Can input in one sensory modality strengthen memory in a different sensory modality? To address this question, we asked participants to encode images presented in various locations (e.g., a depicted dog in the top left corner of the screen) while they heard spatially uninformative sounds. Some of these sounds matched the image (e.g., the word "dog" or a barking sound) while others did not. In a subsequent memory test, participants were better at remembering the locations of images that were encoded with a matching sound, even though these sounds were spatially uninformative – an effect that was mediated by whether the sounds were verbal or non-verbal. Because the sounds did not provide any relevant location information, better spatial memory cannot be attributed to auditory memory; rather, it is attributed to visual memory being strengthened by the matching auditory input. These findings provide the first behavioral evidence for cross-modal interactions in memory.


We model Constant Proportion Debt Obligations (CPDOs) within a Monte Carlo simulation framework in order to examine their sensitivity to various assumptions and parameters. We find that, although we are able to generate exceptionally low default rates under certain assumptions that are commonly used in the industry literature, the sensitivity of default rates and other performance measures to these assumptions is high. Moreover, given the questionable plausibility of some of these assumptions, it is not clear that CPDOs truly carry the same low risk as similarly-rated high investment grade products.


The solubility of CO 2 in water at different temperature and pressure conditions has been studied for more than 150 years because of the common presence of this system in the Earth, and its importance for engineering and in several biological and geological processes. However, there are many contradictions in the literature with regard to the solubility of CO 2 in salt-rich aqueous solutions, and associated effects such as the salting out have been studied in detail for only few salts such as NaCl or Na 2 SO 4 . In this study we introduce Raman spectroscopy as a useful tool to measure gas solubility in brines. We have obtained the solubility of CO 2 in aqueous solution of MgSO 4 at different concentrations (5 and 17 wt %), in the range of temperatures from 5 to 20 °C and pressures up to 50 bar. The results allow one to approach different aqueous reactions and processes that are relevant in geochemical phenomena of some planetary objects. Thus, we have modelled the degassing processes that could occur through the crust of Europa, a satellite of Jupiter.


This study proposed a concept and a method for building egress analysis. The works of this research include: develop procedures to analyze the egress system of a plan, propose methods and a program to identify target spaces in evacuation, present a dynamic blocking viewpoint of an egress system, dedicate a way to identify the threatening room of fire origin, and create an occupant evacuation model (ESM), whose functions are: to simulate the occupant evacuation in a building in the static and the dynamic blocking situations, to record the people changes at every compartment during evacuation, and to review the clearing times of different compartments.


This article examines why, despite similar general interests, institutional positions and political constraints, EU social NGOs find it so difficult to develop co-operative strategies except on the most fundamental issues. To demonstrate these difficulties the article considers the general reasons for and against co-operation between social NGOs and then examines the difficulties and advantages of collective EU social NGO action during the 1998 NGO funding crisis, Red Card protest and civil dialogue. The article argues that there is a fundamental desire for, and are benefits from, close co-operation between the EU social NGOs. However, due to the complex 'context structure' within which NGOs must operate, this co-operative impetus is constantly undermined. In conclusion, the article argues that social NGOs will remain weak and insignificant actors until the Commission/Parliament and/or the social NGOs can organise the complex context structure and allow co-operative strategies to emerge.


Since the advent of the trend using Wireless sensors networks at different work places, field etc. LEACH has been one of the prominent protocols that have been used for the purpose of routing of and all. Many advance protocols like ELEACH, EBCH also exist. But out of them all the ELEACH protocol from many years have been the most common choice for doing some advancement. The scope of our dissertation extends itself to management of load and congestion of traffic on nodes. There are schemes like we are taking as base for our work i.e. EBCH which is traffic distribution protocol which splits up the traffic in different routes; but even after distribution some time resources are not properly utilized. To improve upon those wasted resources is our scope and aim in this work.


The author critically limns the roles of the state, market and civil society in the development of the discipline of Public Administration (PA) and how these roles can help PA move forward. Doing this, she takes the reader on a time trip, from the 1880s of Woodrow Wilson to the present, navigating four streams, namely, Traditional Public Administration (TPA) Development Administration (Dev Ad), New Public Administration (New PA), and Public Administration and Governance (PAG). The article explores the voyages essayed by the meaning of the word "public" in "public administration." This little exploration (the author's own words), shunning proclamation of both great worth and contribution of her work, offers five lessons. All five have to do with the impact of state, market and civil society on the theories and concepts of Philippine Public Administration (PPA).


The effect of microwave irradiation on DNA/DNA hybridization has been studied under controlled power and temperature conditions. It was discovered that microwave irradiation led to the melting of double-stranded deoxyoligonucleotides well below their thermal melting temperature and independent of the length of the deoxyoligonucleotides. These observations indicate a specific interaction of microwaves with DNA, and have important implications in the chemical or enzymatic processing of DNA under microwave heating.


Muscle nicotinic acetylcholine receptors are a class of heteropentameric ligand-gated cation channels with constituent subunits adopting a fixed stoichiometric arrangement. The specific amino acid residues that govern subunit ordering are however, only partially understood. By integrating all-atom molecular dynamics simulations, bioinformatics, two-electrode voltage clamp electrophysiology and 125I-α-bungarotoxin assays of chimeric nAChR subunits, we identify residues across the extracellular, transmembrane and extended M4 helix of the δ subunit that make structural signatures that contribute to intransigent assembly rules. Furthermore, functional differences observed in α2δ2β receptors can be rationalized by changes in dynamical behavior that manifest themselves at the agonist binding site.


The New Almaden mercury mines in California (USA), which collectively represent the largest historic producers of mercury in North America, are a persistent source of mercury contamination to the San Francisco Bay estuary. An estimate based on total mercury concentration (HgTOT) and provisional stream flow data measured at a gauging station in the Guadalupe River during base flow conditions yields a base flow flux of 30 g of mercury for the month of October 2000. In contrast to this base flow estimate, one 2-day rain event in October 2000 resulted in a flux of 22 g of mercury past this site. An estimate of mercury transport from the entire Guadalupe River watershed based on a sediment transport model and our measured suspended particulate HgTOT (0.5–4 μg g−1) results in a total of 4–30 kg year−1 transported to the southern reach of the estuary. Sediments in the southern reach have lower HgTOT (most ≤0.4 μg g−1 dry wt) and monomethylmercury (MMHg, c. 1 ng g−1 dry wt) concentrations than those in the Guadalupe River (HgTOT, 0.41–33 μg g−1 dry wt; MMHg, 1–10 ng g−1 dry wt). Because the most elevated methylmercury concentrations (8–12 ng g−1 dry wt) were found in sediments deposited immediately upstream of hydraulic structures (e.g. diversion dams and weirs) within the river, it is proposed that such physical structures may represent important zones of MMHg production and fluxes to San Francisco Bay.


Blogs the most popular systems for authoring and managing micro-content have the affordance to become an integral part of teaching and learning processes as a vehicle for knowledge management. Open, flexible systems integrating blogs provide user-friendly, personalised micorlearning environments while ensuring ubiquitous access. This book concentrates on blog interoperability in the context of creating such an open space for learning and collaboration. As blogging is one of the most popular web-based forms of publishing today, there is a plethora of different blogging tools, feed readers, and aggregators, enabling information dissemination, filtering, and retrieval. Several different data structure and interaction standards emerged which makes integration a real challenge. This work presents the possibility of creating distributed microlearning environments basing on networks of integrated blogs, discusses problems of such an integration along with possible solutions, and proposes an architecture for loosely-coupled blog integration.


BACKGROUND: Polypharmacy may be defined as the effects of taking multiple medications concurrently to manage coexisting health problems, such as diabetes and hypertension. Polypharmacy is an important issue in elderly patients. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the rural tertiary care teaching hospital in Central India over 2 months. A total of 100 patients were studied. The study population included hypertensive geriatric population above 65 years admitted in the medicine ward who were willing to consent for participation. The patients with incomplete case sheets admitted in the Emergency and Intensive Care Units and with serious illness, malignancy, and other complications were excluded. RESULTS: Out of the total 403 medicine prescribed to study population, 271 potential drug–drug interactions were observed among elderly hypertensive patients. Moderate drug–drug interaction was found to be most common (50.62%) followed by mild (8.64%) and severe (7.94%). Most common potential inappropriate medicine used was spironolactone followed by diltiazem, diclofenac, olanzapine, metoclopramide, digoxin, insulin, and isopto hyoscine (Sliding scale) in the study population. CONCLUSION: In the present study, we can conclude that polypharmacy is a major risk factor for secondary morbidity in elderly patients. Polypharmacy leads to more potential drug–drug interactions and potential inappropriate medicine use. The use of medicines to disease condition is necessary, but unnecessary load of drugs to patient will increase the safety problems. Polypharmacy can be avoided by sharing treatment goals and plans. To improve drug safety in this high-risk population, appropriate prescribing might be more important than simply reducing the number of prescribed drugs.


Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on Earth, infect cellular organisms from all domains of life, and are central players in the global biosphere. Over the last century, the discovery and characterization of viruses have progressed steadily alongside much of modern biology. In terms of outright numbers of novel viruses discovered, however, the last few years have been by far the most transformative for the field. Advances in methods for identifying viral sequences in genomic and metagenomic datasets, coupled to the exponential growth of environmental sequencing, have greatly expanded the catalog of known viruses and fueled the tremendous growth of viral sequence databases. Development and implementation of new standards, along with careful study of the newly discovered viruses, have transformed and will continue to transform our understanding of microbial evolution, ecology, and biogeochemical cycles, leading to new biotechnological innovations across many diverse fields, including environmental, agricultural, and biomedical sciences.


products via bus systems. The importance of industrial communication within machines and installations is increasing exponentially, especially in the context of recent Industry 4.0 (Internet of Things, IoT) discussions. Networking is decentralised from its starting point – communication at control system level – down to the connection of front-end devices, sensors and actuators, which perhaps already feature decentralised intelligence.


The papers in this volume examine how Spanish speakers express attention to their interlocutors (or co-participants) verbally. It is now generally accepted that subjective expressions have interactional functions, encouraging the flow of discussion and creating cohesive discourse and that there are several ways of dealing with the intersubjective or dialogic nature of language: (i) studying heteroglossia or dialoguing voices in monologic texts, (ii) focusing on how in talk-in-interaction speakers refer to information held by the co-participant, (iii) examining intersubjective markers that encode the speaker's assumptions about the co-participant. Concepts such as politeness, argumentation structure, attenuation and hedging are being used to account for the interactional dynamics examined. Moreover, several papers analyze the difference between spoken and written registers and some offer new evidence for functional paths of linguistic change. In doing so, they enrich previous accounts of modality, discourse markers, person referencing, spatial deixis and connectives in Spanish and beyond.


In this quick reference, you'll find everything you need to know about the bash shell. Whether you print it out or read it on the screen, this PDF gives you the answers to the annoying questions that always come up when you're writing shell scripts: What characters do you need to quote? How do you get variable substitution to do exactly what you want? How do you use arrays? It's also helpful for interactive use. If you're a Unix user or programmer, or if you're using bash on Windows, you'll find this quick reference indispensable.


Why is music significant in life and education? What shall we teach? How? To whom? Where and when? The praxial philosophy espoused in Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education offers an integrated sociocultural, artistic, participatory, and ethics-based concept of the natures and values of musics, education, musicing and listening, community music, musical understanding, musical emotions, creativity, and more. Embodied-enactive concepts of action, perception, and personhood weave through the book's proposals. Practical principles for curriculum and instruction emerge from the authors' praxial themes.


There is considerable evidence that people with intellectual disability (PWID) are at an increased risk of offending and are overrepresented in correctional settings. There is also widespread concern, despite the lack of a robust evidence base, that PWID are more likely to be victims of crime, and that victimisation of PWID is underreported. To date, much of the extant research has employed methodologies that are unable to quantify the risk of both offending and victimisation for PWID compared to the community, and/or use samples inclusive of the Borderline range of intellectual disability (ID). In order to address these concerns, epidemiological research is required, using a population-based, well-defined sample of PWID, and measures of offending and victimisation derived from official criminal records. This research study utilised a large sample of PWID (n=2220) from a database held by the Department of Human Services in Victoria, Australia, and matched these with contact-based records from Victoria Police and the Department of Health to quantify the risk for offending and victimisation, and consider any impact of dual disability on this risk. Data was then compared to a community sample derived from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), to determine the differences in risk between PWID and the general population. Results indicated increased risk for offending in PWID when compared to the community sample, particularly for violent and sexual offence types. Results also showed that PWID were less likely to have been a victim of crime overall, but their risk for being a victim of violent or sexual offences was far greater than people without an ID. Dual disability increased risk for offending and victimisation over and above ID; however the nature of this relationship remains complex. This suggests a lack of specialised services necessary to support and protect these individuals. Providing training to employees in justice, health and disability services to identify and treat the mental health issues of PWID may go a long way to redressing the balance.


This is the 11th volume in the New Directions in Cognitive Science Series (formerly Vancover Studies in Cognitive Science). It addresses common sense, reasoning, and rationality, currently areas of considerable interdisciplinary interest and importance. While common sense and rationality have often been viewed as two distinct features in a unified cognitive map, this interdisciplinary volume - including essays from an outstanding group of established scholars - engages with this notion and comes up with novel and often paradoxical views of this relationship. It should appeal to philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and computer scientists interested in considering what constitutes human rationality, behaviour, and intelligence. This groundbreaking collection is at the forefront of Cognitive Science research, and promises to be of unprecedented influence across disciplines.


The 6-azabicyclo[3.2.1]octane ring system is found in a wide variety of biologically active natural and non-natural products. The aim of this project is to prepare the 7,8-diketo-6-azabicyclo[3.2.1]octane structure via a semipinacol rearrangement of ring-fused β -lactams. Chapter 1 introduces the pinacol and semipinacol rearrangement, including the use of cyclic sulfites and phosphoranes, and ring expansion of β -lactams. Previous work in the Grainger group for the synthesis of lactams via tandem radical cyclisation-dithiocarbamate group transfer is also discussed. Chapter 2 describes the methodology developed for the semipinacol rearrangement of β-lactams. Access to suitable precursors for the semipinacol rearrangement is achieved through a sequence of 4-exo trig radical cyclisation, base-mediated dithiocarbamate group elimination and dihydroxylation. Formation of the 7,8-diketo-6-azabicyclo[3.2.1]octane ring system occurs through semipinacol rearrangement of the corresponding cyclic sulfites and phosphoranes. In Chapter 3, the scope and limitations of the methodology are explored. Different substituents on the nitrogen of the β-lactam, groups on the cyclohexane moiety (methyl and oxygenation) and ring sizes are investigated. An original approach to the total synthesis of peduncularine is described in Chapter 4. Synthesis of a suitably functionalised β-lactam and attempts to further transform it into the desired 7,8-diketo-6- azabicyclo[3.2.1]oct-3-ene structure are reported. Work towards the total synthesis of calyciphylline D, calyciphylline F and caldaphnidine M is described in chapter 5. Reductive amination and stereoselective reduction of piperitone are investigated. Use of a model system for the addition of nucleophiles onto thiolactams is also described.


When a multienvironment trial (MET) is established across several locations and years, the interaction is referred to as a three-way array. Three-way interaction can be studied by means of three-way principal components analysis. In this study, the three-way principal components analysis is adapted to the sites regression model (three-way SREG). The three-way SREG with location and year combines the effects of genotype, genotype x location, genotype x year, and genotype x location x year. The objective of this study is to show how the three-way SREG can be put to practical use in agriculture and breeding. We utilized two wheat (Triticum aestivum L) data sets that have already been used for fitting a three-way additive main effects and multiplicative interaction model. One data set had genotype (25) x location (4) x sowing times (4) and eight attributes, and the other data set included genotype (20) x irrigation level x year on grain yield. The three-way SREG applied simultaneously to eight attributes facilitates the interpretation of genotypic performance for all traits in specific locations and across locations for a selected sowing time. Results of the three-way SREG for both data sets show the different response patterns of genotypes for locations and sowing dates (Data Set 1), as well as genotypic responses across irrigation levels in different years (Data Set 2). Using Data Set 1, we show that fitting a three-way data structure to a three-way SREG model is more effective for detecting important interaction patterns than using the two-way SREG.


The practice of Surveying and Construction layout is one of the fundamental skills that need to be acquired by an engineering or construction management student. Mastering these skills require extensive training with the equipment and team members in order to achieve both precision and accuracy in measurements. In additional to getting used to the equipments, the mastering of the technique requires the students to follow procedures accurately. This paper presents the results of testing a surveying and construction layout game. The game is a first step in a plan to develop a Virtual Reality VR surveying education tool, where students will practice by interacting with a real time computer generated imagery (CGI).The test involve students who have been enrolled in the surveying class for the spring semester 2010. The students are asked to perform a specific surveying task. The students attempts are documented based on their ability to follow the correct procedures and on their ability to choose the correct needed equipment. The paper will show the results of the students ability to follow the correct procedures needed to achieve the appropriate level of precision and accuracy. The results of this test will help make the case that Virtual Reality tools can reinforce the learning of hands on classes such is the case for Surveying and Construction Layout.


This Article tests the claims of supporters of stakeholder capitalism ("stakeholderism") in the context of the COVID pandemic. Supporters of stakeholderism advocate encouraging and relying on corporate leaders to use their discretion to serve stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and the environment. The pandemic followed and was accompanied by peak support for, and broad expressions of commitment to, stakeholderism from corporate leaders. Nonetheless, and even though the pandemic heightened risks to stakeholders, we document that corporate leaders negotiating deal terms failed to look after stakeholder interests. We conduct a detailed examination of all the $1B+ acquisitions of public companies that were announced from April 2020 to March 2022, totaling 122 acquisitions with an aggregate consideration exceeding $800 billion. We find that deal terms provided large gains for the shareholders of target companies, as well as substantial private benefits for corporate leaders. However, although many transactions were viewed at the time of the deal as posing significant post-deal risks for employees, corporate leaders largely did not obtain any employee protections, including payments to employees who would be laid off post-deal. Similarly, we find that corporate leaders failed to negotiate for protections for customers, suppliers, communities, the environment, and other stakeholders. After conducting various tests to examine whether this pattern could have been driven by other factors, we conclude that it is likely to have been driven by corporate leaders' incentives not to benefit stakeholders beyond what would serve shareholder interests. While we focus on decisions in the acquisition context, we explain why our findings also have implications for ongoing-concern decisions, and we discuss and respond to potential objections to our conclusions. Overall, our findings have significant implications for long-standing debates on the corporate treatment of stakeholders. In particular, our findings are inconsistent with the implicit-promises/team-production view that corporate leaders of an acquired company should and do look after stakeholder interests;on this view, fulfilling implicit promises to protect stakeholder interests serves shareholders' ex-ante interest in inducing the stakeholder cooperation and investment that are essential to corporate success. Our work also supports the agency critique of stakeholder capitalism which suggests that, due to their incentives, corporate leaders cannot be relied upon to look after stakeholder interests and to live up to pro-stakeholder rhetoric.


