This thesis presents a qualitative study of the factors impacting on collaborative projects in a cross-cultural setting, in this case academic projects carried out under the aegis of a large co-operative
programme linking Europe and India. A case study approach is used, focussing on four projects that
developed between European and Indian academic researchers, aimed at transferring knowledge
between the two continents.
The factors contributing to the success or failure of the projects are assessed. The major factors
identified are fourfold:
The alignment of the project with the personal goals of the participants
The social, cultural and institutional contexts in which the projects take place
The role of the coordinators
The interaction and communication activity of participants, including the role of computer
mediated communication.
On the basis of the results of the study, an existing Activity Theory model developed by Cole
(1988; 1998) to account for cross-cultural research is extended to encompass collaboration. The
potential of the model as a management tool for future cross-cultural collaborative projects is
presented.


Phytochemicals, especially botanical insecticides are currently of interest because of their successful application in plant protection as biocontrol agents. Biological activity of leaf aqueous extract of ten selected medicinal plants were evaluated against the fourth-instar larvae of gram pod borer Helicoverpa armigera (Hubner), (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae). Antifeedant activity of leaf aqueous extracts of Abutilon indicum L., Achyranthus aspera L., Aerva lanata L., Albiziz amara (Roxb), Andrographis paniculata Ness., Cardiospermum halicacabum L., Cassia tora L., Catharanthus roseus L (G) Don., Datura metal L. and Tribulus terrestris L. were evaluated in this study. Preliminary screening after 24 h of exposure with leaf aqueous extracts of the selected plants at a concentration of 1,000 ppm exhibited significant larval mortality rate. The percentage mortality rate ranged considerably from 10.8 to 72.8. The mortality rate was observed in the decreasing order of A. paniculata > C. roseus > D. metal > A. amara > C. halicacabum > A. indicum > C. tora > T. terrestris > A. aspera >A. lanata against the larvae of H. armigera. The results imply that leaf aqueous extract of A. paniculata, C. roseus and D. metal can potentially be used as ecofriendly pest control agents against the larva of H. armigera.


After clarifying what should be meant by "military society", one is reminded that human and social sciences have for a long time shown interest in warfare and armies by giving priority to three viewpoints: historical, functionalist and socio-legal. But these are debatable even outmoded points that should be set aside to make room for another model which is termed here as a cultural one. Then, the conditions in which this entity appeared are recalled and they refer to a precise socio-cultural context: the one deriving from the birth of the nation-state in nineteenth century Europe. However, in order to be able to speak about a society, it is therefore necessary to fulfil several conditions, these are detailed in a second part where the specific features of a military group are given in more details. Once this done, the point at issue is to know whether the main characteristics which used to make of the armies a society are still valid. An attentive examination of changes that inter-state and indeed within a state confrontations have experienced in the post-Cold War era and these coinciding with army professionalization that many western countries have started, compel us to doubt somewhat the preservation of the present military society. In other words, we can bet on a relative withdrawing of the socio-cultural specificity of the military world within the global society.


This protocol describes the simultaneous use of a broad span of methods to examine muscle aerobic capacity, glucose tolerance, strength, and power in elderly people performing short-term resistance training (RET). Supervised progressive resistance training for 1 h three times a week over 8 weeks was performed by RET participants (71±1 years, range 65-80). Compared to a control group without training, the RET showed improvements on the measures used to indicate strength, power, glucose tolerance, and several parameters of muscle aerobic capacity. Strength training was performed in a gym with only robust fitness equipment. An isokinetic dynamometer for knee extensor strength permitted the measurement of concentric, eccentric, and static strength, which increased for the RET group (8-12% post- versus pre-test). The power (rate of force development, RFD) at the initial 0-30 ms also showed an increase for the RET group (52%). A glucose tolerance test with frequent blood glucose measurements showed improvements only for the RET group in terms of blood glucose values after 2 h (14%) and the area under the curve (21%). The blood lipid profile also improved (8%). From muscle biopsy samples prepared using histochemistry, the amount of fiber type IIa increased, and a trend towards a decrease in IIx in the RET group reflected a change to a more oxidative profile in terms of fiber composition. Western blot (to determine the protein content related to the signaling for muscle protein synthesis) showed a rise of 69% in both Akt and mTOR in the RET group; this also showed an increase in mitochondrial proteins for OXPHOS complex II and citrate synthase (both ~30%) and for complex IV (90%), in only the RET group. We demonstrate that this type of progressive resistance training offers various improvements (e.g., strength, power, aerobic capacity, glucose tolerance, and plasma lipid profile).


Abstract We use data from the Swedish Financial Supervisory 2010 consumer survey to look at levels of financial literacy and retirement planning in the Swedish population. The results indicate that many adults have low financial literacy. In general, financial literacy levels are lower among the young, the old, women and those with low income or low educational attainment. People who report having tried to plan for retirement have higher levels of financial literacy. In particular, an understanding of risk diversification is strongly correlated with planning for retirement. We relate our findings to features of the Swedish pension system.


Social spending has become a major tool of targeting resources to South Africa's poor. The poor now get considerably more than their population share of social spending, but the underlying distribution of income is so skewed that overall post-fiscal inequality has not improved much. Concentration ratios and curves show considerable shifts in social spending incidence in the period 1995 to 2006. However, the efficiency of that spending is low, resulting in limited social outcomes and consequently also limited gains to the poor from better targeting. This paper therefore calls for the South African policy discussion to shift to why the ever-increasing fiscal inputs and improved targeting of those inputs have not produced the desired social outcomes.


This dissertation examines the multiplicity of uses associated with tree and palm species of the Rupununi, Southern Guyana and the factors associated with their distribution. As tropical forests continue to decline the most significant response has been to understand the implications for the carbon cycle, with the impacts on forest dwelling peoples and wildlife, inadequately addressed. Multiple-use plants, individual species which at their most critical level provide food for wildlife, non-timber forest products and are commercially logged, provide a suitable lens for appreciating additional ecosystem services that may be compromised as tropical forests decline. I completed a plant inventory in the Rupununi and drew on the traditional knowledge of Amerindians to define multiple-use plants, describe their multiplicity of uses, describe vegetation types and assess multiple-use species distribution relative to land tenure classes and herbivores. I found four classes of multiple-use plants: wildlife food and commercial timber; commercial timber and traditional uses; wildlife food and traditional uses; and, wildlife food, commercial timber and traditional uses, each representing a unique dimension of ecosystem services such plants provide. A map created with descriptions of vegetation from Amerindian hunters showed that multiple-use plants are distributed in forest types that are critical for Amerindian livelihood activities. Further, as policies towards the extraction or protection of plant species are dictated by land tenure holdings, my assessments showed that strategies aimed at sustaining ecosystem services provided by multiple-use plants must consider the ideals for resource management within tenure classes. As expected, the distribution of a key disperser of multiple-use plants fruits and seeds spider monkeys (Ateles paniscus), was closely related to the distribution of their food sources. My results show that land-use change impacting multiple-use plants will have implications for wildlife, and as a consequence traditional activities of forest dwelling peoples. FOR LOGS, FOR TRADITIONAL PURPOSES AND FOR FOOD: IDENTIFICATION OF MULTIPLE-USE PLANT SPECIES OF NORTHERN AMAZONIA AND AN ASSESSMENT OF FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH THEIR DISTRIBUTION


"Study without thought is labor lost; thought
without study is perilous." (Confucius)

This paper is drawn from my research-based teaching activity applied to university students of English regarding self-direction and andragogy, in the attempt to establish philosophy and methodology. Since academic teaching is a complex educational process, I will only address the assessment stage of online learning, which may give a diagnosis of the techniques efficiency, the one that signals the need of changes for a presumable improvement. Assessment of online learning takes many forms (objectively-scored tests, subjectively-rated tests, criterion-referenced tests and learner self-evaluation), but I will focus on learner's self-evaluation, a relatively new method in the field of adult education (Rogers and Knowles).

First I choose to start with the hypothesis that undergraduate compulsory education is or should be designed by academic staff as a preparation basis for the alumni continuing professional education, ideally with the revision of the curriculum (Erikson and Piaget). My concerns for lifelong learning that is measured in the form of formative and summative assessment are the core of the paper, on the purpose of presenting how the shift from higher education level to a career-making advancement may happen. I will give an account of both strategies and methods following a stage-based structure from goals to possible achievements.

Then, I will exemplify with a second language acquisition, more specifically with learning idioms and the difficulties in translating them from Turkish to English and vice versa. A student achieves knowledge concerning fixed phrases in the foreign language based on several types of resources and then checks one's own work for errors. The investigation into strong and weak factors of the process will further mark the beginning of a deeper analysis, while the successful review becomes the reference point within the proposed quality assurance activities with relevant general conclusions. Malcolm Knowles's approach will be taken as basis of discussion, including the five major assumptions about adult learners: self-concept, experience, readiness to learn, orientation to learning and motivation to learn. His conception of andragogy stems from the different traditions of psychological analysis: humanist and behavioral. I will investigate how much of his theory or set of assumptions may serve teaching practice. Independent, asynchronous learning is supported by the wide possibilities opened by technology, not being bound by the constraints of space, time and experience.

