A leading social reformer and pioneering abolitionist, British journalist Harriet Martineau fueled the debate over the abolition of slavery that raged on both sides of the Atlantic before the American Civil War. Her impassioned writings about abolition with more than fifty essays and articles collected in this premier annotated edition provide piercing insights into American society, politics, and the issue of slavery. Determined to give a fair, objective hearing to both sides of the American slavery debate, Martineau crossed the ocean in 1834 and discovered a nation in turmoil. As a prominent writer, she was vigorously courted by both opponents and supporters of slavery who sought her endorsement for their political cause. From northern mansions to southern plantations, from Congress and President Jackson's White House to hospitals, factories, and slave quarters, people opened their doors to Martineau, providing her an unusually comprehensive view of American life. Shocked by the intensity of the controversy over slavery, and inspired by the bravery and defiance of abolitionists who campaigned in the face of social pressure and physical danger, Martineau publicly declared her support of abolition in 1835. Joining the ranks of the abolitionists made Martineau a prime target for persecution, and the remainder of her stay in America was fraught with death threats. She returned to England and promoted her cause by writing for the British periodical press, a career that would span the next thirty-five years. Martineau's friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison praised her as a "social heretic" whose compulsion to uphold the moral ground of human dignity and freedom outweighed any concern with popular opinions about her character or reputation. Twenty years after her dramatic American tour, Martineau wrote with pride that her name was "still reviled" in the South. One of the first women to earn a living by her pen, Martineau never faltered in the lifelong crusade that placed her in the forefront of political and social reform efforts. "Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War" conveys one woman's persistent call for absolute, immediate, and universal emancipation."


If you own a digital camera and actively take pictures with it, you probably have a hard drive, memory card, or laptop filled with images that you keep meaning to do something with but never get around to. "101 Quick and Easy Secrets for Using Your Digital Photographs" will show you how to make the most out of the images you have or plan to take, detailing the best way to manipulate, manage, publish, share, and promote your photographs. You'll learn how to navigate through both free downloadable software programs that help you manage your photos, such as Picasa, and the programs you already have on your computer, such as iPhoto. To help you share your photos with others, the book explores free online sites, such as Flickr and Facebook, and tells you how to best utilize them to suit your needs. The book also walks through the printing process, from finding the right paper for your prints to finding the best printer to make them last. And if you don?t want to do the printing yourself, you'll discover how to outsource it. And when it comes to displaying your printed photographs, whether you prefer elaborate scrapbooks or simple frames, this book will show you the best places to purchase all the supplies and tools you need. Whether you are a professional looking to polish your portfolio and promote yourself or a casual photographer just looking to organize and display your family photos, "101 Quick and Easy Secrets for Using Your Digital Photographs" will help you make the most out of your collection of digital photographs.


The purpose of the present study was to examine the maternal perceptions of the psychosocial sequelae regarding the loss of an infant to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and the effectiveness of the informal and organized sources of support. Seventy-three mothers experiencing a SIDS death within a 3-year period responded to a questionnaire designed to obtain maternal perceptions of the experience. Results indicate that the death of the infant was viewed as a severe life crisis. However, the majority of the mothers reported increased marital supportiveness, increased emotional closeness to surviving children, and a generally satisfactory adjustment. Perceived emotional support was significantly related to the severity of maternal grief reactions. Although the majority of initial grief symptoms subsided, the data indicate that maternal grief reactions may be more extended than would have been predicted from previous literature. A significant number of mothers reported receiving sufficient informational and emotional support. However, one quarter of the respondents indicated that the support was inadequate. Few mothers contacted mental health professionals and, of those that did, their perception was that this contact was of little or no value. Implications for improved support by mental health professionals as well as directions for future research are discussed.


What is the theoretical rationale that e-government evaluation should employ? Witnessing the changes in society and the public sector, an adaptation is proposed, to evaluate trust building as the goal of egovernment, rather than looking for the best predictors of e-government adoption. Organisations that provide online services are concerned about the evaluation of service quality, user satisfaction, and the ultimate goal of the system – value creation. Considering trust as a major value that organisations wish to achieve, the impact of service quality on trust building is at the focus of this study: What are the system features that constitute trust in the organisation? To what extent would each feature explain trust building? In the context of e-government that serves the wide public it is of particular significance to scrutinize the nature of the relationships between the user and the system. Therefore, an adaptation is proposed, to evaluate trust building as the goal of system usage rather than its predictor, in a formative model. This theoretical rationale alters the conventional relationships between well-studied measures of service quality. In a modified version of ESQUAL, the service measures were turned into indicators of trust. The findings (n=395) support the viability of the model; the extent to which the user puts trust in the organisation depends on how trustworthy the system is. In addition, the findings support the conceptualization of richer measures of system usage as stronger indicators. Theoretical, methodological and practical implications are discussed.


The discourse on disaster resilience and vulnerability entails diverse research and policy communities each assigning different meanings to the concepts, which in turn influences their measurement and implementation in decision-making contexts. This invited contribution introduces a themed section with five independently submitted papers on the broad topic of vulnerability and resilience. The distinctive geographical focus on the historical development of vulnerability and resilience and their contemporary manifestations is illustrated by the five internationally focused case studies presented in the themed section.


Altitude Sickness Whether the incidence of malaria will be (or has been) affected by the warming climate is poorly resolved. Global-scale analyses are fraught with technical difficulties, including problems with separating out changes resulting from destruction of mosquito habitat, insecticide use, and antimalarial drug use from multidecadal trends in climate change. Siraj et al. (p. 1154) performed parallel analyses of highland malaria in Ethiopia and Colombia to ask whether interannual changes in temperature could explain variation in malaria incidence with altitude. Modeling the data confirmed that malaria moves up in elevation in warmer years and allowed estimates of how many more millions of cases could be expected in tropical highland areas if the mean temperature increased by 1° to 3°C. Warmer years promote malaria cases at higher altitudes. The impact of global warming on insect-borne diseases and on highland malaria in particular remains controversial. Temperature is known to influence transmission intensity through its effects on the population growth of the mosquito vector and on pathogen development within the vector. Spatiotemporal data at a regional scale in highlands of Colombia and Ethiopia supplied an opportunity to examine how the spatial distribution of the disease changes with the interannual variability of temperature. We provide evidence for an increase in the altitude of malaria distribution in warmer years, which implies that climate change will, without mitigation, result in an increase of the malaria burden in the densely populated highlands of Africa and South America.


A profound analysis of all relevant business data in a company is necessary for optimizing business processes effectively. Current analyses typically run either on business process execution data or on operational business data. Correlations among the separate data sets have to be found manually under big effort. However, to achieve a more informative analysis and to fully optimize a company's business, an efficient consolidation of all major data sources is indispensable. Recent matching algorithms are insufficient for this task since they are restricted either to schema or to process matching. We present a new matching framework to combine process data models and operational data models (semi-)automatically for performing such a profound business analysis. We describe this approach and its basic matching rules as well as an experimental study that shows the achieved high recall and precision.


Yellow-cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis (D. Don) Orsted ex D.P. Little) is in a century-long decline coinciding with the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA). The leading hypothesis explaining this decline is a decrease in insulating snowpack due to warming and increased susceptibility to damaging frosts in the root zone. A ring-width series from yellow-cedar on Excursion Ridge (260 m a.s.l.) in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska, and another from trees on Pleasant Island (150 m a.s.l.) in the Tongass National Forest in Icy Strait were compared with regional monthly temperature and precipita- tion data from Sitka, Alaska, to investigate the changing growth response to temperature at these sites. Comparisons with monthly temperatures from 1832 to 1876 during the end of the Little Ice Age show that the high-elevation Excursion Ridge and the low-elevation Pleasant Island sites strongly favored warmer January through July temperatures. Both tree populations have markedly changed their response from a positive to a strong negative correlation with January through July tempera- tures since 1950. This strong negative response to warming by the yellow-cedar together with a positive relationship with to- tal March and April precipitation suggests that these yellow-cedar sites may be susceptible to decline. Furthermore, these analyses are consistent with the hypothesis that the yellow-cedar decline is linked to decreased snowpack.


This paper explores the political ecological basis behind events in New Zealand's sustainable harvesting regime of native forest species on public land. The case study centers on the mandate of the 1999 newly elected Labour-led government to stop all native forest harvesting on Crown-owned land along the West Coast of New Zealand's South Island. Ethnographic research was conducted from May to July of 2001. This study examined how different members of a given institution or community often have disparate views on logging practices and natural resource conservation while simultaneously exhibiting consensus regarding certain logging and conservation practices. A historical background traces the trajectory of New Zealand's forestry sector and the relationships between conservationists and logging communities. This is followed by a discussion on the key institutions involved in the Labour-led government decision for the cessation of native forest harvesting and what their primary sentiments were regarding the government mandate. Ultimately, this study illustrates how the appropriate utilization of natural resources shift over time and that the struggles over the 'proper' use of resources are politically and historically constructed. These struggles, of course, are pertinent in any context where human-environment interactions occur, regardless of conventional notions on 'developed' and 'undeveloped.'


