Several challenges of port/terminal and/or ferry company managers pertain to decisions for the justification of investments and concurrent operational tasks of roll-on/roll-off passenger (RoPax) and roll-on/roll-off (RoRo) systems. This paper explores the possible uses of Modeling and Simulation (M&S) techniques as a decision-support aid for a RoPax/RoRo system managers. A number of use cases are described and analyzed to inform possible desirable simulation capabilities allowing for resolution of management concerns related to operational and strategic levels. Different simulation methods and their integration in the context of RoPax/RoRo analysis are described. A description of development of a sample simulation model is used to facilitate better understanding of the possible solutions. The paper is mainly directed toward the exploration of RoPax/RoRo system to facilitate understanding of M&S techniques as a possible solution to multiple correlated concerns of stakeholders. The provided overview is based on the current state of the art of M&S and gives a look ahead at future solutions that M&S can facilitate.


L.A. Hanic. 2005. Taxonomy, gamete morphology and mating types of Urospora (Ulotrichales, Chlorophyta) in North America. Phycologia 44: 183–193. Filament and gamete morphology, mating tests and hybridizations reveal the presence of eight taxa of Urospora from the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America. Three are dioecious and anisogamous: U. penicilliformis, U. neglecta and U. wormskioldii (synonym: U. vancouveriana). A fourth, U. bangioides, is monoecious and isogamous. Two are unisexual female variants, one with biflagellate parthenogametes (both coasts) and the other with quadriflagellate parthenogametes (Atlantic coast only). Two others are unidentified monoecious, anisogamous variants: one on the Atlantic coast and one on the Pacific coast. Urospora penicilliformis, U. neglecta and U. wormskioldii from the Pacific formed viable hybrids with their Atlantic counterparts and are considered to be conspecific with them. Urospora penicilliformis from the Pacific coast also formed viable hybrid zygotes with U. penicilliformis from Helgoland and Japan, again indicating conspecificity. On the Pacific coast, U. penicilliformis is the most common Urospora in the upper littoral, ranging from southern California to Homer, Alaska, with U. neglecta being restricted to British Columbia and Alaska. On the Atlantic coast, U. neglecta is the dominant Urospora, with U. penicilliformis subdominant in the upper littoral. Urospora wormskioldii is the dominant Urospora in the lower littoral on both coasts. Sexuality is reported for the first time in U. wormskioldii and for the first time in North America in U. bangioides. Monoecy and isogamy are confirmed in the genus. Urospora penicilliformis, U. neglecta and U. wormskioldii, although usually dioecious, are occasionally monoecious, indicating that the dioecious condition in these three species is not fixed. Emended descriptions of the species and genus are provided.


Alcoholic liver disease progresses through several stages of tissue damage, from simple steatosis to alcoholic hepatitis, fibrosis, or cirrhosis. Alcohol also affects the intestine, increases intestinal permeability and changes the bacterial microflora. Liver disease severity correlates with levels of systemic bacterial products in patients, and experimental alcoholic liver disease is dependent on gut derived bacterial products in mice. Supporting evidence for the importance of bacterial translocation comes from animal studies demonstrating that intestinal decontamination is associated with decreased liver fibrogenesis. In addition, mice with a gene mutation or deletion encoding receptors for either bacterial products or signaling molecules downstream from these receptors, are resistant to alcohol-induced liver disease. Despite this strong association, the exact molecular mechanism of bacterial translocation and of how changes in the intestinal microbiome contribute to liver disease progression remains largely unknown. In this review we will summarize evidence for bacterial translocation and enteric microbial changes in response to alcoholic liver injury and chronic alcoholic liver disease. We will further describe consequences of intestinal dysbiosis on host biology. We finally discuss how therapeutic interventions may modify the gastrointestinal microflora and prevent or reduce alcoholic liver disease progression.


The article points that after the formation of independent state of Lithuania there was almost no literature in Lithuanian language on police and law in general. However, in the third decade due to continuous strengthening of the State and the beginning of publishing of the periodicals ("Militia news", "Police") and other publications the lack of such literature was eliminated, the strong foundations for publishing literature on Police and law were laid. There were even more similar literature published in the fourth decade pre-war Lithuania, according to the author's research. The article outlines the police literature in chronological order. The analytical evaluation of certain publications and police textbooks (of 1925, 1926, 1933 editions) is presented. It is underlined in the article that the studies of outlined literature by police officers had a tremendous importance to the advancement of their professional qualification, cultural education and specific policemen skills development.


To investigate the role of genioglossus and posterior cricoarytenoid (PCA) activity in stabilizing the extrathoracic airway (ETA) of full-term infants during inspiratory flow-resistive loading (IRL), 10 unsedated full-term infants were evaluated in quiet sleep. IRLs were randomly imposed (L2, 125 cmH2O.l-1.s; L3, 250 cmH2O.l-1.s). Ventilation, total respiratory resistance (a correlate of ETA resistance), and moving time averages of PCA, submental activity of the genioglossus (SM), and diaphragm electromyogram were obtained. Results revealed no phasic activity in the SM during baseline breathing or with either IRL. Phasic PCA activity was always observed; burst duration increased with L2 and L3 (P < 0.01) and commenced earlier in relation to the onset of inspiratory airflow with both loads (P < 0.05). PCA activity always preceded that of the diaphragm and invariably outlasted it other than with L3. The upper airway negative pressure changes induced by IRL were insufficient to recruit SM activity; other potential stimuli such as transcutaneous PO2, transcutaneous PCO2, and pulmonary stretch receptor activation (increase in tidal volume) remained unchanged. Ventilation decreased with both loads (L3: P < 0.01), esophageal and mouth pressures increased (P < 0.01), and inspiratory time and inspiratory time divided by total time were both prolonged (P < 0.01). Total respiratory resistance remained unchanged with L2 but increased with L3 (P < 0.01). We concluded that ETA narrowing may be induced in full-term infants during quiet sleep with moderately large-sized IRL and that it is not entirely ameliorated by activation of the SM or PCA or by arousal.


Background: Many people experience living with a long-term health condition as highly stressful. The psychological impact of chronic illness can include anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and relationship difficulties. Aims: The present study used a case series to examine the process and outcome of pluralistically-informed Transactional Analysis counselling in three clients suffering major health problems. Method: A rich case record was assembled for each client, incorporating therapist notes, transcripts of sessions, scores on standard outcome measures, and a follow-up interview. These case materials were analysed to identify key helpful process within the therapy, and to determine the nature of the outcomes of the intervention. Findings: A set of core therapeutic tasks could be identified across all three cases, and clients reported high levels of satisfaction with outcome. Conclusions: Implications for practice and future research are discussed.


Abstract To increase controllability and transparency in recommender systems, recent research has been putting more focus on integrating interactive techniques with recommender algorithms. In this paper, we propose a model of interactive recommending that structures the different interactions users can have with recommender systems. Furthermore, as a novel approach to interactive recommending, we describe a technique that combines faceted information filtering with different algorithmic recommender techniques. We refer to this approach as blended recommending. We also present an interactive movie recommender based on this approach and report on its user-centered design process, in particular an evaluation study in which we compared our system with a standard faceted filtering system. The results indicate a higher level of perceived user control, more detailed preference settings, and better suitability when the search goal is vague.