After the presentation of learning stages and an in-depth description of possible andragogical self-assessment methods, as a conclusion I will look into the educational benefits of allowing students discover their own potential and results, in a trial and error approach, in order to achieve not only new knowledge, but also to develop capabilities in specific areas.


Experiments were conducted to characterise the clean bed headloss of commercial sand and anthracite filter media over sizes ranging from 0.5 to 1.7 mm and over filter rates ranging from 1 to 20 gpm/sf (2.45–49 m/h). Limited tests were also conducted with glass beads. For an equivalent size, the glass beads showed the highest headloss, followed by the sand and then the anthracite. The headloss through granular media was shown to be sensitive to the porosity of the media bed and the size of the media grains. Over the range of filter rates examined in this study, the headloss was not proportional to the filter rate in a simple way as is suggested by Darcy's law.


Abstract Banker plants with Aphidius colemani Viereck were tested in greenhouses in Massachusetts and New York for control of cotton aphid Aphis gossypii Glover, and green peach aphid Myzus persicae (Sulzer) on 2 spring flower crops, pansies (Viola tricolor hortensis) and Marguerite daisies (Argyranthemum hybrid). Banker plants consisted of pots of barley plants infested with the bird cherry-oat aphid Rhopalosiphum padi (L.), inoculated at the start of the crop with adults of A. colemani purchased from a commercial insectary. Initial trials were conducted in University of Massachusetts greenhouses containing flats of the crop plants. Sentinel plants in flats were infested uniformly with aphids, and particular greenhouses were subjected to the presence of banker plants or left as controls. Prior to University trials, a survey was conducted in commercial greenhouses in Massachusetts and New York to determine the frequency and species of aphid infestation in spring flower crops. After University trials, the efficacy of banker plants was tested in commercial greenhouses in both states. In surveys of commercial greenhouses, M. persicae was the most frequently detected species, accounting for 53% of all infestations. In University greenhouse trials, in absence of parasitism, A. gossypii increased fastest on daisy, followed by M. persicae on daisy, M. persicae on pansy, and A. gossypii on pansy. Parasitoid suppression of population increase was strongest for A. gossypii on daisy and poorest for M. persicae on pansy. The presence of 2 aphid species in the same greenhouse did not alter the level of biological control in our trial. In commercial greenhouses, banker plants failed to control M. persicae deployed on infested pansies as sentinel hosts. In the laboratory, a 12-h exposure to dried residues of pyriproxyfen or pymetrozine, insecticides commonly used to control aphids, reduced survival of A. colemani adults, compared to a water control (82% survival), to 71% and 53%, respectively. Adult parasitoid emergence from pesticide-treated aphid mummies was reduced from 68% for the controls to 56% for pyriproxyfen and 62% for pymetrozine.


Word embeddings are an effective tool to analyze language. They have been recently extended to model other types of data beyond text, such as items in recommendation systems. Embedding models consider the probability of a target observation (a word or an item) conditioned on the elements in the context (other words or items). In this paper, we show that conditioning on all the elements in the context is not optimal. Instead, we model the probability of the target conditioned on a learned subset of the elements in the context. We use amortized variational inference to automatically choose this subset. Compared to standard embedding models, this method improves predictions and the quality of the embeddings.


In the frequency range well below 1 MHz, the swimbladder is often considered the most important part for acoustic fish detection. In this work a portable system was developed to not only detect but also try to identify free-swimming fish. It has been used to measure the ultrasound backscatter at 1 MHz from fish. The system consists of a Reson TC3210 1 MHz single-element transducer, a dual-frequency, multi-beam Blueview P900-2250 sonar, and three Oregon ATC9K cameras. The Reson transducer is connected to an Olympus pulser-receiver monitored by a portable computer through a Picoscope 4226 PC oscilloscope. Ex-situ experiments were performed at the NorthSea Oceanarium in Hirtshals, Denmark. The positions, orientations, and lengths of fish were estimated by three dimensional image analysis, taking the measured acoustic distance into account, while species were identified manually. These experiments indicate that at 1 MHz the surface areas (also fins and tail) of the fish can give echoes that are much stronger (up to 3 times) than the swimbladder can, therefore important for identification of fish.


ABSTRACT In 2003, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged and caused over 8,000 human cases of infection and more than 700 deaths worldwide. Zoonotic SARS-CoV likely evolved to infect humans by a series of transmission events between humans and animals for sale in China. Using synthetic biology, we engineered the spike protein (S) from a civet strain, SZ16, into our epidemic strain infectious clone, creating the chimeric virus icSZ16-S, which was infectious but yielded progeny viruses incapable of propagating in vitro. After introducing a K479N mutation within the S receptor binding domain (RBD) of SZ16, the recombinant virus (icSZ16-S K479N) replicated in Vero cells but was severely debilitated in growth. The in vitro evolution of icSZ16-S K479N on human airway epithelial (HAE) cells produced two viruses (icSZ16-S K479N D8 and D22) with enhanced growth on HAE cells and on delayed brain tumor cells expressing the SARS-CoV receptor, human angiotensin I converting enzyme 2 (hACE2). The icSZ16-S K479N D8 and D22 virus RBDs contained mutations in ACE2 contact residues, Y442F and L472F, that remodeled S interactions with hACE2. Further, these viruses were neutralized by a human monoclonal antibody (MAb), S230.15, but the parent icSZ16-S K479N strain was eight times more resistant than the mutants. These data suggest that the human adaptation of zoonotic SARS-CoV strains may select for some variants that are highly susceptible to select MAbs that bind to RBDs. The epidemic, icSZ16-S K479N, and icSZ16-S K479N D22 viruses replicate similarly in the BALB/c mouse lung, highlighting the potential use of these zoonotic spike SARS-CoVs to assess vaccine or serotherapy efficacy in vivo.


ABSTRACT It has been said that the development of surgery has been in tandem with the evolution of anaesthesia. This should hold true all over the world, but in some areas a lack of resources has hindered the growth of both specialities. Most of the work on the economics of anaesthesia in the developing world, especially in Africa, has been by carried out by Western authors. As commendable and factual as they are, little work has been done in the West African sub-region which consists of about sixteen countries, including the most populous nation in Africa, Nigeria. This review looks at the economics of anaesthetic practice in a major country in the region and how improvisation has helped limit the number of expensive drugs needed for the delivery of safe anaesthesia, whilst maintaining cost effectiveness. The cost of anaesthesia in Nigeria as a percentage of the total hospital cost is higher than that in most parts of the developed world, while the converse is true of total hospital costs in the developed world, which are much higher.


The seasonal and diurnal water relations were compared among six desert phreatophytes, two evergreen shrubs, and one deciduous shrub. All species were located in one wash woodland in the Sonoran Desert of southern California. There are several mechanisms by which these phreatophytes have adapted to the desert environment. One group of winter-deciduous phreatophytes (Olneya tesota, Prosopis glandulosa, and Acacia greggii) experienced summer midday leaf water potentials below -4.0 MPa. These phreatophytes had a series of physiological mechanisms for tolerating summer water stress, including seasonal and diurnal osmotic adjustment and the maintenance of high leaf conduc- tance at low leaf water potential. Osmotic adjustment of these three phreatophytes was similar to or greater than that of two evergreen species (Larrea tridentata and Simmondsia chinensis). Dalea spinosa, a stem-photosynthetic phreatophyte, avoided water stress by maintaining a very small leaf area. The summer-deciduous phreatophytes (Hyptis emoryi, and Chilopsis linearis) demonstrated mechanisms of drought avoidance such as change in leaf biomass and low summer leaf conductance. Little osmotic adjustment occurred in the summer-deciduous phreatophytes. The phreatophytic species studied in this investigation have evolved adaptations to water stress that are similar to those of deciduous and evergreen shrubs of the Sonoran Desert. Desert phreatophytes are a complex group of species with varied adaptive mechanisms to tolerate or avoid drought and should not be considered simply as a group of species that avoid desert water stress by utilizing deep ground water unavailable to other desert species of drought tolerance and avoidance.


Background: A retrospective study was undertaken to establish if the outcome of patients with proximal humeral fracture could be predicted by radiographic findings. 12 patients were reviewed with a proximal humeral fracture and were treated conservatively with sling immobilisation, followed by physiotherapy. After each treatment was completed, patient's radiographs, taken immediately after the initial trauma, were reviewed and the fracture was classified according to Neer and arbeitsgemeinschaft orthopaedie (AO). There were two crucial time points.
Methods: Reviewer one, blinded to the patients' final functional outcome, attempted to forecast patient functionality by placing each patient into one of 3 broad groups described as 'good', 'moderate' or 'poor' based on the radiographs. Six months after finishing physiotherapy all patients were reassessed functionally by another researcher (reviewer 2), blinded to radiographic classification and prediction. Multiple regression analysis was used to measure outcomes at both interval points.
Results: Multiple regression analysis revealed a significant correlation (R2 0.613, p = 0.014) between the radiographic predicted outcome and the immediate post treatment outcome when adjusting for age. At 6 months review, there was a significant correlation between predicted radiographic outcome and functional outcome when adjusted for patients' age (R2 0.765 P = 0.001); patients remained in their predicted groups. Six months after physiotherapy only one patient reported being pain free. Poisson linear regression analysis revealed that compared to the patients in the 'poor' and 'moderate' groups those in the 'good' group had 3 treatment sessions wasted (P < 0.001). Those in the 'poor' group accounted for 50 out of 76 treatments after their progress had plateaued.
Conclusions: This study indicates that knowledge of the types of proximal humeral fracture classification and accurate radiological diagnosis may help planning conservative treatment realistically and reduce the number of unnecessary physiotherapy treatments.


