Much attention is focused on the social determinants of health. Family medicine is challenged with a growing number of vulnerable persons with psychosocial or lifestyle related problems. The objective of this work was to explore how vulnerable younger adults experience person-centered preventive health consultations with their general practitioner. The design and setting for this work were a secondary qualitative analysis of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Danish general practices. Younger adults (20-45) were consecutively invited to answer a screening questionnaire about psychosocial and lifestyle-related problems when visiting general practice (28 general practitioners (GPs)) for ordinary consultations. The 30% most vulnerable persons were invited to participate in a randomized controlled study. Intervention participants (n = 209) received a structured 1- hour 'health consultation' with their general practitioner focusing on resources and self-chosen goals and a 20-min follow-up after 3 months; control participants (n = 255) received usual care. At 1 year, 180 participants answered a follow-up postal questionnaire, of whom 135 answered the open- ended question: "Do you think the health consultation was worthwhile?". This question was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Six themes were prevalent: 'Meeting the doctor in a different way', 'Supporting dialogue', 'Food for thought', 'Feeling better', 'Opportunity for change', and the health consultations were 'Not worthwhile'. Offering vulnerable younger adults a structured, person-centered preventive health consultation strengthened the doctor-patient relationship, allowed patients to reflect on their life situation, enhanced their perceived ability to cope with their problems and their belief in and ability to initiate wanted changes, thereby enhancing self-efficacy


In this thesis the study of a multiplexed Fibre Optic Acoustic Sensor (FOAS) system is presented. Narrowband reflectors (Fibre Bragg Gratings or FBGs) define sensing sections of 12.5 metres, which then act as Fabry-Perot (FP) cavities. Low-coherence interferometry is used to interrogate the sensors with an accuracy of 50 µrad/√Hz, in good agreement with the theoretically predicted value. Heterodyne signal processing is used to eliminate low frequency environmental noise. The performance of the sensor is checked by a sinusoidal calibration signal generated by a PZT fibre stretcher. The sensor has a flat frequency response at 10 kHz with a high sensitivity of 50 µrad/√Hz and a dynamic range of 80 dB. The use of FBG based interferometers allows the use of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology allowing us to multiplex large number of sensors in the system. The sensing system uses Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) sources for illumination purposes. ASE sources are an attractive option for interrogating arrays of FBG sensors. The coherence features of broadband ASE light makes it attractive to be used in sensing applications, since Coherence Multiplexed (CM) systems interrogated with these sources do not suffer from phase induced intensity noise, which is a problem when employing laser sources. It is well known that ASE sources suffer from excess photon noise, which is the dominant type of noise and hence limits the systems sensitivity. To get an idea of the impact of this type of noise on the performance of the system, the noise properties have been studied in detail both theoretically and experimentally. Noise spectra are calculated from the autocorrelation function of the output detector current for a thermal-like source. It is well known that unbalanced interferometers (with delay time T) act as filtering elements and produce a noise spectrum with peaks at integer multiples of 1/T, due to filtered source intensity noise. The noise analysis is used to evaluate the performance of the sensor system, and to calculate the optimum reflectivity of both FBGs in the FP sensing cavity. Optimum reflectivities for both FBGs in the FP sensors have been found. Theoretical calculations show that the best phase resolution and visibility is obtained for R1 = 40 % and R2 = 100 %. This has been verified with experiments. We also established the robustness of the system to FBG drift. A first demonstration of a FOS interrogation system using a low-coherence ASE source with a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (SOA) is presented. The SOA is Gain-Saturated and thereby reduces the dominant intensity noise originating from the ASE source, improving the systems Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR).


Abstract Analysis is performed on the production and destruction rates of recycled transuranics (TRUs) in a light water reactor (LWR) fuel assembly using a Monte Carlo-based fuel depletion code (MONTEBURNS 2.0). Thirteen TRUs were recycled into the LWR model through ten 3-yr burnup cycles for a total depletion period of 30 yr. The focus of the research was to determine the relative reduction of TRU waste within the fuel cycle and determine the impact of the recycled TRUs on fuel criticality, waste toxicity, activity, and heat-load production. The amount of TRUs could be reduced by more than a factor of 4 for a 30-yr period when these 13 isotopes were recycled.


The need for and concepts behind demand response are evolving. As the electric system changes with more intermittent renewable electric supply systems, there is a need to allow buildings to provide more flexible demand. This paper presents results from field studies and pilots, as well as engineering estimates of the potential capabilities of fast load responsiveness in commercial buildings. We present a sector wide analysis of flexible loads in commercial buildings, which was conducted to improve resource planning and determine which loads to evaluate in future demonstrations. These systems provide important capabilities for future transactional systems. The field analysis is based on results from California, plus projects in the northwest and east coast. End-uses considered include heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting. The timescales of control include day-ahead, as well as day-of, 10-minute ahead and even faster response. This technology can provide DR signals on different times scales to interact with responsive building loads. We describe the latency of the control systems in the building and the round trip communications with the wholesale grid operators.


The U.S. church is in decline. The literature suggests that one key to revitalizing the church is to reestablish a sense of community. The loss of community is especially acute among the youngest generation—the so-called Net generation, or Net-gen. Each generation develops a set of values that differs from the one before it. Net-geners have largely adopted postmodern values, shaped in part by the Internet itself. In recent years, these Net-geners have adopted a new form of communication—the Web-log or "blog"—which may contribute to their sense of community. While blogs are text-based, the dialog often resembles oral communication. Members of such secondary orality cultures typically favor a flat organizational hierarchy and egalitarianism. In contrast, church growth has been strongest in churches with a strict set of beliefs and strong pastoral authority. These circumstances may combine to make it difficult for non-blogging Net-gen Christians to evangelize and disciple their unchurched blogging counterparts. This study used Hofstede's Power Distance Index (PDI) to compare the preference of Christians (in general), blogging Christians, and non-Christian bloggers for a strong hierarchy, and used Webber's Church Preference Score to measure the differences between church leadership preferred by blogging and non-blogging Net-gen Christians. This study found that non-blogging Christians have a significantly higher PDI than Christian bloggers, suggesting that Christian bloggers are, indeed, more comfortable in an egalitarian environment. This finding is consistent with orality-literacy theory. The study also showed that PDI does not vary significantly between unchurched bloggers and blogging Christians, suggesting that Christian bloggers may have much in common, culturally, with unchurched bloggers. Finally, the data showed that one of the components of the Church Preference Score (Personalization CPS) did not differ significantly between blogging and non-blogging Christians. This research suggests that a new culture of secondary orality is, indeed, taking hold among the younger members of our society, and that Christian bloggers share characteristics of both the Christian and blogging communities. These Christian bloggers may thus be able to serve as a bridge, helping to build relationships between the Church and Net-gen bloggers.


The role of representation in reasoning has been long and widely regarded as crucial. It has remained one of the fundamental considerations in the design of informationprocessing systems and, in particular, for computer systems that reason. However, the process of change and choice of representation has struggled to achieve a status as a task for the systems themselves. Instead, it has mostly remained a responsibility for the human designers and programmers. Many mathematical problems have the characteristic of being easy to solve only after a unique choice of representation has been made. In this thesis we examine two classes of problems in discrete mathematics which follow this pattern, in the light of automated and interactive mechanical theorem provers. We present a general notion of structural transformation, which accounts for the changes of representation seen in such problems, and link this notion to the existing Transfer mechanism in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. We present our mechanisation in Isabelle/HOL of some specific transformations identified as key in the solutions of the aforementioned mathematical problems. Furthermore, we present some tools that we developed to extend the functionalities of the Transfer mechanism, designed with the specific purpose of searching efficiently the space of representations using our set of transformations. We describe some experiments that we carried out using these tools, and analyse these results in terms of how close the tools lead us to a solution, and how desirable these solutions are. The thorough qualitative analysis we present in this thesis reveals some promise as well as some challenges for the far-reaching problem of representation in reasoning, and the automation of the processes of change and choice of representation.


Copyright laws are conventionally justified on consequentialist grounds. As a result, value judgements about the viability of copyright laws are often based on their social or economic consequences. However, despite longstanding conversations among scholars about the nature of copyright and its purported effects on societies and markets, a consensus of how copyright laws ought to be structured to encourage authorship and other forms of creative endeavor has yet to emerge. Framing the analysis of copyright laws within consequentialist frameworks as intellectual property scholars have conventionally tended to do, while important in studying the consequences of laws from a socio-economic perspective, has not yielded satisfactory answers to a more fundamental question about the proper content and scope of copyright laws. For many communities and societies with increasing humanistic interests and goals, this question about the law's proper content is a perennial one. To answer this question, this paper draws from two sources. First, legal theories on natural law, which require as a general rule that man-made laws satisfy an objective moral standard, support a proposition that copyright laws have essential moral content that may be identified through reason. Second, catholic social teachings on the common good, respect for the life and dignity of the human person, and correlation of rights and responsibility offer a framework to inform and shape appropriate copyright laws and policies. This paper proposes that for the progress of science to be sustained, the core content of copyright laws must protect the conditions that contribute towards authentic forms of authorship and support the flourishing and thriving of relationship-oriented communities. By identifying core moral content to inform and guide the development of copyright law and policy, a healthy ecology for the production and distribution of creative works may emerge to produce greater equity in how literary and artistic resources are ultimately used in the information economy.