Bennie Saxon had dementia. Because his family could not care for him at home, he was placed at Alden Wentworth Rehabilitation and Health Care Center ("Alden Wentworth"), a predominately African American nursing home in Chicago, Illinois. On May 4, 2009, he fell four stories to his death. The Cook County Office of the Medical Examiner ruled Mr. Saxon's fall an accident, but his family alleges that his death was caused by neglect. This was not the first incident at this nursing home.Between 2004 and 2009, thirteen civil cases were filed against Alden Wentworth, more than three times the lawsuits filed against half of the city's ninety-one nursing homes. In fact three years prior to Mr. Saxon's death, the nursing home settled a case for the death of Bernetta Hall, a disabled forty-six-year-old woman. Mrs. Hall entered Alden with a single pressure sore at the base of her spine; however, after just five weeks, "she developed sores on her heels, buttock and ear because of the poor care she received at the home," which contributed to her death. Alden Wentworth, a predominately African American nursing home, is part of a chain of thirty for-profit nursing homes throughout Illinois, among which are three predominately African American nursing homes and sixteen predominately Caucasian nursing homes. All three of the predominately African American nursing homes received the lowest quality ranking by the federal government, whereas fewer than half of the sixteen predominately Caucasian facilities received that same rating. In fact, the two nursing homes that received the highest quality ratings were predominately Caucasian. However, a 2009 investigation by the Chicago Reporter ("Reporter") showed that Alden Wentworth "has the worst rating a nursing home can get--three times the number of law-suits of half of Chicago nursing homes--and that residents get less than half the time each day with staff than residents at a predominantly white facility in Evanston operated by the same owner."Empirical data show that racial disparities in the quality of care provided by nursing homes are a common occurrence, not isolated to Illinois. Nine years after the publication of the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine Study ("IOM study") Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare, which acknowledged continued racial disparities in health care and provided suggestions for the elimination of these dis-parities, racial disparities still remain. One chief example of the continuation of racial disparities in health care is in the provision of nursing home care. Decades of empirical research studies have shown that racial disparities in accessing quality nursing home care continue to exist, particularly between African Americans and Caucasians. In the 1980s and 1990s, empirical studies showed that elderly African Americans had difficulty in obtaining access to nursing home care. Specifically, research conducted in New York and North Carolina revealed that African Americans experienced delays in transfers to nursing homes because they were denied admission to nursing homes based on their race. Since these studies, elderly African Americans have been using nursing homes more than Caucasians; however, African Americans have been relegated to racially segregated nursing homes. Moreover, ten years of research show that African Americans disproportionately reside in substandard nursing homes compared to Caucasians. For instance, empirical data from several states, including New York, North Carolina, and Illinois, show that race remains the greatest predictor of the provision of poor-quality nursing home care. The persistence of racial disparities in the provision of quality nursing home care is significant because a considerable number of elderly African Americans will need access to quality nursing home care within the next twenty years.It is predicted that the use of long-term care services, such as nursing homes, will increase from eight million in 2000 to nineteen million in 2050. Since 1995, the population of African Americans residing in nursing homes has been greater than the Caucasian population, and this usage pattern is expected to continue. Because the increase in nursing home use will be by elderly African Americans, and African Americans disproportionately reside in poor quality nursing homes, there is great urgency in putting an end to racial disparities in the provision of quality nursing home care.Overall, a review of the empirical data provides a dismal picture of the accessibility of quality nursing home care available to elderly African Americans. Therefore, it is important to identify the causes of the problem. Some scholars have asserted that socioeconomic status and residential segregation explain why racial disparities in nursing homes persist, while others have submitted that racial bias is the culprit. I suggest that these reasons are inextricably intertwined.Racial bias operates on three different levels in health care: structural, institutional, and interpersonal. Structural bias in health care allows those with privilege, such as wealthy Caucasians, to obtain the best quality nursing home care available. Those without privilege, such as the poor and minorities, are relegated to poor quality nursing homes. The institutional structures of nursing home regulation, such as the lack of certificate-of-need programs, allows nursing home owners to leave predominately poor and minority neighborhoods devoid of health care services to relocate to over-serviced affluent areas. Health care providers' conscious and unconscious racial bias used to determine who is admitted to the nursing home based on race illustrates interpersonal discrimination. Even though evidence shows that racial bias is the central reason for racial disparities in the provision of quality nursing home care, the nursing home regulatory system does not consider racial bias when regulating the quality of nursing home care. Instead of addressing the root cause of quality problems in predominately African American nursing homes, regulators just evaluate the effects: poor quality. Furthermore, structural, institutional, and interpersonal racial bias are present in the nursing home regulatory system, leaving African Americans without protection or exacerbating the disparities in quality. One example of these problems is the federal government's nursing home quality improvement program, the Special Facility Focus Initiative ("SFF Initiative"). In 1998, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ("CMS"), an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS"), initiated the SFF Initiative, a quality improvement program for substandard nursing homes. Under the SFF Initiative, states are required to visit nursing homes designated as special focus facilities usually twice a year to ascertain the quality of care provided residents. If the quality in the nursing homes does not improve after three visits or within 18 months, CMS may involuntarily terminate the nursing home from the Medicare and/or Medicaid programs. Notably, most poor quality nursing homes that are predominately African American are rarely in this program, even though evidence shows that these nursing homes tend to provide worse care than predominately Caucasian nursing homes. The poor quality predominately African American nursing homes on the list remain on the list longer than 18 months and do not improve enough to be removed from the list. Using the problems with the long-term care system as a case study, this Article highlights the fact that racial disparities persist in health care because of racial bias. Section II reviews empirical data illustrating the continuation of racial disparities in accessing nursing home care to explain why African Americans cannot win. Showing why African Americans cannot break even, Section III analyzes research revealing racial disparities in the provision of quality nursing home care. Demonstrating why African Americans cannot get out of the system, Section IV discusses the increased disability of African Americans that forces them to seek medical care from nursing homes, even though the care provided is substandard. Section V discusses the causes of these racial disparities in the provision of quality nursing home care. Finally, Section VI discusses the failures of race-neutral policies to address the root causes of racial disparities.


In this paper, we propose a method to refine geometry of 3D meshes from the Kinect fusion by exploiting shading cues captured from the infrared (IR) camera of Kinect. A major benefit of using the Kinect IR camera instead of a RGB camera is that the IR images captured by Kinect are narrow band images which filtered out most undesired ambient light that makes our system robust to natural indoor illumination. We define a near light IR shading model which describes the captured intensity as a function of surface normals, albedo, lighting direction, and distance between a light source and surface points. To resolve ambiguity in our model between normals and distance, we utilize an initial 3D mesh from the Kinect fusion and multi-view information to reliably estimate surface details that were not reconstructed by the Kinect fusion. Our approach directly operates on a 3D mesh model for geometry refinement. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through several challenging real-world examples.


In this paper, we present a new method to model individual cognitive abilities, which were originally described by structural equation models and which can be used to reduce the possibility of human error when interacting with complex technical system. Our proposed model is based on hierarchical Bayesian networks and deals therefore with uncertain and noisy data. The validity of the method is demonstrated on the basis of simulations of real-life data. The inference from the Bayesian network demonstrates that estimating the user's cognitive abilities is possible in a reliable manner in real-time. Structural and data dependency analyses further show that less evidence data are necessary to provide cognitive profile classification. This especially highlights the advantage of our new method in comparison to the - in psychology - traditionally used structural equation models. Such cognitive profiling will allow adapting a system's demand character to the cognitive ability level of an individual user, which will make operating that system less error-prone, as many human errors result out of systems requesting more cognitive abilities than the operator has available.


In this report protein content and catalase (CAT) activity were used to study the effect of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on leaf senescence in detached Pigeon pea leaves. A decrease in protein content measured as an indicator of leaf senescence, and a drop in CAT activity was observed following treatment with H2O2 in Pigeon pea detached leaves compared with control leaves. However after longer incubations CAT activity significantly increased in comparison with day 1 treatment. Protein content and CAT activity were also studied in the leaves treated by 0.025, 0.05, 0.075 and 0.1 mM H2O2. The optimal concentration of H2O2 in reducing protein content seems to be 0.075 mM, whereas concentration of 0.025, 0.05, 0.075 mM increase the CAT activity while lower and higher concentrations shown the opposite effect. The observed changes revealed that H2O2 induces oxidative stress and oxidative damage thereby leaf senescence in the detached leaves of Pigeon pea.


Training a deep architecture using a ranking loss has become standard for the person re-identification task. Increasingly, these deep architectures include additional components that leverage part detections, attribute predictions, pose estimators and other auxiliary information, in order to more effectively localize and align discriminative image regions. In this paper we adopt a different approach and carefully design each component of a simple deep architecture and, critically, the strategy for training it effectively for person re-identification. We extensively evaluate each design choice, leading to a list of good practices for person re-identification. By following these practices, our approach outperforms the state of the art, including more complex methods with auxiliary components, by large margins on four benchmark datasets. We also provide a qualitative analysis of our trained representation which indicates that, while compact, it is able to capture information from localized and discriminative regions, in a manner akin to an implicit attention mechanism.


There is an urgent conversation happening among the world's democracies about how to respond to the combined threat of online electioneering and foreign interference in domestic elections. Despite the shadow such activities cast over the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the US has been largely absent from comparative discussions about how to tackle the problem. This is not just because of a recalcitrant president. The assumption that America's "First Amendment Exceptionalism" – the idea that American freedom of expression law is simply too much of an outlier to warrant useful comparative consideration – is strong on both sides of the Atlantic. This is especially true in regard to the regulation of political campaigns.

This article challenges that assumption, and argues that America's more libertarian approach to the legal regulation of political speech does not pose a barrier to fruitful comparative work in this area. It does so by comparing the law of the US to that of the UK. Specifically, it organizes reform proposals being considered in the US and UK into a common taxonomy, and sets out the legal standard governing each type of proposal in each country. Considering each country's law through this organizational structure allows us to see that the legal differences between the US and UK, while significant, rarely bar the types of changes being considered in either nation. Indeed, the two countries have much to learn from each other's efforts in this area, and lawmakers, regulators, and scholars should not hesitate to engage with the experiences of their transatlantic peers.

In reaching this conclusion, the paper makes three distinct contributions. First, by clustering reform proposals into a taxonomy, it provides a structure for comparative work that will be useful not just in the US and UK, but in all countries working to bring their election laws fully into the internet era. Second, by providing an in-depth yet accessible guide to the legal structures undergirding election law in the US and UK, it provides a useful tool for scholars attempting to understand these systems. The US system in particular is often quickly dismissed by other nations, but without a deeper understanding of how and why US law has ended up as it has those nations risk inadvertently following in its footsteps. Finally, it identifies several concrete areas where the US and UK can benefit from each other's expertise, thereby providing a roadmap for regulators, lawmakers, and reform advocates in both countries.


