A practical and collaborative approach has been undertaken to develop and implement phase one of the 'Learn, Drive, Survive - Drives for Learners in the Moreton Bay Region' booklet. Based on fatality and injury statistics as well as research that identified the need to develop the skill and knowledge base of drivers in the learner licensing stage, the booklet of driving routes and road safety information provides an educational tool for supervisors and learner drivers. Building and expanding on a road safety initiative from NSW the booklet provides a total of 13 routes covering the Moreton Bay Region in Queensland. The routes contain a variety of drives across the region including different road types, driving conditions and from rural to urban. Each drive has detailed instructions, maps and all the details required to complete the Queensland learner driver log book. The booklet creates access, ideas and opportunity for valuable on-road driving time and experience for learner drivers working towards accrual of the 100 hour minimum state government driving requirement to obtain a provisional licence (P1). Partnering with the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) and working with Queensland Police Service (QPS) provided important linkages of knowledge and expertise in the development of the booklet. Launched in December 2014 over 8,000 copies of the booklet have been distributed across the region.


Supervision and Professional Development in Social Work Practice aims to familiarize its readers with the current state of supervision in social work, provide them a common platform for reflection and action and thereby promote excellence in their respective learning, research and professional practice areas. It incorporates contributions by scholars, practitioners and students from various backgrounds, professional disciplines and countries. The ideas, concepts and practice frameworks discussed in this book are useful in any human service context. However, they need to be adapted with cultural sensitivity and appropriate levels of consultation and guidance to effectively challenge prevalent practice frameworks and support the embracing of new ideas to enhance professional and authentic engagement. The book utilizes several research studies, views, experiences and reflections, and includes numerous Voices from the Field, which provide diverse perspectives and viewpoints as well as practical help.

This book will prove indispensable for academicians, practitioners, supervisors and supervisees as well as postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of social work, counselling, psychology and education.


The effect of random fluctuations in the zero-dispersion wavelength is considered for fiber four-wave mixing. Theoretical expressions for average parametric gain, phase-conjugation conversion efficiency, and gain bandwidth are obtained and found to be in good agreement with experiments. Possible limitations on the noise figure in phase-sensitive amplifiers based on fiber four-wave mixing are also discussed.


Abstract To test how interindividual variation in response to resource availability might reveal mechanisms leading to interpopulation variation across the geographic range of a species, we investigated movement patterns and use of space by 18 radiocollared raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides viverrinus) in a mixed landscape of agriculture and forestry that is widely distributed in Japan, and that is a typical landscape for raccoon dogs. We tested the idea that the behavior of raccoon dogs, as ecological generalists, is sufficiently plastic for individual movement patterns to match habitat variation in this landscape. Home ranges averaged 111 ha (95% kernel estimate), much larger than previously reported for this species in Japan, and varied greatly among individuals (23–228 ha). Home ranges were 62.5% larger in autumn than in other seasons, and 33.5% larger for subadults than for adults. Average movement rate tended to be higher in autumn (mean rate = 297 m/h), and lowest in winter (mean rate = 204 m/h). Within the population, some individuals occupied home ranges that were predominantly seminatural (we refer to these animals as "mountain type"), whereas those of others were dominated by heavily managed habitats (these we term "village type"). Within their home ranges, the types showed preferences for the habitats that were most prevalent there. Mountain-type individuals showed a preference for herbaceous habitat, whereas the village-type individuals used cropland disproportionately. Activity, as measured by the proportion of fixes designated active, tended to be lower in home ranges where cropland was predominant, and the magnitude of preference for cropland increased with its availability with the home range, suggesting a functional response to habitat availability. The fractal dimension of movement trails was more complex in seminatural areas than in agricultural land, possibly reflecting greater spatial regularity of agricultural habitat.


The present paper presents an automatic approach for the determination of the parameters of laminated salient-pole synchronous machines, based on 2D finite element method (FEM). Calculations using FEM are performed in rotation (sudden three-phase short-circuit) and at standstill, for different positions of the rotor and for different frequencies. A comparison between results obtained by both methods is presented. of different algorithms. A further step would be to take into account saturation effects, and to determine the subtransient direct-axis reactance of the synchronous machine for applied voltages at the terminals of the machine before the short-circuit U ≥ Un, tests which are not possible in a conventional test platform. The extension of the study to massive rotors is also considered. A special


This article is conceived within the scientific project "Anthropology in the 20th Century: Theoretical and Methodological Achievements". Focusing on the the disciplinary debates and critique around Millennium, this first article in a series offers a preliminary redefinition of some of the basic anthropological concepts: ethnography, ethnographer and informant, as used in pre-postmodern theory of ethnography. Critics interpreted postmodern anthropology as a strong form of relativism that is both epistemologically self-refuting and socially irresponsible. Much credit for the resulting turmoil goes to "postmodernists" themselves, as they failed to articulate precisely in what way their project rejects the traditional concept of regulative methodology, and what their reinterpretation of relativist conceptions of truth, authority, reflexivity, objectivity, interpretation and representation is. The critics dwelled heavily on the notion of incompleteness, vagueness and methodological irrelevance of postmodern criticism in anthropology, largely due to the fact that it never put forward clear definitions of the basic concepts it aims to pursue or to relinquish. As opposed to this received view, the article argues that at least one of the basic concepts used by postmodernists can be methodologically formalized: it is that of "traditional" or the "realist ethnographer". By construing hypothetical "ideal ethnographer", the article formalizes background theory of ethnography against which the postmodern project raised.


Context:Immunotherapy represents a newer modality for cancer treatment with substantial health benefits. However, the high costs of immunotherapy may create access barriers. Objective:To examine factors associated with the utilization of immunotherapy among newly diagnosed cancer patients. Design and Setting:Analysis of a large national cancer registry data, the National Cancer Data Base, that represents approximately 75% of newly diagnosed cancer patients in the US. Patients:Patient diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), metastatic breast cancer (MBC), or metastatic colorectal cancer (MCRC). Main Outcome Measures:Factors associated with utilization of immunotherapy in NHL, MBC, or MCRC. Results:The study included 207,581 and 42,804 patients diagnosed with NHL and MBC between 1998 and 2004, respectively (based on approval of rituximab in 1997 and trastuzumab in 1998); and 16,027 patients diagnosed with MCRC in 2004 (based on approval of cetuximab and bevacizumab in 2004). Immunotherapy use varied significantly by age, race, insurance status, year of diagnosis, and type of treatment facilities, with largest effects observed in years of diagnosis, followed by insurance status. Among young cancer patients, we found that compared with uninsured patients, the odds of receiving immunotherapy were 1.61, and 2.13 for privately insured MBC, and MCRC patients, respectively, and were in the range of 1.13 to 19.23 for privately insured NHL patients. For elderly NHL patients, those with secondary insurance in addition to Medicare were 1.26 to 8.24 times more likely to receive immunotherapy than those with Medicare alone. Conclusions:The disparities observed in this study suggest that additional efforts are required to ensure that all cancer patients receive timely and appropriate treatment.


Aims To measure the nursing workload and timely completion of essential tasks in relation to BAPM1 recommended staffing levels in a Newborn Network. Methods A prospective observational study was conducted by measuring the time taken by selected nurses in our Newborn Network to undertake necessary tasks for babies receiving different levels of care. A single independent assessor observed and assessed the time spent on various tasks at each of the six constituent neonatal units of our Newborn Network. The individual workload for each nurse was evaluated against BAPM standards of nursing workload. Note was made of how long essential pre-determined tasks were delayed. The impact on the quantity of care given and on the number of delayed tasks was compared between those with the recommended workload or less and those that were overstretched. Results Between October 2008 and February 2009 89 nurses from six units were observed caring for 244 neonates over 534 h. 54% of nursing shifts failed to meet BAPM standards. These shifts demonstrated a 26% decrease in clinical care provided. Time taken on nursing breaks (average 20 min, 95% CI 3) was 51.4% less than allocated. 92(17%) essential tasks were delayed >1 h or not done. Delays/omissions were more likely to occur when BAPM standards were not met (53% vs 40%, p=0.05). In 43 nursing observations without delays/omissions, 302 min was spent on clinical care per neonate in Intensive Care (IC), 254 in High Dependency Care (HDC) and 158 in Special Care (SC). This indicates that a nurse cannot care for >1.2, 1.4 and 2.3 babies in IC, HDC and SC respectively without delaying treatment. Conclusion Understaffing leads to measureable problems including delays to essential treatment, reduced clinical care and absent staff breaks. The BAPM standards are not aspirational and should be regarded as a minimum.


The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.


