Initial measurements of the position sensitivity of a visible-light multi-anode microchannel array (MAMA) detector show that centroid calculations for image spots are accurate to better than 0.04 pixels even with sources that are essentially delta functions at the photocathode. Subpixel sensitivity variations of 10-15% are typically found for pixels in the array. Variations as large as 30% are possible in the worst conditions. These variations limit the photometric accuracy of the detector when very small scale features are observed. The photometric accuracy and the position sensitivity of the detector appear to be limited by cross-coupling effects within the anode array. Initial measurements with more recent designs of the detector show that most or all of this cross-coupling has been eliminated. We will report on the position sensitivity of the newer detectors when they become available for testing.


The occurrence of Chironex fleckeri medusae in the near shore waters of tropical Australia represents a significant safety, financial and medical concern during the warmer months of the year, particularly along vast stretches of unprotected coastline. Although a number of theories relate to the seasonal occurrence of medusae, quantitative data documenting key aspects of C. fleckeri's ecology are currently lacking. As a result, management protocols tend to be based on anecdotal / opportunistic evidence or generalisations extrapolated between geographic regions. While considerable improvements have been made in reducing the risk of an envenomation occurring along confined stretches of coastline, such as within stinger nets, the capacity to model the occurrence and distribution of medusae, both spatially and temporally, would allow for more effective management of the broader tropical coastline. This study represents the first contribution to the development of such models by quantifying some of the long held theories relating to the ecology of C. fleckeri.

The ability to predict when the medusae season will commence would be of considerable benefit to risk management models. Currently, the timing of stinger net installation is largely based on the generalisation that medusae are common inhabitants of the coastline during the warmer months of the year, their arrival being associated with changes in a suite of physical parameters including water temperature, estuary flows and salinity. In contrast, this study has shown that the shift from the polyp to medusa phase was temporally constrained across six seasons in Weipa, with the onset of medusae production varying by only one week in late August / early September. While variables such as water temperature, rainfall and tidal height were not correlated with the onset of medusae production, photoperiod could provide a higher degree of temporal consistency in the onset of the medusae season. Whether photoperiod acts as the cue for metamorphosis in this species is worthy of further investigation.

Once within the medusa phase of the lifecycle, juvenile medusae are thought to undertake a downstream migration from the polyp habitat to the coastline where they grow in size rapidly, accumulating as the season progresses. Population structure data collected across seven seasons does not suggest that this is the case for Weipa sites, however. Instead, larger, older and sexually mature medusae were found in abundance within Weipa's estuarine habitats, while a high proportion of juvenile medusae were represented within the coastal habitat. Given that the oldest medusa collected was estimated to be 78 d in age and was from the estuarine habitat, medusae do not appear to accumulate along the coastline as the season progresses either. Not only were medusae growth rates rapid, increasing at up to ~3 mm d⁻¹ IPD (inter pedalia distance), tentacles were added more rapidly (up to a maximum of 13 per pedalium) as size increased. At this growth rate, medusae would undergo an ontogenetic shift in their cnidome and venom complement after ~50 - 60 d, at which time they become potentially lethal to humans. Given that sexual maturity would also be realised after ~45 - 50 d, the potential for several generations to occur within a single season has also been raised. Determining whether ecological patterns observed in Weipa are consistent between geographic locations is an aspect of C. fleckeri ecology into which future research should extend, allowing predictive models of regional rather than local context to be developed.

Many references are made to the exceptional swimming abilities of C. fleckeri medusae, who, unlike other species of cnidaria, possess the ability to actively move from one location to another, presumably in response to the development of unfavourable conditions. Recent advances in acoustic telemetry allowed the movement patterns of 12 adult medusae to be documented for between 10 and 38 h, within both the coastal and estuarine habitats using manual telemetry. The rates at which medusae travelled varied from approximately 52 ± 26 SE m h⁻¹ to 828 ± 306 SE m h⁻¹, with both tidal state and time of day found to influence rate of travel. This effect was habitat specific, however, whereby medusae within the coastal habitat travelled at relatively consistent rates both day and night, while estuarine medusae travelled at significantly faster rates at night. At increased current speeds, estuarine medusae also appeared to travel with the current rather than across or against it, as they did at slower current speeds. With acoustic telemetry now demonstrated to be an effective method by which medusae movement data can be collected, future studies can focus on quantifying how medusae movements are influenced by changes in physical parameters such as wind speed and direction (wave action).

Manual acoustic telemetry possess a number of logistical constraints that limit the timeframe over which movement data can be collected, however. To this end, this study has also demonstrated the novel application of automated acoustic arrays to C. fleckeri medusae. Combined with a revised method of tag attachment, the timeframe over which medusae were tracked increased from a mean of 16 ± 8 SE h and maximum of 38 h for manual acoustic telemetry to a mean of 37 ± 16 SE h and maximum of 84 h for acoustic arrays. A trade off in the resolution of position estimates derived from acoustic arrays was evident, however, particularly in those cases where position estimates were based on data from a single receiver (839 ± 89 SE m). Error was significantly less where multiple receivers contributed to a position estimate, with a minimum error of 157 ± 10 SE m observed when position estimates were based on four receivers. This was still significantly greater than the 10 m associated with manual telemetry, however. For two medusae tracked using both manual and array techniques, rate of travel estimates from manual telemetry (170 ± 24 SE m h⁻¹) varied significantly from those calculated from array data (487 ± 55 SE m h⁻¹). Similarly, diurnal and tide related movement patterns were inconsistent between manual telemetry and acoustic array analysis.

When array data was considered in terms of presence / absence, however, repeated longshore movements of individual medusae became evident, the direction of which corresponded with tidally generated currents. Movements on several occasions that were restricted to relatively narrow stretches of beachfront (~200 m) indicate that medusae are not simply passive drifters, however. As such, automated acoustic telemetry provides a method by which either presence / absence data or low resolution position estimates can be collected over extended periods of time.

Collectively then, this study has quantified some fundamental aspects of C. fleckeri's ecology, validating some long held theories, while bringing others into question. A contribution to the broader understanding of jellyfish ecology has also been made, with growth and development rates along with population structure and demographics now quantified. The development of a predictive model remains subject to further quantitative comparisons, particularly across geographic locations, however.


Social challenges tear at the fabric of the African American family, revealing complexities that identify a de facto leader, the African American woman. She exists in a chasm of overt circumstances which heavily influences her successes. The purpose of this study is to identify factors that motivated seven female African American community college graduates to persist throughout crisis and to ultimately reach their academic goals and graduate. Using a qualitative narrative design, the study involved semi structured interviews with seven African American women who employed community colleges and other support strategies to accomplish appropriate responses to crises, identify practical support mechanisms, and achieve professional advancement in order to attain professional success. Findings provide a clearer picture of the elements these participants feel foster and enhance their abilities to stay enrolled, to persist and to graduate from college. The study findings illustrate the importance students place on their family's support, the support of their faith and the support of college faculty and staff. The Bates Model for the Initial Creation of a Community College Counseling / Crisis Intervention Center is presented to foster the development of a support service center which will allow community colleges to better meet the needs of these non-traditional students.


Life-history theory predicts that adults of long-lived species such as seabirds should optimally balance investment in current and future offspring. However, when trying to optimize investment in offspring provisioning, the most energetically costly component of seabird parental care, adults need to contend with large interannual fluctuations in prey availability and hence the cost of chick provisioning. Adults faced with this uncertainty can mechanistically balance parental care by adopting a strategy somewhere along the continuum between maintaining constant investment in foraging effort between years and letting chick provisioning fluctuate or holding chick provisioning constant and varying investment in foraging effort. Using ship-based hydroacoustic assessment of prey, time-depth recorders attached to penguins and land-based observations at the breeding colony, we examined how foraging and reproductive effort in breeding chinstrap penguins Pygoscelis antarctica responded to interannual variation in the abundance of Antarctic krill Euphausia superba in the vicinity of Seal Island, South Shetland Islands, 1990–1992. Regional measures of krill density varied by a factor of 2.5 (47.0, 23.8 and 61.2 g m � 2 in 1990, 1991 and 1992, respectively) and was correlated with annual measures of breeding adult body weight and reproductive performance (breeding population size, duration of chick rearing, chick growth, breeding success and fledgling weight). In contrast, measures of penguin foraging effort (dive depth, dive duration, number of trips day � 1 , trip duration, number of dives trip � 1 and dive rate) did not differ between years. We conclude that chinstrap penguins reduce reproductive success rather than increase foraging effort in response to decreases in prey abundance in a manner consistent with predictions of life-history strategies for long-lived seabirds.


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate power Doppler ultrasound (PD) as a technique in assessing response to treatment with steroids in rheumatoid hand synovitis.

METHODS
Twelve patients with rheumatoid hand synovitis were assessed before and after treatment with steroids. Variables used to assess synovitis activity in each patient included patient visual analog scale (VAS) score for pain, physician assessment score (PAS), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and PD of the metacarpophalangeal joints.

RESULTS
Nine female and 3 male patients were studied; mean age was 53.3+/-6.5 yrs and mean disease duration 6.5+/-4.5 yrs. All patients had a good clinical response to steroid treatment and there was a significant improvement in the synovitis activity assessments. Wilcoxon signed-rank test using the exact method was applied to the change in disease activity variables. For PD signal, p < 0.002; VAS, p < 0.0016; ESR, p < 0.031; PAS, p < 0.008.

