The aim ofthis project is to investigate the origin and deformational history ofthe Arthur
Lineament, using amulti-disciplinary approach. The field-based research concentrated on
the structural deformation ofthe study area. Laboratory-based research included
microstructural investigations, whole-rock geochemistry to investigate the mafic igneous
rocks in the study area, and metamorphic petrology and geochronology to characterise the
timing and nature ofthe metamorphic events that affected the lineament and surrounding
region.
TheArthur Lineament is a Cambrian age, high strain metamorphic belt located innorthwest
Tasmania, Australia. It is east-dipping, NE-trending, 5to 10 km wide and approximately
110 km long. The lineament consists ofphyllitic to schistose lithologies that have been
subject to medium- to high strain, and variably metamorphosed to blueschist, or greenschist
grade. The high strain belt comprises several different units. The major lithological unit in
the southern Arthur Lineament isthe Late Neoproterozoic "eastern" Ahrberg Group, which
comprises metamorphosed psammite and psammopelite units, transitional to tholeiitic
metabasalts and mafic volcanogenic metasediments. The southern Arthur Lineament also
contains the Bowry Formation, which contains basalt/dolerite-derived tholeiitic amphibolites
that are intruded by minor deformed 777±7 Ma granitoids, aunit correlated with the Ahrberg
Group (AGC) and Neoproterozoic high strain turhidite sequences (Bumie and Oonah
Formations).
Whole rock geochemistry ofthe metabasites in the "eastem" and "western" Ahrberg Groups,
the Bowry Formation and the AGC have been examined in order to enable an understanding
ofthe tectonic setting, into which the igneous rocks were emplaced. The "eastem" and
"western" Ahrberg Group sequences, and the AGC, are interpreted to be lithostratigraphic
correlates. The units have sequences oftransitional tholeiites, that are enriched relative to
MORB, and are increasingly tholeiitic towards the top ofthe stratigraphic pile. The Bowry
Formation also comprises transitional tholeiites, however they are more evolved than the
other units, and have REE pattems only slightly enriched relative to MORB.
The main orogeny to affect northwestem Tasmania was inthe Early to Middle Cambrian.
This event (the Tyennan Orogeny) consisted ofthree deformational episodes. The first two
episodes (CaD, and CaDz) were high strain events, related to arc-continent collision. These involved the emplacement of allochthonous slices, and the structuralrepetitionof units
within the lineament. CaDi produced isoclinalfolding, a schistose axial planar fabric and
shearingparallel to the CaFi axial plane. CaD2 wasmorepervasive than CaDi, and
produced tightto isoclinal folds with a schistose axial planarfabric. The CaSi and CaS2
axialplanar foliations are commonly sub-parallel, and the fold axesare close to parallel. The
orientation of CaFi and CaF2 folds changes from the low to high strain domains. In the low
strain domains, CaFi folds are variable in their orientation. CaF2 folds in the low strain
domains are gently east- and west-plunging, with south-dipping axial planes. In the high
strain domains, CaFi and CaF2 folds have east-southeastdipping axial planes, and southplunging
fold axes. This is consistent in both thenorth andthe southof the lineament.
Structural analysis suggests that the change in orientation is due to a strongly rotational shear
component during the CaD2 event, and thisisinterpreted as evidence forsouth-directed
transport.
The subsequent CaDs event, in the latest Cambrian, involvedeast-directed thrust. It
produced asymmetric folds with gentlywest-dipping longlimbsand steeply east-dipping
short limbs. The CaFs are gently south plunging, with gently west-dipping axial planes and
associated thrust faults. During the Devonian, and associated with extensive granitoid
intrusion, two episodes of open, east-west trending folding occurred.
Metamorphic investigations show that twometamorphic events occurred in the Arthur
Lineament. The earliest event corresponds to CaDi. This event has been pervasively
overprinted by the CaD2 event, whichhaslargely obliterated CaDi metamorphic textures.
Where observed, CaDi occurred at greenschistgradein allochthonous units. However in
units that are interpreted to be allochthonous, in theBowryFormation and withinpart of the
"eastern" Afrrberg Group, CaDi occurredat blueschist gradewith amphibole coresrecording
conditions of approximately 700-1000 MPa and 450-500°C. Syn-CaD2 metamorphism
varies across the Arthur Lineament. Early in the CaD2 event in the western parts of the
lineament, amphibole compositions indicate thatpressures were around500MPa, and the
metamorphic grade was in the upper greenschist facies. However in parts of the Bowry
Formation and the AGC, early CaD2 temperatures were around 460 ± 40°C, and pressures
were around 500-600 MPa. In these rocks, hornblende was stable in the metabasites, and
syn-CaD2 garnet, indicative of localised temperatures of approximately 500°C (greenschistamphibolitefacies
transition) were found. Duringlate CaD2, pressures were around300-400
MPa and the metamorphic grade was lower greenschist facies. Outside ofthe lineament,
metamorphic conditions duringCaDi and CaD2 didnot exceedgreenschist grade, with
temperatures of approximately 400°C and pressures of around 350 MPa. Metamorphic monazites in northwestern Tasmania andKingIslandwere investigated to
define the extent ofthe Cambrian deformation, and provide insight into other metamorphic
events. King Island has experienceda complexmetamorphic history. There is no evidence
ofthe Cambrian deformation, however a pronounced 1270 Ma regional metamorphic event,
contact metamorphism related to the 760 MaWickham Orogeny, and localised, mylonite
zone-related metamorphismat 380 Ma were observed. In the Arthur Lineament, the
dominantmetamorphic event occurredbetween510-540 Ma. Monazite growthin
metasedimentarysamples from within the lineament is attributed to the early-CaDa event.
However, awayfromthe lineament the Cambrian event is much weakerand significantly
older monazites of detrital origin, are common. No strong Devonian peak was observed.
In summary, in northwestem Tasmania, following theCambrian arc-continent collision, the
blueschistgrade (CaDi) allochthonous slices wereobducted and transported to the southof
the subductionzone, in a progressive deformational event. Other parautochthonous rocks
were also transported to the south duringthis high strainevent, with associated shearingand
folding occurring at greenschist grademetamorphic conditions. Sequential to this, a near
coaxial high straindeformational event took place, detaching other parautochthonous slices
that were variablymetamorphosed to greenschist andupper greenschist-amphibolite facies
(earlyCaD2), and overthrusting the different grade slices to the south. During these events,
strain-related rotation of the developingfolds took place, resulting in a change in orientation
ofthe fold axes from east-west to north south, and foliations from south-dipping to eastdipping,
from thelow strainzones into thehigh strain zones. The revised metamorphic
geochronology of the ArthurLineament indicates the earlyCaDi eventoccurred around 505-
510 Ma. DuringCaDx and early CaDj, the allochthonous and parautochthonous lithologies
were structurally emplacedon top of the less deformed, autochthonous units. In the final
stage of assembling the tectonostratigraphic 'pile', the various sliceswere stacked together,
and lower greenschist facies metamorphic conditions were developeduniformly in all
allochthonous, parautochthonous and autochthonous blocks(late CaD2). Subsequent to this,
the CaDs event caused the tilting ofthe tectonostratigraphy, to complete the evolution of the
Arthur Lineament.


A total of 1,080 nursery pigs (PIC 280 ×1050, initially 13.0 ± 2.38 lb BW) were housed in 3 commercial research rooms and used in a 46-d study to determine the effects of increasing standardized total tract digestible (STTD) phosphorus (P) concentrations in diets with and without phytase on growth performance and percentage bone ash. Pens of pigs (10 pigs per pen, 9 pens per treatment) were balanced for equal pen weights and allotted randomly to 1 of 12 treatments. Dietary treatments were arranged in 2 sets of dose titration with 6 levels of STTD P with and without 2,000 phytase unit (FYT) of phytase (DSM Nutritional Products, Inc., Parsippany, NJ). The STTD P levels were expressed as percentage of the NRC (2012) requirement estimates (0.45 and 0.40% for phases 1 and 2, respectively) and were: 80, 90, 100, 110, 125, and 140% of NRC in diets without phytase and 100, 110, 125, 140, 155, and 170% of NRC in diets with phytase. Diets were provided in 3 phases, with experimental diets fed during phase 1 (d 0 to 11) and phase 2 (d 11 to 25), followed by a common phase 3 diet from d 25 to 46. On d 25, 1 median-weight gilt from each pen was euthanized and radius samples were collected for analysis of bone ash. During the treatment period (d 0 to 25), increasing STTD P from 80 to 140% of NRC in diets without phytase improved average daily gain (ADG) (quadratic, P = 0.005), average daily feed intake (ADFI) (quadratic, P = 0.043), and feed efficiency (F/G) (linear, P < 0.001; quadratic, P = 0.063). Estimated STTD P requirement in diets without phytase was 117 and 91% of NRC for maximum ADG according to quadratic polynomial (QP) and broken-line linear (BLL) models, respectively, and ranged from 102 to >140% of NRC for maximum feed efficiency using BLL, broken-line quadratic, and linear models. When diets contained phytase, increasing STTD P from 100 to 170% of NRC improved ADG (quadratic, P = 0.031) and F/G (linear, P = 0.005; quadratic, P = 0.065). Estimated STTD P requirement in diets containing phytase was 138% for maximum ADG (QP model) and was 147 (QP model) and 116% (BLL model) of NRC for maximum feed efficiency. Increasing STTD P increased (linear, P < 0.001) percentage bone ash regardless of phytase addition. Comparing diets containing the same STTD P levels, adding phytase improved (P < 0.001) ADG, ADFI, and F/G. In summary, estimated STTD P requirements varied depending on the response criteria and statistical models and ranged from 91 to >140% of the NRC in diets containing no phytase, and from 116 to >170% of NRC for diets containing 2,000 FYT phytase. The high dose of phytase promoted growth performance and improved the dose responses to dietary STTD P for ADG and feed efficiency in 13to 28-lb nursery pigs.


