Background: Screening using fecal occult blood testing (FOBt) reduces colorectal cancer mortality, but the test has low sensitivity. A "missed" cancer may cause psychologic harms in the screened population that partially counteract the benefits of early detection. Methods: Three hundred and eleven people diagnosed with colorectal cancer (i) after a negative FOBt result (interval cancer), (ii) a positive result (screen-detected cancer), or (iii) in regions where screening was not offered, completed questions on quality of life (FACT-C), depression (CES-D), perceived diagnostic delay, and trust in the results of FOBt screening. Fifteen withheld consent to data matching with medical records, leaving a sample size of 296. Results: Controlling for demographic and clinical variables, patients with an interval cancer reported poorer quality of life (difference in means = 6.16, P = 0.03) and more diagnostic delay (OR, 0.37; P = 0.02) than patients with screen-detected disease, with no differences in depression. No differences were observed between the interval cancer group and the group not offered screening on these measures. Patients with an interval cancer reported the lowest levels of trust in FOBt. Conclusions: An interval cancer has adverse effects on trust in FOBt, but does not result in worse psychologic outcomes compared with people diagnosed in areas with no screening program. People with an interval cancer report poorer quality of life than people with screen-detected disease. Impact: Improvements in test sensitivity could improve quality of life among people who complete an FOB test over and above any benefits already conferred by earlier detection. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 24(7); 1032–8. ©2015 AACR.


Many objects of common use (tools, utensils, metals, knick-knacks, dishes and glasses) and artifacts (for example paintings of all types) are composed of two or more layers. In many cases, it would be useful to determine the correct location, composition and thickness of the various layers.

Non-destructive and non-invasive methods are described, based on energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence which are able to 'reconstruct' the complete structure of a multilayered sample. These methods use, in different ways, the ratios of characteristic X-rays emitted by the elements of the layers, and, in particular, two effects can be usefully employed, effects which are based on the differential attenuation of Kα and Kβ or Lα and Lβ X-rays:

Different self-attenuation of K or L X-rays emitted by an element characterizing a layer because of the different energy of the two K or L X-rays;
Different attenuation of the two K or L X-rays of an element characterizing a layer by a second superimposed layer.

Furthermore, the ratio of the Kα (or Lα) X-rays emitted by an element characterizing the internal layer, to the Kα (or Lα) X-rays emitted by an element characterizing a second superimposed layer, can also be employed in the 'reconstruction' of the layers.

In this paper, the theoretical background of all these methods is described, and typical examples are shown. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The Olympic Games are an important sporting event with notable consequences for the general economic landscape of the host city. Traditional economic assessments focus on the aggregated impact of the event on the national income, but fail to provide micro-scale insights on why local businesses will benefit from the increased activity during the Games.In this paper we provide a novel approach to modeling the impact of the Olympic Games on local retailers by analyzing a dataset mined from a large location-based social service, Foursquare. We hypothesize that the spatial positioning of businesses as well as the mobility trends of visitors are primary indicators of whether retailers will rise their popularity during the event. To confirm this we formulate a retail winners prediction task in the context of which we evaluate a set of geographic and mobility metrics. We find that the proximity to stadiums, the diversity of activity in the neighborhood, the nearby area sociability, as well as the probability of customer flows from and to event places such as stadiums and parks are all vital factors. Through supervised learning techniques we demonstrate that the success of businesses hinges on a combination of both geographic and mobility factors. Our results suggest that location-based social networks, where crowdsourced information about the dynamic interaction of users with urban spaces becomes publicly available, present an alternative medium to assess the economic impact of large scale events in a city.


It is with great sadness that the Entomological Society learned of the passing of Prof. Graeme Whitehead, one of the stalwarts of our Society. Graeme Whitehead was a true son and gentleman of the Eastern Cape. He was raised on a farm near Queenstown, where he learned to speak Xhosa at an early age. Graeme matriculated from the famous Queens College in Queenstown in 1941 and proceeded to Rhodes University, another world-renowned Eastern Cape educational institution.


Developing interactive software, such as websites or games, is a particularly engaging way to learn computer science. However, teaching and giving feedback on such software is time-consuming -- standard approaches require instructors to manually grade student-implemented interactive programs. As a result, online platforms that serve millions, like Code.org, are unable to provide any feedback on assignments for implementing interactive programs, which critically hinders students' ability to learn. One approach toward automatic grading is to learn an agent that interacts with a student's program and explores states indicative of errors via reinforcement learning. However, existing work on this approach only provides binary feedback of whether a program is correct or not, while students require finer-grained feedback on the specific errors in their programs to understand their mistakes. In this work, we show that exploring to discover errors can be cast as a meta-exploration problem. This enables us to construct a principled objective for discovering errors and an algorithm for optimizing this objective, which provides fine-grained feedback. We evaluate our approach on a set of over 700K real anonymized student programs from a Code.org interactive assignment. Our approach provides feedback with 94.3% accuracy, improving over existing approaches by 17.7% and coming within 1.5% of human-level accuracy. Project web page: https://ezliu.github.io/dreamgrader.


This thesis explores the development of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions. It aims at demonstrating the connection between Russell's views on the subject of denoting and his attempt, in the period 1903-05, to develop a solution to 'the Contradiction' (i.e. the Russell Paradox). The thesis argues that the discovery of the theory of descriptions, and the way in which it works, are best understood against the backdrop of Russell's work on the paradoxes. A new understanding of Russell's seminal paper 'On Denoting' is presented, including a novel interpretation of the notorious 'Gray's Elegy Argument', in which Russell argues against his earlier theory of denoting. That Russell's work on denoting is connected to his work on the paradoxes is
reasonably well-known: the nature of the connection has not, however, been adequately brought out in the literature. This is addressed through demonstrating the relationship between Russell's work on denoting and his development of the 'substitutional theory' of classes and relations. This theory eliminates classes and propositional functions in favour of matrices and substitutions. The role of the theory of descriptions in the development of the substitutional theory is commonly supposed to be merely that the theory of descriptions facilitates the ontological elimination of classes. But this elimination was equally possible on Russell's earlier theory of denoting (which he had rejected in the Gray's Elegy Argument). In the thesis it is suggested that the theory of descriptions brings with it a new conception of analysis, and that it is through the
introduction of this new form of analysis—rather than through the elimination of classes—that the theory of descriptions facilitates the substitutional approach.


Robots need to learn behaviors in intuitive and practical ways for widespread deployment in human environments. To learn a robot behavior end-to-end, we train a variant of the ResNet that maps eye-in-hand camera images to end-effector velocities. In our setup, a human teacher demonstrates the task via joystick. We show that a simple servoing task can be learned in less than an hour including data collection, model training and deployment time. Moreover, 16 minutes of demonstrations were enough for the robot to learn the task.


Local health departments (LHDs) across the United States deliver a range of essential public health services, yet little is known about the costs that LHDs incur in providing these services and the factors that may cause costs to vary both within and across health departments. This report first describes the variations in the costs of one core public health activity commonly provided by LHDs: food hygiene services. It then analyzes the factors that drive LHDs' cost of service provision focusing on the role of economies of scale and economies of scope. Using data for all LHDs in Florida for 2008 and 2010, the study found that the costs of providing food hygiene services varied substantially across LHDs. Economies of scale are demonstrated in multivariate analysis findings as providing greater volumes of services was associated with lower per unit costs. Providing a greater scope of public health services, on the other hand, does not appear to affect the costs of food hygiene services. An in-depth understanding of their cost structure presents an opportunity for LHDs to communicate to policymakers information about the resources needed to provide core public health services. Moreover, it allows public health practitioners to engage in activities aimed at increasing the efficiency of service provision. This study is a first step in the search for evidence of economies of scale that may help to lower costs and increase efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


In contrast to traditional practice, today juvenile courts and child welfare agencies attempt to identify and involve children's fathers in cases as soon as possible. This changing approach to nonresident fathers, in turn, makes child protection cases more complicated. If poorly implemented, it can also threaten to undermine the goals of modern child protection law-insuring children's safety, reuniting children with the parents from whom they were removed when possible, and moving them rapidly into alternate permanent homes when not possible. Most obviously, if the policy of involving nonresidential fathers is implemented woodenly, by requiring that children be placed with the fathers at the outset of the case when little is known about them, the children may be endangered. Less dramatically, efforts to work with fathers can result in children remaining in the system longer. And working with fathers can undermine, or even short-circuit, efforts to reunite children with the mothers from whom they were taken, raising problems of defining children's best interests as well as fairness to both parents in what amounts to state-generated custody contests. This article describes the changing practices and the reasons for them, explores the problems that may be created, and proposes solutions.