This study determined the effect that the irrigation dosage and cluster thinning showed over the antioxidant activities and total phenols in grapes, and phenolic profile and chromatic characteristics of cv. Tempranillo wines. The experiment was carried out over two consecutive seasons at an experimental vineyard in Extremadura (Spain). The plants were subjected to two post-véraison irrigation treatments, one at 100% (R100) and the other at 25% (R25) of crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Two crop loads (C and T) were additionally established for each irrigation treatment by cluster thinning at véraison. The winemaking process involved separate use of the grapes from each of the four resulting treatment groups (R100C, R100T, R25C and R25T) and followed a common protocol. In grapes, the effect of thinning enhanced when combined with water deficit, resulting in increases phenylpropanoids and flavonoids at the harvest, while leaving the polyphenol oxidase ́s activity unaffected. In wines, the higher post-véraison water stress of the R25 treatments resulted in higher values of dimeric flavonol and flavanol concentrations. The wine hue was affected by water status. The cluster thinning caused additional increases in the concentrations of monomeric flavanols and anthocyanins, as well as resulting in stronger wine colour intensity.


The Waldviertel ("Forest Quarter") is a region in northern Austria that is structurally weak. It represents an inner periphery and inner colony of Austrian and European capitalism. This article analyses the political economy of the Internet in the Waldviertel. The Waldviertel is confronted with high rates of exploitation within the context of an imperialist division of labour, with transfer of value, unequal exchange, low wages, the exodus of the textile industry, high unemployment, depopulation of the countryside, a dismantling of public infrastructure, and a declining population. This analysis makes clear that the reality of the Waldviertel as inner periphery of the capitalist centres shapes communication in the region. Access to computers, the Internet and broadband is worse in the Waldviertel than in other regions. Internet and mobile speeds tend to be slower, making the region less attractive to information workers. There are also signs of an alternative economy in the Waldviertel that call imperialism into question. In the area of the information economy there is potential for founding socialist co-operatives for hardware, software, and social media in the Waldviertel that call the capitalist information society into question and struggle for alternatives.


In 1975, Grice introduced the notion of implicature, arguing that it was more appropriate to account for a class of apparent lexical ambiguities through pragmatic processes than by multiplying lexical meanings (Modified Ockham's razor: Do not multiply meanings beyond necessity; Grice, 1975). For the past 20 years, experimental approaches have superseded purely theoretical ones, with mixed results. Paradigms using verification tasks on infelicitous sentences, with rate of pragmatic answers and reaction time as measures, have generally concluded in favor of the post-Gricean views (Bott and Noveck, 2004; Noveck and Reboul, 2008). However, some recent studies discuss additional factors affecting implicature processing and have introduced new paradigms which suggest a different conclusion (Katsos and Bishop, 2011; Breheny et al., 2013; Degen and Tanenhaus, 2015; Foppolo and Marelli, 2017; Bill et al.; Jasbi et al.; Sikos et al.). In addition, current research has shown that lexical scales may play a role in the process in keeping with neo-Gricean views. This Frontiers topic is a collection of 12 contributions in experimental pragmatics focusing on different aspects of child and adult processing of implicatures, factors affecting their rate, relevance of testing paradigms, scale diversity, cross-linguistic differences, and variation in triggers.


My Ballard is a very smart and popular local website in Seattle serving about 35,000. Its creators are confident they can make advertising income. Have a read about why they think it worked but I think the trick was to see themselves as facilitators rather than local journalists: "the appetite for neighborhood news has been tremendous. Newspapers are covering less, and TV stations only storm into a neighborhood when there's breaking news or a quirky story with regional interest. We receive so many email tips, comments and forum posts, we're able to provide a steady stream of original stories. We're also able to beat the traditional media on larger Ballard stories, thanks to our active readers. In effect, we don't "cover" the neighborhood, we "moderate" it. Users are our eyes and ears, and we provide a layer of journalism over the top, confirming stories before we post them."


ABSTRACT The thyroid hormone triiodothyronine (T3) activates thermogenesis by uncoupling electron transport from ATP synthesis in brown adipose tissue (BAT) mitochondria. Although T3 can induce thermogenesis by sympathetic innervation, little is known about its cell autonomous effects on BAT mitochondria. We thus examined effects of T3 on mitochondrial activity, autophagy, and metabolism in primary brown adipocytes and BAT and found that T3 increased fatty acid oxidation and mitochondrial respiration as well as autophagic flux, mitophagy, and mitochondrial biogenesis. Interestingly, there was no significant induction of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) despite high mitochondrial respiration and UCP1 induction by T3. However, when cells were treated with Atg5 siRNA to block autophagy, induction of mitochondrial respiration by T3 decreased, and was accompanied by ROS accumulation, demonstrating a critical role for autophagic mitochondrial turnover. We next generated an Atg5 conditional knockout mouse model (Atg5 cKO) by injecting Ucp1 promoter-driven Cre-expressing adenovirus into Atg5Flox/Flox mice to examine effects of BAT-specific autophagy on thermogenesis in vivo. Hyperthyroid Atg5 cKO mice exhibited lower body temperature than hyperthyroid or euthyroid control mice. Metabolomic analysis showed that T3 increased short and long chain acylcarnitines in BAT, consistent with increased β-oxidation. T3 also decreased amino acid levels, and in conjunction with SIRT1 activation, decreased MTOR activity to stimulate autophagy. In summary, T3 has direct effects on mitochondrial autophagy, activity, and turnover in BAT that are essential for thermogenesis. Stimulation of BAT activity by thyroid hormone or its analogs may represent a potential therapeutic strategy for obesity and metabolic diseases. Abbreviations: ACACA: acetyl-Coenzyme A carboxylase alpha; AMPK: AMP-activated protein kinase; Acsl1: acyl-CoA synthetase long-chain family member 1; ATG5: autophagy related 5; ATG7: autophagy related 7; ATP: adenosine triphosphate; BAT: brown adipose tissue; cKO: conditional knockout; COX4I1: cytochrome c oxidase subunit 4I1; Cpt1b: carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1b, muscle; CQ: chloroquine; DAPI: 4ʹ,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole; DIO2: deiodinase, iodothyronine, type 2; DMEM: Dulbecco's modified Eagle's medium; EIF4EBP1: eukaryotic translation initiation factor 4E binding protein 1; Fabp4: fatty acid binding protein 4, adipocyte; FBS: fetal bovine serum; FCCP: carbonyl cyanide-4-(trifluoromethoxy)phenylhydrazone; FGF: fibroblast growth factor; FOXO1: forkhead box O1; GAPDH: glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase; GFP: green fluorescent protein; Gpx1: glutathione peroxidase 1; Lipe: lipase, hormone sensitive; MAP1LC3B: microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3; mRNA: messenger RNA; MTORC1: mechanistic target of rapamycin kinase complex 1; NAD: nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide; Nrf1: nuclear respiratory factor 1; OCR: oxygen consumption rate; PBS: phosphate-buffered saline; PCR: polymerase chain reaction; PPARGC1A: peroxisome proliferative activated receptor, gamma, coactivator 1 alpha; Pnpla2: patatin-like phospholipase domain containing 2; Prdm16: PR domain containing 16; PRKA: protein kinase, AMP-activated; RPS6KB: ribosomal protein S6 kinase; RFP: red fluorescent protein; ROS: reactive oxygen species; SD: standard deviation; SEM: standard error of the mean; siRNA: small interfering RNA; SIRT1: sirtuin 1; Sod1: superoxide dismutase 1, soluble; Sod2: superoxide dismutase 2, mitochondrial; SQSTM1: sequestosome 1; T3: 3,5,3ʹ-triiodothyronine; TFEB: transcription factor EB; TOMM20: translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 20; UCP1: uncoupling protein 1 (mitochondrial, proton carrier); ULK1: unc-51 like kinase 1; VDAC1: voltage-dependent anion channel 1; WAT: white adipose tissue


We investigate the propagation of high energy laser beams through vaporizing metallic aerosols in the regime for which plasma generation becomes important. Plasma forms in the vapor layer surrounding the irradiated aerosols particles. Both plasma initiation and dynamics are studied. To describe plasma absorption, we include the effects of inverse bremsstrahlung and photoionization. An effective plasma absorption coefficient allows us to set up a coupled system of equations describing the system consisting of the beam and aerosol vapor.


Majority vote is a much studied topic; in particular, the well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) had provided validity to the belief that the majority opinion of a group is superior to those of individuals provided the individuals have reasonable competence. The mathematics of the theorem can be easily explained to teachers with a basic knowledge of statistics, and its interpretation has considerable social implications. Recently, the voting principle has been applied to the technological area of optical character recognition, with significant results. In this domain, computer programs are designed and implemented to read or identify characters and words. When the data is handwritten, the immense diversity in writing styles makes it extremely difficult for one program operating alone to achieve the high levels of accuracy that are required for practical applications. On the other hand, many different programs have been designed for this purpose. Consequently, researchers began to combine the results of different programs by majority vote, in order to obtain more accurate performance. This has created a new trend in pattern recognition, and in the process this author has also derived new results about majority vote. These theoretical findings are reflected in experimental results, and the process has provided an example of the interaction between basic mathematical ideas and their applications in advanced technology.


