Islam spread rapidly after its founding, encompassing much of North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. The art of this vast region draws its distinctive character both from Islam itself and from the diverse cultural traditions of the world's Muslims. Because Islam discouraged the use of figurative images, particularly in religious contexts- unlike Christian art- Islamic artists developed a rich vocabulary of aniconic, or nonfigural, orna ment that is a hallmark of Islamic work. This vocabulary includes complex geometric patterns and the scrolling vines known outside the Islamic world as arabesques. Figural representation, to the extent it was permitted which varied from time to time and place to place, first developed most prominently in regions with strong pre-Islamic figural traditions, such as those that had been under the control of the Roman and Byzantine empires. Stylized forms for representing animals and plants developed in the regions that had been under the control of the Sassanian dynasty of Persia (modern Iran), the heirs of the artistic traditions of the ancient Near East, who ruled from 226 to 641. Because the Arabian birthplace of Islam had little art, these Persian and Roman Byzantine influences shaped Islamic art in its formative centuries. The elements of early early Islamic architecture were formed to respond effectively to people's physical, environmental, social, physiological and religious requirements at their time. The research demonstrates that architects used to copy-paste various elements of the Islamic historical buildings in their design work without understanding the meanings and values that it holds. Such approach would only transfer the element's form though strips it from its historical context and values. The paper argues that architect should comprehend not only the hidden values of the historical elements only but also how values interacted and are integrated into these elements. By doing so, the architect would be able to correctly perceive and read these elements thus incorporate it successfully in his/ her design. This article gives perspective of early Islamic architecture and structural configurations of the related era.


New Federal legislation made all States eligible to provide temporary emergency unemployment compensation benefits, financed entirely by Federal funds, for 13 or 20 additional weeks to unemployed workers who had exhausted their benefits. The emergency benefits program is effective from November 17, 1991, to June 13, 1992. Liberalized provisions were also included for ex-Servicemembers, nonprofessional school employees, and railroad workers. This legislation is Public law 102-164, as amended, enacted on November 15 and December 4, 1991, respectively. On February 7, 1992, further legislation was enacted (Public law 102-244) that extended the expiration date of emergency benefits from June 13 to July 4, 1992, and provided an additional 13 weeks of federally funded benefits to workers eligible under Public Law 102-164, as amended. In the 1970's, a permanent Federal-State program of extended benefits was established for workers who exhaust their entitlement to regular State benefits during periods of high unemployment. The program is financed equally from Federal and State funds. Extended benefits are "triggered" into effect when a State's unemployment rate among insured workers averages 5 percent or more over a 13-week period and is at least 20 percent higher than the rate for the same period in the two preceding years. If the insured unemployment rate reaches 6 percent, a State may by law disregard the 2-percent requirement in initiating extended benefits. Once triggered, extended benefit provisions remain in effect for at least 13 weeks. When a State's benefit period ends, extended benefits to individual workers also end--even for workers who have received less than their potential entitlement and are still unemployed. Further, once a State's benefit period ends, another Statewide period cannot begin for at least 13 weeks. Most eligibility conditions for extended benefits and the amount of weekly benefits payable are determined by State law. However, under Federal law, a claimant applying for extended benefits must have had 20 weeks in full-time employment (or the equivalent in insured wages) and must meet special work requirements. A worker who has exhausted his or her regular benefits is eligible for a 50-percent increase in duration of benefits for a maximum of 13 weeks of extended benefits. There is, however, an overall maximum of 39 weeks of regular and extended benefits, Extended benefits are payable at the same rate as the weekly amount under the regular State program. (For a more comprehensive overview of the unemployment insurance program, see "Social Security Programs in the United States," Social Security Bulletin, September 1991, pp. 20-28). 1991-92 LEGISLATION Because of the way extended benefits are triggered into effect, only nine jurisdictions qualified for them during the economic downturn of 1991: Alaska, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia. Thus, there was broad interest in considering legislation to change how the extended benefits program is activated. The extended benefits program is based on the insured unemployment rate (IUR)--the number of unemployed workers eligible for benefits in a State as a percent of the number of persons in unemployment-insurance covered employment in that State. By definition, the IUR does not include workers who have exhausted their benefits but are still unemployed. It was thought that the IUR worked well until the proportion of unemployed persons receivirig unemployment insurance dropped well below 100 percent--to about percent. Another problem with the IUR is that it has the effect of deactivating extended benefits in a State when substantial numbers of workers are exhausting their benefits, which reduces insured unemployment and therefore the IUR. To correct this situation, Congress considered legislation that would base extended benefits on the total unemployment rate (TUR), rather than the insured unemployment rate. …