CONCLUSION
PD quantifies synovitis and may be a useful adjunct to disease assessment and the response to treatment in RA.


Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) vehicle sticker is important to trace out the valid or
invalid vehicles to enter UiTM.
UiTM staffs, students and UiTM non-staff (user), who have a vehicle and qualify, need to
register their vehicle and get the UiTM vehicle sticker. The problems are user who
qualify, need to fill in the form manually and it takes time during registration process. An
additionally, students who have vehicle summon, need to check their summons at the
UiTM security office.
UiTM Vehicles Sticker System is designed to provide one manageable system that solves
registration of vehicles manually. With this system, it helps users to register fast and
easily. Also, user will be able to check vehicle summons easily online. Furthermore the
system are using summon e-mail alert to notify users that have summon. During
application process, the system also sends email notification automatically to the UiTM
security staff department to notify that they have a new applicant. The UiTM staff
security also can manage the registration process and vehicle summons more efficiently.
UiTM security staff department also can trace out the vehicle easily.
UiTM Vehicle Sticker System is connected with a web-based system. The web-based
system is developed with PHP as interface and MySQL as a database. Apache server is
needed to store the information and PostCast as a E-mail server.
As a conclusion, hopefully with this idea it can make an easy, fast and manageable ways
to solve the problems in register vehicles manually. The expected result from this project
it can help a security staff to manage their work in efficient and make registration process
more easy. It can also make UiTM staffs and students save their time in registration
process and they can check their vehicle summon easily.


Currently available therapies for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are inadequate to alleviate the inflammation and reduce joint damage. While the immune-regulatory effect of human mesenchymal/stromal stem cells (MSCs) extracellular vesicles (EVs) has been tested in many inflammation-related diseases, little is known regarding their effect on patients with RA. Thus, we assessed the effect of human MSCs and MSC-EVs (from naïve or IFN-β-primed MSCs) on CD4+ T cells from patients with RA. Moreover, we investigated the effect of MSC-EVs on RA patients-derived synovial fibroblasts (FLS). MSC-EVs were prepared using a PEG precipitation followed by ultracentrifugation-based protocol. Applied to RA CD4+ T cells, EVs from IFN-β-primed MSCs, suppressed the expression of more key RA-associated cytokines (IL-4, GM-CSF IFN-γ, IL-2, TNF-α), and decreased CD4+ T-cell polyfunctionality than MSCs or EVs from naïve MSCs. MSCs mediated a slight decrease in the frequency of T-regulatory cells, while MSC-EVs rescued the frequency of T-regulatory cells. MSCs significantly inhibited CD4+ T-cell proliferation (P < .05), while no inhibition was observed in response to EV preparations. EVs from IFN-β-primed MSCs inhibited (P < .01) RA FLS migration and downregulated (P < .05) RA FLS surface markers CD34 and HLA-DR. Collectively, we demonstrated the immune-modulatory function of MSCs and their derived EVs in RA CD4+ T cells, which could be further enhanced by priming MSCs with IFN-β. Moreover, EVs from IFN-β-primed MSCs more efficiently inhibit RA FLS migration, and expression of RA FLS-related surface markers, suggesting these EVs as a potent therapy for RA.


A simplified method to obtain the complete set of the dyadic Green's functions (DGFs) for general anisotropic media is presented. The method is based on the k-domain representation of the fields in terms of wave matrices. The Fourier transformed Green's functions are calculated through the inverses of wave matrices. The inverses of the wave matrices, which lead to the final form of DGF, are obtained using dyadic decomposition technique. This facilitates the inverse operation significantly and gives DGFs clear vector representation, which helps their physical interpretation. The dyadic decomposition of the wave matrices has been presented for uniaxially anisotropic, biaxially anisotropic and gyrotropic media. The method of deriving DGF using the technique given in this paper is applied on a uniaxially anisotropic medium and verified with the existing results. It is shown that the knowledge of the inverse of one type of wave matrix is adequate to find the complete set of the dyadic Green's functions for a general anisotropic medium using the method presented. The duality relations of dyadic Green's functions are also developed. It is shown that once the dyadic Green's functions for one of the dual media are obtained, the DGFs for the other dual medium can be found by application of the duality relations shown in this paper.


Most attempts to represent 3D shapes for deep learning have focused on volumetric grids, multi-view images and point clouds. In this paper we look at the most popular representation of 3D shapes in computer graphics---a triangular mesh---and ask how it can be utilized within deep learning. The few attempts to answer this question propose to adapt convolutions & pooling to suit Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This paper proposes a very different approach, termed MeshWalker to learn the shape directly from a given mesh. The key idea is to represent the mesh by random walks along the surface, which "explore" the mesh's geometry and topology. Each walk is organized as a list of vertices, which in some manner imposes regularity on the mesh. The walk is fed into a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that "remembers" the history of the walk. We show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for two fundamental shape analysis tasks: shape classification and semantic segmentation. Furthermore, even a very small number of examples suffices for learning. This is highly important, since large datasets of meshes are difficult to acquire.


What function does professional practice occupy within the Fine Art curriculum in Higher Education? In the past 15 years Professional Practice as a credit bearing core component within Undergraduate Fine Art degree programmes has remained a constant in a shifting curriculum. As degree programmes once based upon old modernist vanguards are largely dismantled or homogenized under the historic umbrella of Fine Art, professional practice has retained its essential qualities as a core and validated component. Has the teaching of 'professional practice' retained its currency within Higher Education due to its apparent transparency or over identification as a social skill? This paper argues that the professional agenda within Fine Art education is misplaced and is inadequately equipping graduates for long-term learning and participation within the cultural conversation. I argue that instead of Professional Practice continuing to fulfill an instrumentalist function, it could symbolically encompass unanswered and avoided questions essential within the education of artists: How do you keep working when you are alone and not part of a community? Is it possible to be an artist without being part of the art world? How does a personal agenda not inflict itself upon a group? This research draws upon questions collected from final year undergraduate students over a period of 5 years responding to the prompt "what do you not know about working as an artist, that you think you should know?" This research explores the importance of opaque question of this nature in forming curricula that is able to engender necessary questioning of insidious professional orthodoxies.


Onset of sexual maturation is a trait of extreme importance both evolutionarily and economically. Unsurprisingly therefore, domestication has acted to reduce the time to sexual maturation in a variety of animals, including the chicken. In comparison with wild progenitor chickens [the Red Junglefowl (RJF)], domestic layer hens attain maturity approximately 20% earlier. In addition, domestic layers also possess larger combs (a sexual ornament), produce more eggs and have denser bones. A large quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis (n=377) was performed using an F(2) intercross between a White Leghorn layer breed and a RJF population, with onset of sexual maturity measured and mapped to three separate loci. This cross has already been analysed for comb mass, egg production and bone allocation. Onset of sexual maturity significantly correlated with comb mass, whilst the genetic architecture for sexual maturity and comb mass overlapped at all three loci. For two of these loci, the QTL for sexual maturity and comb mass were statistically indistinguishable from pleiotropy, suggesting that the alleles that increase comb mass also decrease onset of sexual maturity.


The study focuses on the Child Sex Offender Disclosure Scheme (CSODS), an under-researched area in the management of sex offenders within the UK. With the rise of child sexual abuse reports and sex offender populations, strategies on preventing child sex abuse and managing risk has been a central issue within the criminal justice system and related agencies. As part of a shift in ecological-community-based approaches to crime prevention, CSODS was introduced to empower members of the public to request information so that they could make informed decisions on managing risk. However, lack of take-up, user issues and misunderstandings of the scheme resulted in public and political criticisms, despite police perceptions of the scheme maintaining that the scheme is worthwhile. The current research therefore explored the process of CSODS, how CSODS works within practice, and established how CSODS contributes to the management of risk (and thus the safeguarding of children). The aim of this was to help shed light on why police officers believe CSODS is worthwhile, despite evidential issues of the scheme.

Using a mixed-method approach, data was gathered within two phases. The first phase explored typical CSODS applications, from a sample of 20 random CSODS case files. The data was used to contextualise and illustrate the process of CSODS investigations, and provide an overview of typical applications. Phase 1 aimed to explore:
 a. The nature of CSODS applications;
 b. The typology of applicant and subjects, and their relationship;
 c. The investigation of CSODS cases, following the process of CSODS;
 d. The extent and nature of multi-agency involvement throughout a CSODS investigation.

Phase 2 comprised of 12 semi-structured interviews with police officers from one policing area about their views and experiences of working with CSODS. Phase 2 aimed to:
 a. Determine the extent and nature of CSODS applications, as experienced by Northshire Police officers;
 b. Explore the investigation of CSODS applications and officers' experiences of the CSODS process;
 c. Explore how CSODS contributes to wider risk management strategies;
 d. Explore officers' perceptions on issues relating to CSODS;
 e. Explore officers' recommendations for development/implementation of CSODS policy and practice.

The file data revealed that the largest groups of applicants were female (60%) and were aged 30-39 years (40%). Subjects featuring most commonly in enquiries were: applicants' (own) new partners or applicants' ex-partners' new partners (39%), and applicants' neighbours (33%). All of the subjects (100%) were male and the largest age group were those aged 30-39 (30%). Fifty-five per cent of the cases involved either shared risk assessments with other agencies or had other agency engagement throughout the CSODS application. Of the 16 cases that provided completed data, only three were completed within the CSODS timescales (19%). The majority of delays were within stages 4 (Full risk assessment), 5 (Decision of outcome) and 6 (Outcome and closure).