Bibliotherapy is the use of imaginative or self-help literature as an intervention for mental health problems. It aims to provide psycho-social support and treatment and is used with individuals or in a group. Bibliotherapy has come to prominence in the UK over the past decade. Bibliotherapy schemes mainly operate in partnership between the public library and the NHS. Previous research on bibliotherapy has focused on the quantitative effectiveness of the intervention or anecdotal report of individual successes. Evaluation of current schemes and qualitative investigation of the views of those experiencing bibliotherapy have been neglected in previous research, providing the rationale for this thesis. The thesis argues that because there have been shortcomings in previous research, there are differences in the understanding between those managing bibliotherapy schemes, and those using the schemes. The thesis has a dual research design; it critically analyses the emergence of the main models of bibliotherapy in the UK, deconstructing them using an Actor-Network Theory framework. Document analysis, interview data, and descriptive statistics contribute to these findings. Analysis concludes that the focus of these models is not always user-centred, with other factors driving the implementation of the intervention e.g. cost-effectiveness and health policy requirements. The type of text used is a key element of the intervention. The thesis also takes a qualitative, ethnographic approach based on Interpretive Interactionism to investigate the experiences of people with mental health problems who use bibliotherapy. Data was collected via an interview and observation study. It concludes that there are diverse uses of bibliotherapy. Building on the gaps between the application of bibliotherapy and the experience of using it, the central finding of the thesis is the emergence of four user-centred models of bibliotherapy, focused on the outcomes of bibliotherapy rather than the text used. These proposed models reflect the emotive, escapist, informational, and social outcomes of using bibliotherapy as a form of support for mental health problems.


We survey the microfoundations, empirical evidence and estimation issues underlying the aggregate matching function. Several microeconomic matching mechanisms have been suggested in the literature with some successes but none is generally accepted as superior to all others. Instead, an aggregate matching function with hires as a function of vacancies and unemployment has been successfully estimated for several countries. The Cobb-Douglas restrictions with constant returns to scale perform well. Recent work has utilized disaggregated data to go beyond aggregate estimates, with many refinements and suggestions for future research.


Infrastructure procurement programmes of many public clients and large private developers, increasingly involve complex networks of stakeholders. Well balanced and 'fully informed? decisions are critical in optimizing resources to achieve agreed objectives. A research project in Hong Kong is aimed at developing an ICT (Information and Communications Technology) - enhanced MSS (Management Support System). This will empower the formulation of more effective and efficient construction project procurement and delivery/ operational systems - for innovative and improved 'total? management of construction projects - from a large client's viewpoint. Web-based Decision Support Systems (wDSSs) are being developed to help achieve such objectives, by capturing, codifying and mobilising both expert and experiential construction industry knowledge. Furthermore, web interfaces are being designed to mobilise the collective expertise of the entire project supply chain in real-time collaborative formats. These decision aids will enable the often fragmented multi-disciplinary project teams to build on 'state of the science? knowledge, past 'lessons learnt? and present best practices, in making more informed managerial decisions that will help to optimise inputs and reduce wasted resources. Potential benefits of wDSSs are demonstrated in this paper, through examples from the integrated framework and prototype modules/ models that are under development and 'construction' in Hong Kong. These cover a crosssection of infrastructure programme management decision scenarios, i.e. in: (1) multi-purpose contractor registration-prequalification, (2) dynamic performance appraisal of contractors and (3) evaluating 'extension of time? entitlements. Interim outcomes included herein are the basic MSS framework, pilot models of items (1) and (2) above and prototype modules of item (3) above.


This paper considers the impact of macro-level forces, including policies and organizations, on micro-level behaviors in sub-Saharan Africa. Policies, programs, and organizations shape the context in which people make decisions about sex and childbearing - decisions which then drive fertility and reproductive health outcomes, including HIV prevalence. I find evidence for two types of impacts of such institutional factors on individuals: 1) countries that adopted national population policies had greater declines in their total fertility rates between 1987 and 2002 than did countries that did not adopt such policies, and 2) countries that adopted national HIV/AIDS policies, and that had many HIV/AIDS non-governmental organizations (NGOs), experienced greater declines in HIV prevalence between 2001 and 2007. Other factors, such as wealth, degree of donor investment, and extent of international NGO involvement, do a relatively poor job of explaining differential resource availability.


This book explores the expansion of rugby from its imperial and amateur upper-class white male core into other contexts throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of rugby in the racially divided communities of the setter empire and how this was viewed are explored initially. Then the editors turn to four case studies of rugby's expansion beyond the bounds of the British Empire (France, Italy, Japan and the USA). The role of women in rugby is examined and the subsequent development of women's rugby as one of the fastest growing sports for women in Europe, North America and Australasia in the 1980s and 1990s. The final section analyses the impact of commercialisation, professionalisation and media on rugby and the impact on the historic rugby culture linked to an ethos of amateurism.


Augmenting pre-trained language models with knowledge graphs (KGs) has achieved success on various commonsense reasoning tasks. However, for a given task instance, the KG, or certain parts of the KG, may not be useful. Although KG-augmented models often use attention to focus on specific KG components, the KG is still always used, and the attention mechanism is never explicitly taught which KG components should be used. Meanwhile, saliency methods can measure how much a KG feature (e.g., graph, node, path) influences the model to make the correct prediction, thus explaining which KG features are useful. This paper explores how saliency explanations can be used to improve KG-augmented models' performance. First, we propose to create coarse (Is the KG useful?) and fine (Which nodes/paths in the KG are useful?) saliency explanations. Second, to motivate saliency-based supervision, we analyze oracle KG-augmented models which directly use saliency explanations as extra inputs for guiding their attention. Third, we propose SalKG, a framework for KG-augmented models to learn from coarse and/or fine saliency explanations. Given saliency explanations created from a task's training set, SalKG jointly trains the model to predict the explanations, then solve the task by attending to KG features highlighted by the predicted explanations. On three commonsense QA benchmarks (CSQA, OBQA, CODAH) and a range of KG-augmented models, we show that SalKG can yield considerable performance gains -- up to 2.76% absolute improvement on CSQA.


In the spring of 1945, survivors of the Nazi concentration camps arrived in southern Sweden. A project was launched to collect eye-witness accounts of their experiences and document them for posterity. The scholar in charge of this project was Sture Bolin, professor of history at Lund University After his death Erik Lonnroth hailed him as a 'world-famous' historian. By the turn of the century he was instead being branded an inter-war 'racist' by Sverker Oredsson, and in 2002 listed as a Nazi, or a Nazi sympathizer, by Tobias Hubinette. My once positive impression of the 'world-famous', anti-Nazi historian intent on documenting the Holocaust met this later, darker description of the man Sture Bolin. The contrast between these two incompatible images inspired this article. The study centres on Bolin's own writing during the inter-war period, and concludes that up till 1934 he was a conservative with strong nationalist views who emphasized an organic view of society, inspired by the French Restoration ideologues, in opposition to a strong state. By 1934, in an about face, he contended that a strong state should take command and implement corporatism, thus rejecting the conservatism that in his view had become entirely liberal. He based this view of the state on historical developments, a belief that was a continuation of his existing thinking; but at the same time it represented a radicalization of his practical political thought. Meanwhile, it is established that the opposite was true of his attitudes towards anti-Semitism. In the early 1920S he indeed espoused anti-Semitic ideas, but already by 1928 he had come to strongly question and criticize these beliefs, and by 1934 he had rejected racism altogether. It is also argued here that Sture Bolin himself never expressed any pro-German sentiments and was never viewed or denounced as a Nazi or a Nazi-sympathizer during his lifetime. On the contrary, both during and after the War he was known as an active anti-Nazi. Accordingly, the more recent image of Sture Bolin is not borne out by the sources. Instead, such descriptions of him amount to stigmatization. This can be explained by the change in our understanding of Nazism, which has shifted from German nationalism to anti-Semitism and racism. Today the importance of fighting racism makes Nazism universal, and therefore gives reason to find and brand people in history as Nazis in order to teach the present how not to behave. The stigmatization of Sture Bolin is an example of this. (Less)


Wittgenstein s Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. The novel I liked best this year, said the Washington Times upon the book s publication in 1988; one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination. "


Wide direct band gap CuCl is a promlslng candidate for the next generation Si based optoelectronics, thanks to its excellent properties such as high excltonic binding energy (190 meV) and a close lattice matching with Si.