Agriculture and water resource are highly threatened due to climate change, increasing the probability of backsliding on almost every aspect of sustainable development worldwide. For instance, water resource distribution throughout the Peruvian territory is not homogeneous. Hydrometeorological phenomena also threaten it, so it is crucial for the agriculture sector and water management to increase resilience against climate change. The study aims to understand the Peruvian conduct under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) regime. Its influence in the Peruvian adaptation regulation and public institutions over the years and the interaction with the latest commitment to the UNFCCC related to climate change agriculture - water resources. The methodology used for the study was qualitative, delivered throughout a documentary analysis, and narrative design among scientific papers, UNFCCC documentation, and Peruvian regulation to weave the experience occurred and the sequences of the events to set up a general narrative. The results show that Peru has active participation in the UNFCCC, particularly under a neoliberalism approach. The convention pushed institutional and regulatory development of the Peruvian Government constantly. Also, after the Paris Agreement, one of the most important influences was the implementation of Law N° 30754 on climate change, which articulates all the regulations related to it, providing a national, more substantial legally-binding commitment. Finally, it is important for Peru to analyze the achievement of current adaptation actions and keep studying the impacts of climate change at a local level to develop a bottom-up approach for an effective policy formulation-implementation.


Modern Environmentalism presents a comprehensive introduction to environmentalism, the origins of its main beliefs and ideas, and how these relate to modern environmental ideologies. Providing a historical overview of the development of attitudes to nature and the environment in society, the book examines key environmentalist ideas, influences and movements. Science's role in mediating our view of nature is emphasised throughout. This entirely new account draws on the explosion of writing on socio-environment relations since Pepper's earlier work, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism.


The recognition of congenital heart disease (CHD) during 'routine' obstetric anomaly scans continues to be a challenge. Recent national guidance has strengthened previous recommendations and advocated the incorporation of views of cardiac situs, four-chamber view and outflow tracts into such scans.1 An increasingly important question is how fetal cardiologists can best support district hospitals, first in terms of training and second to provide support if a cardiac abnormality is suspected. The article by McCrossan and colleagues in this month's journal2 provides an important contribution relating to the role of telemedicine in the delivery of a system for prenatal detection and management of CHD. These authors reported on several facets of the application of telemedicine in fetal cardiology practice including technical feasibility, service organisation and quality control.

From a technical perspective, application of telemedicine to the fetal heart demands high spatial and temporal resolution due to the small size of the fetal heart and rapid heart rate. With availability of the appropriate equipment in the district and tertiary hospital coupled with sufficient bandwidth for image transfer, the study of McCrossan reported a high degree of satisfaction with the image quality received at the remote tertiary site, with image scores that were, unsurprisingly, higher in those cases with favourable fetal lie. This permitted reassurance of normality in a significant number of cases where …


In this original look at how ethnic literature enters the U.S. classroom and the literary canon, Delia Poey compares the risks facing teachers and interpreters of well-known Latina/o or Latin American texts with those run by the "coyote" who smuggles undocumented workers across the U.S./Mexico border: both are in danger of erasing those cultural traits that made the border crossers important. Poey shows that these texts have yet to be fully main-streamed into the curricula, and that teachers of multicultural literature inadvertently re-colonize the texts by failing to treat them "on their own terms." She goes beyond highlighting the ways a superficial understanding of Latin American literature has led to an even more superficial or problematic reception of Latina/o texts and offers solutions. In looking at such familiar books as Borderlands, Hunger of Memory, House on Mango Street, Bless Me Ultima, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Poey not only provides teachers and critics of Latina/o literature with innovative and viable approaches to these texts but proposes new contexts for them and new ways of viewing how they have been treated in classrooms and criticism. Far more than merely an entry in the current debate over canon and curricular reform, the work combines a practical approach to teaching Latina/o literature with suggestions on diversifying curricula and revising established reading practices.


Recent work has shown that sharp spectral edges in acoustic stimuli might have advantageous effects in the treatment of tonal tinnitus. In the course of this paper, we evaluate the long-term effects of spectrally notched hearing aids on the subjective tinnitus distress. By merging recent experimental work with a computational tinnitus model, we modified the commercially available behind-the-ear hearing aids so that a frequency band of 0.5 octaves, centered on the patient's individual tinnitus frequency, was blocked out. Those hearing aids employ a steep notch filter that filters environmental sounds to suppress the tinnitus-related changes in neural firing by lateral inhibition. The computational model reveals a renormalization of pathologically increased neural response reliability and synchrony in response to spectrally modified input. The target group, fitted with spectrally notched hearing aids, was matched with a comparable control group, fitted with standard hearing aids of the same type but without a notch filter. We analyze the subjective self-assessment by tinnitus questionnaires, and we monitor the objective distress correlates in auditory evoked response phase data. Both, subjective and objective results show a noticeable trend of a larger therapeutic benefit for notched hearing correction.


In an attempt to investigate the relationship between microscopic and macroscopic fluid properties, like viscosity and density, a vibrational spectroscopic study of the model lubricant 2-ethylhexyl benzoate (EHB) was initiated. The variation in frequencies and band shapes of the vibrational modes of the molecule have been studied as a function of concentration, temperature and pressure. Estimates of correlation times for the reorientational motion of the phenyl ring of EHB, as a function of temperature, have been made from measurements of the Raman bands of the ring v(C-C) deformation mode and (^13)C N.M.R. spin lattice relaxation times. It has been shown using this data that the viscosity/temperature behaviour of EHB is dependent on the reorientational as opposed to the translational motion of the molecule. A noncoincidence of the Raman isotropic and anisotropic bands of the v(C=0) stretching mode of EHB has been seen and explained in terms of a resonance energy transfer (RET) process via transition dipole-transition dipole interactions, most probably as a consequence of preferential alignment via dipole-dipole interactions. It appears from dilution experiments that the EHB molecules do not become completely separated until below 2% mole-fraction. The infrared band of the v(C=0) stretching mode of EHB shows an unusual red shift with increased pressure to 6.5kbar, followed by a blue shift as the pressure is further increased. This has been explained as due to the competing effects of increased alignment of carbonyl dipoles (red shift) and the increase in the repulsive interactions (blue shift). All the other bands exhibit blue shifts, of varying degree, with increased pressure, showing that the repulsive forces dominate the shifts. The spectral changes are consistent with chain extension and increased interchain interactions with increased pressure. The band widths of all the vibrational modes increase with pressure consistent with an increase in vibrational relaxation rate. The fluid appears to exhibit a phase change close to 6.5kbar.


Introduction Public access defibrillation (PAD) prior to ambulance arrival is a key determinant of survival from out-of-hospital (OOH) cardiac arrest. Implementation of PAD has been underway in the UK for the past 12 years, and its importance in strengthening the chain of survival has been recognised in the government's recent 'Cardiovascular Disease Outcomes Strategy'. The extent of use of PAD in OOH cardiac arrests in the UK is unknown. We surveyed all OOH cardiac arrests in Hampshire over a 12-month period to ascertain the availability and effective use of PAD. Methods A retrospective review of all patients with OOH cardiac arrest attended by South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) in Hampshire during a 1-year period (1 September 2011 to 31 August 2012) was undertaken. Emergency calls were reviewed to establish the known presence of a PAD. Additionally, a review of all known PAD locations in Hampshire was undertaken, together with a survey of public areas where a PAD may be expected to be located. Results The current population of Hampshire is estimated to be 1.76 million. During the study period, 673 known PADs were located in 278 Hampshire locations. Of all calls confirmed as cardiac arrest (n=1035), the caller reported access to an automated external defibrillator (AED) on 44 occasions (4.25%), successfully retrieving and using the AED before arrival of the ambulance on only 18 occasions (1.74%). Conclusions Despite several campaigns to raise public awareness and make PADs more available, many public areas have no recorded AED available, and in those where an AED was available it was only used in a minority of cases by members of the public before arrival of the ambulance. Overall, a PAD was only deployed successfully in 1.74% OOH cardiac arrests. This weak link in the chain of survival contributes to the poor survival rate from OOH cardiac arrest and needs strengthening.


Objectives: We aimed to assess the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) level and its relation with leptin and ghrelin levels in obese women. Methods: In this case-control cross-sectional study, forty obese women and 40 healthy normal weight women aged (20- 50 y) were participated. Anthropometric indices were measured and serum levels of BDNF, leptin and ghrelin were assessed by the ELISA method. Results: Obese women had significantly higher leptin, but lower ghrelin levels compared with normal weight women. BDNF level was comparable between the two groups of women. There was a strong positive correlation between leptin and anthropometric parameters. A significant negative association was found between BDNF and leptin levels in normal weight women (r= -0.41, p= 0.02). Conclusion: Our results in women do not support a relationship between BDNF and obesity. Anthropometric indices may be important predictors of the leptin level. Further studies are required to elucidate the exact link between BDNF and leptin.