The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis, developing six main themes. The themes were integrated with the contextualising background of the file data, revealing three overarching themes: (1) The contribution of CSODS to wider risk management strategies; (2) Unintended (positive) consequences of CSODS; and (3) Implications of promoting CSODS. The current study reinforced previous research, policy and practice that, when used appropriately, multi-agency working and CSODS are useful for the community management of sex offenders. The present research shed light on how CSODS can contribute to the protection of children, as it provided a 'safety net' in cases where subjects are not managed under any other statutory arrangements (for example, children's social care, probation or MAPPA), thus the police will become the only responsible body working and managing risk posed by certain individual (subjects). However, poor take up and engagement from the public raises concerns about the scheme's legitimacy and effectiveness to act as a crime prevention tool. Officers reflected upon practical issues of promoting the scheme, such as issues on depleted resources, counter-productivity and targeting the appropriate audience.

Limitations and future directions of CSODS research are discussed, with wider reflection upon a new direction for the management of risk, through desistance and strength-based approaches.


Getting growth going has been rare in the developing world-since 1960 only nine developing countries have succeeded in sustaining high growth. The aim of Dictators, Democrats and Development in Southeast Asia is to examine how dictators and democrats in three of the nine fast growers -Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, hereafter IMT-built and sustained pro-growth political coalitions that enabled them to adopt policies that ushered in sustained high growth. The focus is on IMT because circa 1960 few thought the three were candidates for high growth and because the three have factor endowments, ethnic heterogeneity, and forms of governance that resemble the Rest. These similarities suggest the Rest may have much to learn from IMT. The focus is unabashedly on the politics of development in IMT because dictators and democrats in IMT built and sustained pro-growth political coalitions that enabled them to link their long term political survival with delivering development. How and why they did so should be of keen interest to the Rest. Because dictators and democrats in IMT were committed to capitalist, industrial and open economy development strategies but deeply suspicious of a laissez faire approach to development, none of the three ever adopted a Washington Consensus style growth strategy. While all three toyed with a Northeast style capitalist developmental state approach to growth, because governments in IMT lacked the political requisites to make this strategy work, none really stuck to this approach to growth either. Instead dictators and democrats in IMT implemented highly pragmatic growth and development strategies. When markets worked, governments used them. When interventions worked governments relied on them. When either failed to deliver expected results, governments weeded out bad investments to sustain high growth. Such a pragmatic, trial and error approach to development should also be of keen interest to the Rest.


This policy brief provides a critical analysis of the role players in South African public policy. The brief argues that the institutional and legal framework of South Africa provides for a democratic and inclusive approach to public policy formulation. However, the political reality of the dominant party system in South Africa undermines the independence of Chapter 9 institutions. Furthermore, because parliament is dominated by the ruling African National Congress (ANC), it is preoccupied with ruling party interests, rather than those of the public in general. With regard to the non-state actors in South African public policy, some interest groups that have a large membership and financial resources turn out to have much power and influence on issues of public policy.


The mechanism by which Bordetella pertussis organisms and their products induce lymphocytosis in mice was analyzed in terms of the localization of syngeneic Cr-51-labeled lymph node cells. Labeled lymphoid cells incubated in vitro with the supernatant of B. pertussis cultures and then injected intravenously into normal recipients, or labeled cells injected into pertussis-treated recipients were unable to "home" to lymphoid organs but persisted for long periods in the blood. In animals "equipped" with a population of Cr-51-labeled lymphoid cells, administration of B. pertussis organisms or culture supernatant effected a shift of radioactivity from lymph nodes and spleen into the peripheral blood, coincident with the lymphocytosis. In in vitro experiments it was found that the active principle could bind to both erythrocytes and lymphocytes and could spontaneously elute from these cells onto labeled lymphocytes which were then unable to home efficiently. The data suggest that Bordetella pertussis-induced lymphocytosis involves a reversible attachment of the pertussis factor onto the surfaces of lymphocytes which prevents their recirculation to lymphoid organs. Recirculating lymphocytes are presumably affected as they emerge from lymphoid organs to enter the blood.


Health and a vibrant life are sought by everyone. To improve quality of life (QOL), maintain a healthy state, and prevent various diseases, evaluations of the effects of potentially QOL-increasing factors are important. Chronic oxidative stress and inflammation cause deteriorations in central nervous system function, leading to low QOL. In healthy individuals, aging, job stress, and cognitive load over several hours also induce increases in oxidative stress, suggesting that preventing the accumulation of oxidative stress caused by daily stress and daily work contributes to maintaining QOL and ameliorating the effects of aging. Hydrogen has anti-oxidant activity and can prevent inflammation, and may thus contribute to improve QOL. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of drinking hydrogen-rich water (HRW) on the QOL of adult volunteers using psychophysiological tests, including questionnaires and tests of autonomic nerve function and cognitive function. In this double-blinded, placebo-controlled study with a two-way crossover design, 26 volunteers (13 females, 13 males; mean age, 34.4 ± 9.9 years) were randomized to either a group administered oral HRW (600 mL/d) or placebo water (PLW, 600 mL/d) for 4 weeks. Change ratios (post-treatment/pre-treatment) for K6 score and sympathetic nerve activity during the resting state were significantly lower after HRW administration than after PLW administration. These results suggest that HRW may reinforce QOL through effects that increase central nervous system functions involving mood, anxiety, and autonomic nerve function.


A differential observing response (DOR), in which a unique response puts the learner in sensory contact with the sample stimulus (Walpole, Roscoe, & Dube, 2007), is an antecedent strategy used to address faulty stimulus control. Similarly, error correction (EC) procedures are consequence strategies for addressing errors and faulty stimulus control (McGhan & Lerman, 2013). Few studies have compared the combination of an error correction procedure and a DOR; thus, the purpose of this study was to examine this combination for teaching auditory to visual conditional discriminations. The study employed an adapted alternating treatments design with one participant where the primary dependent variable was the number of sessions to reach mastery criterion. A total of three comparative evaluations (i.e., stimulus bundles) were completed in which the auditory-visual stimuli consisted of nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words assigned to flags. For the first stimulus bundle, more rapid learning was associated with the EC condition. For the second stimulus bundle, neither treatment was associated with more rapid learning, as acquisition in each treatment occurred at the same rate. Finally, for the third stimulus bundle, more rapid learning was associated with the DOR+EC condition. The results indicated that the addition of a DOR to an error correction procedure did not result in more rapid learning of auditory to visual conditional discriminations for the participant. Limitations of the study and directions for future research are discussed.


This is a research-based theatrical action, performed by one actor only, which follows Carlo Collodi's "The Adventure of Pinocchio" in its integral version. The project was a response to an invitation by Teatro Talia (Tagliacozzo, L'Aquila) who produced the premiere in 2012. The production was supported by the Arts Council Northern Ireland. The research imperatives of this work move along two intersecting trajectories to examine how they connect and may implemented in practice. This is a methodological innovation. The first relates to re-enacting and revitalization of Grotowski's latter experimentation of the performer's energies, exploring and mapping the passages from the so-called coarse level (the "everyday level", that is a heavy organic level linked to the forces of life, to sensuality, to instincts), to "a more subtle level". This involves a personal exploration of different extra-daily dimensions of own body-mind states, experienced in a laboratory setting, to reach a so-called "inner action". The second trajectory is in the dramaturgical design of the performance in relation to text and methodology of research, adapting a classic children tale to a personal journey – personal 'mystery' according to Grotowskian terminology. Director Giuliano Campo, with this performance ended a cycle of practice-based research works defined by exploration of the soul of the human being, operated with connecting experimentation on dramaturgy with acting work on the base of Grotowskian 'Action' modality, taken outside the original context of the Workcenter of Pontedera. This cycle began in November 2006 with "Action One", a Zoroastrian Persian litany performed by actor Persis-Jade Maravala at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. "Pinocchio by Collodi" extended this original work with the performer to engagement with a pre-existing and familiar narrative text. This work used paratheatrical voice training techniques, improvisation creative processes and formalisation of physical scores, related to the personal history of the performer. As an Austrian facilitator in the psychiatric departments of a Belfast hospital, every segment was generated by this process and in relation to the case of Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl who was abducted at the age of ten and held in a cellar for more than eight years.


Lascar Volcano in the Central Andes, is an ESE–WNW elongate composite stratocone. Stage I (<43 ka) formed a mafic andesite stratocone and culminated in three coarse-grained pyroclastic flow eruptions. Stage II switched to the west and magmas evolved to silicic andesite and dacite of a lava dome complex and hot rock avalanche apron. Stage II culminated with a major explosive eruption (volume 15 km3) at 26.45 ka producing the Soncor ignimbrite. No caldera formed. Laharic and alluvial fan deposits and a debris avalanche formed from 26.45 to 19.2 ka, indicating a humid climatic period. The dacitic and andesitic Western Stratocone (Stage III) developed over the Soncor vent. Stage III culminated in the 9.2 ka Tumbres eruption which formed andesitic scoria flow fans and a summit collapse crater. Stage IV activity switched to the east forming an andesite lava, three nested summit craters, which repeatedly filled with lava and collapsed. Absence of significant erosion since 9.2 ka is due to the much drier Holocene climate. Activity since 1984 displays cycles of lava dome formation in the summit crater, lava dome subsidence with crater collapse, vulcanian to plinian explosive eruptions culminating in the major explosive eruption of 19/20 April 1993. The total volume of magma erupted from Lascar over a 43 ka period is estimated at 30 to 40 km3.


