This paper investigates the notion of heterogeneity, inspired by Latour's work on Actor Network Theory, as a lens for understanding daily work practices in a large service delivery organization. To this end, we present and discuss the findings from an ongoing research where we unpacked how system-administrators manage and negotiate incident resolution requests as part of service delivery practices. In particular, we looked into how performance metrics, such as, service level agreements (SLAs), mediated those practices. This paper contributes to the studies of infrastructure and explores the critical synergy between quantitative and qualitative methods in support of large-scale work practice research.


In the course of the 2010 election campaign, the Liberal Democrats committed themselves to 'restore the right to protest by reforming the Public Order Act to safeguard non-violent protest even if it offends; and restrict the scope of injunctions issued by vested interests.' This led, after the formation of the Coalition government in May 2010, to a pledge to 'restore rights to non-violent protest'. Nearly a decade on, it is time to assess how far that was brought into effect. This article takes a broad sweep across the past eight years, looking at peaceful protest and political participation. It concludes that, with some honourable exceptions, the trend has been a regressive one or at least not a liberalising one. That is probably unsurprising. While there have been some advances at doctrinal level, the practical reality on the streets for those wishing to express their dissent or bring about political/social change is one marked by increasing difficulty. The article is in two main parts. The first, shorter part plots some of the key events in the period. The second is organised around four themes, each illustrating a tension or an area of interplay between protesters and the state: doctrinal developments; policing practice; non-state—that is private—involvement and regulation; and access to civic space.


Entity Resolution matches mentions of the same entity. Being an expensive task for large data, its performance can be improved by blocking, i.e., grouping similar entities and comparing only entities in the same group. Blocking improves the run-time of Entity Resolution, but it still involves unnecessary comparisons that limit its performance. Meta-blocking is the process of restructuring a block collection in order to prune such comparisons. Existing unsupervised meta-blocking methods use simple pruning rules, which offer a rather coarse-grained filtering technique that can be conservative (i.e., keeping too many unnecessary comparisons) or aggressive (i.e., pruning good comparisons). In this work, we introduce supervised meta-blocking techniques that learn classification models for distinguishing promising comparisons. For this task, we propose a small set of generic features that combine a low extraction cost with high discriminatory power. We show that supervised meta-blocking can achieve high performance with small training sets that can be manually created. We analytically compare our supervised approaches with baseline and competitor methods over 10 large-scale datasets, both real and synthetic.


Academic and policy engagements with constitutions and constitutionalism have largely been built around unstated frameworks within which legitimated activity can take place. The essay suggests both the disorientation of much of the discussion and proposes a n ideological framework that captures the assumptions about which constitutionalist discourse has evolved. Constitutionalism at one time could be said to involve the study of the peculiarities of the unique domestic constitutional framework through which government was constituted and power institutionalized. No longer. This essay examines the current discourse of constitutionalism. That discourse reveals the current dynamic character of the concept. The old consensus of conventional constitutionalism, that constitutions are legitimately grounded either in domestic law and the unique will of a territorially defined demos, is now challenged by a view that constitutional legitimacy requires conformity with a system of universal norms grounded in an elaboration of the mores of the community of nations. Traditional nationalist constitutionalism looks inward for its ideology as well as its yardstick for measuring others. Transnational constitutionalism looks to the common constitutional traditions of the community of states buttressed by international norms and organizations. The prize for both constitutional traditionalists and transnationalists is control of the mechanics for classifying constitutions, judging them legitimate and creating systems to enforce common conceptions of valid constitution making through international law. Yet, both rising constitutionalist discourse, and the development of values rich governance systems suggests that an animating ideology also underlies constitutionalism as a whole, a broader and more basic ideology than those that underpin the particular values variants of nationalist, transnational, theocratic and rationalist constitutionalism. The object of this essay is to draw from out of current practice and discourse a working description of the meta ideology that is constitutionalism in general. That definition suggests the characteristics of constitutionalism as originating as a system of taxonomy and legitimation that is grounded in a set of normative assumptions about the meaning and purpose of government. These basic presumptions produce an ideology of substantive and process limitations on state power the content of which is the usual focus of constitutionalist debate. The constitutionalist presumptions are rarely contested but serve to divide groups of states on the basis of the sort of normative presumptions on which the state is organized-nationalist, transnational, natural law, theocratic or Marxist Leninist presumptions. Constitutions without legitimacy are no constitution at all, and legitimacy is a function of values, which in turn serve as the foundation of constitutionalism. It is through the construction of those values frameworks that international law has come to play an increasingly important role.


John 4:1-42 is the only story of its own kind in the whole New Testament. It is a betrothal narrative with various courtship motifs, and betrothal scenes. Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well and asked for water to drink. The disciples were surprised at what Jesus wanted from the woman, who was a Samaritan for that matter. The woman rushed home announcing the good news the man who told her everything about her life. Subsequently, Jesus was invited by the whole village to stay with them and he does. The encounter between a man and his prospective wife is a common betrothal theme in the Old Testament. Gen.24:1-67 is a similar type of story. Intertextuality helps to highlight the striking similarities between the two stories, without looking at their differences, however minor they may be. When read together, the two stories mutually shed more light in understanding each other. The Samaritan woman read within the context of Old Testament prospective of wife, becomes the portrayal of the spouse of Jesus. Keywords : Samaritan Woman, Bride of Jesus, Intertextuality International Journal of Emotional Psychology and Sport Ethics Vol. 10 2008: pp. 104-109


This study examines the consistency and microphysics assumptions among satellite ice water content (IWC) retrievals in the upper troposphere with collocated A-Train radiances from Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) and lidar backscatters from Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP). For the cases in which IWC values are small (<10 mg m(-3)), the cloud ice retrievals are constrained by both MLS 240- and 640-GHz radiances and CALIOP 532-nm backscatter (532). From the observed relationships between MLS cloud-induced radiance T-cir and the CALIOP backscatter integrated (532) along the MLS line of sight, an empirical linear relation between cloud ice and the lidar backscatter is found: IWC/(532) = 0.58 +/- 0.11. This lidar cloud ice relation is required to satisfy the cloud ice emission signals simultaneously observed at microwave frequencies, in which ice permittivity is relatively well known. This empirical relationship also produces IWC values that agree well with the CALIOP, version 3.0, retrieval at values <10 mg m(-3). Because the microphysics assumption is critical in satellite cloud ice retrievals, the agreement found in the IWC-(532) relationships increase fidelity of the assumptions used by the lidar and microwave techniques for upper-tropospheric clouds.


Bespoke birth should not be private business it shouldbe our core business and bespoke birth is birth with andwithout technology.I want to share the reasons for this statement with youbased on a recent paper I presented at the Palazzo MediciRiccardi in Florence, Italy. This was a culmination ofresearch data, theory and personal beliefs based on 20 yearsof research.Online support and e-connectivity are hallmarks of themodern generation of new mothers who communicatemore with each other than us as their health professionals.As more of our mothers are coming from the z generation,it is important for us as health professionals to be ready forthe bespoke birth experience that these women are likelyto request. The z generation are technologically savvy andexpect to see machines and devices as they grew up in theworld of the internet. We live in a world where an electronicmyriad of data drives, accelerates and touches lives withthe push of a button, creating momentous change and it isin this rapidly digitalised world that precious human birthtakes place.Academically, we can define concepts, build theories,create designs and develop products and devices that arerelevant, effective and meaningful to those who need anduse them. With more and more midwives obtaining PhDsand engaging in research, we use the internet for accessingNICE guidelines, WHO updates, safety alerts and we alsouse the rapidly growing research link databases such asORCID, Research Gate and Academia.eu, to name a few.We cannot function without technology as it provideshealth professionals with online data. We use monitoringand surveillance technologies and we access electronicrecords, APPS, online library databases and laboratoryresults. We are beginning to use robots for teachingmechanisms of normal labour, second life and avatarsfor education and training in breastfeeding. In addition,technology is a platform for social and political activityand we need to start using technology with our parentsto let them know we will support them in achieving their'bespoke birth', whatever that is for them.We need to remember that as soon as the baby is born,the mobile phone is out and the pictures are sent to agrowing number of platforms such as YouTube, WhatsApp,Snapchat, Yeller and many others. Politicians and our ownRCM are using twitter and Facebook to communicate keymessages to inform or seek support. Our conferences aremoving from face-to-face to webinars and live streaming.Our world is changing rapidly because of new technologiesthat permeate every aspect of our lives. We have newcommunication portals, instant access, instant feedbackand, most of all, we need to remember that every motherand father we meet has access to the same online data aswe have and this is why I would stress the importance ofus engaging in online searching as part of our everydaymidwifery practice.Mothers can find apps for pregnancy, birth, infant feedingchild development and of course they can online purchasingof fetal monitors, mini scanning devices, DNA profile kits,abortion kits and abortion pills. Naturally, the marketers'are very interested in pregnant women and this is evidencedin Google's analysis of online searches by pregnant womenthat demonstrated:'New and expecting parents do twice as many searchesas non-parents and health is their biggest concern. Mobilesearches @ babies & parenting have grown 25% since 2013and views of parenting videos on YouTube were up 329%'(Rost et al, 2014).I undertook a simple Google search to see if there wereany devices to prevent perineal tearing, as that is a big fearfor most mothers. I was amazed to find this Swedish trialdata from a sample of 1148 women testing a new perinealprotection device by Levesson et al in 2014 with positiveresults (signifigant reduction in first- and second-degreetears). This is the type of data women will present to us inthe future. They will challenge us to use birth technologiesthat are evidence-based and come to us with the datadownloaded onto their mobile device. They will also expectus to use sensor technologies based on evidence from currenttrials, as this is technology that can enable women to stay athome for longer. We can be reassured that the mother andbaby are well because we have full access to the mother bylive chat and her data and that of her baby can be viewedreal time using sensor technology. This is our future.We need to engage with women and birth technologyon an everyday basis. With rapid advances in personalisedmedicine, epigenetics and more recently robotics, thelifeworld of the z generation of new mothers is anexciting field of new technologies. We must stand asa multiprofessional team of midwives, obstetricians,anaesthetists, paediatricians and researchers activelyengaged in partnership activities to determine guidelinesfor the appropriate use of old, new and future birthing


