Inverse problems related to physical processes are of great importance in practically every field related to signal processing, such as tomography, acoustics, wireless communications, medical and radar imaging, to name only a few. At the same time, many of these problems are quite challenging due to their ill-posed nature. On the other hand, signals originating from physical phenomena are often governed by laws expressible through linear Partial Differential Equations (PDE), or equivalently, integral equations and the associated Green's functions. In addition, these phenomena are usually induced by sparse singularities, appearing as sources or sinks of a vector field. In this thesis we primarily investigate the coupling of such physical laws with a prior assumption on the sparse origin of a physical process. This gives rise to a "dual" regularization concept, formulated either as sparse analysis (cosparse), yielded by a PDE representation, or equivalent sparse synthesis regularization, if the Green's functions are used instead. We devote a significant part of the thesis to the comparison of these two approaches. We argue that, despite nominal equivalence, their computational properties are very different. Indeed, due to the inherited sparsity of the discretized PDE (embodied in the analysis operator), the analysis approach scales much more favorably than the equivalent problem regularized by the synthesis approach. Our findings are demonstrated on two applications: acoustic source localization and epileptic source localization in electroencephalography. In both cases, we verify that cosparse approach exhibits superior scalability, even allowing for full (time domain) wavefield interpolation in three spatial dimensions. Moreover, in the acoustic setting, the analysis-based optimization benefits from the increased amount of observation data, resulting in a speedup in processing time that is orders of magnitude faster than the synthesis approach. Numerical simulations show that the developed methods in both applications are competitive to state-of-the-art localization algorithms in their corresponding areas. Finally, we present two sparse analysis methods for blind estimation of the speed of sound and acoustic impedance, simultaneously with wavefield interpolation. This is an important step toward practical implementation, where most physical parameters are unknown beforehand. The versatility of the approach is demonstrated on the "hearing behind walls" scenario, in which the traditional localization methods necessarily fail. Additionally, by means of a novel algorithmic framework, we challenge the audio declipping problemregularized by sparsity or cosparsity. Our method is highly competitive against stateof-the-art, and, in the cosparse setting, allows for an efficient (even real-time) implementation.


Morbidly obese, leptin‐deficient ob/ob mice display low bone mass, mild osteoclast‐rich osteopetrosis, and increased bone marrow adiposity. While partial leptin deficiency results in increased weight, the skeletal manifestations of partial leptin deficiency are less well defined. We therefore analyzed femora and lumbar vertebrae in growing (7‐week‐old) female C57BL/6 wildtype (WT) mice, partial leptin‐deficient ob/+ mice, and leptin‐deficient ob/ob mice. The bones were evaluated by dual energy absorptiometry, microcomputed tomography and histomorphometry. As expected, ob/+ mice were heavier, had more white adipose tissue, and lower serum leptin than WT mice, but were lighter and had less white adipose tissue than ob/ob mice. With a few exceptions, cancellous bone architecture, cell (osteoblast, osteoclast, and adipocyte), and dynamic measurements did not differ between WT and ob/+ mice. In contrast, compared to WT and ob/+ mice, ob/ob mice had lower cancellous bone volume fraction, and higher bone marrow adiposity in the femur metaphysis, and higher cancellous bone volume fraction in lumbar vertebra. Paradoxically, ob/+ mice had greater femoral bone volume than either WT or ob/ob mice. There was a positive correlation between body weight and femur volume in all three genotypes. However, the positive effect of weight on bone occurred with lower body weight in leptin‐producing mice. The paradoxical differences in bone size among WT, ob/+, and ob/ob mice may be explained if leptin, in addition to stimulating bone growth and cancellous bone turnover, acts to lower the set‐point at which increased body weight leads to a commensurate increase in bone size. Anat Rec, 298:2018–2029, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Title: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF PUBLIC HEALTH: MANAGING CHRONIC DISEASE IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY Sara Mae Glasgow, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Directed By: Professor Dennis Pirages Department of Government and Politics Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) such as heart disease and cancer account for over half of the global mortality burden, and are the leading cause of death in every region of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, they remain off the analytical radarscope in political science. This silence has been coupled with the tendency of public health researchers to frame NCDs as apolitical—largely a product of an individual's risk behaviors. Such an accounting depoliticizes NCDs, as well as public health approaches to their analysis and prevention. This project's central aim is to introduce a political analysis of chronic disease, demonstrating that public health approaches to NCDs exhibit political rationality. To that end, I explore several questions. How are NCDs accounted in behavioral terms, and how are their risks constructed as apolitical in the public health discourse? Additionally, if public health is presented as a domain of neutral science, how is it that its practices increasingly display market values, including a limited role for the state, a preoccupation with cost efficiency and choice, and the cultivation of the entrepreneurial self who sees her health as a site of investment? To answer these, I employ a discursive approach, specifically Foucault's framework of government rationality, or "governmentality." It is through the deployment of neoliberal governmentality in three spheres – knowledge, power, and subjectivity – that public health reveals itself not a neutral science, but rather one brimming with the values and logic of the private sector. I develop this argument through a critique of the discipline and practices of public health in three cases: the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden. Despite exhibiting historically different approaches to health and social welfare, all three show a marked manifestation of neoliberal rationality in public health approaches to chronic disease. The consistency of these findings, in addition to the more general features of the public health discourse, thus allow a conclusion that public health approaches to NCDs are not value-neutral, and are indeed a political phenomenon. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF PUBLIC HEALTH: MANAGING CHRONIC DISEASE IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY


Almost from birth, infants prefer to attend to human vocalizations associated with speech over many other sounds. However, studies that have focused on infants' differential attention to speech and singing have failed to show a speech listening bias. The purpose of the study was to investigate infants' preferential attention to singing and speech presented in audiovisual and auditory mode. Using an infant-controlled preference procedure, 11-month-olds were presented with audiovisual stimuli depicting a woman singing or reciting a song (Experiment 1, audiovisual condition). The results showed that infants attended significantly longer to singing than to speech. In Experiment 2 (visual condition), infants watched the same videos presented with no sound and in Experiment 3 (auditory condition), they listened to the singing and speech stimuli in English and a foreign language. No differences in length of attention to singing and speech were found in either experiment. The results of the study reconcile the seemingly contradicting findings of previous investigations and show that mode of presentation affects infants' preferential attention to speech and singing. The facilitating effects of facial cues on infants' processing of speech and singing are discussed.


Covert spatial cueing effects refer to the finding that targets appearing in the location of a previous cue stimulus are typically responded to more rapidly than targets appearing at different locations than the cue. One explanation of these effects is that the cue captures attention, so that attention is already at the target location when the target appears, resulting in faster responses relative to when targets appear at an uncued new location that requires a shift of attention. Here, however, we investigate the possibility that the relationship between cues and targets is more complicated than just location repetition by viewing cues and targets as separate event files which contain stimulus features (including location) that must be formed before responses can be made. To do this, we varied the relationship be the features of cues and targets to investigate the effect of cue-target similarity on spatial cueing effects, as cues and targets could either match in shape (Experiment 1) and/or color (Experiment 2), and could appear at same or different locations. Therefore, on each trial the target could switch from any of the cue stimulus's features or location or could repeat some or all these features allowing us to examine response time differences given event file repetition. If location repetition is sufficient to produce cueing effects then similar cueing benefits are expected regardless of cue-target feature overlap. Contrary to this prediction, spatial cueing interacted with shape repetition; shape switches between the cue and target attenuated (Experiment 1), or eliminated (Experiment 2), spatial cueing effects. When shape repeated, however, repeating location significantly improved performance. Shape and color also interacted with shape repetition having larger effect if color also repeated. Therefore, it seems that more than location repetition is a factor is spatial cueing effects. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.


As the complexity of systems increases, so does what can go wrong with them. For example, the United States Air Force selected McDonnell Douglas' design for the F-15 Eagle fighter aircraft in 1967 and the aircraft's first test flight was in 1972, 5 years later. In contrast, the US military selected Lockheed Martin as one of two companies to develop the F-35 Lightning II in 1997 and its first flight was in 2006, 9 years later, and the first production aircraft had its first flight in 2011, 14 years after the selection. This complex program's problems have been well-documented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and have contributed to the project's long lead time and skyrocketing budget. GAO reports on other military projects reveal that problems the F-35 project has experienced are shared among all of these projects. In this dissertation I posit that similar problems plague all complex systems engineering projects and that a combination of these problems may lead to negative consequences, such as budget and schedule exceedances, quality concerns, not achieving mission objectives, as well as accidents resulting in loss of human life.Accidents, or unexpected events resulting in loss, have been well-studied over time and we currently have sophisticated theories that help explain how they occur. The leading theory is that most accidents are a result of an accumulation of "mundane" errors at an organization, and that these errors are similar across industries. However, these mundane errors, such as failing to follow procedures and poorly training personnel, occur in all companies, such as companies that design and manufacture military aircraft. My theory is that these mundane errors accumulate in all organizations and result in many different kinds of systems engineering failures, including failures traditionally referred to as "accidents" that result in loss of life, as well as other types of failures which I refer to as "project failures".What can be learned from these systems engineering failures? In this dissertation, I begin by mining publicly-available reports to determine whether seemingly dissimilar failures, accidents and project failures, share common causes. I then explain the similarities and dissimilarities between these causes and provide examples from the failures I studied. To help provide systems engineers with actionable advice on these common causes, I describe how I linked the causes to recommendations from accident reports in a cause-recommendation network. I then discuss the results of interviews I held with systems engineers to determine whether the problems I identified in past failures occur in similar ways to the problems they have encountered on their projects. I also discuss the criticisms these systems engineers have about systems engineering education based on the tasks their newly-hired systems engineers struggle with. I explain how I used what I learned about problems in systems engineering that lead to failures to develop survey questions designed to gauge whether systems engineering education at Purdue prepares students to identify and fix these problems. Then, to help systems engineers learn from the data I collected and solve the problems they encounter on their projects, I describe how I built an interactive, web-based tool that presents expert advice on systems engineering failures. I finally explain the results from feedback I received from experts and novices in systems engineering to determine whether this tool could be useful for engineers in this context.