In this thesis, growth of CuCl using RF magnetron sputtering is investigated in detail. Stoichiometry and microstructure are the two major deciding factors for the UV emission from the film. We have successfully controlled both these properties by varying the sputtering parameters. Chemical stoichiometry was mainly controlled by the spacing between the target and substrate. An optimum spacing of 6 cm was found to yield films with Cu/Cl ratio almost close to stoichiometry (Cu/Cl = 0.94). A more fine control was achieved providing a suitable bias to the substrate and high quality stoichiometric CuCl films were obtained.

Microstructural evaluation revealed that the grain interface area of the film increases on increasing the sputtering pressure. UV emission properties were found to be influenced by the existence of meso- and nanostructural interfaces within the thin film. Cathodoluminescence studies showed a strong UV exciton emission and a green emission from deep levels in a non-stoichiometric and lower crystalline quality samples. CuCl films deposited with optimum sputtering parameters showed good optical quality with an intense and sharp UV emission at room temperature without any deep level emission.

Excitonic line transitions of sputtered CuCl films were investigated using temperature dependant PL spectroscopy. The thermal activation energy was calculated to be 112 meV. Our results show that the sputtered CuCl films have relative higher optical quality compared to the other UV emitting materials such as epitaxially grown GaN and ZnO, demonstrating the potential for Si based UV photonic devices.

Preliminary electrical studies were carried out to identify the conduction mechanism associated with the sputtered CuCl thin films. Field dependant DC conduction studies on CuCl/Si structure indicates that ohmic conduction prevails in the lower field region and an electrode limited Schottky emission process was found to dominate the mechanism of charge carrier transport through these structures at higher fields.


During this lab, you will use bioinformatics to learn how to find the DNA sequence of a given macromolecule and use this sequence to uncover evolutionary sequence conservation. You will use these data to identify conserved sequence segments (invariable blocks) in the ykkCD sensor RNA. During the second half of the lab you will identify conserved structural elements within the toxin sensor. These are elements where the sequence may have been altered during evolution, but the structure was retained. You will then use this information to design a mutant to see if a conserved sequence or structure is important for toxin recognition.


Nowadays there is a resurgence of interest in wild plants for their possible medicinal value in diets, since some epidemiological studies have demonstrated their effectiveness against important diseases. Generally, foods of plant origin contain many bioactive compounds, proteins, energy, vitamins and specific minerals; in addition, the popular wild plant species provide fibre, essential fatty acids and enhance the taste and colour in diets. We studied the nutritional and medicinal potential of leaves of A. subfusiformis and U. urens, collected in Alice, South Africa in November 2006. To asses this we analyzed the phytochemical, antioxidant and antibacterial activities of leaves in acetone, methanol and water extracts, using standard analytical methods. The proximate analysis showed that the leaves of both plant species contained appreciable percentages of moisture; ashes; carbohydrates; crude proteins, lipids and fibres. Elemental analysis of macro and microelements showed higher values for U. urens that contained in decreasing order: iron > manganese > zinc > copper > calcium > potassium > nitrogen > magnesium > phosphorus > sodium, for A. subfusiformis resulted in iron > zinc > manganese > copper > calcium > potassium > nitrogen > magnesium > phosphorus > sodium. Besides, the chemical composition showed higher concentration of alkaloids, saponins and phytates in A. subfusiformis. The extracts also caused 1, 1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and 2, 2-azinobis-3 ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) radical scavenging activities which were comparable to those of ascorbic acid. The extracts of both plants contained appreciable levels of polyphenols and also caused varied inhibition of some bacterial strains used in this study. When the nutrient and chemical constituents of these plants were compared with recommended dietary allowance (RDA) values, the results revealed that the leaves contain an appreciable amount of nutrients, minerals, and phytochemicals and low levels of toxicants. Since the plants also exhibited some level of antibacterial activities, their use for medicinal purposes is to some extent being justified.


Using the Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS, N=24,131 students 22 institutions), I conduct empirical analyses in an effort to differentiate and understand the date and hook-up social scripts. These scripts address sexual partnering, and existing literature portrays the hook-up script as surpassing the date script as preferred method of sexual partnering among college students. To what extent do these social scripts differ? I implement extensive difference testing, develop logistic as well as ordinal response regression models, and utilize multilevel modeling techniques to examine selection into, levels of risk during, and the outcomes of college students' sexual encounters. I address gender, social ties, personal traits, and structural features of college life in my analyses. Based on a theoretical framework situating trust as a cognitive tool, I question the effects of social contexts, personal goals, and divergent scripts on individuals' behavior. Do meeting contexts that represent a greater potential social connection readily facilitate trust states that lead students to engage in risk-taking behavior? What traits are correlated with a greater probability of hooking-up rather than dating, facing higher levels of STI risk, participation in encounters while intoxicated, and low or high levels of reported satisfaction following encounters? Findings reveal that hooking-up, compared to dating, is indicative of higher probability of elevated STI risk, results in lower likelihood of high overall satisfaction, and is highly correlated with intoxication during the encounter. I conclude that the hook-up script does not act as a replacement to the script of dating, rather that these scripts represent divergent goals and methods of obtaining those goals.


Until recently cardiovascular disease is often thought of as a disease that manifests itself during middle age. Researchers and clinicians have begun to realize that the initial signs of cardiovascular disease begin early on in childhood with changes present in both vascular structure and function. This increased recognition has resulted in considerable effort to develop accurate and reliable methods to measure as well as track changes in vascular structure and function applicable to study this process in children and adolescents. Certain genetic abnormalities and chronic diseases, which present or emerge in childhood often result in meaningful changes to vascular structure and function, which aid in our understanding of the vascular disease process. In this review, we will discuss different methods of assessing vascular structure and function, the diseases in childhood associated with decrements and maladaptive changes in the vascular system, and whether modification of lifestyle (ie, weight loss, dietary and/or exercise changes) can affect vascular structure and function in children.


A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonising powers of planet earth that have turned us all into machines. Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition clarifies for the first time the extraordinary history of The Soft Machine's writing and rewriting, demolishing the myths of Burroughs' chance-based writing methods and demonstrating for a new generation the significance of his greatest experiment.


The phase-field-crystal (PFC) modeling paradigm is rapidly emerging as the model of choice when investigating materials phenomena with atomistic scale effects over diffusive time scales. Recent variants of the PFC model, so-called structural PFC (XPFC) models introduced by Greenwood et al., have further increased the capability of the method by allowing for easy access to various structural transformations in pure materials [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 045702 (2010)] and binary alloys [Phys. Rev. B. 84, 064104, (2011)]. We present an amplitude expansion of these XPFC models, leading to a mesoscale complex order-parameter (amplitude), i.e., phase-field representation, model for two dimensional square-triangular structures. Amplitude models retain the salient atomic scale features of the underlying PFC models, while resolving microstructures on mesoscales as in traditional phase-field models. The applicability and capability of this complex amplitude model is demonstrated with simulations of peritectic solidification and grain growth exhibiting the emergence of secondary phase structures.


The politics making of genetic engineering resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand involves a complex interplay between a diverse core of movement network actors and a broad, mediated collective identity. The movement's organisational structure and cultural meanings comprise both diversity and cohesion, which enhance each other, making for successful politics making. This thesis demonstrates how these seemingly contradictory movement features were able to coexist. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 18 key activists, this research investigated how the movement was structurally and culturally organised. Previous social movement analyses have tended to separate structure from culture, resulting in one-sided interpretations that have not adequately addressed the role both elements play in making politics. To overcome this shortcoming, this thesis developed a complementary approach to methodology and analysis that drew on social network analysis to investigate organisational structure, and framing to explore meaning-making and the achievement of collective identity. The network structure of the movement is decentralised, non-hierarchical, flexible and complex. This has enabled both diversity (seen in movement sub-groups, strategic and tactical disparities), and coordination (seen in the significant overlap of relational ties and the convergence of actors in mass mobilisations), to exist at the same time. The same kinds of characteristics are evident when looking to framing and movement collective identity. Activists relayed a broad range of oppositions to genetic engineering, but at the same time their concerns were shared at an elementary level, and were posed as challenging common understandings of Aotearoa New Zealand. The movement was therefore deeply engaged with and embedded in the wider cultural context of this country. The characteristics of flexibility and embeddedness displayed in this movement are a powerful combination for movement mobilisation and endurance. Until there is a commercial release of a genetically engineered crop in this country, the potential for future mobilisation remains.