The Great Recession did not only affect European countries to a varying extent, its impact on national labour markets and on specific socio-economic groups in those markets also varied greatly. Institutional arrangements such as employment protection, unemployment insurance benefits and minimum income support, working time flexibility and wage setting played a crucial role in determining to what extent the economic crisis led to higher unemployment, wage cuts or income losses and rising poverty. As the crisis gained momentum, the action of automatic stabilisation mechanisms built into the national tax-benefit and social protection systems was accompanied by heterogeneous sets of discretionary policy measures. While these factors can explain cross-country variation in labour market developments, they also lead to an unequal distribution of economic risks associated with the crisis across socio-economic groups. The present paper aims to investigate and assess to what extent the financial and economic crisis that hit the global economy in 2008-2009 impacted these labour market developments and to what extent different socio-economic groups were affected.


Purpose – Firms within industrial clusters are subject to challenges such as globalization, limited resources, volatility of international markets and financial instabilities. 4th party logistics (4PL) service providers are supporting individual firms to overcome such challenges by using collaborative operational capabilities from within an industrial cluster to their enhance competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to focus on China and proposes a collaborative operational capabilities framework to illustrate the role of 4PL in industrial cluster competitiveness. Design/methodology/approach – The paper follows an extensive literature review and structured interviews in two types of clusters, drawing on resource-based view and importance-performance matrix analysis. Findings – The paper proposes six elements (that is, synergy of logistics, expansion of industrial chain, financial ability, creativity and innovation ability, cooperation of companies and flexibility of supply chain) that comprise collaborative operational capabilities, and highlights the role of "creativity and innovation ability" and "supply chain flexibility" in the use of 4PL for industrial cluster competitiveness in Chinese context. Research limitations/implications – The paper focusses on China and hence it could also be tested in the developed countries' context with the support of large-scale empirical data to investigate further its usefulness and to identify other constraints. Originality/value – The study contributes to the 4PL literature in that it proposes a framework that extrapolates the importance of 4PL in industrial cluster competitiveness in China.


Joel Fineman was considered one of the most brilliant literary critics of his generation, gifted in doing what the Russian formalists called "making strange." His essays are among the strongest demonstrations of how structures -- whether linguistic, visual, or architectural -- generate large and elaborate systems of meaning. Using examples drawn from literature -- Chaucer, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde -- Fineman creates parables of how language has come to constitute the modern subject (ourselves) as a set of its "effects."Combining formidable learning with theoretical sophistication that is at once philosophical, linguistic, and psychoanalytical, Fineman draws from the most familiar work verbal details that lead to startling new interpretations, challenging Freud or making original applications of Lacan. The repercussion of his writings on theory and on nonliterary discourse is considerable, particularly among critics engaged in showing how artistic practice can be understood, structurally, to signify.Joel Fineman was Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.The Essays: The Structure of Allegorical Desire. The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest. "The Pas de Calais": Freud, the Transference, and the Sense of Woman's Humor. The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction. Shakespeare's "Perjur'd Eye". The Turn of the Shrew. The Sound of 0 in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire. Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape. Shakespeare's Ear.


Background Myocardial infarction (MI) is a common cause of death, with approximately 175000 inpatient episodes of acute myocardial infarction in the UK in 2012. Following an MI the loss of cardiac myocytes triggers a remodelling process depositing extracellular matrix in the infarct region. Hypocontractile, damaged cardiac myocytes surround the infarct, forming a border zone. One of the key structural components regulating excitation-contraction coupling in the heart is the t-tubule network. Conventional confocal microscopy (resolution ˜100 nm) of isolated cardiac myocytes from the border zone post-MI has shown a loss of t-tubules. Here we apply, for the first time to our knowledge, serial block face scanning electron microscopy (SBF-SEM), to investigate the morphology of the t-tubule network within the infarct border zone cardiac myocytes to provide nano-scale structural details of the remodelling process. Methods A porcine model of MI was employed for this study. All animal work was approved by the University of Manchester local ethics committee and was covered by the necessary UK Home Office project and personal licences. Tissue (˜0.5 mm3) was collected from the border and remote zones of the MI pigs and corresponding regions were also taken from control animals and processed for SBF-SEM. Blocks were imaged using an FEI Quanta 250 FEG SEM equipped with a Gatan 3View system. Serial images were collected at different magnifications ranging from 5.4 to 90.0 nm per pixel in the X-Y plane, while the cutting depth along the Z-axis was fixed at 50 nm for all the datasets. Images were segmented and rendered in Fiji or IMOD. Results 3D reconstruction of the t-tubule network from the left ventricle of control animals revealed a spoke-like arrangement, similar to that observed in human cardiac myocytes and other large mammals e.g. the sheep. Cardiac myocytes within the remote region of the infarcted heart have a t-tubule network indistinguishable from that of the control myocytes. In contrast, border zone myocytes showed large areas that were devoid of t-tubules. 3D modelling revealed that the surviving transverse tubules presented gross deformations, appearing to be the result of t-tubules fusing with each other to form a large complex that adopts a variety of orientations within the cardiac myocyte. Conclusion Employing SBF-SEM we have collected 3D datasets of cardiac myocytes in situ within the left ventricle of infarcted pigs at magnifications corresponding to ˜5 nm per pixel in the X-Y plane. This has allowed the resolution of nano-scale details of the remodelled t-tubules, including features such as the basal lamina. Together the loss of t-tubules within parts of the cell, coupled with the formation of super-tubule networks, provide novel structural insights towards unravelling the hypocontractile properties of the border zone cardiac myocytes.


Faceted Execution is a linguistic paradigm for dynamic information-flow control. Under faceted execution, secure program data is represented by faceted values: decision trees that encode how the data should appear to its owner (represented by a label) versus everyone else. When labels are allowed to be first-class (i.e., predicates that decide at runtime which data to reveal), faceted execution enables policy-agnostic programming: a programming style that allows privacy policies for data to be enforced independently of code that computes on that data.To date, implementations of faceted execution are relatively heavyweight: requiring either changing the language runtime or the application code (e.g., by using monads). Following Racket's languages-as-libraries approach, we present Racets: an implementation of faceted execution as a library of macros. Given Racket's highly-expressive macro system, our implementation follows relatively directly from the semantics of faceted execution. To demonstrate how Racets can be used for policy-agnostic programming, we use it to build a web-based game of Battleship. Our implementation sheds light on several interesting issues in interacting with code written without faceted execution. Our Racets implementation is open source, under development, and available online.


In the last ten years there has been a significant shift of interest in film music from Film departments to Music departments. This study seeks to balance the situation and bring film music back into the sphere of action of Film Studies. Film scholars can still give an important specialistic contribution by tackling the music as one of the cinematic devices, and focussing on the analysis of its interplay with the other formal elements of film. In this view, the scope of this study is to develop an approach and a set of analytical tools that serve as a guidance to film scholars to address music in film from their discipline-specific perspective. The analytical approach here offered stems from a mix of Neoformalism – from Film Studies – and concepts drawn from Leonard Meyer's music theories. Neoformalism describes and explains the filmic system focussing on the overall form and style, not only on the interpretation of the film's contents and meanings. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the function(s) and motivation(s) of a series of devices, whose interplay is at the basis of the film's formal system. Being one of the film's devices, music carries out specific functions and responds to specific motivations. Yet, film music is also music. Hence, Neoformalism is coupled with Leonard B. Meyer's theories. According to Meyer the meaning and emotional effect of a tonal piece of music derives from the way in which the composition plays with the listener's expectations and anticipations, which are based on a shared knowledge of norms and conventions. This interest in norms and conventions and in the psychology of perception links Meyer's studies to Neoformalism. And their common interest in the 'whole,' in formal stabilisation, and closure makes Gestalt Psychology a fitting overarching theoretical framework to integrate Neoformalism with Meyer's musicology. The combination of the micro-configuration of the music and that of the visuals produces a macro-configuration in which the whole is something different from the sum of its parts. In this audiovisual interaction, three areas of musical agency are identified in the film: music can have a perceptive function; an emotive function; a cognitive function. The findings are valuable for both the disciplines involved. To film scholars, it presents film music as a topic that can be handled with more confidence and breadth, because the musicological analysis of the musical text (the score) is not required in this approach. To musicologists, it provides a way to deepen their understanding of and insights into the formal and stylistic ways in which music interacts and combines with the other cinematic components.


