both the completeness of coverage and the powerful search interface. ProQuest has fully digitized the complete back file (1851-1999) of The New York Times as part of its Historical Newspapers series. The New York Times includes three million pages and more than twenty-five million articles covering 148 years of history. This is a cover-to-cover digitization of the entire newspaper, including all news articles, editorials, obituaries, marriage and birth announcements, reviews, and advertisements. The entire database is searchable using ProQuest software. In many cases this digitization of the microfilm has produced better quality copy than the microfilm original. One can view either a specific article, or the entire page, which is a wonderful feature if one wants to understand what else was happening on that day or how important an article was based upon page placement. Viewing a specific article will always include the entire article including accompanying graphics and parts of the article that might continue on to other pages. From the "map" of the whole page, one can point and click on one element of the page and isolate just that item to view. Users can also display the complete image of any page in any issue or even browse the database and scan individual issues page by page There are three search methods: "Basic," "Guided," and "Issue(s)." All search methods allow limiting by date--a very important feature for historical research. In January 2003 ProQuest upgraded the search screens and software, which has greatly improved this database. The search screens and help information are now unique to The New York Times and not, as previously, generic to all ProQuest databases. Keyword searching in the "basic" search assumes phrase searching if two words are used; the system defaults to "and" with three or more words. Quotation marks should be used for phrases of more than two words. Basic search allows the user to search either through the entire text, which is the default, or limit searches to "citation and abstract." The abstract is actually the first few sentences of an article. ProQuest is assuming that with traditional newspaper writing, the first few sentences summarize the entire article and provide key information. "Guided" search provides a template allowing the searcher to specify a search to: "All basic search fields," "abstract," "article title," "author," "article text," and "publication name." In addition, one may also limit by Article Type, such as "classified ad," "editorial cartoon," "display ad," "front page," "legal notice," "letter," "review," "stock quote," and more. One unfortunate Article Type choice merges obituaries, marriages, and birth notices. There is no way to limit searches to any one type. This leads to huge numbers of hits when one searches by common names. The final unique method of searching is by issue. …


In recent years, we have seen an increased use of pair programming in CS-1 courses. Widespread evidence shows pair programming as beneficial at all levels of programming skill. During three academic years, we studied what students in CS-1 choose when given the option to either pair program or to program independently. We explore which students choose to pair and how often, and examine the majors and academic years of the self-selected pairs. Among our objectives is to learn about student pair preferences to help guide the assignment of partners when mandatory pair programming is used. We show that Math majors are more likely than Computer Science/Information Systems (CS/IS) majors to prefer pair programming in CS-1. Math majors prefer pairing with Math majors. CS/IS majors more often choose to pair with non-majors, perhaps indicating self-chosen mentoring roles.


Changing Homelands offers a startling new perspective on what was and was not politically possible in late colonial India. In this highly readable account of the partition in the Punjab, Neeti Nair rejects the idea that essential differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities made political settlement impossible. Far from being an inevitable solution, the idea of partition was a very late, stunning surprise to the majority of Hindus in the region. In tracing the political and social history of the Punjab from the early years of the twentieth century, Nair overturns the entrenched view that Muslims were responsible for the partition of India. Some powerful Punjabi Hindus also preferred partition and contributed to its adoption. Almost no one, however, foresaw the deaths and devastation that would follow in its wake. Though much has been written on the politics of the Muslim and Sikh communities in the Punjab, Nair is the first historian to focus on the Hindu minority, both before and long after the divide of 1947. She engages with politics in post-Partition India by drawing from oral histories that reveal the complex relationship between memory and history--a relationship that continues to inform politics between India and Pakistan.


Abstract To clarify the tritium permeation behavior, tritium distribution in iron oxidized in high temperature water was observed with tritium micro autoradiography. It was found that tritium was distributed homogeneously in the iron metal. However the oxide surface (magnetite) was found to contain a very low concentration of tritium. The inner layer of oxide could strongly effect the tritium permeation. From a comparison with the permeation experiment that had been reported in Ref. 1, it was suggested that tritium would mainly diffuse other path except the oxide lattice. According to the chemical form of tritium, which was released from iron surface into water, two assumptions were suggested. One is based on the different combination of tritium on the water-surface interface. The other is based on the oxidation mechanism.