This article originally appeared in the November 2013 Appellate Practice Committee newsletter.TRIAL is fast approaching. Trial counsel knows a question of first impression is lurking in the background. A case of first impression is "[a] case that presents the court with an issue of law that has not previously been decided by any controlling legal authority in that jurisdiction." Preparing before the frenzy of trial to develop a strategy for addressing a question of first impression at the right time and in the right procedural context is of vital importance to trial counsel.For example, in recent years we have encountered multiple plaintiffs' counsel in different jurisdictions who have sought a finding of liability as a matter of law based on the equitable doctrine of offensive nonmutual collateral estoppel. Under that doctrine, a plaintiff seeks to prevent a defendant from litigating an issue that the defendant had previously litigated and lost in an action with another party. The plaintiffs' counsel argued that summary judgment on the questions of negligence and defect was proper based on the fact that juries in other jurisdictions had found either that the manufacturer was negligent in the design of the product or that the product at issue was defective under identical theories of defect.Many courts recognize the use of that doctrine in the right circumstances, even in the negligence and products liability context. The Supreme Court in our jurisdiction had sanctioned the use of the equitable doctrine of offensive nonmutual collateral estoppel in certain contexts. That court had not, however, applied that doctrine in the context of negligence or products liability involving mass produced consumer goods.Counsel facing a question of first impression like this should develop a strategy with appellate counsel for addressing the question before the trial court and on appeal. Considering all the options and having a strategy in place will help minimize the possibility of mistrial, waiver, or reversal on appeal.Counsel Should Plan A Strategy For Addressing a Question of First Impression Long Before TrialA question of first impression gives trial counsel the opportunity to use the wellreasoned rationale of persuasive authority from other jurisdictions as well as public policy arguments to advocate a client's position. Even if trial counsel perceives that the trial court will not have the time or resources necessary to do an in-depth analysis, laying that foundation in the briefing at the trial court level is necessary to avoid a finding of waiver in the event of an appeal from a final judgment.Trial counsel should not leave a question of first impression to appellate counsel to address on the fly during trial or as an afterthought on appeal. Instead, trial counsel litigating a case raising a question of first impression should recruit the assistance of appellate counsel long before trial to map out a workable strategy of when and how to raise that question, or to seek intermediate appellate review, to avoid procedural pitfalls that could result in mistrial, waiver, or reversal on appeal.Intermediate Appellate Review May Be Allowed in Certain Procedural ContextsTo avoid the possibility of reversal on appeal, trial counsel should consider whether intermediate appellate review is an option. Federal courts allow an immediate appeal from a "small class" of collateral orders. Many appellate courts are more inclined to exercise their discretionary mandamus jurisdiction to review a question of first impression. As a general rule, discovery orders are interlocutory orders that are not immediately appealable. Writs of mandamus for discovery orders can be obtained in extraordinary circumstances. Further, depending on the jurisdiction's statutes and rules, certain interlocutory orders may be immediately appealable by right.Trial and appellate counsel should review the governing law carefully as the failure to timely appeal an interlocutory order appealable by right may preclude intermediate appellate review by a writ. …


Charles M. Joseph's recent monograph explores an important subset of Stravinsky's complete oeuvre, namely his works for dance. One of the aims of the book is to stress the importance of dance for Stravinsky throughout his career as a source of inspiration that at times significantly shaped his development as a composer. Joseph offers richly contextualized and detailed pictures of Stravinsky's ballets, ones that will be extremely useful for both dance and music scholars. While he isolates each work, several themes run through Joseph's text. Among the most important are Stravinsky's self–positioning as simultaneously Russian and cosmopolitan; and Stravinsky's successes in collaboration, through which he was able to create fully integrated ballets that elevated music's traditionally subservient role in relation to choreography.


One of the important problems of the environmental economics is the development of methodology for quantifying the assimilative capacity (AC) of a territory. The article analyzes the existing approaches to determining and assessing the AC of a territory. We justify the advantages of using the energy approach. The authors' method consists in using the maximum permissible energy load (MPEL) for quantitative assessment of the AC of a territory. MPEL is a value that the ecological and economic system can withstand for a long time without changing its properties. We determine MPEL on the basis of data on the ability of various categories of land to absorb greenhouse gases (GHG), as well as the specific GHG emissions per ton of conventional fuel. Further, we compare the calculated value of MPEL in fuel equivalents with the actual consumption of fuel resources for the needs of the national economy. These values ratio can serve as a standard for measuring and balancing the environmental and economic system. The authors have validated the described method on the example of the Sverdlovsk region, which is characterized by a high level of man's impact. Calculations show that the actual consumption of fossil fuels in the region exceeds MPEL. That indicates an imbalance in the ecological and economic system and may lead to further deterioration of the environmental quality in the region. The proposed methodological approach and calculations can be used when developing strategic planning documents for a territory, including its energy strategy


This paper introduces the Memetic toolkit for recording the normally ephemeral interactions conducted via internet video conferencing, and making these navigable and manipulable in linear and non-linear ways. We introduce two complementary interaction visualizations: argumentation-based concept maps to elucidate the conceptual structure of the discourse using a visual language, and interactive event timelines generated from the meeting metadata. We discuss in detail the affordances of Memetic's tools, in particular the Compendium hypermedia mapping tool, and the Meeting Replay tool that renders the semantic navigation indices into the videoconference replays. Additionally, with respect to methodology and evaluation, we describe how we are engaging diverse end-user communities in the process of designing and deploying these tools.


Open-source software is becoming a gradually more popular as a software development method; some of the most successful softwares are for example: the Linux operating system, Mozilla, Apache web server and openoffice.org. Open source softwares viewed by many as being very good in terms of their usage, reliability, performance and market share. Mostly open source software developer focus on functionality and different feature of the software; on the other hand they ignore the user centric design requirement. In this thesis the importance of the usability in Open source applications, such as Openoffice.org are described and how usability can be measured by assessing user performance such as, satisfaction, effectiveness and acceptability. Openoffice.org is a freely available office suite in different operating system and with different languages. The OpenOffice.org 3.0 feature set is similar to the feature set of Microsoft Office 2003. It has word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications all together within a common suite. But still this application suite is not much familiar among common users that cause a major usability threat for usability studies. The basic purposed of this thesis was to find out the issues and users satisfaction regarding this Openoffice.org. Empirical method of usability assessment such as thinks aloud, Questionnaires and interviews were used.


The multipurpose reflectometer was developed primarily to measure apparent reflectance, specular gloss and trichromatic coefficients. These measurements are useful in the ceramic, paint, textile, paper and chemical industries to indicate lightness, gloss and color of finished articles. In the reflectometer, two light beams from a single source are directed along separate paths to two barrier-layer photo-cells. Various types of these photo-cells were studied to find which could be used most advantageously. The reflectometer employs a substitution null method and requires a galvanometer to indicate equality of the currents generated by the two photo-cells. For each sample tested, there is a photometric adjustment to restore equality of the currents. The amounts of photometric adjustment are measured on the direct-reading scales; one of which is used for apparent reflectance and the other for specular gloss. Because of its high precision, the instrument is well suited for measuring small differences in apparent reflectance, gloss or color of nearly identical samples. However, for greatest accuracy, it is necessary to correct the scale readings by calibration.


Inter-agency collaboration in health research, health policy development, planning, decision-making and outcomes-tracking is required to enhance governance and adaptive capacity within complex health and socio-economic systems. Collaborative information infrastructures are emerging that support such collaboration and serve to increase the resilience of health and social systems through the development of social capital, fostering innovation, the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives and redundancy in governance systems. World leading web-based collaborative structures and services are being developed in Ontario that enable government and society to foster the emergence of collaboration and governance networks. These technologies although not yet applied in the health sector have been widely applied in environment and community economic development. The authors hope that by presenting this paper containing examples in many sectors and showing some extrapolation to the health sector, the health community will see the benefits of adopting these approaches in health research, public and population health, and health policy development.


Abstract. Convective storms over East Mediterranean sea and Israel were tracked by METEOSAT Second Generation (MSG). The MSG data was used to retrieve time series of the precipitation formation processes in the clouds, the temperature of onset of precipitation, and an indication to aerosol loading over the sea. Strong correlation was found between the aerosol loading and the depth above cloud base required for the initialization of effective precipitation processes (indicated by the effective radius = 15 µm threshold). It seems from the data presented here that the clouds' response to the aerosol loading is very short.


A novel method for assembling endcaps to optical fibers is presented. The method relies on femtosecond laser welding and milling of a glass slide to the polished end of the fiber. The fiber is welded to the glass slide in the cladding region so as to seal the core area without affecting its optical transparency. The same laser is used to mill through the glass slide thereby shaping a microscopic endcap with a diameter slightly larger than that of the fiber. The method was applied to both a standard and a microstructured optical fiber. Preliminary results are also presented on femtosecond laser welding parallel to an interface showing the potential of this approach for optical fiber fusion splicing.


As we choose between on- site document delivery services or remote services and attempt to evaluate types of access available, costs involved, turn-around time, ease of order placement, delivery options, frequency of update, and technical support provided, we have created for ourselves not only a charmed brew, but as Ronald Leach says, "an electronic tower of Babylon."[5] Confused? Where does the confusion lie? Not only must we choose between the services I just mentioned, but we need to decide on the system and mode of delivery as well! Will we use fax, or how about Federal Express, Overnight Courier, United Parcel Service, Next Day Air, and please don't forget Second Day Air. The option of electronic scanning also exists, and for some, Ariel is the answer, where a scanned fax is sent over the Internet. Article discusses these and other decisions.


Multiple three-dimensional (3D) display technologies are reviewed. The display mechanisms discussed in this paper are classified into two categories: holographic display in wave optics and light field display in ray optics, which present the 3D optical wave field in two different ways. Key technical characteristics of the optical systems and the depth cues of human visual system are analyzed. It is to be expected that these 3D display technologies will achieve practical applications with the increase of the optical system bandwidth.


