The Radio Science technique enables to estimate the mass and other gravitational parameters of a solar system body from spacecraft observations very precisely. It uses the radio link between ground station and spacecraft. The frequency shift of the radio signal is proportional to the relative velocity change between spacecraft and ground station. If a spacecraft performs a close flyby at a solar system body, the velocity of the spacecraft is changed by the gravitational attraction of the body. If all other contributions on the radio signal are known, the remaining frequency change is solely due to the gravitational attraction. A least square fit can be performed on the frequency residuals to derive from it gravitational parameters. Within this thesis models were developed and merged into a software package with which it is possible to determine the orbit of a spacecraft precisely and to predict accurately the frequency to be observed at a ground station. Models for extracting the frequency shift caused by the propagation of the radio signal through the ionosphere and troposphere of the Earth were incorporated. The accuracy of the predicted frequency, i.e. the difference between measurement and predict, is in the same order as the total Doppler velocity error in X-band from the thermal noise of the ground station and the transponder phase noise. Filtering techniques were established improving the signal to noise ratio at least by a factor of three. A numerical stable least square fitting procedure was introduced to fit the frequency change due to the gravitational attraction of a body onto the measured frequency residuals. Measurements from the close flyby of the Rosetta spacecraft at the asteroid Steins were analyzed with the developed method. Due to the large flyby distance no mass estimate was possible. A feasibility study was carried out for the upcoming flyby of Rosetta in July 2010 at the asteroid Lutetia. It is possible to estimate from this flyby the mass of Lutetia with an error of 1 %. Moreover, the developed method was applied to measurements of the Radio Science Experiment onboard Mars Express MaRS from two close flybys at the Mars moon Phobos in March 2006 and July 2008. The mass of Phobos was estimated from these flybys. The solution provides the most accurate value currently available for the mass of Phobos from close flybys. Information about the interior were derived from the precise mass estimate. Phobos has a high porosity which is discussed with respect to its origin. It seems to be unlikely that Phobos is a captured asteroid as suggested from first spectral measurements. It seems to be more likely that Phobos is the remnant of the collision between a body originating from the asteroid belt and a body remaining from the formation process of Mars. Mars Express will perform another flyby in March 2010 with a closest distance of 62 km. A feasibility study was performed from which it was derived that the C20 term of the gravity field of Phobos can be estimated with an error of 1 % with the developed method.


The 2016 election campaign's defining issue is the recovery of democracy from the death grip of plutocracy. The reform proposals that are supported at the outset of the primary season by Democrats and their leading presidential candidates are all inadequate for the task. This study provides a critical analysis of the current set of the widely promoted proposals on this issue of money in politics. It features those of the Democratic candidates and the congressional party. The analysis of these proposals functions as a strategy primer on the subject of money in politics for purposes of wisely assessing the widely promoted but misleading and terminally ineffective strategies. This helps open space for identifying and formulating effective strategies. Democrats and their professional activist allies, including celebrity activists and non-profit organizations have not been credible sources of strategic advice on the issue of money in politics. Their priority is the marketability of soundbite strategies, not effective political strategy. The current proposals are necessarily deficient because they all start from the erroneous assumption that the Constitution was written to establish a corrupt plutocracy and that it must therefore now be amended to enable democracy.This premise asks us to believe, without evidence, that the framers' professed intention to establish a democracy legitimized solely by the consent of the governed must now be considered to have been an elaborate fraud because five undistinguished Supreme Court justices tell us, two centuries later, that their Constitution mandates a plutocracy where money buys legitimacy. It is safe to say that the framers, who never said any such thing in the many volumes they wrote about the Constitution, are more reliable sources on this question than two Reagan and three Bush family appointees elevated from deserved obscurity to serve political ends.The active form of the Amendment Diversion is advocacy of a constitutional amendment as the only solution to plutocracy. This advocacy is most often phrased as having the purpose of "overturning Citizens United," which would only leave in place the noxious root of the problem, which is Buckley v Valeo (1976). Such advocacy often takes the form of the mere concept of an amendment, little more than the quoted phrase, thereby avoiding the devilish detail of producing actual text. Amendment proposals that are reduced to text, upon analysis, are found to have perverse unintended consequences.Alternative diversionary proposals instruct us that the only available remedies short of such an amendment are a set of ineffective shopworn piecemeal reforms that comply with the Supreme Court's judicial supremacist interpretations. These interpretations reflect the Court's own plutocratic Constitution, nowhere to be found in the text of the original document. Servile compliance with the Supreme Courts' illegitimate plutocratic amendment of the Constitution is the passive form of the Amendment Diversion.This series on "The Amendment Diversion" is contained in three "Books" to be published in 2016. Book I describes Hillary Clinton's reform proposal which is so minimally piecemeal as to be probably counterproductive. Her proposals explore just how thinly a piecemeal reform of money in politics can be sliced so as not to offend her donors, while appearing to offer substance. In this effort she embraces President Obama's example of how Democrats avoid offending their plutocratic backers while throwing spare soundbites to their uninformed and effectively disenfranchised voters.Hillary Clinton is campaigning on her experience and pragmatism. But pragmatism in the form of piecemeal, gradualist, incremental reform of systemic corruption tends to only make it worse. Clinton's proposals on money in politics so vastly underestimate what it takes to reform a systemically corrupt government that it draws into question her fundamental understanding of the subject. Nor is Clinton's experience with this issue during her service as Secretary of State a recommendation for her candidacy. Instead of attesting to her knowledge, Clinton's experience confirms that she lacks either understanding of or concern about the centrality of the issue of systemic corruption. Her direct intervention to derail anti-corruption programs in Afghanistan contributed to the current precarious status of the Kabul government, and to rendering futile the longest war in American History. Even if Clinton's proposals are not necessarily different in significant ways from her opponent Bernie Sanders' current proposals, her relevant experience, pragmatic approach and lack of determined resolve is the opposite of what is needed to remedy the defining problem of the era.


Abstract. The use of conceptual models is essential in the interpretation of reflection seismic data. It allows interpreters to make geological sense of seismic data which carries inherent uncertainty. However, conceptual models can create powerful anchors that prevent interpreters from reassessing and adapting their interpretations as part of the interpretation process, which can subsequently lead to flawed or erroneous outcomes. It is therefore critical to understand how conceptual models are generated and applied to reduce unwanted effects in interpretation results. Here we have tested how interpretation of vertically exaggerated seismic data influenced the creation and adoption of the conceptual models of 160 participants in a paper-based interpretation experiment. Participants were asked to interpret a series of faults and a horizon, off-set by those faults, in a seismic section. The seismic section was randomly presented to the participants with different horizontal-vertical exaggeration (1 : 4 or 1 : 2). Statistical analysis of the results indicates that early anchoring to specific conceptual models had the most impact on interpretation outcome; with the degree of vertical exaggeration having a subdued influence. Three different conceptual models were adopted by participants, constrained by initial observations of the seismic data. Interpreted fault dip angles show no evidence of other constraint (e.g. from the application of accepted fault dip models). Our results provide evidence of biases in interpretation of uncertain geological and geophysical data, including the use of heuristics to form initial conceptual models and anchoring to these models, confirming the need for increased understanding and mitigation of these biases to improve interpretation outcomes.


The principal focus of community ecology is to detect patterns in natural assemblages of plants and animals and explain the causal factors that underlie them. For the last 30 years, much of ecological theory has assumed that competition is the primary structuring force in communities. Competition is likely to be most important at the lower levels of community organisation, that of the guild. At the scale of large geographic regions, both evolutionary history and the physical environment are important in determining the composition of species assemblages. The structure of the guild of large dasyuroids or marsupial carnivores in Tasmania, Australia, is examined in relation to causal factors, especially the importance of competition. The relative significance of evolutionary history and the physical environment in shaping the composition of the Australian marsupial carnivore fauna is assessed.
Evidence that competition was and still is an important structuring force in the guild is found. Evolutionary evidence is found in character displacement and morphological size patterning in canine strength, the trophic structure proximally related to feeding ecology of the large dasyuroids. The hypothesis of competition as the underlying causal factor is supported by similar patterning in prey size and a carnivore body size / prey size correlation. The existence of current competition in the guild can be inferred from the large extent of dietary overlap between species. The effects of competition are most evident between the two most similar species, the congeneric quolls. Resources are partitioned on at least three niche dimensions, diet, horizontal and vertical use of the habitat. Where dietary overlap is high between species, habitat use overlap is low, thereby reducing the potential for direct competition for individual prey items. Interference competition is most likely to occur over large carcasses. Mainly body size but also age of the carnivore determine interspecific dominance. Devils are usually dominant and are the primary scavengers, exhibiting adaptations for scavenging that are lacking in the other two species.
Aspects of guild structure are influenced by several factors as follows. Size relationships in both body size and trophic stuctures are influenced by - latitudinal size correlations, competitive character displacement, size distributions of prey species which are shaped by the fractal dimensions of the habitat, and sexual selection. Locomotor morphology and habitat use of the carnivore species show evolutionary adaptations that match the arboreal or terrestrial habits of their particular size range of prey species. Competition may result in the depression of species populations. The rarity of spotted-tailed quolls can possibly be explained by higher dietary overlap and competition than is experienced by the other species. Numerical dominance of the guild by devils may relate in part to large body size and behavioural dominance in feeding situations.
Substantial ecological convergence has occurred between the marsupial carnivore fauna of Australia and eutherian carnivore faunas on other continents. The main differences are the low diversity of species and eco-morphological types in Australia, which relate to poor soils and aridity. This supports the general view that the physical environment is more important than evolutionary history in shaping the composition of faunal assemblages.