Optical networks and the related technologies, network management software and services have undergone remarkable developments, and such networks are now the ultra-high-speed backbone networks for communication. Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (WDM), the ability to support multiple communication pathways over the same fiber, enables efficient use of the enormous capability for data communication of optical networks.

This book gives a broad overview of techniques used in the design of WDM networks for efficient dissemination of information in computer networks. It starts with an overview of the hardware components, then provides a thorough review of WDM, wavelength-routed networks, algorithms for route and wavelength assignment, design of broadcast and select networks, logical topology design, and techniques to handle faults and algorithms for efficient use of optical networks. Each topic has been covered rigorously with emphasis on detailed explanations of the approaches used, starting from the fundamentals up to the state of the art. The optimization techniques covered in the book include graph-theoretic algorithms, mixed-integer linear programming and heuristics.

The book is intended for beginners as well as for specialists, and the reader should be able to design WDM networks and follow developments in the field. Each chapter contains a detailed, annotated bibliography. There are numerous exercises for the reader to test understanding of the subject, while readers unfamiliar with mathematical programming techniques and network flow optimization are offered short, easy-to-understand appendices at the end of the book.


The main objective of this study was to analyze the differences and similarities in morphometric characteristics among specimens of greater pipefish Syngnathus acus Linnaeus, 1758 that were collected and described based on data from bottom-trawl surveys and commercial trawl fisheries in the western Black Sea between September 2010 and October 2011. A total of 280 specimens were analyzed, of which 191 were female and 89 were male. Female individuals ranged from 15.6 to 33.8 cm in total length, whereas male individuals ranged from 16.6 to 39.2 cm. For the biometric analysis, 14 morphometric characteristics were analyzed. The females and males were found to differ in maximum body height, maximum body width, and head length (P < 0.05). The length-length equations for overall converted body lengths of fish were linear. The morphometric characteristics were strongly positively correlated except for head length / total length and snout width / head length (P < 0.05). The length-weight relationship of this species was described by the following equation: TW (g) = 0.0001 × TL 3.415 (cm). Relationships between the characteristics were defined separately for both sexes.


Biometric is the science of measuring human characteristics for the purpose of authentication or identification. Palmprint, one of the human physiological characteristics, is gaining attention among researchers as the mean of security. This is because palmprint is rich in unique features. The objectives of this thesis are to design an image processing methodology for palmprint image extraction, to design an efficient feature extraction method and an efficient classification method for palmprint biometric. The hand image is acquired using a digital camera. From the acquired hand image, the hand region are segmented from the background. The gaps between the fingers are located and marked as key pOints. Using the key pOints, the palmprint image rotational angle and the palmprint area are estimated. The palmprint image is rotated and extracted from the hand image. The palmprint image is enhanced using image adjustment and histogram equalization. The enhanced palmprint image is resized to a predefined size. Five types of palmprint features, namely, Geometric Line features, Discrete Cosine Energy features, Wavelet Energy features, Sequential Haar Energy features and SobelCode features, are extracted from the palmprint image. The palmprint features are represented using different feature representation method to form feature vectors. The feature vector is compared with the palmprint database using Hamming Distance similarity measurement, Euclidean Distance similarity measurement and Scaled Conjugated Gradient (SCG) based feedforward backpropagation neural network. Different types of feature extraction methods and classification methods have been tested to find the best discriminating palmprint feature. For comparison using distance similarity, the SobelCode features can achieve up to 97.44% accuracy, followed by the Discrete Cosine Energy features with 94.58%. The Sequential Haar Energy feature and Wavelet Energy feature can achieve 93.99% and 92.95% accuracy respectively. Using SCG-based feedforward backpropagation neural network, the accuracy of the Wavelet Energy Feature and Discrete Cosine Energy Feature can be slightly increased to 99%. Geometric Line Feature can achieve 89.41% accuracy.


We have estimated the performance of discrimination criterion based on the P/S spectral amplitude ratios obtained from six underground tests conducted by the DPRK since October 2006 and six aftershocks induced by the last two explosions. Two aftershocks were detected in routine processing at the IDC. Three aftershocks were detected by a prototype waveform cross correlation procedure with explosions as master events, and one aftershock was found with the aftershocks as master event. Two seismic arrays USRK and KSRS of the IMS and two non-IMS 3-C stations SEHB (South Korea) and MDJ (China) were used. With increasing frequency, all stations demonstrate approximately the same level of deviation between the Pg/Lg spectral amplitude ratios belonging to the DPRK explosions and their aftershocks. For a single station, simple statistical estimates show that the probability of any of six aftershocks not to be a sample from the explosion population is larger than 99.996% at the KSRS and even larger at USRK. The probability of any of the DPRK explosion to be a representative of the aftershock population is extremely small as defined by the distance of 20 and more standard deviations to the mean explosion Pg/Lg value. For network discrimination, we use the Mahalanobis distance combining the Pg/Lg estimates at three stations: USRK, KSRS and MDJ. At frequencies above 4 Hz, the (squared) Mahalanobis distance, D2, between the populations of explosions and aftershocks is larger than 100. In the frequency band between 6 and 12 Hz at USRK, the aftershocks distance from the average explosion D2>21,000. Statistically, the probability to confuse explosions and aftershocks is negligible. These discrimination results are related only to the aftershocks of the DPRK tests and cannot be directly extrapolated to the population of tectonic earthquakes in the same area.


The probability of nuclear war is a major factor in many important policy questions, but it has gotten little scholarly attention. This paper presents a model for calculating the total probability of nuclear war. The model is based on 14 interrelated scenarios for how nuclear war can break out, covering perhaps the entire range of nuclear war scenarios. Scenarios vary based on factors including whether a state intends to make a first strike attack, whether the nuclear attack is preceded by a conventional war or a non-war crisis, whether escalation is intentional or inadvertent, the presence of false alarms of various types, and the presence of non-war nuclear detonations such as nuclear terrorism. As a first step towards quantifying the probability of nuclear war using the model, the paper also includes a dataset of historical incidents that might have threatened to turn into nuclear war. 60 historical incidents are included, making it perhaps the largest such dataset currently available. The paper also includes background information about probabilistic analysis and modeling to help readers understand how to think about the probability of nuclear war, including new theory for the decision to initiate nuclear war.


This 5th Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty Research Brief reviews the findings of four recently commissioned papers, drawing out their implications for understanding, explaining and developing policy against childhood, life-course and intergenerationally transmitted poverty. It highlights recent work on: conflict and IGT in Northern Uganda;•exiting chronic poverty in Kenya; Q2 research on chronic poverty and development policy in Tanzania; IGT and inheritance: policy and practice.


In a time of growing threats and advancing circumstances, receiving and keeping up a strong cybersecurity profile in the enterprises are crucial. Important data and resources must be protected. Nowadays, cybersecurity became a predominant issue facing most organizations. It is recognized by organizations as an enterprise-wide issue requiring protection and detection from possible and malicious attacks to protect enterprise information assets. Hence, enterprises are obligated to use multiple tools for covering most of the cybersecurity aspects through different operations and for supporting different levels of users. Information systems auditing is becoming more difficult due to the rapidly developing technological threats. Hence, having these audits and reviews performed by independent functions increase the likelihood of detecting control weaknesses and provides further checks. These control issues are typically not due to the failure of the technology. However, they are mostly the result of individuals not executing the process, or using a process that is poorly defended. The main purpose of this research is to make a comparative study of the capabilities of most of the available automated cybersecurity auditing tools for frontend cloud computing. The results of this comparative study lead to knowing how to secure the enterprise's assets by using automated tools and techniques. Also, it uses clear steps to gather the information to provide the evidence required in the final report of IS auditing.


When individuals in the United States face civil justice issues, they are not entitled to legal counsel and therefore must secure paid counsel, proceed pro se or qualify for free legal assistance. As a result of the economic downturn, the number of Americans who are unable to afford legal counsel is now at an all-time high. In response to this ever-widening justice gap, the public interest community has launched multiple initiatives to supplement the underfunded legal aid system. Though valiant, this article argues that this approach has unfortunately created a complex, fragmented and overlapping delivery system for legal aid. This article first provides an understanding of the current civil legal landscape, especially as it impacts low-income and modest-means Americans. This article then examines the many initiatives developed as a means of closing the justice gap and whether such initiatives have helped or harmed underserved populations. Finally, this article proposes three specific reforms – the development of a comprehensive triage mechanism, the infusion of business process improvement within legal aid organizations and the creation of legal information exchange organizations – all of which, if implemented, will make great strides toward streamlining the delivery system for civil legal aid.