The appointment of Supreme Court justices is a politically-charged process and the "ideology" (or "judicial philosophy") of the nominees is perceived as playing a potentially relevant role in their future decision-making. It is fairly easy to intuit that ideology somehow enters the analysis with respect to politically divisive issues such as abortion and procreative rights, sexual conduct, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, gun control, procedural protections for the accused in criminal cases, governmental powers. Many studies have tackled the question of the relevance of the ideology of the justices or appellate judges on these issues, often finding a correlation between policy preferences and decisions. This Paper fills a gap in the existing literature examining the correlation between ideology and judicial decision-making in the highly technical area of securities regulation. To put it more provocatively, we address the question if "conservative justices" are more "pro Wall Street", and "liberal justices" more "pro investors." Since the enactment of the securities laws in the 1930s, the Supreme Court has decided a significant number of cases in this field. Even if the regulation of financial markets might seem less politically-charged than some of the issues mentioned above, we argue that there is meaningful room for political ideology and policy preferences in deciding these cases. The Paper is organized as follows. First we offer a brief overview of the different systems used for the selection of the judiciary, focusing in particular on the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, but considering also other systems. We underline the relevance of political considerations in the selection process, which could influence the ideology of selected judges and justices. We also discuss more analytically the space that judicial interpretation can have in the area of securities regulation, and we summarize the existing literature on the correlation between the ideology of judges and justices and their positions on the bench, including measures of the elusive concept of "ideology". The core of our study, and its most important contribution, is in the second part. A first section is dedicated to the methodological approach followed in collecting and coding the data used, explaining issues such as the selection of the cases considered for the empirical analysis, and the coding of the decisions and of the position of the justices on the political spectrum. Several interesting and complex issues, and some judgment-calls, are discussed in this part. For example, different authors have taken diverging positions on whether an active market for control and hostile takeovers are beneficial to investors, or whether rigorous insider trading prohibitions are desirable for fostering efficient markets. We take the position that both takeovers and insider trading protect investors, and we coded the cases we examined accordingly. Finally, we present the major empirical results. Our data confirm that, even using different definitions and measures of "ideology", conservative justices are more "pro Wall Street" and "free markets", and liberal justices are more "pro investors" and "regulated markets", more concerned about market failures, and more in favor of private plaintiffs or government intervention. We also use the data collected to explore other questions. For example, we consider if and how the "pro-market" attitude of the Court correlates with the evolution of some general economic variables (i.e., if in times of economic growth and bullish markets justices tend to be more "free-marketers"). We also examine when justices are more consistent in their decisions in this area, when the Court was more divided, and which Courts of Appeals are more often overruled by the Supreme Court.Two caveats are important. First, we do not associate any negative implication with the fact that "ideology" plays a role in deciding "hard cases." Obviously this does not in any way imply that the justices distort the law in order to achieve pre-determined policy goals, but simply that, when the law is ambiguous, different and legitimate interpretative approaches and policy considerations might lead to different outcomes. Second, while the data indicate a meaningful correlation, the correlation does not entirely explain the decision-making of the justices, therefore confirming the independence and prestige of the Supreme Court and its members.


A previous analysis of the impact of formal institutions on the knowledge economy of 22 Middle-Eastern and Sub-Sahara African countries during the 1996-2010 time period concluded that formal institutions were necessary, but inadequate, determinants of the knowledge economy. To extend that study, this paper claims that globalization induces peace and stability, which affects governance and through governance the knowledge economy. The claim addresses one weakness of previous research that did not consider the effects on the knowledge economy of globalization. We model the proposition as a three-stage process in four hypotheses, and estimate each hypothesis using robust estimators that are capable of dealing with the usual statistical problems without sacrificing economic relevance and significance. The results indicate that globalization has varying effects on peace and stability, and peace and stability affect governance differently depending on what kind of globalization induces it. For instance, the effects on governance induced by globalization defined as trade are stronger than those resulting from globalization taken to be foreign direct investment. Hence, we conclude that foreign direct investment is not a powerful mechanism for stimulating and sustaining the knowledge economy in our sample of countries. However, since globalization-induced peace and stability have both positive and negative effects on governance simultaneously, we also conclude that while the prospect for knowledge economy in African countries is dim, it is still realistic and attainable as long as these countries continue to engage in the kind of globalization that does indeed induce peace and stability. We further conclude that there is a need for a sharper focus on economic and institutional governance than on general governance as one possible extension of this paper.


Background Knee injuries are prevalent in elite volleyball and their preventive management is still discussed. Isokinetic assessment is largely use in sports injury prevention; however few studies investigate the differences in the isokinetic profile of injured knees. These studies analyses the agonist/antagonist ratio and do not consider other parameters as fatigue index. Objective to investigate the differences between injured and non injured knee in the hamstring/quadriceps ratio and fatigue index in volleyball male athletes. Setting all testing took place in the Sports Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation Laboratory- LAPREV in elite volleyball. Participants 49 male (mean+SD age, 21.96+4.1; height, 196.5+0.06; body mass, 89.1+9.03) athletes were evaluated in this study, being 20 at injured group. Participants with lower-extremity surgery in the previous 6 months and pain during the isokinetic test were excluded. Assessment of risk factor: hamstring/quadriceps ratio at 60°/s and 300°/s and fatigue at 300°/s at the dominant knee with 90° of hip flexion. Main outcome measurements trauma and overuse knee injuries provided by questionnaire. Results Differences between groups were found just in hamstring fatigue (p=0.002). The means of this parameter were 63.1 and 55.6 for injured and non-injured group respectively. For quadriceps fatigue the means were 48.4 and 47.3 respectively. No differences were found in the ratio analysis between groups (p=0.403 for 60°/s and p=0.289 for 360°/s). The means were 199.4 and 203.5 for injured and non-injured groups at 60°/s and 157.4 and 168.6 respectively at 300°/s. Conclusion The results showed that the injured group has more hamstring fatigue compared to non-injured group. The ratio analysis does not reveal differences between groups. The fatigue analysis must be incorporated in the athlete's assessment, because seems to be more informative about injury risk.


In the coastal ocean off the Northeast U.S., the sea surface temperature (SST) in the first half of 2012 was the highest on the record for the past roughly 150 years of recorded observations. The underlying dynamical processes responsible for this extreme event are examined using a numerical model, and the relative contributions of air-sea heat flux versus lateral ocean advective heat flux are quantified. The model accurately reproduces the observed vertical structure and the spatiotemporal characteristics of the thermohaline condition of the Gulf of Maine and the Middle Atlantic Bight waters during the anomalous warming period. Analysis of the model results show that the warming event was primarily driven by the anomalous air-sea heat flux, while the smaller contribution by the ocean advection worked against this flux by acting to cool the shelf. The anomalous air-sea heat flux exhibited a shelf-wide coherence, consistent with the shelf-wide warming pattern, while the ocean advective heat flux was dominated by localized, relatively smaller-scale processes. The anomalous cooling due to advection primarily resulted from the along-shelf heat flux divergence in the Gulf of Maine, while in the Middle Atlantic Bight the advective contribution from the along-shelf and cross-shelf heat flux divergences was comparable. The modeling results confirm the conclusion of the recent analysis of in situ data by Chen et al. (2014a) that the changes in the large-scale atmospheric circulation in the winter of 2011–2012 primarily caused the extreme warm anomaly in the spring of 2012. The effect of along-shelf or cross-shelf ocean advection on the warm anomalies from either the Scotian Shelf or adjacent continental slope was secondary.


Endochondral bone formation at epiphyseal growth plate consists of the synchronized processes of chondrogenesis and cartilage ossification. Estrogen, the major female sex hormone, plays an important role in this process, particularly during the pubertal growth spurt. However, its effects on the growth plate are not completely understood. The aims of this study were to clarify the effects of estrogen on the kinetics of chondrocytes in the growth plates of 10- to 25-week-old female rabbits by studying the effects of ovariectomy or high-dose administration of estrogen on the balance between cell proliferation and death. Forty-eight Japanese white rabbits were divided into three groups: sham operated, ovariectomized, or ovariectomized with subsequent weekly injection of high dose estrogen from 10 weeks. The chondrocyte kinetics was investigated by histomorphometry and immunohistochemistry, using antibodies for caspase-3, a marker of apoptosis, and for proliferating cell nuclear antigen. Both ovariectomized and estrogen-injected rabbits showed a declination of the chondrocyte number although the latter animals indicated a more dramatic effect. Estrogen-injected rabbits showed a decrease in the cell proliferating ability together with an increase in chondrocytes undergoing apoptosis while ovariectomy mainly reduced the cell proliferating ability. Given the known importance of estrogen for bone growth, one would expect that ovariectomy and high-dose administration of estrogen would have opposite effects. However, the present study indicated that both low and high concentration had a similar effect: a decrease in the chondrocyte number compared with control, suggesting that estrogen has to be maintained within a narrow range for optimal bone growth.


People with learning disabilities are dying on average 16 years earlier than people in the general population in England because the NHS is failing to treat them adequately, an inquiry has found.