Initially, the methods involved in the study of L2 pragmatics emerged from the combination of questions prompted by theories and studies of second language acquisition (SLA) in the context of L1 pragmatics research. In this book, we have described how current L2 pragmatics research is expanding from its initial base, and drawing from a wider range of sources, ranging from education to psychology to computational, and cognitive. Concomitantly, elicitation methods and practices developed within L2 pragmatics research are now also helpfully filtering through to other areas, enriching general SLA research and beginning to inform theory construction. Second Language Pragmatics: From Theory to Research aims to reinvigorate this field, pointing the way forward to new methodologies that can drive, or be driven by, new theoretical developments. With a unique combination of leading international expertise in general pragmatics, L2 pragmatics, and research methodology, the authors describe in detail the methods, including the most recent techniques, by which pragmatics of all types can be pursued in L2 contexts. This volume argues that L2 pragmatics research needs to expand from its initial base by drawing from a wider range of sources, such as Corpus Linguistics and Psycholinguistics. Clear, accessible, and practical, Second Language Pragmatics will be valuable to novice and seasoned researchers alike in second language pragmatics, general pragmatics, and second language acquisition courses.


The incidence of proximal pancreatic stent migration is unknown, though early studies report up to 5%, with recently reported success rates of < 80% for stent retrieval using conventional techniques [1]. Stent retrieval remains challenging owing to characteristically small pancreatic duct diameters, strictures, tortuous distal pancreatic duct course, stent location proximal to the genu, and small-caliber stents. Novel retrieval techniques for proximally migrated pancreatic stents have included pancreatoscopy to achieve guidewire cannulation of the stent lumen [2, 3] or facilitate retrieval using SpyByte forceps (Boston Scientific, Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA), though duct diameter must be large enough to accommodate a SpyScope for such techniques. For ducts of small or normal diameter, proximally migrated stents can be cannulated with a guidewire, over which mini-snares can be passed to retrieve the stent [4, 5]. We describe two cases in which a SpySnare and SpyBasket, used without the accompanying SpyScope, were used to retrieve proximally migrated pancreatic stents in normal diameter ducts (▶Video 1). A 52-year-old woman was referred for retrieval of a proximally migrated prophylactic 5-Fr pancreatic stent. On pancreatography the stent's distal tip was proximal to the genu with the proximal tip in the body or tail. A pancreatic sphincterotomy was performed using a papillotome over a guidewire. The stent lumen was cannulated with a 0.035-inch guidewire, over which a SpySnare was advanced to capture and retrieve the stent. A 44-year-old woman with history of relapsing pancreatitis presented for repeat endotherapy. The previously placed pancreatic stent was not visible endoscopically, and stent migration proximal to the genu was confirmed on fluoroscopy. A 4-mm balloon was used to dilate a distal pancreatic duct stricture. The stent lumen was cannulated with a curved 0.035-inch guidewire. Despite previous unsuccessful retrieval attempts using SpySnare, the pancreatic stent was successfully captured and retrieved using SpyBasket.


Today students confront more than writing, reading, and arithmetic in school. Students witness and participate in various forms of bullying at an alarming rate. As educators we must help create an environment that is conducive for all students to learn. This study examines college students' definitions and perceptions of incidents of bullying that they witnessed, or where they were the victim or perpetrator. Through 41 in-depth interviews and utilizing the constant comparative method of analysis, themes were identified including reasons students bully and are bullied, such as: weight, size, clothing, being perceived as different, sexual preferences, and placement in special education. Clothing as a reason for bullying emerged as a theme that was echoed by many of those interviewed. Whether it was the brand name of the clothes, where they were purchased, or the style of the clothes, several participants were bullied and bullied others because of clothing. Participants' definitions of bullying were from the perspective of those who are bullied, bully, and who have witnessed bullying, and included defining emotional bullying. Other students noted in their definitions the role of groups and the role of power in incidents of bullying. Unique to this study were participants' recollections of regrets. These regrets were from those participants who had participated as a bully or as a witness. In addition, themes that emerged in the data included: how students perceive teachers' involvement in incidents of bullying, ways to reduce bullying in schools, where bullying occurs, and why some people bully.


BACKGROUND
According to article 21 of the current Belgian law regarding the protection of society, the ministry of Justice can transfer a convicted prisoner to the Commission for the Protection of Society if that prisoner develops a severe mental illness in the course of a prison sentence. The proposed abolition of this article is raising concerns in psychiatric hospitals which are not equipped to deal with dangerous forensic patients.

AIM
To explore the profiles of convicted internees and to find out to what extent they differ from the profiles of regular internees.

METHOD
Convicted internees (n = 48) and regular internees (n = 483) treated in one of the Flemish medium security units were compared on the basis of demographic, clinical and risk factors.