Deliberation depends on the ability of deliberators to learn from each other through the exchange of information. However, the Common Knowledge Effect (CKE) finding, a well-established phenomenon affecting small-group discussion, shows that when people talk in groups they tend to ignore novel information and instead discuss commonly known information; things that everyone knew before discussion started. Some theorists have worried that the CKE makes small group discussion - one of the most common features of recent democratic innovations - a poor tool for making deliberative democracy a reality. However, most research on the CKE is limited to situations where group members share a common goal or interest, while political deliberation generally happens in situations where citizens have at least some conflicting interests. This paper looks for evidence of the CKE in two group-discussion experiments where subjects had partially conflicting interests, ultimately finding find no evidence of this effect. Scholars of deliberation frequently view conflicting interests as an obstacle to the success of deliberation; this result suggests that conflicting interests may, in fact, enhance deliberation by reducing the overreliance on commonly-known information.


We develop an age-structured deterministic model (TBDYN3) of the transmission dynamics
of M. tuberculosis in England and Wales since 1900. The model estimates the age-specific
risks of developing' primary', 'endogenous' and 'exogenous' disease and analyzes the incubation
period, serial interval, lifetime risks and basic and net reproduction numbers for
tuberculosis.

Best-fitting disease risk estimates predict peaks in both morbidity and mortality rates
among young adults for successive birth cohorts during the pre-chemotherapy era, which fit
observed patterns. Model predictions attribute much of the adult morbidity until the 1940s
to exogenous reinfection. Chemotherapy, introduced after 1950, accelerated the decline in
the risk of infection and the overall morbidity for all age groups.

Age and calendar year at infection are shown to determine the lifetime risks of developing
tuberculosis, the incubation period and the serial interval. Twenty year olds faced higher
lifetime risks of respiratory tuberculosis following infection (e. g. 26% and 17% in 1900 and
1950 respectively) than did any other age group. Estimates suggest that about 3% and
over 25% of diseased 20 year olds in 1900 experienced initial infections in 1900 and during
infancy respectively. Analogous estimates are provided for other age groups and calendar
years.

Although tuberculous incidence and mortality declined since the 19th century, the estimated
net reproduction number slightly exceeded one from 1900 until 1930 and declined
thereafter. We discuss the implications of this paradox for diseases for which epidemiological
parameters can change appreciably during a serial interval. Inferences about the
basic reproduction number for tuberculosis are drawn by simulating the introduction of
a sputum-positive case into an uninfected population identical in demography to that in
England and Wales since 1900. A 'founder' case would have led to about 3 secondary cases
in 1900, to about 2 by 1950 and to less than 1 after 1960.


Three different coatings were deposited using the Detonation Gun Spraying (DGS) technology from steel powders alone; and steel powers mixed with Fe3C and SiC particles; respectively. The microstructural characteristics of these coatings were examined and the hardness of each type of coating was studied. The morphology and structure of the feedstock powders were affected by the exposure to high temperature during the spraying process and rapid solidification of steel powders that resulted in the formation of an amorphous structure. The unreinforced steel coating had the highest hardness among the three types of coatings; possibly due to a higher degree of amorphization in the coating compared to the other two samples. The microstructural observation confirmed the formation of dense coatings with a layered structure with good connectivity between layers with minimum defects and porosities in the interfacial regions.


Over the past quarter century, Paul Barry has used lots of different programming languages on lots of different platforms. In this presentation, Paul discusses what it is about his current favorite language--Python--that makes it a stand-out programming technology for him. Paul discusses those Python features that are "pearls", in his opinion. You may not agree with all of Paul's picks, but we hope you'll find Paul's discussion interesting, enlightening and maybe even entertaining.


Research shows that artificial intelligence (AI) technology positively influences students' writing skills, but this area has yet to be touched by Indonesian researchers. This study aims to map perception, obstacles, and recommendations for optimizing use of AI in teaching academic writing in Indonesian. This article focuses on a case study of three senior high schools in Central Java, Indonesia. It employs quantitative and qualitative data. The researcher collected the data using questionnaires presented with Likert scale, followed by an in-depth interview through mobile instant messaging interview. Findings show that (1) AI-based learning tools help students to do academic research, especially in the planning step, to identify and develop the topics, as well as in the drafting step, to develop a paper draft, (2) AI-based learning tools are deemed flexible in accessibility despite not being able to cover all necessities required by students in writing process, (3) students are interested in using AI technology in academic writing class so that learning process will not be boring. Although AI has been used in academic writing classes, tools have not positively impacted quality of students' academic papers in all indicators. There are several obstacles to using AI, namely (1) need for more available feature, especially in editing Indonesian text, and (2) in contrast, the features still need to be optimized. These are the recommendations for the optimization of AI-based learning tools, which are (1) adding features to edit Indonesian text, including spelling, diction, and sentence structure, and (2) enhancing AI literacy to be able to explore and leverage the existing features optimally. This research has yet to accommodate the possible coverage in checking the originality and accuracy of the written product assisted by AI-based learning tools, which could become a focus for future researchers.


Background/Context Empirical evidence suggests women faculty spend more time in campus service than men, which perpetuates inequality between men and women because research is valued more than service in academic reward systems, especially at research universities. Purpose/Focus of Study In this study I apply insights from research on gender inequality to examine whether women and men faculty at a research university were thinking about their campus service differently. I add to the literature by (1) making faculty thinking about campus service visible, (2) examining how this thinking is constrained by gender, and the gendered nature of organizations, and (3) revealing how individualistic and cosmopolitan orientations, and communal and local orientations appear together in faculty thinking about campus service. Research Design My research assistants and I conducted 60–75 minute-long, semistruc-tured interviews with 88 faculty including 34 men and 54 women on their work environment experiences. Interview questions focused on choices that faculty had made to emphasize different kinds of work (teaching, research, service), balance work priorities, and succeed. Findings/Results Overall, more women framed campus service in communal terms and expressed local orientations toward campus service; more men positioned service as a campus problem, and noted their own interests to avoid or minimize involvement in campus service so as not to hurt their career. In a smaller group of cases, (e.g., four men and five women) the faculty member expressed the dominant pattern for the other gender; however, even in these cases participants provided examples of the dominant pattern for their gender as well. In all cases, women and men were influenced by gendered ways of thinking about work, and gendered organizational practices that permeated their socialization and work environments. Conclusions/Recommendations Findings suggest that interventions are needed to affect thinking about campus service within university environments, as thinking shapes gendered divisions of labor. Sharing campus service data transparently, developing department consensus about appropriate levels of service contributions, and developing a sense of collective ownership for academic programs are examples of organizing practices that could generate change toward more gender neutral divisions of labor. Addressing the complex issue of inequality in campus service is not only about counting the numbers of service activities, although this is important. It is also critical to understand how faculty may be approaching the issue, the forces shaping their thinking, and the consequences of their thinking for individual careers and the future of the academic community.


We present our approach to undergraduate engineering education, "A contexualized, social, self-paced, engineering education for life-long learners" through a look at a new two course introductory sequence for the freshman year. As the centerpiece of these courses, we use a smaller version of our advanced research platform, RHex, to integrate introductory programming material with electrical and systems engineering theory. We move away from the traditional "filing cabinet" test and drill approach (fill minds up with facts and test)as students start to become life-long learners, creators, and innovators through exposure to research level problems. The initial assessments of our approach have been very positive. Treating students as juniorresearchers and exposing them to cutting edge robotics yielded a 98% attendance rate, 95% of students choosing to take a optional follow-on course, and 90% saying they would recommend the course to another student. We describe as well our students' development of leadership and communications skills through a required ervice-learning component.Working with high-schoolers from the School District of Philadelphia the undergraduates in the course in turn teach material similar to what they have learned in class Comments Robotics as the Delivery Vehicle: A contexualized, social, self paced, engineering education for life-long learners Conference Paper, January 1, 2007 This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/ese_papers/314


Despite efforts to build robust vision systems, robots in new environments inevitably encounter new objects. Traditional supervised learning requires gathering and annotating sample images in the environment, usually in the form of bounding boxes or segmentations. This training interface takes some experience to do correctly and is quite tedious. We report work in progress on a robotic dialog system to learn names and attributes of objects through spoken interaction with a human teacher. The robot and human play a variant of the children's games "I Spy" and "20 Questions". In our game, the human places objects of interest in front of the robot, then picks an object in her head. The robot asks a series of natural language questions about the target object, with the goal of pointing at the correct object while asking a minimum number of questions. The questions range from attributes such as color ("Is it red?") to category questions ("Is it a cup?"). The robot selects questions to ask based on an information gain criteria, seeking to minimize the entropy of the visual model given the answer to the question.