The Department of Health commissioned researchers at the University of Bristol to undertake a confidential inquiry to assess the extent of premature death among people with learning disabilities and offer guidance on its prevention.1

The researchers reviewed the sequence of events leading to all known deaths of 233 adults and 14 children with learning disabilities occurring over a two year period in five primary care trusts in southwest England and compared them with 58 comparator cases (adults without learning disabilities who died in the study area during the same period of time).

Overall 22% of people with learning disabilities were found to have died before they reached the age of 50, compared with just 9% of the general population. People with …


Introduction J. R. R. Tolkien reinvented the medieval "romance," complete with archetypal characters, quest theme, and interlaced narrative structure, when he wrote The Lord of the Rings and, in doing so, he became a principal founder of the modern literary genre of fantasy and inspiration to a wide range of fantasy art. Tolkien identified the romance with the fairy story, referring to such as the "true fairy story (or romance)" (Tolkien, "On Fairy-stories" 87). Furthermore, he understood Faerie to be a place or state containing, along with fairies, "dwarves, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons," and all the other elements, plants, and things that make up that place or state. Stories set in Faerie are typically "about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches" (38). In spite of the widespread use of illustration in association with medieval narrative, (1) Tolkien was of the opinion that fantasy was a literary form, not a visual one, as he stated quite clearly in "On Fairy-stories": In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. (70) Though not necessarily due to Tolkien's espousal of it, this opinion has become as familiar as Hobbits: artwork, once regarded as a guarantor of book sales, is now generally dispensed with in all but children's literature, comics, and graphic novels as a distraction from the written word. So it is that Alan Lee's fifty paintings make the 1991 HarperCollins edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings one of the rare volumes of later twentieth-century illustrated adult fiction. Albeit of higher than usual quality, Lee's work for Tolkien's The Hobbit is typical of that provided for children's stories insofar as it is limited to visualizations of things already chosen for special attention in the text, such as pivotal actions and strange creatures. Lee's The Lord of the Rings paintings may be enjoyed on a similar level, but as this paper shows, their complexity is as unlikely to be fully appreciated by younger children as is the story itself. Lee's paintings enhance all aspects of Tolkien's original text; most significantly they augment the narrative structure itself, the interlace, a form that relies on design intricacies for both beauty and meaning. (2) This paper is thus dedicated not only to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but to Alan Lee's illustrations. The Lord of the Rings as Interlaced Romance The Lord of the Rings, like the medieval romance, is characterized by archetypal characters, a quest theme, and interlaced structure. As George Thomson notes, "like the traditional allegory, the characters of The Lord of the Rings are types": Gandalf and Galadriel represent light, Sauron and Saruman represent darkness, Frodo is the hero, Aragorn is the returning King, and so forth (50). The reader's interest is held less by these familiar types and far more by revelations about their strange and unusual world and the adventures had in the fulfilling of the quest (54). Thomson also shows that Frodo and Aragorn together satisfy all of the six characteristics of the romance identified by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism (1957): the hero's unusual birth, innocent youth, quest involving sacrifice, the success of the quest in the preservation of innocence and goodness in society, the restoration of the cycle of fertility through the union of lovers, and finally, the ending of action by the assertion of a contemplative state (45-8). Thomson finds Tolkien's principal deviation from the romance form, perhaps made as a courtesy to twentieth-century readers, in his consistent use of his most realistic characters as the narrative center: In writing a traditional romance Tolkien has thrust forward his hobbits as a hostage to modern realism. …


Abstract A radio-frequency ion source has been developed in the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk. Ion source is designed to operate in cw mode with beam modulation. The ion source works with hydrogen at 50kV producing an ion beam current of up to 70mA. The beam is extracted and accelerated by using a four electrode ion-optical system with single aperture. Initial beam diameter is 8 mm. The measured beam divergence is less than 0.5 deg. half angle. This paper describes the experimental results obtained during the ion source testing. Ion source can be applied in many areas including plasma diagnostic, accelerator technique, ion implantation, etc.


This paper presents evaluations among the most usual maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques, doing meaningful comparisons with respect to the amount of energy extracted from the photovoltaic (PV) panel [tracking factor (TF)] in relation to the available power, PV voltage ripple, dynamic response, and use of sensors. Using MatLab/Simulink and dSPACE platforms, a digitally controlled boost dc-dc converter was implemented and connected to an Agilent Solar Array E4350B simulator in order to verify the analytical procedures. The main experimental results are presented for conventional MPPT algorithms and improved MPPT algorithms named IC based on proportional-integral (PI) and perturb and observe based on PI. Moreover, the dynamic response and the TF are also evaluated using a user-friendly interface, which is capable of online program power profiles and computes the TF. Finally, a typical daily insulation is used in order to verify the experimental results for the main PV MPPT methods.


In the first part of this work, I study the structural properties of Galactic molecular clouds. The \Delta-variance method is applied to both the CO integrated intensity maps and the velocity channel maps that present spatial distribution of line intensities at each successive velocity interval. The spectral index \beta of the corresponding power spectrum is determined. Its variation across the cloud and across the lines is studied. It is found that the power spectra of all CO line integrated maps of the whole complex show the same index, \beta = 3.1, for scales between about 0.2 and 3 pc, independent of isotopomer and rotational transition. However, the CO maps of individual subregions show a variation of \beta. The 12CO 3--2 data provide a spread of indices between 2.9 in L 1455 and 3.5 in NGC 1333. In general, active star forming regions show a larger power-law exponent. I use the velocity channel analysis to study the statistical relation between the neighboring channel maps. Some theory predicts systematic increase of the spectral index with channel width. Such systematic increase is only detected in the blue line wings for the CO data. I apply Gaussclumps to the whole observed Perseus cloud and seven sub-regions, and to derive the clump properties as traced in 13CO 1--0 and 2--1. With the individual clumps identified, their properties such as mass, size, velocity width are derived. The clumps identified have a power law mass spectrum, and a power law index 1.9 of clump mass spectra. The virial parameter, which is the ratio between virial mass and the mass estimated from the Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE) analysis, is used to characterize the equilibrium state of a clump. The LTE assumes that all distribution functions characterizing the material and its interaction with the radiation field at one position are given by thermodynamic equilibrium relations at local values of the temperature and density. Virial mass here is the mass of a clump in statistical equilibrium derived by using the virial theorem. All clumps identified in both NGC 1333 and L 1455 are found with a virial parameter above 1. The external pressure needed to bind the clumps falls within 10^3 K cm^-3 and 10^6 K cm^-3 for the whole observed Perseus cloud, while it varies between active star formation regions and quiescent dark clouds. The second part of this thesis is to study the physical properties of the transition layers on the surface of molecular clouds, i.e. Galactic photon dominated regions. Two clouds are selected for the study: IC 348 and Cepheus B. Both clouds are close to the radiation field of the bright stars that are part of the youngest generation. Hence, they are ideal places to study the properties of PDRs. The KOSMA - \tau PDR model is used to interpret the observed line intensities. It is a spherical PDR model, which computes the chemical and temperature structure of a spherical clump illuminated by an isotropic FUV radiation field and cosmic rays. The form of carbon changes with increasing depth from the surface of the PDR from C^+ through C^0 to CO. Therefore emission from [C ii], [C i] and the rotational lines of CO can be used as probes of temperature, density and column density in the PDRs. I use the data of 12CO 1--0, 4--3, 13CO 1--0 and [C i] 3P1 -- 3P0 to study physical and chemical properties of the PDRs in IC 348. New observations of maps in [C i] at 492 GHz and 12CO 4--3 with a resolution of $\sim$ 1\arcmin~are combined with the FCRAO data of 12CO 1--0, 13CO 1--0 and far-infrared continuum data. To derive the physical parameters of the region, three independent line ratios are analyzed using the following: a simple LTE analysis; KOSMA - \tau PDR model considering an ensemble of PDR clumps. Detailed fits to observations are presented at seven representative positions in the cloud revealing clump densities between about 4.4 10^4 cm^-3 and 4.3 10^5 cm^-3, and C/CO column density ratios between 0.02 and 0.26. The FUV flux obtained from the model fit is consistent with that derived from FIR continuum data, varying between 2 to 100 Draine units across the cloud. An ensemble of a few tens PDR clumps with a total mass of a few solar masses and a beam filling close to unity reproduces the observed line intensities and intensity ratios. A multi-line study in the Cepheus B molecular clouds is presented. Two 5' long cuts have been observed for up to three transitions of the CS, HCO^+, HCN, HNC, CN, and C2H molecules. The integrated intensity distribution along the cuts have been calculated and a least square fit is used to the observed hyperfine structure of C2H, CN and HCN for deriving the opacities. At the two interface positions, column densities of H2, 12CO, 13CO, C18O, CS, C34S, HCO^+, H13CO^+, HCN, HNC, HCS^+ and HCO are estimated under the LTE assumption.