The spatial variations of zooplankton communities (i.e. dispersion and retention) between
an inshore embayment and an adjacent offshore coastal site were investigated. Water
enters the bay by its northern shore and circulates through it in a clockwise direction
during an outgoing tide and an anticlockwise direction during an incoming tide.
Distribution of some species, such as Calanus australis, Temora turbinata, Noctiluca
scintillans, Podon sp, Penilia sp., showed a retention time in the bay of around 4 to 6
weeks. Although there is clear evidence that mixing occurred between the bay and the
channel via a complex combination of winds and tides, and no barrier or gradient could
be identified, some species were found only in the bay: examples are Oikopleura sp.,
crustacean larvae, Clausocalanus ingens, and Oithona sp., which were retained in the bay
probably through a combination of behavioural strategies e.g. vertical migration or
selective predation. Some oceanic species even maintained their position outside the bay
(Labidocera cervi), and were not found inshore.
Temporal and spatial variations of the surface zooplanktonic and neustonic
communities of the south east coastal waters of Tasmania were studied. Data on the
neuston in Australia are scarce and distribution atld life history of most of these species
are poorly known. Pontella novaezelandiae (Pontellidae, Copepoda) (Farran 1929) was
recorded for the first time in Tasmanian waters. Fifteen specimens were encountered
during summer 2000-01, whereas the previous records in the region were mostly in
autumn-winter off the North Island, New Zealand. In vitro observations of another
neustonic species, Labidocera cervi (Pontellidae, Copepoda) (Kramer, 1895), revealed
some diel migration patterns. Adults live within the surface 10 em layer during daylight
11
and spread throughout the water column just after dusk, and juveniles spend most of their
time at the surface, day or night. Some observations on the life history and ecology of
these two neustonic species are described.
The data obtained during 2000-01 sampling season were compared with earlier
data from 1971-73 sampled in nearby coastal waters. At the same site, using the same
methodology, two distinct communities were obtained in 1971-73 and 2000-01. The
importance of Antarctic and subantarctic species is greatly reduced compared to 1971-73
and the abundance of subtropical species has increased. These observations are supported
by changes in sea surface temperature and salinity off this coast during the last 45 years.
Changes in the zooplankton community cannot be explained by the ENSO cycle. These
changes are consistent with a regime shift that has been described in the North Pacific.


In 1985 the Australian Government announced a momentous policy initiative allowing Australian universities to enrol full-fee paying international students for the first time. This case study is an analysis of the policy development that ensued at Murdoch University between 1985 and 1991 as it responded to this opportunity to alleviate problems, with finance and low student numbers, that were threatening its very existence as an independent university. In particular, it examines the factors that had placed Murdoch in such a parlous situation, and the reasons why it was able to respond quickly and effectively so as to implement a highly successful and comprehensive program for the recruitment, enrolment and support of full-fee paying international students.

The case study format allowed for the use of a wide range of data sources. Sources of documentary evidence included: formal written works about the events and concepts under investigation, newspapers and other media items, letters, memoranda, agendas and minutes of meetings, and other internal Murdoch University documents. In addition, archival materials such as annual reports, budgets and financial records were consulted. Verification and extension of the documentary and archival evidence was gained from interviews with past and present staff and students of Murdoch University who had been involved with the program.

The study found that organisational changes initiated by successive Vice-Chancellors in the 1980s had replaced a slow and unresponsive, collegial style of decision-making, based on very wide consultation, with a more centralised, bureaucratic and market-oriented system. New, streamlined procedures, and the devolution of policy-development to small, semi-autonomous committees, enabled the University to rapidly develop policies and procedures for the inauguration of a program for full-fee paying international students in 1987. The continued success of the program, both in terms of enrolment numbers and financial returns, was found to be based on the creation and development of an almost independent, and entrepreneurial, International Office for the organisation of most aspects of the program, including the marketing and recruitment process.


We have manually curated a polarity lexicon for German, comprising word polarities and polarity strength values of about 8,000 words: nouns, verbs and adjectives. The decisions were primarily carried out using the synsets from GermaNet, a WordNet-like lexical database. In an evaluation on German novels, it turned out that the stock of adjectives was too small. We carried out experiments to automatically learn new subjective adjectives together with their polarity orientation and polarity strength. For this purpose, we applied a corpus-based approach that works with pairs of coordinated adjectives extracted from a large German newspaper corpus. In the context of this work, we evaluated two subtasks in detail. First, how good are we at reproducing the polarity classification – including our three- level strength measure – contained in our initial lexicon by machine learning methods. Second, because adding of training material did not improve the results at the expected rate, we evaluated the human intercoder agreement on polarity classifications in an experiment. The results show that judgements about the strength of polarity do vary considerably between different persons. Given these problems related to the design and automatic augmentation of polarity lexicons, we have successfully experimented with a semi-automatically approach where a list of reliable candidate words (here: adjectives) is generated to ease the manual annotation process.


Tourism has emerged as one of the largest industries in terms of income generation and employment opportunities around the globe. It seems that none of the settlements on earth can preserve their isolation today merely due to the inlux of globalization. Tourism has been established as a striking by-product of globalization. Due to its economic upshots on foreign currency earning without actually sending any tangible products out of the boarder, almost all the countries around the globe have begun to consign a high priority to its development. However, its effects and implications appear in numerous faces and facades both with momentary and enduring bearings - some with afirmative consignments and other with negative provocations. From socio-cultural dimension, tourism appears as a vehicle of cross-cultural interface resulting socio-cultural phenomena like diffusion, integration, acculturation and assimilation. Its apparent effects can be seen in every host society with different tangs and textures. The lifestyle of the people of tourist receiving community can not remain in isolation. This study analyzes the impacts caused by the development of tourism business over the lifestyles of the people of host societies viz. catchments of Fewa Lake of Pokhara and Sarangkot of Kaski, Nepal. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hjsa.v4i0.4675 Himalayan Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol.IV (2010) 206-223


This is a quality control study and analysis of Portland cement taken from four Pakistani cement plants (Deewan, Kohat, Lucky and Maple Leaf). These four samples were analysed and the determination of major oxides present was carried out. Loss on ignition and the percentage of insoluble residue was also determined. Our research shows percentage of major oxides present in these four samples i.e. calcium oxide, silicon dioxide, aluminium oxide, iron oxide, sulphur trioxide and magnesium oxide. According to the American Society for Testing and Materials Cement (ASTM C150), the percentage of these oxides, loss on ignition and insoluble residue of these four plants are within the specified quality control range. The present study compared the quality of different oxides at the Portland cement brands in Pakistan. The percentages of SiO 2 ,SO 3 , CaO, Al 2 O 3 ,MgO and Fe 2 O 3 were calculated according to American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM C150) uniform standards. The percentages of all of the brands were within the limits specified by the standard (ASTM C150).


While the celebrated graph neural networks yield effective representations for individual nodes of a graph, there has been relatively less success in extending to deep graph similarity learning. Recent work has considered either global-level graph-graph interactions or low-level node-node interactions, ignoring the rich cross-level interactions between parts of a graph and a whole graph. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Graph Matching Network (HGMN) for computing the graph similarity between any pair of graph-structured objects. Our model jointly learns graph representations and a graph matching metric function for computing graph similarity in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed HGMN model consists of a multi-perspective node-graph matching network for effectively learning crosslevel interactions between parts of a graph and a whole graph, and a siamese graph neural network for learning global-level interactions between two graphs. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed HGMN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph matching network baselines for both classification and regression tasks.


The USDA–ARS Tropical Agriculture Research Station (TARS) is responsible for conserving germplasm of a number of important agricultural crop species. Its banana (Musa spp.) collection is comprised of diploid, triploid, and tetraploid accessions of cultivated, ornamental, wild, and synthetic hybrid accessions. To estimate genetic diversity, identify gaps, determine integrity, and generate clonal reference multilocus DNA profiles for a total of 175 accessions in the collection, a set of 22 microsatellite markers developed in the framework of the Generation Challenge Program (www.generationcp.org/, accessed 30 June 2014) by Centre de Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement and recommended by the Global Musa Genomics Consortium were screened with an additional 15 reference DNA samples. Twenty-one of the 22 microsatellite markers amplified well and generated a total of 302 alleles with an average number of 14.4 alleles per locus. In general, profiles were reproducible and consistent for the 21 loci when clonal field and tissue culture plants were compared with reference samples. The average number of alleles and gene diversity estimates demonstrated substantial genetic diversity in the collection. Principal coordinate and cluster analyses grouped accessions in the collection according to their ploidy level and genomic compositions. Markers that were used in the study distinguished accessions to the subgroup level and identified mislabeled accessions, notably in the tissue culture collection where phenotypic differences are difficult to observe. The accessions and fingerprint profiles for the TARS collection are available through the USDA National Plant Germplasm System, Germplasm Resource Information Network (GRIN-Global) database


Peer-instruction has been shown to have a very positive effect on students' engagement and learning. PeerWise is a web-tool designed to allow peer-tutoring between students within a large class group. Students can write, answer and discuss Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) based on their work in-class. It is low-cost and low-maintenance software which has become increasingly popular across many subject disciplines as a method to introduce a peer-tutoring aspect to course work. In this study we introduce PeerWise as a form of continuous assessment to a wide and varied cohort of science students (N=509) across disciplines, undergraduate years, levels (certificate to honours degree) and institutes. Correlations between engagement with PeerWise and an increase in end of module exam results are investigated and found to be strongly correlated in one of the modules investigated. Students' attitudes to PeerWise are probed with a number of Likert style questions. It is found that the students agree that the tool benefits their understanding through the peer-activities of authoring and answering questions and to a lesser degree by discussion of questions with classmates. Some differences exist between class groups but overall the engagement levels across all groups are much higher than the minimum requirement set by the assessments.