Objective. The WHO describes violence as a global public health problem. In contrast to domestic violence, violence against youth has been little explored. Our aims were to investigate the prevalence and gender differences in relation to emotional, physical and sexual abuse among young men and women attending youth health centers in Sweden, the current adverse effects of the abuse and the perpetrators of the abuse. Design. Cross‐sectional study. Setting. Nationally representative youth health centers in Sweden. Population and methods. In total, 2,250 women and 920 men aged 15–23 years answered a validated questionnaire about emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Results. A total of 33% (CI: 31–35) of the young women and 18% (CI: 16–21) of the young men had been exposed to emotional abuse during the past year. For physical abuse, 18% (CI: 17–20) of the women and 27% (CI: 24–30) of the men stated that they had been abused during the past year. The gender differences for sexual abuse were pronounced, with 14% (CI: 12–15) of the young women and 4.7% (CI: 3.3–6.0) of the men stating that they had been abused during the past 12 months. The young women reported more severe adverse effects from all types of abuse and were more often abused by a person close to them. Conclusions. The exposure to violence among young people is alarming and presents prominent gender differences, and should be taken into serious consideration as it is a matter of health, democracy and human rights.


This chapter concentrates on information and public policy. In an information society, the default rules of the road are our information laws. Yet information laws have traditionally resided far beyond the notice of all but specialist lawyers, lobbyists and traditional industries built upon them. The making of UK Digital Economy Act 2010, however, attracted an unprecedented level of public interest in addition to the traditional industry lobbying that is an integral part of the process of getting information laws on the statute books. The chapter discusses the implications of the Act for information use in the United Kingdom, and for the changing understanding of information in the public realm.


The undergraduate building technology sequence (uBTS) seeks to impart abroad understanding of environmental systems through a variety of research and simulation techniques including direct observation, traditional calculations and scientific method, and advanced modeling and evaluation software. The integration of the uBTS sequence with studio project work and engagement with the larger inter-institutional research efforts encourages strong student engagement and early mastery of advanced skills. This paper will discuss the above general themes through specific laboratory case studies which are tied to key points in the three year uBTS.


The present paper argues that the distinction between symmetric- and asymmetric-event descriptions determines the pronominal reference in the conjoined structure "S1. discourse connective + S2." with a pronoun in the S2. Symmetric-event descriptions presuppose an entity which does two things or to which two things are done. Asymmetric-event descriptions evoke an expectation that certain events/states will follow the event/state coded in S1. In asymmetric-event descriptions, the high-accessibility marker refers to the entity that lies inside the expectation, while the low-accessibility marker refers to the entity outside the expectation. We further show that the same phenomena with a different type of discourse connectives (Japanese suruto and Korean geureoja ) can also be fully dealt with in the proposed account.


Mount Etna is one of the world's few continually active continental volcanoes and its frequent flank eruptions have been recorded since classical times. These studies have generated a vast literature which, not only enables the impact of eruptions, recovery from them and aspects of human vulnerability and resilience to be brought into focus, but also provides information that allows an assessment to be made of the interplay between environmental, economic and social forces which has shaped this area into Sicily's most distinctive region. In this paper we argue that a unique agriculturally-based society, largely developing indigenously and without significant outside assistance, evolved during a long pre-industrial era, which stretched from late antiquity until the 1950s. In terms of loss-bearing, responses were also typically pre-industrial, with the 1923 eruption denoting the close of this period. Responses were managed with relatively little outside help or intervention. The 1928 eruption marked a transition, after which responses involved progressively greater State intervention. In the pre-industrial era eruptions were managed at three levels: through limited State involvement; by mutual support within village communities, in which religious belief and explanations for losses provided both a social cement - the church often providing leadership and pastoral support - and a context in which losses could be explained; and by family and extended family groups. Finally we argue that these indigenous mechanisms of coping hold important lessons about how disasters on Etna may be managed today.


This paper proposes an efficient method to model through-silicon via (TSV) interconnections, an essential building block for the realization of silicon-based 3-D systems. The proposed method results in equivalent network parameters that include the combined effect of conductor, insulator, and silicon substrate. Although the modeling method is based on solving Maxwell's equation in integral form, the method uses a small number of global modal basis functions and can be much faster than discretization-based integral-equation methods. Through comparison with 3-D full-wave simulations, this paper validates the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed modeling method.


Lithofacies analysis is fundamental to unravelling the succession of depositional environments associated with sea‐level fluctuations. These successions and their timing are often poorly understood. This report defines lithofacies encountered within the north‐eastern North Carolina and south‐eastern Virginia Quaternary section, interprets their depositional environments, presents a model for coastal depositional sequence development in a passive margin setting and uses this understanding to develop the stratigraphy and Quaternary evolutionary history of the region. Data were obtained from numerous drill cores and outcrops. Chronology was based on age estimates acquired using optically stimulated luminescence, amino acid racemization, Uranium series and radiocarbon dating techniques. Geomorphic patterns were identified and interpreted using light detection and ranging imagery. Since lithofacies occurrence, distribution and stratigraphic patterns are different on interfluves than in palaeo‐valleys, this study focused on interfluves to obtain a record of highstand sea‐level cycles with minimal alteration by fluvial processes during subsequent lowstands. Nine primary lithofacies and four diagenetic facies were identified in outcrops and cores. The uppermost depositional sequence on interfluves exhibits an upward succession from shelly marine lithofacies to tidal estuarine lithofacies and is bounded below by a marine ravinement surface and above by the modern land surface. Older depositional sequences in the subsurface are typically bounded above and below by marine ravinement surfaces. Portions of seven depositional sequences were recognized and interpreted to represent deposition from late middle Pleistocene to present. Erosional processes associated with each successive depositional sequence removed portions of older depositional sequences. The stratigraphic record of the most recent sea‐level highstands (Marine Isotope Stage 5a and Marine Isotope Stage 3) is best preserved. Glacio‐isostatic adjustment has influenced depositional patterns so that deposits associated with late Quaternary sea‐level highstands (Marine Isotope Stages 5c, 5a and 3), which did not reach as high as present sea‐level according to equatorial eustatic records, are uplifted and emergent within the study area.


The paper explores Japan's contribution to the provision of primary healthcare in Ghana through the Community-based Health Planning and Service (CHPS) strategy. The discussion trawls the policy regarding the development of the CHPS and highlights the specific role of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in the 'Scaling up' of the CHPS project in the Upper West Region (UWR) of Ghana. It is suggested in this analysis that through the application of Facilitative Supervision (FSV), a supportive approach to supervision, JICA aimed to review and fine-tune the administrative capacity of the relevant health administrators of the UWR with the primary objective to improve and enhance healthcare delivery in the region. The study proposes that in tune with Michel Foucault's concept of 'administrative control' and 'noso-politics' the FSV initiative further essentialised the role of the state in healthcare delivery in the region.


MATHEMATICAL MODELING AND SIMULATION OF HUMAN MOTION USING A 3-DIMENSIONAL, MULTI-SEGMENT COUPLED PENDULUM SYSTEM: DERIVATION OF A GENERALIZED FORMULA FOR EQUATIONS OF MOTION by Loay Ahmed-Wasfe Al-Zube The use of mathematical models to investigate the dynamics of human movement relies on two approaches: forward dynamics and inverse dynamics. In this investigation a new modeling approach called the Boundary Method is outlined. This method addresses some of the disadvantages of both the forward and the inverse approach. The method yields as output both a set of potential movement solutions to a given motor task and the net muscular impulses required to produce those movements. The input to the boundary method is a finite and adjustable number of critical target body configurations. In each phase of the motion that occurs between two contiguous target configurations the equations of motion are solved in the forward direction as a two point ballistic boundary value problem. In the limit as the number of specified target configurations increases the boundary method approaches a stable algorithm for doing inverse dynamics. A 3-Dimensional, multi-segment coupled pendulum system, that mathematically models human motion, will be presented along with a derivation of a generalized formula that constructs the equations of motion for this model. The suggested model is developed to utilize the boundary method. The model developed in this thesis will lead to a long rang goal, which is the development of a diagnostic tool for any motion analysis laboratory that will answer the question of finding optimal movement patterns, to prevent injury and improve performance in human subjects. MATHEMATICAL MODELING AND SIMULATION OF HUMAN MOTION USING A 3-DIMENSIONAL, MULTI-SEGMENT COUPLED PENDULUM SYSTEM: DERIVATION OF A GENERALIZED FORMULA FOR EQUATIONS OF MOTION by Loay Ahmed-Wasfe Al-Zube A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering Department of Biomedical Engineering


Pathology residency training is currently a time-intensive process, frequently extending up to 6 years in duration as residents complete 1 or 2 fellowships following graduation. Innovative training curricula may help address the impending changes in the health-care landscape, particularly future shortfalls in pathology staffing and changing health-care models that incorporate more work within interdisciplinary teams. Montefiore has created a novel residency training program aimed at accelerating the acquisition of competency in pathology, preparing residents for independent practice at the completion of residency training, and providing residents with the requisite adaptability and consultative skills to excel wherever they choose to practice. We describe the implementation of this novel pathology residency training curriculum at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the perception of residents in both the old curriculum and the new curriculum.