OBJECTIVES: The risk of post-operative nausea and vomiting (PONV) following gynecological surgery remains high despite effective prophylactic medications. Thus, the objectives of this study were to determine if standardized orders for the prophylaxis and treatment of PONV in gynecological surgery patients: 1) reduce PONV occurrence; 2) reduce total costs; and 3) influence the choice of medications used for PONV prophylaxis and treatment. METHODS: A retrospective design was employed in which a random sample of 200 patients was selected from each of the two 6 month phases before (pre) and after (post) the implementation of standardized orders for PONV prophylaxis and treatment. The primary outcome was the occurrence of any PONV episode. Logistic regression was used to adjust for potential confounding factors. RESULTS: Characteristics were similar except for surgical and anesthesia length between phases. The proportion of patients receiving PONV prophylaxis increased from 31% (pre) to 47% (post, p = 0.002). There was a reduction in the risk of a PONV event in the post phase (OR = 0.67, 95% CI 0.67 to 0.97, p = 0.04). The risk of PONV was significantly reduced with the administration of prophylactic medications (OR = 0.46, 95% CI 0.46 to 0.67). There was a reduction in the mean number of PONV episodes in the post phase (1.81 events) versus the pre phase (1.47 events, p = 0.02). A reduction in mean PONV management costs was observed in the post phase ($8.31, SD 8.50) as compared to the pre-phase ($10.23, SD 8.25, p = 0.02). For mean prophylactic costs, these were significantly higher in the post-implementation phase when compared to the pre-implementation phase ($1.64, SD 3.36 vs. $0.91, SD 2.43, p = 0.013). Univariate sensitivity analyses revealed that the economic results were sensitive to several parameters. CONCLUSION: The implementation of pre-printed order forms for PONV prophylaxis and treatment appears to be an effective and economically attractive strategy.


Scottish people have a reputation for being high consumers of alcohol. Certainly this is the case today and was also the case throughout the nineteenth century-the most obvious comparison to be made, a comparison often made both then and now, is with supposedly more moderate English drinking habits. Less well known is the reversal of this perspective during the inter-war years (1918–1939), when Scotland was held in many quarters to be more sober than England. This turnaround was brought about by changes in popular culture alongside specific alcohol control legislation that had a greater impact in Scotland.
This thesis is not an exploration per se of why alcohol consumption rose in nineteenth-century Scotland, fell in the first half of the twentieth century and rose again to damaging levels at the end of the twentieth century. This high level of consumption persists in 2017 and the Scottish government is still acting to reduce alcohol-related harm by a variety of measures. Rather this thesis seeks to explore the response of the Scottish medical profession to the changing conditions in relation to alcohol over a seventy-year period from 1855 to 1925. (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 set the scene).
The starting point of 1855 for the period examined in this thesis is taken from the 1855–57 Inquiry by the Scottish Lunacy Commission, which led to the Lunacy Act (Scotland) of 1857. This report demonstrates that Scottish psychiatry was already having to deal with the mental consequences of alcohol and describes oinomania, an early term for alcohol dependence. The report introduces the idea that alcohol can itself cause insanity – an estimated 20% or more of the cases in asylums were caused by intemperance around that time and this figure was deemed to rise as the century wore on. This seems like a curious and excessive causal attribution from today's perspective.
In this thesis I trace how the idea of a persistent form of alcoholic insanity evolved in the Scottish context (Chapters 4 and 6), and I outline changing terminology and ideas around the mental consequences of alcohol (Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8). These ideas were expounded by physicians and alienists/psychiatrists in the public arena of parliamentary inquiries in the second half of the nineteenth century (Chapter 4) as well as in the specialised literature of the time (Chapters 5, 6, 7 and 8), including the medical reports within the Annual Reports of asylums. Original to this thesis in relation to primary sources is an in-depth analysis of the alcohol cases received by the Delirium Ward at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between 1856 and 1867, in the May to July period of each of these years (Chapter 5). These 178 recorded cases (57% of all admissions with threatening or actual delirium) illustrate that alcohol problems in the form of incipient or established delirium tremens were a common reason for admission to hospital at this early date and that such cases were of particular interest to physicians. It is striking that beyond the acute episode of what was erroneously thought to be an intoxication-induced illness there is no apparent attempt to help the person with their underlying intemperance (Chapter 5).
The idea that later emerged of an underlying condition of inebriety, differentiated from insanity, was to have practical consequences in that it led to the setting up and running of Inebriate Reformatories in Scotland, as elsewhere in the British Isles, in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Chapters 7 and 8). I trace this story in detail through to the closure of the Inebriate Reformatories in 1925,whilst examining this in a Scottish context.
Other scholars have looked at the era of the Inebriate Reformatories in Scotland from the perspectives of sociology, of history and of feminist theory. I review the previous literature in Chapter 2, and provide a historiography spanning the last hundred years. I also bring a fresh medical perspective to the topic in Chapter 7, which uses records not available to some of the previous scholars, and produce a very detailed analysis of the female cases sent to the Glasgow Reformatory (Girgenti House). This is presented in Chapter 8.
The time period cut-off of 1925 for the end of the thesis is made for pragmatic reasons, as the trends in the conception of alcoholism and alcohol use disorders, and in treatment provision, since 1925 would merit separate full consideration. I do, however, sketch out these trends for this later period in a Postscript (Chapter 9) in order to give a context for drawing out some historic lessons from 1855–1925 in my Conclusion and Discussion (Chapter 10) about the "alcohol question" in the Scotland of today. The period I cover therefore includes an historic high in alcohol consumption in the late nineteenth century and an historic low in the 1920s. I aim to show how practice and theory interconnected during these years in the work of medical men such as Thomas Laycock, David Yellowlees, Sir Thomas Clouston, William Tennent Gairdner, James Craufurd Dunlop, John Cunningham and Sir David Henderson. I also describe some of the connections between these key medical figures within the Scottish system in Chapter 4.
The post-1920 period also illustrates a sea change from a time where psychiatrists were arguing for the separation of the "inebriate" from the "lunatic" in terms of service provision to one where the "alcoholic" is seen as deserving of new forms of psychiatric help. This shift in practice, around the end of the period of my study, is seen in the context of a changing emphasis from a more biological view of the problem to a more psychodynamic, or dynamic, view as seen in the work of Henderson and others. The fact that this shift in theory and practice coincides with a decline in the alcohol problem is discussed in the light of Skog's idea that our concerns around alcohol vary in relation to where we are in relation to "waves of consumption" (Chapter 10).
My overall aim in this thesis, then, is to set out how from 1855 to 1925 medicine in Scotland responded to the idea that habituated use of alcohol might represent a disease in its own right. The idea of such a "disease of the will" remains both legally and philosophically controversial to this day. This is perhaps why our diagnostic systems continue to change in this area without final resolution. An associated aim of the thesis is to look at three aspects of the "drinking disease", in Scotland, namely delirium tremens, alcoholic insanity and inebriety, where practice can be examined from case records and related to theory as represented in a range of publications.
I also prove, and highlight the fact, that institutionalised medicine cannot escape engagement with the problem of alcohol. From the beginning, Scottish doctors in both infirmaries and asylums were presented with the consequences of heavy drinking in a sizeable proportion of patients. As with recent epidemiological analyses, alcohol consumption levels in the general population during the nineteenth and early twentieth century are shown to correlate highly with the incidence and prevalence of such disease consequences from the Scottish national and local statistics available. Then, as now, doctors were inevitably drawn into the issue of how best to respond to the underlying habit of drinking both at an individual and societal level. I draw lessons from my study of the past for our continuing struggle in this regard.


We present wall-resolved large-eddy simulations (LES) of flow over a smooth-wall circular cylinder up to Re_D = 8.5 × 10^5, where Re_D is Reynolds number based on the cylinder diameter D and the free-stream speed U_∞. The stretched-vortex subgrid-scale (SGS) model is used in the entire simulation domain. For the sub-critical regime, six cases are implemented with 3.9 × 10^3 ⩽ Re_D ⩽ 10^5. Results are compared with experimental data for both the wall-pressure-coefficient distribution on the cylinder surface, which dominates the drag coefficient, and the skin-friction coefficient, which clearly correlates with the separation behaviour. In the super-critical regime, LES for three values of Re_D are carried out at different resolutions. The drag-crisis phenomenon is well captured. For lower resolution, numerical discretization fluctuations are sufficient to stimulate transition, while for higher resolution, an applied boundary-layer perturbation is found to be necessary to stimulate transition. Large-eddy simulation results at Re_D = 8.5 × 10^5, with a mesh of 8192 × 1024 × 256, agree well with the classic experimental measurements of Achenbach (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 34, 1968, pp. 625–639) especially for the skin-friction coefficient, where a spike is produced by the laminar–turbulent transition on the top of a prior separation bubble. We document the properties of the attached-flow boundary layer on the cylinder surface as these vary with ReDReD . Within the separated portion of the flow, mean-flow separation–reattachment bubbles are observed at some values of Re_D, with separation characteristics that are consistent with experimental observations. Time sequences of instantaneous surface portraits of vector skin-friction trajectory fields indicate that the unsteady counterpart of a mean-flow separation–reattachment bubble corresponds to the formation of local flow-reattachment cells, visible as coherent bundles of diverging surface streamlines.