Background. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) presenting a cost per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) ratio is frequently used to determine ''value for money'' in health care. Despite the proliferation of CEA research, there has been no detailed study focusing on the bibliometric properties of this literature. Objectives. To describe and analyze trends in publications and coauthorship in the CEA literature from 1976 to 2006 and to identify the most prolific authors and research groups conducting CEAs. Methods. The authors used the Tufts Medical Center Registry of original CEAs published through 2006 (www.cearegistry.org). For each article, they recorded the year of publication, the journal title, and the number of contributing authors and their names. Authors were assigned credit based on their weighted contribution to the study (1 credit point for the first and last authors, ½ point for the second author, and 1=n credit points for all other authors, where n reflects the number of coauthors). Results. Approximately 1400 CEAs presenting a cost/QALY ratio were published in 420 journals through 2006. The mean number of contributing authors was 4.7 ± 2.4. Medical journals were characterized by a higher number of coauthors, as compared with the economic and health policy journals: 4.8 ± 2.4 v. 4.2 ± 2.0, P < 0.001. The lowest average number of coauthors was in Medical Decision Making (3.6) and the highest in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (8.2). The most prolific authors were affiliated with Harvard and Tufts Universities and their affiliated hospitals. The authors identified 4 major research groups that contributed substantially to the field of cost-effectiveness analysis but did not find any substantial academic relationships across these groups. Conclusions. The CEA literature continues to proliferate. Coauthorship trends appear to follow the rapid increase in the mean number of authors found in other publication types.


Commonly, different regions of sensory maps are used to meet separate functional requirements. For the somatosensory system (which mediates sensation from the skin including touch, pain, and related modalities), the distal limbs have special behavioral importance for exploration and object manipulation. Accordingly, the hands and fingertips show heightened sensitivity for both touch and pain sensation in human subjects. In contrast to the touch system, the neural mechanisms for region-specific pain sensation are poorly understood. Despite over a century of research into the neural basis of pain, past work has not clearly defined the functional organization of the pain system across the body (somatotopic) map. In Chapter 2, we use a novel genetic mouse line to map the organization of one major class of mammalian pain-sensory neurons (the Mrgprd+ non-peptidergic nociceptors) across the body map. While we find no obvious peripheral mechanisms for high sensitivity in the distal limbs (mouse plantar paw skin has a low density of Mrgprd+ terminals, and single-cell arbor areas are comparable between paw and trunk skin), we reveal a novel regionspecific organization in the spinal cord terminal arbors of these neurons. Specifically, paw and trunk neurons grow 'round' and 'long' arbor morphologies, respectively, such that paw neurons have a wider mediolateral spread in the spinal cord. We show that this region-specific morphology closely correlates with increased signal transmission for paw pain circuits. We conclude that region-specific organization of Mrgprd+ spinal cord terminals provides a possible mechanism for the high pain sensitivity of the distal limbs. In Chapter 3, we investigate potential developmental mechanisms for region-specific arbor morphologies. Disruption of peripheral target innervation does not alter their central arbor morphologies, suggesting that this central somatotopic difference develops independent of cues/processes from the periphery. However, this difference is present from very early developmental stages, suggesting that pre-programming mechanisms might govern this somatotopic pattern. Collectively, this work reveals that region-specific organization is a fundamental principle for the pain system with clear implications for our understanding of pain in both normal and pathological conditions. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Neuroscience First Advisor Wenqin Luo


It has been observed by S. Rayan that the complex projective surfaces that potentially
admit non-trivial examples of semistable co-Higgs bundles must be found at the lower end
of the Enriques-Kodaira classification. Motivated by this remark, we study the geometry
of these objects (in the rank 2 case) over Hirzebruch surfaces, giving special emphasis to
P^1 x P^1. Two main topics can be identified throughout the dissertation: non-emptiness of
the moduli spaces of rank 2 semistable co-Higgs bundles over Hirzebruch surfaces, and the
description of these moduli spaces over P^1 x P^1.
The existence problem consists in determining for which pairs of Chern classes (c_1; c_2)
there exists a non-trivial semistable rank 2 co-Higgs bundle with Chern classes c_1 and
c_2. We approach this problem from two different perspectives. On one hand, we restrict
ourselves to certain natural choices of c_1 and give necessary and sufficient conditions on c_2 that guarantee the existence of non-trivial semistable co-Higgs bundles with these Chern
classes; we do this for arbitrary polarizations when c_2 ≤ 2. On the other hand, for arbitrary
c_1, we also provide necessary and sufficient conditions on c_2 that ensure the existence of nontrivial semistable co-Higgs bundles; however, we only do this for the standard polarization.
As for the description of the moduli spaces M(c_1; c_2) of rank 2 semistable co-Higgs
bundles over P^1 x P^1, we restrict ourselves to the standard polarization. We then discuss
how to use the spectral construction and the Hitchin correspondence to understand generic
rank 2 semistable co-Higgs bundles. Furthermore, we give an explicit description of the
moduli spaces when c_2 = 0; 1 for certain choices of c_1. Finally, we explore the first order
deformations of points in the moduli space M(c_1; c_2).


In the past thirty years, the architectural profession has been characterized by dramatic changes in both its legal liabilities and in its relationship with other members of the construction industry. With the recent abrogation of the privity doctrine, strangers to architectural contracts may now sue in tort and architects inevitably find themselves in a multitude of lawsuits. This Note discusses the contractual nature of the owner/architect relationship and the judicial attempts to analogize to relationships in other professions, and then considers the prevailing judicial theories as to when a cause of action accrues against architects and against professionals in general. This Note asserts that the contractual relationship between architect and owner distinguishes architectural malpractice from other types of professional malpractice, and that this relationship should be a substantial factor in determining the date of accrual.


ABSTRACT Using data from a survey of all high-school graduates in a Swiss canton, we analyze the relationship between students' political orientation and their choice of a university major. Analyzing this question in the context of the Swiss higher education system adds to the existing literature because unlike students in other countries, Swiss students are completely free to choose their place of study and their major. The selection of a university major is therefore not affected by university admission rules and policies. We find that students in different university majors differ systematically with regard to their political orientation. However, when controlling for socio-demographic factors, school-related aspects and personality, the association between political orientation and educational choice becomes small and mostly statistically non-significant. We can conclude from this that political orientation is not influencing the choice of university major in a causal way.


Case-based reasoning is receiving much attention as a technology for building knowledge repositories that can be queried for task-relevant information. Taking the CBR problem-solving model seriously, however, suggests the value of a much stronger integration between knowledge management systems and the tasks that they serve. In this integrated view, knowledge management systems should be designed to do justin-time retrieval, anticipating task-based information needs and satisfying them automatically before the user requests information, and should learn unobtrusively by monitoring the user's task performance. Key issues include how to integrate knowledge access into the user's problem-solving process, how to automatically provide the user with task-relevant information from multiple sources, and how to build up knowledge for transmission between task phases and for longterm storage. This paper describes how these issues are addressed in the Stamping Advisor, a system to aid the design of stamped automotive parts. This system automatically presents the designer with needed information in a natural way, uses CB1% and task-focused information retrieval to access useful information, and automatically captures relevant information to support downstream task processes and build its memory of cases.


Point-of-use (POU) and point-of-entry (POE) drinking water treatment systems are gaining prominence, particularly from the point-of-view of technical appropriateness and consumer acceptance. They are becoming an increasingly viable alternative for small water treatment systems or in individual homes. However, sustainability concerns have been voiced in a number of studies investigating these devices. In this paper, sustainability is examined with respect to the fulfillment of treatment systems for a set of technical, economic, environmental and socio-cultural objectives. Consequently, the use of a hierarchy of sustainability indicators to compare various POU and POE water treatment alternatives is proposed. The indicators' definitions, as well as calculation and normalization methods are explained. The paper also presents a decision model that is capable of selecting the most sustainable treatment option. The model employs the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to help in the analysis of indicators' relative importance with regard to sustainability and to develop the indicators and criteria weights required for aggregating a sustainability score. The generated sustainability scores essentially level the playing field when comparing POU and POE systems for technical and economic appropriateness for a particular water treatment case, in addition to incorporating more difficult to quantify system traits, such as environmental and socio-cultural sustainability.


This work focuses on numerical simulations of water droplet deformations under the influence of transient high-voltage electric fields. In the stationary case, the droplet elongates parallel to the electrostatic field. In the transient case, water droplets undergo a complicated oscillatory motion as the electric field and the droplet shape change simultaneously. This multiphysics phenomenon has been the subject of experimental studies but has never been simulated before in the case of a transient electric field.
 Practical applications of this work include the numerical study of the premature aging of polymer insulators used in power transmission lines and due to water droplets as well as the simulation of industrial processes such as electrowetting and dielectrophoresis.
In this thesis, the motion of a single water droplet located on the hydrophobic surface of a silicone rubber insulator is simulated numerically. This is achieved by solving the transient, three-dimensional system composed of the full sets of electro-quasistatics and Navier-Stokes equations. The solution of the coupled system is obtained by using a computational approach based on the finite element method on a moving mesh for the electrical part of the problem and on the finite volume method on a fixed mesh for the fluid mechanical part. The electro-quasistatics finite element solver calculates on a moving curvilinear tetrahedral mesh the electric field, Maxwell stress tensor and electric force density with higher and mixed-element orders. The multiphase flow finite volume solver computes on a fixed Cartesian hexahedral grid the droplet deformation by tracking the evolution of the water-air interface with the volume of fluid method. Both solvers use an independent time integration scheme but are leapfrogged in a synchronized manner to provide a time accurate calculation of the droplet deformations.