Objective: The aim of this comparative study was to evaluate the effects of radioactive pollution in river water and confounding risk factors on the prevalence of cardiovascular symptoms in people living in the Ural region. Methods: We selected this region as a case territory for study because it is exposed to chronic ionizing radiation. The area is composed of coastal localities situated along the Techa River, into which liquid radioactive waste materials have been released. As a control, we selected settlements that were not subjected to ionizing radiation. Results: We found a statistically significant relationship between radioactive contamination of a territory and the prevalence of pathologies of the cardiovascular systems of people living in the Techa riverside villages (OR=2.31, p<0.001). The influence of covariates (gender, age, overweight status, and others) on the development of cardiovascular pathologies was analyzed. Some of these factors have been recognized as confounding factors. After accounting for confounding factors, the odds ratio for the impact of radiation on the prevalence of pathologies of the cardiovascular system decreased to (OR=1.58, p=0.02). Conclusions: Statistically significant gender and age differences were observed in the prevalence of pathologies of the cardiovascular system in residents of radioactively contaminated areas compared to residents of control areas. These differences show a more pronounced reaction to contamination in older residents, residents with an overweight status and residents with meteotropic reactions.


With artful composition and controlled framing - but no digital manipulation - Edgar Martins creates sublimely beautiful views of often un-beautiful sites. Minimalist night-time beaches, forests ravaged by fires, and Icelands stark terrain have all served as subjects for his large-scale colour photographs. He also explores the unexpected impact of modernism on the landscape, including startlingly graphic airport runways and colourful highway barriers that, at first glance, read like abstract murals. Certain themes recur throughout Martins' work.A sense of place and alienation from it. A sense of mystery - vividly embodied in scenes such as a woman with a bouquet of balloons on a deserted shore. And a sense that something unsettling has just happened or is about to happen - a fire, an accident, a close encounter with some unspecified danger. As John Beardsley notes, 'some images are what we habitually expect photography to be - evidence of the world as we think we know it, while others obscure their subjects through an illusion, that borders on magic.'


Abstract. Marine turtles often conduct extensive migrations from foraging to breeding habitats. Turtles may spend several months in these breeding habitats, while periodically taking brief excursions onto terrestrial environments to nest. Identification and protection of these breeding habitats over the duration of the reproductive season is therefore vital for the conservation of sea turtles. Here, we used satellite telemetry to investigate the internesting behavior of East Pacific green turtles from 2 nesting beaches: Nombre de Jesús and Playa Cabuyal, located 50 km apart on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. A total of 21 satellite transmitters were deployed at Nombre de Jesús (n = 8) between 2007 and 2009 and at Cabuyal (n = 13) between 2012 and 2015. We found that turtle movements and dive behaviors were notably different between the 2 beaches. Specifically, the turtles from Cabuyal engaged in deeper dives (10 ±3 m vs. 6.5 ±2 m [mean ±SD]), presumably because they had access to deeper waters, and had larger minimum convex polygon area (606.5 ± 1150.5 km2 vs. 16 ± 11 km2) than turtles from Nombre De Jesús. Turtles from Nombre de Jesús also engaged in shorter dives (6.68 ± 4.5 min), compared with Cabuyal, where a majority of dives lasted between 10 and 30 min (18.75 ± 5.6 min). Finally, turtles at Nombre de Jesús dove significantly deeper during the day compared with the night, a pattern that was not present at Cabuyal. We conclude that internesting behaviors can be different even between beaches within the same geographical area. As such, internesting habitat management plans should pay specific attention to potential site-specific variation in internesting behaviors.


Recent studies report that Internet users are growingly looking for health information through the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, a collaboratively edited multitude of articles with contents often comparable with professionally edited material. Automatic quality assessment of the Wikipedia medical articles has not received much attention by Academia and it presents open distinctive challenges. In this paper, we propose to tag the medical articles on the Wikipedia Medicine Portal, clearly stating their maturity degree, intended as a summarizing measure of several article properties. For this purpose, we adopt the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a well known methodology for decision making, and we evaluate the maturity degree of more than 24000 Wikipedia medical articles. The obtained results show how the qualitative analysis of medical content not always overlap with a quantitative analysis (an example of which is shown in the paper), since important properties of an article can hardly be synthesized by quantitative features. This seems particularly true when the analysis considers the concept of maturity, defined and verified in this work.


Government agenda-setting rights in the Bundestag are weak. The theoretical part of this article discusses various aspects of agenda setting and their theoretical relevance in the context of the Bundestag. It will be argued that analyses of agenda setting should distinguish between two analytical foci, one concentrating on policy effects in the context of spatial models, the other analysing executive–legislative relations in the broader context of political competition. In addition, agenda setting among veto players should be distinguished from agenda setting between veto players and non-veto players. While the article's theoretical part drives the subsequent empirical analysis, readers more interested in the empirical aspects of agenda setting in the Bundestag may wish to turn directly to the article's second section, which provides an empirical and descriptive account of the formal rules of agenda setting in the Bundestag. In this part, it will be argued that the weakness of the government under the Bundestag's first permanent rules of procedure introduced in the early 1950s can be explained by historic circumstances. Since then, party system characteristics and the strong role of the Bundesrat have made it unattractive for the federal government to seek increased agenda control in the Bundestag. Overall, agenda setting rules in the Bundestag underscore the characterisation of Germany as a consensus democracy.


Testing for conditional independence is a core aspect of constraint-based causal discovery. Although commonly used tests are perfect in theory, they often fail to reject independence in practice---especially when conditioning on multiple variables.

We focus on discrete data and propose a new test based on the notion of algorithmic independence that we instantiate using stochastic complexity. Amongst others, we show that our proposed test, SCI, is an asymptotically unbiased as well as L2 consistent estimator for conditional mutual information (CMI).
Further, we show that SCI can be reformulated to find a sensible threshold for CMI that works well on limited samples. Empirical evaluation shows that SCI has a lower type II error than commonly used tests. As a result, we obtain a higher recall when we use SCI in causal discovery algorithms, without compromising the precision.


Cyber-physical systems are often equipped with specialized fault management systems that observe the state of the system, decide if there is an anomaly and then take automated actions to isolate faults. For example, in electrical networks relays and breaks isolate faults in order to arrest failure propagation and protect the healthy parts of the system. However, due to the limited situational awareness and hidden failures the protection devices themselves, through their operation (or mis-operation) may cause overloading and the disconnection of parts of an otherwise healthy system. Additionally, often there can be faults in the management system itself leading to situations where it is difficult to isolate failures. Our work presented in this paper is geared towards solution of this problem by describing the formalism of Temporal Causal Diagrams (TCD-s) that augment the failure models for the physical systems with discrete time models of protection elements, accounting for the complex interactions between the protection devices and the physical plants. We use the case study of the standard Western System Coordinating Council (WSCC) 9 bus system to describe four different fault scenarios and illustrate how our approach can help isolate these failures. Though, we use power networks as exemplars in this paper our approach can be applied to other distributed cyberphysical systems, for example water networks.