High courts with abstract review powers to find laws unconstitutional may provide a strong check on other political actors and influence public policy if the judges in these courts are impartial decision makers. This paper tests existing judicial decision-making theories in relation to the behavior of judges on the Peruvian Constitutional Tribunal who are selected exclusively by Congress. Taking advantage of an original data set of judges' votes on the Tribunal, we find that the origin of the law and whether the enacting governments at the national and subnational levels are still in power at the time of judicial review are important determinants of judicial behavior. Judges' own political loyalties seem to have no perceived effect on decision making, which suggests that political affiliations are trumped by strategic concerns of judges due to the institutional design of the Tribunal as well as the political context in which it operates.


In fulminant hepatic failure (FHF), rapidly progressive cerebral oedema remains the main fatal complication and an obstacle in liver transplantation. A 29-year-old Japanese woman presented with sudden-onset hepatic encephalopathy and jaundice. Hepatic encephalopathy deteriorated within 2 days of the onset of jaundice. She manifested extensory sustained clonus and was responsive only to pain. Diffuse cerebral oedema was noted on brain computerized tomography (CT) scan. Urgent living-donor liver transplantation (LDLT) at the time of admission was abandoned because of deterioration of neurological status and radiologically evident diffuse cerebral oedema. Instead, a high̄ow-rate (7.2±9.0 l/h) haemodia®ltration with a high-performance membrane was commenced, combined with plasma exchange. This treatment regimen resulted in a gradual improvement of hepatic encephalopathy and complete disappearance of cerebral oedema within 7 days. Liver regeneration did not occur during this period, as evident by CT scan volumetry and serological tests. LDLT was subsequently performed using the right liver lobe of the patient's brother. Our case suggests that high̄ow-rate haemodia®ltration with a high-performance membrane, combined with plasma exchange, could potentially be brain-support therapy for patients with FHF, and may contribute, when combined with liver transplantation, to the improvement of prognosis in hyperacute FHF. Eur J Gastroenterol Hepatol 14:435± 439 & 2002 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins


How students perceive group work is closely correlated with the benefits of group work experience. However, a great variety of influences affect student perceptions of group work. This study quantifies the impact of various influences on the effective working, learning assistance and enjoyment of group work. This is done by analysing 206 responses to a survey of students in a course in actuarial science. A mixed ordered logit model is used to explicitly quantify the effect of various exogenous and endogenous influences on perceptions of group work. Student perceptions of group work are most heavily influenced by course design decisions regarding the scaffolding provided to groups, the expectation about whether or not they will enjoy group work, and their role undertaken in the group, including their level of effort (but not quality) relative to other group members. Implications for teaching practice are discussed.


A 10 month old infant with severe injuries in zone I of neck reported to emergency was managed accordingly and survived. It was a rare incidence of homicidal assault by a father on child with a piece of glass. Father is a regular user of ganja(cannabis). In post-operative period there were complications which were taken care of. Proper and timely intervention is what that is needed in such injuries.


Mark W. Schilling Hydrodynamic Shock Wave Effects on Protein Functionality USDA Select bovine Biceps femoris (BF) samples were divided into four sections and randomly assigned to three hydrodynamic shock wave (HSW) treatments and a control. Different amounts of explosive (105 g, H1; 200 g, H2; 305 g, H3) were suspended in the center of the hemishell tank, 26.7 cm above the vacuum packaged beef placed on the bottom center of that waterfilled tank and detonated, representing three HSW treatments. In addition, BF steaks (2.54-cm thick) from a different and limited common source (2 muscles) were packaged with each HSW designated BF section. These served as internal refernce steaks (IRS) for the six replications to determine if the HSW treatments physically altered the structural integrity of the meat. H1 and H3 decreased (P<0.05) Warner-Bratzler shear values of the IRS from 3.86 and 3.99 kg (controls) to 3.01 and 3.02 kg (HSW), respectively. H2 shear values, 3.86 (control) to 3.46 kg (HSW) were not different (P> 0.05). HSW and control BF sections were analyzed for protein solubility and then used to manufacture frankfurters formulated with 2.0% NaCl, 0.5 % sodium tripolyphosphate, 156 ppm sodium nitrite, 0.42 % sodium erythorbate, 2.0 % sucrose, and 25 % water. Frankfurters (cooked to 71 C) were evaluated for cooking yield, CIE L*a*b*, nitrosylhemochrome, Texture Profile Analysis (hardness, cohesiveness), and stress and strain (torsion testing). Compared to the control samples, the HSW did not affect (P>0.05) myofibrillar or sarcoplasmic protein solubility, cooking yield, or color. Textural properties and gel strength of the frankfurters were not affected (P>0.05) by the HSW. These results indicate that beef trim obtained from HSW processed meat can be used interchangeably with normal meat trim in the production of further processed meats since the functionality of meat protein is not affected significantly by the HSW process.


Africa's urban population is growing rapidly. Between 2000 and 2015, the urban population increased by more than 80 percent from 206 million to 373 million people. Although access to piped water increased over the period (from 82 million urban dwellers with piped water in 2000 to 124 million in 2015), African utilities were not able to keep up with the rapid urbanization as reflected in the decline of piped water as a primary source of water supply in percentage terms. The objective of this assessment is to inform Bank and government policies and projects on the drivers of utility performance. The report describes the main outcomes and lessons learned from the assessment that identified and analyzed the main features of water utility performance in Africa. The report includes the following chapters: chapter one gives introduction, chapter two describes the methodology used in the study, including details on the data collection process. In chapter three, the study team undertook a trend analysis of utility performance of the sector. Chapter four examines the efficiency of utilities using a data envelopment analysis (DEA) while also using an absolute performance approach. Chapter five investigates the effect of institutional factors on utility performance. Chapter six presents an econometric analysis of the drivers of utility performance, using various definitions of utility performance. The results from the econometric models are triangulated with a set of case studies of five utilities (Burkina Faso's l'Office National de l'Eau et de l'Assainissement (ONEA), Cote d'Ivoire's la societe de distribution d'eau de la Cote d'Ivoire (SODECI), Kenya's Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC), Senegal's Senegalaise des Eaux (SDE), and Uganda's National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC), similar to those that the electricity study team undertook, which are presented in chapter seven. The report concludes in chapter eight with the lessons learned from the assessment.


Chemotherapeutic treatment of filarial infections has rendered difficult and still insufficient. Therefore, the identification of potentially protective molecules which can be used for vaccine development is desirable. The chitinase of larvae stage three of Onchocerca volvulus constitutes a promising antigen. Immunological characterization of this protein and the identification of immunodominat regions was performed in this study. The complete sequence (OvL3-chitinase) and the C-terminal end responsible for the binding of chitin (OvL3-CBD) were cloned in an expression vector, overexpressed in E. coli and subsequently purified. Recombinant chitinase was enzymatically active. The OvL3-chitinase and the OvL3-CBD were used for immunization studies using the rodent filaria A. viteae in the animal model M. unguiculatus. No decreased number of adult worms was observed after immunization with OvL3-CBD in the present of Alum as adjuvans, while chitinase together with STP resulted in the reduction the worm burden to 40 % (first trial) and to 17,7 % (second trial). Additional immunization studies using BALB/c-mice were performed with OvL3-chitinase in the absence or the presence of two different adjuvans. Spleen cells isolated from mice immunized with chitinase in the absence of adjuvans were devoid of proliferative capacity after in vitro antigenic restimulation. Antigen-specific IgG1 antibodies were the only subtype detectable in sera from mice. These results suggested that a Th2 response was induced after immunization with chitinase under these conditions. Including STP or Alum in the immunization protocol a polarization of the obtained immune response was found. Immunization with chitinase together with Alum elicited strong IgG1 response followed by slightly increase of IgG2a and IgG2b. Co-administration of chitinase and STP evoked increased IgG2a and IgG2b antibodies in addition to the observed IgG1 response. Good proliferative responses were observed for spleen cells from mice immunized with chitinase in the present of both adjuvans after in vitro restimulation with chitinase. Furthermore stronger T-cell reactivity was found in the group immunized with chitinase/STP. Also chitinase was expressed in Salmonella and oral immunization of mice with this construct enforced the T-cell reactivity, however antigen specific antibodies were undetectable. To further characterize T cell reactivity against OvL3chitinase T cell epitopes using the Rothbard and Taylor algorithm (1988), Humphreys prediction and the MHC-II-binding motifs from Rammmensee (1995) were identified. All predicted epitopes were synthesized and tested in T-cell proliferation assays. Additional synthetic L3-chitinase-derived overlapping peptides were also used in T-cell proliferation assays. The sensitivity and specificity of the algorithms was evaluated by comparing the predicted epitopes with the epitopes determined by overlapping peptides. Using this approach, prediction based on MHC-II-binding motifs showed the highest sensitivity (0,47) and specificity (0,7). A further increase of the predictive power was obtained by a combining MHC-II-binding motifs and Rothbard and Taylor algorithm, resulting in increased sensitivity (0,67) but lower specificity (0,33). Five immunodominant regions were identified by all algorithm and four of them were confirmed as T-cell epitopes in T-cell assays. PBMCs isolated from patients affected with Onchocerca volvulus from Cameroon were also tested for their reactivity against OvL3-chitinase and the OvL3 CBD in T-cell proliferation assays. After in vitro restimulation with OvL3-chitinase and CBD only marginal T-cell response was observed accompanied by release of Th2like cytokines such as IL-10 when stimulated with chitinase and IL-4, IL-5 and IL-10 when stimulated with CBD. Strong antibody responses of the IgG4 isotype were detected in the serum of 77% of the patients against chitinase and only in 20% of the patients against CBD.