Continuously reinforced concrete pavement (CRCP) is a portland cement concrete (PCC) pavement structure with a continuous longitudinal steel layout. CRCP is forming a major portion of PCC roadway systems in the state of Texas due to its low life cycle cost, ease of maintenance, and durable nature. While the overall performance of CRCP is proven to be excellent, some performance problems are still found as a form of distresses such as punchout and spalling. The current pavement design guide states that these distresses are closely related with the early-age behavior characteristics of CRCP, and various measures are underway to develop to improve the long-term performance of CRCP in terms of initial material design and use, structural design, and quality control.
Understanding the current issues that pavement engineers and researchers face, the primary objective of this dissertation research focuses on sound understanding of the early-age structural behavior characteristics of CRCP and its effect on the long-term performance to provide reliable design and analysis criteria for CRCP. To achieve this main objective, characterizing the early-age structural response in CRCP was a core task of this study. For this purpose, a zero-stress temperature (ZST), one of the design and construction variables considered to have most significant effects on CRCP behavior and performance, was evaluated. As a beginning point of the entire framework, a series of field experiments were conducted in four new PCC pavement construction projects in the state of Texas to evaluate the actual structural response in early-age CRCP since a laboratory experiment would have a critical limitation in simulating the restraint conditions that exist in actual CRCP. To expand this core task to various parametric categories, a computer-aided parametric simulation was performed using valid numerical models. Based on data sets obtained from the parametric investigation, a statistical model to quantify the early-age structural response of CRCP was proposed to implement in codes of practice and pavement design guides.
A secondary task was to identify a correlation between the early-age structural response and the long-term performance of CRCP structures. Since the experimental and analytical investigations tended to provide quite localized information for the time-dependent behavior of CRCP, the overall performance of CRCP could not be properly identified solely based on those results. To overcome this limitation, extensive field condition surveys were performed in seven different old CRCP sections with known material and early-age temperature history to find the implications of early-age behavior characteristics on the long-term performance of CRCP from a macroscopic point of view.
It is expected that this research effort will provide pavement engineers and researchers with useful information to understand the actual time-dependent behavior of CRCP and a solid foundation to improve the sustainability of CRCP structures.


Tens of thousands of Canadians die each year as a result of preventable injuries sustained in hospitals. The patient safety literature suggests that we must implement systems and processes designed to prevent errors, rather than focusing on the mistakes of individual health professionals. Although the law tends to reinforce the provider-centric approach to errors, several law reforms have the potential to catalyze a systems-centric approach that finds support in the patient safety literature: shifting some liability from physicians to hospitals, reforming hospital governance practices, and reconsidering the legal relationship between physicians and hospitals.


Three-dimensional fluorescence time-lapse imaging of structural, cellular and sub-cellular processes in the beating heart is an increasingly achievable goal using the latest imaging and computational techniques. However, previous approaches have had significant limitations. Temporarily arresting the heart using drugs disrupts the heart's physiological state, and the use of ultra-high frame-rates for fluorescence image acquisition causes phototoxic cell damage. Real-time triggered imaging, synchronized to a specific phase in the cardiac-cycle, can computationally "freeze" the heart to acquire the minimal number of fluorescence images required for 3D time-lapse imaging. However, until now no solution has been able to maintain phase-lock to the same point in the cardiac cycle for more than about one hour. Our new hybrid optical gating system maintains phase-lock for up to 24 h, acquiring synchronized 3D+time video stacks of the unperturbed heart in vivo. This approach has enabled us to observe detailed developmental, structural, cellular and subcellular processes, including live cell division and cell fate tracking, in the embryonic zebrafish heart using transgenic fish lines expressing cell-specific fluorophores. We show that our approach not only provides high spatial and temporal resolution 3D-imaging, but also avoids phototoxic injury, where alternative approaches induce measurable harm. This provides superb cellular and subcellular imaging of the heart while it is beating in its normal physiological state, and opens up new and exciting opportunities for further study in the heart and other moving cellular and subcellular structures in vivo.


Nanoparticles exposed to biological fluids adsorb biomolecules on their surface forming a biomolecular corona. This corona determines, on a molecular level, the interactions and impact the newly formed complex has on cells and organisms. The corona formation as well as the physiological and toxicological relevance are commonly investigated. However, an acknowledged but rarely addressed problem in many fields of nanobiotechnology is aggregation and broadened size distribution of nanoparticles following their interactions with the molecules of biological fluids. In blood serum, TiO2 nanoparticles form complexes with a size distribution from 30 nm to more than 500 nm. In this study we have separated these complexes, with good resolution, using preparative centrifugation in a sucrose gradient. Two main apparent size populations were obtained, a fast sedimenting population of complexes that formed a pellet in the preparative centrifugation tube, and a slow sedimenting complex population still suspended in the gradient after centrifugation. Concentration and surface area dependent differences are found in the biomolecular corona between the slow and fast sedimenting fractions. There are more immunoglobulins, lipid binding proteins, and lipid-rich complexes at higher serum concentrations. Sedimentation rate and the biomolecular corona are important factors for evaluating any experiment including nanoparticle exposure. Our results show that traditional description of nanoparticles in biological fluids is an oversimplification and that more thorough characterisations are needed.

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Individuals who drink alcohol for the explicit motive of facilitating or enhancing sex may be more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, including having sex under the influence of alcohol. However, efforts to assess sexual motives for drinking (SMDs) have been very limited to date. We examined the psychometric properties of a 5-item measure of SMDs in a sample of HIV-positive heavy drinking men who have sex with men. Findings provided excellent support for the scale's internal consistency and concurrent validity with a well-established measure of sexual alcohol expectancies (SAEs). Good discriminant validity was also established, as SMDs were correlated with other drinking motives but uniquely predicted the proportion of sex acts occurring under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, over and above other drinking motives and SAEs. SMDs were not significantly associated with unprotected anal intercourse. Adjusting for alcohol problem severity, higher SMDs were associated with lower willingness to consider changing drinking. Results suggest this measure of SMDs exhibits sound psychometric properties and may be useful in studies examining the association between alcohol use and sexual behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record


This article outlines an innovative photographic technique used to digitize the Malcolm Francis McGregor Epigraphic Squeeze collection held by the Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in collaboration with a branch of the UBC library system called Digital Initiatives. The squeezes are photographed using a TTI Repro-Graphic Workstation 4060, Sinar 86H cameraback and digital CMV lenses using CaptureShop image processing software. The images undergo further processing using Photoshop CS6 and the HDR merge and Photomerge tools. The result creates a stunningly clear image which fully captures the details of the squeeze and specifically its three-dimensional quality.


The motherhood wage penalty is today probably the largest obstacle to progress in gender equality at work. Using matched employer-employee data from Norway (1980–97), a country with public policies that promote combining family and career, we investigate (a) whether the penalty arises from differential pay by employers or from sorting of employees on occupations and establishments, and (b) changes in the penalties over time in a period with major changes in family policies. The findings are as follows. (1) There are major wage penalties to motherhood, but these declined strongly over the 18–year period, likely caused by changes in family policies and in how families operate. (2) The penalty to motherhood is mostly due to sorting on occupations and occupation-establishment units. By 1995–97, mothers and nonmothers working in the same occupation-establishment unit were paid same wages. (3) Women who become mothers are wage wise positively selected, but the premia are wiped out by the negative effects of actual motherhood. (4) For wage growth, there were premia to motherhood in 1980–89, but none by 1990–97. In conclusion, the motherhood penalty is not due to employers paying mothers lower wages and its size appears sensitive to changes in family policies, with large reductions in penalties over time.


Although numerous ultraand microfiltration dead-end plants with capillary membranes are already operative, some phenomena are still unexplained. Therefore, the fundamental processes taking place inside a capillary membrane were observed. Initially, the flow field depending on axial and radial position inside the capillary was determined. Then, particle transport and deposition were theoretically studied by determination of particle trajectories considering influences of particle concentration and walleffects on hydrodynamics, DLVO-forces, buoyancy, gravitation, diffusion and interparticular forces. Following these calculations, incoming particles with a diameter smaller than the so-called "limiting diameter", which depends on operational and geometrical boundary conditions, due to depositions are widely and evenly distributed. Larger particles do not deposit until they are at a certain distance from the water inlet. The larger the particle size, the longer the distance. If the particle is larger than the so-called "corkforming diameter" then the particles are transported to the dead-end of the capillary which may cause a clogging of the capillary. This "corkforming diameter" depends on operational as well on geometrical boundary conditions. These theoretical predictions are confirmed by experimental results from investigations with spherical latex and non-spherical walnut particles. To avoid this clogging, the deposition of the particles should be evenly distributed, which means that the "corkforming diameter" should be as large as possible. That goal could be achieved by operating the membrane plant with short and/or wide capillaries. However, a small permeate flux, a small membrane resistance and/or a small membrane surface potential succeed as well. Another possibility could be to operate the capillaries with a very small cross flow.