The throughput of SMRT® Sequencing and long reads allows microbial communities to be analyzed using a shotgun sequencing approach. Key to leveraging this data is the ability to cluster sequences belonging to the same member of a community. Long reads of up to 40 kb provide a unique capability in identifying those relationships, and pave the way towards finished assemblies of community members. Long reads are highly valuable when samples are more complex and containing lower intra-species variation, such as a larger number of closely related species, or high intra-species variation. Here, we present a collection of tools tailored for the analysis of PacBio® metagenomic assemblies. These tools allow for improvements in the assembly results, and greater insight into the complexity of the study communities. Supervised classification is applied to a large set of sequence characteristics (e.g. GC content, raw read coverage, k-mer frequency, and gene prediction information) and to cluster contigs from single or highly related species. Assembly in isolation of the raw data associated with these contigs is shown to improve assembly statistics. A unique feature of SMRT Sequencing is the availability to leverage simultaneously collected base modification / methylation data to aid the clustering of contigs expected to comprise a single or very closely related species. We demonstrate the added value of base modification information to distinguish and study variation within metagenomic samples based on differences in the methylated DNA motifs involved in the restriction modification system. Application of these techniques is demonstrated on a mock community and monkey intestinal microbiome sample. Abstract


Lung cancer accounts for a significant percentage of all cancer‑associated mortalities in men and women, with non‑small cell lung cancer being the most frequently occurring type of lung cancer. Melittin is the principal active component of apitoxin (bee venom) that has been reported to exert anti‑chronic inflammatory and anti‑cancer effects. In the present study, the antitumor effect of melittin was evaluated using in vivo and in vitro analyses. The results demonstrated that melittin significantly inhibited the epidermal growth factor‑induced invasion and migration of non‑small cell lung cancer cells. Subcutaneous injection of melittin at doses of 1 and 10 mg/kg significantly suppressed non‑small cell lung cancer tumor growth by 27 and 61%, respectively. In addition, melittin significantly inhibited the secretion of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in non‑small cell lung cancer cells. Furthermore, melittin decreased the protein expression of VEGF and hypoxia‑inducible factor 1‑α. Therefore, the antitumor activity of melittin may be associated with the anti‑angiogenic actions of inhibiting the VEGF and hypoxia‑inducible factor signaling pathways.


A motion tracking system for tracking an object composed of object parts in a three-dimensional space. The system comprises a number of magnetic field transmitters; a number of field receivers for receiving the magnetic fields of the field transmitters; a number of inertial measurement units for recording a linear acceleration; a number of angular velocity transducers for recording angular velocities. The system further comprises a processor for controlling the transmitters and receiving signals coming from the field receivers and the inertial measurement unit; which processor contains a module for deriving orientation and/or position information of the constituent object parts of the object on the basis of the received signals. The processor is configured for intermittently controlling the transmitters transmit at a predetermined frequency, wherein the position and/or orientation information is derived by periodically calibrating the motion information coming from the inertial measurement unit with the motion information coming from the magnetic field receivers.


A burgeoning literature exists on indicators associated with lone-actor terrorism, spree shooters, mass murders and other forms of targeted violence. Such studies of low- likelihood, high-impact crimes largely suffer from 2 interrelated problems: low base rates and long observational periods. These studies largely fail to consider whether risk factors are driven by temporal-cohorts within the wider observation pool or are uniform across the expanses of time under consideration. This paper compares a cohort of violent lone actors (composed of lone-actor terrorists, and solo mass murderer attackers) from 1990 to 2005 with a cohort from 2006 to 2013. We found no significant differences in terms of sociodemographic variables across the 2 temporal periods. The 2006 to 2013 cohort was significantly more likely to use the Internet in their attack planning, have a history of previous imprisonment, engage in multiple attack methods (e.g., a bombing and a shooting), and target ordinary citizens rather than a political or military target for example. The results also indicate that the 2006 through 2013 period contains fewer offenders who (a) had previous military experience, (b) made verbal statements to family/friends/wider audiences about their intent and beliefs, (c) socialized face to face with members of a wider network, (d) experienced being degraded or the target of an act of prejudice or unfairness, (e) experienced a recent stressor, and (f) interacted face-to-face with others holding a similar grievance. The conclusion discusses the research and operational implications of these findings.


Years one and two of a three-year study revealed that, contrary to their teachers' expectations, students working hands on with computer animations and simulations in small groups with a teacher circulating among the groups performed no better, as measured by pre-post gains, than students engaging in teacher-moderated whole class discussions while observing the animations and simulations projected onto a screen before the class. Similar results have been obtained in year three. Initial case study analyses suggested there might exist teaching strategies for promoting at least some of the active thinking and exploration that has been considered to be the strength of small group work. The present study analyzes transcripts from a Projectile Motion lesson sequence taught during years two and three. Pre-post results are presented. Comparative case study analyses of matched sets of classes look closely at features of whole class and small group discussions that accompanied use of Quicktime animations, coding for presence of several factors that appeared to be associated with active reasoning in the initial case studies. One finding was the presence in whole class discussion of many more episodes of support for interpreting the meaning of visual elements in the animations than was present in the small groups. The Whole Class case studies examined here suggest the possibility that there may be certain instructional situations where there is an advantage to spending at least part of the time with the simulation or animation in a whole class discussion mode.


Capacitive technologies play an increasingly important role in the fields of industrial and automotive sensors. The noncontact working principle, on the one hand, is the main advantage of this technology; on the other hand, the sensor is thus sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. This paper describes methods to successfully develop capacitive sensors, which can reliably be operated in harsh industrial and automotive environments. A carrier frequency system combined with a ratiometric evaluation algorithm and a frequency hopping strategy can guarantee safe operation of capacitive sensors.


Due to lack of facilities and expensive medicines most of the patients in developing courtiers do not get adequate treatment for HIV/AIDS. Hence it was an immediate requirement that the developed countries and the developing countries walk hand in hand on the path of defeating this epidemic monster. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is the largest global health initiative dedicated for the cure of a single disease by United States Government. The review article provides the information about the condition of the world before the implementation of PEPFAR program, history and political framework of the organisation, the goals of PEPFAR, the funding sources and its partnership with different countries including India.


The goal of this paper is to provide an intuitive and useful tool for analyzing the impurity bound state problem. We develop a semiclassical approach and apply it to an impurity in two dimensional systems with parabolic or Dirac like bands. Our method consists of reducing a higher dimensional problem into a sum of one dimensional ones using the two dimensional Green functions as a guide. We then analyze the one dimensional effective systems in the spirit of the wave function matching method as in the standard 1d quantum model. We demonstrate our method on two dimensional models with parabolic and Dirac-like dispersion, with the later specifically relevant to topological insulators.


Counselling services in Mainland China are now beginning to be provided as part of their health care system due to the growing awareness of needs associated with mental health. Furthermore, the need for a higher quality of counseling services has been steadily increasing. The Satir Model has shown tremendous vitality in its acceptance as a treatment modality ever since it was introduced to China in 2003, and given its compatibility with Chinese culture and tradition. Along with this compatibility, it provides therapeutic solutions to mental health problems that are particularly associated with the negative influences of Chinese culture and tradition. Here, the authors analyze several possible negative influences in the culture; such as invalidation of self, high expectation towards self and incongruence when expressing feelings. The authors then illustrate how the Satir Model helps people to recover their wounded selves through this transformational counseling process. This study is illustrated by an of 20 sessions of counselling experiences in Beijing, China. With its strength-orientation and change-directed therapeutic approach, the Satir Model has shown its effectiveness in helping Chinese people experience higher self-esteem, take more personal responsibility, increase their ability for choice making and for personal congruence. (First printed in Satir Journal: Transformational Systemic Therapy, Vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 24-52, by permission of author)


This research investigates the European Mobile Telecommunications industry, looking at the biggest strategic challenges Mobile Operators are going to face in the next years. Mobile Services platforms represent the most important paradigm in the industry. Companies as Apple, Google and Facebook have successfully married new consumer devices and Internet platforms with a variety of online services and content undermining Operators central role in the value network. This scenario highlights the importance to investigate how Operators can adopt successful strategies to keep on playing a meaningful role in the Mobile Services domain.These strategies are identifies and mapped adopting a value network model for the Mobile Services domain. This model is the main contribution of this research, tracking new ways of cooperating among them. Operators strategies revolve around two main drivers: defeating networks congestion (investing in network upgrade, optimization & spectrum auctions, charging Service Providers for HQ delivery services and elaborating data price plans for mobile customers) and finding new revenue opportunities (working with Service Providers to offer Location-based services, offering charging services to interested parties and working on Mobile Services platforms).As first step, the investigation offers an overview over the industry, looking at static (actors, technologies, services, devices, end-users and value network configuration) as well as dynamic (trends as Open Mobile, MVNOs, Fixed-Mobile Convergence and Substitution and 4G adoption) aspects. Then the research continues analyzing Mobile Services platforms, proposing an interesting approach to classify scientific articles about this topic. Italy is analyzed as case study and subsequently the model is developed. To conclude the study deals with some reflections about the delicate topic of shaping strategies after a massive usage of end-users data to provide innovative and sophisticated mobile services.


Over the past five decades, gullying has been widespread and has become more severe in the Ethiopian highlands. Only in very few cases, rehabilitation of gullies has been successful in Ethiopia due to the high costs. The objective of this paper is to introduce cost effective measures to arrest gully formation. The research was conducted in the Debre-Mewi watershed located at 30 km south of Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. Gullying started in the 1980s following the clearance of indigenous vegetation and intensive agricultural cultivation, leading to an increase of surface and subsurface runoff from the hillside to the valley bottoms. Gully erosion rates were 10–20 times the measured upland soil losses. Water levels, measured with piezometers, showed that in the actively eroding sections, the water table was in general above the gully bottom and below it in the stabilized sections. In order to develop effective gully stabilizing measures, we tested and then applied the BSTEM and CONCEPT models for their applicability for Ethiopian conditions where active gully formation has been occurring. We found that the model predicted the location of slips and slumps well with the observed groundwater depth and vegetation characteristics. The validated models indicated that any gully rehabilitation project should first stabilize the head cuts. This can be achieved by regrading these head cuts to slope of 40 degrees and armoring it with rock. Head cuts will otherwise move uphill in time and destroy any improvements. To stabilize side walls in areas with seeps, grass will be effective in shallow gullies, while deeper gullies require reshaping of the gullies walls, then planting the gully with grasses, eucalyptus or fruit trees that can be used for income generation. Only then there is an incentive for local farmers to maintain the structures.