State-building is currently considered to be an indispensable process in overcoming state fragility: a condition characterized by frequent armed conflicts as well as chronic poverty. In this process, both the capacity and the legitimacy of the state are supposed to be enhanced; such balanced development of capacity and legitimacy has also been demanded in security sector reform (SSR), which is regarded as being a crucial part of post-conflict state-building. To enhance legitimacy, the importance of democratic governance is stressed in both state-building and SSR in post-conflict countries. In reality, however, the balanced enhancement of capacity and legitimacy has rarely been realized. In particular, legitimacy enhancement tends to stagnate in countries in which one of multiple warring parties takes a strong grip on state power. This paper tries to understand why such unbalanced development of state-building and SSR has been observed in post-conflict countries, through a case study of Rwanda. Analyses of two policy initiatives in the security sector – Gacaca transitional justice and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) – indicate that although these programs achieved goals set by the government, their contribution to the normative objectives promoted by the international community was quite debatable. It can be understood that this is because the country has subordinated SSR to its state-building process. After the military victory of the former rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the ruling elite prioritized the establishment of political stability over the introduction of international norms such as democratic governance and the rule of law. SSR was implemented only to the extent that it contributed to, and did not threaten, Rwanda's RPF-led state-building.


The drought regarding a climate forecast Albanian departments have marked the past three months were the result of winter rainfall that was insufficient for replenishing water tables this year and before . We often say that water shortages are not a threat for our country due to plenty water sources . It's possible to think this when we compare our situation to that in other countries. Still , in some regions the availability of water resources is becoming an urgent problem, even more so if we link this to the different scenarios tied to climate change. Each basin has specificities, but some general evolutions should be planned for ,increase in water demand due to the rise in temperatures , causing an increase in the price of water and usage conflicts , change in the amount of the available water resources , changes in the flow of waterways and the aquifer recharge ,decrease in water quality ( meaning a concentration of pollutants and a weakening in self-purification capacities) rise in nitrates in waterways and in aquifers may occur, as well as increased salinity levels ,increase in the vulnerability of certain ecosystems due to the rise in the risk of erosion, flooding and salting. This paper aims to introduce the benefits and challenges of applying at homes or communal buildings of an Eco-innovation , through developing a new inside distribution of wastewater so that it concludes into sustainable development of inside communal water distribution , therefore recycling inside the house . The main objective of the study is to make evident the cost- efficiency importance of these re-distribution systems , and how they affect improvement in water needs sector , highlighting the deficiencies that cause their not fully-efficient re-use of grey inside water and the positive impact on the potable water saving .


The legume Acacia mearnsii invades South Africa's fynbos riparian zones and may alter the nitrogen (N) dynamics and supply in these areas that typically support few native N fixers. Nitrogen uptake by A. mearnsii may also be influenced by water availability, potentially affecting riparian-specific performance and impact estimations. We expected to find functional differences between the invasive legume and the two co-occurring but non-leguminous native species Brabejum stellatifolium and Metrosideros angustifolia. We also wanted to examine whether in-situ water availability affected N source or uptake inthe invasive species. We found A. mearnsii was indeed functioning differently from non-N-fixing native species, and had considerably higher foliar %N. Interestingly, 15N abundance and uptake were associated with site hydrology, meaning water availability should be scrutinised when assuming N-fixing in A. mearnsii using δ15N. Nonetheless, higher water availability to A. mearnsii in fynbos riparian ecosystems did increase foliar N uptake. This has implications for prioritizing clearing of sites with increased nutrient deposition, such as dense stands in relatively moist riparian zones.


A case of exceptional assignment of prosody to loanwords is considered. In SerboCroatian,
where in loanwords the original position of stress is generally preserved in some
way, a small class of Latinate adjectives (e.g., element ' arna ¯ 'elementary' and person ' alna ¯ 'personal')
become toneless and they display the postcyclic initial falling accent. An account of
these data is proposed which combines a new approach to postcyclic prosody, which is shown
to go hand in hand with syntactically opaque structures, and a new model of loanword integration,
which views the loanword trajectory as lexicalisation. As a result, an enriched theory of
both domains and their interaction arises to account for the data and shed some additional
light on the position of loanwords in the architecture of the grammar/lexicon.


Zines and blogs written by the young women in this study are an important form of inquiry that, if considered by educators, may push us to critically question discourses of young womanhood, questions of subjectivity, and the way we engage with texts. I use readings of Antigone to shape a reading of this discourse. I argue following Judith Butler (2000), that her act speaks to the loss of her particular brother, as well as the ungrievable losses resultant from her tragic family life. Her story invites us to question boundaries of public and private, and suggests a space between them that was inaccessible to Antigone. Similarly, young women who publicly articulate their stories in zines and blogs access a hybrid space, between public and private, where they conduct important subjectivity work. Through hermeneutic readings of these texts, I explore the ways in which their authors articulate the importance of hybrid spaces between public and private as where they can do this work. Like Antigone, whose action challenges binaries, young women who posit their personal stories in public reflect on the past in a way that suggests melancholia, or an unwillingness to part with the past completely as they moves toward the future. I conclude by arguing that when academics and educators approach these texts as hermeneutic readers, they engage in a critical process of understanding with these young women that invites consideration of new feminism articulated in these works.


This stocky, robust, crow-sized seabird is widely distributed through boreal and low-arctic
Atlantic waters; the bulk of the world population breeds in Iceland. From there, colonies
stretch east through northern Europe and northwestern Russia. In the northwest Atlantic,
Razorbills breed mainly in small colonies, few supporting more than 1,000 breeding pairs,
scattered from northwestern Greenland and Hudson Strait, south through the Atlantic
provinces of Canada to Maine. The center of the North American breeding distribution is in
low-arctic waters of southern Labrador and the lower North Shore of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. With only about 300 pairs nesting in Maine, the Razorbill is among the least
numerous of all breeding seabirds in US waters. Most Razorbills from North American
colonies overwinter south of their breeding range in ice-free, coastal waters, with largest
numbers frequenting shoal areas in the outer Bay of Fundy and Gulf of Maine. The species
occurs regularly in winter south to Long Island, NY, and New Jersey, and rarely to Virginia,
with casual records to Florida.
Given the Razorbill's remote distribution and relatively small numbers (about 38,000
breeding pairs) in North America, it is not surprising that its biology is poorly known at most
breeding sites. Individuals breed on rocky islands and steep, mainland cliffs. Most use nest
sites that are partly or wholly enclosed, often in crevices among boulders.
The life-history strategy of this species is typical of marine birds: socially monogamous, with
strong mate and nest-site fidelity; an approximately 90% annual adult-survival rate, with
deferred breeding until 4 or 5 years of age; and a single-egg clutch. Timing of breeding
varies depending on oceanographic conditions; egg-laying begins 2–6 weeks earlier in
boreal than in low-arctic waters. Incubation averages 35 days, and the male parent
accompanies the chick to sea after about 18–20 days at the nest site. At nest departure, the
chick weighs only 25–30% of adult mass and has not yet begun to grow the large feathers
of the wings and tail. This unusual "intermediate" developmental strategy is otherwise
employed only by Common (Uria aalge) and Thick-billed murres (U. lomvia), the Razorbill's
closest extant relatives. While ecologically similar, Razorbills and murres differ in a number
of important respects, such as their nesting habits, and these differences provide fertile
ground for comparative studies.
Wing-propelled divers that feed mainly on schooling fish, Razorbills occasionally descend to
ocean depths greater than 100 meters. In North America, important prey species include
capelin (Mallotus villosus), herring (Clupea harengus), and sandlance (Ammodytes spp.),
varying with location and season. Crustaceans and polychaetes are also important in adult
diets, the former perhaps especially in winter. Nestlings receive about 2–4 feedings daily,
each consisting of 1–8 fish, which the adult birds carry to the nest site held crosswise in the
bill. Razorbills are strong and rapid fliers, yet remarkably agile in flight compared to other
large Alcidae. Foxes, gulls, and ravens are important predators of Razorbill eggs and
chicks.
Heavily persecuted by humans for eggs, meat, and feathers, Razorbill populations were
greatly reduced, even locally extirpated, across much of their northwest Atlantic breeding
range by early in the twentieth century. Although largely protected since 1917 in the
northwest Atlantic, the species was slow to recover as direct harvesting and incidental
killing continued in key regions. With stricter enforcement of regulations, however, and
improved education programs, Razorbill populations have increased dramatically in North
America over the last 20 years—an encouraging sign, although the long-term welfare of the
species remains a concern in the face of grave, human threats to northwest-Atlantic
ecosystems.


This paper analyses the impact of population growth on CO2 emissions in European Union countries. Traditionally, researchers have assumed a unitary elasticity of emissions with respect to population growth. In this study population is treated as a predictor in the model, instead of being included as part of the dependent variable (per capita emissions), thus relaxing the above-mentioned assumption of unitary elasticity. We also contribute to the existing literature by taking into account the presence of heterogeneity in the sample and considering a dynamic specification. The sample covers the period 1975–1999 for the current European Union members. Our results show that the impact of population growth on emissions is more than proportional for recent accession countries whereas for old EU members, the elasticity is lower than unity and non significant when the properties of the time series and the dynamics are correctly specified. The different impact of population change on CO2 emissions for the current EU members should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies within the EU.