With the popularity of cloud computing, mobile devices can store/retrieve personal data from anywhere at any time. Consequently, the data security problem in mobile cloud becomes more and more severe and prevents further development of mobile cloud. There are substantial studies that have been conducted to improve the cloud security. However, most of them are not applicable for mobile cloud since mobile devices only have limited computing resources and power. Solutions with low computational overhead are in great need for mobile cloud applications. In this paper, we propose a lightweight data sharing scheme (LDSS) for mobile cloud computing. It adopts CP-ABE, an access control technology used in normal cloud environment, but changes the structure of access control tree to make it suitable for mobile cloud environments. LDSS moves a large portion of the computational intensive access control tree transformation in CP-ABE from mobile devices to external proxy servers. Furthermore, to reduce the user revocation cost, it introduces attribute description fields to implement lazy-revocation, which is a thorny issue in program based CP-ABE systems. The experimental results show that LDSS can effectively reduce the overhead on the mobile device side when users are sharing data in mobile cloud environments.


Modifications of transfer RNA (tRNA) are widespread and numerous but their function is not well understood. Particularly, three tRNAs (tRNALysAAA, tRNAGluGAA and tRNAGlnCAA) show universal modifications of the second and fifth carbons of the wobble base. The «Elongator» complex (Elp1-6) is proposed to modify carbon five while the Ctu1-Ctu2 complex is responsible for the thiolation of carbon two. In both cases, the modification is thought to be required to optimize the codon-anticodon interaction. In the fission yeast, the deletion of either complexes results in thermosensitivity associated with growth defects on specific compounds as well as cell cycle and cytokinesis defects. A key step in understanding how these phenotypes result from a tRNA modification defect is to compare the proteome from wild type and mutants. We determined the proteome-wide relative expression level of each S. pombe protein by combining an integrated ORFeome to reverse protein arrays. We identified subsets of proteins whose expression level was altered in the strains lacking either modification. The groups identified can be linked to the phenotypes observed. As a detailed example, the subset of proteins involved in the « mitotic cell cycle transition from G2 to M » has been thoroughly studied. Several genes coding for proteins belonging to this subset show genetic interaction with ctu1 or elp3. One of the more interesting of these genes is cdr2, coding for a protein kinase negatively regulating Wee1 to allow the entry into mitosis. The cell cycle phenotypes associated with the absence of tRNA modifications can be explained by the strong decrease in Cdr2 level observed in the corresponding mutants. Moreover, the ctu1 and elp3 mutant phenotypes mimic most of the reported cdr2 mutant phenotypes. Yet, these phenotypes are aggravated in the triple ctu1 elp3 cdr2 mutant, suggesting that Cdr2 is not the only protein responsible for the phenotypes observed in absence of modification. Why is the translation of the proteins in these subsets – and particularly Cdr2 – hyper sensitive to the absence of mcm5s2U tRNA modification? The answer is found in the codon content of the corresponding genes. Indeed, all the sensitive groups are enriched in AAA codons (by opposition to AAG), which is read by tRNALysUUU, one of the three mcm5s2U modified tRNAs. This link between codon content and sensitivity to the absence of tRNA modification has been demonstrated experimentally via the study of Cdr2. We suppressed the translation defect of Cdr2 by overproducing tRNALysUUU from a plasmid, or by replacing every AAA lysine codon by a AAG-lysine (read by the naturally unmodified tRNALysCUU). Taken all together, these experiments show that the translation of groups of genes enriched in AAA codon is less efficient in the absence of mcm5s2U modification. How is the selection pressure leading to an enrichment of these genes in AAA codons exerted? Why enriching a gene with the lysine AAA codon that is read with low efficiency? These issues are part of the remaining questions. We suggest the possibility of a regulation specific to these groups of genes thanks to their codon bias and the mcm5s2 double modification of tRNAs.


The objective of this study was to find innovative approaches for the production of iron fortified noodles that are natural and economically feasible. The functional food was produced using different combinations . The investigated variables were the ratio of sorghum to white bean flour, pre-gelatinized flours (drum dried or extruded) and guar gum addition while the emulsifier added was kept constant. Investigated parameters were the iron content and its bioavailability, as well as the functional properties (cooking weight, cooking time, cooking loss and texture) of the noodles. Results of the study showed that the content of white bean in the noodles had a direct influence on the iron content and bioavailability. As expected, the iron content and bioavailability was higher the higher the amount of white bean added. Additionally, the iron content and bioavailability was affected by the addition of guar gum and the pregelatinised flours. Iron content of noodles decreased with the increase of guar gum content while the addition of white bean pregelatinised flour showed an increase in the iron content and bioavailability. On examination of the functional properties, the 50% white bean noodles gave the best results in terms of texture, cooking loss, cooking time and cooking weight. Cooking time, cooking weight and cooking loss were comparable to that of durum wheat noodles. Noodles prepared with 50% white bean flour and pregelatinized flours (extruded or drum dried) received the best rankings in the sensory evaluation. The result of this study showed that the higher the amount of white bean added, the superior was the noodle quality, therefore fulfilling the requirements of the objectives i.e. good quality noodles with high iron content and bioavailability.


Objective:The aim of this study was to investigate whether transdermal low-dose estradiol treatment induces changes in mammographic density or heterogeneity compared with raloxifene, whether if these changes relate to changes in bone formation/resorption markers, and whether these findings indicate elevation of breast cancer risk by treatment. Methods:Digitized mammograms of 2 × 135 completers of a 2-year, randomized trial formed the base of the present analysis. Active treatments were transdermal estradiol releasing 0.014 mg estradiol (E2)/week and orally administered raloxifene hydrochloride 60 mg/day, respectively. Influence of the therapies on breast density was assessed with categorical scores Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System, area percentage density, and computer-based (E2-specific) heterogeneity examination of radiographs. These where related to physical and systemic markers. Results:At baseline, no mammography scoring methodology or other marker could separate the two treatment groups of transdermal estradiol and raloxifene. No treatment induced significant density changes measured by Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System. Both treatments made the area percentage density increase and the estradiol significantly. Both treatments induced significant changes in E2-specific heterogeneity scoring (E2-specific heterogeneity examination of radiograph), and the raloxifene treatment induced a significantly higher change. At baseline, the mammographic markers showed negative correlation with body mass index and positive correlation with serum type I collagen crosslinks C-telopeptide. The changes in mammographic markers did not essentially exhibit correlations to changes in bone markers in either treatment group. Conclusions:Low-dose transdermal estradiol and raloxifene induced comparable changes in breast density and heterogeneity. Baseline correlations may be explained through relations to obesity. The current study does not yield evidence against the hypothesis that "neither raloxifene nor low dose transdermal estradiol treatment increases the breast cancer risk."


The Nordic countries constitute an interesting laboratory for the study of differentiated European Integration. Even though Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden share some historical, cultural, socio-economic and political characteristics, all those countries have ultimately opted for a different kind of relationship with the EU. Whereas Finland, a member of the Eurozone since its inception in 1999, has been considered to be part of the Union's 'inner core' for quite some time, Iceland and Norway, in contrast, have opted to remain outside the EU albeit closely associated via the European Economic Area Agreement. The variation of relationships has also been reflected in Nordic parties' positioning vis-à-vis European integration in general and differentiation of European integration in particular. Broadly speaking, party families can be distinguished along traditional (e.g., agrarian, Christian democratic, conservative, and social democratic) and modern (e.g., socialist left, green, and populist radical right) ideological orientations. Although political parties belonging to both the traditional and modern Nordic party families have adopted different stances on European differentiated integration, we would assume—against the backdrop of Nordic cooperation—higher levels of transnational cooperation in European matters. Consequently, this article examines the similarities and differences between parties belonging to the same ideological family, and the extent of transnational party cooperation in the Nordic countries. Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with party representatives as well as on official party documents, this article shows that although institutionalized party cooperation mostly reflects divisions between party families, such institutionalization does not include a common vision for European integration. We conclude that the low level of partisan Nordic integration is primarily caused by domestic-level factors, such as intra-party divisions, government participation and public opinion.


Health literacy is an important component of successful health care delivery and relies on both individual and systemic factors to achieve. For individuals not trained in the medical field, health literacy can be a complicated and perplexing web of information to navigate. Patients can have varying degrees of health literacy affecting their understanding of health conditions, especially the elderly, immigrants, minorities, and the low-income populations. Limited health literacy can pose risks on a patient's well-being, interfere with their self-care and health maintenance, and possibly create obstacles for the patient if health instructions are not clearly understood. One proven model of improving patient's understanding of their condition and needed care, is the teach back method. The teach-back method is easily accessible to all providers and effortless to use and is transferable across health care settings so that it can be utilized globally. The teach-back method consistently increases patient proficiency in health literacy and disease awareness, while minimizing the potential for misinterpretation (Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research [AHRQ], 2015). Given high rates of chronic and preventable diseases (Center for Disease Control, 2018), increased access to care, and limited time available to actively engage with patients, finding various ways of utilizing the teach back method effortlessly, can help patients better manage their health. In order to increase awareness of various methods of implementing teach back method and promoting quality outcomes for providers, this paper will review the teach back method; investigate the various methods of utilization; and highlight effective models to integrate teach back in every patient encounter.