Medical embedded systems are capable of recording vast data sets for physiological and medical research. Linear modeling techniques are proposed as a means to explore relationships between two or more medical or physiological signal measurements where a causal relationship is believed to be present. Multiple regression is explored for use in medical monitoring, telehealth, and clinical applications. Spectral regression methods for high-bandwidth medical and physiological signals are demonstrated. The twostage method consists of performing an FFT over a timelagged window of the predictor signal, and constructing a model based on the FFT coefficients. The output of the regression is used in a clustering to explore structure in the array of spectral predictors. It has been applied to medical and physiological time series data, specifically the link between respiration and blood oxygen saturation percentage in sleep apnea patients. Spectral predictors achieved a dramatically better goodness of fit than time-lagged predictors according to standard analysis of variance measures. In the dataset examined, the spectral model achieved a multiple R of 0.90, indicating that 90% of the variation in the dependent signal was captured by the model, while an ordinary distributed lag model had a R of only 0.016.


Severe irritability is impairing to affected individuals and those around them. Literature on irritability and social functioning is growing with a focus on face emotion identification tasks. Most studies, however, have been conducted in children and adolescents, leaving a gap in the literature on adults. This study sought to determine how state irritability, induced during a frustrating computer task, and trait irritability, measured through self-report questionnaires, related to the performance of seventy-five undergraduate students on a face emotion morphing task. Responses to anger were of particular interest and explored through a hostile attribution bias. During the task participants viewed brief movies of faces morphing from a neutral to a 100% prototypical emotional facial expression and were asked to stop the movie when they detected the face emotion. Participants in the frustration condition and participants with high trait irritability were expected to require greater emotional intensity in a facial expression in order to identify non-angry emotions and less intensity in order to identify anger. Results indicated that, although the frustration manipulation was successful, participants in the frustration and nonfrustration conditions identified emotions at equal intensities. Participants in the frustration condition also identified happiness – the most easily identifiable emotion, and anger at comparable intensities. Trait irritability was unrelated to overall emotion intensity but correlated with hostile attribution biases. These findings suggest that the study of irritability and emotion identification should distinguish between state and trait irritability.


Title of dissertation: A PUBLIC HEALTH MODELING BASED APPROACH TO INFORMATION SECURITY QUANTIFICATION Edward M. Condon, Doctor of Philosophy, 2015 Dissertation directed by: Professor Michel Cukier Reliability Engineering Program Modeling the occurrence of computer security incidents within a defined population of computers can be used to help understand some of factors contributing to risk and transmission of these incidents among the population. A better understanding of these factors can be used to determine appropriate intervention actions that can be applied to the population, which may also be evaluated through the application of models. Explanatory models attempt to include and account for various primary factors that affect the occurrence of computer security incidents. Models based on observed security incidents may also be used to evaluate interventions even when explanatory models may not exist or may be difficult to formulate or express for a particular incident type. Forecasting models can be used to project the occurrence of incidents in the future and these projections can be compared to actual observations before and after interventions are applied. The following aspects of modeling computer security incidents are explored: (1) the presentation and discussion of adapting some commonly used infectious disease models for modeling the spread of some types of computer security incidents along with applicable intervention actions; (2) an illustration of how these types of models could be applied to making resource allocation decisions regarding intervention efforts; (3) the presentation and comparison of models that can be used for tracking/forecasting security incidents and monitoring the impact of interventions; (4) the presentation of a method for estimating model features and parameter distributions from observed data; and (5) the exploration of some population characteristics and models for evaluating where to focus or target intervention actions. When resources for responding to or preventing computer security incidents are limited or constrained, the ability to accurately model and evaluate intervention actions can be a useful tool for making the most of these resources. A PUBLIC HEALTH MODELING BASED APPROACH TO INFORMATION SECURITY QUANTIFICATION


ObjectiveOur project goal is to enhance the capability of automating health surveillance[MOU1] by US Department of Defense (DoD) epidemiologists. We employ software tools that build and train Bayesian networks (BNs) to facilitate the development of analytic fusion of multiple, disparate data sources comprising both syndromic and diagnostic data streams for rapid estimation of overall levels of concern for potential disease outbreaks. Working with previously developed heuristic BNs, we evaluate the ability of machine learning algorithms to detect outbreaks with greater accuracy. We use historical training data on the ability to detect outbreaks of influenza-like illness (ILI).IntroductionThe motivation for this project is to provide greater situational awareness to DoD epidemiologists monitoring the health of military personnel and their dependents. An increasing number of data sources of varying clinical specificity and timeliness are available to the staff. The challenge is to integrate all the information for a coherent, up-to-date view of population health.Developers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in collaboration with medical epidemiologists at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch, previously designed a multivariate decision support tool to add to the DoD implementation of the Electronic Surveillance System for Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE). Data sources included clinical encounter records including free-text chief complaints, filled prescription records, and laboratory test orders and results. Filtered data streams were derived from these sources for daily monitoring, and alerting algorithms were customized and applied to the resulting time series. We built BNs to derive overall levels of concern from the collection of data streams and algorithm outputs to derive, in the form of daily fusion alerts, the overall level of various outbreak concerns. Visualizations made apparent which data features accounted for these concerns, including drill-down to the level of patient record details. Advantages of the BN approach are this transparency and the capacity for assessments using incomplete data and incorporating novel and report-based data streams. The need for such fusion was nearly unanimous in a global survey of public health epidemiologists [1].Our proof-of-concept system based on commercial BN software was well received by a cross-section of DoD health monitors. The new software tools we apply in this project use freely available R packages which provide more comprehensive tools for BN training and development. These results will allow us to improve the analytic fusion abilities of DoD ESSENCE, as well as in civilian surveillance systemsOur testing procedures and results are presented below.MethodsWe employ a 3.75-year dataset (2006-2010) with information from 502 US medical treatment facilities including 289 hospitals. Our data include time series of daily counts and alerting algorithm outputs from each facility for syndrome groups based on a) chief complaints and diagnosis codes from clinic visits, b) groups of laboratory test orders and influenza test results, and c) selected groups of filled prescriptions. For each facility group, the challenge is to combine these data streams into a daily assessment of levels of concern for an ILI outbreak. The software developed in this project facilitates the formation, training, and testing of BNs for outbreak alerting based on the datasets above.Underlying each BN is a directed acyclic graph whose leaf nodes represent discrete states of concern for each data stream, ranging from general streams such as ILI-related chief complaints to specific ones such as positive flu test results. The states are derived from both daily stream counts and alerting algorithm outputs. Internal nodes represent mid-level combinations of indicators, such as ILI concern based only on clinic data, and parent nodes which represent the calculated level of concern based on all data sources. The connectivity between the nodes, and the orientation of the edges of the graph are determined by the heuristic relationships adopted in previous projects [2]. Each node is associated with a conditional probability table (CPT). Training a BN requires state assignments for every node in the underlying graph, which must be obtained from a trusted source. These assignments can generate CPTs at each node of the BN such that, when given only a set of evidence nodes, the levels of concern can be propagated up the network to provide the desired levels of concern at the decision nodes.Truth data for ILI outbreaks comes from two sources: 33 documented outbreaks with dates supplied by DoD surveillance reports or media articles and, because many modest-sized outbreaks are unreported, 81 unconfirmed data-derived events with algorithmic alerts across multiple data sources. We use data from the more numerous unconfirmed events to train the BNs.To avoid commercial software constraints, we use the free R package gRain [3] to create, train, and test the BNs. We test multiple BNs for multivariate ILI outbreak detection, all based on the same nodal structure with 18 parent, intermediate, and leaf nodes. Candidate BNs are created and trained using either a) CPTs determined with a multivariate stochastic search in the previous project, augmented with ground truth data or b) a heuristic lookup table of state combinations.ResultsTable 1 shows the high odds ratios calculated for candidate BNs. These statistics are calculated for decision node outputs for event vs non-event dates in the truth data with the constraint that every event is detected for at least one date. The machine learning advantage from the training data is evident from comparing the two rows. To show the advantage of fusing data sources, Table 2 gives analogous odds ratios based on single-stream alerting algorithms. Aside from the lower detection statistics, single streams offer no corroboration of statistical alerts.ConclusionsAnalytic fusion is essential for the efficient, timely use of a growing collection of complex, streaming information by a limited workforce of human health monitors. This project builds upon previous fusion capability for automated health surveillance by expediting new development and facilitating software implementation through open source tools. The detection results indicate a significant advantage in both sensitivity and alert rates of automated systems achievable with machine learning. Moreover, if basic challenges of multivariate data acquisition and determination of truth datasets for supervised learning can be met, further improvements are likely using BN structure discovery methods as well as other machine learning approaches.References1. Hopkins RS, Tong CC, Burkom HS, et al. A Practitioner-Driven Research Agenda for Syndromic Surveillance. Public Health Rep. 2017;132(1_suppl):116s-126s.2. Burkom H.S., Elbert Y., Ramac-Thomas L., Cuellar C., Hung V., Refinement of a Population-Based Bayesian Network for Fusion of Health Surveillance Data, Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, Vol 5, No 1 (2013), DOI: https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v5i1.4413.3. Højsgaard S., Graphical Independence Networks with the gRain Package for R, Journal of Statistical Software, (2012) 46(10), DOI: 10.18637/jss.v046.i10.