Autonomic Communications is a promising approach for the management of future networks, based on providing self-management and other self-x capabilities to the network elements. Network Governance approach aims to develop new methods for operators to efficiently manage this intelligent infrastructure, ensuring human-to-network communication. This paper presents an interview-based analysis of the expertise of human network operators in their network management activity and the derived requirements for the governance of a self-managed network from a human point of view. The requirements cover the aspects of trust, division of labor between human operators and self-x functionalities, self-x design and human-to-network interface.


The African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses (AMMA) fourth airborne campaign was conducted in July–August 2006 to study the chemical composition of the middle and upper troposphere in West Africa with the major objective to better understand the processing of chemical emissions by the West African Monsoon (WAM) and its associated regional-scale and vertical transports. In particular, the french airborne experiment was organized around two goals. The first was to characterize the impact of Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) on the ozone budget in the upper troposphere and the evolution of the chemical composition of these convective plumes as they move westward toward the Atlantic Ocean. The second objective was to discriminate the impact of remote sources of pollution over West Africa, including transport from the middle east, Europe, Asia and from southern hemispheric fires. Observations of O 3 , CO, NO x , H 2 O and hydroperoxide above West Africa along repeated meridional transects were coupled with transport analysis based on the FLEXPART lagrangian model. The cross analysis of trace gas concentrations and transport pathways revealed 5 types of air masses: convective uplift of industrial and urban emissions, convective uplift of biogenic emissions, slow advection from Cotonou polluted plumes near the coast, meridional transport of upper tropospheric air from the subtropical barrier region, and meridional transport of Southern Hemisphere (SH) biomass burning emissions. O 3 /CO correlation plots and the correlation plots of H 2 O 2 with a OH proxy revealed not only a control of the trace gas variability by transport processes but also significant photochemical reactivity in the mid- and upper troposphere. The study of four MCSs outflow showed contrasted chemical composition and air mass origins depending on the MCSs lifetime and latitudinal position. Favorables conditions for ozone production were found for MCSs with increased MCS lifetime (>1.5 days), which allowed for more H 2 O 2 formation, and with trajectories crossing the 10° N latitude, which increased CO transport to the upper troposphere. The upper tropospheric concentrations sampled in the MCS outflow regions showed mixed origins including local vertical convective transport, and uplifting of air from the low troposphere over the middle-east related to the summer Asian low pressure system or from the southern hemispheric fires.


The present study is an exploration of reflections of/on reality in Sasha
Sokolov's novels: School for Fools, Between Dog and Wolf and Palisandriia. The
language in these texts does not express reality but embodies it, and reality fades away
into its reflections, where it finds its essence. The project is framed by an overview of
the theoretical models advanced by Mikhail Bakhtin (outsideness and surplus of vision),
Jacques Derrida (dissemination and supplement) and Jacques Lacan (the mirror stage),
and constructed around the myth of Narcissus. Within this critical framework, the study
comprises three chapters, presenting the novels in their chronological appearance.
Chapter one examines an aesthetical (trans)formation of reality and
reconstruction of the self through a series of metaphors. By adopting the metaphor of
narcissism and exploring its ontological, narrative and psychological implications in
relation to Sokolov's text, it is demonstrated how memory, instead of retrieving the
past, signifies it, and how language, instead of expressing reality, engenders it.
Chapter two constitutes a reading of Between Dog and Wolf as a re-enactment of
the Eucharist, wherein the spirit becomes the letter, and the context merges with the
text. Employing deconstruction as an approach, the analysis illuminates how reality is
grounded by its representation as the latter is grounded in its medium: language.
Chapter three presents Palisandriia as a parody of a 'ritualized biography',
whereby the hero's personal life becomes a historical allegory. This technique,
identified with sots-art and historiographic metafiction, is viewed as an attempt to deal
with the disappearance of the historical referent. It is argued that by approaching history
– personal and public – as an artefact, Sokolov's novel stands as an expression of the
spirit of Dandyism in the face of the total discrediting of the real.


The Old French Crusade Cycle consists of a series of epic poems that together form a cycle concerning the First Crusade and the legendary events associated with Godefroi de Buillon. La Prise d Acre, La Mort Godefroi, and La Chanson des Rois BAudouin designate the principle episodes of Branch II of the Jerusalem Continuations, a continuous and stylistically cohesive narrative found in Paris Bibliotheque Nationale MS 12569 and partly in London British Library Additional MS 36615. Although it draws broadly on narrative elements developed throughout the Old French Crusade Cycle, the narrative edited here follows an independent course and presents a more purely fictional vision of Outremer than its antecedents in the Chanson d Antioche and the Chanson de Jerusalem. Most of the conventional figures of the cycle disappear from the narrative. In addition to Godefroi and Bauduin, Calabre, Corbaran, Jean d Alis, Harpin de Bourges, Tancred, Bohemond, and Raymond de St. Gilles all put in final appearances. In their stead a new generation of adventurers arrives, including Amaury d Aucoire, Bauduin de Sebourc, the tow Fauquembergues brothers, and Renuat du Crac de Monroial. Composed during the second half of the 13th century, this pseudo-historical account of the first century or so in Outremer celebrates a strong monarchy that rewards faithful vassals, courts the loyalty of the bourgeoisie, and refuses intimidation by its partner, the Church. The fate of Christian Palestine is shown to rely greatly on highborn newcomers close to the house of France. Thus the events of the Second Crusade, led by monarch themselves, do no find their place in this segment of the cycle. Such a scale of values and distortion of historical fact suit a literary vehicle conceived primarily to flatter aristocratic nostaligia and tastes for ambition and adventure. To be sure, the work stands in sharp contrast to a popular apathy for holy expeditions, just as it ignores contemporary pleas for more peaceful evangelistic efforts among the heathen. "


An instrument is described which has been built for the automatic recording of sequence exposures on 4-by-10-in. photographic plates. Twelve shutter slides are independently timed so that on one plate up to 384 4-by-5-mm rectangles can be uniformly exposed to high and low intensity radiation. The present design is for an intensity ratio of 100:1, where both intensities are below optimum. With minor modifications the instrument can be converted to operate at other intensity ratios. The densitometer readings are checked from calibration strip data placed adjacent to the sequence exposures. The corrected data, following conversion to Seidel values, are plotted as families of characteristic curves, with the sequence exposure ratio as the constant parameter. Isodense loop data are read from the curves at the intersection with a line drawn parallel to the exposure axis.A theoretical discussion of isodense loops is presented which is based on the hypothesis that for isodense exposures the probability of rendering the last grains developable must be equal. It is shown how this method should yield the limiting slope of the low intensity failure curve and the minimum number of quanta absorbed by the average grain to become developable. Preliminary results presented here for Eastman Kodak Emulsion Type 33 are within expectation.


The First Complete Guide to DevOps for Software Architects DevOps promises to accelerate the release of new software features and improve monitoring of systems in production, but its crucial implications for software architects and architecture are often ignored. In DevOps: A Software Architects Perspective, three leading architects address these issues head-on. The authors review decisions software architects must make in order to achieve DevOps goals and clarify how other DevOps participants are likely to impact the architects work. They also provide the organizational, technical, and operational context needed to deploy DevOps more efficiently, and review DevOps impact on each development phase. The authors address cross-cutting concerns that link multiple functions, offering practical insights into compliance, performance, reliability, repeatability, and security. This guide demonstrates the authors ideas in action with three real-world case studies: datacenter replication for business continuity, management of a continuous deployment pipeline, and migration to a microservice architecture. Comprehensive coverage includes Why DevOps can require major changes in both system architecture and IT roles How virtualization and the cloud can enable DevOps practices Integrating operations and its service lifecycle into DevOps Designing new systems to work well with DevOps practices Integrating DevOps with agile methods and TDD Handling failure detection, upgrade planning, and other key issues Managing consistency issues arising from DevOps independent deployment models Integrating security controls, roles, and audits into DevOps Preparing a business plan for DevOps adoption, rollout, and measurement


Abstract Recent neurophysiological and behavioral evidence suggests that in both perception and memory the differing attributes of multidimensional stimuli are retained independently of one another in the visual system. The phenomenal unity of visual cognition seems to be dependent on the recovery of feature conjunctions. A major objective for research in this area is to identify the mechanism(s) responsible for re-establishing appropriate feature combinations. Recent findings indicate that spatial location may play a mediative role in the feature integration associated with perceptual processing; however, whether location continues to provide the basis for the recovery of feature conjunctions from memory is unknown. This article provides an overview and critique of current research and offers a theoretical model of memorial feature processing.