The cosmic origin of fluorine is still not well constrained. Several nucleosynthetic channels at different phases of stellar evolution have been suggested, but these must be constrained by observations. For this, the fluorine abundance trend with metallicity spanning a wide range is required. Our aim is to determine stellar abundances of fluorine for . We determine the abundances from HF lines in infrared K-band spectra ( ) of cool giants, observed with the IGRINS and Phoenix high-resolution spectrographs. We derive accurate stellar parameters for all our observed K giants, which is important as the HF lines are very temperature-sensitive. We find that [F/Fe] is flat as a function of metallicity at [F/Fe]∼0, but increases as the metallicity increases. The fluorine slope shows a clear secondary behavior in this metallicity range. We also find that the [F/Ce] ratio is relatively flat for , and that for two metal-poor ( ), s-process element-enhanced giants, we do not detect an elevated fluorine abundance. We interpret all of these observational constraints as indications that several major processes are at play for the cosmic budget of fluorine over time: from those in massive stars at low metallicities, through the asymptotic giant branch star contribution at , to processes with increasing yields with metallicity at supersolar metallicities. The origins of the latter, and whether or not Wolf–Rayet stars and/or novae could contribute at supersolar metallicities, is currently not known. To quantify these observational results, theoretical modeling is required. More observations in the metal-poor region are required to clarify the processes there.


Transplanting pancreatic islets into the liver through the portal vein is currently the most common procedure in clinical islet transplantations for treating patients with brittle type 1 diabetes. However, most islet grafts fail within a 5-year period necessitating retransplantation. The vascular connections are disrupted at islet isolation and implanted islets depend on diffusion of oxygen and nutrients in the immediate posttransplantation period. Rapid and efficient revascularization is of utmost importance for the survival and long-term function of transplanted islets. In this thesis, the influence of the implantation microenvironment for islet engraftment and function was studied. Islets were transplanted into the liver, the renal subcapsular site or the pancreas. Islets implanted into the liver contained fewer glucagon-positive cells than islets implanted to the kidney and endogenous islets. Intraportally transplanted islets responded with insulin and glucagon release to secretagogues, but only when stimulated through the hepatic artery. Thus, the intrahepatic grafts were selectively revascularized from the hepatic artery. The vascular density in human islets transplanted into the liver of athymic mice was markedly lower when compared to human islets grafted to the kidney. Islets implanted into their physiological environment, the pancreas, were markedly better revascularized. Insulin content, glucose-stimulated insulin release, (pro)insulin biosynthesis and glucose oxidation rate were markedly decreased in transplanted islets retrieved from the liver, both when compared to endogenous and transplanted islets retrieved from the pancreas. Only minor changes in metabolic functions were observed in islets implanted into the pancreas when compared to endogenous islets. The present findings demonstrate that the microenvironment has a major impact on the engraftment of transplanted islets. Elucidating the beneficial factors that promote engraftment would improve the survival and long-term function of transplanted islets. Ultimately, islet transplantation may be provided to an increased number of patients with type 1 diabetes.


One of the roles of the public library is to provide access to resources which support the self-education and development of the citizenry (Alstead & Curry, 2003). This study sets out to investigate how public libraries in the UK measure their socio-economic value and impact in carrying out this role. T his will be addressed through an investigation into the generation and exchange of human, intellectual, transactional and social capital in the UK public library service. There is a general acceptance that public libraries contribute to 'community' and have the potential to have a very positive impact on civil society. This can be attributed to public libraries contribution to the creation of social capital (Varheim, 2007).The study will explore the extent to which the generation and use of social capital helps library users develop as citizens. Literature reviews have been conducted around the themes of performance measurement in libraries, value and impact case studies, information society and public libraries generating social capital. In addition, the study will now look into the generation and use of intellectual capital and human capital in public library services with a view to determining whether or not there is a positive and valuable impact on an individual's citizenship due to the effective seeking and processing of information and support obtained through the library. The study must also consider the growth in information and whether the concept and theory of the Information Society has a bearing on information and library usage. The research will be generated from a continual review of the literature as well as empirical research elements. This will enable a longitudinal 3 year study and include a cohort approach over three geographical locations in the UK, representing different demographics and types of public library services within the UK.. Focus groups will be used with cohorts of library users and library staff from each location.


In light of the daunting prospect of terrorists striking again on the home front, what special measures, if any, should be taken to assure compensation to those killed or injured by such violence? The starting point for any discussion of the compensation of these victims (and their survivors), we believe, is an appreciation of the baseline arrangements our nation has in place for those killed or seriously injured regardless of cause. One policy option would be to leave victims of terrorism to whatever they might obtain from these baseline tort and social welfare compensation systems in default of special treatment. On what basis, if any, should terrorist victims be singled out for different treatment? Is there something about being victims of terrorism that should entitle them and their survivors to be better treated than they would be by Social Security, victims of violent crimes schemes, and the like? Is there something about tort law's application, or non-application to the terrorist setting, that makes a special compensation scheme appropriate for victims of terrorism?In addressing these questions, there are two basic alternatives to the default solution. One would involve the creation, ex ante, of an ongoing victim compensation fund in anticipation of the occurrence of future terrorist acts. The other would involve the ad hoc creation of a fund established after the occurrence of a terrorist event to provide retrospective compensation to victims. Israel and Northern Ireland are examples of countries with longstanding experience with terrorism, which have adopted legislative schemes of the first sort. In the U.S., the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund is an example of the ad hoc retrospective approach. We begin by commenting on the 9/11 Fund itself, setting it in the context of other American compensation schemes that arose out of concerns about the appropriateness of having injury victims seek compensation through tort law. Next, we consider, in turn, the ex ante and ex post options for addressing the claims of terrorist victims. Finally, we return to the default systems mentioned above, raising the question of whether they offer in all, or most, circumstances the most sensible approach to dealing with future incidents of personal injury from terrorist acts.


Plants regulate their shape and movements in accordance with their surrounding environment. This regulation occurs by a curving movement driven by differential growth. Recent studies has unraveled part of the mechanisms leading to differential growth though lateral polar auxin transport. However the real interplay between elongation, curvature variation, and accordingly the regulation process of growth distribution has not been really investigated so far. This issue is addressed in this study through gravitropic experiments on wheat coleoptiles, using a recently published kinematic approach, KimoRod. Here we show that median elongation is not affected by gravitropic perturbation. However kinematics studies reveal temporal oscillation of the median elongation rate. These oscillations propagate from the apex to the base during the movement with a characteristic velocity that is similar to auxin propagation in coleoptiles. The curvature variation exhibits a similar spatiotemporal pattern to the median elongation which reveals a nontrivial link between this two parameters and potential effect on perception and biomechanics of the tissue.


This essay is about those many hunters in northern and central Italy who captured birds (mostly) for commercial reasons, far from the glamorous performances of aristocratic falconry. It investigates their techniques and practices in the context of their local environments and socio-cultural frameworks. While birds were status food, hunting them thus mostly amounted to a marginal economic activity. The variously wary nature of their target species, and the necessarily repetitive nature of commercial hunting warranted practices in which the hunter's profile was consistently very low, and in which unsuspecting birds were attracted and captured on the basis of their ecological behavior. The paper is based on Book X of Pier de' Crescenzi's early fourteenth century manual Ruralia Commodorum as well as a series of Italian documentary sources from Venice and Tuscany and argues that in late medieval Italy such hunting knowledge was predominantly part of an oral tradition. These sources point both to actual use of certain practices in bird hunting as well as suggesting the modus operandi of the hunters, keen and dynamic observers and users of their local natural environments.


Calcium (Ca) deficiency causes peanut pegs and pods to abort, resulting in decreased shelling percentages and yields. Environmental factors influencing calcium availability include soil Ca content and soil moisture. Genetic attributes that influence the sensitivity of cultivars to soil Ca supply include pod size, soil volume per pod (varied by plant growth habit), and pod wall attributes. Where Ca fertilization is not possible, genetic solutions to Ca deficiency are important, and breeders need information on the relative importance of these attributes. The objective of this research was to quantify the relative importance of these three sources of variation. Data from three trials were used to evaluate the relative importance of these attributes. The trials, sited on Ca-deficient alfisols, used between four and 12 germplasm lines with varied Ca sensitivity- determining attributes. Lines differed in growth habit (spreading or bunch), pod volume, pod yield, shelling percentage, and seed yield. The trial treatments and environments (sites and seasons) also varied Ca supply through soil type, fertilization, and water supply. Assuming that Ca supply has little impact on crop growth rates (CGR), a physiological model was used to set aside the contributions of CGR to yield differences between treatments. The three trials were analyzed separately and then combined for further regression analysis by defining each site and treatment combination as an environment. Within trials, variations in shelling percentage accounted for up to half the variations in seed yield between lines. In the combined analysis, easily selected attributes—pod volume (58% of germplasm sums of squares) and plant habit (8%) and their interaction (14%)—accounted for much of the variation in shelling percentage. The interaction was due to shelling percentage being less influenced by pod volume in spreading than in the bunch types. Thus, in Ca-limiting situations, the spreading growth habit allowed larger seeded peanuts to be grown than the bunch growth habit because of the greater pod dispersal of this type. Assuming that the lines tested typified peanuts for their relation between attributes and Ca deficiency-based shelling percentage variations, breeders should place the greatest emphasis on small pod size to decrease peanut sensitivity to Ca deficiency. Increased soil available to each pod by pod dispersal decreases the need for small pods to decrease sensitivity to Ca-deficient soils


The ability of a current meter equipped with a standard pressure sensor to estimate the wave spectra of underdeveloped, fetch‐limited waves (peak period ~2 s) in a tidally forced, estuarine environment was investigated. Instruments of this type were placed at four heights throughout the 2.5 m water column, and data were recorded synchronously with a co‐located capacitance wave gauge. Linear wave theory was found to adequately describe the wave field in the lower frequency portion of the spectra (<0.6 Hz). The capacitance wave gauge data revealed that the equilibrium range of the spectrum could be modeled as ƒ−4. Large variability in the noise floor of the identical pressure gauges was found. The optimal cutoff frequency (beyond which the ƒ−4 model was applied) was defined as the location where the pressure spectra was 12 times the noise floor but was at least 1.1 times the peak frequency. Using these criteria, the pressure sensors measured root‐mean‐squared wave heights and mean wave periods with an uncertainty of 0.035 m and 0.13 s, respectively (95% confidence level). Applying a point measurement of the current in the transformation of the pressure spectra was found to be as reliable as applying a vertically averaged current. Using the criteria found to best estimate the wave spectra, an expression that determines the ability of a pressure sensor to measure the wave field of interest was developed. This expression enables the user to specify the wind velocity and peak wave frequency at a site and determine the maximum depth below the water surface at which the pressure gauge can be placed.