The tidally modulated outflow of brackish water from a sea loch forms a thin surface layer that propagates into the coastal ocean as a buoyant gravity current, transporting nutrients and sediments, as well as fresh water, heat and momentum. The fresh intrusion both propagates into and generates a strongly stratified environment which supports trains of nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs). NLIWs are shown to propagate ahead of this buoyancy input in response to propagation of the outflow water into the stratified environment generated by the previous release as well as in the opposing direction after the reflection from steep bathymetry. Oblique aerial photographs were taken and photogrammetric rectification led to the identification of the buoyant intrusion and the subsequent generation of NLIWs. An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was deployed on repeated reciprocal transects in order to make simultaneous CTD, ADCP and microstructure shear measurements of the evolution of these phenomena in conjunction with conventional mooring measurements. AUV-based temperature and salinity signals of NLIWs of depression were observed together with increased turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rates of over two orders of magnitude within and in the wake of the NLIWs. Repeated measurements allow a unique opportunity to investigate the horizontal structure of these phenomena. Simple metric scaling demonstrates that these these processes are likely to be feature of many fjordic systems located on the west coast of Scotland, but may also play a key role in the assimilation of the outflow from many tidally dominated fjordic systems throughout the world.


Decentralization reforms have shifted responsibility for public service delivery to local government, yet little is known about how their management practices or behavior shape performance. We conducted a comprehensive management survey of mid-level education bureaucrats and their staff in every district in Tanzania, and employ flexible machine learning techniques to identify important management practices associated with learning outcomes. We find that management practices explain 10 percent of variation in a district's exam performance. The three management practices most predictive of performance are: i) the frequency of school visits; ii) school and teacher incentives administered by the district manager; and iii) performance review of staff. Although the model is not causal, these findings suggest the importance of robust systems to motivate district staff, schools, and teachers, that include frequent monitoring of schools. They also show the importance of surveying subordinates of managers, in order to produce richer information on management practices.


Background: Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) infections are very common in Iran and worldwide and the risk for resistance to anti-herpetic drugs has increased recently. Alternative antiherpetic agents seem necessary to control and reduce the emergence of -resistant strains. Oriental medicine suggests some herbal options for the treatment of herpes lesions. Aim: This study reviews some of the common herbal treatments in oriental medicine for herpes and their availability in Iran. Methods: In this narrative review, information on in vitro and in vivo studies and clinical trials was searched via international databases including PubMed and SCOPUS, using herpes, herb, Oriental medicine, Chinese medicine and the names of herbs as keywords, which resulted in 45 related articles; of these, 38 entered this review. The inclusion criteria were the in vitro and in vivo studies, randomized controlled trials and reviews with acceptable levels of evidence. Information regarding those herbs in traditional Iranian medicine, their availability in Iran, and the available pharmaceutical products in this country were investigated through Persian references. Results: Among herbs suggested by Oriental herbal medicine for the treatment of herpes lesions, Melia azedarach, Aloe barbadensis, Rheum palmatum, Salvia officinalis, Melissa officinalis, Melaleuca alternifolia, Hypericum perforatum, Crataegus pinnatifida, Punica granatum and Rheum palmatum, are backed by acceptable scientific evidence, and are available in Iran. Conclusion: Considering the evidence and availability of many of Oriental herbal medicines for herpes in Iran, they can be utilized for treatment and research purposes.


Visual analytics aims to combine the strengths of human and electronic data processing. Visualisation, whereby humans and computers cooperate through graphics, is the means through which this is achieved. Seamless and sophisticated synergies are required for analysing spatio-temporal data and solving spatio-temporal problems. In modern society, spatio-temporal analysis is not solely the business of professional analysts. Many citizens need or would be interested in undertaking analysis of information in time and space. Researchers should find approaches to deal with the complexities of the current data and problems and find ways to make analytical tools accessible and usable for the broad community of potential users to support spatio-temporal thinking and contribute to solving a large range of problems.


Adeno-associated virus (AAV) is a small non-enveloped virus and as a member of the parvovirus family, it contains a single stranded DNA genome. AAV's life cycle in vitro is strongly dependent not only on cellular factors but also on helper functions provided by other viruses, for example adenovirus, herpes virus and, to a certain extent, papillomavirus (HPV). Although AAVs are wide spread throughout the human population, no disease is yet associated with them. Accordingly, AAV became attractive as a vector for gene therapy studies, but even though the virus is well studied in vitro and now used in clinical trials as a vector, not much is known about AAV infection in vivo. AAV was initially isolated from humans together with its helper adenovirus. However, adenovirus-independent replication of AAV has been reported for a number of cellular situations, including differentiating keratinocytes with or without the presence of HPV, and in cells with an activated DNA damage response due to genotoxic agents. In the work reported here we have undertaken a systematic study of these alternative helper activities with a view to evaluating their contribution to natural infections by AAV. We used three different systems of cultured keratinocytes and showed that in each case in vitro differentiation was achieved. In two of these, the cells were from HPV-induced lesions. We found that AAV replicates efficiently in differentiating monolayer foreskin keratinocytes in the presence but not in the absence of adenovirus. Likewise naturally HPV-infected cervical keratinocytes only support the full life cycle of AAV if adenovirus is present. Even though HPV can provide certain helper functions, it is less efficient as a helper than adenovirus. We also exploited osteosarcoma cells, which are particularly well infected by AAV. Our results indicate that U2OS osteosarcoma cells are semi-permissive for AAV growth. Induction of a DNA damage response in these cells, or in HPV-containing keratinocytes, stimulates AAV genome amplification. Although AAV replication in the absence of helper virus can readily be demonstrated, this is either at a relatively low level or limited to part of the AAV growth cycle. We conclude that although these alternative helper systems can contribute to the natural history of AAV, the presence of an efficient helper virus seems likely to be needed for AAV to persist in the human population.


Analysis of significant level radiosonde data from a network of Arctic stations reveals a systematic reduction in midwinter surface-based inversion depths over the past few decades, accompanied by a rise in surface temperature. Similar trends are observed over a wide sector, from 62°W to 162°W and from 70°N to 83°N. Possible causes for these changes include increases in warm air advection, cloud cover, ice crystals, aerosols, and greenhouse gases, but the specific reasons are difficult to identify, due to strong interactions between many potentially important factors. Nevertheless, the changes are significant for studies of Arctic haze, since the midwinter stable boundary layer has been decreasing in depth over time.


The authors analyze exchange rate pass-through in an estimated structural model of a small open economy that incorporates three types of nominal rigidity (wages and the prices of domestically produced and imported goods) and eight different structural shocks. The model is estimated using quarterly data from Canada and the United States. It predicts a remarkably similar dynamic relationship between the nominal exchange rate and prices in response to the different structural shocks: the nominal exchange rate overshoots its long-run level, and changes in the nominal exchange rate are passed through slowly to the domestic price level. The authors show that, although pricing to market (the slow adjustment of the domestic-currency prices of imported goods) is necessary to generate slow pass-through to the prices of imported goods, it is not necessary to generate slow pass-through to the overall price level. Sticky domestic wages also generate slow exchange rate pass-through, even when the prices of imported goods adjust instantaneously to changes in the exchange rate.


This paper considers automatic accent recognition system performance in relation to the specific nature of the accent data. This is of relevance to the forensic application, where an accent recogniser may have a place in casework involving various accent classification tasks with different challenges attached. The study presented here is composed of two main parts. Firstly, it examines the performance of five different automatic accent recognition systems when distinguishing between geographically-proximate accents. Using geographically-proximate accents is expected to challenge the systems by increasing the degree of similarity between the varieties we are trying to distinguish between. The second part of the study is concerned with identifying the specific phonemes which are important in a given accent recognition task, and eliminating those which are not. Depending on the varieties we are classifying, the phonemes which are most useful to the task will vary. This study therefore integrates feature selection methods into the accent recognition system shown to be the highest performer, the Y-ACCDIST-SVM system, to help to identify the most valuable speech segments and to increase accent recognition rates.


In a network industry like railways, major systemic innovations and new technological trajectories are tightly connected to national institutional frameworks and policies. The major transformation occurring in Europe brought by the liberalization and harmonization of railways since a decade provides a fertile ground to study the link between innovation and institutions. This article aims at providing a structured framework to look at the innovation process in the railway sector. It focuses on institutional and innovation models before and after the railway sector's reorganization. The article is based on the case study of the European Train Management System (ERTMS), whose development spans over a period of 15 years and thus offers a very good foundation to look at the evolution of innovation models. The emergence of different innovation models underline the deep changes that occurred within the rail sector. While the study of ERTMS allows drawing some lessons on how to better manage the development and deployment of key innovative technologies in the railway sector, it also raises questions on how institutions shall adapt in order to cope with fundamental technological transformations.