In 2003, three independent groups reported detecting methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Whether the reported methane is from microbes eking out a living beneath the surface or from deep stirrings of the geologically moribund planet, no one can say. Either prospect would excite scientists, but only martian biology could rejuvenate a troubled NASA Mars program. The first group reported that they had detected a few tens of parts per billion by volume of martian methane. They found it by reading the squiggly lines of infrared spectra recorded by ground-based telescopes. Two other independent groups backed up that work with their own reported spectroscopic detections. But some planetary scientists now see no credible signs that there ever was any methane on Mars.


Recent antitrust cases, such as Trinko, Microsoft, LePage's, and AMR, have focused attention on the uncertain "exclusionary conduct" doctrine under section 2 of the Sherman Act, leading to a renewed debate on the appropriate legal standards to define such conduct, and the proposal of several competing liability standards. Most of the proposed tests offer a single standard to govern all exclusionary conduct. Although the idea of a universal test is attractive initially, for reasons addressed in the paper, the application of any single standard to all allegedly exclusionary conduct would lead to dangers of either false positives or false negatives, and would necessarily either overdeter competitive conduct or underdeter anticompetitive conduct. This paper discusses the three main proposed tests - the "no economic sense" variant of the "profit sacrifice" test, the "excluding equally efficient competitor" test, and the consumer welfare test - and explains that, while each of these tests may be effective for some types of exclusionary conduct, it would be inappropriate as a universal test. This paper proposes, instead, a workable and theoretically reasonable approach that uses different tests for different types of exclusionary conduct. The challenge in fashioning a non-universal approach is to ensure coherence and practicality, and minimize uncertainty. This paper offers a theoretically based and workable method for accomplishing that. The approach takes into account a few factors relevant to how tolerant or intolerant an antitrust rule should be: false positives and false negatives; expected benefits from antitrust remedy; and overdeterrence and underdeterrence. Finally, the paper addresses a few objections that are likely to be made to a non-universal approach.


Most state-of-the-art action feature extractors involve differential operators, which act as highpass filters and tend to attenuate low frequency action information. This attenuation introduces bias to the resulting features and generates ill-conditioned feature matrices. The Gaussian Pyramid has been used as a feature enhancing technique that encodes scale-invariant characteristics into the feature space in an attempt to deal with this attenuation. However, at the core of the Gaussian Pyramid is a convolutional smoothing operation, which makes it incapable of generating new features at coarse scales. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel feature enhancing technique called Multi-skIp Feature Stacking (MIFS), which stacks features extracted using a family of differential filters parameterized with multiple time skips and encodes shift-invariance into the frequency space. MIFS compensates for information lost from using differential operators by recapturing information at coarse scales. This recaptured information allows us to match actions at different speeds and ranges of motion. We prove that MIFS enhances the learnability of differential-based features exponentially. The resulting feature matrices from MIFS have much smaller conditional numbers and variances than those from conventional methods. Experimental results show significantly improved performance on challenging action recognition and event detection tasks. Specifically, our method exceeds the state-of-the-arts on Hollywood2, UCF101 and UCF50 datasets and is comparable to state-of-the-arts on HMDB51 and Olympics Sports datasets. MIFS can also be used as a speedup strategy for feature extraction with minimal or no accuracy cost.


With the progress in hardware implementation of artificial neural networks, the ability to analyze their faulty behavior has become increasingly important to their diagnosis, repair, reconfiguration, and reliable application. The behavior of feedforward neural networks with hard limiting activation function under stuck-at faults is studied in this article. It is shown that the stuck-at-M faults have a larger effect on the network's performance than the mixed stuck-at faults, which in turn have a larger effect than that of stuck-at-0 faults. Furthermore, the fault-tolerant ability of the network decreases with the increase of its size for the same percentage of faulty interconnections. The results of our analysis are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations.


As a novel input techniques for deformable devices, bend gestures can prove difficult for users to perform correctly as they have many characteristics to master. In this paper, we present three bend visual guides which use feedforward and feedback mechanisms to lead users to correctly perform bend gestures on a flexible device. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the efficiency and preference for our visual feedback designs. Our results show that users performed faster when the visual guidance appeared at the location where the bend gesture is to be performed instead of always at a fixed location on the screen. While feedforward improved users' performance, using feedback had a negative effect. We propose a set of design guidelines for visual systems for bend gestures.


This thesis makes a contribution to that part of the economics literature that explores how behavioural economics can inform environmental economics. Theoretically, the thesis develops the concept of environmental morale. Empirically, the study investigates the role of environmental morale on individuals' behaviour within two different contexts: recycling participation and intertemporal choices over different goods (i.e., money, environment, and health) and outcomes (i.e., gains and losses). Major objectives of this analysis are: to shed light on how environmental morale interplays with individuals' behaviour under different recycling policy schemes, and to examine whether temporal discounting is domain specific and depends on environmental morale heterogeneity. Original survey investigations are employed to analyse these issues. Results highlight the relevance of environmental morale both in motivating individuals' contribution to recycling and intertemporal choices towards environmental outcomes. Regarding the interaction between environmental morale, recycling participation and government interventions, results from this analysis suggest that a facilitating nudge policy seems to be relatively more powerful in increasing individuals' contribution and motivation towards recycling. Considering intertemporal choices, a paradox of hyperopia seems to be located in data provided in this analysis. Some of the original contributions of the thesis are, first the broader reconceptualization of the definition of environmental morale and its operationalization in analyses of questionnaire preferences. Secondly, in line with other areas of research (i.e., tax compliance literature); this study pursues an investigation of individual and cultural differences with respect to recycling policies, an area which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. In this regard, the analysis considers a comparison between psychology and economics students in Italy and the UK. Thirdly, conditioning discounting on environmental morale offers a unique opportunity to analyse how ethical considerations influence the way individuals form expectations on (near and far distant) future environmental outcomes.


A selenium-containing amphiphilic block copolymer (PEG-PUSe-PEG) with a hydrophobic polyselenide block and two hydrophilic poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) blocks was synthesized via polymerization of toluene diisocyanate (TDI) with monoselenide-containing diols and subsequent termination with PEG monomethylether. PEG-PUSe-PEG is able to self-assemble in aqueous solution to form block copolymer aggregates. Interestingly, it was found that the aggregates have a good oxidation-responsiveness and undergo a structural dissociation in a mild oxidative environment (such as 0.1% H2O2 v/v) due to the unique sensitivity of selenide groups in presence of oxidants. Compared with the sulfide analogue PEG-PUS-PEG, PEG-PUSe-PEG is more sensitive to oxidants. It is anticipated that selenium-containing block copolymer aggregates may find application in the field of drug delivery systems.


Abstract. Leaves in tropical forests come in an enormous variety of sizes and shapes, each of which can be ultimately viewed as an adaptation to the complex problem of optimising the capture of light for photosynthesis. However, the fact that many different shape "strategies" coexist within a habitat demonstrate that there are many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors involved, such as the differential investment in support tissues required for different leaf lamina shapes. Here, we take a macrogeographic approach to understanding the function of different lamina shape categories. Specifically, we use 106 permanent plots spread across the Amazon rainforest basin to: 1) describe the geographic distribution of some simple metrics of lamina shape in plots from across Amazonia, and; 2) identify and quantify relationships between key environmental parameters and lamina shape in tropical forests. Because the plots are not randomly distributed across the study area, achieving this latter objective requires the use of statistics that can account for spatial auto-correlation. We found that between 60–70% of the 2791 species and 83 908 individual trees in the dataset could be classified as having elliptic leaves (= the widest part of the leaf is on an axis in the middle fifth of the long axis of the leaf). Furthermore, the average Amazonian tree leaf is 2.5 times longer than it is wide and has an entire margin. Contrary to theoretical expectations we found little support for the hypothesis that narrow leaves are an adaptation to dry conditions. However, we did find strong regional patterns in leaf lamina length-width ratios and several significant correlations with precipitation variables suggesting that water availability may be exerting an as yet unrecognised selective pressure on leaf shape of rainforest trees. Some support was found for the hypothesis that narrow leaves are an adaptation to low nutrient soils. Furthermore, we found a strong correlation between the proportion of trees with non-entire laminas (dissected, toothed, etc.) and mean annual temperature once again supporting the well documented association that provides a basis for reconstructing past temperature regimes.


Sustainability is one of the most important issues today. It could be achieved when all its factors could be managed and achieved effectively with full knowledge, strategic focus, and a balance of competing interests. Micro-sustainability focuses on small environmental actions that collectively result in a large environmental impact. It encourages sustainable changes through "change agents", i.e. individuals who are instrumental in bringing a change; therefore, they foster positive environmental action inside their sphere of influence. Examples of micro-sustainability include recycling, turning off unused lights, programming thermostats for efficient use of energy, reducing water usage, reduce waste and consumption. Attentive design and planning is very crucial in any production process. Especially in the construction industry, a lot of time and effort is spent on measuring and analysing how any new construction will interact with materials and environmental conditions and a lot of information management is required for the whole process. In the last few years, the construction industry has gone digital, and technology has created a new process tool. Building information modelling and management has become mandatory to achieve a sustainable construction process and product. New concepts such as EcoBIM have been recently introduced and applied in the construction market. EcoBIM software allows architects and engineers to digitally simulate different construction elements and understand how specific changes in design or construction models will have an impact on other variables. EcoBIM has especially improved the sustainable planning for building life cycle (cradle to grave). EcoBIM helps to achieve micro-sustainability through BIM tools and management process, which in turn help in accurate design and construction analysis for efficient design and construction for efficient use of energy, reducing water usage, waste and consumption, etc.