ABSTRACT Research knowledge about the role of teachers' personality in shaping their mood is still limited. The present study explores the associations between teachers' five broad personality traits (known as the 'Big Five'), emotion regulation (suppression and reappraisal), and mood. Data collected from a sample of 113 Israeli teachers were analysed using structural equation modelling analysis and cluster analysis. Path model analysis indicated that suppression mediates the relations between teachers' conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism on one hand, and their negative mood on the other, and that reappraisal mediates the relations between teachers' conscientiousness and neuroticism on one hand, and their positive mood on the other. Cluster analysis revealed associations between three personality types of teachers with their emotion regulation and mood. The study clarifies the role that teachers' personality traits play in determining their affective life.


In digital audio systems, the amplitude of the signal is quantised with finite resolution. This is a nonlinear process which introduces distortion. We develop a Bayesian, model-based approach to reducing quantisation distortion when moving an audio signal to a higher resolution medium. The signal is modelled as a sum of sinusoids and an autoregressive (AR) process of unknown order. Estimation is performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Selection of the correct AR model order and number of sinusoids is found to be crucial to avoiding artefacts; both of these operations are incorporated into the MCMC structure. An approximate, but fast converging, MCMC method is developed for selecting the sinusoids, and moves between AR models of different orders are made using reversible-jump methods.


Abstract. Short-lived anthropogenic climate forcers (SLCFs), such as sulfate aerosols,
affect both climate and air quality. Despite being short-lived, these forcers
do not affect temperatures only locally; regions far away from the emission
sources are also affected. Climate metrics are often used in a policy context
to compare the climate impact of different anthropogenic forcing agents.
These metrics typically relate a forcing change in a certain region with a
temperature change in another region and thus often require a separate model
to convert emission changes to radiative forcing (RF) changes. In this study, we used a coupled Earth system model, NorESM (Norwegian Earth
System Model), to calculate emission-to-temperature-response metrics for
sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission changes in four different
policy-relevant regions: Europe (EU), North America (NA), East Asia (EA) and
South Asia (SA). We first increased the SO2 emissions in each
individual region by an amount giving approximately the same global average
radiative forcing change (−0.45 Wm−2). The global mean temperature
change per unit sulfur emission compared to the control experiment was
independent of emission region and equal to
∼0.006 K(TgSyr−1)−1. On a regional scale, the Arctic showed
the largest temperature response in all experiments. The second largest
temperature change occurred in the region of the imposed emission increase,
except when South Asian emissions were changed; in this experiment, the
temperature response was approximately the same in South Asia and East Asia.
We also examined the non-linearity of the temperature response by removing
all anthropogenic SO2 emissions over Europe in one experiment. In
this case, the temperature response (both global and regional) was twice that
in the corresponding experiment with a European emission increase. This
non-linearity in the temperature response is one of many uncertainties
associated with the use of simplified climate metrics.


A central thesis of this paper is that social science is the study of human experience, and hence strongly conditioned by history. Modern Western political, economic and social structures have emerged as a consequence of the repudiation of religion, and are based on secular principles. Many of these are inimical to Islamic principles, and cannot be adapted to an Islamic society. Muslim societies achieved freedom from colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century and sought to construct institutions in conformity with Islam. The development of Islamic economics is part of this process of transition away from Western colonial institutions. This paper focuses on the contrasts between Western economic theories and Islamic approaches to organization of economic affairs. Neoclassical theory is centered around the acquisitive instinct of humans, and makes competition the driving force of economic analysis. Islamic approaches foster cooperation and encourage generosity as the fundamental principle for handling economic affairs. Human beings have potential for good and evil, and are free to choose between the two; their behavior is not subject to mathematical laws postulated by neoclassical economic theory. The main message of Islam is that we must strive to achieve the potential for good both at the individual and at the social level. Behavior in the economic realm is also governed by this goal. Islamic law (Shari'ah) provides the framework for all activity within an Islamic society. In the economic domain, Islamic law regulates both methods by which money may be earned and also the ways it may be spent. Acquisition of wealth is permissible only in ways which are just to all parties concerned; exploitation, arbitrary taxation, and individual profit resulting in social harm is not permissible in Islamic law. This puts numerous restrictions on business practices utilized to make profits. For example, polluting the environment, or selling products which lead to moral corruption would not be permissible in Islamic law. Wealth which has been acquired becomes private property, which is both a trust and a test according to Islamic concepts. The "trust" aspect means that property must be used in ways beneficial to the individual and society. The "test" aspect means that those who have more than they need should take care of those who are in need. Ways in which acquired wealth can be spent is also subject to Islamic law. People are expected to strive to be self-sufficient and not ask from others. Thus striving to acquire wealth and spending it on personal and family needs is encouraged by Islamic law. Islam does not preach austerity and encourages a comfortable standard of living. At the same time, it strongly discourages spending on idle desires, luxuries, and ostentation. There is also a strong encouragement to spend what is beyond ones needs on social welfare. These fundamental principles for acquiring wealth, using property (acquired wealth), and spending it impact on all realms of economic activity. Since these are substantially different from Western ideas in all three areas, there are substantial contrasts between Western economic institutions and Islamic ones. The paper traces out these differences in many realms of economic activity. The primary objective of an Islamic state is to provide justice, and Islamic public finance is concerned with tracing the concrete implications of this abstraction in the economic realm. Western financial institutions have the acquisition and multiplication of wealth as their prime objective. Since acquisition of wealth can only be a means to an end, these institutions require modification in an Islamic society. Similarly, Islamic imperatives for social welfare require construction of certain uniquely Islamic types of institutions which do not have counterparts in the West. The paper discusses these issues in some detail.


In 1946, England rejoined FIFA and Stanley Rous, secretary of the Football Association, persuaded the FA to appoint Walter Winterbottom as the FA's first Director of Coaching, and the first England team manager. Over the next four years, before the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, Winterbottom assembled the first squad to compete for the Jules Rimet Trophy. The England national football team is now one of the oldest in the world. They have competed in the FIFA World Cup thirteen times since 1950, won the cup once in 1966, and reached the semi-finals in 1990. Football historian and statistician Tony Matthews explores each of England's World Cup appearances, from Brazil 1950 to Brazil 2014, giving detailed match reports and stats along with a historical narrative to set each tournament in its context. This is essential reading for any fan of the beautiful game.


Silicon photonic circuits are rapidly growing in complexity and spreading to new applications. However, programmable circuits consume much power and require active electrical interfaces. For the first time, we demonstrate a nonvolatile photonic MEMS π-phase switch using dual comb-drive actuation and adhesion forces, implemented in a silicon photonics foundry. Both nonvolatile states are low-loss, display low dispersion, could be cycled through over 100 times, and have retention times over 12 hours. We believe that the demonstrated nonvolatility combined with excellent optical performance can enable a new generation of programmable photonic chips that do not consume any electrical power once (re)configured.


We address the problem of instance-level facial attribute transfer without paired training data, e.g., faithfully transferring the exact mustache from a source face to a target face. This is a more challenging task than the conventional semantic-level attribute transfer, which only preserves the generic attribute style instead of instance-level traits. We propose the use of geometry-aware flow, which serves as a wellsuited representation for modeling the transformation between instance-level facial attributes. Specifically, we leverage the facial landmarks as the geometric guidance to learn the differentiable flows automatically, despite of the large pose gap existed. Geometry-aware flow is able to warp the source face attribute into the target face context and generate a warp-and-blend result. To compensate for the potential appearance gap between source and target faces, we propose a hallucination sub-network that produces an appearance residual to further refine the warp-and-blend result. Finally, a cycle-consistency framework consisting of both attribute transfer module and attribute removal module is designed, so that abundant unpaired face images can be used as training data. Extensive evaluations validate the capability of our approach in transferring instance-level facial attributes faithfully across large pose and appearance gaps. Thanks to the flow representation, our approach can readily be applied to generate realistic details on high-resolution images1.


Through a combined reading of the works of Philippe Gutton and V. Bonamino, the author examines three interconnected aspects of analytic work with adolescent patients: the styles, the tools, and the moving forces at work in the analytic treatment. This gives an idea of the particular position of the analyst working with adolescents, who must be ready to be transformed into a mediating object in order to re-start a capacity for thought and to enable the patient's intimate relationship with himself to be restored.