Suppose you have a wooden board, and you need to drive a nail into it. You have the nail, and you have the board, but you do not have a hammer. You do, however, have a pipe wrench. What do you do? Faced with this problem, some people would simply abandon the task. Not possessing the right tool for the job, they would take the position that it would be better that the task not be performed than that it be performed poorly. But most of us would react differently. Especially if the task is genuinely important, we will whack away at the nail with the pipe wrench. This will take longer than it would have taken with a hammer, the nail will still probably not go all the way into the board, and the wrench will likely be damaged in the process. But it would be better than nothing. In many respects, the culture of First Amendment discourse and argument, both in the courtroom and in the larger culture, exhibits many of the features of the story of the nail and the pipe wrench. With surprising frequency, people and organizations with a wide array of political goals find that society has not given them the doctrinally or rhetorically effective argumentative tools they need to advance their goals. The absence of these legally or culturally accepted arguments, like the absence of the hammer, disturbs them, but it also leads them, faced as they are with immediate goals that cannot wait until the world is reordered, to look for plausibly effective but ill-fitting tools. And in looking for these imperfect but usable tools, they often find that the leading candidate is the First Amendment. Like the pipe wrench, the First Amendment is frequently called upon to do a job for which it is poorly designed. The job frequently gets done, but, as with driving a nail with a pipe wrench, the job gets done poorly, and the tool is damaged in the process.


Adverse-possession doctrine labors under a pair of disabilities: a hesitancy by theorists to embrace the abandonment-and-recapture principle that informs the doctrine, and a substantial unwillingness of governments to abandon an antiquated and outmoded maxim shielding them from the doctrine's important work. Removing these disabilities will allow a series of positive outcomes. First, it will demonstrate that all would-be adverse possessors, not just those acting "in good faith" or with possessory intent, should enjoy the fruits of the doctrine. Second, it will provide valuable additional means by which the public may monitor the performance of government employees, and additional discipline to governments tempted to allow their aspirational commitments to outstrip their fiscal capacities. As an added benefit, it can achieve these ends without posing any threat to emergent environmental values, while serving as a positive support for effective government conservation efforts. Moreover, once adverse possession is recognized as a process of abandonment and recapture, and is applied to government entities as well as to private, opportunities arise to employ the doctrine expansively for the protection of property and liberty interests against aggressive overregulation and overcriminalization. The doctrine can become a tool for tempering and restraining burgeoning zoning and other property- and liberty-curtailing regulations by declaring regulations that have gone long unenforced in the face of broad, open public violation to be abandoned and unenforceable. Perhaps most intriguingly, it can provide a secure foundation in the American legal system for the doctrine of desuetude, by which long-violated and long-unenforced criminal prohibitions lose their restrictive capacity.


In Cypriot Greek, word-final /n/ assimilates to word-initial fricative and sonorant geminates producing 'super-geminates'. This study examines whether these super-geminates are perceptually distinct from other types of word-initial and postlexical geminates. The results of the study indicate that supergeminates were not readily identified by the subjects, while the contrast between word-initial geminates and singletons was more marked.


The author looks at ways in which fictional and fictionalised legal stories shape popular attitudes to the activities of lawyers, judges, police officers, other legal actors, and the functioning of the justice system. Considering scenes from courtroom films as cultural artefacts that that can serve as teaching tools, the author examines how one might analyse films' impact on their audiences. Article by Paul Bergman, Professor of Law Emeritus, UCLA Law School - published in Amicus Curiae - Journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies. The Journal is produced by the Society for Advanced Legal Studies at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.


There is a well established body of feminist scholarship critiquing the methodological and epistemological limits of an "objective" view from nowhere in urban research and political economy frameworks. Recent developments, such as the planetary urbanization thesis, have reignited feminist efforts to counter patriarchal, colonial, and hegemonic ways of knowing. Here, we recount our frustrations with the reproduction of dominant political economic modes of "knowing" urban processes such as gentrification and culture-led regeneration in research that seeks to uncover the production of neoliberal spaces and subjectivities. We argue that this narrow approach forecloses the possibility of observing or working with radical world-making projects that stand outside of traditional understandings of the political. Thus, we heed our feminist colleagues' call to foreground the undecidability of the urban, allowing ourselves and our subjects to express uncertainty about the causes, outcomes, and impacts of urban processes. In what follows, we share short research vignettes from our projects in Toronto and Glasgow and discuss the implications of forging unexpected solidarities, engaging in embodied, participatory knowledge production, and reading urban politics off of persistent, uncertain, under-the-radar projects. We maintain that working from a position of undecidability yields greater potential for renewing our political imaginations beyond neoliberalism.


The development of information technology and, consequently, rapid increase of the available amount of data have contributed to the fact that data mining, as a key component of a wider interactive, iterative and creative process of knowledge discovery from data, is of great importance in economic research. The basic idea of data mining is reflected in the efficient and effective identification of regularities, that are hidden in large sets of (multidimensional) data stored in information repositories, using software-supported methods and algorithms. Taking into account the foregoing, in this doctoral dissertation, the most important theoretical-methodological aspects of data mining approaches in data analysis are examined, as well as its applicative possibilities in the field of studying economic phenomena. In this sense, trends in the modern economy, from the perspective of the growing role of data (as a usable resource for generating values), fundamental terminology related to the concept of data mining as well as the positive and negative contexts of its application, have been analyzed. The tasks of discovering knowledge from data, in function of creating a data mining model, are viewed through the prism of a wide range of methodological procedures for their implementation. Special attention has been dedicated to the relationship between data mining and statistics, as a science that traditionally deals with the discovery of regularities from data.
The results of the research indicate the great potential of integrated implementation of statistical and data mining approaches in finding innovative methodological solutions to specific problems and, at the same time, suggest the need for mutual adaptation and modification of basic paradigms of data analysis on both sides. Empirical part of the dissertation points out innovative conceptually-methodological frameworks for analyzing data from time series of stock exchange indices and survey data on service users. Empirical results, as the exact knowledge extracted from data, confirm the importance of implementing data mining analysis in the problem contexts of economics, business economics and management. The conducted research represents a suitable basis for profiling future research orientations in the field of data mining application concerning the study of economic phenomena.


ABSTRACT In studies of consumption, social theories of practice foreground the purchasing and use of resources not for intrinsic pleasure but rather in the routine accomplishment of "normal" ways of living. In this paper, we argue that a key strength of theories of practice lies in their ability to expose questions of power in the construction of normality, but that this has been largely overlooked. Since practice theories are leveraged in understanding urgent questions of climate change, we use ethnographic data of a sustainable community in England to examine the normative dimension of sustainability. Using Michel Foucault's approach to practice, we elucidate the social technologies operating in the community that govern sustainable practices in the absence of a singular cultural authority. We illustrate how shared understanding guiding normative sustainable practice was negotiated and maintained through collective ethical work, the paramount importance of interpersonal harmony, and the continual formation of ethical subjects.


Users are frequently cited as being the weakest link in the information security chain. However, in many cases they are ill-positioned to follow good practice and make the necessary decisions. Part of the reason here is that, even if security awareness, training and/or education have been provided, some of the key points may have been forgotten by the time that users find themselves facing security-related decisions. A potential solution in this context is to ensure that security guidance and feedback is available at the point of need, providing effective information to help users to make the right decision at the right time to avoid security risks. This paper examines the issue of targeted security awareness raising, and presents the results of an experimental study conducted to test the effectiveness of the approach. This experiment was based around the scenario of connecting to Wi-Fi networks, and determining whether participants could make informed and correct decisions about which networks were safe to connect to. Four alternative interfaces were tested (ranging from a version that mimicked the standard Windows Wi-Fi network selection interface, through to versions with security ratings and additional guidance). The aim of the experiment was to determine the extent to which providing such information could affect user decisions when presented with a range of networks to connect to, and help to move them more effectively in the direction of security. The findings revealed that, while they still exhibited far from perfect behaviour in terms of selecting more secure networks in preference to less protected ones, there was a tangible improvement amongst the users that had been exposed to the selection interfaces offering and promoting more security-related information. In common with findings from other security contexts, these results suggest that users' security behaviours can be positively influenced purely through the provision of additional information, enabling them to make better choices even if the system does not provide any further means of enforcement.