This paper discusses monetary policy's effects on market behavior instead of the opposite relationship that Gertler and Lown (1999) examined. Sargent (1979) discusses that the rational expectations theory is related to What is the effect of monetary policy on market behavior? Michael Mayberger The Park Place Economist, Volume XXII 79 the term structure of interest rates. He states that long-term yields are a function of current and past short-term rates. In the rational expectations theory, economic choices are based on a rational outlook of all available information and past experiences. The theory suggests that current expectations in the economy are equivalent to what the future state of the economy will be. This contrasts the idea that monetary policy influences the decisions of people in the economy. This article is available in The Park Place Economist: http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/parkplace/vol22/iss1/16


To date, no method is available to quantify jerk at a local point of the human joint along a direction that depends on the 3D curvature of the articular surface. This paper proposes a new measurement technique of normalized jerk-cost(NJC)of a target point movement along a direction that is normal to the 3D curvature of the condyle of human temporomadibular joint (TMJ). This study aimed to investigate the reliability and effectiveness of NJC measurements at 9 condylar points. Five control subjects and 3 subjects with condylar asymmetry participated in this study. Each participant performed unilateral gum-chewing. In all control subjects, an artificial occlusal interference(OI)was inserted to the lower molar. The NJCs and intra-articular space of the TMJ on the working side were calculated with and without OI. In 3 control subjects and 3 test subjects, the experiment was repeated after an average interval of 2 months to evaluate reproducibility of the measurements. By means of dynamic stereometry, the NJCs of the 9 condylar point movements towards a direction normal to the condylar surface and intra-articular space were calculated and compared between control group with and without OI, between control group without OI and test group, and between group data measured in two separate sessions. Significantly greater NJC and joint space were observed after insertion of OI(P< 0.05). The NJC in test subjects was greater than that in the control group without OI(P < 0.05) . In addition, these parameters measured at different sessions did not differ significantly. These findings suggest that measurement of the NJC and intraarticular space are effective and reliable to evaluate the instability of condylar movements due to OI or joint deformation.


Transport of suspended sediment between the two reservoirs of a pumped-storage plant in Switzerland was monitored over an 8-month period. A turbidity probe was installed on the upstream end of the pressure shaft, in which real-time monitoring was ensured by automatic data acquisition and remote control. The suspended sediment concentration in the reservoirs varies considerably over the course of a year, with low particle loads in the winter, when the reservoirs are covered by ice and the catchment area is entirely covered by snow. In late spring, when snowmelt starts, the suspended sediment concentration increases and remains high until summer. The short-term evolution of the suspended sediment concentration was found to be correlated to the pumped-storage sequences, especially when the reservoir levels are low. Higher concentrations during pumping mode were observed for low levels in the lower reservoir, and low levels in the upper reservoir corresponded to higher sediment concentrations in turbine mode. Concentration ratios between pumping and turbine mode between 0.93 and 1.16 were observed. Periods with higher particle load were observed more frequently during pumping mode. Nevertheless, the suspended sediment balance due to pumped-storage operations is equilibrated, which indicates a high degree of correlation between the transported sediment volume and hydropower operation. Connecting the applied monitoring system in an existing plant control and management system would allow the plant operator to detect increased suspended sediment loads in the pressure shaft and to adapt the operation mode to actively manage reservoir sedimentation or to estimate and predict the long-term sediment balance.


We investigated the diffraction properties of dynamic holograms recorded in porphyrin:Zn doped nematic liquid crystals (NLCs) under the influence of an applied dc electric field for various conditions of the grating period, the writing beam intensity and the applied electric field. We also derived an analytic expression for diffraction efficiency from NLCs material equations and torque balance equations and compared the experimental results with the theory, revealing excellent agreement.


This thesis presents a case study of the trucking (or
drayage) portion of rail-truck intermodal freight transportation.
The approach used was to examine in detail the current costs and
potential for improvement at one New Jersey intermodal terminal.
The analysis is conducted using a mathematical programming model to
find an optimal scheduling plan for the drayage operation. To solve
the model more efficiently, a modification is made to explore the
special structure of the original problem which has a sparse
constraint matrix. The model is solved first with an objective
function that minimizes the total cost of the operation, and then
with an objective function that minimizes the total tractor fleet
size required to move the containers. The model results indicate a
19.2% and 52.7% reduction in overall costs respectively for the
objectives of minimizing total cost and minimizing fleet size. This
reduction is achieved by repositioning and reloading containers,
after they have been unloaded at consignees.


The color constancy problem has proven to be very hard to solve. This is even true in the simple Mondriaan world where a planar patchwork of matte surfaces is viewed under a single illuminant. In this paper we consider the color constancy problem given two images of a Mondriaan viewed under different illuminants. We show that if surface reflectances are well modeled by 3 basis functions and illuminants by up to 5 basis functions then we can, theoretically, solve for color constancy given 3 surfaces viewed under 2 illuminants. The number of recoverable dimensions in the illuminant depends on the spectral characteristics of the sensors. Specifically if for a given sensor set a von Kries type, diagonal model of color constancy is sufficient then we show that at most 2 illuminant parameters can be retrieved. Recent work has demonstrated that for the human visual system a diagonal matrix is a good model of color constancy given an appropriate choice of sensor basis. We might predict therefore, that we can recover at most 2 illuminant parameters. We present simulations which indicate that this in fact the case.


Code smells indicate the presence of quality issues in a software system. For a thorough large scale smell mining study, researchers require tools that not only allow them to detect a wide range of smells in a large number of repositories automatically but also offer mechanisms to customize the analysis. In this paper, we present a tool Designite that detects 19 design and 11 implementation smells for source code written in C# programming language. Designite provides a command line tool, in addition to an interactive user interface, to support automation required for a large scale mining study. Furthermore, the tool allows customization of quality analysis parameters, such as metric thresholds, to serve a wider range of users.


In-band full-duplex (FD) communications - enabled by recent advances in antenna and RF circuit design - has emerged as one of the promising techniques to improve data rates in wireless systems. One of the major roadblocks in enabling high data rates in FD systems is the inter-user interference (IUI) due to activating pairs of uplink and downlink users at the same time-frequency resource block. Opportunistic user scheduling has been proposed as a means to manage IUI and fully exploit the multiplexing gains in FD systems. In this paper, scheduling under long-term and short-term temporal fairness for single-cell FD wireless networks is considered. Temporal fair scheduling is of interest in delay-sensitive applications, and leads to predictable latency and power consumption. The feasible region of user temporal demand vectors is derived, and a scheduling strategy maximizing the system utility while satisfying long-term temporal fairness is proposed. Furthermore, a short-term temporal fair scheduling strategy is devised which satisfies user temporal demands over a finite window-length. It is shown that the strategy achieves optimal average system utility as the window-length is increased asymptotically. Subsequently, practical construction algorithms for long-term and shortterm temporal fair scheduling are introduced. Simulations are provided to verify the derivations and investigate the multiplexing gains. It is observed that using successive interference cancellation at downlink users improves FD gains significantly in the presence of strong IUI.


Sometimes dramatically changing vogues in diagnostic practice in psychiatry resemble the volatility of international share markets. One such quickly shifting diagnostic area has been that of bipolar disorder (BD). Historically regarded as a relatively uncommon condition until recent decades, the construct of BD underwent a major expansion in the 1990s and 2000s with promulgation of the concept of the soft bipolar spectrum disorder, from which the recent research focus on subthreshold BD presentations was derived. Related to this has been renewed interest in treatments for BD from the pharmaceutical industry. The increasing rates of diagnosis have largely related to BD II, for which there has been a dramatic broadening of diagnostic criteria. This article critically reviews research data, both for broadening the diagnostic criteria for BD and, conversely, for the growing evidence of overdiagnosis in clinic practice. Why does this debate matter? I would suggest that there are many valid reasons to be concerned about overdiagnosis: first, the potential for overtreatment or inappropriate treatment of such patients with mood stabilizing treatments, including antipsychotics; second, the potential for diagnostic oversimplification, with consequent diagnostic deskilling and loss of credibility for the psychiatric profession; and third, the potential major impact on etiologic research for this condition. Psychiatry should not uncritically accept the shift to overdiagnosis, which has developed a rapid momentum in recent decades, in both clinical and academic circles. We must ensure, as a profession, that any change in diagnostic practice is underpinned by rigorous and critical research inquiry.


Is 5G revolutionary? Will the "fifth generation" of wireless technology not only update our network from 4G, but spark deep and widespread change across economies, industries, and the lives of consumers? 5G hype certainly abounds. But the theory of 5G is difficult to put into practice. Despite the drumbeat of hype, it is not clear how quickly 5G will be deployed. Just as unclear is how transformative 5G will be when it does arrive. This paper will explore the promises and limitations of 5G through the lens of four critical issues: first, the question of how network operators will build 5G, if they do build it; second, ways that governments can use policy to make sure 5G networks get built; third, 5G's potential impact on network architectures and competition among computing infrastructure providers. Finally, this paper will explore 5G's role in the rise of China, international competition, and related debates over network security.


What are the global financial spillovers from major political shocks in the United States? We analyze the response of international financial markets to the 2016 US presidential election. The surprise election outcome represents an exogenous shock that affords us a unique opportunity to estimate the effect of a partisan shift in the White House on third countries. Given Donald Trump's unanticipated victory and his promises of financial deregulation, investors revised their return expectations for third countries according to countries' exposure to the election shock. We argue that countries with dense financial ties to the US benefited from expectations of regulatory reform in Wall Street. We estimate the election effect on foreign equity markets using data on 134 single-country exchange-traded funds (ETFs) covering 48 developed and developing economies. Results show that the election had an overall negative effect on international markets, but countries with close ties to the US banking system fared better. We further test the mechanism with data on US global banks and find support for our hypothesis.