In general, people coexist peacefully with the innumerable microorganisms that colonize the gut. Some gut microbes, however, are potential pathogens; moreover, inappropriate immune responses directed against gastrointestinal flora may be involved in the pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) such as ulcerative colitis. Mazmanian et al. used a mouse model of IBD in which naïve effector T cells were introduced into immunodeficient mice, along with the bacterium Helicobacter hepaticus, to investigate the hypothesis that IBDs may involve an imbalance between potentially harmful and potentially beneficial commensal bacteria. Co-colonization with the bacterium Bacteroides fragilis protected these mice from colitis, whereas B. fragilis lacking the surface polysaccharide PSA (B. fragilis ΔPSA) were not protective. Colon cultures revealed increased abundance of pro-inflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) in mice with experimental colitis, an increase blocked by colonization with B. fragilis but not B. fragilis ΔPSA. Oral PSA protected against this model of colitis as well--and also against a chemically induced model of colitis. PSA increased expression of the transcript encoding the anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-10 (IL-10) in mouse colon and also in cocultures of bone marrow-derived dendritic cells and naïve CD4+ T cells (BMDC-T cell cocultures). PSA decreased production of TNF-α in BMDC-T cell cocultures infected with H. hepaticus, an effect blocked by neutralizing antibodies directed against the IL-10 receptor. Furthermore, such antibodies inhibited the protective effect of PSA in the T cell-transfer model of colitis, and PSA failed to protect against colitis when the naïve effector T cells were derived from mice lacking IL-10. The authors thus conclude that B. fragilis PSA can modulate the inflammatory response associated with H. hepaticus and thereby protect against IBD. Kullberg discusses the results and provides thoughtful commentary. S. K. Mazmanian, J. L. Round, D. L. Kasper, A microbial symbiosis factor prevents intestinal inflammatory disease. Nature 453, 620-625 (2008). [PubMed] M. C. Kullberg, Immunology: Soothing intestinal sugars. Nature 453, 602-604 (2008). [PubMed]


In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, transmit antenna selection is a very promising technique for reducing implementation cost and computational complexity. In this paper, we propose two novel fast near-optimal antenna selection algorithms based on channel capacity maximization, whose core idea is to use an effective iterative process to reduce computational complexity and retain near-optimal performance. Compared with the conventional algorithm, the proposed algorithms have lower computational complexity and achieve almost the same capacity and bit-error rate (BER) performance as the optimal one. In particular, the BER performance gain of the proposed algorithms is much larger than the conventional algorithms in correlated fading channels. Finally, computer simulations are presented to validate and demonstrate performance of our algorithms.


Abstract : Ad-hoc networks among groups of autonomous mobile robots are becoming a common occurrence as teams of robots take on increasingly complicated missions over wider areas. Research has often focused on proactive means in which the individual robots of the team may prevent communication failures between nodes in this network. This is not always possible especially in unknown or hostile environments. This research addresses reactive aspects of communication recovery. How should the members of the team react in the event of unseen communication failures between some or all of the nodes in the network? We present a number of behaviors to be utilized in the event of communications failure as well as a behavioral sequencer to further enhance the effectiveness of these recovery behaviors. The performance of the communication recovery behaviors is analyzed in simulation and their application on hardware platforms is discussed.


Item Response Theory (IRT) provides the accepted framework for examining student responses to individual test items so as to assess their quality. Moreover, IRT proves especially valuable in both improving items, which will be reused in future tests, and eliminating the ambiguous or misleading ones. However, to ensure all IRT parameters are correctly estimated, every single item needs to be tested on a large number of examinees to define its properties. As a result, IRT tends to be shunned by teaching staff who only have access to a relatively small number of students. Nevertheless, the accuracy of parameter estimates is of lesser importance in assessment calibration, when items whose parameters exceed a threshold value are flagged for revision. This study uses simulated data sets under various simulation conditions and introduces two new quality indices together with their respective IRT goodness-of-fit tests as a means to explore the feasibility of applying IRT-based assessment calibration to small sample sizes.


This study seeks to articulate a particular moral, Christian vision and discover what it entails for reading texts; it tries to bring literary criticism and Christian ethics into discussion with one another. Insisting on the vital, productive relationship between ethics and the study of literature, "Love and Good Reasons" demonstrates ways of reading novels and stories from a Christian perspective. Fritz Oehlschlaeger argues for the study of literature as a training ground for the kinds of thinking on which moral reasoning depends. He challenges methods of doing ethics that attempt to specify universally binding principles or rules and argues for the need to bring literature back into conversation with the most basic questions about how we should live. "Love and Good Reasons" combines postliberal narrative theology - especially Stanley Hauerwas' Christian ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of traditional inquiry - with recent scholarship in literature and ethics including the work of Martha Nussbaum, J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, Jeffrey Stout, and Richard Rorty. Oehlschlaeger offers detailed readings of literature by five major authors - Herman Melville, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James, and Stephen Crane. He examines their works in light of biblical scripture and the grand narratives of Israel, Jesus, and the Church. Discussing the role of religion in contemporary higher education, Oehlschlaeger shares his own experiences of teaching literature from a religious perspective at a state university.


We analyze how consumer preferences for one-stop shopping affect the (Nash) bargaining relationships between a retailer and its suppliers. One-stop shopping preferences create 'demand complementarities' among otherwise independent products which lead to two opposing effects on upstream merger incentives: first a standard double mark-up problem and second a bargaining effect. The former creates merger incentives while the later induces suppliers to bargain separately. When buyer power becomes large enough, then suppliers stay separated which raises final good prices. We also show that our result can be obtained when wholesale prices are determined in a non-cooperative game, under two-part tariffs and when products are substitutable.


Presents the development of the basic institutions of the Anglo-American common-law system. Explores the sources of law from cases, legislation, and codification, to doctrinal writings. The text also discusses the development of legal concepts such as property in land, contracts, liability for injury, negotiability of commercial paper, and the business corporation.


Electrophysiological data processing can take place both in time and in frequency domains as well as in the joint time-frequency domain. Short Time Fourier Transform and Wavelet Transform are commonly used time-frequency analysis methods. The limitations of these methods initiated the use of methods such as synchrosqueezing and multivariate synchrosqueezing methods. In our proposed method 88.9%, 77.8%, 80.6% accuracy rates were obtained respectively for the valence, activation and dominance parameters using and multivariate synchrosqueezing methods and support vector machines(SVM) which yields better results than most of the other methods mentioned in the literature.


This article explores the divergence between international and national legal responses to maritime piracy, and it addresses the benefits of a unified international legal framework. Current domestic, regional and international legal frameworks fail to adequately combat the nature and scale of maritime piracy, which increasingly impacts the shipping, global manufacturing and tourism industries and which governments now consider to be a serious problem. As of yet, no unified legal approach exists to address the problem of modern piracy. The crux of the argument advanced in this article is that an inadvertent – yet dangerous – bifurcation of legal developments has unfolded within the field of maritime piracy, consequently creating a body of law that lacks harmony.


Though perhaps better known for their stylistic use of metaphor, lawyers' substantive use of metaphor drives the law. Like other disciplines, law requires its categories and thus its metaphors. For utility's sake, lawyers put similar things in categories and thereby treat them as categorically the same. However, good lawyers understand that such categorical equating is not literally true since nothing truly is what it is not. Instead, good lawyers understand the metaphorical nature of categorization. Good lawyers also understand the need to identify both the conscious and unconscious metaphors in play in a given situation. They understand the need to avoid uncritically accepting others' metaphors, categories, and narratives, the need where possible to construct metaphors, categories, and narratives that benefit one's case, and the need to be aware of what operative metaphors, categories, and narratives highlight and conceal so that one can proceed accordingly and avoid surprise. Good lawyers further understand that predictability, precedent, simplicity, and coherence in the broadest sense not only help them evaluate their own categories and other metaphors and the "flexible" logic of metaphor discussed in this article. These tests also help good lawyers evaluate the categories and metaphors of others.Finally, good lawyers understand that metaphor is more than powerful kennings. Metaphor is more than blood as "raven-wine," more than raven as "battle-gull." Metaphor lives in and generates much blood, flesh, and bone of that living thing we call the law.


The gut bacterial community plays a vital role in human health with a diverse and complex composition, sculpted by complex host – microbe interactions. Neonates born prematurely are vulnerable to various infections due to their weak immune system and the immaturity of the gut. The most significant diseases are necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) and sepsis. With the advent of molecular techniques the development of the microbial community were better characterised. Leading to better understanding of the microbial contribution to preterm diseases and how clinical and dietary interventions can be tailored to reduce their incidence. The aim was to study the impacts of clinical and dietary interventions on the community structure and function of the preterm gut microbiota by using high throughput molecular techniques.