Much of the political rhetoric about healthcare in the United States is couched in terms of healthcare as a right or entitlement. Healthcare as a right, like all welfare rights, carries with it the obligation to pay for it. This paper proposes that healthcare be considered, not a right, but rather a duty within the framework of a Kantian approach to ethics. The categorical imperatives of rational beings include the duties of self-preservation and self-development. As a precondition for these duties, health is essentially bound up with the nature and duties of physical, rational beings. The complexity of healthcare ensures that virtually all persons will need the services of others, and the expense of healthcare can exceed the resources even of those who are insured. Therefore, a just society has a moral duty to ensure access to healthcare to all of its members.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV) accuracy can vary substantially depending on the dynamic susceptibility-weighted contrast-enhanced (DSC) acquisition and postprocessing methods, due to blood-brain barrier disruption and resulting T1-weighted leakage and T2- and/or T2*-weighted imaging (T2/T2*WI) residual effects. We set out to determine optimal DSC conditions that address these errors and maximize rCBV accuracy in differentiating posttreatment radiation effect (PTRE) and tumor. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We recruited patients with previously treated high-grade gliomas undergoing image-guided re-resection of recurrent contrast-enhancing MR imaging lesions. Thirty-six surgical tissue samples were collected from 11 subjects. Preoperative 3T DSC used 6 sequential evenly timed acquisitions, each by using a 0.05-mmol/kg gadodiamide bolus. Preload dosing (PLD) and baseline subtraction (BLS) techniques corrected T1-weighted leakage and T2/T2*WI residual effects, respectively. PLD amount and incubation time increased with each sequential acquisition. Corresponding tissue specimen stereotactic locations were coregistered to DSC to measure localized rCBV under varying PLD amounts, incubation times, and the presence of BLS. rCBV thresholds were determined to maximize test accuracy (average of sensitivity and specificity) in distinguishing tumor (n = 21) and PTRE (n = 15) samples under the varying conditions. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) areas under the curve (AUCs) were statistically compared. RESULTS: The protocol that combined PLD (0.1-mmol/kg amount, 6-minute incubation time) and BLS correction methods maximized test AUC (0.99) and accuracy (95.2%) compared with uncorrected rCBV AUC (0.85) and accuracy (81.0%) measured without PLD and BLS (P = .01). CONCLUSIONS: Combining PLD and BLS correction methods for T1-weighted and T2/T2*WI errors, respectively, enables highly accurate differentiation of PTRE and tumor growth.


We present a formalism which modifies the Mueller Dipole Model such that it incorporates energy-momentum conservation and also important colour suppressed effects. We implement our formalism in a Monte Carlo simulation and compare the results to inclusive data from HERA and the Tevatron, where we see that there is a good agreement between the data and our model.


Numerous studies have demonstrated that university students are capable of contributing to sustainable development while improving their academic skills. Unfortunately for many institutions, the expense of sending large cohorts of students on international service learning trips is prohibitive. Yet, students remain enthusiastic and well equipped to assist in sustainable development. This article reports on two pedagogical experiments in service learning that overcame this challenge by providing solutions to sustainable development problems using Appropedia.org, the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. The course successfully used Appropedia (1) as a forum for students who were geographically dispersed, (2) for a whole-class writing collaboration, (3) to coordinate a sustainability-focussed outreach campaign to retrofit stop lights in communities throughout Pennsylvania and (4) to review class material with application to technologies for sustainable development.


Introduction: The topic of migrating doctors and in particular surgeons is not confined to Germany. Many countries, amongst them Australia, simply do not train enough doctors to be self-sufficient. Germany is different. It has excellent university facilities and a well-defined and structured medical curriculum. Junior surgeons have a very high exposure to patients and procedures as compared to Australia. Yet increasing numbers of students and potential surgeons are leaving Germany. Why is this? Materials and methods: In a mix of personal experience, literature review and reasoning the problems of retaining junior surgeons shall be demonstrated. Experiences from fellow colleagues working overseas shall be added. Results: Since the public shift of concern from "Arzteschwemme" to "Arztemangel" especially the surgical departments are starting to feel the heat. Numerous surveys, articles and suggestions on how to tackle the problem constantly resist naming the real problems. Years of demeaning behaviour from administrations, the public and the media paired with the experiences of senior surgeons bullied out of office or simply made redundant with no reason are not an incentive to become a surgeon in Germany, no matter how fulfilling the life as a surgeon may be. Conclusion: While the suggestions from the BDC and DGCH to ease the situations may be all correct: create more half-day jobs create childcare facilities open during working hours create structured training plans facilitate implementation of the EU working directive and others there are no plans to addres;' the unscrupulous behaviour of administrations towards doctors in general and to senior surgeons in particular the fraudulent attitude as far as payment is concerned more to add...limited list as no. of words limited. The examples of Australia and England show us the consequences of an over boarding bureaucracy. Germany with its genuine history of medical development deserves better.


The purpose of this study was to investigate how child welfare social workers in social services experienced challenges in their work. A qualitative method was used in the study in which three people were interviewed. The results were analyzed with content analysis. The theoretical frameworks included coping theory, stress theory and Sence of Coherence (COS). Furthermore wasthe terms of compensation strategies, requirements-reducing strategies, voice and exit used.The results showed that social workers have a tough and challenging working situation that is psychosocial stressful. High workload, recruitment difficulties and high staff turnover was recurring. Positive aspects of the work was mentioned poorly. A number of coping strategies were used among the social workers; e.g., to emotionally shut themselves off from work when the situation was too difficult to handle or to resign from work or work overtime during lunches and breaks. Organizational and personal factors affected the respondent's experience of the work.


ABSTRACT Finding the right jobs-housing balance has long been an important concern for urban planners. More recently, attention has turned to jobs-housing fit – the extent to which housing price is well matched to local job quality. Prior analyses have been constrained by a lack of local data on job quality, making it difficult to identify the geography and scale of the problem. We introduce a new methodology for calculating the low-wage jobs-housing fit at both a jurisdiction and neighborhood scale that was designed in collaboration with affordable housing advocates and has been directly applied in urban planning and affordable housing policy efforts. Low-wage fit is particularly important because of ongoing difficulties with affordable housing provision and the disproportionate benefits of reducing transportation costs for low-income earners. We use the calculated metric at both a city and neighborhood scale to identify what can be learned from a low-wage jobs-housing fit metric that is not evident in traditional measures of jobs-housing balance. In contrast to jobs-housing balance, the low-wage fit analysis clearly highlights those jurisdictions and neighborhoods where there is a substantial shortage of affordable housing in relation to the number of low-wage jobs. Because of the geographic coverage of the data sources used, the results can be widely applied across the United States by affordable housing advocates, land-use planners, and policy makers.


Fundamental questions of protein cofactor oxygen reactivity are left unanswered even after years of research due to the limitations imposed by the complexity of natural systems. Natural electron transport proteins are often large with many spectrally overlapping cofactors and fragile to mutation due to multiple roles of each amino acid. The study of the products oxygen reduction is further made difficult by inadequate available methods for kinetic resolution with quantitative yields of different reactive oxygen species (ROS). To first examine how proteins can avoid oxygen reduction for oxygen transport, as in natural globins, an oxygen transporter is designed from first principles of protein folding with each intermediate characterized. This is the first example of a transparently-crafted protein design functioning at natural rates. The ease of this design process, only three steps, and the minimalism of the design, only 8 different amino acids, calls into question many assumptions of what is necessary for a functional protein. This work suggests that functional success is easier reached by modification of gross properties of proteins rather than attempting structural exactness. This work may also aid future designs without necessitating a return to first principles because it not only produces a functional design but a toolbox from which to engineer. Oxygen reactivity was further studied through the development of a system for differentiating the rates and yields of superoxide, hydrogen peroxide and hydroxyl radicals. A series of man-made proteins were tested for oxygen binding, each aforementioned ROS production, and ligand exchange rates to uncover differences in ROS species production and mechanisms. It was found that it takes a single repetitive mutation to design from stable oxygen binder to a rapid outer-sphere superoxide generator. Further, another small set of changes confer preferential hydrogen peroxide generation without a superoxide intermediate through an inner-sphere mechanism. The ability to elucidate mechanistic details of highly homologous proteins and resolve each species of ROS allows us to learn about protein oxygen chemistry and apply this knowledge to the interpretation of data from natural systems, as well as use this knowledge to engineer forward towards industriallyand medically-applicable designer proteins. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics First Advisor P. Leslie Dutton


In some real-time applications, it is desirable to trade off precision for timeliness. For such systems, considered typically under the imprecise computation model, a function assigns reward to the application depending on the amount of computation allotted to it. Also, many such applications run on battery-powered devices where the energy consumption is of utmost importance. We address in this paper the problem of energy minimization for imprecise-computation systems that have reward and time constraints. We propose a quasi-static (QS) approach that exploits, with low on-line overhead, the dynamic slack that arises from variations in the actual number of execution cycles: first, at design-time, a set of solutions are computed and stored (off-line phase); second, the selection among the precomputed assignments is left for run-time, based on actual values of time and reward (on-line phase)


While epidemics and disease outbreaks are not uncommon world wide, the most recent outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) has been the largest outbreak of the disease and the most wide spread in history. The outbreak has caused international concern and was declared a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) in August of 2014. Since the outbreak started there have been a total of 15,351 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of EVD reported in six affected countries including Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Spain and the United States. There have been 5459 reported deaths associated with EVD worldwide. In this paper, Ebola Response: A Summary of Field Work Project, Jeffrey Schmidt's fieldwork with San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center and the San Francisco Department of Public Health is summarized. The main objective of the fieldwork project was to assist with developing an Ebola response plan and then test the response plan through simulations.


"This article deals with the semantics and pragmatics of the possessive adjective in French. As a point of departure we do not base this article, as it is traditionally done, on the general semantic category of 'possession', but instead we take our point of departure in the competition of the possessive determiner and the definite article in the context of associative anaphors. This article shows firstly, that the possessive adjective requires an a priori dependant asymmetry between the two entities E1 and E2 which are implied by a possessive description, secondly, that this asymmetry is satisfied either by the ontological status of the entities involved; by the semantico-lexical relation between the Ns of the entities involved which indicate an a priori subordination; or by a discursive relation between two specific groups or classes of referents established by the linguistic or situational context."


Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) was employed for the in situ analysis of pigments used in painting. LIBS spectra were collected from a wide variety of pigments in powder form and in oil color test samples. Appropriate emission lines for the identification of the metallic elements in the pigments examined are proposed. Under optimal experimental parameters, the technique is minimally destructive; two pulses from a laser beam focused on the sample surface result in the formation of a small crater with typical diameter around 40 μm and depth of no more than 10 μm. Furthermore, recording LIBS spectra from successive laser pulses on the same spot of a model oil painting resulted in information regarding the pigment composition of several paint layers, showing the capability of the technique in performing depth profile analysis. Finally, a test case is presented in which an 18th century oil painting, subjected to partial restoration, was examined by LIBS, and the different pigments used in the original and in the restored part of the work were clearly identified. The results of our studies demonstrate the applicability of LIBS in the rapid, in situ, and practically nondestructive determination of pigments in painted artworks.


We present a novel algorithm for concurrent model state and parameter estimation in nonlinear dynamical systems. The new scheme uses ideas from three dimensional variational
data assimilation (3D-Var) and the extended Kalman filter (EKF) together with the technique of state augmentation to estimate uncertain model parameters alongside the model state variables in a sequential filtering system. The method is relatively simple to implement and computationally
inexpensive to run for large systems with relatively few parameters. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method via a series of identical twin experiments with three simple dynamical system models. The scheme is able to recover the parameter values to a good level of accuracy, even when observational data are noisy. We expect this new technique to be easily transferable to much larger models.


Are smarter people funnier? Recent work suggests that cognitive abilities are important to humor production—the ability to generate funny ideas on the spot. Using the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model of intelligence, the present research examined both general and specific contributions of cognitive factors to humor ability. It extended past research by (a) measuring a broader range of cognitive abilities, including some that have not been assessed thus far, (b) assessing humor with a broader battery of tasks, and (c) using bifactor models to estimate both general and specific effects of intelligence on humor. A sample of 270 young adults completed measures of fluid reasoning (Gf), vocabulary knowledge (Gc), and broad retrieval ability (Gr) along with a battery of humor production tasks. All 3 specific factors correlated with humor ability, and a higher order model found a large effect of g on humor ability (s = .51 [.32, .70]). In a bifactor model, however, humor ability was predicted primarily by g and Gr but not Gf, suggesting that fluid intelligence's correlation with humor ability found in past studies is carried by g. These findings illustrate both general and specific effects of intelligence on humor, and they expand the growing literature on the important role of intelligence in creative thought.


Students
as Partners

Drawing
together scholarship and research this sub-group seeks to share strategies that
develop our understanding of students as agents of change. Working in
partnership to

foster
a genuine sense of belonging within a community of learning, promoting student
health and wellbeing to ensure the highest standards of learning and teaching. Work
may include but is not limited to:

• The identification
of strategic and sustainable (pedagogical) practices.

• Presenting
models that support our understanding of students as partners.

• Exploring
the rationale for staff and students to engage in partnership.

• Identifies
tensions and challenges to partnership and offers suggestions to address them.

• Academic
and pastoral support.

Curator:

Dr
Chris Headleand, The University of Lincoln


This report examines the impact of the REDD+ agreement between Guyana and Norway on indigenous communities in the country. Through literature review, analysis of secondary data, and interviews with indigenous chiefs and other informed stakeholders, it aims to understand the concerns, hopes, and fears of indigenous communities at the start of the agreement, and the effects, if any, that communities have faced from REDD+. Concerns at the inception of the agreement focused on long-standing issues with land rights, and a sense of lack of consultation. There were hopes, however, in the potential economic benefits that could accompany REDD+. Implementation of REDD+ in Guyana has proved slow, and the cash (or other benefits) received by communities has been small. Deforestation has risen—due to increased mining activity—and costs incurred by REDD+ have been minimal. This has created an overall air of scepticism regarding the future of the initiative. Future developments of REDD+ could be stronger through its indirect effect on changing donor actions, and broader policy thinking in Guyana; but major challenges exist in creating an opt-in mechanism that is fair for all indigenous communities, integrating REDD+ with the extractives industries such as mining, and keeping a focus on low-carbon development in the light of major new oil finds.


This paper presents the power quality assessment of large synchronous motor starting and loading in the integrated steel-making cogeneration facility. To execute the transient stability analysis, the proper mathematical models and the accurate parameters of the cogeneration units, excitation systems, governor systems, load and static VAr compensators (SVC) are investigated in detail. Four study cases with or without considering the connection of the power grid, the installation of autotransformer starter and SVC are performed to demonstrate the dynamic responses of system frequency, voltage and cogeneration units due to motor starting and loading. Also, the voltage sag ride-through curve of sensitivity load has been included and a power quality index (PQI) due to voltage variation in the assessment period has been proposed to find the impact of motor starting and loading on the power quality of the cogeneration system. It is concluded that the system dynamic responses and PQI values have better performances if the autotransformer starter is applied with either the regulation of SVC system or connecting to the bulk power grid.


Background Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) is an effective technique to improve gait and reduce freezing episodes for Persons with Parkinson's Disease (PwPD). The BeatHealth system, which comprises a mobile application, gait sensors, and a website, exploits the potential of the RAS technique. This paper describes the tools used for co-designing and evaluating the system and discusses the results and conclusions. Methods Personas, interviews, use cases, and ethnographic observations were used to define the functional requirements of the system. Low fidelity prototypes were created for iterative and incremental evaluation with end-users. Field trials were also performed with the final system. The process followed a user centered design methodology defined for this project with the aim of building a useful, usable, and easy-to-use system. Results Functional requirements of the system were produced as a result of the initial exploration phase. Building upon these, mock-ups for the BeatHealth system were created. The mobile application was iterated twice, with the second version of it achieving a rating of 75 when assessed by participants through the System Usability Scale (SUS). After another iteration field trials were performed and the mobile application was rated with an average 78.6 using SUS. Participants rated two website mock-ups, one for health professionals and another for end-users, as good except from minor issues related to visual design (e.g. font size), which were resolved in the final version. Conclusion The high ratings obtained in the evaluation of the BeatHealth system demonstrate the benefit of applying a user centered design methodology which involves stakeholders from the very beginning. Other important lessons were learned through the process of design and development of the system, such as the importance of motivational aspects, the techniques which work best, and the extra care that has to be taken when evaluating non-functional mock-ups with end users.