Several studies have reported the accuracy of transient elastography (TE), a noninvasive, reproducible, and reliable method for predicting liver fibrosis. This study evaluated the predictive factors associated with significant liver fibrosis assessed through TE. This study enrolled 1799 consecutive patients who underwent TE at Taipei Medical University Hospital between February 2014 and June 2015, including 810 patients with normal serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels (<40 U/L). We evaluated the risk factors for significant liver fibrosis (liver stiffness measurement [LSM] > 7 kPa) assessed through TE and compared the results with those of the aspartate aminotransferase (AST)/platelet ratio index (APRI), a validated serum marker of liver fibrosis, in 672 patients with detailed laboratory data. Significant liver fibrosis was defined as an APRI score of >0.7. Significant liver fibrosis was detected through TE in 103 (12.7%) of 810 patients with normal serum ALT levels and in 91 (19.4%), 17 (18.7%), and 13 (5.8%) patients with chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, respectively. Univariate analysis of patients with detailed biochemical test data showed that compared with without significant fibrosis, patients with significant fibrosis in the LSM > 7 kPa group were older; had higher body mass index (BMI) values; had higher fasting glucose, ALT, AST, total bilirubin, gamma‐glutamyltransferase, and ferritin levels; had higher APRI and fibrosis index based on four factors scores; had lower serum albumin levels and platelet counts; and higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, hepatitis C virus (HCV) positivity, splenomegaly, and hepatocellular carcinoma than those without significant fibrosis. Multivariate analysis disclosed that high BMI (P < 0.001), high AST levels (P = 0.006), low platelet counts (P < 0.001), and low albumin levels (P = 0.008) were the independent factors associated with significant liver fibrosis. In patients with normal serum ALT levels, the factors determining significant liver fibrosis were high BMI (P < 0.001), high AST levels (P < 0.001), low platelet counts (P = 0.001), and anti‐HCV positive (P = 0.006). LSM exhibited a moderate correlation with APRI scores (R2 = 0.325, P < 0.001). Among patients with normal serum ALT levels, the percentage of significant liver fibrosis defined as LSM > 7 kPa (11.2%) was higher than that of significant liver fibrosis defined as APRI > 0.7 (2.6%) (P < 0.001). Significant liver fibrosis is not uncommon in patients with chronic hepatitis and normal serum ALT levels. TE is a reliable method for assessing the degree of liver fibrosis. High BMI values, high AST levels, low platelet counts, and low albumin levels are correlated with the diagnosis of significant liver fibrosis through TE.


The purpose of the project is to develop a tuition center information system which
is data collecting and data processing system built with Visual Basic 6.0 programming
language with Microsoft's Access as a database. The main objective of developing this
system is to help administrator in managing the unavoidable administrative tasks such as
student registration, and fee collecting. Benefit to public is that they can register on-line,
check for timetable and tuition fee. And benefit for existing student, they are able to look
for personal timetable and fee payment status.


The plasma proteins of the complement system fulfill important immune defense functions, including opsonization of bacteria for phagocytosis, generation of chemo-attractants and direct bacterial killing via assembly of the Membrane Attack Complex (MAC or C5b-9 complex). The terminal complement pathway is the final stage of the complement cascade. This pathway is initiated by surface-bound C5 convertase enzymes that cleave C5 into C5b. The formation of C5b leads to rapid assembly of the MAC that perturbs lipid bilayers. The MAC can kill Gram-negative bacteria whereas Gram-positive bacteria are resistant.

In this thesis we discovered that the MAC can kill Gram-negative bacteria at different rates and that the bactericidal activity of serum can be both dependent on MAC assembly and other serum components. Some Gram-negative pathogens have evolved MAC evasion strategies, of which we described a secreted MAC-inhibitor from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Even though Gram-positive bacteria are intrinsically resistant against MAC-mediated killing, we found specific deposition and distinct localization of C5b-9 complexes on this class of bacteria. Since C5 convertases are crucial for the initiation of MAC assembly, our newly established convertase model systems allowed us here to gain detailed insights into the final steps of complement activation on both the Gram-positive as well as the Gram-negative surface.


Background: Foot screening is an important part of diabetic care as it prevents significant morbidity, loss of function and mortality from diabetic foot complications. However, foot screening is often neglected. This project was aimed at educating health care workers (HCWs) in a primary health care clinic to increase diabetic foot screening practices.

 Methods: A quality improvement project using a plan, do, study, act (PDSA) cycle was used. HCW needs were assessed using a questionnaire; this was followed by a focus group discussion with HCWs, which was recorded, transcribed and assessed using a general inductive approach for common themes. Staff training was done using the Diabetic Foot Assessment Questionnaire. Patient information pamphlets and screening tools were made available to all clinical staff. Thirty-two consecutive diabetic patient folders were audited to compare screening in 2013 to that in the first half of 2014 after initiation of the PDSA cycle. Results: HCW confidence in conducting foot screening using the Diabetic Foot Assessment Questionnaire improved markedly after initial training. Diabetic foot screening practices increased from 9% in 2013 to 69% in 2014 after the first PDSA cycle. A strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results (SOAR) analysis showed promise for continuing quality improvement cycles.

 Conclusions: The findings showed a significant improvement in the number of diabetic patients who received foot screening. A feedback session was held with the team of HCWs involved in the project to discuss their experience and for future improvement planning. Using strategic planning with appreciative intent based on SOAR, proved to be inspirational and will be used in the planning of the next cycle.


Non-democratic regional powers are increasingly blamed for authoritarian backlashes in formerly democratising countries, or for the persistence of entrenched autocratic regimes in their neighbourhood. Yet there is a striking scarcity of theoretical deliberations as to why powerful autocracies should prefer autocratic neighbours over democratic ones. Employing a rational-choice model that links foreign policy behaviour to the logic of domestic politics, this article develops a theoretical argument why, and under which circumstances, autocratic regional powers should be expected to attempt to impact upon governance structures in their regional environment. Combining a political economy perspective with findings from transition literature, the authors conclude that, all else equal, autocratic regional powers have strong incentives to favour similar political systems in nearby states, but that this interest must be weighted against an overarching interest in political stability. The article discusses these theoretical findings against the backdrop of country cases in the regional environments of Russia and China.


The adrenal glands of 30 dogs with primary adrenal insufficiency (hypoadrenocorticism) were measured ultrasonographically and compared with those of 14 healthy dogs and those of 10 dogs with diseases mimicking hypoadrenocorticism. Thickness and length of the adrenals were measured on abdominal ultrasonography and the results for each group were compared. Dogs with primary hypoadrenocorticism had significantly thinner adrenals compared with the other two groups, and their left adrenal glands were also significantly shorter than those of healthy dogs. Adrenal ultrasonography may be of diagnostic value in dogs with clinical signs suggestive of primary hypoadrenocorticism, as a left adrenal gland measuring less than 3.2 mm in thickness is strongly suggestive of the disease.


In this paper we use the quantization of fields based on Geometric Langlands Correspondence \cite{diep1} to realize the automorphic representations of some concrete series of groups: for the affine Heisenberg (loop) groups it is reduced to the construction of the affine Kac-Moody representation by the Weyl relations in Fock spaces. For the solvable and nilpotent groups following the construction we show that it is the result of applying the constructions of irreducible unitary representation via the geometric quantization and the construction of positive energy representations and finally, for the semi-simple or reductive Lie groups, using the Geometric Langlands Correspondence, we show that a repeated application of the construction give all the automorphic representations of reductive Lie groups: first we show that every representation of the fundamental group of Riemann surface into the dual Langlands groups ${}^LG$ of $G$ corresponds to a representation of the fundamental group of the surface into the reductive group $G$, what is corresponding to a quantum inducing bundle of the geometric quantization of finite dimensional reductive Lie groups and then apply the construction of positive energy representation of loop groups.