Interest in risk measurement for spot price has increased since the worldwide deregulation and liberalization of electricity started in the early 90's. This paper is focused on quantifying risk for the Swedish spot price. Our analysis is based on a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) process with skewed exponential power innovations to model the stochastic component of the price. A Expected Shortfall (ES) backtesting procedure is presented and our model performance is compared to commonly used distributions in risk measurement. We show that the skewed exponential power distribution outperforms the competitors for the upside risk, which is of high interest as electricity spot prices are positively skewed.


Abstract:  An increasingly important determinant in food choice is the growing consumer concern about nutrition and health. This focusing of consumer interest on the food supply, and also extensive research and technological developments in food science will provide further opportunities for new product development. The Food-Based Dietary Guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and European Union (EU) legislation on health claims play an important role in regulating information to the public about a wholesome diet and for improving the availability and affordability of nutritious food choices to consumers. More specifically, the food industry can contribute by reducing the number of energy-dense products; by improving the nutrient profile of processed food through the reduction of salt, added sugar, trans-fatty acid, and saturated fat content. As a result, food science and technology are prompted to create a new framework for these food-based dietary guidelines, principally in the areas of food physics, methods of food storage and preservation, nutrient restoration and fortification of foods, and the development of health-focused designer foods and functional foods. The aim of this review is to provide an overview of some further opportunities for new product development and nutrition research. Some topics related to the energy reduction of foods include: dilution and structure design, carbohydrate and/or fat substitutes, and inhibition of enzymes in carbohydrate and/or fat digestion; additionally, regulation of some metabolic functions with food-derived bioactive peptides and probiotics, and enrichment of foods with bioactive compounds are reviewed in this overview as the most promising issues.


Food historian Cynthia Clampitt pens the epic story of what happened when Mesoamerican farmers bred a nondescript grass into a staff of life so prolific, so protean, that it represents nothing less than one of humankind's greatest achievements. Blending history with expert reportage, she traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.


In developing countries as in developed countries, the COVID-19 crisis has led to near universal school closures that will affect children's ability to learn, especially in countries with limited infrastructure for distance learning. While most children are likely to return to school when they reopen, quite a few may drop out. In addition, the economic recession generated by the crisis will affect livelihoods, leading to higher rates of poverty and food insecurity. This also may have negative impacts on both Catholic schools and their students. This paper, the second in a set of two, looks at likely impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on Catholic Schools in developing countries, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, a vulnerable region given the comparatively weak performance of its education systems and the limited availability of resources for governments to protect education budgets (acknowledging that many Catholic schools in the region are public schools). How Catholic schools will be able to respond to the twin challenges of school closures and the economic downturn may affect their comparative advantage for the medium term. A key aim of the paper is to make Catholic school teachers and leaders aware of some of the discussions on how to respond to the crisis, and provide links to resources online that may be useful.


As a prolegomena to writing a critique of contemporary capitalism which takes into account its semiotic, affective dimensions and which emphasises the notion of hyper-capitalism with Asian characteristics, and in considering the nature of the floating, heterogeneous population of the lumpenproletariat in the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century, the authors believe they remain faithful to Marx and the 11th thesis on Feuerbach. Bringing a unique perspective to the debate and raising pressing issues regarding the exploitation of the lumpenproletariat, we are not content to merely revisit the concept of the lumpenproletariat in Marx's writings such as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) but to apply this concept to the contemporary conditions of capitalism and especially to the loci of the precariat in Asia. Our goal is to begin to account for the changing demographic of labour flows, the precarity of life, the modern day slavery which takes place in our time. In examining the passage from the lumpenproletariat, hitherto defined as "non-class" or "people without a definite trace", to lumpen-precariat, defined as people not seen in Asian economies (refugees, the illegally employed, illegal migrants, nationless foreign labour, the withdrawn clan, sex industry workers, night workers; those behind walls, gated communities, and other entrance-exit barriers), this paper discloses not only the subsistence of those in the non-places of the world – in the technocratic-commercial archipelago of urban technopoles – but also and, arguably more importantly, on the Outside, namely the rest of the planet, the other six-sevenths of humanity. This paper looks for "a" missing people, "a" singular, people yet to come, those exiled, excluded and unseen – sited on the edges of respectable society.


Crude oil and gas products transported using pipelines systems is safe and economical all over the the world. Nonetheless, such pipelines can still be subject to various degrees of failure and degradation generating hazardous consequences and severe environmental damages. As a result, it is important for these pipelines to be effectively monitored and assessed for optimal operation. Many models have been developed to predict pipeline failures and conditions. However, most of these models were limited to use corrosion features as the only factor to assess the condition of pipelines which can lead to inaccurate condition prediction. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to develop models that predict the condition of offshore oil and gas pipelines based on several other factors including corrosion. Regression analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) techniques were used to develop condition prediction models based on historical inspection data of three existing pipelines in Qatar. In addition, a condition assessment scale for pipelines was built based on experts' opinion. All necessary statistical diagnosis have been checked showing sound results for the developed models. The models have been validated and the results showed their robustness with an average validity percentage from 96 to 99%. The models are expected to help pipeline operators to assess and predict the condition of existing oil and gas pipelines and hence prioritize their inspections and rehabilitation planning.


People can make decisions intuitively, based on their values and perceptions which take account of their contexts, so demonstrating a systemic approach. Other decisions processes are more rational than intuitive and can be quite systematic. The decisions people make range from simple to highly complex and the processes can be analysed to help understand how and why decisions were made in order to improve both the process and the outcome. This analysis can also highlight which processes can be replicated or supported by computers, raising questions about the role of computers in decision-making and to what extent they can make decisions autonomously. Computer-based decision-making uses a more systematic approach than humans alone which has advantages and disadvantages. Mobile agricultural robots or more intelligent machines can be modelled on this process to allow them to behave in the same way people do and to offer the possibility to carry out autonomous plant level operations such as mechanical weeding. A truly intelligent machine is unlikely in the near future but more intelligent machines that can behave sensibly within a given context are becoming a reality.


Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury. Volume 1: Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice. Ed. Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari (London: Palgrave, 2010) xvii + 188pp. The essays in Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury grew out of the 14th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, held in London in June 2004, whose theme was "Back to Bloomsbury." Volume 1 of the two-volume set clusters papers under the heading "Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice." (A second volume centers on "International Influence and Aesthetics.") The collection conveys the sense of a lively conversation and the excitement of the peripatetic conference's return to Woolf's hometown. An interest in situating Woolf within London marks several of the papers, though the focus on the city tends, surprisingly, more toward the insides of houses and the shelves of their libraries than street haunting. The rubric "Aesthetics and Literary Practice" is broadly defined, with essays engaging topics from painting, architecture, and photography to less expected subjects like natural history and Leonard Woolf. Indeed, following Gina Potts's introduction, first among the essays comes Cecil Woolf's warm recollection of his uncle and aunt, an affectionate corrective to accounts of a mean, authoritarian Leonard and melancholy, dispirited, even sadistic Virginia who haunt the biographical record. The fascinating essay that follows, by Suzanne Raitt, also centers on revision and return, though of a different sort, in Woolf's composition practices and as thematized in To the Lighthouse. Whereas writing for Woolf could be an ecstatic experience, revision was traumatic. Even the narrator's encounter in A Room of One's Own with Milton's and Thackeray's drafts, as Raitt shows, proves so. Placing accounts of Woolf's practices in the context of psychoanalytic understandings of textual revision, Raitt looks at Woolf's expansion, through revision, of the section of To the Lighthouse devoted to Lily Briscoe's practices of artistic return and argues that, in returning to that novel, Woolf came to see revision as potentially--sometimes--curative. Beth Rigel Daugherty examines the influence of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Woolf's "Aunt Anny," first as a model of a writing woman to balance Leslie Stephen's man of letters, and then through the prose style and preoccupations that Ritchie shares with Woolf. The younger writer admired Ritchie and at times, according to Daugherty, seems even to have echoed her sentences. In A Room of One's Own, Daugherty traces the recurrence of the canon of women writers that Ritchie too championed and the method that she pioneered for writing women's lives. Daugherty credits Ritchie, too, as the likely source of Virginia Stephen's copies of Atalanta, a progressive girls' magazine that could have served as a standin for the community and instruction of a schoolroom. Anna Bogen's contribution places Room in relation to a body of writing that made less room for women, the popular campus novels of the period. These novels nevertheless share with Woolf's essay an investment in insider-outsider tensions and the divide between modern London and the world apart that is the university, evocative alternately of history and timelessness. Yet, Bogen notes, it is from a modern London of recognizable sites that Woolf's narrator imagines a future Cambridge of women writers. Bogen shows that Room can be read as appropriative, rather than merely subversive, of university literature--a genre in which, though its writer was thought until recently never to have enrolled in a university course, it is now the canonical text. Morag Shiach's and Elisa Kay Sparks's contributions return to the city. Shiach poses the question of whether, to complement the flaneur as metaphor of modernity, we can find a "comparably historicized form of cultural analysis or literary criticism that engages with the more confined, and the more static terrain of the room"--a model that would re-imagine the city's connecting streets as a "structured network" of interior spaces (51). …