Invasive species is a worldwide issue that is considered to be the one of the main reasons to losses of biodiversity. The round goby, Neogobius melanostomus, is an invasive species in the Baltic Sea that originates from the Black- and Caspian Sea. It was probably introduced via ballast water and since the discovery of the first speci-mens in 1990 round goby has spread and is now established along a majority of the Baltic coasts.

To investigate the success of an invasion it is important to understand the competitive effects from the intruder but also the predator-prey interaction be-tween the introduced species and native predators. Round goby competes with native fish species for resources but it has also been shown to be an important prey to native piscivorous predators such as cod, Gadus morhua, perch, Perca fluviatilis and great cormorant, Phalacrocorax carbo.

The present study was carried out to investigate cod predation on round goby in the Karlskrona archipelago over seasons. The aim of the study was to see if round goby is a common prey for cod in this area and if round goby make up a part of the diet all year round or just certain parts of the year. Cod condition over the seasons were also investigated to get an idea of the quality of round goby as prey.

Round goby looks very similar to the native black goby, Gobius ni-ger, and to be able to separate the two species in stomach content an anatomical study was carried out. Stomach content from 116 cod caught in the Karlskrona archipelago was then analysed.

Round goby was more common during the spring periods compared to the winter season. Cod condition was also higher during the spring periods com-pared to the winter season. Differences in round goby presence might be the result of a seasonal shift in cod diet or lack of spatial overlap between the two species. For cod condition the differences might be due to round goby consumption but further anal-yses have to be carried out to exclude other explanations for seasonal change in cod condition.


This paper argues that the current debate about developer contributions in relation to infrastructure networks is blinding us to radical shifts emerging in the relationship between infrastructure providers and developers. Moreover, we suggest that conventional planning discourse about infrastructure charges, standardised service fees and impact assessment could actually hamper the emergence of this new logic. The paper illustrates how a new logic of network provision is subtly, yet profoundly, shifting the context within which the bargaining process unfolds by highlighting the proactive role of infrastructure providers in shaping the location, form and specification of three new developments. We argue that if debate is not extended to take account of these new infrastructure practices then planners will miss a significant new opportunity for promoting new communities of interest between actors who have conventionally been seen as adversarial and thereby encouraging environmentally sensitive development activity that may provide wider community benefits.


Graphene transistors are of considerable interest for radio frequency (rf) applications. High-frequency graphene transistors with the intrinsic cutoff frequency up to 300 GHz have been demonstrated. However, the graphene transistors reported to date only exhibit a limited extrinsic cutoff frequency up to about 10 GHz, and functional graphene circuits demonstrated so far can merely operate in the tens of megahertz regime, far from the potential the graphene transistors could offer. Here we report a scalable approach to fabricate self-aligned graphene transistors with the extrinsic cutoff frequency exceeding 50 GHz and graphene circuits that can operate in the 1-10 GHz regime. The devices are fabricated on a glass substrate through a self-aligned process by using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) grown graphene and a dielectrophoretic assembled nanowire gate array. The self-aligned process allows the achievement of unprecedented performance in CVD graphene transistors with a highest transconductance of 0.36 mS/μm. The use of an insulating substrate minimizes the parasitic capacitance and has therefore enabled graphene transistors with a record-high extrinsic cutoff frequency (> 50 GHz) achieved to date. The excellent extrinsic cutoff frequency readily allows configuring the graphene transistors into frequency doubling or mixing circuits functioning in the 1-10 GHz regime, a significant advancement over previous reports (∼20 MHz). The studies open a pathway to scalable fabrication of high-speed graphene transistors and functional circuits and represent a significant step forward to graphene based radio frequency devices.


A microelectronic circuit of block-elements functionally analogous to two hydrogen bonding networks is investigated. The hydrogen bonding networks are extracted from â-lactamase protein and are formed in its active site. Each hydrogen bond of the network is described in equivalent electrical circuit by three or four-terminal block-element. Each block-element is coded in Matlab. Static and dynamic analyses are performed. The resultant microelectronic circuit analogous to the hydrogen bonding network operates as current mirror, sine pulse source, triangular pulse source as well as signal modulator.


The paper proposes a robust circuit-based Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver, QuteSAT, that can be applied to complex circuit netlist structure. Several novel techniques are proposed in this paper, including: (1) a generic watching scheme on general gate types for efficient Boolean constraint propagation (BCP), (2) an implicit implication graph representation for efficient learning, and (3) careful engineering on the most advanced SAT algorithms for the circuit-based data structure. The experimental results show that our baseline solver, without taking the advantage of the circuit information, can achieve the same performance as the fastest conjunctive normal form (CNF)-based solvers. The authors also demonstrate that by applying a simple circuit-oriented decision ordering technique (J-frontier), our solver can constantly outperform the CNF ones for more than 75+ times. With the great flexibility on the circuit-based data structure, our solver can serve as a solid foundation for the general SAT research in the future


The Egyptian rice yield is one of the highest in the world (9.1 tons per hectare in 2001), a crop that leaves behind roughly 4.0 million tons of straw annually. Because of limited water resources, the government of Egypt has tried to limit rice cultivation. However, cultivation has continued to expand due to rice production's high profits. The methods for disposing of the straw and stubble residue remaining in the fields after harvest are either burning or baling. Although some limited uses of rice straw, such as for animal feed or paper making, are maintained, burning is still the principal disposal method for most of the rice straw residue, as it is efficient, effective and cheap, even after being phased out in the Egyptian law of Environment number 4-1994. As a result most farmers tend to burn the straw in open fields, boosting air pollution and serious human health problems due to the emission of carbon monoxide. This paper addresses the recycling of chopped rice straw to produce light weight cement bricks to be used as fillers in skeleton type buildings. The production of these bricks was studied analytically to reach the best mix proportions under compression strength not less than 80 kg/cm 2 according to the Egyptian codes of building. An economical market study for the mass production of the cement brick has been carried out. It was concluded that the rice straw–cement brick that would maintain a compression stress up to 115kg/cm2 costs 25% less than the similar pure cement brick available in the market.


Backgrounds: Sudomotor dysfunction is one of the earliest neurophysiologic abnormalities to manifest in distal small fiber neuropathy. SUDOSCAN ® was developed to provide a non invasive, quick, simple and quantitative measurement of sweat function. The aim of this study is to evaluate the value of SUDOSCAN in the diagnosis of neuropathy and its early detection. Methods: This is a case control study was conducted from March 2014 to December2014 on type2 diabetic patient in the center of diabetes and endocrine disease in AL-Najaf. Sweat function was evaluated by measuring the electrochemical skin conductance (ESC) of the hands and feet. Results: 100 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus including 55 patients with peripheral neuropathy and 45 patients without peripheral neuropathy were involved in this case control study. Hands and feet conductance were lower in patients with type 2 diabetes with peripheral neuropathy when compared to patients with type 2 diabetes without neuropathy (with p value<0.001 for hands mean electrochemical skin conductance and feet mean electrochemical skin conductance). Conclusions: SUDOSCAN is a promising, screening tool to detect neuropathy in patients with diabetes mellites. This is a very simple test, easy-to-perform that can be done in the clinical setting in 3–5 min.


Multiple Traveling Repairmen Problem (MTRP) is a class of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, an other variant of MTRP, also known as Multiple Traveling Repairmen Problem with Distance Constraint (MTRPD), is introduced. In MTRPD problem, a fleet of vehicles serves a set of customers. Each vehicle which starts from the depot is not allowed to travel any distance longer than a limit and each customer must be visited exactly once. The goal is to find the order of customer visits of all vehicles that minimizes the sum of all vertices' waiting time. To the best of our knowledge, the problem has not been studied much previously, even though it is a natural and practical extension of the Traveling Repairman Problem or Multiple Traveling Repairmen Problem case. In our work, we propose a metaheuristic algorithm which is mainly based on the principles of Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) to solve the problem. The GRASP is used to build an initial solution which is good enough in a construction phase. In a cooperative way, the VND is employed to generate diverse neighborhoods in an improvement phase, therefore, it can help the search escape from local optimal. Extensive numerical experiments on 321 benchmark instances show that our algorithm can find the optimal solutions with up to 50 vertices in several instances. For larger instances, our algorithm obtains provably near-optimal solutions, even for large instances.


Virtually all recent research has been on conventional gravity sewers without pumping. A variety of optimization techniques has been used, including linear programming, nonlinear programming, separable programming, geometric programming, mixed integer programming, and dynamic programming. Cost savings of 2 to 30% compared with traditional designs have been claimed. Optimization does not appear to have had a significant impact on design practice, because researchers have focused on problems for which an experienced and cost-conscious designer could relatively easily arrive at a nearly optimal design using traditional methods, and because software for optimal sewer design does not appear to have been made generally available. Further research is needed on alternative sewer systems, and generally available software is needed.


This paper reconsiders the Late Neolithic of the Maltese Islands from a broader perspective. It argues that the prevailing narrative centred on passzvely inherited cultural baggage obscures the dynamic narrative created by the ancient inhabitants. It is argued that a fuller understanding of the period requires an engagement with concepts of time and tradition, which are seen here on multiple scales. This enables a fuller reading of the period, particularly in terms of how people created and redefined time.