RESULTS
Compared to regular internees, convicted internees suffered from more serious psychiatric problems and showed a more severe risk profile.

CONCLUSION
The abolition of article 21 presents regular psychiatric hospitals with new challenges.


The perception of color testing in early detection of the
macular diseases is a dissertation research implements at the
Clinic of Eye Diseases and Optometry in the Faculty Hospital
St. Anne, Brno, Czech Republic People over fifty are in risk
group of the degenerative changes in the retina. The most
common cause are Age-Related Degeneration (AMD) and diabethic
retinopathy, that affect primary vision because of macular
involvement. In developed countries is an AMD the leading cause
of of practical blindness. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading
cause of complete blindness. Color perception test is performed
on the experimental and control group. The experimental group,
which has diagnosed a disease affecting the macula, and a
control group without diagnosed eye disease. First time is
measured the visual acuity of probands with the correction and
then is conducted Lanthony D-15 Standard test and Lanthony D-15
desatured test. Testing is done monocular. In conclusion is
detected density of eye lens by Pentacam because of the
exclusion of probands with a high degree of cataract.
Subsequently is evaluated statistically average value of the
angle (confusion angle), TES (total error score), S-index
(selectivity index), C-index (index confusion) and FTS with
standard and desatured test. The results are compared between
the two groups in order to determine whether is there a
statistically significant difference. First results show a
statistically significant difference.


In vivo, mammalian cells proliferate within 3D environments consisting of numerous microcavities and channels, which contain a variety of chemical and physical cues. External environments often differ between normal and pathological states, such as the unique spatial constraints that metastasizing cancer cells experience as they circulate the vasculature through arterioles and narrow capillaries, where they can divide and acquire elongated cylindrical shapes. While metastatic tumors cause most cancer deaths, factors impacting early cancer cell proliferation inside the vasculature and those that can promote the formation of secondary tumors remain largely unknown. Prior studies investigating confined mitosis have mainly used 2D cell culture systems. Here, we mimic aspects of metastasizing tumor cells dividing inside blood capillaries by investigating single-cell divisions of living human cancer cells, trapped inside 3D rolled-up, transparent nanomembranes. We assess the molecular effects of tubular confinement on key mitotic features, using optical high- and super-resolution microscopy. Our experiments show that tubular confinement affects the morphology and dynamics of the mitotic spindle, chromosome arrangements, and the organization of the cell cortex. Moreover, we reveal that membrane blebbing and/or associated processes act as a potential genome-safety mechanism, limiting the extent of genomic instability caused by mitosis in confined circumstances, especially in tubular 3D microenvironments. Collectively, our study demonstrates the potential of rolled-up nanomembranes for gaining molecular insights into key cellular events occurring in tubular 3D microenvironments in vivo.


Currently, there is no standard instrument for measuring user adoption of mobile services. Based on the mobile service acceptance model, this paper reports on the development of a survey instrument designed to measure user perception on mobile services acceptance. A survey instrument was developed by using some existing scales from prior instruments and by creating additional items which might appear to fit the construct definitions. In addition, a pilot study was conducted by distributing the survey to 25 users of a mobile service called Mobile Student Information Systems. As a result, a survey instrument containing 22 items were retained. Furthermore, the results showed that the reliabilities of all the scales in the survey instrument were above the target acceptance level.


Microeconomic evidence reveals a direct link between firms' current earnings and their access to debt. This paper studies macroeconomic implications of earnings-based borrowing constraints. In a macro model, firms with earnings-based constraints borrow more in response to positive investment shocks, whereas firms with collateral constraints borrow less. Empirically, aggregate and firm-level credit responds to identified investment shocks according to the predictions with earnings-based constraints. Moreover, with sticky prices, earnings-based constraints imply that supply shocks are quantitatively more important. This is validated in an estimated version of the model, highlighting the importance of carefully modeling credit constraints to understand policy trade-offs. (JEL E22, E32, G31, G32)