Abstract This paper assesses the reliability with which fossil reefs record the diversity and community structure of adjacent Recent reefs. The diversity and taxonomic composition of Holocene raised fossil reefs was compared with those of modern reef coral life and death assemblages in adjacent moderate and low-energy shallow reef habitats of Madang Lagoon, Papua New Guinea. Species richness per sample area and Shannon-Wiener diversity (H′) were highest in the fossil reefs, intermediate in the life assemblages, and lowest in the death assemblages. The taxonomic composition of the fossil reefs was most similar to the combination of the life and death assemblages from the modern reefs adjacent to the two fossil reefs. Depth zonation was recorded accurately in the fossil reefs. The Madang fossil reefs represent time-averaged composites of the combined life and death assemblages as they existed at the time the reef was uplifted. Because fossil reefs include overlapping cohorts from the life and death assemblages, lagoonal facies of fossil reefs are dominated by the dominant sediment-producing taxa, which are not necessarily the most abundant in the life assemblage. Rare or slow-growing taxa accumulate more slowly than the encasing sediments and are underrepresented in fossil reef lagoons. Time-averaging dilutes the contribution of rare taxa, rather than concentrating their contribution. Consequently, fidelity indices developed for mollusks in sediments yield low values in coral reef death and fossil assemblages. Branching corals dominate lagoonal facies of fossil reefs because they are abundant, they grow and produce sediment rapidly, and most of the sediment they produce is not exported. Fossil reefs distinguished kilometer-scale variations in community structure more clearly than did the modern life assemblages. This difference implies that fossil reefs may provide a better long-term record of community structure than modern reefs. This difference also suggests that modern kilometer-scale variation in coral reef community structure may have been reduced by anthropogenic degradation, even in the relatively unimpacted reefs of Madang Lagoon. Holocene and Pleistocene fossil reefs provide a time-integrated historical record of community composition and may be used as long-term benchmarks for comparison with modern, degraded, nearshore reefs. Comparisons between fossil reefs and degraded modern reefs display gross changes in community structure more effectively than they demonstrate local extinction of rare taxa.


Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine exercise program and outcome variables of exercise intervention studies from 1985 to 2004 in 9 major nursing journals in Korea. Method: From 81 articles, publishing year, research design, subjects, exercise program and outcome variables were analyzed. Results: The 57 papers(70.4%) were experimental research among 81 papers. Subjects of exercise intervention studies were demonstrated that patients were 55.6% while healthy person was 44.4%. Exercise type by the subjects which demonstrated the highest proportion was dance movement for the elderly, walking for the middle aged women and aqua exercise for the arthritis. The 40 papers(49.4%) included exercise duration, frequency and time for the exercise program which demonstrated the highest proportion. Outcome variables to determine the effect of exercise intervention were demonstrated to be physical function, physiological index, psychological and emotional variables, cardiopulmonary function, body composition, physical symptoms, variables related to exercise and behavior in order. Conclusion: Half of the exercise intervention papers included exercise duration, frequency, time and intensity for the exercise program. Frequently used outcome variables to determine the effect of exercise intervention were demonstrated to be physical function, physiological index and psychological emotional variables.


The temnospondyl Wantzosaurus elongatus Lehman, 1961, from the Lower Triassic of Madagascar, is redescribed on the basis of a new specimen, which is the most complete trematosaur ever found. Detailed osteological observations and comparisons provide new data on the anatomy, ontogeny, palaeobiology and palaeoecology of this peculiar marine 'amphibian'. The morphology of this aquatically readapted taxon is compared to that of marine 'reptiles': Wantzosaurus might have been able to swim by undulation. A phylogenetic analysis of the trematosaurs is performed for the first time and suggests that Wantzosaurus is a derived taxon within the clade Trematosauridae. The family is defined on the basis of derived character states and is shown to be monophyletic.


In alpine regions of Europe, river training works were typically the reason for the transformation of wide and braided rivers into linear river systems with a lack of structural diversity, i.e. gravel banks, islands, woody debris, riffles or pools. These interventions considerably impoverished river ecosystems. From the end of the 20th century, "river rehabilitation" has been a concept commonly used by environmental professionals and river management authorities. The rehabilitation purpose is to recover the vital space required for the rivers that were degraded by human interventions and to link the sustainable use of rivers and wetlands with human well-being. Furthermore the flood safety has to be adapted to the higher hydrological risk resulting from increased urbanization. A good understanding of the flow dynamics, sediment transport patterns and of the development of the bed morphology is essential to successfully accomplish river rehabilitation projects. Alpine confluences are typically characterized by steep gravel-bed streams carrying large sediment loads, which often connect asymmetrically at large angles with the main river. Such zones present important challenges, not only for flood protection but also for rehabilitation works. Current knowledge of river channel confluences, mainly based on lowland confluences is not applicable to alpine conditions. The morphodynamics of confluences have been experimentally investigated with special attention to the potential of local tributary widening in the framework of confluence rehabilitation projects. Local widening of the tributary in the confluence zone aims to increase the heterogeneity in sediment substrate, flow depth and flow velocity, which is favourable for in-stream habitat (e.g. aquatic invertebrates, fish, and vegetation) and for the connectivity between the main river and the tributary. Zones of quiescent water (flow stagnation or flow recirculation zones) may play an important role as refuges during flood events. Moreover, a local tributary widening can create a riparian zone which favours the diversity of plants and animals (e.g. birds, mammals, insects, amphibians). Obviously, river rehabilitation by means of local tributary widening is only feasible if it has negligible adverse effects on the flood safety of the confluence zones. The experimental set-up and the test configurations are based on the analysis of the Upper Rhone River, in Switzerland, which can be considered as representative of regulated alpine river confluences. Systematic laboratory experiments were performed in a confluence flume where the main channel is 8.5 m long and 0.50 m wide. A 4.9 m long and 0.15 m wide tributary channel is connected at an angle of 90°. Three discharge scenarios were tested for four different geometrical configurations: a reference case (without widening) and three different tributary widenings: the "Small" configuration, (Bw = 0.30 m and Lw = 0.45 m, the "Medium" configuration (Bw = 0.45 m and Lw = 0.45 m) and the "Large" configuration (Bw = 0.45 m and Lw = 0.60 m). Each experiment was conducted under steady flow conditions in the main and tributary channels and with a steady supply of poorly sorted sediments (d50 = 0.82 mm and d90 = 5.7 mm) at the tributary. There is no sediment transport in the main channel upstream of the confluence. All experiments were conducted until the equilibrium conditions were reached. The duration of the tests varied between 22 and 24 hours. Measurements of the three-dimensional velocity field, turbulence, bed material grain size distribution and morphology as well as observations of the sediment transport in the confluence flume for the reference case revealed that the hydro-morpho-sedimentary processes occurring in alpine confluences differ fundamentally from existing conceptual models of confluence morphodynamics. Therefore, a conceptual model for the main hydraulic and morphological processes occurring in confluences with characteristics similar to those found in alpine environments is proposed. Bed morphology in alpine confluences is characterized by the presence of a significant deposition bar downstream of the confluence. Differences between the water depths in the tributary and in the main channel induce the formation of large bed discordance between the confluent channels. Moreover, no considerable scour hole is observed. Regarding the flow, the tributary momentum input, associated with the presence of the deposition bar resulted in a considerable mass redistribution in the confluence zone as the main flow is deviated towards the outer bank. The main channel flow is hardly hindered by the tributary in the lower part of the water column, giving rise to a two-layer flow structure at the tributary mouth. The two-layer flow plays an important role in dampening the formation of a flow recirculation zone downstream of the confluence. The deposition bar downstream from the confluence reduces the flow area and causes flow acceleration. The sediment supplied by the tributary is mainly sorted and transported on the face of the deposition bar. The sediment transport capacity is further increased by the three-dimensionality of the flow. It is characterized by maximum velocities occurring near the bed and by a considerable increase in turbulent kinetic energy generated in the shear layer at the interface of the flows originating from the main channel and the tributary. Laboratory experiments revealed that the local widening of tributaries creates a pronounced heterogeneity in the sediment substrate, flow velocities and flow depths, without having any adverse effects on flood safety in the confluence zone. Although the local tributary widening allows a reduction in the confluence angle, it locally amplifies the hydro-morpho-sedimentary processes in the confluence zone. This is due to the reduction of the effective flow area in the local tributary widening, resulting in locally increased tributary velocities and momentum flux. This reduction of the effective flow area occurs due to a general rise of the bed elevation and by a lateral constriction of the flow induced by a zone of flow stagnation at the upstream confluence corner. Flow coming from the tributary remains in the upper part of the water column in the main river and it is considerably more directed outwards than flow in the lower part of the water column coming from the main channel. The increased tributary velocities lead to increased bed discordance and a higher tributary penetration in the confluence zone. Despite the different morphodynamic responses at the widened zones depending on the geometry and the discharge ratio, the local tributary widening always enhance the variability of flow depths, bed constitution and flow velocities without causing adverse effects on the morphodynamics of the tributary and main channels in equilibrium conditions. Furthermore, the lateral freedom obtained by the local widening associated to the different combinations of the main and tributary discharge events further allows the formation of different bed forms, which contributes to the improvement the lateral connectivity of regulated networks. Therefore, local tributary widening can be considered as an efficient solution for increasing the ecological potential of fluvial systems without reducing the conveyance capacity of a given network.