The influence of tropical precipitation variability on summertime seasonal circulation anomalies in the Euro-Atlantic sector is investigated. The dominant mode of the maximum covariance analysis (MCA) between the Euro-Atlantic circulation and tropical precipitation reveals a cyclonic anomaly over the extratropical North Atlantic, contributing to anomalously wet conditions over western Europe and dry conditions over eastern Europe and Scandinavia (in the positive phase). The related mode of tropical precipitation variability is associated with tropical Pacific SST anomalies and is closely linked to the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The second MCA mode consists of weaker tropical precipitation anomalies but with a stronger extratropical signal that reflects internal atmospheric variability. The teleconnection mechanism is tested in barotropic model simulations, which indicate that the observed link between the dominant mode of tropical precipitation and the Euro-Atlantic circulation anomalies is largely consistent with linear Rossby wave dynamics. The barotropic model response consists of a circumglobal wave train in the extratropics that is primarily forced by divergence anomalies in the eastern tropical Pacific. Both the eastward and westward group propagation of the Rossby waves are found to be important in determining the circulation response over the Euro-Atlantic sector. The mechanism was also analyzed in an operational seasonal forecasting system, ECMWF's System 4. While System 4 is well able to reproduce and skillfully forecast the tropical precipitation, the extratropical circulation response is absent over the Euro-Atlantic region, which is likely related to biases in the Asian jet stream.


We have combined the first satellite maps of the global distribution of phytoplankton functional type and new measurements of phytoplankton-specific isoprene productivities, with available remote marine isoprene observations and a global model, to evaluate our understanding of the marine isoprene source and its impacts on organic aerosol abundances. Using satellite products to scale up data on phytoplankton-specific isoprene productivity to the global oceans, we infer a mean "bottom-up" oceanic isoprene emission of 0.31±0.08 (1σ) Tg/yr. By minimising the mean bias between the model and isoprene observations in the marine atmosphere remote from the continents, we produce a "top-down" oceanic isoprene source estimate of 1.9 Tg/yr. We suggest our reliance on limited atmospheric isoprene data, difficulties in simulating in-situ isoprene production rates in laboratory phytoplankton cultures, and limited knowledge of isoprene production mechanisms across the broad range of phytoplankton communities in the oceans under different environmental conditions as contributors to this difference between the two estimates. Inclusion of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) production from oceanic isoprene in the model with a 2% yield produces small contributions (0.01–1.4%) to observed organic carbon (OC) aerosol mass at three remote marine sites in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Based on these findings we suggest an insignificant role for isoprene in modulating remote marine aerosol abundances, giving further support to a recently postulated primary OC source in the remote marine atmosphere.


Poor design and documentation quality has been identified as being a major factor in reducing the overall performance and efficiency of construction projects as well as being directly responsible for many projects running over budget, over time and being plagued with rework, variations and disputation. Recent studies show that this problem is not only widespread, but continues to get worse in spite of the negative impact it's having on the construction industry. In a similar way, project management deficiencies have also been shown to have a negative impact on construction process efficiency. However, by adapting Lean Production principles and viewing construction in terms of "production" as opposed to "transformation", the concept of Lean Construction has been promoted as being successful in improving overall construction process efficiency, by improving the management of construction project operations. Whilst recent studies into design and documentation quality problems have focused on a variety of external factors (ie. design fees, design time, procurement methodology, ICT, etc.), as being the key to improving overall quality, this paper investigates whether the way in which the design process is managed, may provide more immediate and easily measurable results. Lean Design Management (LDM)—the introduction of "lean production" principles to the process of design—has been promoted as a new paradigm by which the design process can be made more efficient and better quality outcomes achieved. As part of an ongoing study into "theory-based lean project and production management", this paper reviews the LDM approach to determine how new it really is and whether its implementation has the potential to achieve the design and documentation quality improvements required.


Born in Hiawatha, Kansas, Mr. Adams grew up in Kansas City, Kansas where he was working as a motion picture projectionist when he was called to service in 1942. He gives a detailed account of what he experienced during his induction at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and basic training at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. Afterwards, he was assigned to attend school at the Franklin Technical Institute in Boston, Massachusetts for training in General and Topographic drafting. He recalls some of his academic and social experiences during his course work in Boston. Having graduated with high honors from the Institute, he explains what his assignment to an aviation engineering group at March Field, California was like and how instead of going with his military unit overseas, he ended up being accepted to Tuskegee's cadet pilot training program, in 1943, for a "…possible future as a pilot, bombardier, or navigator with the 332nd Fight Group." He provides a detailed account of his preliminary and advanced training experiences with the B13, At6 and P47's, which includes a time when he lost his way flying at night and another time he mistakenly landed on an airstrip where only white cadets were training. But, the war ended before he was sent overseas. After returning home, Mr. Adams worked for the U.S. Postal Service, earned an M.A. degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and became known for his talent as a portrait painter.


Background: The introduction of HAART has produced dramatic clinical improvements and quality of life in patients living with HIV/AIDS. Financial access to healthcare services is critical for survival. Currently little is known about direct costs to patients before and during regular access to care services. In the absence health insurance direct costs can be a significant barrier to financial access to care services. Objectives: To assess improvements in CD4 cell count and viral load and also determine direct costs associated with various HAART regimens as well as affordability of direct costs. Methods: This cross sectional study has both retrospective and prospective components. A total of 867 out of 5000 case notes that met inclusion criteria were selected by systematic random sampling. Direct costs were obtained from relevant departments and structured questionnaire. Data were entered into SPSS 20 and analyzed using one way anova with post hoc, student t test and Chi square as appropriate. P values ≤ 0.05 were considered significant. Results and Discussion: The most prescribed regimens were those containing Zidovudine+Lamivudine+Nevirapin e (Regimen I) and Tenofovir+Lamivudine/Emtricitabine+Efavirenz (Regimen IV) accounting for 38.4% and 49.1% respectively. Improvement in CD4 and viral load is significant across all regiments. The mean direct costs ranged between US$182.9-504.5 per encounter, which makes it highly unaffordable to majority of patients. Conclusion: Clinical improvement across all the HAART regimens is significant. Direct costs are highly unaffordable and this may impact negatively on access to care services.


In spite of numerous advantages of biometrics-based personal authentication systems over traditional security systems based on token or knowledge, they are vulnerable to attacks that can decrease their security considerably. In this paper, we propose a new hardware solution to protect biometric templates such as fingerprint. The proposed scheme is based on chaotic N × N grid multi-scroll system and it is implemented on Xilinx FPGA. The hardware implementation is achieved by applying numerical solution methods in our study, we use EM (Euler Method). Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed scheme allows a low cost image encryption for embedded systems while still providing a good trade-off between performance and hardware resources. Indeed, security analysis performed to the our scheme, is strong against known different attacks, such as: brute force, statistical, differential, and entropy. Therefore, the proposed chaos-based multiscroll encryption algorithm is suitable for use in securing embedded biometric systems.


An achromatic Fourier transforming system is analyzed in a manner which gives new physical insight. A matched spatial filtering experiment is performed comparing the noise performance of a coherently produced matched filter and one made using broad spectrum light in an achromatic Fourier transforming system. The broad spectrum light is obtained by scanning a dye laser through its tuning range, thereby simulating a polychromatic point source. The system is applied to the construction of low noise holographic optical elements.


The use of special functions, and in particular Airy functions, is rather common in physics. The reason may be found in the need, and even in the necessity, to express a physical phenomenon in terms of an effective and comprehensive analytical form for the whole scientific community. However, for the past twenty years, many physical problems have been resolved by computers. This trend is now becoming the norm as the importance of computers continues to grow. As a last resort, the special functions employed in physics will have to be calculated numerically, even if the analytic formulation of physics is of primary importance. Airy functions have periodically been the subject of many review articles, but no noteworthy compilation on this subject has been published since the 1950s. In this work, we provide an exhaustive compilation of the current knowledge on the analytical properties of Airy functions, developing with care the calculus implying the Airy functions. The book is divided into 2 parts: the first is devoted to the mathematical properties of Airy functions, whilst the second presents some applications of Airy functions to various fields of physics. The examples provided succinctly illustrate the use of Airy functions in classical and quantum physics.