A high bandwidth-efficiency modulation scheme is demanded for supporting a high-data rate communications, and so a highly linear transmitter is needed. Applying a linearisation technique to the transmitter can achieve this goal. In this thesis, there are three main topics which are investigated. They are mixer linearisation, the vector modulator based on the reflection-type attenuator and transmitter linearisation. For the first topic, there are two contributions in this thesis. The first technique is the application of the feedforward (FF) technique to linearise a downconversion mixer. It is shown for the first time that the FF technique for a mixer is simplified to a be a single loop rather than the conventional doubleloop structure, leading to a lower complexity and a high-linearity mixer. The second proposed technique applied to a mixer is a harmonic injection technique. The technique simply injects the difference-frequency tone to the input of a mixer. It is shown from the simulations and the experiments that the technique can improve the linearity significantly without trading off the power efficiency. Apart from the mixer linearisation topic, there are three contributions concerning with the reflection-type attenuator (RTA). The first is the feedback reflection attenuator based on Field-Effect Transistors (FETs). It has been found that applying resistive feedback can improve the attenuation range of the RTA and also the phase-distortion by trading-off the input and output return losses. The RTA size is comparable to the size of the conventional RTA which suffers from the phase-distortion. For variable attenuator applications, this structure can improve the attenuation range over the conventional RTA. For bi-phase modulator application, the structure is 50% smaller than the balanced structure based on the conventional RTA, which is needed for correcting the phase-distortion. The second contribution for this topic is the demonstration of an improved structure for a vector modulator (VM) based on the RTA. To avoid the phase distortion problem, the full balanced structure is needed and hence a large chip area is consumed. A simple technique to compensate the phase distortion and balance the amplitude for the whole control voltage range is proposed by adding an extra source inductor and a shunt resistor at the MESFET's drain. The aforementioned problems are overcomed and the circuit size is 50% of the balanced VM. In addition, the baseband signals for the proposed structure are reduced to 2, compared to 4 channels for the balanced VM. The third contribution is the study of the nonlinearity distortion in the RTA, The analysis technique is based on the power series model, The results provide the criteria for selecting the active devices to obtain the small nonlinearity distortion. Linearisation techniques for the whole transmitter are also under the research in this thesis. There are three contributions to the topic; The first technique is applying the FF technique for the whole transmitter. The advantage of the technique is the capability of reducing the distortion not only from the main power amplifier but also for the modulator. The second technique is a proposed topology for a low-cost millimetre-wave transmitter. The structure has low complexity since it composes of only 3 main parts, i.e. a VM, a medium/high-power oscillator and a DSP processor. The DSP part provides multi-functionality to the structure. These functions include baseband predistortion, channel filtering, modulation technique, to name the few. The last contribution of this topic is the improved LINC structure, so called adaptive predistortion LINC, to correct the phase/gain imbalances. The proposed technique shows the capability to overcome this effect, which can degrade the distortion performance in LINC.


Extracted from text ... 44 Management Today May 2006
The perils of
positive thinking
SSomething bothered me about the teeth of
the consultant who was sitting opposite me
on the other side of the helpdesk. I couldn't
identify what it was immediately. I was at
my bank's foreign exchange division where
I was hoping to get some advice on an upcoming
business trip.
As the positive and friendly consultant
was talking, I suddenly realised what
seemed out of place for me. Embedded in
his front tooth was the ultimate symbol of
business success - a gold dollar sign!
I struggled to concentrate on our ..


Are rapid-mixing tanks with intense mixing necessary? Intense mixing applies to the coagulation mechanism of charge-neutralization of negatively-charged particles, but this is not a common coagulation method. More common is precipitation of aluminum or iron for coagulation of particles and natural organic matter, which is often called sweep-floc coagulation. Coagulation by precipitation is indifferent to mixing intensity. Energy and cost savings are realized by designing mixing systems for coagulation that do not use tanks with mechanical mixers. Systems examined are hydraulic methods (weirs, Venturi meters, others) including the non-mechanical systems of pipe and open-channel static mixers. These systems provide sufficient mixing intensity for sweep-floc coagulation and for certain conditions provide sufficient mixing intensity for charge-neutralization coagulation with much less energy input. Mixing systems designed specifically for coagulant addition, such as rapid-mixing tanks and pipe and open-channel static mixers, should be sized based on the average daily flow not on the plant capacity flow. This produces sustainable designs with lower capital costs for all systems and lower operating costs for rapid-mixing tanks.


Peer feedback in online education becomes increasingly important to meet the demand for feedback in large scale classes, such as e.g. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). However, students are often not experts in how to write helpful feedback to their fellow students. In this paper, we introduce a corpus compiled from university students' peer feedback to be able to detect suggestions on how to improve the students' work and therefore being able to capture peer feedback helpfulness. To the best of our knowledge, this corpus is the first student peer feedback corpus in German which additionally was labelled with a new annotation scheme. The corpus consists of more than 600 written feedback (about 7,500 sentences). The utilisation of the corpus is broadly ranged from Dependency Parsing to Sentiment Analysis to Suggestion Mining, etc. We applied the latter to empirically validate the utility of the new corpus. Suggestion Mining is the extraction of sentences that contain suggestions from unstructured text. In this paper, we present a new annotation scheme to label sentences for Suggestion Mining. Two independent annotators labelled the corpus and achieved an inter-annotator agreement of 0.71. With the help of an expert arbitrator a gold standard was created. An automatic classification using BERT achieved an accuracy of 75.3%.


Poorly constrained rates of biomass turnover are a key limitation of Earth system models (ESMs). In light of this, we recently proposed a new approach encoded in a model called Populations-Order-Physiology (POP), for the simulation of woody ecosystem stand dynamics, demography and disturbance-mediated heterogeneity. POP is suitable for continental to global applications and designed for coupling to the terrestrial ecosystem component of any ESM. POP bridges the gap between first-generation dynamic vegetation models (DVMs) with simple large-area parameterisations of woody biomass (typically used in current ESMs) and complex second-generation DVMs that explicitly simulate demographic processes and landscape heterogeneity of forests. The key simplification in the POP approach, compared with second-generation DVMs, is to compute physiological processes such as assimilation at grid-scale (with CABLE (Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange) or a similar land surface model), but to partition the grid-scale biomass increment among age classes defined at sub-grid-scale, each subject to its own dynamics. POP was successfully demonstrated along a savanna transect in northern Australia, replicating the effects of strong rainfall and fire disturbance gradients on observed stand productivity and structure. Here, we extend the application of POP to wide-ranging temporal and boreal forests, employing paired observations of stem biomass and density from forest inventory data to calibrate model parameters governing stand demography and biomass evolution. The calibrated POP model is then coupled to the CABLE land surface model, and the combined model (CABLE-POP) is evaluated against leaf–stem allometry observations from forest stands ranging in age from 3 to 200 year. Results indicate that simulated biomass pools conform well with observed allometry. We conclude that POP represents an ecologically plausible and efficient alternative to large-area parameterisations of woody biomass turnover, typically used in current ESMs.


Selecting or even designing a computer architecture is at best as much a black art as a science. The problem is particularly difficult when one tries to choose an architecture meant to serve a very broad range of users whose present and future requirements are poorly understood. This article describes the activities of a joint Army/Navy Selection Committee, which was charged with the task of selecting a single computer architecture to be used as the basis for a new military computer family. The range of applications for military computers is broad and ill defined; how the committee tried to cope with this problem should be of interest to others who are interested in measuring, designing, or selecting computer architectures.


The city of Liverpool has experienced extensive redevelopment to its waterfront over recent decades as derelict land is being transformed into mix use developments. Peel Holdings' 'Liverpool Waters' is an ambitious, large scale plan that hopes to continue the ongoing waterfront developments, by creating 17,000 jobs and 23,000 apartments.

The aim of this research is to get a sense of how the public feel about this grand plan including the various issues that surround urban development. Along with this, the respondent's opinion on Liverpool's waterfront development as a whole was asked. While these issues could be apparent in many developments nationwide, the conflict between UNESCO and Peel Holdings over issues of heritage is unique to this development and it was for this reason that it was investigated. Research was conducted through the use of questionnaires.

The study found that the vast majority of respondents were in favour of the Liverpool Waters scheme, as well as Liverpool's waterfront development as a whole. Mostly those who did were not in favour were sceptical as opposed to being outright against the developments. The issues of heritage were considerably more contentious than the other questions with strong opinions for both sides of the argument. While public opinion is generally in favour, citing the economic affects of the scheme as the main benefit, the public showed that the UNESCO dispute is by far the most controversial issues on the scheme, and this dispute is set to continue.


In Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks, an energy efficient scalable medium access control (MAC) is crucial for serving massive battery-driven machine-type devices. In this paper, we investigate the energy efficient MAC design to minimize battery power consumption in cellular-based M2M communications. We present an energy efficient MAC protocol that not only adapts contention and reservation-based protocols for M2M communications in cellular networks, but also benefits from partial clustering to handle the massive access problem. Then we investigate the energy efficiency and access capacity of contention-based protocols and present an energy efficient contention-based protocol for intra-cluster communication of the proposed MAC, which results in huge power saving. The simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms the others in energy saving without sacrificing much delay or throughput. Also, the lifetimes of both individual nodes and the whole M2M network are significantly extended.


The analysis in this paper examines the impact of reducing the excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel on the United States economy. The analytical approach used consists of a computable general equilibrium model composed of fourteen producing sectors, fourteen consuming sectors, six household categories classified by income and the government. The effects of a 4.3 cents per gallon reduction in the excise tax on gasoline and diesel fuel on prices and quantities are examined. The results suggest, for example, that a decrease in the tax would result in higher output by the producing sectors (by about $2.86 billion), and expansion in the consumption of goods and services (by about $3.48 billion), and an increase in welfare (by about $3.59 billion). The government would realise a decrease in revenue of about $2.37 billion. When subjected to a sensitivity analysis, the results are reasonably robust with regard to the assumption of the values of the substitution elasticities.


The costs of clean energy solutions are falling. As one example, solar panel prices are down more than 50 percent in the last three years. Costs of batteries, wind turbines, and fuel cells have also declined. As promising as that is, soft costs—installation, permitting, and financing—now account for nearly two-thirds of the cost of a residential solar system, and they have not declined. There is little hope of providing clean energy solutions at scale until the soft costs are brought under control. One promising innovation is a state-sponsored "green bank" to lower finance costs for the deployment of clean energy. Despite nearly record low interest rates, financing costs for the clean energy sector remain high—not for the largest, utility scale projects—but for smaller projects, including small business and residential. Because the ongoing costs of clean energy are very low, given that wind and sunlight are free, the solution to reducing clean energy costs is reducing the upfront costs. And costs are costs—whether they are hardware costs or financing costs. The key reason of why financing costs are high for clean energy is that the industry is financed in an old-fashioned, anachronistic way. The energy technology deployed may be 21st century, but the financing structures used are out of date.