: Purpose: This research paper is focusing on the role of leadership and strategic approach for the best institutional model toward balanced regional economic development (RED) in developing countries. The research paper examines the cohesion among leadership models and decision making structures toward strategic model for regional economic development in Kosovo. Final purpose is setting up the suitable decision making structure across all regions in the country that through proactive and authentic leadership, as well effective institutional structures creates capacity in each region for better utilization of the resources. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper methodology used a mixed-methodological approach including both qualitative and quantitative data collection and appraisal, which included desk review covering existing literature at national and international level, semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, relevant reports and other related documents. Findings: The research paper has finded that there are significant relationships among leadership role, organizational structures and regional development. Acording to the paper a suitable leadership model followed by responsible institutional framework and decision making structures is usualy the most important factor influencing growth at the regions. Actually in Kosovo regions and municipalities lack the capacities to create an effective environment for private sector development and job creation for all communities. The paper analysis shows that both-leaderhsip and decision making structure amplifies the institutional structure and institutional resources' effect on the better performance of regions. Practical Implications: The practical implications deriving from this research concludes that future approach to RED should be based on balanced distribution of responsibilities between different governmental levels with clear vision and leadership, as well as with much more advanced institutional structures and detailed work design. This means that creative leadership will ensure not only better performance in economical development aspects but meanwhile will adjust better to external changes and work more efficiently. Originality/Value: The research paper shows its originality in a specific case study and the value of this is finalized with the regional economic development model that will serve as one stop shop at different regions supporting the economic and overall development.


Sensors constitute a powerful tool in physical science as far as the rapid collection and analysis of data is concerned. In addition to the rapid collection of data, sensors are valued for their capability in the simultaneous representation of this data in the form of a graphical plot. Previous research has shown that elementary school students encounter various difficulties in their attempt to construct and interpret graphs. This article reports on a research effort through which we aim to investigate whether the use of sensors in the specific context of phase transformations (melting and freezing) contributes to the development of fourth grade (9-10 year old) students' ability to interpret, comment on and explain graphs. The subjects of the study were sixty five (65) 4 th grade students (organized into an experimental and two control groups) studying at two technologically well-equipped public elementary schools in Larnaca and Nicosia. Data collection was accomplished through a specially designed pre-test and post-test, which were administered to the students before and after instruction, respectively. The implementation of inquiry-based (reconstructed curriculum) lessons, which incorporated the use of instructional technology in the experimental group as opposed to the application of traditional lessons in the first control group and the application of the reconstructed curriculum without the use of computer resources in the second control group, revealed a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and both control groups in students' understanding of phase transformations as well as their ability to interpret graphs. In view of these findings we elaborate on the sequencing of instructional materials that aim to develop conceptual understanding concerning the phenomena of melting and freezing. The findings of this research suggest that there is a significant added value in employing sensors in an instructional effort to enhance students' ability in interpreting graphs and as a tool that enhances learning in the specific context of natural sciences.


BACKGROUND
The displacement of populations as the result of an armed conflict generally entails a worsening of the living and health conditions of those undergoing such a displacement. This paper is aimed at analyzing the health-related needs perceived by men and women displaced by the armed conflict and their main strategies to address those needs.

METHODS
A qualitative study was carried out by means of semi-structured individual interviews to 31 displaced men and women in the transition stage. A narrative analysis of the contents was conducted, segmenting the information by age and sex. The area under study was made up of five localities in the city of Bogotá.

RESULTS
The negative effects on their mental health and psychosocial stability, access to food and, to a lesser degree, gastrointestinal and respiratory disorders, are the main health problems reported by both groups of informants. The difficulty of accessing health care services comes up as an added problem. The precarious economic situation underlies the health care-related needs and problems. To solve their health problems, in addition to the health care services, they employ other strategies within their reach. Expressed needs are coherent with the problems perceived. Some differences between women and men and age groups were observed concerning the definition of the problems and employed strategies.

CONCLUSION
In the health field, actions are required in order to improve their access to services in addition to specific strategies for the psychosocial rehabilitation of the displaced population which take into account the differences existing within this group.


Singer and Dawson point out that two arguments against abortion, that the embryo is entitled to protection because from fertilization it is (1) a human being or (2) a potential human being, are also used by opponents of embryo experimentation. They focus on the second argument, evaluating the notion of potentiality as it applies to gametes, to the unimplanted embryo, to the implanted developing embryo, and to the embryo created by in vitro fertilization (IVF). They argue that there is a crucial distinction between natural reproduction, in which all that is needed for the embryo to have a prospect of reaching its potential is for those involved to refrain from stopping it, and IVF, in which the embryo cannot develop into a person without a deliberate human act. Reproductive techniques necessitate our rethinking of established views about potentiality, and how it should be applied to the embryo in a laboratory.


'Tour of Duty' is a series of pictures from East Timor that say very little about that country but a great deal about Australia. Given our military history as colonial canon fodder and our recent political collusion in East Timor's occupation, Australia's leadership role in the InterFET mission should have been a key moment of national redemption. But no. The experience was anything but - with the government, army and UN all desperate to turn the exercise into a huge PR opportunity. Rather than quietly focusing on correcting a situation we had contributed to, Australia seemed more interested in treating the Timorese as extras in a jingoistic movie of the week. From concerts they were not allowed to attend, to the distribution of Christmas teddy bears they had no use for. No-one thought to ask the Timorese how they could best be helped - it was Australia to the rescue with Kylie Minogue and stuffed toys.


The goal of improving the intelligibility of broadcast speech is being met by a recent new direction in speech enhancement: near-end intelligibility enhancement. In contrast to the conventional speech enhancement approach that processes the corrupted speech at the receiver-side of the communication chain, the near-end intelligibility enhancement approach pre-processes the clean speech at the transmitter-side, i.e. before it is played into the environmental noise. In this work, we describe an optimisation-based approach to near-end intelligibility enhancement using models of speech intelligibility to improve the intelligibility of speech in noise.

This thesis first presents a survey of speech intelligibility models and how the adverse acoustic conditions affect the intelligibility of speech. The purpose of this survey is to identify models that we can adopt in the design of the pre-enhancement system. Then, we investigate the strategies humans use to increase speech intelligibility in noise. We then relate human strategies to existing algorithms for near-end intelligibility enhancement. A closed-loop feedback approach to near-end intelligibility enhancement is then introduced. In this framework, speech modifications are guided by a model of intelligibility. For the closed-loop system to work, we develop a simple spectral modification strategy that modifies the first few coefficients of an auditory cepstral representation such as to maximise an intelligibility measure. We experiment with two contrasting measures of objective intelligibility. The first, as a baseline, is an audibility measure named 'glimpse proportion' that is computed as the proportion of the spectro-temporal representation of the speech signal that is free from masking.
We then propose a discriminative intelligibility model, building on the principles of missing data speech recognition, to model the likelihood of specific phonetic confusions that may occur when speech is presented in noise. The discriminative intelligibility measure is computed using a statistical model of speech from the speaker that is to be enhanced.

Interim results showed that, unlike the glimpse proportion based system, the discriminative based system did not improve intelligibility.
We investigated the reason behind that and we found that the discriminative based system was not able to target the phonetic confusion with the fixed spectral shaping. To address that, we introduce a time-varying spectral modification. We also propose to perform the optimisation on a segment-by-segment basis which enables a robust solution against the fluctuating noise. We further combine our system with a noise-independent enhancement technique, i.e. dynamic range compression.
We found significant improvement in non-stationary noise condition, but no significant differences to the state-of-the art system (spectral shaping and dynamic range compression) where found in stationary noise condition.


This paper explores, the `myth of the urban peasant', the widespread belief that urban Russian households are surviving the collapse of employment and money incomes by turning to subsistence agriculture. On the basis of the analysis of official and survey data the paper shows that although many urban households grow food in their garden plots, those with low money incomes are the least likely to do so, while subsistence production is a complement rather than an alternative to paid employment. Moreover, those who do grow their own food work long hours for very little return, spending no less of their money income on buying food than do those who grow nothing. The implication is that dacha use is a leisure activity of the better-off rather than a survival strategy of the poor. Regional data suggests that urban agricultural production persists in those regions in which commercial agriculture and monetised relations are least developed which, it is surmised, retain memories of past shortages


We report experiments on the generation of third and fifth harmonics of millijoule-level, tightly focused, femtosecond laser pulses at 2.2 μm wavelength in air. The measured ratio of yields of the third and fifth harmonics in our setup is found equal to 2 · 10(-4). This result contradicts the recent suggestion that the Kerr effect in air saturates and changes sign in ultra-intense optical fields.


Activated charcoal can remove contaminants such as radionuclides from potable water. In northern Virginia, a community water well normally producing about 17 million gallons of water per year plus many small homesite water wells were used to study the monthly and seasonal variation in waterborne radon concentration, These wells were also used to study the ability of activated charcoal to capture the dissolved radon before it reaches the home occupants. It was found that the percentage of radon removal was related to the volume of treated water, the type of activated charcoal, and the length of time that the charcoal was used. In brief, if sufficient activated charcoal was placed in the water treatment tank, the removal of waterborne radon could reach 90 percent. While the intensity of radiation that escaped through the walls of the capture tank was easily detected, estimates indicate that the health risk was minimal while the capture tanks were in operation, and during the replacement of the used and radioactive charcoal.