A collection of recorded and transcribed telephone conversations clearly demonstrates the universality of small talk and other socially-motivated utterances. Building on theories about the linguistics of conversational speech, I consider various ways of describing each utterance, including which words were used, their part-of-speech, and the proximity to the beginning of the conversation. In order to better understand which of these features are most useful, I create a system for automatically distinguishing between onand off-topic utterances and compare its performance when using different combinations of these features. The central hypothesis is that conversational speech contains sufficient low-level clues to separate onand off-topic utterances with an automatic classifier. I find that the overall structure of conversations is predictable, and automatic classification can indeed be done with better-than-chance accuracy. But distinguishing more reliably between onand off-topic utterances will probably require deeper knowledge of the context and overall topic.


Within the last three years, the global economic crisis has prompted unprecedented change with organizations traditionally considered as solid, crumbling and liquidating in front of incredulous stock brokers and global audiences. This paper considers the extent to which continuous organizational changes lead to organizational burnout. Whilst traditional approaches to burnout have concentrated on individual and job burnout, research into organization burnout remains limited. A key emerging trend is the concept of organizational resilience and strategies for copying with continuous change. Our initial research into this area suggests that organizations and their employees respond to change in a variety of ways, such as the "boiled frog syndrome", and "survivor syndrome". Survey research from a sample of 100 companies contacted revealed some alarming results. Whilst many originations recognised that they had serious concerns about the rate of change and the impact upon the business, very little concern was expressed in relation to their employees and employee welfare. This paper explores these emerging themes and consequences for management through the use of further primary data collection from in-depth semi-structured interviews. Suggestions for further research and managing burnout are provided.


Resilience will be an essential design and operational characteristic of future networks. This paper first surveys resilient networks and Situation Awareness (SA) in cyberspace. Then, SA is introduced in the detection module development of our dynamic adaptation architecture that realizes the resilience control loop. Finally, a state transition model based on Petri net analyzing resilience is presented. Further detailed development including a fusion algorithm to analyze failure based on SA and state transition according to failure model evaluating resilience forms the basis for further work.


The intense emission of carbon dioxide, global warming and the resulting climate change is causing serious crises in the world that it is necessary to identify factors affecting dissemination, scientific studies and practical measures to be. In this context, the present study examines factors affecting the emission of carbon dioxide and its causal relationship between economic growth, energy, free trade and urbanization with co-integration and Granger causality has been in the data panel. Required data was used in the years 1990-2014 for the countries of the MENA region. Results Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis is approved in these countries. The results also show that causality short side panel of economic growth, energy, free trade and urbanization to the carbon dioxide emissions and error correction ECM shows that long-term mitigation potential of environmental pollution by controlling variables in the short run there. In this regard, a clean energy policy is strongly recommended to reduce the burden of fossil fuel pollution as the most important source of energy in these countries. Also, increasing the efficiency of energy consumption can also help reduce pollution caused by it.


The aim of this enquiry was to 'analyse the nature of the governance of international schools and the potential of accreditation for securing appropriate governance'. The research questions were: 'What is the nature of the governance of international schools as experienced by heads of international schools?' 'What is the nature of the governance of international schools as experienced by representatives of organizations that accredit international schools, and the owners of international schools?' and 'What is the potential of accreditation for securing appropriate governance of international schools?'. The relevant literature was reviewed. Empirical data were collected by means of a questionnaire-based survey of heads, and interviews with: executives from accreditation organizations, representatives of owned schools and heads. A framework for the analysis of the data was developed, which employed two analytic distinctions: the 'ownership' of schools, and potential of a financial profit impetus. The main findings are as follows. The governance of international schools is not static, and successful governance is dependent upon the type of school and board structure. Boards tend not to receive proper and on-going training and many of the models of governance in use have inherent weaknesses, which require a more robust system of oversight. Governance structures and practice have not been able to keep pace with the increasing complexity of types of international schools. The organisations that accredit international schools, including their governance, have been unable to deal with the monitoring and enforcement standards of governance. Despite an inability of accreditation organisations to monitor and enforce standards of governance, they should take up this responsibility. To achieve this potential, a multi-faceted approach is necessary. Accreditation organizations need to gain further understandings of the governing of 'owned schools'. Common guidelines and standards for governance will be required.


In response to the recent cholera outbreak, a public health response targeted high-risk communities, including resource-poor communities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A survey covering knowledge and practices indicated that hygiene messages were received and induced behavior change, specifically related to water treatment practices. Self-reported household water treatment increased from 30.3% to 73.9%.


OpenGL ES is the industrys leading software interface and graphics library for rendering sophisticated 3D graphics on handheld and embedded devices. The newest version, OpenGL ES 3.0, makes it possible to create stunning visuals for new games and apps, without compromising device performance or battery life. In the OpenGL ES 3.0 Programming Guide, Second Edition, the authors cover the entire API and Shading Language. They carefully introduce OpenGL ES 3.0 features such as shadow mapping, instancing, multiple render targets, uniform buffer objects, texture compression, program binaries, and transform feedback. Through detailed, downloadable C-based code examples, youll learn how to set up and program every aspect of the graphics pipeline. Step by step, youll move from introductory techniques all the way to advanced per-pixel lighting and particle systems. Throughout, youll find cutting-edge tips for optimizing performance, maximizing efficiency with both the API and hardware, and fully leveraging OpenGL ES 3.0 in a wide spectrum of applications. All code has been built and tested on iOS 7, Android 4.3, Windows (OpenGL ES 3.0 Emulation), and Ubuntu Linux, and the authors demonstrate how to build OpenGL ES code for each platform. Coverage includes EGL API: communicating with the native windowing system, choosing configurations, and creating rendering contexts and surfaces Shaders: creating and attaching shader objects; compiling shaders; checking for compile errors; creating, linking, and querying program objects; and using source shaders and program binaries OpenGL ES Shading Language: variables, types, constructors, structures, arrays, attributes, uniform blocks, I/O variables, precision qualifiers, and invariance Geometry, vertices, and primitives: inputting geometry into the pipeline, and assembling it into primitives 2D/3D, Cubemap, Array texturing: creation, loading, and rendering; texture wrap modes, filtering, and formats; compressed textures, sampler objects, immutable textures, pixel unpack buffer objects, and mipmapping Fragment shaders: multitexturing, fog, alpha test, and user clip planes Fragment operations: scissor, stencil, and depth tests; multisampling, blending, and dithering Framebuffer objects: rendering to offscreen surfaces for advanced effects Advanced rendering: per-pixel lighting, environment mapping, particle systems, image post-processing, procedural textures, shadow mapping, terrain, and projective texturing Sync objects and fences: synchronizing within host application and GPU execution This edition of the book includes a color insert of the OpenGL ES 3.0 API and OpenGL ES Shading Language 3.0 Reference Cards created by Khronos. The reference cards contain a complete list of all of the functions in OpenGL ES 3.0 along with all of the types, operators, qualifiers, built-ins, and functions in the OpenGL ES Shading Language.


Evaluating Clinical Problem-Solving Skills Through Computer Simulations Computer-aided instruction (CAI) is an effective teaching technique that has existed for almost two decades (Braun, 1980; Frenzel, 1980; Gerhold, 1978; Office of Technology Assessment, 1979). The primary advantage of CAI over traditional classroom teaching methods appears to be the automatic interaction and immediate feedback that the computer can provide to students on an individual basis (Frenzel, 1980). In addition, CAI is an exciting, interesting, and valid way of introducing students to the use of modern computers. Unfortunately, because of the historically high cost of electronic computing on large mainframe computers and medium-size minicomputers, CAI has not been used extensively. However, with the advent of large-scale integrated (LSI) circuits and the introduction of personal microcomputers, the cost of CAI computing is no longer prohibitive. As a result, there is currently a resurgent interest in the application of computers in education (Frenzel, 1980). In rehabilitation, the provision of high-quality services to large numbers of clients with a wide variety of disabling conditions and rehabilitation needs is a great challenge to counselors (Cox, Connolly, & Flynn, 1981). To meet this challenge, rehabilitation counselors must develop not only strong clinical and counseling skills, but must also possess strong case management skills in the areas of problem-solving, time usage, budgeting, communication, use of community resources, and documentation as well. Although the professional preparation of rehabilitation counselors devotes a considerable amount of time to developing clinical and counseling skills, it has been only recently that consideration has been given to preparation in case management (Cox, Connolly, & Flynn, 1981). This lack of attention can be attributed to the fact that case management skills are more readily developed through hands-on experience and it is difficult to simulate this experience in a classroom setting. To facilitate training in this area, computerized case management simulation programs have been developed to help rehabilitation counselor trainees develop appropriate clinical problem-solving and case management skills. Because undergraduate and graduate level rehabilitation services students are frequently employed as rehabilitation counselors in state vocational rehabilitation agencies, it is logical to assume that they could also benefit from case simulation exercises. Berven and his colleagues have developed a series of case management simulation programs (based on state vocational rehabilitation agency materials) on large mainframe computers (Berven, 1985; Berven & Scofield, 1980) and microcomputers (Chan, Parker, Lam, Mecaskey & Malphurs, 1987). They used computer simulations to compare clinical and graduate problem-solving skills of undergraduate and graduate rehabilitation students with experienced rehabilitation counselors. The computer simulation results have provided encouraging reliability and validity data and have successfully differentiated case performance among rehabilitation counseling students (Berven, 1985; Berven & Scofield, 1980; Chan et al., 1987). However, Berven and Scofield's original 1980 study, with only 12 counselors forming the performance standard for comparison purposes is tentative at best. If a study with a large representative sample of counselors and students is not possible, then a series of local validation studies conducted across the country maybe necessary to provide further evidence of psychometric properties for computer simulations to be considered a valid assessment and teaching tool in rehabilitation education. The purpose of this study was to validate the appropriateness of the computerized case simulation program developed by Berven and Scofield (1980) as a tool to evaluate case management performance using a sample of rehabilitation students and rehabilitation counselors in the state of Texas. …


Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician--and this is the condition I make--should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political theorist's opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria the author desires formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words.