With the developments of new technologies appearing very quickly, the attention has been focused more on technology than learning. English centers and institutes have mostly been busy accommodating new programs and technologies and hence have not spent enough time to evaluate the CALL programs and technologies employed to find their affordances and limitations. The present study was an attempt to study the perceptions and evaluation of the Iranian EFL learners and teachers about CALL. To this end, 240 students and teachers of two big institutes in Iran where CALL is used in their English learning program participated in the study. The required data were collected through a mixed-method design. The results of data analysis showed that CALL can enhance language learning and English listening, reading, and writing skills. It can also increase students' motivation and interest in learning and their exposure to language. However, it cannot improve speaking skill well. It also causes technology addiction, lacks good standards and an interactive nature necessary for the development of communicative proficiency, and may give the confidence to the teachers that everything is prepared by CALL courseware designers and hence they may come unprepared. The present study argues that the mere focus on technological support is not adequate, and a pedagogical understanding of language teachers' and learners' new roles and identities in CALL environment should be developed.


Nowadays, business processes are increasingly supported by IT services that produce massive amounts of event data during process execution. Aiming at a better process understanding and improvement, this event data can be used to analyze processes using process mining techniques. Process models can be automatically discovered and the execution can be checked for conformance to specified behavior. Moreover, existing process models can be enhanced and annotated with valuable information, for example for performance analysis. While the maturity of process mining algorithms is increasing and more tools are entering the market, process mining projects still face the problem of different levels of abstraction when comparing events with modeled business activities. Mapping the recorded events to activities of a given process model is essential for conformance checking, annotation and understanding of process discovery results. Current approaches try to abstract from events in an automated way that does not capture the required domain knowledge to fit business activities. Such techniques can be a good way to quickly reduce complexity in process discovery. Yet, they fail to enable techniques like conformance checking or model annotation, and potentially create misleading process discovery results by not using the known business terminology.

In this thesis, we develop approaches that abstract an event log to the same level that is needed by the business. Typically, this abstraction level is defined by a given process model. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to match events from an event log to activities in a given process model. To accomplish this goal, behavioral and linguistic aspects of process models and event logs as well as domain knowledge captured in existing process documentation are taken into account to build semiautomatic matching approaches. The approaches establish a pre--processing for every available process mining technique that produces or annotates a process model, thereby reducing the manual effort for process analysts. While each of the presented approaches can be used in isolation, we also introduce a general framework for the integration of different matching approaches.

The approaches have been evaluated in case studies with industry and using a large industry process model collection and simulated event logs. The evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the approaches and their robustness towards nonconforming execution logs.


A House in the Sky is the dramatic and redemptive memoir of Amanda Lindhout, a woman whose curiosity led her to the world's most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity - an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace. As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia - "the most dangerous place on earth." On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road. Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives "wife lessons" from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory - every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity - and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity. For fans of the award-winning blockbuster Captain Phillips and readers of Kate McCann's Madeleine, Natasha Kampusch's 3,096 Days and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea. Amanda Lindhout is the founder of the Global Enrichment Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports development, aid and education initiatives in Somalia and Kenya. Sara Corbett is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic; Elle; Outside; O, the Oprah magazine; Esquire; and Mother Jones.


This article explores the notion of so-called 'strengths-based' offender reintegration for prisoners returning to the community. First, we briefly explore the normative and empirical theory underlying this approach. Next, we present evidence from a case study the authors have undertaken on a particularly interesting example of strengths-based resettlement in action. It illustrates the tensions that occur when risk-based policies collide with strengthsbased opportunities. The lessons learned in this case study are then used to develop further the theoretical understanding behind a strengths-based resettlement approach.


In the context of lossy compression, Blau&Michaeli (2019) adopt a mathematical notion of perceptual quality and define the information rate-distortion-perception function, generalizing the classical rate-distortion tradeoff. We consider the notion of universal representations in which one may fix an encoder and vary the decoder to achieve any point within a collection of distortion and perception constraints. We prove that the corresponding information-theoretic universal rate-distortion-perception function is operationally achievable in an approximate sense. Under MSE distortion, we show that the entire distortion-perception tradeoff of a Gaussian source can be achieved by a single encoder of the same rate asymptotically. We then characterize the achievable distortion-perception region for a fixed representation in the case of arbitrary distributions, identify conditions under which the aforementioned results continue to hold approximately, and study the case when the rate is not fixed in advance. This motivates the study of practical constructions that are approximately universal across the RDP tradeoff, thereby alleviating the need to design a new encoder for each objective. We provide experimental results on MNIST and SVHN suggesting that on image compression tasks, the operational tradeoffs achieved by machine learning models with a fixed encoder suffer only a small penalty when compared to their variable encoder counterparts.


There is a plethora of literature on older adults and psychological counselling. The literature reveals many assumptions and opinions of healthcare professionals and academics regarding older adults' decision to enter into counselling or not and advice on how counselling should be conducted with older adults. Yet, there is an absence of the voices of older people in narrating their counselling encounters. This qualitative study explored how six older women constructed their decisions to enter into counselling and their experiences of counselling. Although the study was open to both older men and women, only women expressed an interest in participating. Narrative interviews were therefore conducted with former female clients of a mental health charity aged between 66 and 74. Interviews elicited individuals' stories of counselling and a critical narrative analysis approach was used to examine each narrator's story.

From this analysis, three overarching themes and corresponding subthemes emerged across the six narratives. Accounts highlighted the significance of generational and cultural factors in narrators' expectations of counselling and
subsequent decision to enter into therapy. Narrators revealed long-standing patterns of projecting an outward image of wellbeing whilst struggling to manage difficult circumstances and emotions. This was often linked to generational attitudes of selfsufficiency, independent problem solving and emotional reticence. Narrators also worried about burdening loved ones with their problems. Decisions to enter into counselling were constructed within this context of emotional isolation.

Furthermore, findings highlighted the significance of people or services influencing narrators' access to counselling. Counselling was constructed as an opportunity to focus on hearing one's own thoughts, without outside voices impeding. Narrators also constructed identities from passive patients at the start of counselling to emerging active agents of change both in the therapeutic context and in their wider lives. Dominant cultural narratives of mental health problems and counselling were also discussed with reference to narrators' stories. The implications of the study's findings for referrers and counselling psychology practice were explored.


The second half of the twentieth century has been characterized by substantial changes in demographic behaviors. Among these transformations also the process by which adolescents and teenagers transition to adulthood has changed greatly in many countries of the Western world. All the events of the transition to adulthood have been delayed and life course trajectories became more diverse. There are some aspects concerning the mentioned changes that have not been extensively studied in the literature. This dissertation is a collection of three papers that have the aim to investigate these neglected aspects concerning life course trajectories of young adults. In particular, the first two papers look at trends over time in the achievement of economic independence, a crucial event in the transition to adulthood that has not received enough attention so far. The first paper is a cross-national comparison describing the situation in six different developed societies. The second paper studies only the United States, going back to the 1970s and tracing changes over time until 2007. The third paper, instead, focuses on the role of parental social class in the transition to adulthood. The exact mechanisms by which socio-economic status affects the transition to economic selfsufficiency and family formation are largely unknown. A better understanding of these issues can highlight additional information to understand why and how the transition to adulthood has changed in the last five decades. Analyses were carried out using survey data from the Luxemburg Income Study (LIS), the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS, NLSY79, NLSY97), and the Multipurpose ISTAT (FSS 2003). A first main finding of this study is that the transition to economic independence has been delayed together with all the other events of the transition to adulthood. This process has occurred in all developed Western countries even if with some differences. A second finding is that parental social class can explain some of the variation in life courses, and that a higher social class is associated with a postponement in the transition. Also the role of family background, however, differentiates based on welfare state regimes, institutions, and the strength of family ties. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Demography First Advisor Frank Furstenberg This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/700 Second Advisor Hans-Peter Kohler


Catecholamine-induced lipolysis was investigated in nonobese females and males. Isolated subcutaneous adipocytes were obtained from the abdominal and gluteal regions. The lipolytic effect of noradrenaline was four to fivefold more marked in abdominal adipocytes than in gluteal fat cells. This regional difference was more apparent in females than in males. No site differences were observed when lipolysis was stimulated with agents acting at different postreceptor levels. The beta-adrenergic lipolytic sensitivity was 10-20 times greater in abdominal adipocytes from both sexes than in gluteal adipocytes. Abdominal adipocytes from females showed a 40 times lower alpha 2-adrenergic antilipolytic sensitivity than did gluteal adipocytes, but the adenosine receptor sensitivity was similar in both sites. Beta-receptor affinity for agonists displayed no site or sex variation. Abdominal adipocytes showed a twofold increased beta-adrenoceptor density than did gluteal cells from both sexes. The alpha 2-adrenoceptor density was similar in all regions, but in females the affinity of clonidine for these sites was 10-15 times lower in the abdominal fat cells compared with gluteal cells. In conclusion, regional differences in catecholamine-induced lipolysis are regulated at the adrenoceptor level, chiefly because of site variations in beta-adrenoceptor density. Further variations in the affinity properties of alpha 2-adrenergic receptor in females may explain why the regional differences in catecholamine-induced lipolysis are more pronounced in women than in men.