Background: Recent reports from the developing world have documented rheumatic fever (RE) incidence rates as high as 206/100 000 and Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) prevalence rates as high as 18.6/1000. The high frequency of RHD in the developing world necessitates aggressive prevention and control measures. Aim: The aim of the study was to examine the effect of intensive antenatal follow up program on decreasing cardiovascular complications among rheumatic pregnant woman. Design: Randomized controlled trial. Setting: This study was conducted at El Kasr-EL Aini, maternity hospitalCairoUniversity Hospitals. Sample: A total of 100 rheumatic pregnant women that attended the antenatal clinic at El Kasr-EL Aini, maternity hospital who could read and write, had functional class I and II cardiac disease, primigravida, nullipara with single fetus were recruited to this study and assigned randomly into two groups. Procedure: Women who met the inclusion criteria were interviewed and baseline assessment was done. The intervention was an intensive antenatal follow up program for decreasing cardiovascular complications among rheumatic pregnant woman. Patients in the study group (SG) were offered an intervention at three levels, basic, intermediate and comprehensive. Evaluation of the program was carried out in term of assessment of maternal and neonatal outcome. Results: There were several significant differences between the study group (SG) and control group (CG). In the SG, antepartum complications was less common, gestational age at birth was higher, postnatal hospital stay shorter, birth weight higher, more had vaginal deliveries with episiotomy, fewer had caesarean section, forceps deliveries and termination of pregnancy, and cardiac class was better at follow up as compared to the CG. Conclusion: The difficult issues in pregnancy complications by cardiac disease are best managed through a team approach. Establishing a pre-pregnancy plan will foster a better therapeutic relationship between all parties and allow for better understanding of the patient's beliefs regarding pregnancy, her disease and attitude towards medications. Mesh Terms: • Rheumatic heart disease


Prevalence sample-based data should be transmitted from Member States to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) using the EFSA Standard Sample Description version 2 (SSD2) standard. To support reporting countries in data transmission using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data transfer, specific guidance is given in this report covering the reporting of sample-based zoonoses and zoonotic agent data. This guidance is specifically aimed at guiding the reporting of information under the framework of Directive 2003/99/EC and of Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/772. The objective is to explain in detail the individual data elements that are included in the EFSA (SSD2) data model to be used for the XML prevalence sample-based data transmission through the Data Collection Framework according to the protocol described in the EFSA Guidance on Data Exchange version 2 (GD2). In particular, data elements to be reported are explained, including information about the data type, a reference to the list of allowed terms and business rules or requirements that may apply. © European Food Safety Authority, 2020


Bezier curves (BC) are important tools in a wide range of diverse and challenging applications, from computer aided design to generic object shape descriptors. A major constraint of the classical BC is that only global information concerning control points (CP) is considered, consequently there may be a sizeable gap between the BC and its control polygon (CtrlPoly), leading to a large distortion in shape representation. While BC variants like degree elevation, composite BC, and refinement and subdivision narrow this gap, they increase the number of CP and thereby, both the required bit-rate and computational complexity. In addition, while quasiBezier curves (QBC) close the gap without increasing the number of CP, they reduce the underlying distortion by only a fixed amount. This paper presents a novel contribution to BC theory, with the introduction of a dynamic-Bezier curve (DBC) model, which embeds variable localised CP information into the inherently global Bezier framework, by strategically moving BC points towards the CtrlPoly. A shifting parameter (SP) is defined that enables curves lying within the region between the BC and CtrlPoly to be generated, with no commensurate increase in CP. DBC provides a flexible rate-distortion (RD) criterion for shape coding applications, with a theoretical model for determining the optimal SP value for any admissible distortion being formulated. Crucially DBC retains core properties of the classical BC, including the convex hull 1 Corresponding author: E-mail: email@example.com; email@example.com; Tel.: +61-3-99026133; Fax: +61-3-990-26842. Mailing address:GSIT, Monash University, Churchill, Victoria – 3842, Australia. and affine invariance, and can be seamlessly integrated into both the vertex-based shape coding and shape descriptor frameworks to improve their RD performance. DBC has been empirically tested upon a number of natural and synthetically shaped objects, with qualitative and quantitative results confirming its consistently superior shape approximation performance, compared with the classical BC, QBC and other established BC-based shape descriptor techniques. Index Terms – Vertex-based shape coding, image processing, video processing, and Bezier curves.


When concrete loses its moisture, it shrinks and results in cracking. In addition to undesirable effects on the appearance of concrete, cracks reduce its strength and durability. Fibers are used in concrete in order to control shrinkage cracks. The goal of this study is to evaluate the effects of micro and macro synthetic fiber in reducing the drying shrinkage and cracking under restrained conditions. For this purpose, in the first phase of the study, the effects of two types of microfibers, polypropylene and double-part, were selected. The results of the first phase of the study showed that polypropylene fibers have a better performance in improving initial cracking time and reducing the maximum crack width. The second phase of the study investigated the effect of macro synthetic fibers as well as the micro and macro synthetic fibers, hybrid mixes, in reducing the drying shrinkage of restrained conditions. The experimental results obtained in the second phase showed that the presence of macro synthetic fibers, due to the high modulus of elasticity, had a significant effect on drying shrinkage. The results also showed that the hybrid mixes had the best performance.


Government use policy to achieve certain outcomes. Sometimes the desired ends are worthwhile, and sometimes they are pernicious. Cross-country regressions have been the tool of choice in assessing the effectiveness of policies and the empirical relevance of these two diametrically opposite views of government behavior. When government policy responds systematically to economic or political objectives, the standard growth regression in which economic growth (or any other performance indicator) is regressed on policy tells us nothing about the effectiveness of policy and whether government motives are good or bad.


The Natural Talent traineeship scheme, run by The Conservation Volunteers (TCV), aims to address skills shortages in taxonomy and specialist habitat management within the conservation sector. The scheme is currently funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and previously the Heritage Lottery Fund. There are 60 trainees to date, many of them placed with museums across the UK where they receive expert mentoring, guidance and access to museum collections to develop their skills. Over 90% of trainees are employed in the sector, and over 30,000 individuals have engaged with the trainees through outreach and training delivered as part of the scheme.


OF DISSERTATION MECHANISMS AND POTENTIAL THERAPY ON DISRUPTED BLOOD PRESSURE CIRCADIAN RHYTHM IN DIABETES Arterial blood pressure (BP) undergoes a 24-hour oscillation that peaks in the active day and reaches a nadir at night during sleep in humans. Reduced nocturnal BP fall (also known as non-dipper) is the most common disruption of BP circadian rhythm and is associated with increased risk of untoward cardiovascular events and target organ injury. Up to 75% of diabetic patients are non-dippers. However, the mechanisms underlying diabetes associated non-dipping BP are largely unknown. To address this important question, we generated a novel diabetic db/db-mPer2 mouse model (db/db-mPer2) that allows quantitatively measuring of mPER2 protein oscillation by real-time mPer2 bioluminescence monitoring in vitro and in vivo. Using this model, we demonstrated that the db/db-mPer2 mice have a diminished BP daily rhythm. The phase of the mPER2 daily oscillation is advanced to different extents in explanted peripheral tissues from the db/db-mPer2 mice relative to that in the control mice. However, no phase shift is found in the central oscillator, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The results indicate that the desynchrony of mPER2 daily oscillation in the peripheral tissues contributes to the loss of BP daily oscillation in diabetes. Extensive research over the past decades has been focused on how the components of food (what we eat) and the amount of food (how much we eat) affect metabolic diseases. Only recently has it become appreciated that the timing of food intake (when we eat), independent of total caloric and macronutrient quality, is also critical for metabolic health. To investigate the potential effect of the timing of food intake on the BP circadian rhythm, we simultaneously monitored the BP and food intake profiles in the diabetic db/db and control mice using radiotelemetry and BioDAQ systems. We found the loss of BP daily rhythm is associated with disrupted food intake rhythm in the db/db mice. In addition, the normal BP daily rhythm is altered in the healthy mice with abnormal feeding pattern, in which the food is available only during the inactive-phase. To explore whether imposing a normal food intake pattern is able to prevent and restore the disruption of BP circadian rhythm, we conducted active-time restricted feeding (ATRF) in the db/db mice. Strikingly, ATRF completely prevents and restorers the disrupted BP daily rhythm in the db/db mice. While multiple mechanisms likely contribute to the protection of ATRF on the BP daily rhythm, we found that ATRF improves the rhythms of energy metabolism, sleep-wake cycle, BP-regulatory hormones and autonomic nervous system (ANS) in the db/db mice. To further investigate the molecular mechanism by which ATRF regulates BP circadian rhythm, we determined the effect of ATRF on the mRNA expressions of core clock genes and clock target genes in the db/db mice. Of particular interest is that we found among all the genes we examined, the mRNA oscillation of Bmal1, a key core clock gene, is disrupted by diabetes and selectively restored by the ATRF in multiple peripheral tissues in the db/db mice. More importantly, we demonstrated that Bmal1 is partially required for ATRF to protect the BP circadian rhythm. In summary, our findings indicate that the desynchrony of peripheral clocks contributes to the abnormal BP circadian pattern in diabetes. Moreover, our studies suggest ATRF as a novel and effective chronotherapy against the disruption of BP circadian rhythm in diabetes.


Modern blood transfusion is very safe but preventable death and major morbidity still occurs. Inappropriate decisions to transfuse put patients at unnecessary risk of transfusion errors, reactions and transfusion-transmitted infection. Identification errors (of patients, blood samples and blood components) by hospital staff are the root cause of most 'wrong blood into patient' incidents, including ABO-incompatible transfusions. Severe acute transfusion reactions are the most common cause of major morbidity. These include immunological reactions (predominantly allergy/anaphylaxis, haemolytic reactions and lung injury), circulatory overload and rare bacterial contamination of blood components. If a serious transfusion reaction is suspected – ; assess clinically and start stop the transfusion resuscitation if necessary; that the details on the patient's ID band and the compatibility check label of the blood component match; for medical assistance; the transfusion laboratory. call contact Transfusion-transmitted infection is now a very rare event, underpinned by voluntary donation, donor selection procedures and microbiological testing, but constant vigilance is required as new threats emerge. Variant CJD transmission by blood has had a major impact on transfusion practice in the UK although the risk appears to be receding.