Sentiment classification has become very popular to analyze opinions about events, products, and so on, especially for social networks such as Twitter. Due to the size limitation of expressing ideas on social networks, the classification performance needs to be boosted by proposing various techniques. In this work, the enhancement of feature space with word embedding based features is proposed to deal with the size limitation issues and the classification success of sentiment analysis is improved by employing classifier ensembles. The contributions of this paper are fivefold. First, the representative capabilities of features are enriched by using a semantic word embedding model and followingly the conventional feature selection techniques are compared. Second, traditional machine learning algorithms, namely naive Bayes, support vector machine, and random forest are carried out to select baseline classifier for the proposed ensemble system. Third, three ensemble strategies namely, bagging, boosting and random subspace are introduced to ensure the diversity of ensemble learning. Fourth, experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the models with the word embedding baseline. Eventually, a wide range of comparative experiments on Twitter datasets demonstrate that the classification performance of the proposed model significantly outperforms the state of art studies DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.47.3.20935


Slow running or straggler tasks can significantly reduce computation speed in distributed computation. Recently, coding-theory-inspired approaches have been applied to mitigate the effect of straggling, through embedding redundancy in certain linear computational steps of the optimization algorithm, thus completing the computation without waiting for the stragglers. In this paper, we propose an alternate approach where we embed the redundancy directly in the data itself, and allow the computation to proceed completely oblivious to encoding. We propose several encoding schemes, and demonstrate that popular batch algorithms, such as gradient descent and L-BFGS, applied in a coding-oblivious manner, deterministically achieve sample path linear convergence to an approximate solution of the original problem, using an arbitrarily varying subset of the nodes at each iteration. Moreover, this approximation can be controlled by the amount of redundancy and the number of nodes used in each iteration. We provide experimental results demonstrating the advantage of the approach over uncoded and data replication strategies.


We propose an admission control scheme to guarantee a certain level of QoS to on-going connections in cellular networks. This admission control scheme is based on a differential bandwidth reservation policy that uses a sector of cells in making bandwidth reservation for accepting the new call. The sector of cells, which are located along the way to which the MT might move, is further divided into two regions depending on whether they have an immediate impact on the handoff or not. Two different bandwidth reservation policies are applied to cells in the two regions to optimize the connection dropping rate (CDR) while maximizing the connection blocking rate (CBR). In contrast to most prior policies, the proposed admission control scheme uses the varying number of cells in the sector to make the admission decision. Depending on the currently measured average CDR of the cells in the sector and the current cell where a new connection is generated, the number of cells involved in admission control can be changed dynamically to satisfy the target QoS (CDR) parameter. Simulation results indicate that our admission control policy guarantees the required CDR over the entire workload, while maintaining a competitive CBR. Comparison of the proposed scheme with two prior schemes shows that our approach is not only capable of providing better QoS guarantees, but also is more flexible in terms of using varying number of cells in satisfying a certain QoS requirement.


This chapter presents different methods and tools for microgrid optimal investment and planning problem, focusing on specific methodological aspects addressing the challenges of rural microgrids design. In particular, three aspects of rural microgrids planning are analyzed: (1) the multi-energy nature of rural microgrids, where electricity coexists with other energy vectors (such as heat distribution); (2) the occupation of large portions of the rural territory, which requires planning methods to consider the microgrid internal network constraints; (3) the remote (and sometimes off-the-grid) locations of rural microgrids, which require security criteria and multi-objective approaches to be considered in planning problem. These three methodological aspects are discussed using the example of a real microgrid in Alaska.


Social capital can be understood as network-based civic engagement, based on reciprocity and trust. This sociological approach, however, is faced with problems when assuming network-based social capital as a stock of capital. Any form of capital should have a positive economic payoff, should be measurable, and should define the mechanisms through which social capital can be accumulated and depreciated (Solow, 1995). To meet these criteria, we refer to social capital as "persistent and shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities" (Guiso et al., 2010). In this study, we assess the role of education as a potential accumulation mechanism of civic awareness and social trust. We implement a pseudo-panel data approach to identify, specifically in Italy, the effect of education on social capital. The findings show that participation in education is likely to foster higher levels of social capital, understood as a culture-based concept of civic engagement. In Italy, we also observe heterogeneous effects depending on the geographical location along the north-south axis. The Islands and the South, geographical areas in which levels of social capital are typically lower, are the areas where education shows a higher impact on civic awareness and social trust. We discuss and substantiate the results in terms of education policy implications.


One of the effective techniques of improving the coverage and enhancing the capacity and data rate in cellular wireless networks is to reduce the cell size and transmission distances. Long Term Evolution (LTE) has developed small cellular base stations called femtocells that can dramatically improve voice and data coverage for the indoor subscribers. Therefore, the concept of deploying femtocells over macrocell has recently attracted growing interests in academia, industry, and standardization forums. Various technical challenges towards mass deployment of femtocells have been addressed in recent literature. However, the interand intra tier interferences in such systems can significantly reduce the capacity and cause an unacceptably high level of outage. In this paper we propose a scheme which mitigates co-tier as well as cross tier interference using cluster aware soft frequency reuse scheme. That assigns distinct set of Physical Resource Blocks (PRB)s to each interfering femtocells. The scheme first uses periodic messages from the femto-user (FUE) to identify the interfering femtocells. It then divides each femtocell area into cell-center and cell-edge. Finally, it uses the CASFR algorithm to assign un interfering sets of PRBs to the cell-center and cell-edge users of all the interfering femtocells Same process is followed by macrocells. The proposed interference mitigation scheme for femtocell networks offers significant performance improvement over the existing methods by substantially reducing the co-tier and cross-tier inferences in the system.


This paper present three versions of Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA) including conventional Cuckoo Search Algorithm (CSA), modified CSA (MCSA) and adaptive CSA (ACSA) for solving the fixed head short-term hydrothermal scheduling (ST-HTS) problem where the reservoir volume constraints and nonconvex fuel cost function of thermal unit as well as the power losses in transmission line are taken into account. Among the applied methods, ACSA is first developed in the study by performing two modifications on second new solution generation via the action of an alien egg to be abandoned. In the ACSA, all initial solutions or all solutions at the end of the previous iteration are evaluated and sorted into two kinds of solution, good solutions with lower fitness function and bad solutions with higher fitness function. The implementation of the first new solution generation first via Levy flights in the ACSA is carried out similarly to that in MCSA. However, at the second new solution generation the ACSA evaluates the current solutions to choose the best one and use the information of the best one with a random solution to generate the second new solutions via the action of an alien egg to be abandoned. In addition, the probability of an alien egg discovery is considered an adaptive variable, which is set to the largest value at the beginning and decreased as the iteration is increased. Due to the adaptive value of the parameter, the ACSA can search an optimal solution but the trial runs are significantly decreased compared to CSA and MCSA. The performance of the ACSA is validated by testing on two systems and comparing with CSA, MCSA and other existing methods available in the paper.


In many humans, head hair can grow to a much greater length than hair elsewhere on the body. This is a "derived" form that evolved outside Africa and probably in northern Eurasia. The ancestral form, which is frizzier and much shorter, survives in sub-Saharan Africans and in other groups whose ancestors never left the tropics. This original hair form is nonetheless relatively straight and silky during infancy. Head hair thus seems to have lengthened in two stages: 1) retention of the infant hair form at older ages; and 2) further lengthening to mid-back and even waist length. These changes seem to have gone farther in women, whose head hair is thicker and somewhat longer. The most popular evolutionary explanations are: 1) relaxation of selection for short hair; and 2) sexual selection for women with long hair. Neither hypothesis is satisfactory. The first one cannot explain why head hair lengthened so dramatically over so little time. The second hypothesis suffers from the assumption that some populations have remained naturally short-haired because they consider long-haired women undesirable. Almost the opposite is true in traditional African cultures, which have a long history of lengthening and straightening women's hair. It is argued here that sexual selection produced different outcomes in different populations not because standards of beauty differed but because the intensity of sexual selection differed. In the tropical zone, sexual selection acted more on men than on women and was thus too weak to enhance desirable female characteristics. This situation reversed as ancestral humans spread northward into environments that tended to limit polygyny while increasing male mortality. Because fewer men were available for mating, women faced a more competitive mate market and were selected more severely.