[Extract] Food is an essential component of the tourist experience (Hall, Sharples, Mitchell, Macionis & Cambourne, 2003) and has gained increased recognition in the academic literature in the last decade. A growing interest in food, including where it was grown and how it is prepared and shared, has given rise to a food culture that has influenced the consumption of food at home and on holiday. Travelling to experience a region's food, and in some cases wine, has given agricultural regions an opportunity to diversify and develop tourism experiences based on the local agriculture, often expressed through regional cuisine. To enhance the opportunities for success of regions undergoing tourism diversification, an understanding of the drivers and barriers to developing tourism in agricultural regions is essential. The Barossa is an agricultural region in South Australia that is a renowned as a wine destination and, in more recent times, for its food heritage. Settled in the 1840s by the British and Lutheran refugees from the former Prussian provinces of Silesia, Posen and Brandenburg (now part of Poland), the region is very proud of its heritage, which is expressed through its cultural heritage and food traditions. Today, tourists have the opportunity to enjoy the region's cuisine, which is a fusion of traditional foods with Asian, Italian and modern Australian cuisines for example. Many factors have contributed to the region's reputation for regional food and fine wine. This paper examines the central role of cultural heritage as a key driver in the development of tourism in the Barossa, South Australia.


Smoke emissions from wildland fires contribute to concentrations of atmospheric particulate matter and greenhouse gases, influencing public health and climate. Prediction of emissions is critical for smoke management to mitigate the effects on visibility and air quality. Models that predict emissions require estimates of the amount of combustible biomass. When measurements are unavailable, fuel maps may be used to define the inputs for models. Mapped products are based on averages that poorly represent the inherent variability of wildland fuels, but that variability is an important source of uncertainty in predicting emissions. We evaluated the sensitivity of emissions estimates to wildland fuel biomass variability using two models commonly used to predict emissions: Consume and the First Order Fire Effects Model (FOFEM). Flaming emissions were consistently most sensitive to litter loading (Sobol index 0.426–0.742). Smouldering emissions were most often sensitive to duff loading (Sobol 0.655–0.704) under the extreme environmental scenario. Under the moderate environmental scenario, FOFEM-predicted smouldering emissions were similarly sensitive to sound and rotten coarse woody debris (CWD) and duff fuel components (Sobol 0.193–0.376). High variability in loading propagated to wide prediction intervals for emissions. Direct measurements of litter, duff and coarse wood should be prioritised to reduce overall uncertainty.


I. WHAT FOLKLORE CAN TELL US ABOUT THE PAST In 1875, Hinrich Rink proposed that where indigenous material culture had been largely supplanted by Western goods, a glimpse of pre-contact life might be had through oral traditions. Two lines of thought issue from this proposition. One sees oral tradition as a window onto past conditions, events, or practices of a local nature. For example, in support of archaeological evidence that their ancestors arrived in the Dobe area over a thousand years ago, Lee argues that the "Dobe !Kung ... have no tradition of being refugees from other areas" (Dobe !Kung 17; see also Boas, Kwakiutl Culture; Goodwin x; LeBlanc and Register 65; Opler, Lipan 6; Schaafsma 90). The second line of thought sees folklore as a window to past conditions of a pan-human nature. Biesele, for example, observes that Ju/'hoansi folktales "deal with problem points in living which must always have characterized the hunting-gathering adaptation, such as uncontrollable weather, difficulty in procuring game, danger from carnivore attacks, and correct relations with in-laws" (Women 13; see also Fock 17). Similarly, Daly and Wilson suggest that recurrent folklore themes may be "a reflection of certain basic, recurring tensions in human society" (85). These observations imply that oral traditions can be used to make inferences about past conditions, but do not provide theoretical support for this claim. Scalise Sugiyama's research ("Origins," "Social Mapping") provides the missing theoretical link. Because oral folklore content has been shaped by the constraints of memory, the oral traditions of foraging peoples constitute a record of, at least in part, the kinds of information humans are designed to notice, remember, and share with others in a foraging context. On this view, the oral tradition is a cognitive artifact (Scalise Sugiyama, "Origins," "Social Mapping")--a record of universal patterns of thought that can be examined for clues to past selection pressures and cognitive design. Although the forager oral traditions available to us do not come straight from the Pleistocene, they are nevertheless the product of foraging cultures: the social and economic conditions under which contemporary foragers tell stories are similar to those under which ancestral humans told their tales. It is therefore plausible that the oral traditions of ancient and contemporary foraging peoples evince thematic continuities. Moreover, the antiquity of narrative points to its content and structure having been shaped by the information storage constraints imposed by a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. Storytelling is an act of verbal communication; as such, it requires language, which evolved by the time H. sapiens migrated out of Africa 100,000 years ago. This date is conservative: the rudiments of language began evolving hundreds of thousands of years ago (Byrne; Dunbar; Falk; Holloway; Pfeiffer; Pinker), and storytelling might not require the full complexity of modern language for its expression: a five-year-old child, with limited vocabulary and imperfect grammar, can tell a story (Pitcher and Prelinger; Sutton-Smith) and "e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve" (Pinker 354). These converging lines of evidence indicate that oral narrative emerged tens of thousands of years ago. For the overwhelming majority of its existence, then, narrative has been transmitted orally and stored in the minds of storytellers and their audiences. As a result, the content of oral narrative has been shaped by the limitations of memory--specifically, by the kinds of information the mind is designed to attend to, store, and recall. Information acquisition is a fundamental adaptive problem: each species occupies a different ecological niche, and each niche has different information demands (Hauser). All species must solve the problem of acquiring the information requisite to survival and reproduction in their particular niche. …