Using a density-functional scheme, we study the migration of a single O atom in a (110) plane between two adjacent bond-center sites in bulk Si. The minimum energy migration path is found through the nudged elastic band method within a generalized gradient approximation for the electronic structure. The energy barrier is then also evaluated within a hybrid functional scheme. We achieve for the transition barrier a best estimate of 2.3 eV in the generalized gradient approximation and of 2.7 eV in the hybrid functional scheme, both in fair agreement with the commonly accepted experimental value of 2.53 eV. The transition is characterized by a saddle point which does not occur at the midpoint between the two bond-center sites and by a pattern of displacements extending up to the second nearest-neighbor Si atoms. The atomistic mechanism of oxygen migration is analyzed from three complementary viewpoints involving the evolution of the structure, the Wannier centers, and the single-particle energies and wave functions. The diffusion process can be separated into two distinct parts. In one part, the exchange of the Si atoms in the first-neighbor shell of the diffusing O atom occurs through the formation of a threefold coordinated O center and an overcoordinated Si atom. In the other part, the Si-Si bond flips its position through the creation of occupied and unoccupied Si dangling bonds which give rise to states in the band gap.


~~~Iag, 2~26.9_~~~~_ his Urtext edition of the famous Piatti Caprices is a most welcome addition to the cellist's library. Henle is known as a publisher that strives for the most accurate and historically correct presentation of works, and this beautifully clean and readable edition, replete with fold-out pages that eliminate difficult page turns, continues that tradition. The preface provides helpful historical background, and the appendix gives detailed descriptions of differences between the four sources used for this edition (including a source in Piatti's own hand). Editing of fingerings and bowings is not an issue, as they were provided by the composer, one of the great cellists of the 19th century. While there are attractive elements of other editions (particularly the Ricordi edition that contains extremely helpful preparatory exercises for each Caprice, written by Luigi Silva), this Henle version is a very fine edition to own, and worth the higher price. L.S. DEUX AQUARELLES for pedal or lever harp. Pascal Proust. Editions Combreffheodore Presser, 2001 1.95. ese short and charming pieces (three minutes total) are refreshing to hear and would be a nice transitional work to the intermediate level of playing. They require a musical awareness of layers and the relationship of melodic motives tucked in between the treble and bass voices. The first opens with a slow introduction leading to a relaxed waltz-like section in C major. The second piece, in E minor, opens with a flowing melody presented in a slower, antiphonal middle section (evocative of a brass choir). Fingerings are not indicated, and the octave changes for lever harp are not notated but are presented as pedal markings, which may be a little confusing at first, but the correct harmonies are clear. This would be a sophisticated yet rewarding recital work for a young player. A.Y.


A novel unsupervised learning rule, called Boundary Adaptation Rule (BAR), is introduced for scalar quantization. It is shown that the rule maximizes information-theoretic entropy and thus yields equiprobable quantizations of univariate probability density functions. It is shown by simulations that BAR outperforms other unsupervised competitive learning rules in generating equiprobable quantizations. It is also shown that our rule can do better or worse than the Lloyd I algorithm in minimizing average mean square error, depending on the input distribution. Finally, an application to adaptive non-uniform analog to digital (A/D) conversion is considered.


This monograph sets out (i) to establish criteria for differentiating adjectives from other word-classes for languages in which they form a distinct category, and (ii) to establish criteria for determining their (non-)identity with words from other categories for languages in which they do not. As languages show various gradations in the extent to which adjectives can be distinguished from other word-classes, the author discusses idealized language types, thereby providing a model for the analysis of natural languages. The book argues that adjectives do not uniformly show all differentiating characteristics and that these characteristics are semantically relevant and functionally motivated: for instance, when word-classes are used in functions not their own, they manifest characteristics of the categories to which the relevant functions belong. The second part of the book discusses three distinct idealized languages types without a distinct adjectival category in which "property words" remain undifferentiated from (i) nouns, (ii) verbs, and (iii) nouns as well as verbs. These three types are shwon to represent gradations of distinctions between word-classes as they occur in natural languages and to manifest various degrees of the corresponding functional neutralizations. In the final chapter the wider theoretical implications of this work for the study of categories are discussed.


The user interface and system architecture of a novel interactive shared educational environment (ISEE) are presented. Based on a lightweight infrastructure, ISEE enables relatively low bandwidth network users to share videos as well as text messages. Smartlink is a new concept introduced. Individual information presentation components, like the video player and text chat room, are "smartly" linked together through video timestamps and hyperlinks. A field study related to children book selections using ISEE was conducted. The results indicated that the combination of three information presentation components, including video player with storyboard, shared browser, and text chat room, provided an effective and more comfortable collaboration and learning environment for the given tasks than text reviews or text chat alone or in combination. The video player was the most preferred information component. Text comments in the chat room that did not synchronize with the video content distracted some participants due to limited cognitive capacity. Using smartlink to synchronize various information components or "channels" is our attempt to reduce the user's working memory load in information enriched distance learning environments made possible by digital libraries.


Study Objective: Serotonergic (5HT) neurons of the dorsal raphe nuclei receive excitatory input from hypothalamic orexin (hypocretin) neurons and reciprocally inhibit orexin neurons through the 5HT1A receptor. However, the physiological significance of this negative feedback circuit for sleep/wakefulness regulation is little understood. Design: 5HT1A receptor expression level was specifically and reversibly controlled in the orexin neurons using the Tet-off system. The responsiveness of orexin neurons to 5HT in vitro and the sleep/wakefulness patterns were compared between 5HT1A-overexpressing and control mice. Measurements and Results: When the 5HT1A receptor was overexpressed in orexin neurons of Orexin-EGFP; orexin-tTA; TetO Htr1a mice, 5HT-induced inhibition of orexin neurons was prolonged. In the absence of doxycycline, Orexin-tTA; TetO Htr1a mice exhibited severe fragmentation of sleep/wakefulness during the first half of the dark period—the time of maximal activity in nocturnal rodents—without affecting sleep/wakefulness during the light period when sleep time is maximal. However, when the 5HT1A receptor in orexin neurons was reduced to basal expression levels in the presence of doxycycline, sleep/wakefulness patterns in Orexin-tTA; TetO Htr1a mice during the early active period were indistinguishable from those of littermate TetO Htr1a mice. These results strongly suggest that enhancement of inhibitory serotonergic input to orexin neurons caused fragmentation of wakefulness. In contrast, sleep/wakefulness architecture in the light period was unaffected by 5HT1A receptor overexpression in the orexin neurons. Conclusion: Inhibitory serotonergic input likely functions as negative feedback to orexin neurons in the early dark period and helps stabilize wakefulness bouts, thereby contributing to the diurnal rhythm of sleep and wakefulness. of


The recent nationwide adoption of smart meters provides a new source of rich data about individual household electricity consumption. Data science techniques can extract a variety of high temporal resolution, household-specific features from the hourly electricity time series itself and in combination with other readily available relevant information, like weather or census data. This allows us to observe or estimate important characteristics of household electricity use that were previously unobservable. These characteristics and household features have the advantage of representing the actual choices and behaviors of households, which can differ substantially from stated preferences and subjective information from traditional survey or interview methods. The use of data-derived numerical features is common in machine learning but not in traditional engineering and econometric models. In this paper, we use this technique to help answer a question that is important to program implementers: who is likely to respond to my program? In other words, program implementers typically use rules of thumb to identify target households (e.g., top 25% of usage from monthly bills), and program evaluation typically only identifies the overall average effect. Understanding the heterogeneity of program response can help shed light on how and why different households respond in different ways, allowing implementers to focus on specific groups, tailor programs to speak to the way that households actually behave, and predict the effectiveness of future programs for portfolio planning purposes. We identify household specific features that explain heterogeneity in response to experimental time-of-use and critical-peak-pricing electricity rates. The experiment was performed using randomized controlled trials with treatment groups encouraged to enroll into new rates. The household responses of interest are metrics related to energy consumption during peak hours. We use numerical features derived from pre-treatment smart meter data as covariates in an instrumental variable regression, and we find, promisingly, that they can explain considerable heterogeneity of treatment outcomes. These results lay the groundwork for using smart meter data along with data science techniques to improve program uptake, evaluation, design, and targeting.


The land valuation is a field that must be done with scientific, right and independent perspective. The land valuation is not only in the estimation of marketing value, additionally it finds usage areas like mortgaged sales, expropriation, urban renewal etc. This study is about the expropriation and how the land valuation must be done in this area. In this study, the application area was chosen as the premises of the expropriation in the district of Uluirmak in Meram, KONYA, and the valuation before the application was done with the Cobb - Douglas Hybrid regression method. Twenty three criterion's that belong to the number of 1078 constructed and unconstructed premises were utilized. In consequence of the nonlinear regression modeling it succeeded about 98%. The land valuation does not only depend on the area index, it can be done in a short time while a lot of criterion's are considered, by this way the proprietors are able to get their rights with this developed mathematical model.