A growing volume of crucial information for protecting public health and safety is controlled by private-sector entities. The data is private in two senses - both proprietary and secluded from scrutiny. Controversies over corporate secrecy, such as sealed settlements that hide deaths due to product defects or nondisclosure of potentially hazardous substances, illustrate how corporate privacy and public safety can conflict. Courts are conflicted about when to defer to companies' claims of the right to keep information private - even when important public interests are implicated by the data that companies refuse to disclose. This article proposes allowing what it terms "bounded access" to share such private data important to public health and safety with safeguards for the private interests at stake. In contrast to mandated public disclosure regimes, bounded access would provide information access to trained professionals capable of effectively using data to detect health and safety harms while honoring data protections. The paradigmatic audience for bounded-access private data disclosures is researchers overseen by institutional review boards and trained in how to minimize damage to data owners. Information aggregation and de-identification can help protect the anonymity of the private entities and their product lines, thereby ameliorating the concerns of private entities regarding prematurely rousing consumer panic, injuring brand reputation, or destroying trade secrets. Such bounded access would address the limitations of general public disclosure, such as conflict with the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause or piling more disclosure on the information-overloaded consumer. Information would be rich in technical details to facilitate effective expert analyses rather than pared down for general public consumption. The proposed approach thus balances private-sector interests with the public interest in protecting population health and safety.


Objective: This paper describes three different institutional experiences in developing research data management programs and services, challenges/opportunities, and lessons learned. Overview: This paper is based on the Librarian Panel Discussion during the 4th Annual University of Massachusetts and New England Region eScience Symposium. Librarians representing large public and private research universities presented an overview of service models developed at their respective organizations to bring support for data management and eScience to their communities. The approaches described include two library-based, integrated service models and one collaboratively-staffed, center-based service model. Results: Three institutions describe their experiences in creating the organizational capacity for research data management support services. Although each institutional approach is unique, common challenges include garnering administrative support, managing the integration of services with new or existing staff structures, and continuing to meet researchers needs as they evolve.


This paper reports a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) study on influence of flow field on to gas residence time in boiler furnace. Specifically, investigated was secondary air nozzle direction influence on level of elimination of dead and recirculation zones. As residence time is a ratio between effective furnace volume and gas flow rate from the solid bed, increase of the former through elimination of dead zones would lead to increase of the residence time, and it as a consequence would have an increase of combustion efficiency. Small-scale biomass boilers are specific in a way that their design has not been studied as extensively as boilers on fossil fuels or large scale power boilers. And straw itself has properties such as high volatile content that differs it significantly from other solid fossil fuels. Gas residence time distribution in boiler furnace is calculated by Lagrangian approach, using massless particle tracks calculated in StarCCM+ CFD software. Cold flow model was used for optimization sake, which could be upgraded to hot flow with no difficulties other from computing power demand. Any fuel type can be analyzed in this way when appropriate solid fuel bed models are applied which would generate boundary conditions for gas phase model. Results show increase of 10 percent of the average gas residence time.


This graduate thesis will explore the term "confessional" and its application to literature. The term "confessional" varies; confessional writing can take different forms in different genres. In this thesis, works by contemporary authors of personal lyric poetry, memoir, and fiction are discussed and an investigation of confessional writing within their work is undertaken. While not all authors use a direct confessional voice, the overall effect of their writing creates an intimate space between the writer and reader. A sense of self-reflection on the part of the author gives a confessional feel to his or her work. While the lines of literary conventions separate genres, confessional writing tends to blur those lines by bringing the message of the work to the forefront. A piece of literature said to be of a particular genre is challenged when one discovers a confessional voice, as it weaves itself among genres and changes the face of the genre itself. While the confessional voice may be less pronounced in fiction, when we think we hear it speaking, albeit unconsciously on the part of the writer, the same effect takes place: writer and reader become engaged in a communicative relationship that reveals secrets of the heart. In exploring personal lyric poetry and memoir of Gregory Orr, personal lyric poetry of Linda Gregerson and Frank Bidart, short stories and essays by Susan Sontag, and finally, the short stories, essays, and letters of Flannery O'Connor, confessional writing proves to be ambiguous in meaning and difficult to define; nevertheless, each author uniquely incorporates varying degrees of confessionalism to achieve a sense of intimacy that is not a result of the genre they are working in, but in how they say what they do within the genre they have chosen to write in.


"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights.

Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity.

With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.


Purpose
Podcasts have become a main content delivery platform in the last decade. Since not enough studies examined the wider population adoption patterns of podcasts in general and outside the USA in particular, the purpose of this paper is to examine the socio-demographics of podcast listeners and the uses and gratifications fulfilled by listening to podcasts using Israel's most popular podcast as our case study.

Design/methodology/approach
The authors uploaded a survey on the podcast platforms aiming to identify their socio-demographic profiles of listeners (n=960) and where they listen to the podcast. Next, the authors conducted follow-up interviews with 100 respondents to understand their main uses and gratifications fulfilled while listening to the podcast.

Findings
The findings of this survey indicate podcast listeners in Israel as mostly male, with self-reported high income, under the age of 45, highly educated and nearly half work in the high-tech sector. Follow-up interviews identified that the main uses and gratifications from listening to podcasts were cognitive – acquiring new knowledge, social – a desire to share new data with friends, entertainment, hobby and a way to assist falling asleep.

Research limitations/implications
The findings of this study indicate that access to podcasts in Israel is utilized mostly by members of already advantaged and technology-oriented groups, thus potentially widening existing societal gaps.

Originality/value
The study examines the podcast adoption in a country whose podcast adoption patterns were not yet explored, thus contributes toward mapping of the global usage of podcasts. It portrays podcasts in Israel as a platform used mostly by members of privileged and technology-oriented groups, which is similar to findings regarding the demographics of podcast listeners in the USA. Some of the uses and gratifications are similar to that in the USA while others, such as the desire to share knowledge and efficient time management, are unique and reflect the impact of the local culture and conditions on podcast adoption.


Gold winner in 2014 IBPA Ben Franklin Awards! "...the images are second-to-none in their ability to present the subject material...The authors have made this atlas an efficient and informative read. It is this pairing of operative photographs with high-quality illustrations that raises this text to a level superior to that of its competitors." -- American Journal of Neuroradiology A highly-anticipated addition to Thieme's classic color atlas collection, Color Atlas of Cerebral Revascularization focuses on cerebral bypass techniques pioneered by leading surgeons at the world-renowned Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Each procedure is presented with intraoperative photographs and exquisite anatomical illustrations to help surgeons master the complex microsurgical anatomy and subtle surgical technique used in managing the potential onset and condition of stroke and other causes of cerebral ischemia. Key Features: * Side-by-side photo and illustration format aids in interpretation of intricate surgical procedures * More than 1300 figures elucidate clinical cases from the Barrow Neurological Institute and other centers of neurosurgical excellence* A DVD, featuring more than 30 related surgical cases and narrated by the authors, is included with the book* Cases illustrate how to successfully achieve revascularization for conditions such as moyamoya disease, recurrent aneurysms after endovascular treatment, giant aneurysms, vertebral artery insufficiency, and severe stenosis* The vascular anatomy related to each bypass technique is illustrated and described in the sections showcasing the clinical cases treated by the technique This comprehensive atlas is an ideal reference for practicing neurosurgeons, neurosurgical residents, and interventional neuroradiologists, and it will be a relevant volume in their medical library for years to come.


Spearmints, a system of hardware components that can be easily interfaced to the nodes of an instrumented distributed system for monitoring or evaluation using event-triggered measurements, is described. Each machine of the target system must have one sensor that collects relevant events and marks them with global time stamps. The sensors can be attached to a common measurement system that samples the marked events on- or offline, orders them chronologically, and analyzes the resulting sequence. The design of Spearmints is based on providing a simple and universal tool that causes little interference and furnishes highly accurate measurements in distributed systems. As Spearmints only requires standard interfaces with its integration into an object system and its connection to a measurement system, it permits the use of a wide range of measurement systems for the evaluation of a variety of distributed systems.<<ETX>>


First published in 1990 as "A Community Researcher's Guide to Rural Data" this completely revised edition explains how to find and obtain the most current information on rural America both in published form and electronically.The authors identify a wealth of data sources and illustrate how those data can be used to analyze social and economic change. Chapters describe data on local population and community resources, economics, and government. Appendices include details about federal statistics programs along with addresses and phone numbers for state and federal offices that house or collect data."Guide to Rural Data" is an essential resource for anyone concerned with evaluating economic and demographic change in rural America.


In a Wizard-of-Oz experiment we investigate to what degree automatic activity recognition could support the use of prioritized lists for nursing documentation on hand held mobile devices. The study involved 15 nurses, 60 patients records and over 250 documented processes at a geriatric care ward. Based on time effort, interaction complexity, error rate and subjective system perception our wizard of oz study shows that activity recognition is a key factor in the usability and acceptance of the system. We also study the impact of varying simulated activity recognition errors and demonstrate that error rates of up to 25% do not aversely affect the documentation process.


The evolution of Sino-Soviet/Russian relations from an antagonistic militarized stand-off in the early 1980s to a nascent partnership today is an important development in a changing Northeast Asian security environment. In a joint statement emerging from the April 1996 summit between Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin, the Chinese and the Russians announced that they were engaged in building a "strategic partnership." Some eyebrows rose in response, and a good deal of skepticism remained among Russia followers who recalled the inflated rhetoric of 1992 about the supposed "US-Russian strategic partnership." A joint Sino-Russian joint statement from April 1997 began to spell out what the strategic partnership involved as it included an anti-hegemony clause and expressed opposition to a lingering "Cold War mentality" and efforts to enlarge and strengthen military blocs. Seemingly, like the US-Russian declaratory strategic partnership of five years ago, the emerging Sino-Russian strategic partnership carries more near-term political than security weight. This brief will explore the national interests driving Russia and China to closer ties, the dynamics of the Sino-Russian relationship and the security policies of the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia, and how we should begin thinking of a Eurasian security community.