The development and implementation of government policy, which we term 'policy work', is a complex challenge that needs to address cooperation and collaboration between multiple agencies and coordination of activities occurring at multiple levels within agencies, stakeholder organisations and the community. This paper describes an action-oriented Task-based Knowledge Management (KM) framework aimed specifically at building capability for policy work in order to address the challenges of a complex policy environment. Our research is conducted in the context of current capacity-building initiatives in Indonesia focused on the dual policy challenges of sustainable development and natural resource management. In this context our KM approach supports the consolidation of diverse information streams including formal (science) and informal (tradition, social norms, local lore), and provides the means to build a shared understanding of problems (natural resource management) and innovative solutions to those problems (sustainable management practices) involving all stakeholders.


The interaction of Candida albicans with the host is of a complex nature involving fungal factors and host's response. In this study, we concentrated on the phenotypic expression of virulence attributes and genotypic characteristics of C. albicans isolates from two distinct clinical entities of candidiasis—blood stream and vaginal infections, and the possible role of these factors. Hence, we conducted a comparative in vitro assessment of virulence characteristics, including adhesion to epithelial cells and HaCat cell line, biofilm formation, aspartic proteinases and phospholipase activity of 20 C. albicans isolates from patients with C. albicans bloodstream infection and 22 isolates from patients with C. albicans vaginitis. Further, we studied the epigenetic phenotypic switching of the strains and their ploidy, by flow cytometry and CHEF techniques. These studies indicated that although no overall differentiation between the isolates of the two groups (bloodstream infection and vaginitis) could be demonstrated, several characteristics were more specific to one of the groups than the other. While the strains from vaginal infection had higher capacity to adhere, the strains from patients with bloodstream infection had higher activity of phospholipase. Differences were also noted in phenotypic switching, with the strains from bloodstream infection revealing primarily the "white" type colonies, known to be more virulent, and had higher DNA content. This study is unique considering the concurrent comparison of isolates from different clinical entities, at the phenotypic and genotypic level.


Monitoring of microseismicity is an important tool to understand the magmatism, tectonics and hydrothermal circulation of a mid-oceanic ridge. In the presence of sea ice, use of ocean bottom seismometers is not practical, but several experiments with small networks of seismometers drifting with the sea ice have previously been completed successfully. The goal of this project was to build on the earlier experiments and develop a method for monitoring the microseismicity above the Gakkel Ridge by developing seismic stations tailored for a small network on the Arctic sea ice. The new equipment has been taken from concept through development, building and deployment with data acquisition to data analysis. A 3D location algorithm was developed in order to locate a sample of the recorded events. Five prototype seismic stations were designed, built and tested in a small network on the sea ice. The stations had individual timing and positioning, and were connected in a wireless network for real time transmission of position, status and data. The network was deployed on the sea ice above the Gakkel Ridge at 85◦N during the FRAM-2012 expedition to the Arctic Ocean with the hovercraft R/H Sabvabaa in July September 2012. The network drifted over the rift valley along with the ice and two re-deployments were made, totalling 23 days of recording. The last of the three deployments (7 days) was the most successful, with three of the buoys fully operational. Although technical challenges had to be overcome due to the prototype nature of the equipment, it proved practical and functional. The last deployment was analyzed and 41 events were identified. To account for the rough bathymetry at the Gakkel Ridge, a 3D grid search based location algorithm was developed, with which three of the events were located. The prototype and the experiences from the deployment are presented together with an overview of the recorded data, the location algorithm, results from data analysis with the three event locations and interpretations.


"At Play in the Tavern" is a lively study of the tavern, inn, and brothel in the literature of medieval France. Cowell's original treatment of the medieval tavern as a counterpoint to orthodox institutions considers such delicious transgressions as drinking, gambling, prostitution, theft, usury, and "foile" (a peculiar combination of madness and sinfulness). This innovative study of both market-place values and literary culture unveils a raucous culture opposed to the dominant models of society coming out of the Augustinian tradition. Cowell contrasts the literary domains of the carnal and the orthodox and innovatively assigns physical space to each. The literature of the tavern is shown to represent the possibility of escape from ecclesiastical models of economic and literary exchange that insisted on equality, utility, and charity by offering a vision of exuberant excess. Cowell concludes that drama, poetry, and other secular texts, when considered as a whole, are ultimately complicit in a revolution favoring an ethic of profit.Drawing on recent work in medieval literature, history, popular culture, gender studies, and sign theory, Andrew Cowell employs a wide range of traditional and, until now, little known sources to show the unity and importance of a countercultural literary mode.Andrew Cowell is Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Colorado at Boulder.


This study compares the Weber fraction for human perception of stiffness among three conditions: vision, proprioceptive motion feedback, and their combination. To make comparisons between these feedback conditions, a novel haptic device was designed that senses the spring behavior through encoder and force measurements, and implements a controller to render linear virtual springs so that the stimuli displayed haptically could be compared with their visual counterparts. The custom-designed, torque-controlled haptic interface non-invasively controls the availability of proprioceptive motion feedback in unimpaired individuals using a virtual environment. When proprioception is available, the user feels an MCP joint rotation that is proportional to his or her finger force. When proprioception is not available, the actual finger is not allowed to move, but a virtual finger displayed graphically moves in proportion to the user's applied force. Visual feedback is provided and removed by turning on and off this graphical display. Weber fractions were generated from an experiment in which users examined pairs of springs and attempted to identify the spring with higher stiffness. To account for slight trial-to-trial variations in the relationship between force and position in the proprioceptive feedback conditions, our analysis uses measurements of the actual rendered stiffness, rather than the commanded stiffness. Results for 10 users give average Weber fractions of 0.056 for vision, 0.036 for proprioception, and 0.039 for their combination, indicating that proprioception is important for stiffness perception for this experimental setup. The long-term goal of this research is to motivate and develop methods for proprioception feedback to wearers of dexterous upper-limb prostheses.


Unsupported Z39.50 access points result to query failures and/or inconsistent answers, in spite of the protocol specification for a unified global access mechanism. A challenge to this issue is to substitute an unsupported access point with others, so that the most similar semantics to the original access point can be obtained. In this paper, we describe the Bib-1 access points semantics of the Z39.50 protocol using the RDF Schema language, based on the official semantics specification of the Z39.50 Bib-1 attribute set. Moreover, we suggest two algorithms for the substitution of unsupported access point exploiting semantics information from the RDFS graph. The algorithms produce the set of access points, the proper combination of which produces semantics similar to the original access point. Then, we optimize the resulting set of access points by producing the minimal set of them with the closest semantics to the original one. Finally, we present an implementation where Z39.50 searches could be done using our access point substitution algorithms.