"The Press Council has announced that the Radio and Televison Supreme Council stopped 39 programmes of 16 channels in September. The General Secretary of the Press Council, Oktay Eksi, has evaluated the state of the freedom of communication of the previous month. Based on information coming from national television stations, he announced that the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTUK) stopped 39 programmes of 16 TV channels in September.(...) " Source : Bianet


One would expect a relationship between the ethical attitudes and the religion of individuals. Published research into this relationship has found somewhat mixed results. While some studies have found a significant, positive relationship between religious belief and ethical attitudes, other studies have found either no effect or only a "marginal effect". In this study, we investigate the relationship between religious convictions and attitudes toward ethical dilemmas. We find strong evidence to suggest that business professionals who self-report higher levels of religious importance are significantly less accepting of ethically questionable behavior – for all 16 vignettes studied. This result is far more consistent and significant than for respondents who simply self-classify as "Christian." Further, we find evidence, consistent with the literature, that older respondents and females also tend to be less accepting of ethically questionable behavior than are younger, male respondents. Finally, we find that professionals working at larger firms tend to be less accepting of ethically questionable behavior than their counterparts at smaller firms.


What makes a household-level short-term load forecast "good"? Individual household load profiles are intermittent, as distinct peaks correspond to specific activities in the household. Using traditional point-wise error metrics to assess household-level forecasts may lead to, for instance, double-digit mean absolute percentage errors. One reason is a double penalty incurred if a peak is forecasted correctly in amplitude, but with a small delay in time. An adjusted forecast error measure based on local permutations was proposed to assess household-level forecasts by optimally aligning the peaks bounded by a displacement limit. This work shows how the choice of this parameter leads to different "best" forecasts in terms of specific applications, namely the optimization objectives of an energy management system. For that, different parameterizations of the Local Permutation Invariant (LPI) distance are compared within k-Nearest Neighbors as a forecasting model for three different optimization objectives. A simulation study on 100 households of the CER dataset shows that the optimal parameterization can decrease the peak load on average by over 22.5% compared to the Euclidean distance. However, for increasing self-sufficiency and minimizing costs, no significant improvements can be achieved. This implies that household-level forecasts should generally be evaluated in terms of their application, as traditional metrics as a proxy may not express its "goodness" adequately.


The public budget has always been a much debated object at the political level as well as in academia. This is not surprising as it mirrors the political intentions and ideologies of those running the government on the one hand and taking into account that economics is a multiparadigmatic science on the other hand. Against this backcloth, the current unambiguity of budgetary restriction in recent political and scientific debates seems curious. The paper aims at explaining this development and questions its validity by framing a concept of budgetary sustainability on the grounds of a heterodox, post Keynesian model.


Historical learning is affected by cultural features and differences in educational systems. This is a comparative analysis of the progression of students' ideas in the understanding of historical significance, between two countries of the European Union, England and Spain. The research was intended to establish an empirically grounded model of progression in an area hitherto not investigated, namely significance within accounts. Progression was evaluated in two aspects: a) the relationship between significance and accounts (the significance of an event in rival historical narratives); and b) its variability of attributions, or types of significance (the different assessments of significance). This study was carried out with a sample of English and Spanish 12 to 17 year-old students. Methods followed were mainly qualitative, but the scale of the sample also allowed some quantitative analysis. The analysis of the relationship between significance and accounts concentrated on several notions: intrinsicallitylcontextuality; importance; emplotment and story parameters; point o/view; and validity and truth. Empirical data allowed the development of level-scales for each concept. Progression was found in all these areas, both for English and for Spanish students. However, cross-cultural differences were evident for some concepts, levels and age, in particular for importance and point 0/ view. English students became aware of these concepts at earlier ages and in higher numbers than Spanish ones. Five types of historical significance, contemporary, causal, pattern, symbolic, and presentljuture were defined. A further model of progression was generated through a qualitative analysis. This model comprises different levels, from responses that indicate no awareness of the notion of importance, and make no allusion to any type, or refer to the contemporary type only, towards responses that establish some kind of criteria to assess significance in different contexts and mention various types. The comparison of English and Spanish students' responses indicated several qualitative differences regarding types of significance and progression: pattern, symbolic and presentljuture types were more frequently mentioned amongst English participants in all year groups; and they reached a higher order of ideas at an earlier age than Spanish ones.


Despite its conversation potential, little is known of whether land taken out of arable production as set-aside benefits wildlife, nor what features enhance its value as a habitat. Authors studied the presence of small mammals on one-year set-aside through a summer harvest period (278 captures in 3000 trap nights). Trapping success was low on all set-aside (0.6%), but was higher in adjoining hedgerow (30%) and cereal crops (13%). Wood mice Apodemus sylvaticus (Linnaeus, 1758) were the most commonly caught species, and the only species to occur on set-aside. There were no significant differences in trap success between set-aside configured in blocks and strips, nor between sown and naturally regenerated set-aside. Captures on set-aside increased after harvest, when the crop no longer provided cover. Data demonstrate that set-aside is not necessarily a suitable habitat for small mammals.


On 20 November 1989, the United Nations General Assembly, comprised of delegates representing a wide spectrum of legal systems, cultures and religious traditions, unanimously adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Now, more than a quarter of a century on, the CRC is ratified by almost the entire international community and is widely regarded as the most important advocacy tool for children's rights. Incorporating the full range of human rights – civil, cultural, economic, political and social – it creates an international legal framework for the protection and promotion of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons under the age of 18. This introductory chapter establishes the motivation and rationale for and aims and objectives of the book and outlines the overarching conceptual framework for the chapters that follow; namely a critical exploration of the ways in which the CRC has informed, presently informs and may in future inform educational research in various contexts internationally. The logic informing the structure of the book is explained and each chapter is introduced, signposting for the reader the key concepts, themes, issues and debates to be covered.


This document describes the construction of the Global Bilateral Migration Data Base, the GMig2 Data Base, based on the GTAP 8 Data Base. To avoid confusion we will refer to this database as the GMig2 8_0 Data Base where 8 refers to the version of the underlying GTAP Data Base and 0 refers to the first or original version of the migration data.

Recent developments by Ozden, Parsons, Schiff and Walmsley (2011) to construct a time series of bilateral matrix of foreign population have allowed us to update the previous GMig2 7_0 database of labor, remittances, and wages. The purpose of this document is to outline how this data is combined with other data on wages and remittances to create a database which can be used to model the impact of labor movements.

The GMig2 8_0 Data Base is based on and consistent with the GTAP 8 Data Base. The GTAP 8 Data Base contains input-output data on 129 regions and 57 commodities, as well as detailed bilateral trade, transport and protection information (Narayanan et al., 2012). In addition to the GTAP Data Base and the Ozden, Parsons, Schiff and Walmsley (2011) we also obtained remittance data from the IMF; participation rates obtained from the ILO LABORSTA database website (ILO, 2012); skill splits estimated from data obtained from LABORSTA and Docquier et al. (2010). The migration labor force data and total remittances are constructed for 244 countries and then aggregated up to the GTAP countries, where wages and incomes can then be determined. In this way the migration database can be updated as new countries are incorporated into the GTAP Data Base.


The University of Bologna has started the Career Guidance Project developing several initiatives: self evaluation questionnaires for Secondary Schools students, training courses for admission tests, and an e-learning platform with online modules in order to explain and show the cultural and professional environment of the University.
It will be explained the genesis of the Project, the choice of the Learning Management System, the authoring tool advantages and the practical modules implementation.
Special attention will be devoted to the analysis of the relationship with Professors and Authors during the modules preparation: the course deployment has been an opportunity not only to explain which are the basic aspects of e-learning effectiveness, but also to stress the importance of pedagogical aspects of a well structured course.
The modules have been offered to several Secondary Schools in a pilot edition in Spring 2007.
Now there are ten modules available: Industrial Chemistry, Economics, Engineering, Medicine and Nursing, Foreign Languages, Arts and Humanities, Psychology, Statistics, Law, Sciences.
A new development of the Project will offer to the Erasmus students the possibility to use the e-learning modules to approach the University of Bologna and the preferred Faculty.


As the Internet becomes part of daily living rather than a place to visit, its rough edges are smoothed and its extremes tamed by sovereigns wanting to protect consumers, prevent network resource abuse, and eliminate speech deemed harmful. The tools are now within reach to permit sovereigns with competing rulesets to play down their differences - whether by countenancing global privatization of some Internet governance issues through organizations like ICANN, coming to new international agreements on substance and procedure to reduce the friction caused by transborder data flows, or by a "live and let live" set of localization technologies to shape the Internet to suit the respective societies it touches. These shifts will help ease the tension between the certitudes that the Internet is global, while the imposition of regulation is almost always local. Such cures for the longstanding dilemmas of Internet jurisdiction and governance eliminate the originally cherished aspects of a global Internet as well - urging us to consider the iatrogenic effects of bulldozing online activity to conform more to the boundaries of the physical world that preceded it, and explaining why, in the United States and elsewhere, there are contradictory policies emerging about the Internet's future.