New Zealand has seen significant change in curriculum and qualification frameworks in recent years. The implementation of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) from 2002 and a revised national curriculum in 2007 have underpinned the forces of change. However, preceding its implementation, the NCEA qualification sparked controversy both in the education literature and general media. This controversy around the NCEA continues. Classroom-based evidence on the impact of the NCEA on teaching and learning has a significant role in informing policy, and this work aimed to make such a contribution. As a number of secondary schools in this country offer alternative senior school qualifications, this invited the opportunity to compare the phenomenon of teaching chemistry to Years 12 and 13 students under two structurally different qualification frameworks. The overarching research question investigated in this study was: In the context of NCEA and International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) chemistry courses in New Zealand secondary schools, how do teachers manage the tension between learning, teaching, and assessment? Teachers' views and practices were explored through inquiry questions relating to the following: Teaching the content and procedural knowledge of chemistry (referring to curriculum and pedagogy); and their approaches to assessment.  Qualitative research was undertaken from a comparative case study within an interpretive paradigm. Two case schools offered both NCEA and IB Diploma qualifications, and one case school NCEA only. A total of ten participants from the three case schools were interviewed, and short sequences of lessons taught by the participant teachers were also observed. Following the coding of the interview data, emergent themes provided direction for the simple statistical analysis of national NCEA results data.  Manageability of courses and their assessment, feeling accountable for high grade outcomes, and the wish for subject specific professional development were areas that teachers of both NCEA and IBDP noted as factors that concerned them. The influence of high-stakes assessment was seen in the teaching methods used in the case schools towards preparing students to attain these qualifications.  It was evident from the interviews that participants had much more to say about their teaching of NCEA than they did for the IB Diploma qualification. The imbalance in the collected data, with more being related to the NCEA, was interpreted as arising from issues related to the achievement standard structure of this qualification. The impact of the NCEA on teaching and assessment of chemistry in Years 12 and 13 was found to be significant. NCEA achievement standards were seen to be the default curriculum (rather than the New Zealand Curriculum), and drove course designs in the three case schools. Extrinsic motivation from NCEA credits and grades were considered by the teachers to be key factors in students' approaches to learning. Courses were designed to maximise grades, and teachers identified the time spent on rehearsal leading up to internal assessment as a concern. When mapped to the New Zealand Curriculum, it was evident that curricular holes in NCEA courses existed; in particular with regard to nature of science and investigation learning objectives. In the case schools, coherence of chemistry as a discipline was compromised in NCEA courses, with implications for students understanding. The performance of schools is evidently being judged, by both government and the media through the publication of league tables of NCEA grade data. This seems to be driving chemistry learning in directions that are counter to international directions in curriculum reform.  Based on the findings of this study, several recommendations are made. Attention should be paid to supporting (and resourcing) full implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum, with a focus on subject specific professional development for teachers. The relationship between the New Zealand Curriculum and the NCEA needs addressing; the achievement structure of the NCEA as it currently exists, is coming at a high cost in terms of compromising pedagogy and subject connectedness. Issues of the reliability and validity of NCEA assessment also exist, suggesting that review of current implementation and assessment policy, including that relating to the conduct of national examinations, need review.


In the web context, it is difficult to disentangle presentation from process logic, and sometimes even data is not separate from the presentation. Consequently, it becomes crucial to define an abstract model for business processes, and their mapping into an active user interface presentation, using the principle of separation of concern between the process logic, data and its presentation aspects. We endeavour to extend declarative (rule based) XSLT to accommodate the separation of process information from the data structure and presentation, and thus propose to design process aware stylesheets, in a minimally invasive manner. The isolation of the three otherwise entangled aspects of web-processes makes it easy to develop and maintain web-applications in a more independent manner where each individual developer can focus on his/her primary responsibility, like describing the process, maintaining a database, or creating user interface (web-pages) without being levied any substantial effort to learn new technology.


Nutrient composition of 27 cooked snack foods and 19 processed snacks was determined. The cooked foods were
mostly cereal based, made from wheat flour, rice or rice flour, and almost all of them were traditional Malaysian
kuih or dishes. The processed snacks studied were chocolate, cereal, tuber, fish and prawn products. The levels of 19 nutrients were tabulated, expressed as per 100 g edible portion. Selected nutrients in each serving or
packet of the foods were also presented. The paper is intended as a contribution to the knowledge on nutrient
composition of local snack foods, for which information is still greatly lacking. The number of foods studied
is only a fraction of the total number available. More work in this area will have to be carried out, to meet
the increasing demand for such data.


The focus of this paper is to discuss and show the policy relevance of "environmental load displacement" adjustments to national aggregate (macroeconomic) indicators for taking account of openness to the rest of the world. A national economy is considered as a set of production and consumption sectors interdependent with (i) natural processes and (ii) other national economies. In this structural perspective, three distinct "adjustment" concepts are put to work in the development of aggregate indicators. The first type of adjustment centres on accounting conventions, through an enlargement of the scope of national accounting to include specified monetary accounting for selected categories of environmental assets. This is the basis for construction of an "Aggregate Indicator of the Change, during the Current year, in the economic Assets of the Nation" (AICCAN for short). The second indicator type is based on hypotheses of adjustment of the economy itself that is, modelling of an "adjusted economy" which respects specified environmental performance standards. We call the corresponding indicators "greened economy GDP" (geGDP for short). In the third adjustment procedure, the AICCAN/geGDP concepts are maintained, and further classifications are introduced for making the distinction between "costs borne" and "costs caused" by a nation. A simple typology of the different types of between-nation "load displacement" is presented, and a variety of selected examples is presented of different types of "inter-country environmental load displacement" indicator concepts and empirical results that can be found in the published literature. Perspectives are developed for future research that can deepen statistical analysis of patterns of ecologically unequal exchange between countries.


ABSTRACT Boxplots are statistical representations for organizing and displaying data that are relatively easy to create with a five-number summary. However, boxplots are not as easy to understand, interpret, or connect with other statistical representations of the same data. We worked at two different schools with 259 middle school students who constructed and interpreted boxplots. We observed that even students who were able to create boxplots had difficulty interpreting data represented in a boxplot. After sharing specific difficulties that we observed students having, we discuss ways to help students to make sense of data presented in boxplots.


The economic substance doctrine has no basis in economics. The fact that a transaction has an after-tax profit but not a pretax profit is not an indication of inefficient resource allocation. Nor does economic analysis suggest that denying tax benefits to arrangements lacking economic substance will reduce the deadweight loss of taxation. Because a pretax profit requirement has no economic foundation, it is irrelevant whether the calculation of pretax profit takes account of implicit taxes. Both the conventional definition of economic substance based on pretax profit and competing formulations that give less or no weight to pretax profit appear to be based on reverse engineering to isolate features that unappealing transactions in high-profile litigation have shared. All these formulations fail to answer the critical questions surrounding the economic substance doctrine: why lack of economic substance is intrinsically bad, and why intrinsically bad transactions are more likely to lack economic substance. Some supporters of the doctrine concede its lack of economic logic but defend it based on its practical effectiveness. This line of defense is generally based on anecdotes unconnected to the actual content of the doctrine and fails to explain why a pretax profit test should be a relatively effective means of targeting objectionable transactions


Hierarchical structure is ubiquitous in data across many domains. There are many hierarchical clustering methods, frequently used by domain experts, which strive to discover this structure. However, most of these methods limit discoverable hierarchies to those with binary branching structure. This limitation, while computationally convenient, is often undesirable. In this paper we explore a Bayesian hierarchical clustering algorithm that can produce trees with arbitrary branching structure at each node, known as rose trees. We interpret these trees as mixtures over partitions of a data set, and use a computationally efficient, greedy agglomerative algorithm to find the rose trees which have high marginal likelihood given the data. Lastly, we perform experiments which demonstrate that rose trees are better models of data than the typical binary trees returned by other hierarchical clustering algorithms.


Conventional wisdom is that outside the Eighth Amendment context, the Supreme Court does not engage in the sort of explicitly majoritarian state nose-counting for which the 'evolving standards of decency' doctrine is famous. Yet this impression is simply inaccurate. Across a stunning variety of civil liberties contexts, the Court routinely, and explicitly, bases constitutional protection on whether a majority of states agree with it. This Article examines the Supreme Court's reliance on the majority position of the states to identify constitutional norms, then turns to the qualifications, explanations, and implications of state polling as a larger doctrinal phenomenon. While the past few years have seen an explosion of constitutional law scholarship demonstrating the Supreme Court's majoritarian tendencies, the most powerful evidence of the Court's inherently majoritarian nature has been right under our noses all along: its widespread use of explicitly majoritarian doctrine.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between firm resources and performance. We divide firm resources into two types: primary resources and support resources. Primary resources include technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities, which directly contribute to a firm's competitive advantage. Support resources include internal human capital, interfirm collaboration, and managerial vision, which contribute to the development of primary resources. Using a sample of 302 small-and-medium manufacturing firms in Japan, our analysis revealed that both technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities significantly enhanced firm performance, that the firms with superior technological assets tended to possess superior reconfiguration capabilities, and that most of the support resources significantly contributed to the development of both technological assets and reconfiguration capabilities.


This paper presents Cisco's speaker segmentation and recognition (SSR) system, which is a part of a commercial product. Cisco SSR uses speaker segmentation and speaker recognition algorithms with a crowd sourcing approach to create speaker metadata. The speaker metadata makes the enterprise videos more accessible and more navigable by itself, and by its combination with other forms of metadata such as keywords. This paper illustrates various functional blocks of SSR and a typical user interface. The paper describes the specific implementations of speaker segmentation and recognition algorithms. The paper also describes the evaluation data and protocols plus results for both speaker segmentation and speaker recognition tasks. Speaker segmentation results show that Cisco SSR performs comparable to the state-of-the-art on RT-03F data. Speaker recognition results show that a small set of user provided labels can be effectively transferred to a continuously expanding set of videos.


The new stage of globalization, marked by deeper integration of work, creates new opportunities, both in terms of economic growth and job creation, but at the same time creates new challenges and problems in the labor market, such as: increasing labor market flows, exposing jobs to increased global competition and segmenting the labor market in formal and informal terms. It is known that the main feature of the informal labor market, whether we are talking about a developed economy or a developing economy, is flexibility, and the essential feature of a formal labor market is security. In any labor market, there is an increasingly fierce struggle between employers, who want more flexibility and employees, who want more security. Thus, was born the concept of "flexicurity". This paper aims to approach the flexicurity of the labor market through the formal / informal duality in the current context of globalization and to show the optimal combination of job flexibility and the security of the workers, who occupy those jobs.