This paper designs an efficient image hashing with a ring partition and a nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which has both the rotation robustness and good discriminative capability. The key contribution is a novel construction of rotation-invariant secondary image, which is used for the first time in image hashing and helps to make image hash resistant to rotation. In addition, NMF coefficients are approximately linearly changed by content-preserving manipulations, so as to measure hash similarity with correlation coefficient. We conduct experiments for illustrating the efficiency with 346 images. Our experiments show that the proposed hashing is robust against content-preserving operations, such as image rotation, JPEG compression, watermark embedding, Gaussian low-pass filtering, gamma correction, brightness adjustment, contrast adjustment, and image scaling. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve comparisons are also conducted with the state-of-the-art algorithms, and demonstrate that the proposed hashing is much better than all these algorithms in classification performances with respect to robustness and discrimination.


Finding new protein-coding genes is one of the most important goals of eukaryotic genome sequencing projects. However, genomic organization of novel eukaryotic genomes is diverse and ab initio gene finding tools tuned up for previously studied species are rarely suitable for efficacious gene hunting in DNA sequences of a new genome. Gene identification methods based on cDNA and expressed sequence tag (EST) mapping to genomic DNA or those using alignments to closely related genomes rely either on existence of abundant cDNA and EST data and/or availability on reference genomes. Conventional statistical ab initio methods require large training sets of validated genes for estimating gene model parameters. In practice, neither one of these types of data may be available in sufficient amount until rather late stages of the novel genome sequencing. Nevertheless, we have shown that gene finding in eukaryotic genomes could be carried out in parallel with statistical models estimation directly from yet anonymous genomic DNA. The suggested method of parallelization of gene prediction with the model parameters estimation follows the path of the iterative Viterbi training. Rounds of genomic sequence labeling into coding and non-coding regions are followed by the rounds of model parameters estimation. Several dynamically changing restrictions on the possible range of model parameters are added to filter out fluctuations in the initial steps of the algorithm that could redirect the iteration process away from the biologically relevant point in parameter space. Tests on well-studied eukaryotic genomes have shown that the new method performs comparably or better than conventional methods where the supervised model training precedes the gene prediction step. Several novel genomes have been analyzed and biologically interesting findings are discussed. Thus, a self-training algorithm that had been assumed feasible only for prokaryotic genomes has now been developed for ab initio eukaryotic gene identification.


Expert finding for question answering is a challenging problem in Community-based Question Answering (CQA) site, arising in many applications such as question routing and the identification of best answers. In order to provide high-quality experts, many existing approaches learn the user model mainly from their past question-answering activities in CQA sites, which suffer from the sparsity problem of CQA data. In this paper, we consider the problem of expert finding from the viewpoint of learning ranking metric embedding. We propose a novel ranking metric network learning framework for expert finding by exploiting both users' relative quality rank to given questions and their social relations. We then develop a random-walk based learning method with recurrent neural networks for ranking metric network embedding. The extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset from a real world CQA site show that our method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art solutions to the problem.


We investigated the nutritional condition of larval fishes caught in daily ichthyoplankton hauls in the 'Helgoland Roads' (54°11.18'N and 07°54.00'E) from February to June 2004. We concentrated on larvae of dab Limanda limanda and lesser sandeel Ammodytes marinus in order to compare early life stages of iteroparous and nearly semelparous fish. We analysed length, weight and RNA:DNA ratios as a proxy for condition of the larvae. The relationship between larval nutritional condition and larval size provided an indication of condition-selective mortality due to a loss of larvae in poor condition from the larger size-classes. For the sandeel, larvae in good condition were present in all size-classes, whereas for the dab maximum larval condition increased with increasing size. Variability in both standard length and condition was high in the 2 species during their planktonic stage. Both species showed good nutritional condition in the early to mid portion of the recruitment period and declines in condition in late April. This was more pronounced in larval dab, which showed a higher dependency on feeding conditions than larval sandeel. Together, these findings indicate a more conservative strategy of early life stages of the nearly semelparous sandeel compared with the iteroparous dab.


An extensive theoretical and qualitative literature stresses the promise of instructional practices and content aligned with the cultural experiences of minority students. Ethnic studies courses provide a growing but controversial example of such "culturally relevant pedagogy." However, the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these courses is limited. In this study, we estimate the causal effects of an ethnic studies curriculum piloted in several San Francisco high schools. We rely on a "fuzzy" regression discontinuity design based on the fact that several schools assigned students with eighth-grade GPAs below a threshold to take the course in ninth grade. Our results indicate that assignment to this course increased ninth-grade student attendance by 21 percentage points, GPA by 1.4 grade points, and credits earned by 23. These surprisingly large effects are consistent with the hypothesis that the course reduced dropout rates and suggest that culturally relevant teaching, when implemented in a supportive, high-fidelity context, can provide effective support to at-risk students. Thomas Dee Stanford University 520 Galvez Mall, CERAS Building, 5th Floor Stanford, CA 94305-3084 and NBER email@example.com Emily Penner Stanford University 520 Galvez Mall, CERAS Building, 5th Floor Stanford, CA 94305-3084 firstname.lastname@example.com


ABSTRACT In the latest discussions of children and young people's new geographies of leisure and pleasure, one controversial issue has been how digital technologies co-produce and reconfigure young people's everyday worlds. This article draws on semi-structured interviews with 40 young people who regularly use social networking technologies in their nightlife experiences in Zurich and Lausanne, two nightlife hubs in Switzerland. Informed by Danah Boyd's concepts of 'collapsing contexts' and 'imagined audiences', this article enables a critical engagement with young people's emerging understanding of their nightlife contexts, which are increasingly permeated by networking technologies. I show how social networking spaces facilitate the coming together, or collapse, of various social contexts which induce young people to imagine multiple audiences, including authority figures, in their nightlife practices. These collapsing contexts and imagined audiences, I argue, present new perspectives on debates about control and surveillance in young people's contemporary urban nightlife.


The report analyzes barriers to and opportunities for private sector participation in district heating (DH) in the Western Balkan countries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia, as well as in Mongolia and Ukraine. Specifically, the report analyzes the legal and regulatory frameworks for public-private partnerships (PPP) and for DH in each of the countries,including an overview of the primary and secondary legislation, PPP preparation and approval processes, institutional setup of the DH sector, heat tariff-setting procedures, etc. In addition, the report describes international best practice for various business models for private sector participation in DH and provides country-specific recommendations to improve the attractiveness of PPP in the DH sector. Finally, the report provides an estimation of the investment needs in the DH sector by country and indicates selected investment projects, which are conservatively assessed at 1.5 billion dollars.


This study has at its centre the relationship between student teachers' behaviour and their underlying thoughts and beliefs as they learn to teach primary English. Following Harre's definition of personal identity as an organising principle for action (Harre, 1983), it seems that student teachers' sense of self-hood provides a key to understanding their actions in the classroom. The findings suggest that student teachers are powerfully influenced by the way they view the role of the teacher. They can be crudely identified with one of three categories. Task Managers have a restricted view of their role, concerned with organisation and management. Curriculum Deliverers relate to learning but this is defined and limited by the curriculum. Concept/Skill Builders link to an underpinning framework of concepts, which relate to learning beyond the curriculum and the classroom. An examination of the identity and knowledge held by each type of student teacher, when compared with an experienced teacher, reveals the importance of viewing teacher knowledge as a synchronised process of making connections. This highlights the centrality of school based learning and leads to conclusions about the complex nature of the support required to enhance student teachers' learning both in school and in Higher Education Institutions.


Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is asked to visit Zurich, to clean the work of an Old Master for a millionaire banker. But when he gets there he finds the corpse of his client in a pool of blood beneath the masterpiece, and discovers that a secret collection of priceless paintings - stolen by Nazis in the war - is missing. With the Swiss authorities trying to pin the murder on Allon and a powerful cabal determined to make sure this wartime secret remains buried, the art restorer must use all his former spy skills to find out the truth. And with an assassin that he helped to train also on the loose, Allon will need all his wits just to stay alive.