This is a Pearson Global Edition. The Pearson Editorial team worked closely with educators around the world to include content especially relevant to students outside of the United States. Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation allows students to actually experience the interaction between marketing research and marketing decision-making. Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation takes a unique applied and managerial orientation that illustrates the interaction between marketing research decisions and marketing management decisions. This text is comprehensive, practical, and presents balanced coverage of both qualitative and quantitative material. The sixth edition is even more current, contemporary, illustrative, and sensitive to user needs


The focus of this thesis is the study of the demand side of the shadow economy. To achieve this, the informal consumption of Peruvian families located in urban areas is studied. This is possible thanks to a household survey collecting information on where people acquired their goods. The main contribution of the research is that it identifies an unexplored area in the literature with limited theoretical discussion and few empirical applications. Information about why people purchase from informal markets will supplement wider knowledge of labour allocation on informal opportunities. The thesis uses an Almost Ideal Demand System in order to verify some demand properties of informal consumption: income and price elasticities, the existence of linkages between working and purchasing decisions and explore the effects of bargaining on expenditure allocation. Four robust results are encountered. First, the inferiority of informal consumption is rejected. Formal and informal expenditure are classified as normal, but income responses on the latter (necessity) are lower than on the former (luxury). Second, there are linkage effects between working and purchasing in the informal and formal sectors. These effects are stronger for informal consumption and among the self-employed. Linkages are also not equally applicable across all goods. Better results are found within quasi-substitutes with leisure. Third, formal and informal food consumption reveals elastic demand curves and imperfect substitution between them, with higher compensated own-price and cross-price elasticities for formal markets. Fourth, household members bargain in their allocation decisions across markets, with females' decisions being closer to less-informal purchasing baskets. This result is clearer in the case of food consumption. Public policy recommendations based on these results are derived, where it is found that formalization policies will need to take into account their negative distributional effects.


The recent release of large open access chemistry databases into the public domain generates a demand for flexible tools to process them so as to discover new knowledge. To support Open Drug Discovery and Open Notebook Science on top of these data resources, is it desirable for the processing tools to be Open Source and available to everyone. The aim of this project was the development of an Open Source workflow engine to solve crucial cheminformatics problems. As a consequence, the CDK-Taverna project developed in the course of this thesis builds a cheminformatics workflow solution through the combination of different Open Source projects such as Taverna (workflow engine), the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK, cheminformatics library) and Pgchem::Tigress (chemistry database cartridge). The work on this project includes the implementation of over 160 different workers, which focus on cheminformatics tasks. The application of the developed methods to real world problems was the final objective of the project. The validation of Open Source software libraries and of chemical data derived from different databases is mandatory to all cheminformatics workflows. Methods to detect the atom types of chemical structures were used to validate the atom typing of the Chemistry Development Kit and to identify curation problems while processing different public databases, including the EBI drug databases ChEBI and ChEMBL as well as the natural products Chapman & Hall Chemical Database. The CDK atom typing shows a lack on atom types of heavier atoms but fits the need of databases containing organic substances including natural products. To support combinatorial chemistry an implementation of a reaction enumeration workflow was realized. It is based on generic reactions with lists of reactants and allows the generation of chemical libraries up to O(1000) molecules. Supervised machine learning techniques (perceptron-type artificial neural networks and support vector machines) were used as a proof of concept for quantitative modelling of adhesive polymer kinetics with the Mathematica GNWI.CIP package. This opens the perspective of an integration of high-level "experimental mathematics" into the CDK-Taverna based scientific pipelining. A chemical diversity analysis based on two different public and one proprietary databases including over 200,000 molecules was a large-scale application of the methods developed. For the chemical diversity analysis different molecular properties are calculated using the Chemistry Development Kit. The analysis of these properties was performed with Adaptive-Resonance-Theory (ART 2-A algorithm) for an automatic unsupervised classification of open categorical problems. The result shows a similar coverage of the chemical space of the two databases containing natural products (one public, one proprietary) whereas the ChEBI database covers a distinctly different chemical space. As a consequence these comparisons reveal interesting white-spots in the proprietary database. The combination of these results with pharmacological annotations of the molecules leads to further research and modelling activities.


Network modeling reveals an RNA splicing network in the brain and uncovers complex mechanisms of regulation. RNA splicing, which involves selectively cutting and pasting messenger RNA to generate different proteins, is critical in regulating human physiology and diseases. However, our knowledge of the underlying rules governing splicing regulation remains incomplete. The recent emergence of next-generation sequencing and other high-throughput technologies has provided an opportunity to transform our understanding of RNA regulation. Zhang et al. combined multiple data sets to generate a robust and relatively complete picture of splicing regulation by the mammalian neuronal splicing factor Nova in the brain. About 700 splicing events were identified, including many novel target exons, some likely to be involved in neurological disease. Combining genomic studies with computational biology also yielded insight into the regulation of alternative splicing. C. Zhang, M. A. Frias, A. Mele, M. Ruggiu, T. Eom, C. B. Marney, H. Wang, D. D. Licatalosi, J. J. Fak, R. B. Darnell, Integrative modeling defines the Nova splicing-regulatory network and its combinatorial controls. Science 329, 439–443 (2010). [Abstract] [Full Text]


Many of the theories in this field have been largely expressed in scientific or clinical terms; research and practice from a creative perspective, as a sustained and systematic approach, have received less attention.

My practice-led research offers an alternative method to the predominantly theoretical and textual discourse normally encountered, utilizing the singular or combined application of creative still photography, videography and lenticular technology, as a strategy for the study and management of grief. Through creative processes, it explores and interprets human responses to loss through death, and demonstrates the value of creative practice as scholarly research, and its significance as a tool for the development of communication and understanding.

The work has drawn on my own personal bereavement experiences, and those of volunteer participants as primary data.

Divided into four topics, the visual work has proved relevant in a broad range of transdisciplinary contexts including health, education, research and the arts. As Dr Robert Kastenbaum has stated: "Your distinctive and innovative work … will have relevance to human service caregivers, researchers, and people in the arts and Humanities." Dr Robert Kastenbaum, Arizona State University.

This original lens-based artwork involves a process of deconstruction/reconstruction of events, which includes self-reflection and self-evaluation.

Negative emotions produced through bereavement can be re-aligned as history, memory and biography overlap and resonate, and past experiences become re-articulated in the present (Ellis & Bochner, 1992).

Placed in a health context, these lens-based practices can be effective in terms of the healing process (Dalley, 1984). Research has shown that positive evaluation of experiences during bereavement can help to produce 'resilient rather than vulnerable survivors' (Riches, 2002, p. 8).

Feedback has underlined the importance of the current position of photography as a research strategy in general, and its impact as a tool within the context of grief study.


Supporting and accelerating the adoption and diffusion of environmental innovations amongst small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is a major challenge to environmental policy makers. Research suggests that whilst SMEs possess high flexibility, their innovative capacity may be limited to incremental changes within their existing technology system and network. Twenty case studies examining the innovation adoption process in SMEs in four sectors and in five countries within the ENVIS project (commissioned by the EU) revealed great variety in factors driving this process. Findings indicate that this variation can be attributed to the character of the environmental innovation, the specific business opportunity, the regulatory setting and pressure experienced by the sector. Based on these findings an analytical framework is suggested, whereby the environmental innovative capability of SMEs is conceived as the result of an interplay between the competencies, the network relations and the strategic orientation of the company (the 'dynamic triangle'). This indicates that policy to support SME's adoption of environmental innovations has to take an integrated form, i.e. addressing and developing competence, networks and strategic orientation of SMEs simultaneously whilst remaining systemic and context sensitive.


Alcohol and illicit drug abuse continues to be a significant problem in the United States. Although access to treatment remains a hurdle for many who struggle with addiction, the extent to which treatment (once available) is effective in promoting recovery and preventing relapse remains unclear. Thus, the present study examined the relationship between clinical risk factors for substance abuse and their effects on treatment outcomes. Data was obtained from the Comprehensive Addiction Treatment Outcome Registry (CATOR; N=13,051), which was designed to provide substance abuse treatment programs with uniform forms that cover intake information and discharge, as well as treatment outcomes for 12 months post-treatment. From the original CATOR sample, predictors of treatment outcomes (i.e., relapse) at follow-up were examined in a total of 10,405 participants with complete data. Results suggested several variables to be significant indicators of relapse, including needle use, age of first drink, using multiple substances, depression, multiple substance diagnoses, the Big 5 cocaine items (craving, failing to fulfill responsibilities, withdrawal symptoms, giving up pleasant activities to use substances, and inability to reduce or stop substance use), history of substance abuse and past psychiatric history, as well as all of the behavioral risk items (meeting conduct disorder criteria as an adolescent, being arrested within the past year, and being arrested for a DUI/DWI). Secondary multivariate analyses, specifically a series of logistic regressions, were used to determine if demographic factors were significant in the context of the clinical risk items. Results suggested that age, race, employment status and marital status remained significant and these variables were included as control variables. Third, it was determined that the significant clinical risk variables listed above, as well as the four demographic control variables, would be used to construct a global assessment tool measuring clinical risk factors of relapse for the purpose of identifying high risk clients.


In this paper, we propose a new scene change detection method using multiple histograms. The proposed method produces multiple histograms of split blocks for consecutive frames. Then, it computes the optimal threshold value using automatic thresholding based on the Otsu method and decides whether the scene change occurs or not using the difference between threshold values in successive frames. In the experiments for the subjective evaluation, the proposed method correctly identified the scene change, thereby preventing interpolated frames with poor image quality due to block artifacts. In the objective evaluation using the F1 score, the proposed method improved the accuracy of the scene change detection by up to 0.461 compared with the benchmark methods.