 Several experimental investigations are performed to verify simulation results using a high speed camera. The comparison between simulation and experiment shows good agreement between the numerically computed droplet motion and the recorded video images for both horizontal and vertical applied AC electric fields. The simulation results are analyzed by applying a one-dimensional mechanical model of water droplet deformation based on the linear harmonic oscillator. The standard model which is limited to the steady-state regime is extended to include the transient regime. It is shown that the droplet vibrations occuring at frequencies below the driving frequency are not necessarily due to the accidental charging of the water droplet as it is sometimes suggested in the literature. Rather, they may be caused by underdamped droplet oscillations which originate in the transient regime. This finding is further supported by the fact that their frequencies correspond to the resonance frequencies of the sessile water droplets oscillating freely.


Written on the 40th Anniversary of the Indian Civil Rights Act, this article engages with a prominent critique of individual rights in tribal communities, namely that they effectuate the 'assimilation' of tribal people, values, and institutions. On the one hand, because American Indian religions emphasize collective values and experiences, this critique is particularly apt in the religion context, and the imposition of individual rights norms recalls the federal government's historic efforts to destroy tribes by eradicating tribal religious practices. Moreover, in many tribal communities, religion is conceptualized and practiced not in terms of 'rights' but rather 'duties' to other people, plants, animals, natural features, and the ceremonies themselves. On the other hand, some Indian tribes have historically recognized personal liberties in spiritual practices, and now consider it an obligation of self-government to protect individual interests in religion. This article explores these themes, particularly as they manifest in tribal constitutional law, which reveals a broad spectrum of rights and duties, individual and collective protections. The article also elaborates on several ways that tribes recognize individual rights in the context of tribal culture, namely using tribal custom as a basis for interpreting positive law on individual religious rights, maintaining separate institutions for the resolution of legal disputes about religion, and engaging in constitutional reform to change religious rights provisions that are inconsistent with tribal values. In the final analysis, the article observes that that while many challenges remain, tribal governments often try to facilitate individual and collective interests in religious freedom today.


Web-crawled datasets have enabled remarkable generalization capabilities in recent image-text models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image pre-training) or Flamingo, but little is known about the dataset creation processes. In this work, we introduce a testbed of six publicly available data sources - YFCC, LAION, Conceptual Captions, WIT, RedCaps, Shutterstock - to investigate how pre-training distributions induce robustness in CLIP. We find that the performance of the pre-training data varies substantially across distribution shifts, with no single data source dominating. Moreover, we systematically study the interactions between these data sources and find that combining multiple sources does not necessarily yield better models, but rather dilutes the robustness of the best individual data source. We complement our empirical findings with theoretical insights from a simple setting, where combining the training data also results in diluted robustness. In addition, our theoretical model provides a candidate explanation for the success of the CLIP-based data filtering technique recently employed in the LAION dataset. Overall our results demonstrate that simply gathering a large amount of data from the web is not the most effective way to build a pre-training dataset for robust generalization, necessitating further study into dataset design. Code is available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/clip_quality_not_quantity.


CONTEXT
Warm-up before athletic competition might enhance performance by affecting various physiological parameters. There are few quantitative data available on physiological responses to the warm-up, and the data that have been reported are inconclusive. Similarly, it has been suggested that varying the recovery period after a standardized warm-up might affect subsequent performance.

PURPOSE
To determine the effects of varying post-warm-up recovery time on a subsequent 200-m swimming time trial.

METHODS
Ten national-caliber swimmers (5 male, 5 female) each swam a 1500-m warm-up and performed a 200-m time trial of their specialty stroke after either 10 or 45 min of passive recovery. Subjects completed 1 time trial in each condition separated by 1 wk in a counterbalanced order. Blood lactate and heart rate were measured immediately after warm-up and 3 min before, immediately after, and 3 min after the time trial. Rating of perceived exertion was measured immediately after the warm-up and time trial.

RESULTS
Time-trial performance was significantly improved after 10 min as opposed to 45 min recovery (136.80 +/- 20.38 s vs 138.69 +/- 20.32 s, P < .05). There were no significant differences between conditions for heart rate and blood lactate after the warm-up. Pre-time-trial heart rate, however, was higher in the 10-min than in the 45-min rest condition (109 +/- 14 beats/min vs 94 +/- 21 beats/min, P < .05).

CONCLUSIONS
A post-warm-up recovery time of 10 min rather than 45 min is more beneficial to 200-m swimming time-trial performance.


Multi-channel combustion data, consisting of gas pressure and two combustion chamber luminosity measurements, are investigated in the prediction of combustion instability. Wavelet analysis is used for feature extraction. A SVM approach is applied for novelty detection and the construction of a model of normal system operation. Novelty scores generated by classifiers from different channels are combined to give a final decision of data novelty. We compare four novelty score combination mechanisms, and illustrate their complementary relationship in assessing data novelty.


The metal finishing industry has been rated among the most polluting industries worldwide. This industry has traditionally been responsible for the release of heavy metals such as chrome, nickel, tin, copper etc into the environment. The application of cleaner production systems to a range of industries, including the metal finishing industry has provided significant financial and environmental benefits. An example of a successful application cleaner production in the metal finishing industry is the reduction in the typical water consumption from 400 1/m² to less than 10 1/m² of plated product. The successful application of cleaner production to the mental finishing industry has encountered many barriers. These barriers include the need for a highly skilled cleaner production auditor and the need for rigorous plant data to effectively quantify the cleaner production potential of the company under consideration. This study focuses on providing an alternate user-friendly audit system for the implementation of cleaner production in the mental finishing industry. The audit system proposed eliminates the need for the need for both a technical auditor and rigid plant data. The proposed system functions solely on plant operator inputs. The operator's knowledge is harnessed and used to conduct an efficient and effective cleaner production audit. The research is based on expert knowledge, which was gained by conducting audits on some 25 companies using traditional auditing tools. This company audits were used to construct a database of data that was used in the verification of the models developed in this study. The audit is separated into different focus components. The first system developed was based on fuzzy logic multi variable decision-making. For this system the plant was categorized into different sections and appropriate fuzzy ratings were allocated based on experience. Once the allocations were completed multi variable decision analysis was used to determine the individual variable impact. The output was compared and regressed to the database equivalent. Operator inputs can then be used to determine the individual category outputs for the cleaner for the production rating for the company under consideration. The second part of this study entails the development of mathematical models for the quantification of chemical and water consumptions. This was based on the present and ideal (cleaner production) plant configuration. Cleaner production operations are compared to present operations and potential savings quantified. Mathematical models were developed based on pilot scale experiments for the acid, degreaser and zinc plating process. The pilot experiments were carried out on a PLC controlled pilot plant. These models were developed form factorial experimentation on the variables of each of the plating processes. The models developed aid in the prediction of the relevant optimum consumptions. The key challenge in traditional evaluation systems has been the quantification of the plant production. The most effective measure of production is by means of the surface area plated. In this study a novel approach using the modeled acid consumption is proposed. It was assumed that the operator inputs for the above models would not be precise. The models developed allowed for input variations. These variations were incorporated into the model using the Monte Carlo technique. The entire cleaner production evaluation system proposed is based on an operator questionnaire, which is completed in visual basic. The mathematical model was incorporated into the visual basic model. For the purpose of model verification the mathematical models were programmed and tested using the engineering mathematical software, Mat Lab. The combined fuzzy logic and mathematical models prove to be a highly effective means of completing the cleaner production evaluation in minimal time and with minimal resources. A comparative case study was conducted at a local metal finishing company. The case study compares the input requirements and outputs from the traditional systems with the system proposed in this study. The traditional model requires 245 inputs whilst the model proposed in this study is based on 56 inputs. The data requirements for the model proposed in this study is obtained from a plant operator in less than one hour whilst previous models required high level expertise over a period of up to two weeks. The quality of outputs from the model proposed is found to be very comparable to previous models. The model is actually found to be superior to previous models with regards predicting operational variations, water usages, chemical usages and bath chemical evolution. The research has highlighted the potential to apply fuzzy-mathematical hybrid systems for cleaner production evaluation. The two limitations of the research were found to be the usage of a linear experimental design for model development and the availability of Mat Lab software for future application. These issues can be addressed as future work. It is recommended that a non-linear model be developed for the individual processes so as to obtain more detailed process models.


In this paper, we propose a novel user-cell association approach for wireless small cell networks that exploits previously unexplored context information extracted from users' devices, i.e., user equipments (UEs). Beyond characterizing precise quality of service (QoS) requirements that accurately reflect the UEs' application usage, our proposed cell association approach accounts for the devices' hardware type (e.g., smartphone, tablet, laptop). This approach has the practical benefit of enabling the small cells to make better informed cell association decisions that handle practical device-specific QoS characteristics. We formulate the problem as a matching game between small cell base stations (SBSs) and UEs. In this game, the SBSs and UEs rank one another based on well-designed utility functions that capture composite QoS requirements, extracted from the context features (i.e., application in use, hardware type). We show that the preferences used by the nodes to rank one another are interdependent and influenced by the existing network-wide matching. Due to this unique feature of the preferences, we show that the proposed game can be classified as a many-to-one matching game with externalities. To solve this game, we propose a distributed algorithm that enables the players (i.e., UEs and SBSs) to self-organize into a stable matching that guarantees the required applications' QoS. Simulation results show that the proposed context-aware cell association scheme yields significant gains, reaching up to 52% improvement compared to baseline context-unaware approaches.