Originally published in 1984, Reading the Romance challenges popular (and often demeaning) myths about why romantic fiction, one of publishing's most lucrative categories, captivates millions of women readers. Among those who have disparaged romance reading are feminists, literary critics, and theorists of mass culture. They claim that romances enforce the woman reader's dependence on men and acceptance of the repressive ideology purveyed by popular culture. Radway questions such claims, arguing that critical attention "must shift from the text itself, taken in isolation, to the complex social event of reading." She examines that event, from the complicated business of publishing and distribution to the individual reader's engagement with the text. Radway's provocative approach combines reader-response criticism with anthropology and feminist psychology. Asking readers themselves to explore their reading motives, habits, and rewards, she conducted interviews in a midwestern town with forty-two romance readers whom she met through Dorothy Evans, a chain bookstore employee who has earned a reputation as an expert on romantic fiction. Evans defends her customers' choice of entertainment; reading romances, she tells Radway, is no more harmful than watching sports on television. "We read books so we won't cry" is the poignant explanation one woman offers for her reading habit. Indeed, Radway found that while the women she studied devote themselves to nurturing their families, these wives and mothers receive insufficient devotion or nurturance in return. In romances the women find not only escape from the demanding and often tiresome routines of their lives but also a hero who supplies the tenderness and admiring attention that they have learned not to expect. The heroines admired by Radway's group defy the expected stereotypes; they are strong, independent, and intelligent. That such characters often find themselves to be victims of male aggression and almost always resign themselves to accepting conventional roles in life has less to do, Radway argues, with the women readers' fantasies and choices than with their need to deal with a fear of masculine dominance. These romance readers resent not only the limited choices in their own lives but the patronizing atitude that men especially express toward their reading tastes. In fact, women read romances both to protest and to escape temporarily the narrowly defined role prescribed for them by a patriarchal culture. Paradoxically, the books that they read make conventional roles for women seem desirable. It is this complex relationship between culture, text, and woman reader that Radway urges feminists to address. Romance readers, she argues, should be encouraged to deliver their protests in the arena of actual social relations rather than to act them out in the solitude of the imagination. In a new introduction, Janice Radway places the book within the context of current scholarship and offers both an explanation and critique of the study's limitations.


We aim at a step change in numerical modeling in order to answer actual industrial needs. Our goal is to implement these new models in performing codes on HPC infrastructures and to make them available to respond to societal needs. We do that by developing two fundamental enablers: reduced-order models and Cartesian grid methods. Thanks to these enablers it will be possible to transfer complexity handling from engineers to computers, providing fast, on-line numerical models for design and control.


Generally urban drainage systems are built to protect urban property and control runoff. Moreover, these systems collect the runoff for storage purposes to serve society through sufficient water supply to meet the needs of demand, irrigation, and drainage. Urban environments are exposed to risks of extreme hydrological events. Therefore, urban water systems and their management are critical. Precipitation data are crucial, but may be prone to errors due to the lack of information e.g., short length of records. In this thesis, a Monte Carlo simulation and regional frequency analysis based on L-moments approach were utilized during the research in order to estimate the uncertainty in the Intensity Duration Frequency (IDF) curves by using historical precipitation data from Environment Canada (EC) weather stations and simulating a new series of data through a weather generator (WG) model. The simulations were then disaggregated from daily into hourly data for extraction of the annual maximum precipitation for different durations in hours (1, 2, 6, 10, 12, and 24). Regional frequency analysis was used to form the sites into groups based on homogeneity test results, and the quantile values were computed for various sites and durations with the return periods (T) in years (2, 10, 20, and 100). As a result, the regional frequency analysis was used to estimate the regional quantile values based on L-moment approach. Moreover, the box and whisker plots were utilized to display the results. When the return periods and durations increased, the uncertainty slightly increased. The historical IDF curves of London site falls within the regional simulated IDF curves. Furthermore, 1000 runs have been generated by using the weather generator.


Justice is pictured blind and her daughter, the law, ought at least to be color-blind. (Albion Tourgee, qtd. in Olsen, Thin 90) Nowhere, in the history of our jurisprudence, has [the] power of the courts been more strongly exerted than in the matter of Negro rights, and nowhere has it been more swayed by prejudice and class interest. (Charles Chesnutt, "Courts" 1) In many ways, Albion Tourgee's relationship to turn-of-the-century African American writers is paradoxical. His fiction focusing on the injustices suffered by African Americans in the South, his continuous support of Reconstruction legislation, and his pro bono work on the Plessy v. Ferguson case all demonstrated a profound commitment to changing the racist structures of American society. He was perhaps the most vocal and visible white writer who promoted "radical" Reconstruction. Later, in the 1880s and early 1890s, a time when virtually no white people were harshly criticizing racial injustices, Tourgee wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Inter Ocean ("A Bystander's Notes") advocating racial equality (Kull 119). His ideas and writing proved to be instrumental, and at times inspirational, to the work of many emerging black writers. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed he was influenced by Tourgee's fiction, and in his 1910 article reflecting on Reconstruction, Du Bois cited favorably Tourgee's journalistic scholarship of twenty years earlier (Olsen, "Tourgee" 23). Even as he ardently supported the "negro cause," however, Tourgee expressed attitudes which often appear naive, lacking insight into the complex situation of Southern race relations. As his quote in the epigraph illustrates, Tourgee's view of Reconstruction politics seems to be idealistic, depending upon a "color-blind" justice system in which "right reason" will prevail over racist sentiment. Clearly, Tourgee understood that the justice system was not free of racism; he argues, for example, in Plessy v. Ferguson that "the Court has always been the foe of liberty... until forced to move on by public opinion" (qtd. in Lofgren 149). Yet even as he recognized these biases and the fact that the Supreme Court was governed by social tides, Tourgee clung devoutly to the notion that the education of both Southern whites and blacks could lead to a color-blind justice system capable of transcending society's differences and correcting its injustices. Furthermore, his line of reasoning in the Plessy case (which argues, among other things, that the indeterminability of Homer Plessy's race should nullify segregation legislation) seems to protect the "mulatto elite," who could theoretically "pass," rather than arguing for the equality of African Americans as a whole. (1) Charles Chesnutt undoubtedly understood the ambiguous position that Tourgee held in relation to the African American community. In his now well-known 1880 journal entry, Chesnutt cited Tourgee's fiction--principally A Fool's Errand--as the inspiration for his stories of the color line. Many critics have made much of this entry, in which he discusses the immense popularity of Tourgee's writing and subject matter. Scholars such as Myles Raymond Hurd ("Step"), Julian Mason, Jr., Richard Lewis, Peter Caccavari, and Richard Brodhead (ch. 6) have all given extended attention to the entry, quoting and analyzing it at length. These critics have rightly emphasized Tourgee's influence on Chesnutt's career as a writer, as one of the sparks which ignited his literary aspirations. Nevertheless, when we look at both Tourgee's political career and his literary one in conjunction with Chesnutt's short stories, we can see that Chesnutt challenges the very tenets upon which Tourgee's political and literary convictions rest. In this essay, I will argue that in the final story of The Wife of His Youth (1899), "The Web of Circumstance," Chesnutt questions the plausibility of the seemingly progressive belief in a "blind"--or, in this case, "color-blind"--legal system in which Tourgee so fiercely believed. …


Informal Value Transfer Systems ("IVTS") are types of remittance mechanisms that allow funds to change hands and cross borders without necessarily passing through the conventional banking sector. While many IVTS transfers serve legitimate purposes, in a post-9/11 world, IVTS have garnered increased attention as potential sources of funding for terrorism or other criminal activity. This note examines past approaches to IVTS regulation in the United States and abroad, and outlines the obstacles that have undermined effective regulation. To overcome such obstacles, it argues that the United States and the international community should adopt new regulatory measures, including positive incentives to increase self-regulation and cooperation between IVTS operators and law enforcement. This note further discusses how the government should enact and enforce such new incentives, arguing that implementation methods — including a focus on procedural justice concerns — may strongly impact co-operation rates with law enforcement.


This paper examines the recent fascination the Broadway musical has had with Victorian gothic, focusing both on the transition from opera seria to Disneyesque musical and on one specific cultural product, Paul Gordon and John Caird's 2000 Broadway production, Jane Eyre: The Musical.  The paper claims that this particular hybrid of two notoriously hybrid nineteenth-century forms (the novel and opera) defangs both of its source genres, but nevertheless still allows its middle-class audience to participate in the spectacle of their own self-definition as consumers of "culture."  The production also allows that audience to congratulate itself for having escaped the bourgeois repressions that arguably made the gothic such a viable genre in the Romantic and Victorian periods.  The fact is, though, that contemporary viewers of the Broadway gothic musical do still experience the frisson of a repressed terror: the return to a postmodern world that scripts our camp appreciation of such kitsch entertainments.


Autotuning is an established technique for adjusting performance-critical parameters of applications to their specific run-time environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential of online autotuning for general purpose computation on GPUs. Our application-independent autotuner AtuneRT optimizes GPU-specific parameters such as block size and loop-unrolling degree. We also discuss the peculiarities of autotuning on GPUs. We demonstrate tuning potential using CUDA and by instrumenting the parallel algorithms library Thrust. We evaluate our online autotuning approach with various GPUs and sample applications.