According to the Dual Idiom Representation Model (Titone & Connine 1994; Abel 2003), the number of idiom entries created in a learner's L1/L2 mental lexicon depends on the decomposability and frequency of the idiom and the time of exposure to the language in question. When the idiom is comparatively opaque, the frequency relatively low and/or little time has been spent on acquiring the language, the learner, when trying to interpret idioms, instead resorts to conceptual metaphors that exist across languages. L2 learners also make use of context to a greater extent than L1 speakers. (Liu 2008) L2 idiom comprehension thus appears to entail a more heuristic approach than L1 idiom comprehension. (Liu 2008) In the present investigation 15 first-term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in English (L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively (30 of which focused on the source domain of animals which is commonly used in both languages) and asked to explain their meaning. The idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. Three main research questions were thus addressed.1) How well do the subjects master idioms of approximately the same total frequency in their L2 as compared to in their L1?2) How do a) degrees of transparency (full transparency, semi-transparency, no transparency), b) idiom frequency and c) the choice of source domain affect the subjects' comprehension in their L2 as compared to in their L1?3) To what extent is context used when interpreting the idioms in the subjects' L2 as compared to in their L1?The students were also requested to evaluate their knowledge. In addition, native speaker results were used as a point of reference for the L2 test.


Under the assumptions that (i) gamification consists of various types of users that experience game design elements differently; and (ii) gamification is deployed in order to achieve some goal in the broadest sense, we pose the gamification problem as that of assigning each user a game design element that maximizes their expected contribution in order to achieve that goal. We show that this problem reduces to a statistical learning problem and suggest matrix factorization as one solution when user interaction data is given. The hypothesis is that predictive models as intelligent tools for supporting users in decision-making may also have potential to support the design process in gamification.


We examine support for the death penalty among a unique group of respondents: one hundred and eighty-seven citizens who actually served as jurors on capital trials in South Carolina. Capital jurors support the death penalty as much as, if not more than, members of the general public. Yet capital jurors, like poll respondents, harbor doubts about the penalty's fairness. Moreover, jurors?black jurors and Southern Baptists in particular?are ready to abandon their support for the death penalty when the alternative to death is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, especially when combined with a requirement of restitution. Support for the death penalty therefore exists side by side with doubts about its fairness and a distinct preference for some alternative to it. What explains this deadly paradox? We suggest that the paradox arises where democratic politics fails to make life imprisonment without parole one of the alternatives to death, or where public education fails to inform or persuade jurors that capital defendants sentenced to life imprisonment will really remain in prison for the rest of their lives.


PURPOSE
To characterize by Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT) the loss of nerve fiber layer (NFL) and ganglion cell complex (GCC) in nonarteritic ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION).

METHODS
Patients diagnosed with NAION were enrolled and categorized into "superior field loss (SFL)," "inferior field loss (IFL)," and "bihemispheric field loss (BFL)" groups based on the Swedish interactive threshold algorithm 30-2 achromatic visual field (VF) tests. Six months after presentation, they were scanned by FD-OCT to map peripapillary NFL and macular GCC thicknesses. Age-matched normals were selected from participants in the Advanced Imaging for Glaucoma Study (www.AIGStudy.net). Deviation maps were defined as the difference between the thickness maps and the average normal maps. Pearson's correlation coefficient was used to assess the correlation between VF and OCT measurements.

RESULTS
Twenty-five NAION eyes in 20 subjects were analyzed. Most (2/3) SFL cases showed inferior NFL loss with variable sparing of inferonasal losses. All (4/4) IFL cases showed superior NFL loss with variable inferonasal extension. The GCC maps demonstrated clear hemispheric loss pattern in agreement with VFs. NFL and GCC losses could be detected even in the less affected hemispheres (P < 0.001). NFL and GCC were highly correlated (P < 0.001) with VF in terms of both overall averages and superior-inferior hemispheric differences.

CONCLUSIONS
NFL and GCC losses correlated well with VF losses in both magnitude and location. Hemispheric GCC loss correlated with altitudinal VF loss and this pattern may be of diagnostic value. FD-OCT is useful in the evaluation of NAION.


Purpose Precision oncology is dependent upon the matching of tumor variants to relevant knowledge describing the clinical significance of those variants. We recently developed the Clinical Interpretations for Variants in Cancer (CIViC; civicdb.org) crowd-sourced, expert-moderated, open-access knowledgebase, providing a structured framework for evaluating genomic variants of various types (e.g., fusions, SNVs) for their therapeutic, prognostic, predisposing, diagnostic, or functional utility. CIViC has a documented API for accessing CIViC records: Assertions, Evidence, Variants, and Genes. Third-party tools that analyze or access the contents of this knowledgebase programmatically must leverage this API, often reimplementing redundant functionality in the pursuit of common analysis tasks that are beyond the scope of the CIViC web application. Methods To address this limitation, we developed CIViCpy (civicpy.org), a software development kit (SDK) for extracting and analyzing the contents of the CIViC knowledgebase. CIViCpy enables users to query CIViC content as dynamic objects in Python. We assess the viability of CIViCpy as a tool for advancing individualized patient care by using it to systematically match CIViC evidence to observed variants in patient cancer samples. Results We used CIViCpy to evaluate variants from 59,437 sequenced tumors of the AACR Project GENIE dataset. We demonstrate that CIViCpy enables annotation of >1,200 variants per second, resulting in precise variant matches to CIViC level A (professional guideline) or B (clinical trial) evidence for 38.6% of tumors. Conclusions The clinical interpretation of genomic variants in cancers requires high-throughput tools for interoperability and analysis of variant interpretation knowledge. These needs are met by CIViCpy, an SDK for downstream applications and rapid analysis. CIViCpy (civicpy.org) is fully documented, open-source, and freely available online.


ABSTRACTHourly particulate matter mass concentrations and meteorological parameters, recorded by the China National Environmental Monitoring Center (CNEMC) and China Observatory, between June 2013 and March 2016 in Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai and Guangzhou were examined to explore correlations. Characteristics of a rapid (abrupt) rise in PM2.5 mass concentration during early stage of a serious urban PM pollution event were examined and compared with pollution events with a gradual (accumulative) rise in PM2.5 mass concentration. The accumulative rise in air pollution is characterized by a prolonged slow PM2.5 growth rate (3–5 µg m–3 h–1), and could eventually lead to middle level pollution (ambient PM2.5 mass concentration of about 150 µg m–3), accompanied with an uncertain temporal variation in SO2, NO2, O3 and CO concentrations. The abrupt rise process is characterized by a short-term high aerosol growth rate (> 10 µg m–3 h–1), and could eventually form severe air pollution (PM2.5 mass concentration exceeds 250 µg m–3), with a constant increase in gaseous pollutants concentrations. The average relative humidity (RH) was observed to have a less impact on the rise of PM2.5 concentration, but the fluctuation in RH was found to have a strong correlation with the rise in PM2.5 concentration. Further analysis has indicated that both abrupt and accumulative rise in PM2.5 mass concentration could be due to the RH fluctuation in atmosphere. The RH variation is important for the study of the fine-particle growth and for prediction of PM pollution episodes.


Energy consumption in buildings has been increased due to HVAC systems in recent years with the development of the economy worldwide Air-conditioning is provided by electrically-driven vapor-compression air conditioning unit especially during the summer. Electrically driven VCR requires high grade energy and it also damage our environment. On other hand thermally driven adsorption refrigeration and absorption refrigeration systems got considerable attention nowadays not due to its manufacturing simplicity, but also having environment friendly adsorbent/refrigerant pairs. The present work is focused towards the development of a prototype of vapour adsorption refrigeration system and design of the innovative vapor absorption system using aqua ammonia and a prototype of 1 KW capacity has been designed, developed and tested in the laboratory for vapour adsorption as well as absorption systems. In the present work the heating time required to achieve the cooling effect is around 10 minutes. The COP of the system is in the range of 0.08 to 0.190. The major problem in absorption system is that, along with the ammonia, water also enters into the condenser and the evaporator tube which hampers the cooling effect.


Has the emergence of nationalism made warfare more brutal? Does strong nationalist identification increase efficiency in fighting? Is nationalism the cause or the consequence of the breakdown of imperialism? What is the role of victories and defeats in the formation of national identities? The relationship between nationalism and warfare is complex, and it changes depending on which historical period and geographical context is in question. In 'Nationalism and War', some of the world's leading social scientists and historians explore the nature of the connection between the two. Through empirical studies from a broad range of countries, they explore the impact that imperial legacies, education, welfare regimes, bureaucracy, revolutions, popular ideologies, geopolitical change, and state breakdowns have had in the transformation of war and nationalism.