LOVETT, MALLORYE DELORIS. Calcium Chloride and Vitamin D Fortified Beverages: Bioavailability in Wistar Rats. (Under the direction of J.C. Allen.) Calcium and vitamin D deficiency is now recognized as an epidemic in the United States. Calcium and vitamin D play a critical role in the prevention of metabolic diseases including osteoporosis, osteomalacia, and rickets. Epidemiological research indicates that average intake of these nutrients is well below the RDA. Dairy products continue to be the main source of calcium intake. The major source of vitamin D is from sensible sun exposure. Greater intake of calcium and vitamin D has been correlated to a reduction in fractures, prevention of osteoporosis, and increased bone mass. The objective of this study was to test effects of a water-soluble form of vitamin D and calcium chloride as fortifiers for an aqueous sports drink solution with a rat bioavailability assay. A water-soluble vitamin D fortifying ingredient was prepared as a spray-dried complex with bovine beta-lactoglobulin. Vitamin D content of the complex was assessed by HPLC. Flavored beverages were formulated with various ratios of calcium and vitamin D in a 4x4 factorial design. Female Wistar rats were housed under incandescent lighting and randomly divided into the treatment and control groups. After a 4-week depletion phase, rats were given specialized drink formulations and low calcium, vitamin D-deficient diet for an additional six weeks. Blood and femur bones were removed for further analysis. Serum vitamin D was measured by ELISA. Results demonstrate that fortified drink solutions could be accurately formulated to contain calcium chloride at 0, 1, 2 and 2.5 g Ca/L with palatability to rats. The vitamin D content of the drinks was formulated to be 0, 10, 20, and 40 μg/L. Serum vitamin D was significantly greater (p< .0001) in rats receiving the vitamin D-fortified drinks. Water-soluble vitamin-D can be used to fortify aqueous products with this fat-soluble vitamin to help facilitate the uptake of calcium. Regular consumption of flavored sports drink fortified with calcium and vitamin D may significantly increase dietary calcium and vitamin D intake. Calcium Chloride and Vitamin D Fortified Beverages: Bioavailability in Wistar Rats by Mallorye Deloris Lovett A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Science


The officially adopted Master Plan of Shoreline Development for Santa Monica Bay covers 13 miles of the shoreline between Topanga Canyon and El Segundo, with 9 miles in the City of Los Angeles, 3 miles in the City of Santa Monica, and one mile in unincorporated territory. It is planned to care for the beach recreation needs of 6,000,000 people, which is the estimated population for Los Angeles County in 1970. The beach development includes an ocean fill of 56,000,000 cubic yards, on which all the facilities will be constructed. These include scenic beach drives with divided roadways, promenades, areas for games of various kinds, bath houses, rest rooms, landscaping, restaurants, and last but not least, auto parking areas with a total capacity of 40,000 cars at one time. The amusement park and marina will also have parking fields with a capacity of 6,000 and 11,000 cars, respectively.


Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves in Western Australia and driving up the likelihood of very high fire danger weather. Western Australia is experiencing a long-term increase in average temperatures and in 2014 the state recorded its highest ever annual average maximum temperature. The number of heatwave days in Perth has increased by 50% since 1950. Nine of Western Australia's hottest Januarys on record have occurred in the last 10 years. The number of days per year with severe fire danger weather is projected to almost double in south west Western Australia by 2090 if global carbon emissions are not drastically reduced. Recent fires in Western Australia have been influenced by record hot dry conditions. The long-term trend to hotter weather in Western Australia has worsened fire weather and contributed to an increase in the frequency and severity of bushfires. The concept of a normal bushfire season is rapidly changing as bushfires increase in number, burn for longer and affect larger areas of land. By 2030, the number of professional firefighters in WA will need to more than double to meet the increasing risk of bushfires. 3. The economic, social and environmental costs of increased extreme heat and bushfire activity is likely to be immense. In Perth, from 1994-2006, there were over 20 heat attributable deaths per year. If average maximum temperatures were 2°C warmer, this number would almost double to 40 deaths. Some of Western Australia's most fire-prone regions may become unlivable as the risks to lives and property caused by bushfires continue to increase. Without effective action on climate change, there will be 20 times the number of dangerous days for outdoor workers by 2070, reducing productivity. 4. Tackling climate change is critical to protecting Western Australia's prosperity. As a nation we must join the global effort to substantially reduce emissions and rapidly move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy if we are to limit the severity of extreme heat and bushfires both in Western Australia and nationally.


The production of Mg alloy AZ31B sheet in a single deformation step by large- strain extrusion machining (LSEM) is detailed. LSEM imposes intense simple shear in a narrow zone by constrained chip formation. The confined deformation and the associated in situ adiabatic heating are found to be the key factors in production of the Mg sheet without need for external (pre-) heating. A range of shear textures with basal planes inclined to the sheet surface are achieved by this processing. The basal plane inclination could be varied by controlling the strain path. Microstructures, both ultrafine-grained (100-500 nm) and conventional fine-grained (2-5 μm), have been obtained by controlling the adiabatic heating and the extent of dynamic recrystallization. The LSEM sheet with shear texture and fine grain size shows superior combinations of formability and strength compared to rolled sheet.


Australia has seen an unprecedented proliferation in large scale water recycling schemes since the late 1990s. This has been driven by a recent decade of drought, policies to encourage water efficiency in new homes and buildings in urban areas, and to reduce pressure on rain-fed water supplies by replacement with alternate water sources in rural areas. Underpinning these drivers are principles of economic and environmental sustainability and protection of public health. National guidelines for recycling of treated sewage, released in 2006, replaced an approach using prescriptive end point water quality targets, with a 12-step risk-based framework for the planning and operation of Australian water recycling schemes. Essential to this risk-based approach is an understanding of the sewage treatment system and assessing the risks in the catchment, the treatment process, distribution system and end use environment. Inherent also in this process is the identification of critical control points with tangible operational targets for pre-empting, preventing and correcting off-spec conditions before they derail a scheme. Validation of systems through microbial log reduction targets for indicator viruses, bacteria, protozoa and helminths, differentiated according to end use and expected exposures, may be obtained through treatment, site controls or a combination of both. Drawing on case studies from the Australian states of New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland (Qld), this paper gives insight to preventative risk management of water recycling schemes with typical risk profiles. Some advantages and disadvantages of the guideline approach are considered. The information paints a picture of the industry's risk management obligations in the planning phase and may be of use to practitioners in other regions where planning for safe and sustainable water recycling is developing.


This paper examines analysts' security recommendations in the "Dartboard" column of the Wall Street Journal and tests whether the impact on the recommended security prices is temporary or permanent. We document a two-day announcement effect for the experts' stocks, which exhibits mean reversion and varies with experts' reputation and stock sizes. Our study supports the price pressure hypothesis: abnormal returns and trading volumes following the announcement date are driven by noise trading from naive investors. The bootstrapping results indicate that the performance of the pros' stocks is indistinguishable from that of the dartboard stocks for 90% of the contests. Overall, pros can neither outperform the darts nor the market. By examining the pre- and post-contest periods, we find that pros follow relative strength strategies to choose past winners with high risk and low dividend yields, but the stock prices of these winners tend to show mean reversal in the subsequent period. In addition, a lower bound for sample size is derived for reliable statistical inference on mean returns.


This thesis discusses the development of an ion beam generation and transport system for the purpose of high current ion implantation and presents a method to
achieve high quality beam generation and high transport efficiency. An advanced method of achieving ideal space charge neutralization of an ion beam as well as
charge neutralization of implanted targets has also been developed and presented. This study was carried out in five main categories as described below.

1. Beam optics: The optical properties of the ion beam have to be well controlled through various beam transport devices. Beam transfer matrix calculation and Poisson's equation solver were used to determine beam optics.
2. Plasma generation: The ion beam is extracted from a plasma generated in the ion source. Therefore, the
quality of ion beams depends largely on the characteristics of the source plasma. Plasma diagnostic tools were used to understand the desired plasma conditions.
3. Space charge neutralisation: Space charge neutralisation is essential to transport high perveance beams because a beam without neutralisation develops a high electric potential in itself that would scatter beam ions away. A plasma based charge neutraliser "Plasma Flood System" was developed to maintain space charge neutrality during implantation.
4. Low energy beam extraction and transport: Beam extraction and transport become difficult at lower energy due to growth of emittance and space charge. Beam divergence had to be minimized by tight optical
control.
5. Microwave plasma sources as ultimate ion source: A microwave source was developed to obtain high current, ultra clean ion beams and long source life. The characteristics of microwave plasmas differ significantly from whose generated by other methods such as DC excitation. The source achieved the highest recorded beam currents for various species.

All the technology and the methods described above were combined to develop a state-of-the-art high current ion implanter that has achieved world leading beam
performance.


We present results that trace the dynamics of two historical remnants, SN 1006 and SN 1572 (Tycho), for the past two decades. 21-cm radio images of each remnant were recorded during two previous epochs: 1983-1984 and 1991-1994. We obtained third-epoch images of both remnants from 2001 to 2003. After a direct comparison of images from these three epochs, we found the mean radio expansion rate of Tycho now agrees with a previous X-ray expansion study, and for the first time, we have measured the azimuthal expansion rate over the entire rim of SN 1006.