On the development of Seoul, from a city of the third world to an economic and political metropolis, scientific studies are few with difficulty in explaining the mechanisms and conditions of this remarkable evolution. The objective of this thesis is to study the development of Seoul in multidisciplinary and consistent ways. Foucault's lectures in the late 1970s, especially the idea of "dispositif' acting on the population, territory and security, we provide a geographic intuition as an issue of our thesis. A study of the city in the process of metropolization inevitably requires the analysis of mechanisms of power that controls the incessantly growing populations and the intervention of infrastructure construction. For the geography of Seoul, we begin with demographic studies, reflections on urban planning and "social" management of an urban environment by these governmental practices. It was the "genealogy" of the dispositifs of Seoul: evolution of the identification system, the development of urban administration, implementation of urban and regional planning and construction of housing for the middle class, which is the technique of the power to "agencer" the population. Our research work is therefore an explanation of the evolution of Seoul whose processes are based on dispositifs both disciplinary and libertarians. This results in enforcement of the ruling class and the mobilization of capital, but also by the emergence of the middle classes, now central phenqmenon in the metropolis.


American literature, as the voice of our national consciousness, begins with the works of Crevecoeur.Published in 1782, "Letters from an American Farmer" painted a vivid portrait of the American scene, from New England seafaring life to Southern plantation culture. More popular abroad than at home, the work provided Europeans with their chief impression of American landscapes, peoples, institutions, values, and problems. In "Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America" Crevecoeur explored some of the unpleasant truths about the nation's birth pangs. These essays described the hardships of frontier life, the threat of Indian raids, and the bloody unrest between fanatical patriots and back-country loyalists.


This thesis considers the development of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), from its foundation in 1993 to the Presidential election of 2008. The study begins with a discussion of the context of change for the CPRF in the post-Soviet world from the perspective of political transitions of other communist parties and their development in the post-Soviet world. The final years of the party's predecessor, and that predecessor's collapse contribute a sense of perspective to the party's development and this is followed by a consideration of the need for ideological change in order to transform the party, the electorate's support for the CPRF in recent parliamentary elections and the political views of members of a branch of the party with particular emphasis on the opinions of younger members: those who may be guiding the party's development in the future.
How does the transformation of the CPRF compare with that of other communist parties in the region? Organisational change, including the inheritance of political control and resources by former communist parties in some countries where they were in power, has greatly aided some parties in their return to government while the lack of such advantages has hindered others. The ban on the party in Russia adversely affected the unification of communists in Russia from 1991 to 1993 while the CPRF's counterparts in other countries faced no such difficulties. The electoral successes of other communist and former-communist parties serve to highlight the increased problems the CPRF faces after the splits the party has undergone in recent years. Ideological change across the post-communist world has been very varied in terms of moves towards social democracy, towards nationalism or the retention of a more orthodox communism depending on the local circumstances in individual countries.
How has the legacy of the CPSU influenced the formation and development of the successor party? The origins of the CPRF can be seen in the divisions that formed in the CPSU in its final years. The scale of ideological change in the final years of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union can be seen in the radical differences between the 1986 Party Programme and 1991 draft Programme. Documents from the era reveal a failure to understand the depth of the reaction against communism in Eastern Europe and what it could mean for the Soviet Union as well as concern about the effects of glasnost' on support for the regime and the thinking behind attempts to use electoral change to increase the party's legitimacy. These changes did not have the anticipated effect for the CPSU and resulted in the loss of party control over those elected and over electors with the formation of platforms in the CPSU and parties outside the CPSU leading the way to the demise of the party.
When the ideology a party represents appears to have been comprehensively rejected, how does that party reposition itself in the political landscape in order to survive? With the election of a new leader prepared to lead the party in a new direction, the CPRF has recast itself as a nationalist party that sees communism as a Russian tradition. Zyuganov's repositioning of the party has been characterised by the acceptance of democracy, which has arguably kept the CPRF in the public eye as the party has been represented in every Duma since 1993, and the search for means of uniting various political groups under a broad 'patriotic' banner in order to return the party to power at the head of a coalition. Zyuganov's reworking of communist theory includes a heavy reliance on geopolitics to argue for the re-establishment of the Soviet Union and support for the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian culture as cornerstones of the patriotic cause.
Which members of the Russian electorate now define themselves as communist? The party's relationship with the electorate is examined through the results of public opinion surveys conducted just after the 1999 and 2003 Duma elections to see what views communist voters hold in common and whether it is possible to determine what political opinions can be said to predict a vote for the CPRF. A CPRF supporter could be predicted to be older and with more strongly held political views than the average Russian citizen. As many previous studies have found, age is clearly one of the most significant factors in predicting support for the CPRF but this factor is outweighed in these surveys by party identification and ideological conviction. If a voter identified with a political party and an ideology, there was a greater probability that that voter supported the CPRF than any other political party.
 Are members of the party able and willing to defend the change in direction of the party leadership? Interviews with members of the St Petersburg branch of the CPRF indicated that members were willing to accept the nationalist stance of the party as a temporary necessity to extend electoral support for the party. In view of the fact that party membership has fallen drastically in recent years, members were asked what was drawing them to join the CPRF or remain in the party when others had left. With an ageing and falling membership, the Komsomol is playing an important role by recruiting young people to the party. Members were asked for their views on the possibility of the party changing course and their attitudes to Zyuganov's leadership. However, with support for the party from the electorate in decline, party members were divided about what they felt needed to change.
 This thesis concludes that the party remains popular with a minority of voters who were impoverished by the transition and that the current strategies of democratic participation and a nationalist stance have been accepted by the membership as the achievement of communism is seen as a very distant prospect. The party, however, still believes that communism is inevitable.