Strawberry (Fragaria ×ananassa) production practices followed by growers in the United States vary by region. Understanding the challenges, needs, and opportunities in each region is essential to guide research, policy, and marketing strategies for the strawberry industry across the country, and to enable the development of general and region-specific educational and production tools. This review divided the United States into eight distinct geographic regions and an indoor controlled or protected environment production system. Current production systems, markets, cultivars, trends, and future directions for each region are discussed. A common trend across all regions is the increasing use of protected culture strawberry production with both day-neutral and short-day cultivars for season extension to meet consumer demand for year-round availability. All regions experience challenges with pests and obtaining adequate harvest labor. Increasing consumer demand for berries, climate change-induced weather variability, high pesticide use, labor and immigration policies, and land availability impact regional production, thus facilitating the adoption of new technologies such as robotics and network communications to assist with strawberry harvesting in open-field production and production under controlled-environment agriculture and protected culture.


Transcriptional feedback loops are at the heart of circadian clocks of mammals and other organisms, but evidence is emerging that suggests that other signaling mechanisms also have important roles in basic functions of the clock. O'Neill et al. (see the Perspective by Harrisingh and Nitabach) show that cytosolic signaling through adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate (cAMP) integrates with the transcriptional timing mechanism, sustains it, and determines the fundamental properties (amplitude, phase, and period) of the transcriptional feedback loops of the mammalian circadian pacemaker. This expands the paradigm of cellular circadian oscillation control by transcriptional feedback loops to include small-molecule cytoplasmic signals that differ between species--cAMP in mammals, Ca2+ in mammals and insects, and cyclic ADP ribose in plants. J. S. O'Neill, E. S. Maywood, J. E. Chesham, J. S. Takahashi, M. H. Hastings, cAMP-dependent signaling as a core component of the mammalian circadian pacemaker. Science 320, 949-953 (2008). [Abstract] [Full Text] M. C. Harrisingh, M. N. Nitabach, Integrating circadian timekeeping with cellular physiology. Science 320, 879-880 (2008). [Summary] [Full Text]


We present a compilation of tropospheric 14CO2 for the period 1950–2010, based on published radiocarbon data from selected records of atmospheric CO2 sampling and tree-ring series. This compilation is a new version of the compilation by Hua and Barbetti (2004) and consists of yearly summer data sets for zonal, hemispheric, and global levels of atmospheric 14C. In addition, compiled (and extended) monthly data sets for 5 atmospheric zones (3 in the Northern Hemisphere and 2 in the Southern Hemisphere) are reported. The annual data sets are for use in regional and global carbon model calculations, while the extended monthly data sets serve as calibration curves for 14C dating of recent, short-lived terrestrial organic materials.


Blueberry dietary interventions have demonstrated remarkable potential against obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, the effects of fermented blueberry juice on metabolic syndrome, the gut microbiota, and insulin resistance have not yet been reported. This study aimed to investigate the potential of fermented blueberry juice against obesity, hyperglycemia, and gut microbiota dysbiosis in high fat diet (HFD)-fed mice. Our study findings revealed that supplementation with fresh blueberry juice (BBJ), and fermented blueberry juice with homemade probiotic starter (FBJ) or commercial starter (CFBJ) significantly decreased fat accumulation and low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) levels in HFD-fed mice. FBJ showed relatively more potency to reduce body weight than BBJ and CFBJ. The percentage increase in the body weight of the FBJ group was almost the same as that in the normal chow diet (NCD) group, and was approximately 10% lower than the BBJ and CFBJ groups. Overall, all blueberry juices significantly ameliorated hyperlipidemia and insulin resistance in HFD-fed mice. Moreover, the dietary interventions with BBJ, FBJ, and CFBJ for 17 weeks significantly improved the community richness and diversity of the gut microflora along with an altered structure in the HFD-fed mice group. The FBJ treated mice group showed relatively low abundance of Firmicutes, obesity-related bacteria (Oscillibacter and Alistipes), and high abundance of lean bacteria (Akkermansia, Barnesiella, Olsenella, Bifidobacterium, and Lactobacillus) compared to the HFD-fed mice group. Furthermore, BBJ and FBJ treatments regulated the liver mRNA and protein expression levels involved in lipid and glucose metabolism. This study inferred that fermented blueberry juice could be used as a functional food to prevent the modern pandemics i.e., obesity and insulin resistance.


We propose a disk encryption method, called secure disk mixed system (SDMS) in this paper, for data protection of disk storages such as USB flash memory, USB hard disk and CD/DVD. It is aimed to solve temporal and spatial limitation problems of existing disk encryption methods and to control security performance flexibly according to the security requirement of system. SDMS stores data by encrypting with different encryption key per sector and updates sector encryption keys each time data is written. Security performance of SDMS is analyzed at the end of the paper.


In this paper the authors examine the new public management (NPM) philosophy influencing the organisational environment in which child protection social workers are located. NPM prioritises outputs through policies, such as results based accountability (RBA) predicated on the expectation that responsibility to achieve designated programme outcomes is sheeted to the agency and its workers. Ongoing funding depends on programme results. NPM ideology assumes that workers and managers in agencies tasked with delivering care and protection services are able to control the variables influencing outputs which contribute to outcomes. The authors will analyse four key aspects of NPM thinking (RBA, outputs, outcomes and key performance indicators) and explore their organisational consequences. The influence on social work practice of information and communications technology (ICT), on which NPM depends, is also considered. The paper is not an ideologically based rejection of NPM, but rather an assessment of its consequences for care and protection practice. The authors call for a return to the centrality of relationally based social work processes embodied in common factors (CF) practice, such as the therapeutic alliance. We argue that CF approaches offer a contrasting and more appropriate practice philosophy than NPM thinking while still enabling achievable, multifaceted organisational benefits.


Pot experiment conducted in the nursery of Faculty of Forestry, University Putra Malaysia during the periods from May to August, 20006 to investigate the effect of water stress on Asplenium nidus growth performance, transpiration rate and chlorophyll content in fronds. The plants were subjected to five water stress levels; control-watered every day, T1-watered every three days, T2-watered every seven days, T3-watered every fourteen days and T4-suspended without watering. Growth parameters were measured every week for a period of sixteen weeks. At the end of experiment, transpiration rate and chlorophyll content were measured as well as dry matter of plants. The results showed that levels of watering did not significantly affect all growth and physiological parameters of Asplenium nidus except T4 which decreased all growth parameter and some physiological responses. T1 had the highest dry matter production. The plants allocated more growth to the shoot under optimum conditions but more growth to the root under stress conditions. This plant was able to adapt and survive without watering for 16 weeks and demonstrate that it can survive in water limited condition.


Climate change forecasts of more frequent climate extremes suggest that such events will become increasingly important drivers of future ecosystem dynamics and function. Because the rarity and unpredictability of naturally occurring climate extremes limits assessment of their ecological impacts, we experimentally imposed extreme drought and a mid-summer heat wave over two years in a central U.S. grassland. While the ecosystem was resistant to heat waves, it was not resistant to extreme drought, which reduced aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP) below the lowest level measured in this grassland in almost 30 years. This extreme reduction in ecosystem function was a consequence of reduced productivity of both C4 grasses and C3 forbs. However, the dominant forb was negatively impacted by the drought more than the dominant grass, and this led to a reordering of species abundances within the plant community. Although this change in community composition persisted post-drought, ANPP recovered completely t...


Body image is a human universal which affects the health and well-being of an individual and their ability to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Results in the field of body image research and its relationship with sports participation have been mixed, meaning that the effect of athletic involvement on body image in unclear. This study uses a sample of 142 adult females to address the question of whether participation in sports, and aesthetic sports in particular, has an effect on body concern. The results of this study indicate no link between participation in sports and body concern in a sample of non-elite-level athletes from a wide spectrum of sports, including aesthetic sports. The results do indicate that a large proportion of the variance in body concern can be explained by psychological and sociocultural variables, age and Body Mass Index. The relationship between these variables and scores on the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ) are modelled using structural equation modelling. BODY CONCERN AND SPORTS PARTICIPATION


Early in the development of the antitrust laws, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that conditioning the sale of one product on the customer's agreement to purchase another ("tying" or "tie-in sales") was inherently anticompetitive and lacked any redeeming virtue. During the Chicago School's ascendancy, article after article appeared challenging that notion and explaining how tying could benefit consumers. Einer Elhauge's article, "Tying, Bundled Discounts, and the Death of the Single Monopoly Profit Theory," 123 Harv. L. Rev. 397 (2009), finally turns the tables, purporting to show that tying, in many of its forms, is bad for consumers after all. In the process, Elhauge takes on not just the old Chicago School, but also the current mainstream commentators who oppose existing law's tough approach to tying.Valuable as all this is, Elhauge makes one less than convincing claim: that antitrust law should condemn tying by firms with market power even when the practice does not restrain competition in the tied product market. He systematically seeks to show that tying enables a firm with market power to charge higher prices than it could if it simply charged the profit-maximizing price on the tying product alone. But he shortchanges the most compelling counter argument: namely, that granting firms with market power broad leeway to exploit that power actually benefits consumers over time so long as competing firms are not restrained. Despite the short-run harm from temporarily higher prices, the opportunity to charge them encourages rival firms to invest in innovative activities that are essential to a vibrant economy.This Response first articulates the case for permitting firms that do not restrain competition to exploit market power through tying. The Response criticizes Elhauge's counter-points, and concludes that irrespective of who wins the economic debate, Elhauge's approach necessarily conflicts at a deep level with the theory of competition policy that underlies antitrust law. As a result, one who accepts his argument with respect to tying would be compelled to re-examine antitrust doctrine all the way down to its core.