Classical constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are commonly defined on finite domains. In real life, constrained variables can evolve over time. A variable can actually take an infinite sequence of values over discrete time points. In this paper, we propose constraint programming on infinite data streams, which provides a natural way to model constrained time-varying problems. In our framework, variable domains are specified by ω-regular languages. We introduce special stream operators as basis to form stream expressions and constraints. Stream CSPs have infinite search space. We propose a search procedure that can recognize and avoid infinite search over duplicate search space. The solution set of a stream CSP can be represented by a Buchi automaton allowing stream values to be non-periodic. Consistency notions are defined to reduce the search space early. We illustrate the feasibility of the framework by examples and experiments.


Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker's Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker's Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19 century gender roles, especially in regard to women's communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters' revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker's novel, the women's violent deaths in the films are treated as punishment for their defiance of gender codes. Carmilla is more sympathetic than the vampire sisters, both in Le Fanu's original text and in recent adaptations. In Le Fanu's text, Carmilla is the primary antagonist, but she remains an attractive figure. Carmilla is even more humanized in recent adaptations, occasionally even being transformed into a heroic figure, while the role of the antagonist is taken on by figures who represent patriarchal control. Despite her more sympathetic characterization, Carmilla dies as brutal a death as Dracula's vampire sisters in nearly every adaptation. Ultimately, the treatment of the vampire women in these adaptations reveals that our own culture is still largely guided by biases against women, especially lesbians, in filmmakers' treatment of villainous and heroic women alike. Table of


Final volume of the long-awaited translation of one of Augustines classics and a great work in Christian literature. Newly translated by Maria Boulding, O.S.B., whose masterful translation of Augustines Confessions in the same series has been praised as being of a different level of excellence from practically anything else in the market (Bishop Rowan Williams, Monmouth, England). As the psalms are a microcosm of the Old Testament, so the Expositions of the Psalms can be seen as a microcosm of Augustinian thought. They recapitulate and focus the experiences of Augustines personal life, his theological reflections, and his pastoral concerns as Bishop of Hippo.


Central to the theoretic orientation of the present panel analysis is the Meadian assumption that the attitudes and behavior of individuals are influenced by those with whom they interact on a continuing basis. By implication, the truth or falsity of that statement is particularly important for the victims of serious chronic illnesses whose ordinary patterns of interaction are disrupted and whose social involvements must be modified. In investigating the specific disease condition of renal failure with its associated treatment procedure, hemodialysis, this research examines whether a relationship exists between social environment-including the attitudes of family, friends, and others contractually yet importantly related-and the chronically ill person's modification of social functioning. Analysis of data collected through structured interviews at two times (T1 and T2) separated by a three-year interval finds statistically significant associations between patients' perceived expectations offamily andfriends and the patients' socialfunctioning, both initially and at the time of reinterview. Although the amount of interactional behavior appears to increase over time, the quality of such interaction clearly decreases. Alienation also increases significantly over time. Partial correlational analysis of the relationships between major variables, controlling for the effect of education, suggests that although the perceived expectations of primarygroup members are clearly associated with socialfunctioning at T1 and T2, the expectations of secondary-group members cannot be so described in either instance. Clinical implications of these findings for the health care professional working with the chronic dialysis patient are discussed.


Sympathetic nervous system reactivity to stress is though to increase with age in humans. We tested this hypothesis by recording postganglionic sympathetic nerve activity to skeletal muscle (MSNA) (peroneal microneurography) and by measuring plasma norepinephrine concentrations (PNE), heart rate, and arterial pressure before (prestress control) and during cognitive challenge (mental arithmetic and colored word test), thermal stress (i.e., the cold pressor test), and exhaustive isometric handgrip exercise (40% of maximum voluntary force)/postexercise ischemia in 15 older (60-74 yr, mean +/- SE = 64 +/- 1) and 15 young (19-30 yr, mean +/- SE = 25 +/- 1) healthy men and women (8 males, 7 females each). The initial prestress control level of MSNA was higher in the older subjects (P < 0.01 vs. young), but there were no significant differences for PNE, heart rate, or arterial pressure. The MSNA and PNE responses to mental stress were small and not different in the two groups. MSNA and PNE increased markedly in response to the cold pressor test and isometric handgrip exercise/post exercise ischemia in both groups. The absolute unit increases in MSNA were similar in the two groups, but the relative (percentage) increases were actually smaller in the older subjects (P < 0.05 vs. young) due to their elevated baseline levels. The stress-evoked increases in arterial pressure were similar in the groups, but the older subjects tended to demonstrate smaller increases in heart rate. In general, no gender differences were noted in either age group. These findings fail to support the long-held concept that stress-induced sympathetic nervous system stimulation becomes exaggerated with age. Thus, sympathetic neural hyperreactivity does not appear to be a fundamental property of the aging process in humans.


In a harmonically mode-locked laser multiple optical pulses propagate inside the laser cavity. The noise in different pulses inside the laser cavity is in general correlated. Information regarding the sign and magnitude of the noise correlations is contained in the distribution of the spectral weight among the supermode noise peaks that appear in the pulse energy and timing noise spectral densities. We show that the supermode noise spectrum obtained experimentally by measurement of the photodetector current noise spectral density can be used to determine the correlations in the energy and the timing noise of different pulses in the laser cavity. We also present simple models for the timing noise in harmonically mode-locked lasers that demonstrate the relationship between the noise correlations and the supermode noise peaks. © 2002 Optical Society of America


Most predictive modeling techniques utilize all available data to build global models. This is despite the wellknown fact that for many problems, the targeted relationship varies greatly over the input space, thus suggesting that localized models may improve predictive performance. In this paper, we suggest and evaluate a technique inducing one predictive model for each test instance, using only neighboring instances. In the experimentation, several different variations of the suggested algorithm producing localized decision trees and neural network models are evaluated on 30 UCI data sets. The main result is that the suggested approach generally yields better predictive performance than global models built using all available training data. As a matter of fact, all techniques producing J48 trees obtained significantly higher accuracy and AUC, compared to the global J48 model. For RBF network models, with their inherent ability to use localized information, the suggested approach was only successful with regard to accuracy, while global RBF models had a better ranking ability, as seen by their generally higher AUCs.


The ratio of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) to the tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMPs) in wounded tissues strictly control the protease activity of MMPs, and therefore regulate the progress of wound closure, tissue regeneration and scar formation. Some amphibians (i.e. axolotl/newt) demonstrate complete regeneration of missing or wounded digits and even limbs; MMPs play a critical role during amphibian regeneration. Conversely, mammalian wound healing re-establishes tissue integrity, but at the expense of scar tissue formation. The differences between amphibian regeneration and mammalian wound healing can be attributed to the greater ratio of MMPs to TIMPs in amphibian tissue. Previous studies have demonstrated the ability of MMP1 to effectively promote skeletal muscle regeneration by favoring extracellular matrix (ECM) remodeling to enhance cell proliferation and migration. In this study, MMP1 was administered to the digits amputated at the mid-second phalanx of adult mice to observe its effect on digit regeneration. Results indicated that the regeneration of soft tissue and the rate of wound closure were significantly improved by MMP1 administration, but the elongation of the skeletal tissue was insignificantly affected. During digit regeneration, more mutipotent progenitor cells, capillary vasculature and neuromuscular-related tissues were observed in MMP1 treated tissues; moreover, there was less fibrotic tissue formed in treated digits. In summary, MMP1 was found to be effective in promoting wound healing in amputated digits of adult mice.


Diabetes mellitus (DM) remains one of the leading factors of morbidity and mortality worldwide augmenting social and medical care burden.1 Currently, advances in pathophysiological understanding of the innate mechanisms of DM-related complications in part affecting heart and vessels are impressed, while they are not fully clear. Recent basic and clinical studies have shown that DM directly induces changes in various organ systems in close conjunction with glucotoxicity, lipid toxicity, oxidative stress and low-grade inflammation, which lead to microvascular and macrovascular complications mediating cardiovascular (CV) risk.2 Moreover, accelerating atherosclerosis, endothelial dysfunction and cardiomyopathy play a causative role in the development and progression of DM-related CV outcomes and death.3 In this context, use of cardiac biomarkers for risk stratification in patients with DM appears to be promising, especially in individuals without known CV disease.

The abundant biomarkers representing several pathophysiological pathways of DM development have been investigated to improve the prediction of CV events and DM-related deaths (table 1). Although all these biomarkers have strongly accompanied to staging of evolution of target organ damage in DM, it is completely unknown whether cardiac biomarkers associated with CV risk in general population may predict future incident of CV disease in DM. Yet, several biomarkers reflected endothelial cell activation and dysfunction, cell growth and differentiation, vascular remodelling and angiogenesis have not exhibited an ability to improve CV-event prediction based on traditional CV risk factors, that is, smoking, obesity, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, etc. Nevertheless, natural evolution of metabolic disease from pre-diabetes including impaired fasting glucose and/or impaired glucose tolerance to type-1 or type-2 DM has not obligatorily associated with sufficient changes in …


Non-use values are frequently underestimated or ignored in natural resource damage assessments, despite the fact that there are significant social and economic benefits to assessing costs for lost non-use values. The regulations of the Department of the Interior, which bind some CERCLA trustees, create unusual barriers to the consideration of non-use values and are potentially vulnerable to a reasonableness challenge under Chevron v. NRDC. Trustees who are not bound by the DOI regulations should consider calculating and assessing non-use values because of the economic and social benefits of recognizing non-economic injury caused by the destruction or degradation of natural resources.