The starting point for this chapter is my project UNCAGED, which is a series of six 'telesymbiotic' installations, exploring interrelationships and transitions between screen-based digital environments and their physical surroundings. The chapter introduces the initial motivation behind the project, which is based on the idea to 'uncage' computer based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. Further, it explores how my critical engagement with the work has nourished the impression that despite the perceptual fusion between the digital and the physical world, UNCAGED actually seems to highlight the distance between the two domains. In my view, all six exhibits bear an underlying absurdity, which arises from the very fusion between their physical and digital components. For me, this absurdity ultimately hints at the fallacy of the initial motivation behind UNCAGED and, in a wider context, questions the idea to seek in virtual worlds a place for meaningful human exchange and experiences.
In the second part of this chapter, I discuss how these new insights have informed my subsequent artistic approach, which is essentially concerned with exploring further the socio-philosophical issues implied in UNCAGED. In particular, I refer to my project Cyber-Spatialism, which is a series of canvasses in which common computer connectors are inserted. The project obviously references Luigi Fontana's slashed canvasses and his concept of Spatialism, which is usually regarded as an attempt to overcome the illusionistic representation of space in painting by introducing real (physical) space. By substituting Fontana's slashes with computer connectors, Cyber-Spatialism implies an extension of the canvass into cyberspace, and thus attempts to address the notion, that in today's (globalized) culture real space is increasingly being replaced by virtual space.


A number of scholars have found that concepts such as mutation, selection, and random drift, which emerged from the theory of biological evolution, may also explain evolutionary phenomena in other disciplines as well. Drawing on these concepts, Professors Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman classify and systematize the various modes of transmitting "culture" and explore their consequences for cultural evolution. In the process, they develop a mathematical theory of the non-genetic transmission of cultural traits that provides a framework for future investigations in quantitative social and anthropological science. The authors use quantitative models that incorporate the various modes of transmission (for example, parent-child, peer-peer, and teacher-student), and evaluate data from sociology, archaeology, and epidemiology in terms of the models. They show that the various modes of transmission in conjunction with cultural and natural selection produce various rates of cultural evolution and various degrees of diversity within and between groups. The same framework can be used for explaining phenomena as apparently unrelated as linguistics, epidemics, social values and customs, and diffusion of innovations. The authors conclude that cultural transmission is an essential factor in the study of cultural change.


How and why species' ranges shift has long been a focus of ecology but is now becoming increasingly important given the current rate of climatic and environmental change. In response to global warming, species will need to migrate northward or upward to stay within their climatic tolerances. The ability of species to migrate will determine their fate and affect the community compositions of the future. However, to more accurately predict the future extent of species, we must identify and understand their responses to past and current climatic and environmental changes. The first place change is expected to occur is within ecotones where the ranges of many species converge and individuals exist at the limits of their environmental tolerances. In montane regions, these boundaries are compressed, creating a situation in which even relatively small changes in conditions can lead to shifts in the elevational ranges of species. In this dissertation, I examine the responses of forests in the Green Mountains of Vermont to recent climatic and environmental change in an attempt to understand how future climate change will affect their location and composition. I focus on the BorealDeciduous Ecotone (BDE), where the high elevation spruce-fir forests converge with the lower elevation northern hardwoods. In addition to investigating adult trees within the BDE, I also examine the responses of understory herbs and tree seedlings to changes in environmental and climatic factors. Factors considered in these investigations include temperature, soil environment, light environment, invasive species, competition, disturbance and many others. I will examine the complex range of responses in forest species that results from prolonged exposure to these forces alone and in combination. I have attempted to identify the responses of forest species to environmental changes by resurveying historic vegetation plots (Chapter 2), experimentally manipulating the growing environment of tree seedlings (Chapter 3) and performing dendrochronological analyses on tree rings (Chapter 4). Through my resurvey of historic vegetation plots, I determined the degree to which understory species have shifted as individuals or as groups. I also identified a set of novel understory communities that have developed since the 1960's in response to recent climate change, acid deposition and invasive species (Chapter 2). By transplanting and artificially warming tree seedlings, I identified factors responsible for limiting the growth and survival of northern hardwood species above the BDE. Temperature was the primary factor limiting sugar maple (Acer saccharum) at high elevations, while yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) was limited almost exclusively by light (Chapter 3). Dendrochronological studies of sugar maples indicated that prolonged exposure to acidified soils has only recently caused growth declines and has altered their relationship to climate (Chapter 4). Together, these studies have produced a cohesive picture of how northeastern montane forests have responded to recent climate change and other anthropogenic impacts. These findings can be used to help predict future species' ranges and identify species that may not be capable of migrating fast enough on their own to keep pace with changes in climatic conditions.


This paper attempts to reconcile the so-called 'superstratist' and 'substratist' views on creole formation, with special attention to the emergence of tense/aspect systems in Haitian French Creole and Sranan Tongo. Creole formation involves a process of restructuring by which interlanguage grammars are created and elaborated in the course of second language acquisition. This process involves three major components: input (intake) from the TL, L1 influence, and internal developments. Differences in the degree of TL and L1 influence result in differences between Haitian Creole and Sranan Tongo in their inventory of tense/aspect categories, and the forms that express them. At the same time, both creoles display similarities due to shared substrate input as well as similar processes by which superstrate lexical forms are reanalyzed as tense/aspect markers.


Sponsored by the Fluids Committee of the Engineering Mechanics Division of ASCE. This report provides environmental engineers with a comprehensive survey of recent developments in the application of fluid mechanics theories to treat environmental problems. Chapters cover principles of fluid mechanics, as well as contemporary applications to environmental problems involving river, lake, coastal, and groundwater areas. Topics include: turbulent diffusion; mixing of a turbulent jet in crossflow -- the advected line puff; multi-phase plumes in uniform, stratified, and flowing environments; turbulent transport processes across natural streams; three-dimensional hydrodynamic and salinity transport modeling in estuaries; fluid flows and reactive chemical transport in variably saturated subsurface media; heat and mass transport in porous media; parameter identification of environmental systems; finite element analysis of stratified lake hydrodynamics; water quality modeling in reservoirs; and linear systems approach to river water quality analysis. In addition to providing valuable information to practitioners, this book also serves as a text for an advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate level course.


Microbial carbon mineralization in soils leads to the production of different gaseous or dissolved components that have environmental impacts. Our study deals with the influence of soil temperature on the production of gaseous and dissolved carbon components during carbon mineralization in forest soils in France. After an incubation of soil samples for 42 days at 4 different temperatures, we determined both size and 13C isotopic signature of dissolved organic carbon and CO2 pools. We also characterised the soil microbial community structure (PLFA profiles). While temperature clearly increases the CO2 production, a low decrease of the dissolved organic carbon pool was observed whatever the temperature of incubation. The isotopic fractionation of the dissolved organic pool was not affected by temperature while a correlation was observed between temperature and isotopic fractionation of the produced CO2. The soil microbial structure was observed to change during incubation. Changes were affected by the soil temperature, specially the relative proportion of fungi decreased with temperature incubation. Correlations between the relative proportion of fungi and isotopic fractionation of the CO2 pool were observed. This result suggests that soil microbial structure can control fractionation during C mineralization.


Evidence supporting the synergistic antitumor activity of radiation therapy combined with immune checkpoint inhibitors is rapidly growing. Investigators should consider the characteristics and challenges of gastrointestinal (GI) cancers to evaluate the safety and clinical effectiveness of this combination. In this paper, we present the rationale for exploring this strategy and the opportunities it possesses to challenge our standard of care. We also discuss unique considerations to systematically develop this combination in GI cancers.


Semantic parsing is the task of translating natural language utterances into a machine-interpretable meaning representation. Most approaches to this task have been evaluated on a small number of existing corpora which assume that all utterances must be interpreted according to a database and typically ignore context. In this paper we present a new, publicly available corpus for context-dependent semantic parsing. The MRL used for the annotation was designed to support a portable, interactive tourist information system. We develop a semantic parser for this corpus by adapting the imitation learning algorithm DAgger without requiring alignment information during training. DAgger improves upon independently trained classifiers by 9.0 and 4.8 points in F-score on the development and test sets respectively.


Abstract. A unique stratigraphic sequence of fossil leaves of Eotrigonobalanus furcinervis (extinct trees of the beech family, Fagaceae) from central Germany has been used to derive an atmospheric pCO2 record with multiple data points spanning the late middle to late Eocene, two sampling levels which may be earliest Oligocene, and two samples from later in the Oligocene. Using the inverse relationship between the density of stomata and pCO2, we show that pCO2 decreased continuously from the late middle to late Eocene, reaching a relatively stable low value before the end of the Eocene. Based on the subsequent records, pCO2 in parts of the Oligocene was similar to latest Eocene values. These results suggest that a decrease in pCO2 preceded the large shift in marine oxygen isotope records that characterizes the Eocene–Oligocene transition and that when a certain threshold of pCO2 change was crossed, the cumulative effects of this and other factors resulted in rapid temperature decline, ice build up on Antarctica and hence a change of climate mode.


We investigate the phase noise of a diode laser based on the interferometric self-mixing effect. A detuned Fabry-Perot cavity converts the phase noise into intensity noise, and the noise is measured by the novel method as a function of the amount of feedback and the distance between the target and the laser front facet. Experimental results can be well explained by theory.