The microbial communities derived from clinical samples that are implicated in gastrointestinal disease were explored. By utilising ecological theory, high-throughput sequencing, metabolomic profiling, and statistical modelling to identify how the assembly, phylogenetic diversity, and overall function of these communities impact on disease state. The comparison of archeal and fungal diversity between preterm infants diagnosed with NEC and/or sepsis, compared to healthy controls, showed no significant differences in the community profiles between health and disease. To study if microbial load was associated with NEC, independent of community profiles, total bacterial load was quanitified temporally in NEC infants and matched. The results showed no significant differences in the bacterial load between NEC samples before or at diagnosis, compared to healthy controls, with the only difference occurring following diagnosis, with NEC samples showing significant reduced bacterial load.

To better understand clinical intervention in shaping the developing microbial community and the resulting contribution to NEC and sepsis disease mechanisms, the commonly administered antibiotics and probiotic supplementation were investigated. The result of the findings confirm existing publications, showing probiotic species administered to preterm infants significantly reduce the abundance of potentially pathogenic bacteria associated with NEC and LOS. In the first study of its kind, the study followed the same neonates longitudinally through probiotic administration, including post discharge several months after cessation. Crucially, this novel analysis revealed that supplemented bifidobacteria was able to colonise the gut long-term, but supplemented Lactobacilli did not. As well as changes in the bacterial profiles, further metabolomic profiling of functional small molecules confirmed that probiotic supplementation caused functional changes in the preterm gut microbiota. Antibiotic administration represents the most important element of current clinical practise that causes profound shifts in the gut microbiota. To further explore the routinely used antibiotics in neonatal intensive care units and to what extent this intervention alters the preterm gut microbiome, the infants were followed temporally through different antibiotic courses. This revealed that antibiotics differentially affected the preterm gut microbiome, with no single combination found to cause consistent changes between individuals. At a time when antibiotic use is under scrutiny, the outcomes show that much greater understanding of the short and long-term effects on the developing microbiome is necessary.

This thesis has combined a range of molecular methods to explore the microbial community in the developing preterm gut microbiota, including bacteria, fungi, and archaea, finding no association in pathogenesis of NEC. Metabolite profiling was also performed, determining how changes in the gut microbiota cause functional changes in the gut. Combining the data from these powerful analyses revealed probiotics help to modulate a healthy gut microbiome, but antibiotics may disturb the developing bacterial community. Ultimately, better understanding of the consequences of clinical intervention will lead to more refined and personalised care.


The research area of music information retrieval has gradually evolved to address the challenges of effectively accessing and interacting large collections of music and associated data, such as styles, artists, lyrics, and reviews. Bringing together an interdisciplinary array of top researchers, Music Data Mining presents a variety of approaches to successfully employ data mining techniques for the purpose of music processing. The book first covers music data mining tasks and algorithms and audio feature extraction, providing a framework for subsequent chapters. With a focus on data classification, it then describes a computational approach inspired by human auditory perception and examines instrument recognition, the effects of music on moods and emotions, and the connections between power laws and music aesthetics. Given the importance of social aspects in understanding music, the text addresses the use of the Web and peer-to-peer networks for both music data mining and evaluating music mining tasks and algorithms. It also discusses indexing with tags and explains how data can be collected using online human computation games. The final chapters offer a balanced exploration of hit song science as well as a look at symbolic musicology and data mining. The multifaceted nature of music information often requires algorithms and systems using sophisticated signal processing and machine learning techniques to better extract useful information. An excellent introduction to the field, this volume presents state-of-the-art techniques in music data mining and information retrieval to create novel ways of interacting with large music collections.


This thesis develops a q theory model of housing, where the value of Norwegian housing, q, is defined as the ratio of housing prices to the construction costs of new housing and housing is defined as the aggregate housing stock in Norway's national accounts. This thesis analyzes the development in q during the period 1992-2011 and show that q is positively and significantly related to housing investment when assuming that shocks in the economy are both absent and present. In the assumption that shocks are present in the economy, developments in income, debt, population, initiation of new housing construction, interest rates and taxes where analyzed. Empirical estimates show that the developments in population and interest rates in particular may explain the variance in q. The positive relationship between the value of housing and the aggregate housing stock suggests that there may be a presence of bubbles in the Norwegian housing market and that the dynamics in the housing market may be influenced by non-fundamental variables such as animal spirits and irrational exuberance. This finding must however be interpreted with caution since it is difficult to measure bubbles before they have burst. In addition, the empirical estimates have not accounted for all the variables that may impact the dynamics of the housing market and it is discussed that land prices in particular may have contributed to the rising housing prices. Thus it can neither be proved nor disproved that a bubble may exist in the Norwegian housing market. Nevertheless, this does not alter the main result in this thesis, that the value of housing is significantly related to housing investment according to the q theory model of housing.


Landmines and unexploded ordinance (UXO) are laid during a conflict against enemy forces. However, they kill or maim civilians decades after the conflict has ended. There are more than 110 million landmines actively lodged in the globe. Every year more than 26,000 innocent civilians are killed or maimed. Most modern landmines are mainly nonmetallic or plastic, which are difficult to be detected using conventional metal detectors. Detection using hand-held prodding is a slow and expensive process. Impulse Ground Penetrating Radar (ImGPR) is a nondestructive technique capable of detecting shallowly buried nonmetallic anti-personnel (AP) and anti-tank (AT) landmines. In this PhD thesis, ImGPR is considered as a tool to detect landmines and UXO. The presence of strong ground clutter and noise degrade the performance of GPR. Hence, using a GPR sensor is almost impossible without the application of sophisticated signal processing. In electromagnetic wave propagation modeling, a multilayer transmission line technique is applied. It considers different soil types at different moisture levels. Plastic targets of different diameters are buried at different depths. The modeled signal is then used to estimate the ground and buried target parameters. In a parameter estimation procedure, a surface reflection parameter method (SRPM) is applied. Signal processing algorithms are implemented for clutter reduction and decision making purposes. Attention is mainly given to the development of techniques, that are applicable to real-time landmine detection. Advanced techniques are preceded by elementary preprocessing techniques, which are useful for signal correction and noise reduction. Background subtraction techniques based on multilayer modeling, spatial filtering and adaptive background subtraction are implemented. In addition to that, decorrelation and symmetry filtering techniques are also investigated. In the correlated decision fusion framework, local decisions are transmitted to the fusion center so as to compute a global decision. In this case, the concept of confidence information of local decisions is crucial to obtain acceptable detection results. The Bahadur-Lazarsfeld and Chow expansions are used to estimate the joint probability density function of the correlated decisions. Furthermore, a decision fusion based on fuzzy set is implemented. All proposed methods are evaluated using simulated as well as real GPR data measurements of many scenarios. The real data collection campaign took place at the Griesheim old airport and Botanischer Garten, Darmstadt, Germany in July 2011.


The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST), a 4 meter class telescope for observations of the solar atmosphere currently in construction phase, will generate data at rates of the order of 10 TB/day with its state of the art instrumentation. The high-priority ATST Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) instrument alone will create two data streams with a bandwidth of 960 MB/s each. Because of the related data handling issues, these data will be post-processed with speckle interferometry algorithms in near-real time at the telescope using the cost-effective Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) technology that is supported by the ATST Data Handling System. In this contribution, we lay out the VBI-specific approach to its image processing pipeline, put this into the context of the underlying ATST Data Handling System infrastructure, and finally describe the details of how the algorithms were redesigned to exploit data parallelism in the speckle image reconstruction algorithms. An algorithm re-design is often required to efficiently speed up an application using GPU technology; we have chosen NVIDIA's CUDA language as basis for our implementation. We present our preliminary results of the algorithm performance using our test facilities, and base a conservative estimate on the requirements of a full system that could achieve near real-time performance at ATST on these results.


In this paper I am going to deal with the phenomenon of synonymy from the logical point of view. In Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), which is my background theory, the sense of an expression is an algorithmically structured procedure detailing what operations to apply to what procedural constituents to arrive at the object (if any) denoted by the expression. Such procedures are rigorously defined as TIL constructions. In this new orthodoxy of structured meanings and procedural semantics we encounter the problem of the granularity of procedure individuation. Though the identity of TIL constructions is rigorously defined, they are a bit too fine-grained from the procedural point of view. In an effort to solve the problem we introduced the notion of procedural isomorphism. Any two terms or expressions whose respective meanings are procedurally isomorphic are deemed semantically indistinguishable, hence synonymous and thus substitutable in any context, whether extensional, intensional or hyperintensional. The novel contribution of this paper is a formally worked-out, philosophically motivated criterion of hyperintensional individuation, which is defined in terms of a slightly more carefully formulated version of - conversion and -conversion by value, which amounts to a modification of Church's Alternative (A1).