The recovery of post-consumer waste in cities in the developing world is driven by the informal ecosystem. Kabadiwalla Connect, a technology-based social enterprise based in Chennai, has determined that leveraging the informal ecosystem of urban waste recyclers has the potential to decrease the amount of waste sent to landfills in Indian cities by 70 percent. In the current scenario, municipalities, multinational brands, and waste management companies struggle to work effectively with informal stakeholders – despite increasing evidence of the commercial, environmental, and social benefits of forming mutually beneficial partnerships. Through a unique business process and award winning technology, Kabadiwalla Connect integrates the informal ecosystem into the reverse-logistics supply chain, helping municipalities, brands, and waste management companies recover post-consumer waste efficiently and more inclusively in the developing world. Rather than approaching the informality as a problem and developing a new system for waste management, Kabadiwalla Connect uses its technology platform to leverage the already existing informal infrastructure toward a more efficient waste management system. The KC platform makes the informal ecosystem more accessible to other players. Municipalities can utilise informal infrastructure to bring down operational costs; waste management firms can source from it; corporations can carry out their extended producer responsibility through it; apartments and small businesses can send their recyclable waste directly to informal stakeholders that are a part of the informal ecosystem.


This paper presents an adaptable genetic evolutionary system, which includes an innovative approach to
mapping genotypes to phenotypes through XML rules. The evolutionary system was originally created to
evolve Regular Expressions (REs) to automate the extraction of web information. However, the system has
been adapted to work with a completely different domain – Complete Software Programs – to demonstrate
the flexibility of this approach. Specifically, the paper concentrates on the evolution of 'Sorting' programs .
Experiments show that our evolutionary system is successful and can be adapted to work for challenging
domains with minimum effort.


Various streams of organizational research have examined the relationship between creativity and leadership, albeit using slightly different names such as "creative leadership", "leading for creativity and innovation", and "managing creatives". In this article, we review this dispersed body of knowledge and synthesize it under a global construct of creative leadership, which refers to leading others toward the attainment of a creative outcome. Under this unifying construct, we classify three more narrow conceptualizations that we observe in the literature: facilitating employee creativity; directing the materialization of a leader's creative vision; and integrating heterogeneous creative contributions. After examining the contextual characteristics associated with the three conceptualizations, we suggest that they represent three distinct collaborative contexts of creative leadership. We discuss the theoretical implications of a multi-context framework of creative leadership, especially in terms of resolving three persisting problems in the extant literature: lack of definitional clarity, shortage of nuanced theories, and low contextual sensitivity.


The heating of the solar corona is an important topic both for scientists and modern society. One of the most fundamental of structures in the corona are bundles of plasma confined to the magnetic field, loops. Here we perform empirical studies to better understand the mechanisms responsible for heating loops. We observe loops in X-rays with XRT and model the observations as bundles of independent strands, showing that the mechanisms instigating the heating of loops is likely impulsive, yet requires multiple heating events to match observations. We also observe and model very small loops with Hi-C, exploiting the high resolution to show that the frequency with which small loops are heated is larger than expected. This study also puts constraints on the size of the heating events. We also perform a study on the initiation of magnetic reconnection between neighboring active regions, in hopes of understanding how magnetic fields interact, evolve and heat coronal loops. We close with a discussion on calibrating the data from a solar X-ray telescope and interpret the uncertainties within.


An authentication sever (108) to authenticate real time a transaction associated with an electronic card performed by a user 102 subscribed to an authentication service having a user subscription database (202) on the authentication server 108 is provided. The authentication server (108) executes including obtaining a confirmation that the user (102) is subscribed to the authentication service, generating a verification code real time triggered by the transaction associated with the electronic card, communicating the verification code to a mobile communication device (104 A-B) associated with the user, processing a verification message based on the verification code and a mobile communication device information associated with the mobile communication device (104 A-B), and authenticating the transaction if the verification message and the mobile communication device information matches an information associated with the user subscription database. The verification message and the mobile communication device information are obtained from the mobile communication device (104A-B) real time.


Field interviews conducted by the author in Afghanistan suggest current theories linking conflict to development do not adequately account for ideological drivers of resistance. We present a model demonstrating how reconstruction/development led by a foreign occupier can exacerbate violence through popular discontent, if projects are ideologically controversial. We test the model using detailed data on military-led reconstruction and public opinion from NATO, and a US-Government violence log covering Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009. We find projects in the health sector successfully alleviate violence, whereas those in the education sector actually provoke conflict. The destabilizing effects of education projects are strongest in conservative areas, where public opinion polls suggest education projects breed antipathy towards international forces. Further underscoring the role of local perceptions, project-driven violence appears to be homegrown, rather than sourced externally. Our findings do not support competing theories; are not driven by reverse causation; and are robust when considering many sources of endogeneity.


The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is the first international cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide and the largest carbon pricing regime in the world. A significant concern over the Emissions Trading Scheme has been the potential impact on the competitiveness of industry. Using data on 5,873 firms in ten European countries during 2001-2009, this paper assesses the impact on three variables through which the effects on firm competitiveness may manifest -- unit material costs, employment and revenue. The analysis focuses on the three most heavily-emitting industries under the program -- power, cement, and iron and steel. Empirical results indicate that the Emissions Trading Scheme has had different impacts across these three sectors. Although no impacts are found on any of the three variables in the cement and iron and steel industries, a positive effect is found on both material costs and revenue in the power sector. The effect on material costs likely reflects fuel-switching to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, while that on revenue may be partly due to cost pass-through to consumers in a market that is less exposed to competition outside the Europen Union. Overall the findings do not substantiate concerns over carbon leakage, job loss or industry competitiveness during the study period.


Topics on sustainable manufacturing, use, environmentally friendly treatment and resource recovery are currently very important issues for governments and industries worldwide. Environmental regulations for technical products currently focus on recycling ratios and prohibition of toxic materials. The concept of creating more use-productivity with less resource consumption has considerable potential to a sustainable society. Hence, the objective of this paper is to identify a research and development plan for sustainable manufacturing focusing on enhancing use-productivity. Core research fields are identified, and finally their technology road maps are developed.


Behind the release of the new paperback edition of The Pit in the summer of 1994 lies a disagreement between the editor and publisher over the cover art for it. The editor, Joseph McElrath, Jr., originally selected an art nouveau print by the graphic artist Alphonse Mucha, perhaps best known for his posters of Sarah Bernhardt. Plate 47 from Mucha's Documents Decoratifs (published in 1902, the same year as The Pit) is a vertical composition featuring a voluptuous woman with dark hair piled on top of her head. Her torso and legs are covered by a rich-looking teal wrap that spills out in sensuous disarray over the ornamental border beneath. The woman's breasts are uncovered, one hand rests suggestively on her hip, and she gazes directly at the viewer. To the left, a bear snarls at the viewer (the animal's head is in front of the woman's right breast and obscures it). The bear and woman are framed by an ornate, stylized floral pattern which, in the lower half, has the effect of both peacock feathers and stained glass. The iconography of this print is richly suggestive of The Pit. The bear (even if it is a bear rug) evokes Curtis Jadwin, whose stock market strategies alternate between being bullish and bearish; the peacock pattern suggests his narcissistic rival, the artist of stained glass, Sheldon Corthell; but the focal point is the languorous, self-absorbed woman. McElrath selected this image to focus readers of the book not on the Chicago Board of Trade or Jadwin, but on Laura Dearborn as femme fatale--or so she likes to see herself. Penguin, however, rejected the Mucha in favor of a photograph of the Chicago Board of Trade. The vintage photograph of "the pit" is also a vertical composition, the top two-thirds showing a vast, hazily-lit room. In the bottom third, a huge crowd of men in business suits (and, oddly, at least one child in the lower left) look toward the camera. Penguin's decision to play up the commodities market plot, which I think is unfortunate, encapsulates the longstanding critical misjudgment about how The Pit should be read that is the point of departure for this essay.(1) American literary naturalism flourished during a period that historians have described as marking a "crisis of masculinity."(2) Not surprisingly, naturalism has generally been seen as hypermasculine, and the place of women in the naturalist aesthetic is thus--as Penguin's decision illustrates--precarious at best. Turn-of-the-century novels that depict the breakdown of families and social relationships or feature "fallen women" are likely to be labelled naturalistic, along with tales of such Strenuous Life pastimes as commodities trading, muckraking, and dog sledding. Literary-historical labels have their necessary uses, but the problem with how naturalism has been constructed is that all the works of certain authors tend to be interpreted within a framework that is both too broad (in the number of novels it seeks to encompass) and too narrow (in the issues said to be definitive). Particularly with the works of Frank Norris and Jack London, and to a lesser degree, Theodore Dreiser, naturalist novels are often read in terms of how they succeed or fail in embodying a masculine code, a code believed to leave its traces on the pages of novels and in the events of authors' lives. Because of the initial crudeness and startling endurance of critical constructions about the gender of naturalism and some of its key players, a number of novels that do not fit the mold have been trivialized or ignored.(3) A case in point is the reception of The Pit. Frank Norris's final novel has been pronounced a blunder by most of its commentators, but the grounds for indicting it were initially chauvinistic, and remain rooted in dubious assumptions about gender. Like all of Norris's novels and much of his nonfiction, The Pit is surely concerned with gender issues, but not so as to advertise some juvenile or bellicose idea of its author's masculinity. …


John M. Hunt offers a social and cultural history of the papal interregnum from 1559 to 1655 that concentrates on Rome's relationship with its sacred ruler.