Studies investigating associations between health outcomes and exposure to environmental pollutants benefit from measures of exposure made at the individual level. In this thesis we consider geostatistical modelling strategies aimed at providing such individual-level estimates. We present three papers showing how to adapt the standard univariate stationary Gaussian geostatistical model according to the nature of the exposure under consideration. In the first paper, we show how informative spatio-temporal covariates can be used to simplify the correlation structure of the assumed Gaussian process. We apply the method to data from a historical cohort study in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, designed to investigate links between adverse birth outcomes and maternal exposure to black smoke, measured by a fixed network of monitoring stations throughout a 32-year period. In the second paper, we show how predictions in the stationary Gaussian model change when the data and prediction locations cannot be measured precisely, and are therefore subject to positional error. We demonstrate that ignoring positional error results in biased predictions with misleading prediction errors. In the third paper, we consider models for multivariate exposures, concentrating on the bivariate case. We review and compare existing modelling strategies for bivariate geostatistical data and fit a common component model to a data-set of radon measurements from a case-control study designed to investigate associations with lung cancer in Winnipeg, Canada.


This research studied the relationship between good corporate governance (GCG) and the company's performance. The previous studies on this topic revealed inconsistency in the relationship. In this research, GCG applies to agency theory and stewardship theory to measure the company's performance in term of ROE and ROA. The objective of this research is to study the relationship among GCG, company's performance and moderating of manager's compensation and foreign ownership. Methodology used in this research is moderating regression analysis (MRA) while using 167 collected respondents to acknowledge GCG and company's performance to test whether they have significant relationship in term of ROE-ROA or not. The results of this research indicate that GCG in Indonesia has not yet been considered necessary to evaluate the company's performance. The company's performance is measured in term of profitability. However, all managers should maintain relationship in harmony between principal, agent and the foreign ownership in order not to will trim down the agency cost.


Music is an immensely powerful affective medium that pervades our everyday life. With ever advancing technology, the reproduction and application of music for emotive and information transfer purposes has never been more prevalent. In this paper we introduce a rule-based engine for influencing the perceived emotions of music. Based on empirical music psychology, we attempt to formalise the relationship between musical elements and their perceived emotion. We examine the modification to structural aspects of music to allow for a graduated transition between perceived emotive states. This engine is intended to provide music reproduction systems with a finer grained control over this affective medium; where perceived musical emotion can be influenced with intent. This intent comes from both an external application and the audience. Using a series of affective computing technologies, an audience's response metrics and attitudes can be incorporated to model this intent. A generative feedback loop is set up between the external application, the influencing process and the audience's response to this, which together shape the modification of musical structure. The effectiveness of our rule system for influencing perceived musical emotion was examined in earlier work, with a small test study providing generally encouraging results.


In order to eliminate the salt pepper and Gaussian mixed noise in X-ray weld image, the extreme value characteristics of salt and pepper noise are used to separate the mixed noise, and the non local mean filtering algorithm is used to denoise it. Because the smoothness of the exponential weighted kernel function is too large, it is easy to cause the image details fuzzy, so the cosine coefficient based on the function is adopted. An improved non local mean image denoising algorithm is designed by using weighted Gaussian kernel function. The experimental results show that the new algorithm reduces the noise and retains the details of the original image, and the peak signal-to-noise ratio is increased by 1.5 dB. An adaptive salt and pepper noise elimination algorithm is proposed, which can automatically adjust the filtering window to identify the noise probability. Firstly, the median filter is applied to the image, and the filtering results are compared with the pre filtering results to get the noise points. Then the weighted average of the middle three groups of data under each filtering window is used to estimate the image noise probability. Before filtering, the obvious noise points are removed by threshold method, and then the central pixel is estimated by the reciprocal square of the distance from the center pixel of the window. Finally, according to Takagi Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy rules, the output estimates of different models are fused by using noise probability. Experimental results show that the algorithm has the ability of automatic noise estimation and adaptive window adjustment. After filtering, the standard mean square deviation can be reduced by more than 20%, and the speed can be increased more than twice. In the enhancement part, a nonlinear image enhancement method is proposed, which can adjust the parameters adaptively and enhance the weld area automatically instead of the background area. The enhancement effect achieves the best personal visual effect. Compared with the traditional method, the enhancement effect is better and more in line with the needs of industrial field.


The dynamic simulation of mechanical effects has a long history in computer graphics. The classical methods in this field discretize Newton's second law in a variety of Lagrangian or Eulerian ways, and formulate forces appropriate for each mechanical effect: joints for rigid bodies; stretching, shearing or bending for deformable bodies and pressure, or viscosity for fluids, to mention just a few. In the last years, the class of position‐based methods has become popular in the graphics community. These kinds of methods are fast, stable and controllable which make them well‐suited for use in interactive environments. Position‐based methods are not as accurate as force‐based methods in general but they provide visual plausibility. Therefore, the main application areas of these approaches are virtual reality, computer games and special effects in movies. This state‐of‐the‐art report covers the large variety of position‐based methods that were developed in the field of physically based simulation. We will introduce the concept of position‐based dynamics, present dynamic simulation based on shape matching and discuss data‐driven upsampling approaches. Furthermore, we will present several applications for these methods.


Fifteen years ago the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody drew attention to the fact that the rate of imprisonment of Indigenous Australians was 13 times higher than the corresponding rate for nonIndigenous Australians. Efforts to reduce Indigenous imprisonment rates over the intervening period have met with little success. Indeed, over the last few years, the rate of Indigenous imprisonment has increased. The research reported here had two main objectives. The first was to determine whether there is any evidence of racial bias in the sentencing of Indigenous offenders. The second was to determine what other factors account for the higher proportion of Indigenous offenders sentenced to terms of imprisonment. The research revealed no evidence of racial bias in sentencing. The higher rate at which Indigenous offenders are sent to prison stems mainly from (a) a higher rate of conviction for violent crime and (b) a higher rate of re-offending, particularly following the imposition of sanctions intended as alternatives to full-time imprisonment. The implications of these findings for policy are discussed.


For the last two decades, Ready-Made Garment (RMG) Industry has been the life-blood of the economy of Bangladesh. This sector accounted for about 80% of the total export earnings of the country. In the recent years, it has been observed that the workers have came down in the street and making insurgence on their demand and tried to destruct public properties. As a result, companies are losing working-hours and production targets. It also hampers export earnings and the image of the country to the international markets. In this connection, this study tried to find out the factors behind the unrest in the ready-made garment industry of Bangladesh and identifies some measures to improve the situation. In this study, 244 workers were interviewed from the different garment factories located in Savar and Gazipur district of Bangladesh. Data were analyzed with factor analysis, regression model, and by using other suitable statistical tools. The results show that the main causes of labor unrest include lack of minimum facility and safety at work, sub-standard living conditions, deferred payment of wages and benefits, international conspiracy and coercive role of the law enforcing agency, too much dependency on buyers, pressures from the workers and local terrorists, use of workers by others and rumors, un-fulfillment of education demands of their children, distorted minded workers, political instability of the country, too much workload, lack of promotion opportunity, insufficient wages to survive etc. If the policy makers of Bangladesh consider these causes and make policies to overcome the problems the labor unrest in garment sector may be minimized.


Pump and probe reflective imaging using a soft x-ray laser probe was applied to the observation of the early stage of femtosecond laser ablation process on platinum. In strongly excited area, drastic and fast reflectivity drop was observed. In moderately excited area, the decay of the reflectivity is slower than that in the strongly excited area, and the reflectivity reaches its minimum at t = 160 ps. In weakly excited area, laser-induced reflectivity change was not observed. In addition, the point where the reflectivity dip was observed at t = 10 ps and t = 40 ps, coincides with the position of the edge of reflectivity drop at t = 160 ps. These results give the critical information about the femtosecond laser ablation.


Abstract This paper focuses on climate-induced migration. We construct a simple theoretical model where, in a first step, climate shocks accelerate the transition from the traditional to the modern sector, leading rural workers to move to urban centres within national borders, while in a second step, downward pressures on wages due to the greater labour supply in cities push people to engage in international migration. To test this hypothesis, we exploit a rich panel dataset, displaying a representative picture of bilateral migration flows and climatic data across 222 countries for the period 1960–2000. Findings suggest that in the next few years the climate-induced growth rate of migrant stocks might be in a range between 8.6 per cent and 12.8 per cent, especially from developing countries, where the level of rural employment is more likely to be affected by climatic shocks.


RNA is not only an intermediate for the flow of genetic information between DNA and protein. The transcription of the entire genomes generates a myriad non-protein coding RNA in addition to protein coding genes. Among these transcripts, lncRNA which is the least well understood and they cannot be considered as merely transcriptional noises. Here, we review the emerging role of lncRNA interactions with binding proteins (RBP) to perform multidirectional functions in transcription and epigenetic gene regulations, control of mRNA splicing, translation and post translational modifications. In addition, lncRNAs may acts as cellular thermostat that helps in preserving of cellular homeostasis. Keywords: lncRNAs; RBPs; cellular hemostasis