The core-set approach is a discretization method for Markov state models of complex molecular dynamics. Core sets are disjoint metastable regions in the conformational space, which need to be known prior to the construction of the core-set model. We propose to use density-based cluster algorithms to identify the cores. We compare three different density-based cluster algorithms: the CNN, the DBSCAN, and the Jarvis-Patrick algorithm. While the core-set models based on the CNN and DBSCAN clustering are well-converged, constructing core-set models based on the Jarvis-Patrick clustering cannot be recommended. In a well-converged core-set model, the number of core sets is up to an order of magnitude smaller than the number of states in a conventional Markov state model with comparable approximation error. Moreover, using the density-based clustering one can extend the core-set method to systems which are not strongly metastable. This is important for the practical application of the core-set method because most biologically interesting systems are only marginally metastable. The key point is to perform a hierarchical density-based clustering while monitoring the structure of the metric matrix which appears in the core-set method. We test this approach on a molecular-dynamics simulation of a highly flexible 14-residue peptide. The resulting core-set models have a high spatial resolution and can distinguish between conformationally similar yet chemically different structures, such as register-shifted hairpin structures.


Cartels are a focus of concern for many reasons. Cartels cause a locative inefficiency by reducing production in order to raise market price. This forces consumers to pay significantly more money for products, from luxuries like high end art to necessities like vitamins and pharmaceuticals. Fortunately, cartels are inherently unstable. Many of the problems of cartel stability are related to trust. For a cartel to be formed, each participant must trust its cartel partners not to do two things: cheat on the agreement by charging less than the fixed price, or tell antitrust authorities about the cartel. In our article we will try to place all the methods of distinguishing cartels from cross-licensing arrangements between competitors. It is very important to know about cartels and cross licensing arrangements in the competitive world. Cross licensing is legal where as Cartels are legal and illegal both, in Cross licensing there is no such strict requirement of trust but in Cartels trust is required among the members of the cartel. There are two methods for competitors to expose their business and earn profit in case of IP related transactions. Several developed countries have separate laws which are specifically applied to Cartels but in India there is no such law it is governed under the Competition Act.


This piece offers a teaching strategy to help students overcome the sense of being overwhelmed by the 2016 election and its immediate aftermath. It emphasizes the importance of understanding Trump in a broader historical context yet with a sharper analytical focus. By attending to the specificity of language, separating policy from rhetoric, and recognizing the limitations of the current political spectrum, students learn to avoid the pitfalls of caricature and exceptionality. Ultimately this empowers them to imagine and engage in a wider, more creative and transformative world of politics.


A new definition of the sheath edge is rigorously derived taking into account the kinetic properties of the plasma, and a consistent set of local sheath edge conditions is presented for the case of a magnetic field perpendicular to the wall. These local boundary conditions give explicit expressions for the ion velocity, the electron velocity, and the electron heat flux at the sheath edge, which can be easily implemented in a fluid code. It is shown that in the case of positive current to the wall, the commonly used Bohm's relations well aproximate the proposed boundary conditions, while large discrepancies are observed for negative currents. A fully kinetic PIC code simulating the plasma wall transition has been developed to validate these local relations, showing an excellent agreement with the theory. This work represents a first step towards a complete formulation of the sheath edge local boundary conditions for a general magnetic geometry.


Flagrant cases of professional incompetence are often identified and corrected through formal remediation procedures. However, many subtle cases exist that can go undetected and uncorrected. This article describes a 5-component schema for categorizing the elements of competence necessary to provide quality psychological services: factual knowledge, generic clinical skills, orientation-specific technical skills, clinical judgment, and interpersonal attributes. Case examples are used to illustrate the types of problems that are likely to occur in these different areas. Peer education and supportive confrontation are suggested as appropriate means of addressing subtle cases of incompetence. Also, suggestions are made for system changes (graduate training, licensure requirements, and continuing education) designed to promote competence among clinicians.


How the division of the Americas from the rest of the world affected human history. In 15,000 B.C. early humankind, who had evolved in Africa tens of thousands of years before and spread out to populate the Earth, arrived in Siberia, during the Ice Age. Because so much water was locked up at that time in the great ice sheets, several miles thick, the levels of the world's oceans were much lower than they are today, and early humans were able to walk across the Bering Strait, then a land bridge, without getting their feet wet and enter the Americas. Then, the Ice Age came to an end, the Bering Strait refilled with water and humans in the Americas were cut off from humans elsewhere in the world. This division - with two great populations on Earth, each oblivious of the other - continued until Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America just before 1500 A.D. This is the fascinating subject of THE GREAT DIVIDE, which compares and contrasts the development of humankind in the 'Old World' and the 'New' between 15,000 B.C. and 1500 A.D. This unprecedented comparison of early peoples means that, when these factors are taken together, they offer a uniquely revealing insight into what it means to be human. THE GREAT DIVIDE offers a masterly and totally original synthesis of archaeology, anthropology, geology, meteorology, cosmology and mythology, to give a new shape - and a new understanding - to human history.


Laboratory feeding assays employing the common Canbbean wrasse Thalassoma bifasciatum were undertaken to determine the palatability of food pellets containing natural concentrations of crude organic extracts of 71 species of Caribbean demosponges from reef, mangrove, and grassbed habitats. The majority of sponge species (69%) yielded deterrent extracts, but there was considerable interand intraspecific vanability in deterrency. Most of the sponges of the aspiculate orders Verongida and Dictyoceratida yielded highly deterrent extracts, as did all the species in the orders Homosclerophorida and Axinellida. Palatable extracts were common among species in the orders Hadromerida, Poecilosclerida and Haplosclerida. Intraspecific variability was evident, suggesting that, for some species, some individuals (or portions thereof) may be chemically undefended. Reef sponges generally yielded more deterrent extracts than sponges from mangrove or grassbed habitats, but 4 of the 10 most common sponges on reefs yielded palatable extracts (Callyspongia vaginalis, Mycale laevis, Niphates erecta, Iotrochota birotulata), including those most commonly eaten by sponge-eating reef fish. The presence of symbiotic zoanthid cnidarians of the genus Parazoanthus in the tissues of otherwise palatable sponges had little effect on the deterrency of tissue extracts, indicating that these commensal polyps do not confer a chemical defense by association There was no relationship between sponge color and deterrency, suggesting that sponges are not aposematic and that color variation is the result of other factors. There was also no relationship between the toxicity of sponge extracts (as determined in previous studies) and deterrency, confirming the invalidity of previous assessments of chemical defense based on toxicity. Although chemical antipredatory defenses are important strategies for most Caribbean sponges, some common species appear to rely on other tactics.


The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence is a pioneering study of the export of books from Britain to early-independent Spanish America, which considers all phases of production, distribution, reading, and re-writing of British books in the region, and explores the role that these works played in the formation of national identities in the new countries. Analysing in particular the publishing house of Rudolph Ackermann, which dominated the export of British books in Spanish to the former colonies in the 1820s, it discusses the ways in which the printed form of these publications affected the knowledge conveyed by them. After a survey of the peculiar characteristics of print culture in early-independent Spanish America and the trends in the import of European books in the region, the author examines the operation of Ackermann's publishing enterprise. She shows how the collaborative nature of this enterprise, involving a number of Spanish American diplomats as sponsors and Spanish exiles as writers and translators, shaped the characteristics of its publications, and how the notion of 'useful knowledge' conveyed by them was deployed in the service of both commercial and educational concerns. The hitherto unexplored mechanisms of book import, distribution, wholesale and retailing in Spanish America in the 1820s are also analysed as is the way in which the significance of the knowledge transmitted by those books shifted in the course of their production and distribution. The author examines how the question-and-answer form of Ackermann's textbooks constrained both publishers and writers and oriented their readers' relation with the texts. She then looks at the various ways in which foreign knowledge was appropriated in the construction of individual, social, national, and continental identities; this is done through the study of a number of individual reading experiences and through the analysis of the editions and adaptations of Ackermann's textbooks during the nineteenth century.


We present an efficient and effective nonlinear feature-domain noise suppression algorithm, motivated by the minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) optimization criterion, for noise-robust speech recognition. Distinguishing from the log-MMSE spectral amplitude noise suppressor proposed by Ephraim and Malah (E&M), our new algorithm is aimed to minimize the error expressed explicitly for the Mel-frequency cepstra instead of discrete Fourier transform (DFT) spectra, and it operates on the Mel-frequency filter bank's output. As a consequence, the statistics used to estimate the suppression factor become vastly different from those used in the E&M log-MMSE suppressor. Our algorithm is significantly more efficient than the E&M's log-MMSE suppressor since the number of the channels in the Mel-frequency filter bank is much smaller (23 in our case) than the number of bins (256) in DFT. We have conducted extensive speech recognition experiments on the standard Aurora-3 task. The experimental results demonstrate a reduction of the recognition word error rate by 48% over the standard ICSLP02 baseline, 26% over the cepstral mean normalization baseline, and 13% over the popular E&M's log-MMSE noise suppressor. The experiments also show that our new algorithm performs slightly better than the ETSI advanced front end (AFE) on the well-matched and mid-mismatched settings, and has 8% and 10% fewer errors than our earlier SPLICE (stereo-based piecewise linear compensation for environments) system on these settings, respectively.