Stole, Inger L. Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 290 pp. $25. In Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and Corporate Public Relations in the 1930s, Inger Stole begins from the standpoint of a contemporary United States in which few citizens question commercialization of the public sphere; omnipresence of advertising messages; or political dominance by U.S. business institutions. She looks back to a time in the late 1920s through the 1930s when a second-wave consumer movement challenged the condescension, puffery, and misrepresentation then endemic to print and radio advertising. Before addressing the consumer critique of advertising and the advertising industry's successful counterattack, which is the focus of Advertising on Trial, Stole begins by describing the transformation of the U.S. economy from local production and distribution by many manufacturers to national mass production and distribution by a few oligopolistic industries following the Civil War, an economy that matured after a decade of mergers around 1900. This shift fueled the first-wave consumer movement of the Progressive Era, with its focus on regulating the quality of foods and drugs manufactured in distant cities. That movement led to the passage of the federal Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; but Stole, an assistant professor at Illinois' Institute of Communications Research, argues these activists largely ignored the emerging field of advertising. In the 1920s, following the success of propagandistic advertising during World War I, advertising became the chief means by which manufacturers communicated with consumers. As the depression began, the second-wave consumer movement criticized advertising as wasteful and deceptive. The leading consumer group seeking advertising regulation was Consumers' Research, Inc., the main focus of the book. Founded in 1929 by Stuart Chase and Frederick Schlink, who co-authored the bestseiling YourMoney's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollars in 1927, Consumers' Research soon became a testing laboratory for consumer products with results distributed via the Consumers' Research Bulletin. Chase left Consumers' Research in 1932 to continue his writing career, and Schlink, an engineer, became director and was joined by Arthur Kallet, another engineer from the American Standards Association. Stole notes that the advertising critique was gaining popularity at the same time when companies were cutting advertising budgets as the economy collapsed. Of equal concern, the new Roosevelt administration-especially Assistant secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell-clearly sympathized with consumer interests. The advertising industry realized it must defend itself against the growing consumer movement and the introduction of the Tugwell bill (S1944) in 1933. Its passage would treat false and ambiguous advertising claims for foods, drugs, and cosmetics as misbranded and subject the advertised products to confiscation by the Department of Agriculture. Although the advertising trade press earlier attacked Consumers' Research for misleading consumers with unscientific claims and scare tactics, and advertisers pressed magazines to refuse Consumer Research advertisements, the introduction of the Tugwell bill captured the industry's full attention. …


This dissertation explores the impact of power and politics in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) institutionalisation. We argue that this process can be understood in power and politics terms because the infrastructure skews the control of organisational action in favour of dominant individuals and groups. Indeed, as our case studies show, shifting power balances is not only a desired outcome of PKI deployment, power drives institutionalisation. Therefore, despite the rational goals of improving security and reducing the total cost of ownership for IT, the PKIs in our field organisations have actually been catalysts for power and politics. Although current research focuses on external technical interoperation, we believe emphasis should be on the interaction between the at once restrictive and flexible PKI technical features, organisational structures, goals of sponsors and potential user resistance. We use the Circuits of Power (CoP) framework to explain how a PKI conditions and is conditioned by power and politics. Drawing on the concepts of infrastructure and institution, we submit that PKIs are politically explosive in pluralistic, distributed global organisations because by limiting freedom of action in favour of stability and security, they set a stage for disaffection. The result of antipathy towards the infrastructure would not be a major concern if public key cryptography, which underpins PKI, had a centralised mechanism for enforcing the user discipline it relies on to work properly. However, since this discipline is not automatic, a PKI bereft of support from existing power arrangements faces considerable institutionalisation challenges. We assess these ideas in two case studies in London and Switzerland. In London, we explain how an oil company used its institutional structures to implement PKI as part of a desktop standard covering 105,000 employees. In Zurich and London, we give a power analysis of attempts by a global financial services firm to roll out PKI to over 70,000 users. Our dissertation makes an important contribution by showing that where PKI supporters engage in a shrewdly orchestrated campaign to knit the infrastructure with the existing institutional order, it becomes an accepted part of organisational life without much ceremony. In sum, we both fill gaps in information security literature and extend knowledge on the efficacy of the Circuits of Power framework in conducting IS institutionalisation studies.


Research on organizational improvisation has gained much momentum in information systems development literature. Although recent studies have started to explore how to conduct improvisation effectively and generated rich findings on the antecedents, the process of effective improvisation remains unknown and the lack of knowledge in this area may account for the difficulties faced by many IS practitioners in engaging in effective improvisation. Based on a case study on Tencent's software product development, we derive a four-phase process model of effective improvisation, which is a continuous iteration between improvisational search and build. The former consists of simultaneous grounded observation and situated reflection. The latter consists of simultaneous grounded design and situated execution. The findings contribute to both the IS and improvisation literature, and transform into practical implications for IS managers, who are increasing relying on real-time planning and spontaneous execution.


The assignment is an investigation about using a Functional Hardware Descriptive Language
(FHDL) called "CλaSH" (CAES Language for Synchronous Hardware), to implement a digital
Class – D amplifier controller module in a functional language. CλaSH is an FHDL that borrows its
syntax and semantics from Haskell, enabling the use of many of Haskell's features such as
polymorphism and recursive programming. The course of this assignment aims to show how
Haskell can be used to describe complex digital circuits by modeling the Class – D amplifier
controller, eventually converting the model into CλaSH code with minimal transformations to the
base model. Also, the Haskell model and the CλaSH implementaion simulation results are
evaluated against a Simulink model acting as reference, which in this assignment is the obtained
noise shaping responses of the three models that are typical for a Class - D controller.


The article discusses the meaning of fairness in mediation. Mediation academics and the drafters of codes of conduct for mediators frequently employ fairness terminology but tend not to define it. As a result fairness discourse in mediation literature is incoherent, inconsistent, and confusing. Moreover, in the absence of a defined meaning of fairness it is difficult to evaluate the strength of fairness-based arguments which commentators make. No author has yet offered a coherent theory of fairness in mediation.The article suggests a new and innovative approach for understanding mediation fairness. Drawing on literature from philosophy, morality, professional ethics, jurisprudence, and mediation the article identifies perspectives of fairness which clarify the meaning of fairness in mediation, provide tools for a better understanding of what codes of conduct and mediation literature on fairness mean when they make assertions of unfairness, and make it possible to evaluate the force of these assertions.


Sea level rise will happen no matter what we do. Even if we stopped all carbon dioxide emissions today, the seas would rise one meter by 2050 and three meters by 2100. Thisnot drought, species extinction, or excessive heat waveswill be the most catastrophic effect of global warming. And it wont simply redraw our coastlinesagriculture, electrical and fiber optic systems, and shipping will be changed forever. As icebound regions melt, new sources of oil, gas, minerals, and arable land will be revealed, as will fierce geopolitical battles over who owns the rights to them. In The Flooded Earth, species extinction expert Peter Ward describes in intricate detail what our world will look like in 2050, 2100, 2300, and beyonda blueprint for a foreseeable future. Ward also explains what politicians and policymakers around the world should be doing now to head off the worst consequences of an inevitable transformation.


Abstract Securing green infrastructure is crucial to maintaining the quality of life in cities therefore it is necessary to create new public green spaces responding to the needs of city dwellers. This paper provides a qualitative evaluation of the results of teaching the process of public participation to landscape architecture students from Politechnika Krakowska including such activities both preceding and during their work on the design of public parks. In this paper the author describes the rationale behind introducing participative planning into academic education and its theoretical background, as well as comparing the local perspective with examples of successful participative projects in the broader European context and the context of international trends in landscape architecture and urban planning in general. Both the teaching methodology and participation tools used are presented, referring to the methods already in use in practice and highlighting the fact that the teaching goes far beyond the legal minimum foreseen in Polish legislation. Finally, based on a summary of their experiences and case studies, particular fields of impact observed in the practical implementation of their projects are identified. Taking all this into consideration, it may be stated that from the moment when landscape architecture graduates started working for the public authorities in Kraków and making use of their knowledge and skills in public participation, the quality of public involvement has risen and the number of parks realised via this process is growing.


In the hierarchy of cellular targets damaged by ionizing radiation (IR), classical models of radiation toxicity place DNA at the top. Yet, many prokaryotes are killed by doses of IR that cause little DNA damage. Here we have probed the nature of Mn-facilitated IR resistance in Deinococcus radiodurans, which together with other extremely IR-resistant bacteria have high intracellular Mn/Fe concentration ratios compared to IR-sensitive bacteria. For in vitro and in vivo irradiation, we demonstrate a mechanistic link between Mn(II) ions and protection of proteins from oxidative modifications that introduce carbonyl groups. Conditions that inhibited Mn accumulation or Mn redox cycling rendered D. radiodurans radiation sensitive and highly susceptible to protein oxidation. X-ray fluorescence microprobe analysis showed that Mn is globally distributed in D. radiodurans, but Fe is sequestered in a region between dividing cells. For a group of phylogenetically diverse IR-resistant and IR-sensitive wild-type bacteria, our findings support the idea that the degree of resistance is determined by the level of oxidative protein damage caused during irradiation. We present the case that protein, rather than DNA, is the principal target of the biological action of IR in sensitive bacteria, and extreme resistance in Mn-accumulating bacteria is based on protein protection.