Aberrant DNA methylation contributes to the malignant phenotype in virtually all types of cancer, including myeloid leukemia. We hypothesized that CpG island hypermethylation also occurs in juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML) and investigated whether it is associated with clinical, hematologic, or prognostic features. Based on quantitative measurements of DNA methylation in 127 JMML cases using mass spectrometry (MassARRAY), we identified 4 gene CpG islands with frequent hypermethylation: BMP4 (36% of patients), CALCA (54%), CDKN2B (22%), and RARB (13%). Hypermethylation was significantly associated with poor prognosis: when the methylation data were transformed into prognostic scores using a LASSO Cox regression model, the 5-year overall survival was 0.41 for patients in the top tertile of scores versus 0.72 in the lowest score tertile (P = .002). Among patients given allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, the 5-year cumulative incidence of relapse was 0.52 in the highest versus 0.10 in the lowest score tertile (P = .007). In multivariate models, DNA methylation retained prognostic value independently of other clinical risk factors. Longitudinal analyses indicated that some cases acquired a more extensively methylated phenotype at relapse. In conclusion, our data suggest that a high-methylation phenotype characterizes an aggressive biologic variant of JMML and is an important molecular predictor of outcome.


In this study, 4 different extracts of Thymus praecox subsp. grossheimii var. grossheimii (Ronniger) an endemic species of genus Thymus were investigated on gram positive and gram negative test bacteria for the antibacterial activity. The plant extracts were obtained via Soxhlet method, and the antibacterial activities were determined by macrodilution liquid (tube) method (MIC). Results indicated that 4 different extracts at different concentrations showed antibacterial activities on both gram positive and gram negative strains. The highest antibacterial activity was observed in acetone extract against Bacillus cereus, whereas the lowest activity was seen in methanol extract against Klebsiella pneumonia, Proteus mirabilis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Salmonella Enteritidis. In conclusion, it was determined that Thymus praecox subsp. grossheimii var. grossheimii (Ronniger) has an antibacterial activity against gram positive and gram negative test bacteria.


The Indo-European languages attest to a pie system with three local cases: locative, ablative, and (allative) accusative. I will focus on the system of local cases in Ancient Greek and in Latin. Both languages have a reduced number of case distinctions with respect to the pie system; in the field of spatial relations, they display interesting differences. In Ancient Greek the locative has merged with the dative, the ablative has merged with the genitive, and the accusative is retained as such. The three cases can be reinforced with all types of nouns with three different prepositions, en , ek , and eis and express basic spatial relations. Thus, a connection continues to exist between cases and spatial semantic roles, as shown by the fact that a fourth preposition, para , could take all three cases and express adessive, ablative, and allative meanings. In Latin the locative and the ablative merged; as a result, location and source could no longer be distinguished through case marking alone. Some toponyms retained the locative case until the end of the Classical period. Consequently, Latin displays a sub-system with three case distinctions for this group of toponyms. Within prepositional phrases, only two cases occur in Latin, i.e., the ablative and the accusative. Source is expressed through the ablative with a special set of prepositions, while location and direction are both expressed with the same set of prepositions. Consequently cases became increasingly disconnected from the semantic roles they used to express.


Abstract A new Swiss glacier inventory is to be compiled from satellite data for the year 2000. The study presented here describes two major tasks: an accuracy assessment of different methods for glacier classification with Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data and a digital elevation model (DEM); the geographical information system (GIS)-based methods for automatic extraction of individual glaciers from classified satellite data and the computation of three-dimensional glacier parameters (such as minimum, maximum and median elevation or slope and orientation) by fusion with a DEM. First results obtained by these methods are presented in Part II of this paper (Kääb and others, 2002). Thresholding of a ratio image from TM4 and TM5 reveals the best-suited glacier map. The computation of glacier parameters in a GIS environment is efficient and suitable for worldwide application. The methods developed contribute to the U. S. Geological Survey-led Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS) project which is currently compiling a global inventory of land ice masses within the framework of global glacier monitoring (Haeberli and others, 2000).


Recent work has pointed to the importance for their social inclusion of convivial encounters between people with and without disabilities, but little is known about the spatial and social conditions of the places that encourage these encounters. This paper is concerned with public places that are conducive for convivial encounters between people with and without disabilities. Drawing on extensive participative observations of four community projects and 78 interviews with people visiting or working at these projects we investigated which elements in these places encourage 'strangers' to move from merely co-presence to conviviality. Three conditions seem to be conducive, namely: (1) a shared purpose, (2) built-in boundaries, (3) freedom to (dis)engage. These conditions were beneficial for convivial encounters, but do not lead to friendship or long-term support. People engage in such contact because they can be sure that these contacts do not raise expectations of long-term support or friendship.


To investigate brings over the gender's culture in the university, it led us to the topic of the production of the subjectivity inside the academic area, especially, in his relation with the kind, to try to understand how it is that the symbolic order that organizes the institutional life operates in the subjects and assures his reproduction. The point from which we depart is the supposition of which the body, while I seal of the individual and of his identity, is the subjective excellent space which meaning, nevertheless, is neither transparent nor univocal.


Plantar fasciitis is pain caused by inflammation of the plantar fascia at the
junction of the medial calcaneal tuberosity. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of
high energy radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy (RSWT) versus local steroid injections in the
treatment of chronic plantar fasciitis.
Materials & Methods: In a randomized clinical trial that was performed in the Department of
Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, 40 patients with
chronic plantar fasciitis were randomly divided into two gropus with 20 patients, that RSWT group
underwent five step high energy radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy (RSWT) with 0.2 mj/mm2
and local injection group included injection of depomederol steroid. Pain severity at the base of visual
analogue scale at moring and day length, daily function base on Foot function index questionnaire and
satisfaction with polling of patients were determind.
Results: In this study, 40 patients including 33 female and 7 male patients with the meas age of
42.85±8.62 year with plantar fasciitis underwent high energy radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy
(RSWT), and local steroid injections were evaluated. Significant difference was not found between
morning and daily pain of pateints at the beginning of the study, one and two months later. Significant
decrease was found in mornig and daily pain and FFI of patients in both groups during treatment
(P<0.001). Pain reduction rate at the end of two months in RSWT group was above 60% and in
function improvement was about 67.4% and in stroeid injection group was near 50% in pain relife and
function. Although significant statistical difference was not found in this changes between two groups
(P=0.068,0.081).
Conclusion: Both shock therapy and local steroid injection was effective in treatment of chronic
plantar fasciitis in reduction of pain and improve daily function of patients up to two months after
treatment without significant differences in their therapeutic efficacy. However, shock wave therapy
because of more percent improvement and high patient satisfaction was more recommended as the
preferred treatment.


Staff at a day program were trained in Augmentative/Alternative Communication (AAC) strategies and techniques. The goal was to provide training that would allow staff at the centre to use communication strategies when working with their clients. Two training sessions were provided on AAC and communication strategies for all staff at the centre. Additional training was provided on the use of Boardmaker software. The research team also worked directly with four clients and their key workers to implement AAC strategies. These selected staff members were provided with the opportunity to observe and participate in communication intervention sessions with their client. These sessions were intended to provide the staff with AAC skills and knowledge. An initial assessment established the client communication needs and obstacles. A plan was developed for each client and key-worker, and they were trained based on the plan. There was a range of success among the four clients, but impact was seen on both clients and key-workers.


The discovery of effective immunosuppressive medications, namely cyclosporine in the early 80's, was the seminal event that dramatically improved patient and graft survival after liver transplantation and solidified its status as the treatment of choice for end-stage liver disease (ESLD). Over the ensuing 30 years, the immunosuppressive armamentarium has expanded dramatically leading to a significant decrease in acute cellular rejection (ACR), and hence improvements in graft and patient survival. Unfortunately, long-term exposure to immunosuppressive medications and their cumulative adverse effects, including renal dysfunction, metabolic syndrome, and malignancy, contribute to morbidity and mortality in the long-term transplant recipients leading to late graft loss. Therefore, judicious use of immunosuppressive medications, with utmost attention to their unique adverse event profiles, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics are essential in designing individualized regimens best suited for each transplant recipient. In this article, major classes of immunosuppressive medications used for induction and maintenance therapy in liver transplantation are reviewed, including their pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, drug interactions and common adverse drug reactions. The evidence for their preferential use is presented where available.


The paper presents a brief overview of cold regions considerations that were considered during the design of the various elements of the Eklutna Water Project in Anchorage, Alaska. The major elements of the project consist of a lake diversion tunnel, a raw water transmission pipeline, two energy recovery stations, a 35 million gallons per day (132. 5 megaliters per day) water treatment facility, a clearwell, and a treated water transmission pipeline. Cold regions problems considered during design include everything from a thermal analysis of the transmission pipeline, to the prevention of freezing at drainage culverts. Other cold regions considerations/design solutions are discussed. The paper is intended to highlight the many different types of cold regions issues which must be dealt with on a project of this diversity, and to present an overview of the more important cold region considerations for the major project elements of this particular project.