How the CIC recorded the historical and cultural significance of the architecture of independent liberal arts colleges and universities. America's private colleges and universities include most of the oldest institutions of higher education in the country, and their evolving physical campuses tell us much about American education. In recent years, the study of campus history, preservation, and adaptive reuse has received increasing attention by many sectors of the educational community. Institutions are working to more completely understand their physical environments and how they relate to educational mission and wider historical trends. The campus is more than just a place: it is an emblem of what the institution values, how it brings its community together, and how it physically manifests its educational philosophy. Documenting and evaluating the new and changing needs of historic buildings on a college campus provides a window into understanding the distinctive educational mission of the institution, the values of its founders, and the ways in which the physical campus embodies - and supports - the educational program. In recognition of these trends and as part of a short-term, focused initiative of the Getty Foundation, in 2002 the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) proposed the development of the CIC Historic Campus Architecture Project (CIC HCAP). This project resulted in the first national architecture and landscape database of independent college and university campuses. The first phase of the project was designed to record, interpret, and evaluate an inventory of buildings and structures of significance as identified by the colleges and universities themselves. The second phase took these data and shaped them into a database that has benefited many constituencies: administrators, college and university architects, scholars, alumni, students, and interested laypeople. Today, this database is available online at www.cic.edu/hcap. Multifaceted and fully searchable, the CIC HCAP database presents information about significant buildings, landscapes, and campus plans in American higher education and identifies sources for further research. Historic buildings and landscapes on the campuses of small colleges and universities across the country offer a rich and vital resource for understanding the history and cultural significance of American architecture, design, and planning over the past two centuries. These buildings offer evidence of the relationship between physical facilities and educational objectives, illustrating issues of form and function as well as educational philosophy. Documentation of a particular structure's design and placement can also reflect broader trends in the history of the American campus. Project Goals The CIC HCAP recorded the historical and cultural significance of the architecture on the campuses of independent liberal arts colleges and universities in the United States in a commitment to making a lasting contribution to the documentation of the architectural, landscape architectural, and cultural history of these institutions. Its stated goals were to help various constituencies gain an awareness of and appreciation for campus history and to learn from the architecture and landscape preservation efforts made by institutions. Project Funding Between 2002 and 2006, the CIC HCAP was supported by two generous grants that totaled $431 ,000 from the Getty Foundation's Campus Heritage Initiative. The Getty Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust. In announcing the grant, Joan Weinstein, interim director of the Getty Foundation, said the foundation was proud to support CICs ambitious documentation project. Through Getty's Campus Heritage Initiative, we have worked since 2002 to assist colleges in the United States to manage and preserve the integrity of their historic buildings and landscapes. With its wealth of material, the HCAP website has the potential to advance the interest in campus preservation to a wide audience across the country. …


In tropical regions, two decades after the "Bushmeat Crisis" outcry, there is now a growing recognition of the failure of single solutions to the issue. Strict protectionist measures toward wildlife consumption through highly militarized law enforcement has proved to fail (Bennett, 2011; Wellsmith, 2011; Challender and MacMillan, 2014; Cooney et al., 2017). The development of alternative livelihoods, which was based on the hypothesis that hunting and consumption of wildmeat could be downsized if the reliance on wildlife as a source of food and income could be reduced, also evidenced several short comes (Wicander and Coad, 2015; Alves and van Vliet, 2018). More recent recommendations by the scientific community (Wilkie et al., 2016) and endorsed by the Convention on Biological Diversity now acknowledge the need for more comprehensive and context specific responses to prevent wildlife declines (CBD, 2017). While these recommendations clearly show progress in our understanding of wildlife management complexities, I argue that any approach to manage wildmeat use in tropical regions might continue to result inadequate, un-effective or un-acceptable without a mutualistic understanding of the complexity and nuance regarding the multiple connections that people maintain with wildlife and how these reflect the value orientations shared within the resource constituency. I use a humans' dimension approach to characterize human relationships with wildmeat in tropical forest areas, both in rural and urban/western contexts. Then, I analyze how the two opposed ends of the wildlife value orientations continuum are resulting in stigmas, which represent clear bottlenecks for sustainability in tropical regions. Finally, I call for a better understanding of the cultural constructions that shape beliefs, attitudes and behavior among the different beneficiaries of wildlife, taking into account local/international, rural/urban, traditional/western specificities. Indeed, considering that the mass of the funding available for wildlife conservation originates from foreign countries and is mostly executed through international institutions, claims of "cultural imperialism" may legitimately continue to arise if the complex and dynamic cultural dimensions of human-wildlife relations is not adequately analyzed and considered.


As late as 1998, U.S. citizens constituted the significant majority of Internet users (84%: GVU 1998). Given this demographic dominance, it is not surprising that U.S.-specific visions also dominated both popular discourse and English-language scholarship regarding computer-mediated communication (CMC). Such dominance, of course, goes hand-in-hand with ethnocentrism – and so it is perhaps not surprising that the rapid diffusion of CMC technologies among diverse cultures and settings issued in a range of conflicts, from the minor to the catastrophic, that collectively began to demonstrate two central points. One, far from serving as value-free or morally-neutral tools, CMC technologies themselves appear to embed and foster the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers. As a first example: South Africa has attempted to establish Learning Centres intended to empower indigenous peoples by helping them take advantage of the multiple potentials and capacities of ICTs. A series of observers have noted, however, that these Centres repeatedly fail – in part, because of basic cultural conflicts. Briefly, the Centres reflect their designer's Western emphasis on individual and silent learning – in contrast with indigenous preferences for learning in collaborative and often noisy, performative ways (Postma 2001). This conflict is also captured in Edward T. Hall's distinction between high and low context cultures (1976). In this schema, contemporary societies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Germanic countries show a preference for literate (i.e., textual), high content (but low context) information transfer – while societies such as Arabic cultures, indigenous peoples, and many Asian cultures prefer instead more oral, low content (but high context) modes of communication. As the CMC technologies and social context of the Learning Centres favors the cultural values and communicative preferences of their Western designers – these values and preferences clash with those of the indigenous peoples the Centres are intended to serve, with almost total failure as a result (see Snyman and Hulbert 2004; cf. Duncker 2002). Similarly, Western Group Support Systems (GSS) that favor anonymity as a feature intended to encourage open and direct communication proved disastrous in the Confucian cultures of South Asia, as this indeed succeeded in encouraging subordinates to make comments that were culturally interpreted – and condemned – as attacks on one's "face" (Abdat and Pervan 2000). These and multiple other examples make clear that CMC technologies carry and further a specific set of cultural values and communicative preferences ones that, far from being universally shared, are indeed limited to specific cultural domains.


During the 1960s the booming economy allowed a greater clientele than before to employ architects to create modern and individually designed houses. Examples that demonstrate this are the 1965 Littlejohn House in Karori, Wellington and the 1969 Tustin House in LowerHutt. Both were built by the partnership of the Austrian immigrants Erwin Winkler and Fritz Eisenhofer. Swimming pools and carports demonstrated, among other things, the taste of the inhabitants for luxurious living and the influence of modern North American, mainly west coast, houses. The use of an American house as model was not a singular event. During the 1960s a trend can be discerned that displays the growing influence of American 'lifestyle' in housing, furniture, and fashion. This led to a critique of the use value of the vocabulary of a modern style outside of the socio political and cultural climate in which it had emerged. Intentions that led to the adaptation of role models were reflected upon because the long discussed question arose again as to how a distinct New Zealand identity might express itself in its built environment.


The crayfish claw closer muscle is innervated by 2 distinct excitatory motoneurons, one tonic and the other phasic. The phasic motoneuron is relatively inactive and generates large EPSPs that normally depress rapidly with repetitive stimulation at moderate frequencies. Stimulation of the phasic motoneuron in vivo for 3 d at 5 Hz (2 hr/d) produced a marked adaptive shift in the neuromuscular synaptic response properties of the motoneuron: average initial EPSPs and depression of EPSPs were significantly reduced. We tested the hypothesis that neuronal protein synthesis is required for full expression of long-term adaptation (LTA). A reversible inhibitor of neuronal protein synthesis, cycloheximide (CHX), was injected into intact crayfish at various times prior to, during, or after each stimulation period. At a dosage of 5 micrograms/gm body weight, CHX inhibited the incorporation of [35S]- methionine into abdominal nerve cord protein for approximately 2 hr after administration (greater than 80% inhibition). Full expression of LTA was selectively blocked when CHX was administered 6 hr or 2 hr prior to each stimulation period. Both the reduction in initial EPSP amplitude and the resistance to synaptic depression were significantly attenuated. CHX administered at the onset of or at the end of each stimulation period did not affect the expression of LTA. Control experiments using unstimulated animals showed that neither chronic nor acute administration of CHX adversely affected the phasic axon's synaptic response properties. Our results suggest that full expression of neuronal LTA requires the presence of a pool of preexisting, short- lived (or rapidly utilized) protein(s). Depletion of such a pool prior to each stimulation period appears to interfere with subsequent induction of LTA.