Debate over unpublished judicial opinions and no-citation rules frequently proceeds without full and updated information about citation practices and developments. This is particularly true of the state courts, whose citation practices are diverse, elusive, and fast-changing. This article offers a comprehensive report on current practices in the federal circuit courts of appeals - where nine of the thirteen circuits now allow citation of unpublished opinions (apart from related cases) - and in the state courts. The situation in the states as of late 2003 is found to be notably different from what was reported in congressional testimony in mid-2002. In place of a vast majority of states banning citation of unpublished opinions, a distinct trend toward allowing citation has produced near-equality between citation and no-citation states. (See the table in the Appendix.) The article then focuses on a proposed new rule for the federal courts, making unpublished opinions citable in all circuits, which has been put forward by the Advisory Committee on Appellate Rules of the United States Judicial Conference and on which the committee is receiving public comments (due by February 16, 2004). Problems of drafting the proposed rule are discussed, along with questions of how to deal with provisions in local circuit rules that allow, but disfavor and discourage, the citation of unpublished opinions.


Despite its political significance, not much is known about the behavioral and attitudinal bases of different head cover practices in Turkey. The article makes use of two nationwide representative surveys, one carried out in 1999 and the other in 2006, to expose the characteristics of "covered" women in contrast to "the uncovered." Three different types of head covers are distinguished: (1) the more traditional but relatively more colorful head cover allows for the hair, neck, and shoulders and much of the face to be seen; the turban, paler in color, covers all hair, the neck, and the shoulders and leaves only a smaller portion of the face uncovered; and the veil, in dark brown or black, leaves only the eyes uncovered. Several hypotheses are made on an a priori conceptual level, variables are operationalized, and proper tests are conducted. A detailed series of questions concerning attitudinal traits and the social and political preferences of covered and uncovered women, together with demographics, are used to determine Turkish women's choices for different types of religiously meaningful head covers. Among the various hypotheses, the political significance of turban wearing, as opposed to purely private-sphere religious beliefs as the guiding motivation behind turban use, is contrasted and tested.


This paper analyzes colonialism in Africa to show a plausible connection between culture and human agency and to highlight the conceptual problem of ascribing responsibility in the context of the notion of culturally induced moral ignorance. It argues for the plausibility of the inability thesis, which states that people can be rendered morally ignorant by their culture, using as a backdrop, Moody-Adams' account of the connection between culture and agency. It shows that Moody-Adams' account, and her criteria for ascribing responsibility, cannot handle the problem identified with the colonial situation or culture in Africa, with respect to responsibility of corrupt African leaders. Her arguments do not fully appreciate the real force of the inability thesis and the substantial problem of delimiting the scope of responsibility, which is involved in ascribing responsibility in the context of cultural impediments. This paper does not draw any specific practical conclusion with respect to the responsibility of African leaders. It leaves such a practical conclusion open. However, given the analysis of the colonial situation, the nature and complexity of the problem, it suggests that it is conceptually problematic to blame entirely, without qualification, the specter of corruption in Africa on African leaders.


"Strategic planning is a critical part of running a business, but when you get a team of people together to plan, it can often become a confused exercise in grand visions without a clear process for establishing workable goals. This book is unique in providing both guidance for the actual content of strategic plans and techniques for how to plan in a team context. Readers will discover how to: * structure the process so it custom fits their company needs * effectively facilitate the process (keep meetings on track, train others in planning skills, document decisions made at meetings, present and communicate the plan) * use teams and teamwork smoothly and productively to create a far-reaching plan -- and then to implement it Features detailed guidelines for each step, dozens of flowcharts, and three self-contained "facilitator's guides" to follow."


The status of physical activity in higher education has changed dramatically over the past 100 years. In this paper, we aim to (a) provide a brief history of physical activity on campus; (b) describe how that activity has changed from a requirement to an elective; (c) illustrate how mental health (particularly stress, anxiety, and depression) has changed in college students over the past few decades; and (d) describe the relationships between physical activity and mental health, particularly in college students. The paper culminates with recommendations for how colleges and universities might facilitate better student mental health through physical activity. There is room to improve the physical activity and mental health of college students, realigning higher education with the promotion of mens sana in corpore sano.


This focus of this paper is the role that coconut products have played in Samoa's cash economy, past and present. This paper begins with a brief history of the use of coconut products in Samoa before independence. Next, the decline of the copra and copra oil industries in the 1980s and 1990s is highlighted, and several causes for this decline are explained. The current roles of coconut products such as copra oil, virgin coconut oil, whole coconuts sold locally, coconut cream, coconut shell handicrafts, and coconut wood are then analyzed. Specific attention is given to the potential role of copra oil as a bio-fuel alternative to imported diesel fuel, and to the expanding export-oriented virgin coconut oil industry. The products' current contributions to Samoa's economy are presented, and important research currently being done on coconut products is also analyzed. Finally, this paper's conclusion focuses on the future of these industries, and what needs to be done to ensure that the coconut tree's potential economic benefits are reaped in the years to come.


This paper will examine the role of spreadsheet analysis in all aspects of hydropower development. The structure of the presentation will be first to briefly present an overview of the theory behind spreadsheet modeling including a discussion of the various types of spreadsheets available. Second, suggestions will be made of possible areas for the application of spreadsheet technology within the hydropowr industry. Third, guidelines for the use of spreadsheets will be presented from the perspective of proper data processing control and protection. Finally, a general conclusion regarding spreadsheet usage will be presented and directions for future study will be given.


The question posed in this dissertation is why high-level corruption has been less widespread in Chile than in Argentina. It explores the hypothesis that political-institutional conditions have made Chile less vulnerable to high-level corruption than its neighbor. The analytical focus is on four institutional dimensions usually considered significant for explaining variations in vulnerability to corruption: power concentration, discretion, transparency, and intrastate accountability. The role and significance of institutional conditions emerge from an empirical study of the actions of decision-makers – largely executive officials – in connection with the launching and implementation of privatization during the 1990s (just the sort of situation normally offering manifold incentives and opportunities for corrupt behavior).The results of this study confirm the significance of political institutions in accounting for differences in vulnerability to corruption at high levels of the political hierarchy. The Chilean political setting proved more adverse to corruption than its Argentinean counterpart, with stronger intrastate accountability and a less pronounced concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch. Variations in the level of discretion in decision-making were found to be less influential than is usually suggested in the literature on corruption. Most notably, a higher level of transparency in Argentina was not associated with any lower level of corruption. The research findings indicate a more complex causal relationship than expected between transparency and corruption, with results varying according to level of transparency, time span considered, and degree of intrastate accountability and power concentration. The empirical analysis also yields revealing insights into the role played by particular institutional conditions in shaping contexts more adverse or favorable to high-level corruption. These insights are of value for theory development, and may be useful for purposes of institutional reform.


The choice of reliability indices of pipes and conduits as criteria by which to assess the effectiveness of the object in the design of piping systems. Based on the analysis of statistical data and regulatory requirements for the selection of the range of indicators of reliability of technical devices is justifiedthat the reliability of pipes and pipelines must be assessed indicators of longevity: Т*ср, Тсл, Тγ. If it isср сл γjudged piping system, such as conduits or piping distribution network, the reliability is taken as ameasure of P ( t ) reliabilities for time t. It is proposed to the existing set of rules (SR) design water and wastewater systems to make the requirements for standardization and evaluation of the reliability of pipelines.


Objective: To critically appraise the published evidence for risk factors for injuries and deaths relating to work-related road traffic crashes. Design: Systematic review. Data sources: Electronic databases searched included Medline, EMBASE, PsycINFO, Transport database, and the Australian Transport and Road Index (ATRI) database. Additional searches included websites of relevant organizations, reference lists of included studies, and issues of major injury journals published within the past 5 years. Inclusion criteria: Studies were included if they investigated work-related traffic crashes or related injuries or deaths as the outcome, measured any potential risk factor for work-related road traffic crash as an exposure, included a relevant comparison group, and were written in English. Methods: Included studies were critically appraised using the GATE-lite critical appraisal form (www.epiq.co.nz). Meta-analysis was not attempted because of the heterogeneity of the included studies. Findings: Of 25 studies identified, three of four robust (case–control and case-crossover) studies found an increased injury risk (i) among workers after extended shifts, (ii) for tractor-trailers with brake and steering defects, and (iii) for "double configuration" trucks. The fourth study showed that alcohol and drug use were not risk factors in an industry with a random testing policy. The best cross-sectional studies showed associations between injury and sleepiness, time spent driving, occupational stress, non-insulin-dependent uncomplicated diabetes, and use of narcotics and antihistamines. Conclusions: Modifiable behavioral and vehicle-related risk factors are likely to contribute to work-related traffic injury. Fatigue and sleepiness—the most commonly researched topics—were consistently associated with increased risk.