During the first 24 h of post-embryonic development in Xenopus laevis, a rapid change in the neural activity underlying swimming occurs in which the duration of ventral root discharge on each cycle increases from a single compound impulse to discrete bursts of activity. Moreover, this change in motor output progresses rostrocaudally, suggesting that it could result from the influence of a descending neural pathway upon the spinal rhythm-generating circuitry during early post-embryonic development. To begin to examine whether serotonergic neurons of brainstem raphe nuclei might have a role in this swimming development, we have studied the effects of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5HT) on fictive swimming in embryonic and larval animals. As previously demonstrated for other vertebrate locomotor rhythms, we find that bath-applied 5HT enhances the duration of motor activity on each cycle of larval fictive swimming. In addition, our results show that the sensitivity of the swimming rhythm to exogenous 5HT follows a strict rostrocaudal gradient. In young embryos (stages 32–36) 5HT does not affect the duration of ventral root impulses per cycle; by the time of hatching (stage 37/38), rostral but not caudal discharge is enhanced, and by stage 42 (24 h post-hatching) 5HT can increase motor burst durations along most of the length of the animal. These reversible changes induced by bath-applied 5HT closely resemble the normal rostrocaudal development of burst discharge during swimming in animals some 12 h older. As these developmental effects of 5HT are mimicked by bath application of its metabolic precursor, 5-hydroxytryptophan (5HTP), our results suggest that a functional endogenous 5HT system, presumably located in the brainstem raphe nuclei, develops rostrocaudally, is preceded by the development of 5HT receptors on target neurons of the spinal rhythm-generating circuit, and may have an important role in the ontogeny and subsequent modulation of Xenopus swimming motor output.


Climate change is one of the major challenges of the 21 st century. The energy sector represents the main contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, due to its reliance on fossil fuels. Renewable energies arise as current solutions. Nevertheless, they are still facing two central difficulties: the lack of large-scale energy storage technologies to deal with their intermittent nature (e.g. wind and solar power), and the absence of energetically dense fuel alternatives for the transportation sector. Additionally, biogas technologies are indispensable for achieving sustainable societies. They result in energy and nutrients recovery from waste, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and other kinds of pollutions. These technologies are required in circular economies, characterised by the non-production of disposable wastes. However, biogas needs to be upgraded to optimise its properties as energy carrier. Indeed, biogas upgrading results in a broader use for the gas, besides combined heat and power generation; enabling its efficient transport, large-scale storage, and use as vehicle fuel. This project shows how electricity and gas systems can be integrated through an innovative Power-toGas technology which is able to partially solve these problems. The technology is based on the synergy of coupling biogas plants to hydrogen generation systems powered by off-peak electricity surpluses from intermittent renewable energies (e.g. solar and wind power), and subsequent biological methanation of the CO 2 from the biogas and the produced H 2 in an ex-situ anaerobic reactor. At first, this thesis presents a detailed definition of the overall innovative system and its different components. Subsequently, focus is put on the search for the most suitable biological methanation technology for industrial purposes. Through experimental work, this thesis examines and compares four different anaerobic reactor configurations, aiming to determine the most effective technology among the ones studied. Expressly, the experiment investigated different diffusion techniques for injection of the gases in the liquid media, together with diverse pore-sizes for the mentioned diffusers. The leading reactor configuration transformed 98.4% of the injected H 2 at the highest loading rate tested (3.6 L H2 /L R .d), upgrading biogas from a CH 4 concentration of 60% to 96% in volume. The performance of the different setups is examined, and origins for the biological efficiency variations are elucidated, in order to help with the selection of subsequent experimental prototypes. Given its early stage of development, this biomethanation unit process forms the pivotal technology of the overall system. As soon as this …


Neural adaptation enables sensory information to be represented optimally in the brain despite large fluctuations over time in the statistics of the environment. Auditory contrast gain control represents an important example, which is thought to arise primarily from cortical processing. We find, however, that neurons in both the auditory thalamus and midbrain of mice show robust contrast gain control, and that this is implemented independently of cortical activity. Although neurons at each level exhibit contrast gain control to similar degrees, adaptation time constants become longer at later stages of the processing hierarchy, resulting in progressively more stable representations. We also show that auditory discrimination thresholds in human listeners compensate for changes in contrast, and that the strength of this perceptual adaptation can be predicted from physiological measurements. Contrast adaptation is therefore a robust property of both the subcortical and cortical auditory system and accounts for the short-term adaptability of perceptual judgments.


In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called "processual landscape," which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson's ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations.


In her essay, "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik," Joan Didion describes the funeral of a motorcycle outlaw portrayed in The Wild Angels,the 1966 "classic exploitation bike movie" starring Peter Fonda. After the gang has raped and murdered while destroying a small town, "They stand at the grave, and, uncertain how to mark the moment, Peter Fonda shrugs. |Nothing to say,' he says" (99). Didion finds in this remark the existential myth of the outlaw embracing man's fate, a myth that suits both the motorcycle gang and the film's teenage audience. The adult audience, including Didion herself, sees in this remark the moral emptiness of these fallen angels; for them, there is nothing to be learned from human experience; there is nothing to say. The film bothers to say this: art, even schlock, has the habit of revealing something about the essence of human life, bad or good. When we look around at contemporary fiction, though, we notice that this habit of revelation is missing. Because T. Coraghessan Boyle's story "Greasy Lake" has recently been presented in X. J. Kennedy's fifth edition of his literature anthology, Literature (along with stories by John Updike, James Joyce, and Katherine Anne Porter), comparisons are bound to occur. Although this is not the place for a survey of Boyle's work, a brief overview of "Greasy Lake" may serve as an introduction to his short fiction and to a major theme in it: the failure of moral nerve that has become a commonplace in contemporary fiction. If postmodern means anything (and there is increasing evidence that, like political, it doesn't), it refers not only to the oft-noted element of self-consciousness or "intertextuality," but more importantly to a Fonda-like shrug and the admission, "nothing to say." We are all accustomed to the ubiquitous breaking of the proscenium that is the hallmark of "clever" mass-produced art. From Robbe-Grillet to Roseanne, the wink into the mirror has become habitual, almost a nervous tic. But while the conservative art forms that practice this "hey, ma, no hands" approach to post-modernity holds fast to some sort of "family values," the avant-garde of postmodern fiction, because it is in the grip of a self-image that transcends anything so banal as beliefs, is necessarily limited to parody. It attempts satire, but because it lacks any moral standards, its exaggeration and self-absorption can only serve as frenetic substitutes for a moral point of view. Before postmodernism and its resulting habits put a stranglehold on fiction, one of the most common practices of the twentieth-century short story was presenting the sudden insight of a character under pressure. Any number of stories that make up the core of a traditional course in short fiction - and that make up most anthologies - could serve as examples: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "A & P," "Araby," "The Jilting of Granny Weather-all." At the moment of emotional climax, the usually unwilling protagonist encounters a sudden Joycean epiphany, a new awareness of the reality of human existence. The titles I cited, of course, are good examples of this practice; like any facet of fiction, revelation can be handled well or ill and we are all familiar with stories that have banal or stupid morals tacked on willy-nilly. Contemporary fiction has, to a great degree, avoided this last problem by avoiding revelation altogether. In these worlds of fiction, there is nothing to be learned, nothing to be revealed; there is only the endless circuit of plot and character, the zanier, the more discordant, the more violent the better. Boyle's fiction, though, goes further to parody the revelatory nature of fiction itself. Characters in Boyle's first two collections, Descent of Man and Greasy Lake & Other Stories, are frequently put in a position to understand the world around them and then to act according to this new understanding; but each time they ignore the knowledge, fumble the opportunity, or avoid the entire situation. …


OBJECTIVES
The relative size of the infraorbital foramen (IOF) has been used to infer the ecology of extinct primates for several decades. Primates have relatively smaller IOFs than most other mammals, which may result from the fact that they pre-process and manipulate food with their hands rather than their muzzles. In primates, relative IOF area co-varies with diet, where insectivores and folivores have relatively smaller IOFs than frugivores. We wanted to determine whether the observed patterns associated with IOF variation hold across other orders.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
We examined how relative IOF area differs among marsupials occupying different ecological niches. Marsupials were chosen because they converge with primates in both ecology and morphology, but unlike primates, some marsupials approach and pre-process foods only with their muzzles. We measured IOF area and cranial lengths from 72 marsupial species, and behavioral feeding data were obtained from a subset of this sample (N = 20).

RESULTS
Relative IOF area did not vary significantly between substrate preferences. However, relative IOF area differed significantly by diet category (P < 0.001). Species that specialize in feeding on non-grassy leaves have significantly smaller relative IOF areas than species which primarily feed on grasses, insects, vertebrates, or some combination thereof. Behavioral analyses support that folivorous marsupials approach and remove food with the hands more often than marsupials from other dietary groups.

DISCUSSION
Results suggest that relatively small IOF area may reflect increased reliance on the hands while feeding, and that relative IOF size can be used as an indicator of feeding behavior.