Chondroitin sulfate (CS) A is a key receptor for adhesion of Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes (IEs) in the placenta and can also mediate adhesion to microvascular endothelial cells. IEs that adhere to CSA express var2csa-type genes, which encode specific variants of the IE surface antigen P. falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1). We report direct binding of native PfEMP1, isolated from IEs and encoded by var2csa, to immobilized CSA. Binding of PfEMP1 was dependent on 4-O-sulfated disaccharides and glucuronic acid rather than iduronic acid, consistent with the specificity of intact IEs. Using immobilized CS oligosaccharides as neoglycolipid probes, the minimum chain length for direct binding of PfEMP1 was eight monosaccharide units. Similarly for IE adhesion to placental tissue there was a requirement for 4-O-sulfated GalNAc and glucuronic acid mixed with non-sulfated disaccharides; 6-O-sulfation interfered with the interaction between placental CSA and IEs. The minimum chain length for maximal inhibition of adhesion was 10 monosaccharide residues. Partially 4-O-sulfated CS oligosaccharides (45–55% sulfation) were highly effective inhibitors of placental adhesion (IC50, 0.15 μg/ml) and may have potential for therapeutic development. We used defined P. falciparum isolates expressing different variants of var2csa in adhesion assays and found that there were isolate-specific differences in the preferred structural motifs for adhesion to CSA that correlated with polymorphisms in PfEMP1 encoded by var2csa-type genes. This may influence sites of IE sequestration or parasite virulence. These findings have significant implications for understanding the pathogenesis and biology of malaria, particularly during pregnancy, and the development of targeted interventions.


Magnetic shape memory alloys (MSMAs) can exhibit the shape memory effect when there is a magnetic field in the vicinity of a material point. The microstructure of the MSMAs is comprised of tetragonal martensite variants, each with their preferred internal magnetization orientation. Starting from a random variant orientation, the application of a large enough magnetic field will cause the variants to reorient so that the internal magnetization vectors align with the external field. Then, keeping the magnetic field constant and adding a variable compressive stress in a direction normal to that of the magnetic field, some or all of the martensitic variants may rotate into a stress preferred state. As the variants reorient, the internal magnetization vectors rotate, and the material's magnetization changes. For power harvesting and sensing applications, the change in magnetization induces a current in a pickup coil placed around the MSMA specimen, resulting in an output voltage at its terminals according to Faraday's law of inductance. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the voltage output, both experimentally and numerically, in an attempt to assess the ability of a MSMA thermodynamic based constitutive model, used in conjunction with Faraday's law of induction, to predict the variant reorientation induced voltage output. Assessing the accuracy of the predicted voltage is beneficial for the design of both MSMA based power harvesting devices and MSMA based displacement sensors.