This thesis attempted to develop a clearer understanding of the social environment
surrounding the athlete and the coach in the team sport context. To that end, achievement
goal theory served as the main framework of the social environment's interpretation and
was studied in relation to the newly developed coach-athlete relationship
conceptualisation. The representative frameworks and conceptualisations introducing
these two concepts were discussed in Chapter II, along with a review of the relevant
literature in the domain of sport. Specifically, the association between athletes' perceptions of the motivational climate created by the coach and athletes' perceptions of the coach-athleter elationship in terms of Closeness, Commitment, and Complementarity,
was examined in Study 1, which comprised Chapter III. Results from canonical
correlational analysis showed that athletes' perceptions of a task-involving motivational
climate were positively associated with high scores on the Closeness, Commitment, and
Complementarity elements. Athletes' perceptions of an ego-involving climate were
negatively associated with the Closeness, Commitment, and Complementarity elements.
These associations were studied at one point in time, with a cross-sectional design. The
second study, which comprised Chapter IV, extended Study 1, in investigating these
associations across a nine-month academic period. Results from the Latent Growth
modelling analysis showed that specific aspects of the task- and ego-involving climate and specific elements of the coach-athlete relationship changed linearly across time, whereas other remained stable. Moreover, it was shown that athletes' perceptions of the coach-athlete relationship predicted later change in athletes' perception of ego-involving climate, supporting the association between these constructs across time. The consistent
association between perceptions of the motivational climate and the coach-athlete
relationship provided the basis for examining their effects on potential cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes through comparative models, in Study 3, which
comprised Chapter V. The third study's unique contribution lies in the examination of the mechanisms through which such effects took place. Results from Structural Equation
modelling analysis showed that both, perceptions of the motivational climate and the
coach-athlete relationship predicted, through the satisfaction of the basic needs,
substantial variation in athletes' motivation, role ambiguity, satisfaction, and performance. Collective results of all the studies, limitations, future directions and implications are discussed in Chapter VI. The intention of this thesis has been to extend past work on the study of the athletic social environment. An amalgamation and incorporation of motivational theories and a relationship conceptualisation was assumed to aid in a better and more holistic understanding of the athletes' experience of the social sporting context.


In this paper, dual-hop amplify-and-forward (AF) cooperative systems in the presence of high-power amplifier (HPA) nonlinearity at semi-blind relays, are investigated. Based on the modified AF cooperative system model taking into account the HPA nonlinearity, the expression for the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination node is derived, where the interference due to both the AF relaying mechanism and the HPA nonlinearity is characterized. The performance of the AF cooperative system under study is evaluated in terms of average symbol error probability (SEP), which is derived using the moment-generating function (MGF) approach, considering transmissions over Nakagami-m fading channels. Numerical results are provided and show the effects of some system parameters, such as the HPA parameters, numbers of relays, quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) order, Nakagami parameters, on performance.


This thesis seeks to explore residents' and visitors' sense of place, in the form of a case study in the English Lake District National Park, which is under environmental, social, and economic pressures. It addresses the issue of local land use changes from an agroecological perspective and an attempt is being made to use the knowledge of landscape values and meanings for enhancing and sustaining the upland landscape. The main methods used are literature study, observations, and interviews, for which 14 residents and 14 visitors as key respondents were chosen. Analysis of the interview results involved the organization and thematic categorization of data. One relevant finding was the uniformity of the identified key categories and sub-categories for the sense of place constructed by the respondents, which was found primarily 'recreational' by visitors and predominantly 'reassuring-comforting' by residents. Physical and spatial components of the landscape were found to have a central role in constructing meanings. Iconic and aesthetic roles of sheep were highly valued, suggesting that historical past can contribute to the creation of landscape meanings, whereas gained products from sheep received much less attention. This finding was unexpected and may suggest a certain level of weakness in promoting local farm products. The results, furthermore, seem to support the idea that humans have an overall tendency to prefer diversity and to seek harmony between landscape elements. This may be extended to the heterogenous mosaic of agricultural and semi-natural components in the upland landscape with a desirable degree of diversity. On the one hand, the physical form of the landscape is considered to be the main contributor to the sense of wilderness. On the other hand, manmade elements of the landscape, however less attractive for the eyes, could convey the sense of 'ordered wilderness'. Changes happen at a very slow scale in Troutbeck and this is one of the main reasons for finding the area attractive. Desired landscape would require the place to become preserved in present state in terms of its relative contentedness and tranquillity. Enhancement of the landscape may involve diversity and balance in the number of tourists, level of development, and rejuvenation of the village itself. This case study confirms that landscapes encompass more than just physical entity and it raises the question of what sort of landscape is desirable in the long term. Ancient values may be rethought and a deeper understanding of the right balance between natural and cultural must be prioritized. Whether to what extent it is possible to define balance, regarding the many different forms of opinions, this is a question that must be fully considered. One difficulty may be to reach an agreement as to where to set limits. An integrated view on nature and human beings may help this process. By recognizing various interpretations of potential users and key values, more access may be gained to 'hidden aspects' of the landscape (Arnesen, 2008) which contributes to a collective way of designing and the enrichment of places. The challenge is now to raise public awareness of landscape values, wider recognition of ecosystem services, and to develop appropriate pasture management regimes so as to support diversity. There is, therefore, definite need for communication and for a greater effort to reconnect producers to consumers. Future landscape changes are inevitable at the social, natural, and economic levels and investigating associations of these dimensions in future studies is recommended.


Undocumented immigrants usually trust their voices to immigration activists rather than engaging with strategies of visuality to reclaim their rights. The universe of illegal border crossing is about radical experiences of invisibility, misidentification, erasure, dispossession, and disappearance. First person testimonies by undocumented immigrants have, however, seen the light of day throughout the last decade in unsuspected media venues, from the New York Times to the Guardian, small sites of independent journalism, and also some book publications. Revealing their presence, their names, and their faces seems a brave decision, when the risk of deportation is part of their everyday reality. In my reading of their testimonies and the photographs illustrating them, I follow two theoretical lines that engage with the subjectivities of marginalized groups: sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos' elaboration of a post abyssal thinking and cultural critic Nicholas Mirzoeff's ideas of spaces of appearance and practices of counter visuality. Combining them will allow me to analyze how instances of self-representation by undocumented immigrants in the United States contribute to crafting a new subject position by a group who, by definition, cannot speak because it is deemed non-existent in legal terms. The issue brings back to the discussion Gayatri Spivak's classical questions on subalternity and power.


Using a simple analytical model incorporating costs and benefits, stock decay, time discounting, and uncertainty, we uncover several important principles governing the choice of price-based policies (e.g., taxes) relative to quantity-based policies (e.g., tradeable permits) for controlling stock externalities. As in Weitzman (1974), the relative slopes of the marginal benefits and costs of controlling the externality continue to be critical determinants of the efficiency of prices relative to quantities, with flatter marginal benefits and steeper marginal costs favoring prices. But we can say more. The relative slopes also help determine the optimal control path, with convergence to a steady state proceeding slowly as long as marginal benefits are relatively flat. On this basis we conclude that the conditions typically characterizing long-lived stock externalities—in particular, that the optimal control path involves long-term changes in the stock level—tend to favor price-based policies. While this result holds over a wide range of conditions, it depends on several key variables. Positive correlation of cost shocks across time, in particular, as well as low rates of time discounting and stock decay, will tilt the balance back toward quantity controls. These results are potentially applicable to a wide range of market failures involving stock externalities. In addition to the obvious application to stock pollutants, one can view species preservation, land-use policy, education, and research as areas where policymakers wish to regulate a stock-like externality. This analysis provides a useful framework for comparing alternative policy instruments for regulating such problems. Regarding climate change, for example, these results suggest that the use of tradeable emission permits rather than emission fees to slow growth in the stock of greenhouse gases is probably inefficient. Optimal policy would involve either tradeable permits that quickly stabilize the stock, or emission fees that gradually slow its growth.


In 2008, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression launched a deep contraction of the US economy. Output fell quickly to a level 10% below trend. Unemployment reached 10% of the labour force. Seven years after the crisis, unemployment was back to normal, but output was 15% below trend. Stagnation had set in. The most important source of the stagnation was a sharp decline in productivity growth. A decline in R&D and other productivity-enhancing investment was at least partially responsible. That decline began before the crisis, but the financial events of 2008 worsened the cutback. A second major source of stagnated output and income was capital depletion. Investment in business equipment fell in half immediately after the crisis. Cumulatively, the effect of below-trend investment accounted for 5 of the 15 percentage points of the shortfall in output. The third major development accounting for stagnation in output was a decline in the labour force that remained after unemployment had returned to normal. This development accounted for more than 3 percentage points of the shortfall in output. As a general matter, the direct decline in labour input and in output associated with the rise in unemployment was not important by 2015, but the follow-on stagnation operating through the effects on the two types of capital formation was substantial.


WiFi devices operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band significantly suffer from the interference caused by overlapping side-channels. This paper proposes a metric to quantify the Quality of Experience (QoE) impact of side-channel interference based on passive, granular wireless driver parameter samples from consumer grade WiFi Access Points (APs). The variables of the metric are BadPLCP, NoPkt, and Glitch which are driver parameters determined in home environment experiments to be highly correlated to interference. Filed analysis of the proposed metric in 802.11ax and 802.11n deployments indicates that side-channel interference prevents medium access and causes frame losses, which are the main drivers of lowered QoE. Further, this paper proposes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based algorithm to detect the interfering side-channel neighbour, where the wireless driver parameters are the input features. For 6 classes representing interference from different side-channels, we achieve 78% accuracy, 83% precision, 78% recall, and 79% f1-score.