Excimer laser annealing is shown to be very promising to promote Sb incorporation in Ge up to concentrations as high as 1 × 1021 at./cm3. However, we demonstrate that when Ge is melted by laser irradiation, a high excess of vacancies is generated in the molten region. These vacancies induce Sb electrical deactivation at the melt depth through the formation of Sbm-Vn complexes that act as a sink for further Sb atoms, even leading Sb to back-diffuse towards the surface, against the concentration gradient. These results are fundamental for the realization of new generation Ge-based micro and optoelectronic devices.


Abstract Most investigations of the importance of and the determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (a) they are produced primarily by schooling and (b) schooling is statistically predetermined. But these assumptions may lead to misleading inferences about impacts of schooling and of pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences on adult cognitive skills. This study uses an unusually rich longitudinal data set collected over 35 years in Guatemala to investigate production functions for adult (i) reading-comprehension and (ii) nonverbal cognitive skills as dependent on behaviorally-determined pre-schooling, schooling and post-schooling experiences. Major results are: (1) Schooling has significant and substantial impact on adult reading comprehension (but not on adult nonverbal cognitive skills)—but estimates of this impact are biased upwards substantially if there are no controls for behavioral determinants of schooling in the presence of persistent unobserved factors such as genetic endowments and/or if family background factors that appear to be correlated with genetic endowments are included among the first-stage instruments. (2) Both pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences have substantial significant impacts on one or both of the adult cognitive skill measures that tend to be underestimated if these pre- and post-schooling experiences are treated as statistically predetermined—in contrast to the upward bias for schooling, which suggests that the underlying physical and job-related components of genetic endowments are negatively correlated with those for cognitive skills. (3) The failure in most studies to incorporate pre- and post-schooling experiences in the analysis of adult cognitive skills or outcomes affected by adult cognitive skills is likely to lead to misleading over-emphasis on schooling relative to these pre-and post-schooling experiences. (4) Gender differences in the coefficients of the adult cognitive skills production functions are not significant, suggesting that most of the fairly substantial differences in adult cognitive skills favoring males on average originate from gender differences in schooling attainment and in experience in skilled jobs favoring males. These four sets of findings are of substantial interest in themselves. But they also have important implications for broader literatures, reinforcing the importance of early life investments in disadvantaged children in determining adult skills and options, pointing to limitations in the cross-country growth literature of using schooling of adults to represent human capital, supporting hypotheses about the importance of childhood nutrition and work complexity in explaining the "Flynn effect" of substantial increases in measured cognitive skills over time, and questioning the interpretation of studies that report productivity impacts of cognitive skills without controlling for the endogeneity of such skills. Abstract Most investigations of the importance of and the determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (a) they are produced primarily by schooling and (b) schooling is statistically predetermined. But these assumptions may lead to misleading inferences about impacts of schooling and of pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences on adult cognitive skills. This study uses an unusually rich longitudinal data set collected over 35 years in Guatemala to investigate production functions for adult (i) reading-comprehension and (ii) nonverbal cognitive skills as dependent on behaviorally-determined pre-schooling, schooling and post-schooling experiences. Major results are: (1) Schooling has significant and substantial impact on adult reading comprehension (but not on adult nonverbal cognitive skills)—but estimates of this impact are biased upwards substantially if there are no controls for behavioral determinants of schooling in the presence of persistent unobserved factors such as genetic endowments and/or if family background factors that appear to be correlated with genetic endowments are included among the first-stage instruments. (2) Both pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences have substantial significant impacts on one or both of the adult cognitive skill measures that tend to be under estimated if these pre- and post-schooling experiences are treated as statistically predetermined—in contrast to the upward bias for schooling, which suggests that the underlying physical and job-related components of genetic endowments are negatively correlated with those for cognitive skills. (3) The failure in most studies to incorporate pre- and post-schooling experiences in the analysis of adult cognitive skills or outcomes affected by adult cognitive skills is likely to lead to misleading over-emphasis on schooling relative to these pre-and post-schooling experiences. (4) Gender differences in the coefficients of the adult cognitive skills production functions are not significant, suggesting that most of the fairly substantial differences in adult cognitive skills favoring males on average originate from gender differences in schooling attainment and in experience in skilled jobs favoring males. These four sets of findings are of substantial interest in themselves. But they also have important implications for broader literatures, reinforcing the importance of early life investments in disadvantaged children in determining adult skills and options, pointing to limitations in the cross-country growth literature of using schooling of adults to represent human capital, supporting hypotheses about the importance of childhood nutrition and work complexity in explaining the "Flynn effect" of substantial increases in measured cognitive skills over time, and questioning the interpretation of studies that report productivity impacts of cognitive skills without controlling for the endogeneity of such skills. the importance of pre-schooling, schooling and post-schooling experiences in the determination of two representations of cognitive skills in adults: reading-comprehension and nonverbal cognitive skills, in a low-income context in which it is widely expected that greater cognitive skills will lead to and economic development. In more we that that nutrition work enhance cognitive skills. results that cognitive skills are predetermined and enhance productivity rather than cognitive skills as endogenously determined and depending on various life-cycle


Suitability of a multifunctional additive (MFA), a widely available cheap natural polymer belonging to the group polysaccharides, as a coupling agent for silica filled natural rubber (NR) compounds was investigated using a solid tyre compound. The test compounds were prepared by replacing currently used silane coupling agent, Si-69, with the MFA in different proportions ranging from 10 – 50% by weight. A compound containing only Si-69 as the coupling agent was also prepared to use as the control. Rheological properties of test compounds were assessed by using a Oscillating Disc Rheometer (ODR 100) at 1500C. The effectiveness of the MFA as a coupling agent for silica in NR compounds was evaluated through investigation of mechanical properties such as tensile and tear strength of silica filled NR vulcanisates containing MFA. Rheological properties of the above compounds indicate that there is a marked influence of MFA on the cure time,t90,  cure rate index(CRI), scorch time (ts2) and maximum torque (MH) of the rubber compounds. The compound became quite scorchy as the 50% of Si-69 was replaced by MFA and its cure time decreased by about 6 minutes. MH was increased by about 4 units resulting in an increase in CRI.  Evaluation of technical properties of the vulcanisates of tread compounds reveals that, about 10-20% of Si-69 can be replaced with the MFA without adversely affecting mechanical properties such as tensile strength, tear strength and modulus. Aging properties vucanisates having 10% of Si-69 replaced with MFA were within acceptable regions though that tends to decline with increasing the MFA content. It appears that the added MFA is capable of functioning as a coupling agent for silica filled compounds but this coupling action gets masked with increasing its concentration in the rubber compound. This may be a consequence of cure acceleration effect imposed on the rubber compounds by the MFA as revealed by rheological properties.


Due to several biological characteristics, bacterial phytases have considerable potential in commercial and environmental applications. Until now, there is no single phytase that is able to meet the diverse needs for all commercial and environmental applications. Phytase enzyme preparations have a wide range of applications in animal and human nutrition. The addition of phytase can improve the nutritional value of plant-based foods by enhancing protein digestibility and mineral availability through phytate hydrolysis during digestion in stomach or during food processing. The extra cellular production of Enterobacter sakazakii ASUIA279 previously isolated from Malaysian maize root was optimized using response surface methodology with full-factorial faced centered central composite design. Two steps of experiments were carried out to optimize the five most profound factors of the cultivation conditions in order to maximize the phytase production. Incubation temperature, initial pH of the media and percentage of rice bran supplemented in the media were optimized in Erlenmeyer flasks while agitation and aeration effect were further up in a bioreactor. This design reduced the number of actual experiment performed while allowing for possible interactions among the factors. The optimum combination of cultivation conditions for maximum phytase production were determined at incubation temperature which is 39.7°C, initial pH 7.1, rice bran percentage at 13.6%, 320 rpm of agitation and 0 vvm of aeration. The response surface model is a valuable tool for predicting and optimizing the cultivation conditions to maximize the phytase production. The results show that phytase production by E. ASUIA279 can be improved by controlling various factors simultaneously.


Experiments were undertaken on four farms in southern New South Wales to assess the requirements for superphosphate of clover-ley farming soils. The sites were selected to provide contrasts in initial soil phosphate status (medium v. high) in both low and high average annual rainfall conditions. At each site a sheep-grazing experiment with factorial arrangement of three annual topdressing rates (nil, 125, and 250 kg superphosphate ha-1) and two sheep stocking rates (district average, twice district average) was imposed for the duration of a normal ley phase (4 years). The response to topdressing depended on the initial soil phosphate status and was modified by seasonal rainfall conditions. At the high phosphate sites topdressing had little effect on pasture production, but at the medium phosphate sites topdressing increased pasture availability, and caused rapid and profound changes in botanical conlposition; topdressing induced grass dominance while omission of topdressing led to clover dominance. The changes in botanical composition had important effects on forage quality. With normal seasonal conditions there was no overall response to topdressing in sheep performance, but in poor years the pasture changes conferred by topdressing were reflected in a general increase in the level of sheep productivity.