Significance A fundamental tenet of life-history theory is that reproduction and longevity trade off against one another. Experiments on invertebrates show that, rather than competing for limiting resources, reproduction and lifespan are optimized on different dietary macronutrient compositions. In mice, studies have yet to establish the relationship between macronutrient balance, reproduction, and lifespan. We evaluated the effects of macronutrients and energy on lifespan and reproductive function. Indicators of reproductive function (uterine mass, ovarian follicle number, testes mass, epididymal sperm counts) were optimized by high protein (P), low carbohydrate (C) diets whereas lifespan was greatest on low P:C diets. Corpora lutea and estrous cycling were higher in females on lower P:C diets. Macronutrient balance has profound and opposing effects on reproduction and longevity. In invertebrates, reproductive output and lifespan are profoundly impacted by dietary macronutrient balance, with these traits achieving their maxima on different diet compositions, giving the appearance of a resource-based tradeoff between reproduction and longevity. For the first time in a mammal, to our knowledge, we evaluate the effects of dietary protein (P), carbohydrate (C), fat (F), and energy (E) on lifespan and reproductive function in aging male and female mice. We show that, as in invertebrates, the balance of macronutrients has marked and largely opposing effects on reproductive and longevity outcomes. Mice were provided ad libitum access to one of 25 diets differing in P, C, F, and E content, with reproductive outcomes assessed at 15 months. An optimal balance of macronutrients exists for reproductive function, which, for most measures, differs from the diets that optimize lifespan, and this response differs with sex. Maximal longevity was achieved on diets containing a P:C ratio of 1:13 in males and 1:11 for females. Diets that optimized testes mass and epididymal sperm counts (indicators of gamete production) contained a higher P:C ratio (1:1) than those that maximized lifespan. In females, uterine mass (an indicator of estrogenic activity) was also greatest on high P:C diets (1:1) whereas ovarian follicle number was greatest on P:C 3:1 associated with high-F intakes. By contrast, estrous cycling was more likely in mice on lower P:C (1:8), and the number of corpora lutea, indicative of recent ovulations, was greatest on P:C similar to those supporting greatest longevity (1:11).


Synopsis This paper documents the first identified occurrence of a garnet-bearing olivine-web-sterite rock within the Eastern Glenelg Lewisian of the Glenelg inlier. Bulk chemistries of the rock and associated websterites are comparable with komatiite or ultrabasic intrusive rocks. However, comparison with zoned ultrabasic–basic gneisses from the Scourie area suggests that the rock may be genetically linked to associated eclogites and represents a cumulate from a magma of basaltic composition. Geothermobarometry indicates that the rock equilibrated at eclogite facies P–T conditions: 20 ± 3 kbar, 730 ± 50°C. It is suggested that the magmatic protolith for this rock was emplaced during the Scourian, and from the textural evidence of the pyroxene grains, experienced granulite facies conditions followed by cooling prior to being subject to eclogite facies metamorphism during Grenville events.


Abstract The analysis of age-at-death data, derived from epiphyseal fusion and dental eruption/wear patterns, is one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of zooarchaeologists studying past hunting and herd management practices. Zooarchaeologists typically analyze age-at-death data by constructing survivorship and mortality curves in order to allow insight into a variety of ecological and economic relationships between humans and animals. Since adopting such practices in the middle of the twentieth century, zooarchaeologists have proposed several methods for analyzing these curves, including visual examination and hypothesis testing. Creating confidence intervals is complementary to these two methods, allowing practitioners to graphically represent survivorship and mortality while testing hypotheses and accounting for sample sizes, which are often small in zooarchaeological assemblages. We discuss the basic concepts behind the nature of age-at-death data and the analysis of mortality and survivorship curves. We then describe how to calculate confidence intervals using bootstrapping techniques for both dental eruption/wear data and epiphyseal fusion data. To enable future users to replicate our methods, we introduce the freely available online R package "zooaRch" (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/zooaRch/ ), which includes a vignette to guide first-time users.


The study of architecture requires not only an understanding of the history of buildings, but also knowledge of the correct terminology that is used to describe them. The "Encyclopaedia of Architectural Terms" provides a comprehensive, clearly written, practical guide to the terminology used in the various aspects of architecture and building. It contains over 3500 terms offering definitions of styles, the components of buildings, materials, the various parts of orders and architectural details.


The paper reports on a naturalistic study that replicated the evaluative design associated with the UK National Health Service initiative IAPT − Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CSIP 2008, NHS 2011), as previously used to assess Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), with the aim of evaluating 12-session treatments for anxiety and depression, applying Transactional Analysis and Integrative Counselling Psychology approaches within real clinical settings in primary care. Standard outcome measures were used in line with the IAPT model (CORE 10 and 34, GAD-7, PHQ-9), supplemented with measurement of the working alliance (WAI Horvath 1986) and an additional depression inventory BDI-II (Beck, 1996), and ad-herence to the therapeutic model using newly designed questionnaires. Results indicated that severity of problems was reduced using either approach, comparative to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; that initial severity was predictive of outcome; and that working alliance increased as therapy progressed but was not directly related to outcomes. Adherence was high for both approaches. Several areas for enhance-ments to future research are suggested.


This paper experimentally demonstrates the strong enhancement of light extraction efficiency in two-dimensionally arranged microcolumns. They were designed like a honeycomb photonic crystal and fabricated into GaInAsP-InP wafers by using the inductively coupled plasma etching. For the laterally directed light passing through the microcolumns, peculiar transmission characteristics were observed, which could be explained by the Bragg reflection theory, namely, the photonic bandgap (PBG). The measurement of spontaneous lifetime showed that the internal efficiency in the microcolumns was reduced by the surface recombination at sidewalls. In contrast, the light extraction efficiency evaluated from the measured photoluminescence intensity, and the internal efficiency was more than ten times that for a planar wafer. This was thought to be due to the expanded escape cone of internal light by the low effective refractive index, and also due to the strong diffraction and scattering of laterally directed light, which corresponds to the second-order Bragg condition. Such effects are expected not only in photonic crystals but also in some disordered structures. We expect this structure to allow a high-efficiency light-emitting diode (LED), since electronic elements needed for current injection devices can be added independently of the effects.


Like in animals, the growth rate and pattern of plants is controlled by both genetic and environmental factors. Manipulation of plant form and height has been instrumental in the domestication and improvement of crops. The balance between growth of vegetative (stems, branches, leaves) and reproductive (flowers, fruits, seeds) organs in the shoot is of chief importance for agriculture. In this Teaching Tool we present an overview of recent advances in understanding the molecular basis of shoot architecture. We introduce basic concepts of plant growth and shape generation and provide an overview of their control. Both chemical and physical forces are involved in pattern generation. Plant hormones, transcription factors and small RNAs are key among the former, tension and pressure among the latter. We discuss how physical forces interact with chemical signals to produce specific developmental outcomes. Plants can concentrate their growth in the vertical direction, or laterally, through profuse side branching and branch outgrowth, and we present a brief outline of the molecular and physiological mechanisms involved in vertical and lateral growth. Finally, we outline the potential for manipulation of plant architecture using state-of-the-art genome editing technology and how it could bring about agricultural benefits through an accelerated optimization of crop shape and size. (Posted January 15, 2019) Click HERE to access the Teaching Tools components [http://www.plantcell.org/…..] RECOMMENDED CITATION STYLE: Zsögön, A. and Peres, L.E.P.) (January 15, 2019). Molecular control of plant shoot architecture. Teaching Tools in Plant Biology: Lecture Notes. The Plant Cell (online), doi/ /10.1105/tpc.118.tt1218.


In this work we propose a development methodology to specify Moderately Open Multi-Agent Systems. Our model has the advantage that it allows both high-and low-level behavior specifications. There is a large class of systems with reactive components that can benefit from our model; for example, monitoring and control systems, telecommuting services and e-commerce systems. Our methodology allows fast prototyping of agent-based systems in an incremental process based on roles. The methodology, a programming language, and a project manager are the structural elements of the development framework we propose. We describe and demonstrate the use of our development methodology with a real-world application example. It models a system for the collection and analysis of seismic data.


Background: State newborn screening (NBS) programs are considering the storage and use of NBS blood samples for research. However, no systematic assessment of parents' attitudes exists. Methods: We conducted an Internet-based survey of a nationally representative parent sample. We examined parents' willingness (1) to permit use of their children's NBS samples for research with/without their permission and (2) to allow NBS sample storage. Using bivariate and multinomial logistic regression, we examined the association of parent and child characteristics with parents' willingness to permit NBS sample storage and use for research, respectively. Results: The response rate was 49.5%. If permission is obtained, 76.2% of parents were 'very or somewhat willing' to permit use of the NBS sample for research. If permission is not obtained, only 28.2% of parents were 'very or somewhat willing'. Of parents surveyed, 78% would permit storage of their children's NBS sample. Parents who refused NBS sample storage were also less willing to permit use of the NBS sample for research. Conclusions: Three-quarters of parents would permit use of their children's NBS samples for research – if their permission is obtained. Parents not in favor of storing NBS samples often opposed the use of NBS samples for research.