The universe of digital assets is vast, including email accounts, picture and video storage sites, social networking sites, domain names, games and related sites; professional sites and backups; as well as online banking and business accounts. Moreover, digital assets go beyond online accounts to include your own personal or work computers, their hardware and software. If your clients are smart about their digital life, then they have numerous usernames, passwords, and security questions for their accounts. Trust and estates lawyers are increasingly helping to plan for the care of digital assets upon their client's incapacity or death, providing advice concerning both the safekeeping of usernames and passwords and the disposition of the assets themselves. Each of these issues requires different techniques from the estate planning toolbox. Lawyers provide this planning for new clients, and they may often follow up with previous clients to ensure a periodic review of the disposition of these assets. This article discusses the reasons to engage in digital asset planning, the steps to plan for digital assets, the obstacles to planning for digital assets, and concludes by looking at what the future may hold.


The infrared through millimetre light curve of 3C279 is investigated for the period of 1986 until mid-1994, during which time several flares were observed. A quiescent spectrum (identified with emission from an underlying jet) is presented. Both the near-IR and 375–150 GHz regimes are shown to be well described by power laws, with no evidence for any thermal contribution in the IR. Successful isolation of the flaring component by subtraction of a base level is found to be difficult. Dividing each individual flare into two regimes corresponding to before and after maximum flux, we find strong linear correlations between log 90 GHz flux and 22–90 GHz spectral slope. Furthermore, the gradient of the linear correlation steepens as the flare decays after maximum. This trend is observed for several successive flares, and can be successfully explained in terms of evolution of the flare according to the the shocked-jet model of Marscher & Gear (1985).


In Bangladesh, Formal legal education is provided by either a department of a university or an affiliated college. There are four public universities and above twenty six private universities in our country with law as a regular subject of teaching. Besides, the National University imparts teaching of law through law colleges in the country. All public and private universities providing law graduate degree by conventional system but many people deprived from this opportunities. Thus to increase equitable access to education and to develop the human resources of the country the Bangladesh Open University playing significant role. Large numbers of students of rural areas, particularly women, out of school and adults who must do work to support their families are include with the university. Bangladesh Open University is the only institution in Bangladesh which imparts education in open and distance mode and offers 23 formal programmes, the demand for the introduction of LL.B programme for the benefit of those who have been, for various reasons, deprived of the opportunity of undertaking graduate course in law in conventional mode of education. The decision to offer the programme in distance mode is being taken in response to the earnest desire of the relevant quarters expressed in various dailies and formal applications submitted to the university authority as the learners in the open and distance mode learn at his own place and any time whenever he feels convenient to learn and is not for restricted by time, space or age. Distance learning is, indeed, presently considered as a viable alternative of the conventional system of education to fulfill the growing demand for legal education. This paper presents the new academic trends in Bangladesh Open University by distance learning Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree and modern aspects of the legal education at School of Law in Bangladesh Open University.


Location-based social networking (LBSN) is a service that utilizes location information to facilitate social networking. LBSN applications allow users to view the locations of their "friends." They also may allow users to view information about other users of LBSN applications that are located in proximity. Users invite their friends to participate in LBSN. A process of consent follows in which users provide permission for their location information to be viewed to varying levels of detail depending on their chosen settings. The manner in which LBSN applications work is illustrated simplistically in Fig. 1, although variations to this model exist. LBSN applications such as Loopt, Fire Eagle, Navizon, iPoki, Locago, ZinTin, iFob, WhosHere, and Google Latitude enhance a users ability to perform overt or covert social surveillance. These applications enable users to view and share real-time location information with their family and friends. With the emergence of this technology it is crucial to consider, as suggested by Kling [1], that "technology alone, even good technology alone is not sufficient to create social or economic value." Further to not contributing "sufficient" economic or social value, Kling and other scholars, such as Kraut et al. [2], have identified that technologies can have negative impacts on society.


Although knowledge management is considered as a very recent phenomenon, research in to knowledge and the management of the knowledge within the business context has grown dramatically over the last few years, in a number of different directions. As a result, a great deal about, what knowledge is and the ways in which knowledge is managed, have been addressed by many authors. However, despite the growing body of theory, there are relatively few knowledge management texts that make an explicit connection between knowledge and performance. Knowledge is not always utilised and that utilised knowledge does not always result in improved performance. Thereby measurement of performance is of utmost importance for an organisation to ensure the successful implementation of knowledge management exercise. This paper is aimed at reviewing literature on both knowledge management and organisational performance. Based on the review it was underlined knowledge management as a strategy which leads to performances. The paper highlighted the extreme importance of looking into the performance measures which can be deployed in knowledge organisations and recommends further research to be carried out on this regard.


Abstract. The Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature version 2.1 (MEGAN2.1) is a modeling framework for estimating fluxes of biogenic compounds between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere using simple mechanistic algorithms to account for the major known processes controlling biogenic emissions. It is available as an offline code and has also been coupled into land surface and atmospheric chemistry models. MEGAN2.1 is an update from the previous versions including MEGAN2.0, which was described for isoprene emissions by Guenther et al. (2006) and MEGAN2.02, which was described for monoterpene and sesquiterpene emissions by Sakulyanontvittaya et al. (2008). Isoprene comprises about half of the total global biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emission of 1 Pg (1000 Tg or 1015 g) estimated using MEGAN2.1. Methanol, ethanol, acetaldehyde, acetone, α-pinene, β-pinene, t-β-ocimene, limonene, ethene, and propene together contribute another 30% of the MEGAN2.1 estimated emission. An additional 20 compounds (mostly terpenoids) are associated with the MEGAN2.1 estimates of another 17% of the total emission with the remaining 3% distributed among >100 compounds. Emissions of 41 monoterpenes and 32 sesquiterpenes together comprise about 15% and 3%, respectively, of the estimated total global BVOC emission. Tropical trees cover about 18% of the global land surface and are estimated to be responsible for ~80% of terpenoid emissions and ~50% of other VOC emissions. Other trees cover about the same area but are estimated to contribute only about 10% of total emissions. The magnitude of the emissions estimated with MEGAN2.1 are within the range of estimates reported using other approaches and much of the differences between reported values can be attributed to land cover and meteorological driving variables. The offline version of MEGAN2.1 source code and driving variables is available from http://bai.acd.ucar.edu/MEGAN/ and the version integrated into the Community Land Model version 4 (CLM4) can be downloaded from http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/ .


1. Turfgrasses 2. Turfgrass Physiology and Environmental Stresses 3. Soil Chemical Properties 4. Soil Physical Properties and Drainage Characteristics 5. Soil Oxygen and Temperature Properties 6. Soil Organisms 7. Golf Course Construction and Renovation 8. Putting Green Construction 9. Turfgrass Establishment and â Grow-In 10. Plant Nutrition and Turf Fertilizers 11. Developing Turf Fertilizer Programs and Fertilizer Calculations 12. Water Management and Conservation in Turf 13. Irrigation Water Quality 14. Cultural Practices for Golf Courses 15. Managing Bentgrass/Poa annua Golf Greens in Stressful Environments 16. Managing Bermudagrass Golf Greens 17. Managing Seashore Paspalum 18. Integrated Pest Management 19. Turfgrass Diseases 20. Turfgrass Insects 21. Turfgrass Nematodes 22. Turfgrass Weeds 23. Turfgrass Plant Growth Regulators 24. Effective, Safe, and Legal Use of Pesticides 25. Best Golf Course Environmental Protection Strategies 26. Sprayer and Spreader Calibration 27. Budgets and Personnel Management Appendix A: Stoke's equation for Calculating the Velocity of Falling Particles and Darcy's Equation for Calculating Hydraulic Conductivity. Appendix B: Calculating Soil Porosity. Appendix C Chemical and Physical Properties of Organic Materials Used in Turf Appendix D Surface Area Calculations Appendix E Calibration Formulas and Metric Conversion Tables


Semiotics as a discipline has gained a recognition in many spheres. A.J. Greimas semiotic theory has proven to be suitable for analysing architectural works. Obviously, there is a need of theory regarding architectural space to be collected and compiled to lend a helping hand for a researcher. The article demonstrates how to undertake a close semiotic analysis of the architectural space. Semiotic 'tools' help to articulate the form of the expression of the architectural work with the form of the content to make a corresponding reading of the signifying object possible. The article gives a general overview of the semiotics of architecture and space and some of the issues that surface in it. Moreover, it clarifies how signification comes in architecture, spells this out in more detail and confronts us with disoursive syntax and semantics.