Teenagers under the influence of strong emotions, without the tools to regulate them, can be identified as dangerous. Throughout the past decade many cases of poor emotional regulation in adolescents have been documented, including school shootings, murders, and suicides. The literature discussed the impact attachment and parenting styles have on the development of adolescents and the positive outcomes individual work with parents, in therapy, has had for family systems. This research aims to further the knowledge of the impact parenting styles have on the development of emotional regulation in adolescents and to describe effective means of helping adolescents develop the ability to regulate their emotions, through the use of family therapy. Data for this project was collected through a qualitative study, which interviewed four licensed marriage and family therapists. Each participant was asked seven semi-structured questions that focused on the association between caregiver and adolescent interactions and the ability for the adolescent to effectively regulate his or her emotions and also practical interventions to use in family therapy, to help repair the adolescent's ability to regulate his or her emotions. The findings of this project were consistent with the literature and furthered current literature, by discussing specific interventions therapists could utilize while working with clients in therapy, such as using therapy as a model for effective interactions. This research could be furthered by investigating what happens to children, who have developed skills to regulate their emotions, when: 1) their parents are invested in the treatment process but then revert back to old behaviors; and 2) their parents never become invested in the treatment process and their natural home environment remains chaotic and dysfunctional. THE IMPACT OF PARENTING STYLES ON THE EMOTIONAL REGULATION OF ADOLESCENTS iii


Abstract.
 Understanding the drivers of macroevolutionary trends through the Phanerozoic has been a central question in paleobiology. Increasingly important is understanding the regional and environmental variation of macroevolutionary patterns and how they are reflected at the global scale. Here we test the role of biotic interactions on regional ecological patterns during the Mesozoic marine revolution. We test for escalatory trends in Jurassic marine benthic macroinvertebrate ecosystems using occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database parsed by region and environment. The escalation hypothesis posits that taxonomic groups that could adapt to intense predation and bioturbation proliferated, whereas groups unable to adapt were reduced in diversity and abundance or driven to extinction. We tested this hypothesis in five regions during Jurassic stages and among four depositional environments in Europe. Few escalatory trends were detected, although at least one escalatory trend was observed in every region, with the greatest number and strongest trends observed in Europe. These trends include increases in shallow infauna and cementing epifauna and occurrences of facultatively mobile invertebrates and decreases in pedunculate, free-lying, and sessile epifauna. Within Europe, escalatory trends occur in shallow-water environments but also in deeper-water environments, where they are predicted not to occur. When regional trends are aggregated, trends in Europe drive the global signal. The results of this study suggest that while evidence of escalation is rare globally, it is plausible that escalation drove macroevolutionary patterns in Europe. Furthermore, these results underline the need to dissect global fossil data at the regional scale to understand global macroevolutionary dynamics.


As modern economists, we use Adam Smith's "invisible hand" metaphor confident that we all know what it means in our discourse: it reflects our admiration for the elegant and smooth functioning of the market system as a coordinator of autonomous individual choices in an interdependent world. But in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, the invisible hand has a much broader responsibility: if individuals are to enjoy the fruits of a classical liberal society, the invisible hand must not only coordinate individuals' choices, it must shape the individuals into constructive social beings—ethical beings. I begin by presenting the philosophical basis for Smith's invisible hand, describing the sense in which the hand is invisible and whose hand it is. I then describe the story Smith tells of the invisible hand creating and maintaining a constructive classical liberal society and show how Smith's story evolved as his faith in the ability of the invisible hand to shape an appropriate ethical foundation waned. I conclude with some thoughts on the legacy of Adam Smith and of our predecessors in economic inquiry more generally.


Turkey is a secondary center of diversity for melon (Cucumis melo) and is home to a variety of regional morphotypes. This diversity is housed in a national germplasm repository with more than 500 accessions. Molecular genetic variability of 209 melon genotypes from 115 accessions of this collection was characterized using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). Ten AFLP primer combinations yielded 279 reproducible fragments, which were used for dendrogram and principal coordinate analyses. These analyses showed two major clusters of Turkish melons: one group contained highly similar genotypes (maximum Dice dissimilarity coefficient of 0.18), whereas the other group was genetically more diverse (maximum dissimilarity 0.41). Although average dissimilarity was low (0.13), a broad range of genetic diversity was observed in the collection. A marker allele richness strategy was used to select a core set of 20 genotypes representing the allelic diversity of the AFLP data. The core set had double the average diversity (0.26) of the entire set and represented the major morphotypes present in the collection. Molecular genetic diversity of the core set was further validated using simple sequence repeat marker data (116 polymorphic fragments), which confirmed that the selected core set retained high levels of molecular genetic diversity.


In the last 20 years the attention of international organizations towards air pollution has been improved, leading to definition of laws and regulations. In order to evaluate strategies and policies, forecasting tools have been adopted by institutions. Currently, the estimation of traffic emissions is based on static models, in which the amount of pollutant is computed as a function of average parameters obtained on a single road stretch. The well-known traffic increase of recent years has significantly changed the actual flow conditions, producing a strong rise of interferences. As this facet affects the operating condition of each vehicle, the use of a standard emission model at high traffic interference can lead to some inaccuracies. In such cases, instantaneous emission models introduce deeper capabilities; essentially, the pollutant prediction is directly tied to the engine vehicle operation point in reallike traffic condition. This second modelling approach has been adopted in the current work. A complete lumped parameter vehicle model has been built to be used as a virtual on-road emission/fuel consumption test unit. Investigations have highlighted the dependence of emission level and fuel consumption on drivers' behaviour; indeed, the analysis took advantage of the experiments carried out in the virtual reality laboratory: on a typical highway geometry, characterized by a dual lane carriageway with three lanes each, three different flow conditions have been simulated. Once the relationship between highway interference level and drivers' behaviour has been evidenced (in terms of emissions and fuel consumption), a relation between highway interference level and emissions/fuel consumption has been highlighted. Finally, in order to assess the differences


We use multiscale smoothed particle hydrodynamic simulations to study the inflow of gas from galactic scales (∼10 kpc) down to ≲ 0.1 pc, at which point the gas begins to resemble a traditional, Keplerian accretion disc. The key ingredients of the simulations are gas, stars, black holes (BHs), self-gravity, star formation and stellar feedback (via a subgrid model); BH feedback is not included. We use ∼100 simulations to survey a large parameter space of galaxy properties and subgrid models for the interstellar medium physics. We generate initial conditions for our simulations of galactic nuclei (≲ 300 pc) using galaxy-scale simulations, including both major galaxy mergers and isolated bar-(un)stable disc galaxies. For sufficiently gas-rich, disc-dominated systems, we find that a series of gravitational instabilities generates large accretion rates of up to ∼ 1–10  M⊙  yr−1 on to the BH (i.e. at ≲ 0.1 pc); this is comparable to what is needed to fuel the most luminous quasars. The BH accretion rate is highly time variable for a given set of conditions in the galaxy at ∼kpc. At radii of >rsim 10  pc, our simulations resemble the 'bars-within-bars' model of Shlosman et al., but we show that the gas can have a diverse array of morphologies, including spirals, rings, clumps and bars; the duty cycle of these features is modest, complicating attempts to correlate BH accretion with the morphology of gas in galactic nuclei. At ∼ 1–10  pc, the gravitational potential becomes dominated by the BH and bar-like modes are no longer present. However, we show that the gas can become unstable to a standing, eccentric disc or a single-armed spiral mode (m= 1), in which the stars and gas precess at different rates, driving the gas to sub-pc scales (again for sufficiently gas-rich, disc-dominated systems). A proper treatment of this mode requires including star formation and the self-gravity of both the stars and gas (which has not been the case in many previous calculations). Our simulations predict a correlation between the BH accretion rate and the star formation rate at different galactic radii. We find that nuclear star formation is more tightly coupled to active galactic nucleus activity than the global star formation rate of a galaxy, but a reasonable correlation remains even for the latter.


Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a zoonotic infection incompletely understood by scientists, pastoralists and policy makers. The irregular intervals at which outbreaks occur make it difficult for governments to develop and implement clear intervention strategies. This paper provides an evidence-based analysis of some of the conditions under which the risks posed to Kenya by RVF might be diminished. It is premised on the assumption that public policy-making on an issue such as RVF cannot be decided solely by reference to scientific considerations.The analysis was developed by studying the knowledge, beliefs and uncertainties about RVF, and the policies and preparations to respond to it, taking into account not only the extent and limits of scientific knowledge, but also the perspectives, knowledge and
beliefs about RVF among a diverse range of stakeholder groups.These include nomadic rural pastoralists, sedentary agropastoralists,government policy makers, expert advisors and local public officials. The paper aims to understand RVF policy-making and implementation by identifying these diverse perspectives, by assessing their congruencies and/or incompatibilities, and
estimating the extent of their influence upon policies and practices. It seeks to explore the conditions under which the diverse understandings are most likely to be mutually re-enforcing, and to appraise the upsides and downsides of alternative responses to the challenges of RVF.


textabstractSince the Nobel-prize winning papers of Black and Scholes and Merton in 1973, the
derivatives market has evolved into a multi-trillion dollar market. Structures which were once
considered as exotic are now commonplace, appearing in retail products such as mortgages
and investment notes. At the same time, new and more complex structures are invented on a
regular basis. To price and risk manage such products, a financial engineer will typically: (1)
choose a model which is both economically plausible and analytically tractable, (2) calibrate
the model to the prices of traded options, and (3) price the exotic option with the calibrated
model, using appropriate numerical techniques. This thesis mainly deals with the second and
third steps in this process. For the analytically tractable class of affine models, containing
among others the Black-Scholes model and Heston's stochastic volatility model, it deals with
topics such as the robust pricing of European options via Fourier inversion, the pricing of
Bermudan options using convolution based methods, the simulation of stochastic volatility
models and the pricing of Asian options. A separate chapter deals with a completely different
topic, the mathematical properties of the principal components of term structure data.
Roger Lord (1977) holds cum laude Master's degrees in both Applied Mathematics
(Eindhoven University of Technology) and Econometrics (Tilburg University). After
graduating he joined Cardano Risk Management in 2001 as a financial engineer. Deciding to
pursue a PhD degree, he joined Erasmus University Rotterdam as a PhD candidate in 2003.
Throughout his PhD he held a part-time position as a quantitative analyst at the Derivatives
Research & Validation team of Rabobank International. He has published articles in Applied
Mathematical Finance, the Journal of Computational Finance, Mathematical Finance,
Quantitative Finance and SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and presented his research
at several international conferences. Since October 2006 he joined Rabobank International's
Financial Engineering team in London as a quantitative analyst, developing front-office
pricing models for interest rate derivatives.