In a recent review of an edition of E.M. Forster's talks for the BBC, Zadie Smith sums up the general view of Forster as "middling" (8), and this portrait may be based in part on not only his widely chronicled hesitating manner but also on his leaving the novel form apparently so early in his life. Many years prior, Louis Kronenberger, in a general treatment of art in "the present age," speaks of Lionel Trilling chiding E.M. Forster "'for his refusal to be great' ... [which] can mask a certain evasion of moral responsibility, of final decisions and allegiances" (22). More importantly, in his highly influential The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster, which is still considered by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell to be "the outstanding critical work" (xxiv) on Forster, Wilfred Stone nonetheless sums up the novelist and critic's period after 1924 as a "postscript to a great creative achievement" (348). Even when one allows for the fact that in 1966 not all of Maurice and The Life to Come was known, Stone's assumptions still seem faultily derived. First, to assume Forster's "nonfictional prose" was not creative is to deny the liveliness, the anecdotal spiritedness of the style and content of such works as "Anonymity: An Enquiry" (1925), "A Letter to Madan Blanchard" (1931), and of course his celebrated "What I Believe" (1939). These three essays were given separate publication by Hogarth Press and stand out as highly visualized statements of faith and belief. Second, Forster's evolution as an artist was ongoing and Protean throughout his entire life, not necessarily depending on any one form to embody the vitality of his outlook. Eventually leading up to "The Other Boat" of The Life to Come stories as well as the final version of Maurice and his libretto for Britten's Billy Budd, Forster experimented in fiction, drama, as well as essays with a concept of spiritual homoeroticism that grew out of his earlier work, particularly "The Story of a Siren." Thus, for the years following the publication of A Passage to India, even when his pattern of sending a new novel to publisher Edward Arnold was long over, Forster was very much at work with a new vision of nature and civilized life that would eventually inform the final draft of Maurice. Throughout, we can see the quest for "the greenwood," the gay Arcadia that has its roots not only in Theocritus, Virgil, and Marlowe, but also in Forster's momentous visit to the farm of Edward Carpenter and his lover. The greenwood, for Forster, was the haven, ensconced in the natural world, where men were free to express love for one another, love that was both physical and spiritual. In order to best define the literary, imaginative, and spiritual journey of the latter part of Forster's life, we might first look at a story that slightly precedes the appearance of A Passage to India, "The Story of a Siren" (1920). The first work that Forster published with Hogarth, it holds an important place in his oeuvre because it embodies the "atmosphere" Forster would later explore in his crucial essay on anonymity and also in "What I Believe." The story looks ahead to "The Life to Come" (1922) and the extraordinary "Arthur Snatchford" (1928), works which would not see daylight until after Forster's death, when the volume The Life to Come would appear in 1972. In their recent edition of Forster's Selected Stories, David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell have pointed out that "The Story of the Siren" has strong homoerotic elements (ix) and holds affinities with elements in Maurice (x). "The Story of a Siren," with its frame of civilized narrator listening to the embedded tale coming from a recently naked "child of nature," explores the common humanity so central to Forster's idea of anonymity and homoerotic bonding as well. "The Story of a Siren" dates back to 1904 (Forster, Life to Come viii) when Forster's diary would express frustration about his not being able to get the story published. …


The irony of the Anthropocene—an idea grounded in earth sciences—is that it acts to unground some of the foundational ideas about the world. It asks us to reevaluate and rethink the human–nature binary, to inhabit a world less hospitable and malleable than we dared to believe. I explore this notion of groundlessness by returning to a personally traumatic event that literally swept me off my feet—crossing a river. I argue that the experience of such corporeal vulnerability can provide fertile ground for reorienting our own perception. Delving into such experiences may be used to provoke and expand thinking with a view to grappling with the implications of living within conditions of an Anthropocenic world.


This paper presents the results of two studies comparing traditional lab-based usability testing and remote Webbased usability testing of Web sites. Two sites were tested: an employee benefits site and a financial information site. The remote tests used an automated technique whereby the users participated from their normal work locations using their normal browser, and there was no real-time observation. Tasks were presented to the user in a small browser window at the top of the screen that was also used to capture their input. Results showed high correlations between lab and remote tests for the task completion data and the task time data. Subjective ratings of the sites did not correlate as well. The most critical usability issues with the sites were identified by both techniques, although each technique also uniquely uncovered other issues. In general, the results indicate that both the lab and remote tests capture very similar information about the usability of a site. Each type of test appears to offer its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of the usability issues it can uncover.


This article explores how a strategy discourse in a UK bank reproduced a managerial preoccupation with costs, control and numbers that was grounded in the extant culture. Through engaging with this discourse, strategists displayed numerical ways of thinking, which suggested that they did not 'see' those on the receiving end of the strategy as human beings. The article contributes to the strategy literature first by exploring how 'strategists' are constituted and how they forge themselves as particular types of subject through participating in strategy discourses. Second, it examines the consequences of numericalization for those on the receiving end of strategic discourses. It is argued that the accountability that numbers seek to generate can undermine accountability, and so numbers are not entirely the servant of strategists or frontline staff but instead reflect and contribute to ongoing workplace struggles. Finally, it is argued that both strategists and academics need to reflect on the discourses that they (we) employ because otherwise we risk further numericalizing the other.


Due to its complexity, the evolution of cities is something that is difficult to predict and planning new developments for cities is therefore a difficult task. This complexity can be identified on two levels: on a micro level, it emerges from the multiple relations between the many components and actors in cities, whereas on a macro level it stems from the geographical, social and economic relations between cities. However, many of these relations can be measured. The design of plans for cities can only be improved if designers are able to address measurements of some of the relationships between the components of cities during the design process. These measurements are called urban indicators. By calculating such measurements, designers can grasp the meaning of the changes being proposed, not just as simple alternative layouts, but also in terms of the changes in indicators adding a qualitative perception. This thesis presents a method and a set of tools to generate alternative solutions for an urban context. The method proposes the use of a combined set of design patterns encoding typical design moves used by urban designers. The combination of patterns generates different layouts which can be adjusted by manipulating several parameters in relation to updated urban indicators. The patterns were developed from observation of typical urban design procedures, first encoded as discursive grammars and later translated into parametric design patterns. The CItyMaker method and tools allows the designer to compose a design solution from a set of programmatic premises and finetune it by pulling parameters whilst checking the changes in urban indicators. These tools improve the designer's awareness of the consequences of their design moves.


We have inverted high-phase-angle Voyager images of Neptune to determine the atmospheric extinction coefficient as a function of altitude and the scattering phase function at a reference altitude. Comparisons between theoretical models and observations help separate the contributions from molecular Rayleigh and aerosol scattering and help determine the variation of the aerosol size, concentration, and scattering properties with altitude. Further comparisons between models and data allow us to place constraints on the location and composition of the hazes, the concentration and downward flux of certain condensible hydrocarbon gases, the eddy diffusion coefficient in the lower stratosphere, and the thermal profile in parts of Neptune's stratosphere. We find that a distinct stratospheric haze layer exists near 12+_ mbar in Neptune's lower stratosphere, most probably due to condensed ethane. The derived stratospheric haze production rate of a+0.2 10-IS •v-o.3 x g cm -2 see -1 is substantially lower than photochemical model predictions. Evidence for hazes at higher altitudes also exists. Unlike the situation on Uranus, large particles (0.080.11/zm) may be present at high altitudes on Neptune (e.g., near 0.5 mbar), well above the region in which we expect the major hydrocarbon species to condense. Near 28 mbar, the mean particle size is about a t_+0.o2 v.,_-0.o2 ttm with a concentration of 5+] particles cm -3. The cumulative haze extinction optical depth above 15 mbar in the clear filter is -3 x 10 -3, and much of this extinction is due to scattering rather than absorption; thus, if our limb-scan sites are typical, the hazes cannot account for the stratospheric temperature inversion on Neptune and may not contribute significantly to atmospheric heating. We compare the imaging results with the results from other observations, including those of the Voyager Photopolarimeter Subsystem, and discuss differences between Neptune and Uranus. © 1995 Academic Press, Inc.


This paper describes a technology foresight study performed in co-operation with Stanford University (CIFE) and VTT Building and Transport. The main aim of the project is to provide information for decision-makers about the future of interoperability and product modeling. Information was collected about technologies and their use, conditions affecting the use of the technologies and development trends.The project had two main phases: state-of-the-art and scenario building. Different methods were used for collecting data for the state-of-the-art phase. A two-round Delphi survey complemented interviews and literary study. Scenario planning and technology roadmapping were used to formulate alternative pictures of how product modeling and use of interoperable software might affect the industry. The scenarios are based on two main forces seen as the ones most likely to shape the business environment: the adoption non-proprietary approach in developing software and the adoption of value-adding approach in providing services during the life cycle of facilities. Based on the survey and data, the most wanted scenario is identified as well as different roadmaps toward most wanted scenario.


In 2007, at its 52nd Conference in Polokwane, the African National Congress called for the implementation of a National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme. The proposed NHI scheme will potentially significantly increase funds available for health and restructure health service delivery. However, the success or failure of a NHI scheme will rely on the availability, skills and motivation of health workers.
This chapter will summarise key human resource (HR) challenges in South Africa and sketch important requirements to support the implementation of a NHI-funded health system. Transformation of the health system has been hampered by inadequate numbers and inequitable distribution of health workers between private and public sectors and urban and rural areas, lack of appropriate skills throughout the system, and poor planning and management. Clinic based services are limited in their ability to reach community level and, being focused on curative aspects, are often inadequate with regard to prevention, health promotion and rehabilitation services. There are a large number of community health workers in the country, yet they remain disorganised and peripheral to the public health system and the mid-level worker category has not been fully explored. Finally, there are no clear strategies for recruitment and retention of health workers in rural and under-resourced areas.
Using available evidence and information from interviews conducted with a number of key informants, the authors make recommendations on HR requirements for implementation of an effective and equitable health system funded by a NHI, including skills mix and projected numbers of health workers, and propose ways to improve the deficient HR situation.


The purpose of the study was to assess the validity and inter-bike reliability of ten Wattbike cycle ergometers, and to assess the test-retest reliability of one Wattbike. Power outputs from 100 to 1000 W were applied using a motorised calibration rig (LODE) at cadences of 70, 90, 110 and 130 rev.min -1 , which created nineteen different intensities for comparison. Significant relationships (p<0.01, r 2 =0.99) were found between each of the Wattbikes and the LODE. Each Wattbike was found to be valid and reliable, and had good inter-bike agreement. Within-bike mean differences ranged from 0.0 W to 8.1 W at 300 W and 3.3 W to 19.3 W at 600 W. When taking into account the manufacturers stated measurement error for the LODE (2%), the mean differences were less than 2%. Comparisons between Wattbikes at each of the nineteen intensities, gave differences from 0.6 to 25.5 W, at intensities of 152 W and 983 W respectively. There was no significant difference (p>0.05) between the measures of power recorded in the test-retest condition. The data suggest that the Wattbike is an accurate and reliable tool for training and performance assessments, with data between Wattbikes being able to be used interchangeably.


Several extractions of coal-tar pitch were performed using supercritical fluid carbon dioxide. The relationships between extraction yield during supercritical fluid extraction (SFE) and the variables temperature, pressure and extraction time were investigated. For qualitative and quantitative identification of organic compounds, gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry were used. Each SFE experiment was performed at a specific pressure and temperature; the maximum yield was obtained at 200 bar and 125 oC. In general, the yields of all compounds studied increased with increasing temperature, and reached their maximum values at 125 oC; above this temperature, yields remained almost constant. Higher yields were also obtained with greater retention times or higher pressures. Partial selectivity could be achieved by extracting at different constant temperatures and constant pressures.
South African Journal of Chemistry Vol.53(3) 2000: 179-190