Metrics and incentives for open data sharing are presented. A cultural shift to open science is occurring and the science community is transitioning from traditional data practices to open data practices. Open data is accompanied by responsibilities that can be opportunities for stakeholders throughout the data lifecycle. Recognition can serve as incentives for open data practices. In terms of metrics, we need to ask whether the data usable and how they are being used. Metrics also can serve as incentives for open data sharing when recognized by hiring, tenure, promotion, and sponsorship committees. Examples of community efforts to address these issues also are shared.


According to the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, almost 36% of U.S. citizens over the age of 20 are obese. To address this issue, healthcare professionals have proposed interventions that target physical activity, even going so far as to consider physical activity a vital sign to be addressed by health care providers. Although most exercise recommendations target aerobic conditioning, recent studies suggest that weightlifting programs offer many health benefits as well.


In adolescence the body becomes a projection surface that one must control by adorning it, concealing it, abusing it, etc. Existence is a matter of skin, a question of the frontier between inside and outside. Cutting into the body brings suffering to the surface of oneself, where it becomes visible and controllable; it is much more an act of passage than a passage to the act.


Immediate funds transfer (IFT) is a highly convenient, certain, secure, and economical means of payment using bank money. IFT is not available in the U.S. banking system, except for large-value business payments, interbank transfers, and specialized financial market transactions. This article examines the successful experience with IFT in Mexico, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK and concludes that payment system governance is the principal barrier to IFT innovation in the U.S.


Motivated by the benefits, people have used a variety of webbased services to share health information (HI) online. Among these services, Facebook, which enjoys the largest population of active subscribers, has become a common place for sharing various types of HI. At the same time, Facebook was shown to be vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in unintended information disclosure, privacy invasion, and information misuse. As such, Facebook users face the dilemma of benefiting from HI sharing and risking their privacy. In this work, we investigate HI sharing practices, preferences, and risk perceptions among Facebook users. We interviewed 21 participants with chronic health conditions to identify the key factors that influence users' motivation to share HI on Facebook. We then conducted an online survey with 492 Facebook users in order to validate, refine, and extend our findings. While some factors related to sharing HI were found in literature, we provide a deeper understanding of the main factors that influenced users' motivation to share HI on Facebook. The results suggest that the gained benefits from prior HI sharing experiences, and users' overall attitudes toward privacy, correlate with their motivation to disclose HI. Furthermore, we identify other factors, specifically users' perceived health and the audience of the shared HI, that appear to be linked with users' motivation to share HI. Finally, we suggest design improvements— such as anonymous identity as well as search and recommendation features—for facilitating HI sharing on Facebook and similar sites.


The aim of this thesis is to estimate the cost-effectiveness of intermittent preventive treatment of pregnant women (IPTp) with sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) to prevent Low Birth Weight (LBW) and anaemia due to malaria in pregnancy in Gambian multigravidae, including an examination of indirect costs. The study was piggy-backed on a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) of the effectiveness of IPTp conducted in the rural area of the country from July 2002 to February 2004. The specific objectives are to: 1. Examine the cost-effectiveness of introducing SP as IPTp for malaria into normal antenatal care for multigravidae women in rural Gambia; ii. Explore various methods of valuing indirect costs and assess the extent to which they affect the cost-effectiveness ratio; and iii. Make policy recommendations as to whether to introduce SP as IPTp on. cost-effectiveness grounds. The rationale for the study is that both national and international policy makers need precise information to determine which intervention strategies are best for prevention and control of malaria in pregnancy, and which strategies represent good investment. They also need to know how the cost-effectiveness of such interventions compared to other public health interventions. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a recognised tool for advising policy makers on the value of an intervention. However, in practice, there are few CEA studies of malaria in general and. malaria in pregnancy in particular in developing countries. Previous CEA studies of IPTp in developing countries have been limited to primigravidae and secundagravidae. Moreover, most of them were conducted from the perspective of the provider without incorporating indirect or productivity costs. This could partly be due to lack of consensus on the issue of whether or not to include indirect costs. The data required for the study was collected through several methods. For IPTp intervention costs to the health-care provider, antenatal clinic users and their families, a sample of 884 multigraviade were randomly selected from the main IPTp effectiveness trial sample of 2,688 recruited multigravidae. In addition, several sub-studies such as health facility studies for the IPTp intervention, a hospital study for treatment of LBW and anaemia, a time-use study and collection of secondary data were used to estimate costs. Time-use and employment surveys were used to measure the time and alternative values for unpaid work. The costs data were combined with the effectiveness data from the trial to estimate incremental costs and consequences for Base case I (trial sample) and Base case II (non-users of bednets in trial sample). The study results showed that the net costs of IPTp with SP for multigravidae with and without indirect costs were D1,221,771 and D1,887,607 respectively for Base case I. The inclusion of indirect costs led to a 68% increase in net costs in Base case I. The corresponding figures for Base case II were D315,933 and D453,620. The indirect costs in Base case II constituted a 44% increase in net costs. In terms of effectiveness, the DALY s averted in Base cases I and II were -125.8 and -0.13 respectively so the intervention created resource losses. Sensitivity analysis conducted by varying key costs and effectiveness parameters showed the introduction of a haemo lobin test led to over 400% increase in net costs for both cases and reduction in number of doses led to around a 40% reduction in net costs. Except for the use of the opportunity cost method of valuing indirect costs in Base case I that led to a 12% decrease in net costs, the use of all other human capital wage rates led to a less than 10% change in net costs for both base cases. Sensitivity analysis of giving IPTp to all pregnant women (primigravidae, secundigravidae and multigravidae) found that IPTp dominated the control for the two base cases. The domination remained regardless of whether indirect costs were included or not. However, the magnitude depended on the wage rate used in estimating indirect costs. The inclusion of indirect costs led to resource savings in the range of 9%-20% for Base case I and 10%-23% for Base case II. The general conclusion is that giving IPTp with SP to multigravidae alone is not cost-effective. However, some improvements in health outcomes were observed for those women who do not sleep under bednets. If IPTp were to be given to all pregnant women without regard to gravidae, IPTp was dominant with and without indirect costs. The resource savings varied according to the wage rate used. Howeve there may be a policy dilemma associated with giving IPTp to all women knowing that the trial showed it confer no benefits, and even might carry some risks.


Personal and Body Area Networks (PAN/BAN) are spontaneously formed through the participation of a number of devices, using wireless technologies. They are considered to be components of larger Personal Networks (PN), which include clusters formed at a user's points of interest. In such a dynamic environment, a Service Discovery (SD) process is required for the detection of participating devices and their offered services and capabilities. In the course of this research, SD requirements in wireless personal networks were identified and the suitability of some of the existing protocols was investigated. Contributions of the research are listed below. 1) New PN Service Discovery and Management Platform (PNSDP & PNSMP): This is a generic platform that considers the characteristics of PNs, and is inter-operable with Bluetooth Service Discovery Protocol (SDP), Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and Service Location Protocol (SLP). Furthermore, a new solution for enabling IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and Service Session Management in PNs was proposed. 2) Optimised structure for PNSDP: An analytical evaluation was performed to aid in the proposal of the optimised structure for PNSDP. The results suggest that the most appropriate solutions are registry-based discovery within the clusters, peer-to-peer discovery in the infrastructure network, and the use of the binary format for SD messaging. 3) Interoperability between SD legacy protocols within PNSDP: The results of an experimental evaluation of the performance of the Bluetooth SDP suggest that it is better to use the search operation instead of the browse. In ad hoc networks, the SD time and the success rate (SR) of the SSDP were evaluated (through computing simulations) employing different levels and types of background traffics, showing the non-sensitivity of the SD time to congestion. A new (single- and multi-PAN) mobility model was proposed and the SLP was evaluated in terms of the SR, SD time and cost. One of the important results in using registry-based SLP was the increasing of the SR by ~60% at an energy cost increase of ~25% in the multi-PAN case. 4) Enhanced SLP (ESLP): Three new techniques were proposed and evaluated: sleep mode for the service nodes (ESLPi), multi-tier discovery for the convergence algorithm (ESLP2), and scope-based clustering (ESLP3). The achieved results indicate a reduction in energy expenditure of up to 3-5%, as well as a lower SD time in ESLP1 and ESLP3 and a higher SR in ESLP3.


Abstract This paper introduces a simple measure of a concordance pattern among observed outcomes along a network, that is, the pattern in which adjacent outcomes tend to be more strongly correlated than nonadjacent outcomes. The graph concordance measure can be generally used to quantify the empirical relevance of a network in explaining cross-sectional dependence of the outcomes, and as shown in the paper, it can also be used to quantify the extent of homophily under certain conditions. When one observes a single large network, it is nontrivial to make inferences about the concordance pattern. Assuming a dependency graph, this paper develops a permutation-based confidence interval for the graph concordance measure. The confidence interval is valid in finite samples when the outcomes are exchangeable, and under the dependency graph, an assumption together with other regularity conditions, is shown to exhibit asymptotic validity. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the validity of the permutation method is more robust than the asymptotic method to various graph configurations.