The "affective turn" has been primarily concerned not with what affect is, but what it does. This article focuses on yet another shift towards how affect gets organized, i.e., how it is produced, classified, and controlled. It proposes a genealogical as well as a critical approach to the organization of affect and distinguishes between several "affect disposition(ing) regimes"—meaning paradigms of how to interpret and manage affects, for e.g., encoding them as byproducts of demonic possession, judging them in reference to a moralistic framework, or subsuming them under an industrial regime. Bernard Stiegler's concept of psychopower will be engaged at one point and expanded to include social media and affective technologies, especially Affective Computing. Finally, the industrialization and cybernetization of affect will be contrasted with poststructuralist interpretations of affects as events.


Abstract: Research on molluscan specimens is increasingly being carried out using high-throughput molecular techniques. Due to their efficiency, these technologies have effectively resulted in a strong bias towards genotypic analyses. Therefore, the future large-scale correlation of such data with the phenotype will require a significant increase in the output of morphological studies. Three-dimensional (3D) scanning techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) can achieve this goal as they permit rapidly obtaining digital data non-destructively or even entirely non-invasively from living, fixed, and fossil samples. With a large number of species and a relatively complex morphology, the Mollusca would profit from a more widespread application of digital 3D imaging techniques. In order to provide an overview of the capacity of various MRI and CT techniques to visualize internal and external structures of molluscs, more than twenty specimens ranging in size from a few millimeters to well over one meter were scanned in vivo as well as ex vivo. The results show that all major molluscan organ systems can be successfully visualized using both MRI and CT. The choice of a suitable imaging technique depends primarily on the specimen's life condition, its size, the required resolution, and possible invasiveness of the approach. Apart from visual examples derived from more than two dozen scans, the present article provides guidelines and best practices for digital 3D imaging of a broad range of molluscan taxa. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of studies that previously have employed MRI or CT techniques in malacological research is given.


Optical properties of one-dimensional photonic structures consisting of Kerr-type nonlinear and magnetic layers under the action of an external static magnetic field in the Faraday geometry are investigated. The structure is a periodic arrangement of alternating nonlinear and magnetic layers (a one-dimensional photonic crystal) with one of the layers doubled to create a defect where periodicity is violated. Strong enhancement of nonreciprocity is observed at the frequencies of the defect modes, where linearly polarized light incident from one side of the structure undergoes polarization rotation upon reflection, while light reflected from the other side has its polarization unchanged. Using the nonlinear transfer matrix calculations in the frequency domain, it is demonstrated that defect resonances in the nonlinear reflection spectra undergo bending, resulting in polarization bistability of reflected light. This bistability is shown to result in abrupt switching between linear polarization of the output reflected light when the input intensity is varied. This switching is confirmed in finite-difference time-domain simulations, and its hysteresis character is established.


This Supportive Initiative for the Global Management of Allergy (SIGMA) initiative gathered together four multidisciplinary and inter-university groups of Belgian experts in the treatment of allergic rhinitis to review the literature and come to a consensus opinion on the global management of allergy. Their conclusions were as follows. Group 1 concluded that in children suffering from allergic rhinitis, there is sufficient expert opinion in favour of continuous treatment with both H1-antihistamines and corticosteroids for controlling symptoms during periods of allergen exposure, but not to support continuous treatment during periods when symptoms are negligible in an attempt to prevent the development of new allergic diseases. Group 2 came to similar conclusions in adults. Group 3 considered adults with concomitant asthma and stressed the crucial necessity to screen each asthmatic for allergic rhinitis and institute appropriate therapy for both conditions. Even though efficacious treatment algorithms are available for both rhinitis and asthma, an integrated management of these frequently concomitant diseases is not always prescribed even though there is a proven clinical advantage of adequate treatment of the nose of asthmatics. Group 4 concluded that for both H1-antihistamines and nasal corticosteroids, safety data indicate that continuous treatment may be given without fears of adverse consequences. With regard to the cost implications of continuous therapy versus on-demand therapy, there are indications that effective treatment of allergic rhinitis by continuous treatment reduces overall drug costs, particularly that of escape medication and indirect costs in the form of days absent from work and school.


In recent decades, there has been a gradual penetration of plant factories achieving semiautomated crop cultivation. However, efficient energy utilization, as well as quality control of crops, are very important factors with regard to sustainable operation. Operating parameters, such as room temperature, affect not only the quality of crops but also the electric power required to realize the target operation while being influenced by the environment outside the plant. Therefore, a methodology is needed to analyze and interpret the relationships among these manipulated variables, exogenous variables, crop quality, and the amount of required electric power. Constructing a directed acyclic graph composed of regression models is an attractive approach for such analysis; however, the relationships can possibly be nonlinear, so the direct application of existing analytic approaches will not be appropriate. In this paper, we propose a methodology for relationship analysis among variables based on the directed acyclic graphs while identifying the linearity/nonlinearity in their relationships. In general, the construction of such a graphical model has computational issues, especially when the number of variables is large, and the risk of overfitting. The proposed method utilizes the idea of sparse regularization, which has been actively discussed in the field of machine learning, for realizing the automatic identification of linearity/nonlinearity between variables and screening redundant candidate structures; this approach relaxes the computational complexity issue and controls the risk of overfitting. As a case study, the proposed method is applied to a dataset collected from a real-world cultivation system in a plant factory to discuss its usefulness.


We study the uniqueness of the solution of a nonlinear problem formulated by H. Brezis, D. Kinderlehrer and G. Stampacchia [same journal Ser. A-B 287 (1975), no. 9, A711-A714] to solve the porous dam problem. More precisely we prove the uniqueness of the solution modulo a certain class of disturbing functions which is completely described.


One of the many current challenges posed to scholarship is that of the historicity of scholarship itself. One manifestation of this challenge can be seen in critical researcher's contention that current interpretations of the ancient world are themselves the product of modern European historical developments and more particularly of certain intellectual events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since the historical development of Eurocentrism is at the base of most discourse within the American academy, researchers' task should be attentive to transforming ideas and problematic values of the Eurocentric tradition. However, advocacy of critical approaches, which finds one expression through multiculturalism, has failed to recognize the changing nature of a diverse society until the development of Afrocentricity. Afrocentrism, as Molefi Asante conceives of it, challenges the Eurocentric position. In theory, Asante sees Afro-centricity involving the interpretation analysis from the perspective of African people as subjects rather than objects (1983). In practice, Afrocentric principles are used to interpret and explain issues in the search for understanding within the historical context associated with underrepresented groups overlooked for generations. This paper explores the theory of Afrocentricity through a Burkiean analysis utilizing cluster analysis, antithesis, and pentadic analysis. This paper will illustrate the underlying motives of Asante's rhetoric challenging the notion of persuasion between the bipolar opposites of Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism. The purpose of this examination is not to evaluate the theory/ methodology of Afrocentricity, but to illustrate its purpose. Using a traditional rhetorical method does not limit the scope of the analysis, but provides a useful construction of knowledge to describe and explain the critique. Cluster Analysis Dramatism is a method of textual analysis designed to show that the most direct route to the study of human relations and human motives is via inquiry into cycles or clusters of terms and their functions (Burke, 1968). This analysis concentrates on the clusters that revolve around the key terms of Afrocentricity, Afrology, and Ideology/Reality that are used throughout Asante's discourse. The frequency of these terms determined their significance as key terms. The interpretations from the text will be linked to the key terms that Asante uses to convey his message. Although cluster analysis helps critics to ground their interpretations in the text through an inductive investigation that meets the criterion of empirical verifiability, Conrad (1984) believes that it cannot guarantee that the insight will be either representative or comprehensive. In order to meet the other criteria of representativeness and comprehensiveness, this analysis will also identify the representational anecdote to satisfy the representativeness criterion, and complete a pentadic analysis to satisfy the comprehensiveness criterion. The objective of cluster analysis is to uncover the representative key terms which will reveal other terms that are clustered around them, based on the frequency, intensity, and representativeness of their usage in the text. This phase will specifically identify the pivotal terms and clusters evident in Asante's texts, which will provide the foundation for illustrating how Asante accomplishes symbolic action through his language choices. Burke (1968) argues that symbolic acts simultaneously express a rhetor's dreams and shape her or his sense of community with others. Rueckert (1963) argues that clusters are spontaneously generated and/or deliberately contrived as a result of a process of identification or association that operates under all conditions and in every human activity. Every cluster is unified by the presence of a conscious or unconscious master motive. …


Understanding climate change and its potential impact on species, populations and communities is one of the most pressing questions of twenty-first-century conservation planning. Palaeobiogeographers working on Cenozoic fossil records and other lines of evidence are producing important insights into the dynamic nature of climate and the equally dynamic response of species, populations and communities. Climatic variations ranging in length from multimillennia to decades run throughout the palaeo-records of the Quaternary and earlier Cenozoic and have been shown to have had impacts ranging from changes in the genetic structure and morphology of individual species, population sizes and distributions, community composition to large-scale bio-diversity gradients. The biogeographical impacts of climate change may be due directly to the effects of alterations in temperature and moisture on species, or they may arise due to changes in factors such as disturbance regimes. Much of the recent progress in the application of palaeobiogegraphy to issues of climate change and its impacts can be attributed to developments along a number of still advancing methodological frontiers. These include increasingly finely resolved chronological resolution, more refined atmosphere-biosphere modelling, new biological and chemical techniques in reconstructing past species distributions and past climates, the development of large and readily accessible geo-referenced databases of biogeographical and climatic information, and new approaches in fossil morphological analysis and new molecular DNA techniques.