This paper describes data obtained from tensiometers installed through 60 m of the unsaturated zone of a site situated on the Chalk aquifer of southern England. The data are interpreted together with consideration of previous work on unsaturated zone processes. The data show that, at the North Heath Barn site near Patcham (West Sussex, UK), matric potentials at many depths remain high throughout the year, and therefore the potential for fracture flow to occur remains high throughout the year. The high matric potentials support earlier closed-circuit TV surveys that indicated that wet borehole walls occurred throughout the year at some horizons. Rapid bypass flow (taken to mean significant fracture flow that is sufficient to cause a water level rise) occurs relatively frequently through winter, and there is a characteristic sequence of events leading to a water level rise. Although, during the summer, effective precipitation ceased (i.e. precipitation was exceeded by evapotranspiration) at the surface, beyond the root zone, downward drainage of water through the unsaturated zone occurred throughout the year, with recharge occurring at the water table. The recession of water levels in the spring reflected the fact that recharge at the water table was less than discharge through saturated zone flow, rather than a cessation in drainage altogether. This is the first time continuing drainage through the deep unsaturated zone has been directly observed, although it has been inferred for many years.


The Vital Few, a study of the contribution of entrepreneurs to the American economy, provides portraits of the men and women whose individual enterprise has helped to establish the character of the American businessperson and to carry our economy forward from colonial times. Examining such legendary figures as William Penn, Eli Whitney, Henry Ford, and J. Pierpont Morgan in their social and economic environment, Jonathan Hughes illuminates each period of American economic history and provides insights into the workings of American business and the special qualities required of its super-achievers. Taking into account such dramatic changes in the economy as the explosive growth of government and the puzzling effects of "stagflation," Hughes has now expanded his original volume. The new edition includes two additional biographies and a short essay on the nature of bureaucracy in both the government and the private sector. Both biographies are of "bureaucratic entrepreneurs," whose work in the federal government represents the two most prominent trends in government economics. Mary Switzer's 48-year career demonstrates the ways in which the modern welfare state has developed. First a catalyst then a major force in establishing social programs and institutions, she is in large part responsible for the existence of the American welfare state. Marriner Eccles's career, on the other hand, shows the evolution of "compensatory" fiscal and monetary policies from the New Deal to the Korean War. A self-made millionaire who was appointed to a high-level job in the federal government, Eccles quit his post after 1950, convinced that American economic policy was hopelessly inflationary and economically destructive. With these new additions, The Vital Few, long a source of inspiration and economic interest, is more accessible and useful than ever.


Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is characterized by attention deficit, hyperactivity and impulsivity. The heterogeneity of clinical manifestations, the response to different treatment alternatives and variable prognosis suggest a multifactorial etiology, based on neurobiological, genetic and psychosocial factors. ADHD has a proven familial character demonstrated by many clinical studies even if now the genes involved can not yet be determined. Neurobiologically, clinical symptoms of ADHD were associated with changes in dopaminergic and noradrenergic system functions. Neuroimaging studies support the hypothesis that ADHD pathophysiological processes are not limited to certain specific areas of the brain, involving several neural networks.


Three distinct types of granitoids, and intrusive contacts between them, are exposed in the central White Mfolozi Inlier, northern KwaZulu-Natal, where they form the basement on which the Mesoarchaean Pongola Supergroup had been deposited. In order to assess the position of these granites within the geochronological framework of Archaean felsic magmatism in the southeastern Kaapvaal Craton, to clarify the precise age relationships between these granitoids, and to examine their early petrogenesis, zircons extracted from these three granitoids have been analysed by LA-MC-ICPMS for their U-Pb and Hf isotopic compositions. The three U-Pb ages obtained from upper concordia-discordia intercepts are 3254 ± 7 Ma, 3245 ± 5 Ma and 3234 ± 5 Ma, which are taken to reflect magmatic crystallisation. Hence, all three granitoids belong to the late Palaeoarchaean group of Kaapvaal intrusives that appear to be prominent in the southeastern Kaapvaal Craton. In terms of Hf isotopes, the samples studied overlap with ~3.25 to 3.20 Ga granitoids from the southeastern part of the Kaapvaal Craton, the Barberton North and South terranes and coeval granitoids from Swaziland. The average Hf isotopic signature ( e Hf ~ 0) points to early magma extraction processes from an original mantle source prior to ~3.3 Ga.


AIM: The aim of this study is to describe the use of Godoy & Godoy Cervical Stimulation Therapy to improve the clinical signs and symptoms of lymphedema after laryngeal cancer treatment. Case report: The case of a 62-year-old patient is reported who made an ultrasound and found a nodule in the larynx and diagnosed laryngeal cancer. The patient was submitted to chemotherapy and radiotherapy. After treatment, the patient complained of neck pain, difficulty in swallowing, decreased saliva production, difficulty in sleeping and hoarseness. The patient was then referred to the Clinica Godoy for treatment of the edema where Cervical Stimulation Therapy as described by Godoy & Godoy was performed. A marked improvement was observed in the first few days with the voice and swallowing of solids returning to normal.
CONCLUSION: The Cervical Stimulation Therapy improvement of signs and symptoms of lymphedema resulting from laryngeal cancer treatment.


Background: Pimobendan has been shown to impart a significant survival benefit in cardiomyopathic cats who receive it as part of heart failure therapy. However, use of pimobendan remains controversial in cats with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) due to lack of pharmacodynamic data for pimobendan in cats with HCM and due to theoretical concerns for exacerbating left ventricular outflow tract obstructions. Hypothesis/Objectives: Our objective was to investigate the cardiac effects of pimobendan in cats with HCM. We hypothesized that pimobendan would not exacerbate left ventricular outflow tract obstructions and that it would improve echocardiographic measures of diastolic function. Animals: Thirteen purpose-bred cats were studied from a research colony with naturally-occurring HCM due to a variant in myosin binding protein C. Methods: Cats underwent two examinations 24 h apart with complete standard echocardiography. On their first day of evaluation, they were randomized to receive oral placebo or 1.25 mg pimobendan 1 h prior to exam. On their second examination, they were crossed over and received the remaining treatment. Investigators were blinded to all treatments. Results: The pimobendan group had a significant increase in left atrial fractional shortening (pimobendan group 41.7% ± 5.9; placebo group 36.1% ± 6.0; p = 0.04). There was no significant difference in left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) velocities between the groups (pimobendan group 2.8 m/s ± 0.8; placebo group 2.6 m/s ± 1.0). There were no significant differences between the number of cats with LVOT obstructions between groups (12 in pimobendan group; 11 in placebo group; p = 1.00). There were no detectable differences in any systolic measures, including left ventricular fractional shortening, mitral annular plane systolic excursion, and tricuspid annular plane systolic excursion. Doppler-based diastolic function assessment was precluded by persistent tachycardia. Conclusions: Improved left atrial function in the pimobendan group could explain some of the reported survival benefit for HCM cats in CHF. Pimobendan did not exacerbate LVOT obstructions and thus may not be contraindicated in HCM cats with LVOT obstructions. Future studies are needed to better characterize other physiologic effects, particularly regarding diastolic function assessment, and to better assess safety of pimobendan over a longer time-course.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of an infrared GaAlAs laser operating with a wavelength of 830 nm in the postsurgical scarring process after inguinal-hernia surgery.

BACKGROUND
Low-level laser therapy (LLLT) has been shown to be beneficial in the tissue-repair process, as previously demonstrated in tissue culture and animal experiments. However, there is lack of studies on the effects of LLLT on postsurgical scarring of incisions in humans using an infrared 830-nm GaAlAs laser.

METHOD
Twenty-eight patients who underwent surgery for inguinal hernias were randomly divided into an experimental group (G1) and a control group (G2). G1 received LLLT, with the first application performed 24 h after surgery and then on days 3, 5, and 7. The incisions were irradiated with an 830-nm diode laser operating with a continuous power output of 40 mW, a spot-size aperture of 0.08 cm(2) for 26 s, energy per point of 1.04 J, and an energy density of 13 J/cm(2). Ten points per scar were irradiated. Six months after surgery, both groups were reevaluated using the Vancouver Scar Scale (VSS), the Visual Analog Scale, and measurement of the scar thickness.

RESULTS
G1 showed significantly better results in the VSS totals (2.14 +/- 1.51) compared with G2 (4.85 +/- 1.87); in the thickness measurements (0.11 cm) compared with G2 (0.19 cm); and in the malleability (0.14) compared with G2 (1.07). The pain score was also around 50% higher in G2.

CONCLUSION
Infra-red LLLT (830 nm) applied after inguinal-hernia surgery was effective in preventing the formation of keloids. In addition, LLLT resulted in better scar appearance and quality 6 mo postsurgery.


Legacy cities, whose built environments are undergoing transformations due to population loss, are at a critical juncture in their urban history and the historic preservation field has an important role to play. Rapid mobile surveys provide an opportunity for data collection that expands beyond traditional historic criteria, and positions preservationists to be proactive decision-makers and to align with multi-disciplinary partners. Rapid mobile surveys are being utilized in conjunction with in-depth data analysis of comprehensive livability metrics at the parcel, neighborhood, and citywide levels to develop recommendations for reactivating vacant properties. Historic preservationists are spearheading these efforts through a tool called Relocal, which uses 70–85 distinct metrics and a community priority survey to generate parcel-level recommendations for every vacant lot and vacant building in the areas in which it is applied. Local volunteer-led rapid mobile surveys are key to gathering on-the-ground, real-time metrics that serve as Relocal's foundation. These new survey techniques generate usable data sets for historic preservation practitioners, land banks, planners, and other entities to inform strategic rightsizing decisions across legacy cities.