The core of our approach, Pixel Consensus Voting, is a framework for instance segmentation based on the generalized Hough transform. Pixels cast discretized, probabilistic votes for the likely regions that contain instance centroids. At the detected peaks that emerge in the voting heatmap, backprojection is applied to collect pixels and produce instance masks. Unlike a sliding window detector that densely enumerates object proposals, our method detects instances as a result of the consensus among pixel-wise votes. We implement vote aggregation and backprojection using native operators of a convolutional neural network. The discretization of centroid voting reduces the training of instance segmentation to pixel labeling, analogous and complementary to FCN-style semantic segmentation, leading to an efficient and unified architecture that jointly models things and stuff. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline on COCO and Cityscapes Panoptic Segmentation and obtain competitive results. Code will be open-sourced.


In May 2015, the Law Commission of India drafted its 257th report titled 'Reforms in Guardianship and Custody Laws in India', in which it suggested several modifications to the custody framework in India. Within this report, the Law Commission also suggested the possible incorporation of shared parenting as a post-divorce custody model within India. This paper attempts to analyse the principle need as well as the practical ramifications of implementing such a model. In doing so, this paper contextualises the demands for shared parenting made by men's rights groups and provides a feminist jurisprudential critique to the underlying basis of these demands. Finally, this paper recommends modifications to the report, suggesting mandatory child support orders and a rebuttable presumption model against shared parenting in cases of domestic violence. In doing so, the paper attempts to provide tangible suggestions in order to ensure that such a model meets the goals of justice and care in laws related to parenting in India.


The association of Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) and Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) established in 2008 has opened doors for the study of virus-induced oncogenesis. Much of what is known about polyomaviruses (PyVs) stems from decades of studies on SV40. However, recent research has shown differences among PyVs that might help explain the uniqueness of MCPyV that makes it the only PyV discovered to date that is associated with a human cancer. Therefore, it is important to understand the biology of this virus and its oncogenic potential. My study focuses on two of the early proteins of MCPyV, namely the large tumor antigen (LT) and the small tumor antigen (sT). Both proteins are multi-functional, contributing to viral replication and the stimulation of cellular proliferation. MCPyV LT is the viral helicase that binds to the viral origin (Ori) to initiate unwinding and the replication of the double-stranded DNA genome. Like other PyVs, MCPyV requires numerous cellular proteins to replicate its genome. In my research, I show that, in the presence of the viral Ori, the binding of LT to the Ori forms replication factories in the nucleus. A number of cellular factors involved in the host DNA damage response (DDR) re-localize to the sites of MCPyV LT-mediated replication. Inhibition of the DNA damage response by either drug treatment or siRNA knockdown decreases MCPyV replication, suggesting that an intact host DDR pathway is essential for the optimal replication of MCPyV. Previous research has shown that MCPyV sT indirectly enhances viral replication by stabilizing LT. In my study, I discover that sT is a metalloprotein that coordinates two iron-sulfur clusters. Mutations in the highly conserved cysteines found in MCPyV sTs abolishes its ability to stimulate LT-mediated viral DNA replication, and that sT can enhance LT-mediated replication in a manner that is independent of LT stabilization. Moreover, I show that sT translocates to the nuclear replication factories formed in the presence of LT and Ori, suggesting a more direct role of sT in promoting viral DNA replication. Interestingly, upon treatment with the potent antiviral agent cidofovir, sT-mediated enhancement of MCPyV replication is robustly inhibited, while replication driven by LT alone was not affected much. This finding supports the use of cidofovir in controlling PyV infection and offers MCPyV sT as a potential drug target to dampen viral growth. In summary, my work elucidates various aspects of MCPyV replication, including the involvement of the host DDR machinery and the role of sT that could potentially be targeted by drug treatment. This study contributes to the understanding of the virology of MCPyV and opens avenues for further research. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Cell & Molecular Biology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2063 First Advisor Jianxin You


Recently Transformer has been largely explored in tracking and shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, existing efforts mainly focus on fusing and enhancing features generated by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The potential of Transformer in representation learning remains under-explored. In this paper, we aim to further unleash the power of Transformer by proposing a simple yet efficient fully-attentional tracker, dubbed SwinTrack, within classic Siamese framework. In particular, both representation learning and feature fusion in SwinTrack leverage the Transformer architecture, enabling better feature interactions for tracking than pure CNN or hybrid CNN-Transformer frameworks. Besides, to further enhance robustness, we present a novel motion token that embeds historical target trajectory to improve tracking by providing temporal context. Our motion token is lightweight with negligible computation but brings clear gains. In our thorough experiments, SwinTrack exceeds existing approaches on multiple benchmarks. Particularly, on the challenging LaSOT, SwinTrack sets a new record with 0.713 SUC score. It also achieves SOTA results on other benchmarks. We expect SwinTrack to serve as a solid baseline for Transformer tracking and facilitate future research. Our codes and results are released at https://github.com/LitingLin/SwinTrack.


This paper finds large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers to interact and play with their children in ways that would develop their children's cognitive and personality skills. The authors re-interviewed the study participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation increased the average earnings of participants by 42 percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor market outcomes and reduce later life inequality.


This article develops a perspective on a practical theology of belonging. It argues that the political rhetoric of inclusion, while possibly necessary, is deeply inadequate to help us understand what disability is and what it really means to be with people who have received this label. We need to shift our thinking from inclusion to belonging and to reframe our practices from politics to love. The article seeks to do three things. Firstly, it highlights that the term disability is a vague and complex concept that, while it might be necessary, requires to be treated with both caution and suspicion. Secondly, the article argues that the idea of including people with disabilities does not go far enough in overcoming the alienation, stigmatization, and exclusion of those whom we choose to name "disabled." We need to move from ideas of inclusion to the practices of belonging. Finally, the article engages with the theologies of Jean Vanier and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and suggests that the key to such transformation is not in politics but in Jesus. It is only as we learn how to love one another in and through Jesus and to create communities that embody such Christ-like love that we can begin to understand what it means truly to belong.


A general non-parametric technique is proposed for the analysis of a complex multimodal feature space and to delineate arbitrarily shaped clusters in it. The basic computational module of the technique is an old pattern recognition procedure: the mean shift. For discrete data, we prove the convergence of a recursive mean shift procedure to the nearest stationary point of the underlying density function and, thus, its utility in detecting the modes of the density. The relation of the mean shift procedure to the Nadaraya-Watson estimator from kernel regression and the robust M-estimators; of location is also established. Algorithms for two low-level vision tasks discontinuity-preserving smoothing and image segmentation - are described as applications. In these algorithms, the only user-set parameter is the resolution of the analysis, and either gray-level or color images are accepted as input. Extensive experimental results illustrate their excellent performance.


International relations scholars of all stripes have long been interested in the idea of "international order." At the most general level, international order entails some level of regularity, predictability, and stability in the ways that actors interact with one another. At a level of higher specificity, however, international orders can vary along a number of dimensions (or fault lines). This includes whether order is thin or thick, premised on position or principles, regional or global in scope, and issue specific or multi-issue in nature.
 When it comes to how orders emerge, the majority of existing explanations can be categorized according to two criteria and corresponding set of questions. First, are orders produced by a single actor or a select subset of actors that are privileged and powerful, or are they created by many actors that are roughly equal and undifferentiated in capabilities and status? Second, do orders come about from the purposive behavior of particular actors, or are they the aggregated result of many behaviors and interactions that produce an outcome that no single actor anticipated? The resulting typology yields four ideal types of order explanations: hegemonic (order is intentional, and power is concentrated), centralized (order is spontaneous, but power is concentrated), negotiated (order is intentional, but power is dispersed), and decentralized (order is spontaneous, and power is dispersed).
 Finally, it is useful to think about the process by which order can transform or break down as a phenomenon that is at least sometimes distinct from how orders emerge in the first place. The main criterion in this respect is the rapidity with which orders transform or break down. More specifically, they can change or fall apart quickly through revolutionary processes or more gradually through evolutionary ones.


An increasing share of Italian industrial firms chose to become multinational since 2000, notwithstanding the small average size of our firms and the high sunk costs involved in this decision. Among firms with at least 20 employees 18.7% owned a foreign productive unit in 2011 (up from 13.4 in 2004), according to survey results. The main reason for locating units in advanced countries is to be close to outlet markets and not to save on costs; this is true also for investments in developing countries, where nearly half of foreign affiliates were located. Italian multinationals are on average more productive and profitable, even when compared to exporters with plants solely in Italy. The productivity premium relative to exporting firms is 15 percent, in line with estimates by Helpman et al. (2004) for the US. Since 2008, in the aftermath of the crisis, Italian multinationals performed better than the average firm, also on the Italian labor market. Throughout this period they tended to have more optimistic plans and forecasts, which were then confirmed by later results. In fact, internationalization and exporting have been successful strategies for many firms during the crisis. The better-than-average performances and the efficiency gains from investing abroad suggest to step up effort by Italian public institutions to support firms' foreign expansion.