We investigate the entanglement spectra arising from sharp real-space partitions of the system for quantum Hall states. These partitions differ from the previously utilized orbital and particle partitions and reveal complementary aspects of the physics of these topologically ordered systems. We show, by constructing one to one maps to the particle partition entanglement spectra, that the counting of the real-space entanglement spectra levels for different particle number sectors versus their angular momentum along the spatial partition boundary is equal to the counting of states for the system with a number of (unpinned) bulk quasiholes excitations corresponding to the same particle and flux numbers. This proves that, for an ideal model state described by a conformal field theory, the real-space entanglement spectra level counting is bounded by the counting of the conformal field theory edge modes. This bound is known to be saturated in the thermodynamic limit (and at finite sizes for certain states). Numerically analyzing several ideal model states, we find that the real-space entanglement spectra indeed display the edge modes dispersion relations expected from their corresponding conformal field theories. We also numerically find that the real-space entanglement spectra of Coulomb interaction ground states exhibit a series of branches, which we relate to the model state and (above an entanglement gap) to its quasiparticle-quasihole excitations. We also numerically compute the entanglement entropy for the nu=1 integer quantum Hall state with real-space partitions and compare against the analytic prediction. We find that the entanglement entropy indeed scales linearly with the boundary length for large enough systems, but that the attainable system sizes are still too small to provide a reliable extraction of the sub-leading topological entanglement entropy term.


This study details a Digital Story Community Project undertaken by the Centre for Innovative Education and Communication Technologies of the University of the Western Cape, which took place in George (South Africa) in November 2014. The aim was to explore, via digital stories, the authentic needs of vulnerable community sectors by engaging with representatives, leaders and activists from those sectors, while equipping them in turn with transferable skills in the production of digital stories. Digital stories proved to be an excellent tool for community need identification, while simultaneously building digital skills among community members in a range of areas such as storyboarding, script writing, image preparation, and voice recording. A Sociocultural Constructionist and Asset-Based Community Development theoretical approach underpinned this research and proved an excellent fit for the creation of community narratives. A mixed methodology was adopted in this empirical study, relying primarily on qualitative data with quantitative support. Qualitative measures include pre- and post-survey questionnaires, facilitators' observations during the workshop, participant feedback within an online discussion forum, as well as the perceived impact and application of digital stories. The skills attained, community needs and solutions produced, and the potential contribution of ICTs in these are also discussed. Supporting quantitative measures are drawn from an analysis of responses to the pre-and postsurvey questionnaires and attendance numbers during the workshop. Identified needs clustered around four interrelated themes: youth, economic challenges, substance abuse, and healthcare. The use of digital stories in identifying community needs, in a theoretically sound manner, is recommended in future research focusing on community development. It is no longer possible or desirable to speak on behalf of communities in relation to their development needs, and the digital story eTool is appropriate for obtaining authentic community data, while building skills.


The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance provides a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of the global art form butoh.

Originating in Japan in the 1960s, butoh was a major innovation in twentieth century dance and performance, and it continues to shape-shift around the world. Taking inspiration from the Japanese avant-garde, Surrealism, Happenings, and authors such as Genet and Artaud, its influence can be seen throughout contemporary performing arts, music, and visual art practices.

This Companion places the form in historical context, documents its development in Japan and its spread around the world, and brings together the theory and the practice of this compelling dance. The interdisciplinarity evident in the volume reflects the depth and the breadth of butoh, and the editors bring specially commissioned essays by leading scholars and dancers together with translations of important early texts.


The original authors claim to have developed a rigorous method allowing the reduction of a surface integral to a contour integral with application to mode-matching analysis of waveguide junctions. The authors have applied the method to analyze the transition from circular waveguide to rectangular waveguide. This same method has been previously derived in its general form. Some preliminary results on the discontinuity between ridged and rectangular waveguide have been presented. The only original contribution recognized is therefore the application to the analysis of coupling between circular cavities through rectangular irises. The original authors give their reply. >


This study aimed to: (a) determine the inter-rater reliability of the proposed muscle dysmorphia criteria, (b) investigate if muscle dysmorphia (MD) represented a syndrome of frequently co-occurring symptoms, and (c) determine the level of correlation between the proposed MD criteria and the Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale. Men (N = 48) aged 18 years and older who were currently participating in resistance training were assessed using the Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale and a one-on-one interview. Two qualified psychologists assigned a diagnosis of MD to those participants who appeared to meet the proposed criteria for MD. Inter-rater reliability and the frequency of co-occurring symptoms in participants were assessed. The correlation between MD and the Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale was explored. The inter-rater reliability between the researchers was low (Cohen's kappa = .39; p ≤ .05). A Binomial test revealed that MD represented a syndrome of frequently co-occurring symptoms; there was a significant probability (>.70) of a participant with one diagnostic symptom of MD (criterion 2a or 3) to exhibit another symptom (criterion 1) of the disorder. Point-biserial correlation indicated that the proposed MD criteria, excluding criterion 2b, were significantly correlated with the total score of the Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale and its subscales, excluding Muscle Satisfaction. The study provides some evidence to question the acceptance of the proposed MD criteria.


Previous studies have reported a relationship between cholesterol and leptin levels, and suicide attempts, impulsivity, and aggressive behaviors. An orexigenic hormone seems to be strongly associated with lipid metabolism and leptin levels. Therefore, we aimed to compare serum cholesterol, leptin, and ghrelin levels in 36 patients with suicide attempts and 25 healthy controls. Patients with suicide attempts had decreased leptin levels and significantly higher ghrelin levels compared to healthy controls. While the serum ghrelin level did not show any correlation with the demographic and clinical factors, leptin showed a correlation with body mass index (BMI), and cholesterol levels were correlated with the age, BMI, and number of suicide attempts in the suicidal group. The results suggest that suicide attempts seem to be related with higher serum ghrelin values, decreased leptin, and cholesterol levels.


This article examines the persuasive effects of images in the context of online peer-to-peer microfinance. The theoretical framework—based in self-presentation and impression management—relates micro-entrepreneurs' loan-request image choices to lending decisions and lenders' perceptions of the borrower's trustworthiness and need. We explore effects of three specific visuals: (1) genuine enjoyment (Duchenne) smiles; (2) material status symbols; and (3) babies, children, and husbands. Using loan-request image data from 323 women micro-entrepreneurs on the Kiva.org website, results suggest smiling behavior is not associated with funding speed. However, loan-request images that include a baby are associated with significantly quicker funding, and those that include a man or an indication of relative material well-being are associated with delays in the average funding speed.


I examine the dynamic evolutions of unemployment, hours of work and the service share since the war in the United States and Europe. The theoretical model brings together all three and emphasizes technological growth. Computations show that the very low unemployment in Europe in the 1960s was due to the high productivity growth associated with technological catch-up. Productivity also played a role in the dynamics of hours but a full explanation for the fast rise of service employment and the big fall in aggregate hours needs further research. Taxation has played a role but results are mixed.


Dasher is a promising fast assistive gaze communication method. However, previous evaluations of Dasher have been inconclusive. Either the studies have been too short, involved too few participants, suffered from sampling bias, lacked a control condition, used an inappropriate language model, or a combination of the above. To rectify this, we report results from two new evaluations of Dasher carried out using a Tobii P10 assistive eye-tracker machine. We also present a method of modifying Dasher so that it can use a state-of-the-art long-span statistical language model. Our experimental results show that compared to a baseline eye-typing method, Dasher resulted in significantly faster entry rates (12.6 wpm versus 6.0 wpm in Experiment 1, and 14.2 wpm versus 7.0 wpm in Experiment 2). These faster entry rates were possible while maintaining error rates comparable to the baseline eye-typing method. Participants' perceived physical demand, mental demand, effort and frustration were all significantly lower for Dasher. Finally, participants significantly rated Dasher as being more likeable, requiring less concentration and being more fun.


This paper introduces a technique that improves the efficiency of the Open Sound Control (OSC) communication protocol. The improvement is achieved by decoupling the user interface and the transmission layers of the protocol, thereby reducing the size of the transmitted data while simultaneously simplifying the receiving end parsing algorithm. The proposed method is fully compatible with the current OSC v1.1 specification. Three widely used OSC toolkits are modified so that existing applications are able to benefit from the improvement with minimal reimplementation efforts, and the practical applicability of the method is demonstrated using a multitouch-controlled audiovisual application. It was found that the required adjustments for the existing OSC toolkits and applications are minor, and that the intuitiveness of the OSC user interface layer is retained while communicating in a more efficient manner.