Objectives: First-generation immigrants, in many countries, are healthier than their native counterparts. This study examined the association between first- and second-generation immigrant status and alcohol- or drugs other than alcohol-related (primarily opioids) mortality for those with risky substance use. Methods: A Swedish longitudinal, 2003 to 2017, registry study combined Addiction Severity Index (ASI) assessment data with mortality data (n = 15 601). Due to missing data, the analysis sample for this study was 15 012. Multivariate models tested the relationship between immigration status and drugs other than alcohol or alcohol-related mortality, controlling for demographics and the 7 ASI composite scores (CS). Results: Age, a higher ASI CS for alcohol, a lower ASI CS family and social relationship, a lower ASI CS for drug use and a higher ASI CS for health significantly predicted mortality because of alcohol-related causes. Higher ASI CS for drugs other than alcohol, employment, and health, age, male sex, and immigration status predicted drugs other than alcohol, related mortality. Individuals born in Nordic countries, excluding Sweden, were 1.76 times more likely to die of drugs other than alcohol compared with their Swedish counterparts. Individuals born outside a Nordic country (most common countries: Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Chile) were 61% less likely to die of drugs other than alcohol compared with their Swedish counterparts. Those with parents born outside Nordic countries were 54% less likely to die of drugs other than alcohol. Discussion: Research is needed on why people with risky substance use from Nordic countries (not Sweden) residing in Sweden, have higher mortality rates because of drugs other than alcohol (primarily opioids drugs other than alcohol compared with the other population groups in our study). Findings indicate that ASI CSs are strong predictors of future health problems including mortality due to alcohol and other drug-related causes.


Hibernation, the use of prolonged torpor to depress metabolism, is employed by mammals to conserve resources during extended periods of extreme temperatures and/or resource limitation. Mammalian hibernators arouse to euthermy periodically during torpor for reasons that are not well understood, and these arousals may facilitate immune processes. To determine whether arousals enable host responses to pathogens, we used dual RNA‐Seq and a paired sampling approach to examine gene expression in a hibernating bat, the little brown myotis (Myotis lucifugus). During torpor, transcript levels differed in only a few genes between uninfected wing tissue and adjacent tissue infected with Pseudogymnoascus destructans, the fungal pathogen that causes white‐nose syndrome. Within 70–80 min after emergence from torpor, large changes in gene expression were observed due to local infection, particularly in genes involved in pro‐inflammatory host responses to fungal pathogens, but also in many genes involved in immune responses and metabolism. These results support the hypothesis that torpor is a period of relative immune dormancy and arousals allow for local immune responses in infected tissues during hibernation. Host–pathogen interactions were also found to regulate gene expression in the pathogen differently depending on the torpor state of the host. Hibernating species must balance the benefits of energy and water conservation achieved during torpor with the costs of decreased immune competence. Interbout arousals allow hibernators to optimize these, and other, trade‐offs during prolonged hibernation by enabling host responses to pathogens within brief, periodic episodes of euthermy.


With the development of Web 2.0, the online publication of Korean cartoons has increased substantially. The webtoon is a new genre of publishing Korean comics (manhwa) online, and is considered a unique case in the global cartoon market. The increase of Internet users and digital cultural consumption has established conditions for fostering the platform for webtoons and their production. In addition, the popularity of Korean dramas and K-pop has cultivated the spread of webtoons in the countries receiving dramas and K-pop. This study discusses the characteristics of Korean webtoons and their development using the concept of "glocal culture." The glocalization of Korean cultural contents is the combined result of local socio-cultural characteristics of Korea, the hybridization of global and local features, and the transnational consumption of the Korean cultural contents. Such glocalizing dynamics can be seen in the process of the consumption and creation of new forms of pop culture in the countries receiving Korean Wave products. The paper argues that webtoons should also be understood as an exemplary glocalization of Korean culture, representing the social and cultural characteristics of Korea, while also having an impact on foreign comics industries in the age of digitalization. In addition, the glocalization process of Korean webtoons promotes cultural communications establishing a global webtoon fandom.


Adolf Hitler's experiences during the First World War have been much discussed, with historians tending to concentrate on his involvement in the fighting and the operational lessons he later claimed to draw. Much less has been written about the impact of the war on his world view, though recent work has tended to suggest that his paranoid anti-Semitism was not yet visible during the conflict. Drawing on this latest research, but also on newly discovered sources and previously underused material, the author shows that Hitler's main preoccupation during the war and its immediate aftermath was the overwhelming power of Great Britain and its American ally. He associated these two powers with the alleged international Jewish economic conspiracy that had crushed the German empire. Hitler's anti-Semitism thus originated in an anti-capitalist, rather than anti-communist, discourse. He blamed Britain and the US for the rigours of the Versailles peace settlement, a moment which was far more politically formative for him than the experience of defeat itself. His encounter with American soldiers in the summer of 1918 also marked his first engagement with the global power of the United States and the start of a belief in the demographic weakness of the German empire which inspired his plans for Lebensraum in the east.


It is generally accepted in geotechnical engineering that non-cohesive materials such as sands exhibit no or negligible tensile strength. However, there is significant evidence that interparticle forces arising from capillary and other pore-scale force mechanisms increase both the shear and tensile strength of soils. The general behavior of these pore-scale forces, their role in macroscopic stress, strength, and deformation behavior, and the changes that occur in the field under natural or imposed changes in water content remain largely uncertain. The primary objective of this research was to experimentally examine the manifestation of capillary-induced interparticle forces in partially saturated sands to macroscopic shear strength, tensile strength, and deformation behavior. This was accomplished by conducting a large suite of direct shear and direct tension tests using three gradations of Ottawa sand prepared to relatively "loose" and relatively "dense" conditions over a range of degrees saturation. Results were compared with previous experimental results from similar tests, existing theoretical formulations to define effective stress in unsaturated soil, and a hypothesis proposed to define a direct relationship between tensile strength and effective stress. The major conclusions obtained from this research include: Theoretical models tended to underpredict measured tensile strength. Analysis of results indicates that shear strength may be reasonably predicted using the sum of tensile strength and total normal stress as an equivalent effective stress (σ' = σt + σn). Analysis also indicates that Bishop's (1959) effective stress formulation is a reasonable representation for effective stress by setting χ = S and by backcalculating χ from shear tests. Tensile strength and apparent cohesion measured exhibited doublepeak behavior as a function of degree of saturation. Relatively dense specimen with water contents approaching the capillary regime start behaving as a loose specimen. Horizontal displacement at failure in tension exhibited double-peak behavior as a function of saturation. The two-peak behavior tends to flatten out as the grain size increases.


In its most basic form, Simple Reliabilism states that: a belief is justified iff it is formed as the result of a reliable belief-forming process. But so-called New Evil Demon (NED) cases have been given as counterexamples. A common response has been to complicate reliabilism from its simplest form to accommodate the basic reliabilist position, while at the same time granting the force of NED intuitions. But what if despite initial appearances, Simple Reliabilism, without qualification, is compatible with the NED intuition? What we can call the Dispositionalist Response to the New Evil Demon problem is fascinating because it contends just that: Simple Reliabilism is fully compatible with the NED intuition. It is claimed that all we need to do to recognize their compatibility is appreciate that reliability is a dispositional property. In this paper I shall critically evaluate the Dispositionalist proposal.


We investigate primary school precursors to criminal involvement in early adulthood. Two large longitudinal datasets, Children of the National Longitudinal Youth Study (NLSY) and the Beginning School Study (BSS), provide us with estimates of the association between criminal involvement by around age 21 on the one hand and four primary school indicators—reading and math skills, attention problems, and antisocial behavior problems—on the other. Looking first at bivariate associations, we find significant correlations between early-adult crime and all of our early measures of skills and behaviors. Controls for either a handful of family background measures or concurrent primary-school skills and behaviors reduce all but the early antisocial behavior measure to statistical insignificance. Our detailed look at the persistence of early antisocial behavior problems show that children, particularly boys, with antisocial behavior that begins early and persists beyond age 10 or 11 are at the highest risk of later arrest or incarceration.


Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional theory, in either its conventional or societal forms, engages in both a descriptive and a normative project — the former looking to the incarnation of an abstraction and the later to the development of a set of presumptions and principles through which this incarnation can be judged. Constitutional theory is conventionally applied to states — that is, to those manifestations of organized power constituted by a group of individuals, bounded by a territory, and evidenced by the institution of government. But today a certain measure of disaggregation has managed to manifest a constituting power. Globalization has opened holes in the walls that used to serve to police and protect states and their power authority. Societal aggregations can exist now between borders. Groups of individuals (and not just natural persons) incarnate abstractions of governance and then judge them in ways that are consonant with constitutional theory. These emerging realities have produced societal constitutionalism. But like conventional constitutionalism, societal constitutionalism seeks the comfort of equilibrium and stasis as the basic operating premises of self-constituting governance systems. This paper considers societal constitutionalism in its dynamic element — as a system structures constant adjustment among the constituting elements of a governance unit (whether state, corporation, religion, etc.). After an Introduction, Section I engages in framework setting, focusing on the structures of societal constitutionalism within the logic of globalization. This consideration necessarily frames societies and their constitution from a spatially static and inward looking perspective. That investigation is divided into two parts; first a consideration of societal constitutionalism as a set of parameters for the ordering system of states and non-state actors, and second a brief consideration of the organization of corporate actors within this framework, specifically Apple, Inc. Section II provides an illustration of a societally constituted enterprise operating in three dimensional dynamic governance space. The focus is Apple, Inc.; the context is the enforcement of international human rights norms through the governance activities of Apple Inc. and its supply chain, and the focus are the spaces where systems converge, harmonize and collide; the object is to consider a societally constituted governance unit operating in three dimensional space that is in constant motion, but within which the entity remains stable. Section III then develops the more important characteristics of this new dynamic and permeable constitutional framework. If societies can be understood as subject to certain principles for their inward constitution, to what extent might there be principles that affect the outward expression of inward self-constitution. That consideration requires both an examination of the way in which societally constituted entities may be felt and seen by outsiders, and also the way that expressive communication can have inward affecting consequences. For that purpose, Gunther Teubner's notions of addiction and chaos and Hans Lindahls notions of spatiality and communication serve as a starting point. The paper concludes where it started — in constitutional theory. It will suggest the need to expand our understanding of constitutional theory beyond incarnation and judgment, to include communication among systems in a complex polycentric constituting universe. It suggests the dynamic consequences of this emerging societal framework of hierarchical power arrangements and horizontal effects for constitutional theory among this amalgam of states and other societally constituted organisms. Final version to be published as "Dynamic Societal Constitutionalism: Transnational corporations' outward expression of inward self constitution: The enforcement of human rights by Apple, Inc." in the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies.


INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MONETARY POLICY TRANSMISSION By LUCIANA TEAGNO LOPES AUGUST, 2014 Committee Chair: Dr. Andrew Feltenstein Major Department: Economics This dissertation states that the behavior of banks and investors varies according to the rules of the game and demonstrates that the level of institutional development may have an important role on the effectiveness of monetary policies. The level of institutional development is measured by the quality of contract enforcement, the level of corruption, the extent of political stability, the level of government's transparency and accountability and the quality of the implemented policies and regulations. This research presents a framework to explain how the traditional channels of monetary policy transmission are altered by the level of institutional development, allowing the construction of three hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that institutional development matters for the effects of monetary policies on output. The second hypothesis is that contractionary policies have more adverse effects on output in countries with low institutional development than in countries with high institutional development. The third hypothesis is that expansionary policies are more effective in terms of output promotion in countries with high institutional development than in countries with low institutional development. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that research has established a relationship between the level of institutional development and the asymmetric effects of monetary policies on output. Two country examples are presented: the case of Nigeria illustrates the third hypothesis and the case of Brazil illustrates the second hypothesis. Several econometric models and six institutional development indicators are used to evaluate the three hypotheses. This dissertation provides strong empirical support for the hypotheses 1 and 2, sustaining the argument that the asymmetric effects of monetary policies on output may have deep institutional causes. Rule of law and government effectiveness are the indicators that matter most for the effectiveness of monetary policies. Particular consideration should be given to the rule of law indicator because of its clear connection with the theoretical arguments and country examples, suggesting that fundamental institutional improvements should be focused on the efficiency of the judiciary system and the quality of law enforcement. INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MONETARY POLICY TRANSMISSION BY LUCIANA TEAGNO LOPES A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies of Georgia State University GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY 2014 Copyright by Luciana Teagno Lopes 2014


Several short peptides, so called cell-penetrating peptides, have the capability to transport large hydrophilic cargos through the cell membrane. The objective is to use these peptides as drug carriers and thereby enhance the uptake of drugs into cells.Three different cell-penetrating peptides are characterized in this thesis. Structure and dynamics of transportan when bound to phospholipid bicelles was determined using NMR. The hydrophobic peptide transportan and its deletion analogue Tp10 both bind to lipid head-group region of the membrane as amphipathic α-helices (papers I & II) and they were found to cause leakage in vesicles (paper IV). The membrane disturbing effect is probably part of how these peptides are translocated through the cell membrane, but also an explanation to why these peptides are found to be toxic in vivo. The high degree of toxicity limits their usefulness. We however also found that the membrane disturbing effect was significantly reduced when a large hydrophilic cargo was attached, which indicates that the properties of the whole peptide-cargo complex has to be taken into account (paper IV).The highly charged cell-penetrating peptide penetratin is not nearly as membrane disturbing as transportan (papers III and IV). Penetratin binds preferably to negatively charged membranes by electrostatic interactions. We used several different techniques to investigate if penetratin could be translocated through membrane model systems. All experiments consistently suggested that penetratin could not be translocated into model systems. It indicates an endocytotic uptake mechanism into cells rather than a direct membrane penetration (paper III). The ribonucleotide reductase inhibitor protein Sml1 was characterized using NMR and CD spectroscopy (paper V). Three different secondary structure elements were found, in agreement with previous NMR studies, but Sml1 does not have a well defined three-dimensional structure in solution. The N-terminus includes an α-helical region between residues 4-14 and we propose that this region interacts with the C-terminal part of the protein in the monomeric form. The N-terminus is also suggested to be a dimerization interface. Dimers are formed at concentrations above 10 µM in solution. The C-terminal region of Sml1 includes an α-helix between residues 61-80 that is crucial for binding and inhibition of RNR.


The refractive index measured by the Abeles method can have a serious error because of a film transition layer. The effect is different depending on which side of the film the layer exists. Calculation is chiefly made for a surface transition layer which is more realistic than an inner one in the case of deposited films. The following error characteristics are elucidated for a thin surface transition layer: (1) The error is a cotangent function of the film thickness. (2) It is proportional to the transition layer thickness. (3) It increases as the refractive index along the transition layer gets closer to the averaged index of the air and the film. (4) It is almost independent of the substrate index ns except when ns is close to the film index.


The President of the United States frequently signs international agreements but postpones ratification pending Senate consent. Under international law, a state that signs a treaty subject to later ratification must avoid acts that would defeat the treaty's object and purpose until the nation clearly communicates its intent not to join. As a result, the President in signing assumes interim treaty obligations before the treatymaking process is complete. Despite the pervasiveness of this practice, scholars have neglected the question of its constitutionality. As this Article demonstrates, the practice is unconstitutional. Neither the text, structure, nor history of the Constitution supports the practice. Nor can the practice be justified under the President's authority to enter sole executive agreements or as a longstanding practice in which Congress has acquiesced. The result, ironically, is that the President often acts unconstitutionally when employing the treatymaking process outlined in Article II of the Constitution. Yet the President need not avoid the Article II process to cure this constitutional defect. The President avoids constitutional violation by consenting to international agreements through means other than signature subject to ratification.


Due to their diameter, of only 24 nm, single microtubules are extremely challenging to image without the use of extrinsic contrast agents. As a result, fluorescence tagging is the common method to visualize their motility. However, such investigation is limited by photobleaching and phototoxicity. We experimentally demonstrate the capability of combining label-free spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) with numerical processing for imaging single microtubules in a gliding assay. SLIM combines four different intensity images to obtain the optical path length map associated with the sample. Because of the use of broadband fields, the sensitivity to path length is better than 1 nm without (temporal) averaging and better than 0.1 nm upon averaging. Our results indicate that SLIM can image the dynamics of microtubules in a full field of view, of 200 × 200 μm2, over many hours. Modeling the microtubule transport via the diffusion-advection equation, we found that the dispersion relation yields the standard deviation of the velocity distribution, without the need for tracking individual tubes. Interestingly, during a 2 h window, the microtubules begin to decelerate, at 100 pm/s2 over a 20 min period. Thus, SLIM is likely to serve as a useful tool for understanding molecular motor activity, especially over large time scales, where fluorescence methods are of limited utility.


In this present investigation the ethanolic extract of Madhuca longifolia bark (EEMLB) was screened for hepatoprotective activity against D-galactosamine (d-GalN) induced hepatiotoxicity in rats. Wistar rats were divided into five groups (n=6). Hepatotoxicity in rats was achieved by intraperitoneal injection of 400mg/kg of d-GalN for five days. Silymarin (100mg/kg) was given as reference standard. The degree of protection against liver toxicity was determined by measuring the serum biochemical parameters viz. SGPT (serum alkaline phosphatase), SGOT (serum glutamine oxaloacetate transaminase), ALP (alkaline phosphatase), total cholesterol and bilirubin (Total and Direct). The result shows that d-GalN has enhanced the levels of SGPT, SGOT, ALP, total cholesterol and bilirubin. Pretreatment with EEMLB (200mg/kg B. wt. and 400 mg/kg B. wt.) brought back the altered levels of biochemical markers to the near normal levels. Histopathological studies also confirmed the hepatoprotective activity of these extracts when compared with d-GalN treated groups. It can be concluded from the result that the extract of Madhuca longifolia bark possesses hepatoprotective activity against D-GalN induced hepatotoxicity in rats.


: Field experiments to investigate the effect of different sources of organic manure (Cow, Sheep and Poultry Manure) on growth and yield of okra was carried out at the Teaching and Research Fadama Farm of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, Nigeria during 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 dry seasons. Treatments were laid out in a randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications. Data were collected on growth and yield parameters (Plant height, number of leaves per plant, pod length and fresh pod weight). Results obtained indicated that growth and yield of okra was lowest in control treatments which showed that the organic manures used in the study especially poultry manure positively influenced the performance and yield of okra. Poultry manure positively increased okra plant height by 39.4% and number of leaves by 37.8% compared to control treatments. There was no significant effect with respect to number of leaves in 2007/2008. Fresh pod weight was significantly increased by 34.6% with poultry manure compared to control treatments. However, pod length was not significantly affected by the treatments. Based on the findings of the experiments it could be deduced that poultry manure seems to promote higher growth and yield of okra. Thus, it should be recommended for farmers growing okra in this zone.