In the keynote, major reforestation challenges in Scandinavia will be highlighted. The following countries make up Scandinavia: Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. For Iceland, with only a forest cover of 2%, a major reforestation challenge is the deforestation and overgrazing in combination with land degradation and extensive soil erosion. The challenges include the conflicts with livestock farmers. For centuries the commons were used for sheep and horse grazing. However, more and more of farmer grazing land have been fenced up, allowing the regeneration of birch and plantations of other species to increase. With a forest cover of 37% and 69% respectively, for decades a major reforestation challenge in Norway and Sweden has been the risk of seedling damages from the pine weevil. Unprotected seedlings can have a survival rate of less than 25% after being planted. Pine weevils feed on the bark of planted young seedlings at regeneration sites. If the seedling is girdled, it will not survive. In Sweden, and soon in Norway, pesticides have been forbidden. In the keynote, new methods and technology will be presented based on non-chemical protection. In Finland, with a forest cover of 75%, a major reforestation challenge is linked to the forest structure. The structure of Finnish forestry includes many private forests in combination with small regeneration sites. This implies a situation where logistics and methods for lifting and field storage provide a major challenge in order to preserve seedling quality until the planting date. Due to this situation, new logistic systems and technologies are being developed in Finland, including new seedling cultivation programs (including cultivation under Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs)) to match the access of fresh planting stock to different planting dates. In Denmark, with a forest cover of 13%, a major reforestation challenge is the possibility of future plantations based on a wide range of relevant species. For this to become a realistic option, new methods and technology have to be developed in reforestation activities that support this possibility. These methods and technology should make it possible to not be limited to certain species due to problems and restrictions during field establishment. This due to the prospect of establishing stable, healthy, and productive stands of various forest species that can be adapted to future climate change.


Metaheuristics have been developed to provide general purpose approaches for solving hard combinatorial problems. While these frameworks often serve as the starting point for the development of problem-specific search procedures, they very rarely work efficiently in their default state. We combine the ideas of reactive search, which adjusts key parameters during search, and algorithm configuration, which fine-tunes algorithm parameters for a given set of problem instances, for the automatic compilation of a portfolio of highly reactive dialectic search heuristics for MaxSAT. Even though the dialectic search metaheuristic knows nothing more about MaxSAT than how to evaluate the cost of a truth assignment, our automatically generated solver defines a new state of the art for random weighted partial MaxSAT instances. Moreover, when combined with an industrial MaxSAT solver, the self-assembled reactive portfolio was able to win four out of nine gold medals at the recent 2016 MaxSAT Evaluation on random, crafted, and industrial partial and weighted-partial MaxSAT instances.


Abstract. The fundamental role of the hydrological cycle in the global climate system motivates a thorough evaluation of its responses to climate change and mitigation. The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP) is a coordinated international effort to assess the climate impacts of solar geoengineering, a proposal to counteract global warming with a reduction in incoming solar radiation. We assess the mechanisms underlying the rainfall response to a simplified simulation of such solar dimming (G1) in the suite of GeoMIP models and identify robust features. While solar geoengineering nearly restores preindustrial temperatures, the global hydrology is altered. Tropical precipitation changes dominate the response across the model suite, and these are driven primarily by shifts of the Hadley circulation cells. We report a damping of the seasonal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) in G1, associated with preferential cooling of the summer hemisphere, and annual mean ITCZ shifts in some models that are correlated with the warming of one hemisphere relative to the other. Dynamical changes better explain the varying tropical rainfall anomalies between models than changes in relative humidity or the Clausius–Clapeyron scaling of precipitation minus evaporation (P − E), given that the relative humidity and temperature responses are robust across the suite. Strong reductions in relative humidity over vegetated land regions are likely related to the CO2 physiological response in plants. The uncertainty in the spatial distribution of tropical P − E changes highlights the need for cautious consideration and continued study before any implementation of solar geoengineering.


Recent academic research into the use of games for educational purposes has focused almost exclusively on video games. In this study, we explore player perceptions of board games with regards to education. We started with a large dataset of 7,806,486 reviews of 53,960 games collected from the BoardGameGeek website. We performed a keyword search for "education," resulting in a working dataset of 1,978 reviews. First, we evaluated what games were being discussed with regards to education, looking at educational reviews per game title as well as educational games per subdomain and category. We also qualitatively coded a sample of 200 reviews to describe the perception of the educational value of these games and the perception of the quality of these games. We found, through a number of quantitative and qualitative measures, that reviewers were generally accepting of games' potential for educational purposes.


We report the synthesis of a new synthetic cavitand receptor with an embedded thiourea moiety directed at effective molecular recognition of ion pairs. Initial prospects towards the use of cavitands in biomimetic carbocationic cyclizations have been carried out, employing ionic guests as stable surrogates for putative substrates and intermediates. The cavitand displays tight binding with tetramethylammonium salts, with unforeseen slow exchange kinetics of both cation and anion components.


We introduce data-driven suggestions for 3D modeling. Data-driven suggestions support open-ended stages in the 3D modeling process, when the appearance of the desired model is ill-defined and the artist can benefit from customized examples that stimulate creativity. Our approach computes and presents components that can be added to the artist's current shape. We describe shape retrieval and shape correspondence techniques that support the generation of data-driven suggestions, and report preliminary experiments with a tool for creative prototyping of 3D models.


The presence of disturbances such as bends, contraction, expansion, junction, bridge piers in a drainage system is very common in Malaysia. These hydraulic structures often cause the channel flow to choke and form standing waves. The challenges for this numerical model lie in representing supercritical transition and capturing shocks. For this purpose, an unstructured two-dimensional finite-element model is used to solve the governing shallow water equations. This numerical model utilizes a characteristic based Petrov-Galerkin method implemented with shockdetection mechanism. The model testing demonstrates the ability of this numerical model to reproduce the speed and height of flow with the presence of hydraulic structure under different flow conditions. Four experiments, which consist of weir, contraction and 90° expansion, hydraulic jump and bridge pier, were conducted in laboratory Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). The Reynolds number for these experiments is within the range of 30000 to 47000. The numerical model results are compared quantitatively with experimental results, published numerical simulation and analytical solution. In general, the energy in the model is dissipated too fast and the short wave in the model tends to travel faster. The present model is not suitable for any surface flow that has steep gradients. Overall results show that the numerical model satisfactorily computed the water-surface profiles of the experiments data and exact solutions. The results demonstrate that the numerical model provides an alternative tool in validating theoretical finding and evaluating flow performance


The Malaysian federal government is largely responsible towards providing several facilities to the community. The development of various types of property assets which encompasses buildings and infrastructure such as office buildings, roads, bridges and others, has proved that the government is really committed in executing its responsibility. From time to time, the number of property assets that were developed by the government is increasing parallel with the government's desire to stabilize its service quality. Nevertheless, in managing those property assets, the government currently is facing a mixture of problems and pitfalls such as the increase of property management and maintenance costs, the occurrence of incompatible maintenance programs, underutilization of property, end-user dissatisfaction and others. Following this scenario, the study was done with the main objective is to determine the management factors that are hindering the implementation of property management activities. A total of 67 respondents from ministries and technical departments were selected. The data was collected through a survey using questionnaire forms. The collected data was then analyzed using quantitative approaches such as frequency analysis method, mean analysis, relative important index as well as others. Results from the analysis show that there are 5 main management issues in managing Malaysian government owned property assets. Those issues are lack of proper property unit/department within a ministry, lack of expertise, lack of proper strategies, lack of proper management procedure and lack of IT usage.


The need to improve the nutritional status of extremely low birth weight infants has resulted in a higher incidence of problems related to glucose intolerance. The inability of the newborn to inhibit gluconeogenesis in response to a glucose infusion has been postulated as an important determinant of the hyperglycemia observed in extremely low birth weight infants. The 2 proposed mechanisms to explain this finding include inappropriate secretion of insulin by the pancreas and decrease sensitivity of the liver to the gluco-regulatory effect of insulin. The capacity of extremely low birth weight infants to oxidize glucose at higher rates, and the positive effect that insulin may have in glucose utilization and tolerance, support the use of insulin in the prevention and treatment of hyperglycemia. Continuous infusion of insulin appears to be safe for the treatment of hyperglycemia, based on the available studies. However, the effectiveness of insulin treatment needs to be critically tested further before it can be implemented in routine clinical practice.


Kernel discriminant analysis (KDA) is one of the most effective nonlinear techniques for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction. It can be applied to a wide range of applications involving high-dimensional data, including images, gene expressions, and text data. This paper develops a new algorithm to further improve the overall performance of KDA by effectively integrating the boosting and KDA techniques. The proposed method, called boosting kernel discriminant analysis (BKDA), possesses several appealing properties. First, like all kernel methods, it handles nonlinearity in a disciplined manner that is also computationally attractive; second, by introducing pairwise class discriminant information into the discriminant criterion and simultaneously employing boosting to robustly adjust the information, it further improves the classification accuracy; third, by calculating the significant discriminant information in the null space of the within-class scatter operator, it also effectively deals with the small sample size problem which is widely encountered in real-world applications for KDA; fourth, by taking advantage of the boosting and KDA techniques, it constitutes a strong ensemble-based KDA framework. Experimental results on gene expression data demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed methodology.