Abstract Background: Statistics around the world show a rapid increase in HIV infection in the older population. Many older women remain sexually active and are therefore exposed to heterosexual transmission of HIV infection. Older women are most likely considered respected opinion leaders within the families and communities and are likely to influence others' attitudes and behaviours. An increase in knowledge through information plays a fundamental role and is a prerequisite for behavioural change that may prevent new HIV infections. The purpose of the current study was to assess the knowledge and misconceptions regarding the spread and prevention of HIV in older women attending the Tshwane District Hospital (TDH) in South Africa. Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study of 100 women, aged 50 to 80 years, attending the TDH out-patient section during November and December 2006 was done. The levels of knowledge were determined by using a directed questionnaire. Results: Eight per cent of the participants answered all the questions correctly, showing knowledge gaps in the remaining 92% (95% confidence interval: 86.7%-97.3%). Many participants were unaware of the protective effects of condom use, especially female condoms, and of HIV spread by anal transmission, the sharing of needles and blood transfusion. Three or more misconceptions were present in 48% of the participants, such as HIV spread by casual contact, the sharing of personal items, air-borne infection, mosquito bites, HIV testing and AIDS prevention or cure by traditional medicines or alternatives. Sixty-two per cent of the older women were found to have adequate knowledge (95% confidence interval: 52%-71.5%), knowing the basic concepts regarding HIV transmission. Conclusion: There is a significant need for HIV-related preventive health education in older women, not only to decrease potential high-risk behaviours, but also to reduce unnecessary feelings of anxiety and misconceptions. Family physicians, due to their unique role, might be able to use the present study in their practices in order to optimise the planning and structuring of awareness interventions and prevention programmes.


One of the difficulties in complying with the prohibition of routine tail docking is a lack of effective alternative solutions to prevent tail biting, especially in fully slatted systems. This study compared three slat-compatible enrichment replenishment strategies for pigs. Forty-eight mixed-sex pens (six males and six females/pen) of undocked pigs were followed from birth to slaughter. Pre-weaning, half the pigs were provided with enrichment materials (a cardboard cup, rubber toy, hessian cloth and bamboo), in addition to a rope for the sows, in all farrowing crates. Post-weaning, all pens were enriched with eight identical items, including an elevated rack supplied with fresh-cut grass, and objects of wooden, bamboo, rubber, and fabric materials presented in various ways. However, three different replenishment frequencies were applied: "Low" (replenished on Monday/Wednesday/Friday), "Medium" (replenished once daily), and "High" (replenished ad libitum). Individual pigs were weighed on days 0, 49, 91, and 113 post-weaning. Direct behavior observations were conducted twice weekly at pen level (10 min/day/pen), and tail and ear lesion scores of individual pigs were also recorded every other week. These measurements were taken during the post-weaning period. The cost of all enrichment materials used was calculated. Pre-weaning enrichment only contributed to a lower ear lesion score (P = 0.04). No difference in lesion scores was found between post-weaning treatments. "Low" replenishment rate pigs performed more damaging behaviors (tail/ear biting, belly-nosing, mounting, other biting, and aggressive behaviors combined) than "High" and "Medium" pigs (P < 0.01). The average daily gain in the finishing stage was higher in "High" than "Low" pigs (P < 0.05). Although sporadic tail biting occurred, only 0.69% of the pigs had their tails bitten severely enough that they became shorter than half of a normal undocked tail. The average enrichment cost for the post-weaning period was <€2 per pig. In conclusion, the high enrichment replenishment rate increased growth and reduced damaging behaviors compared to the low replenishment rate pigs. Overall, these findings show that the provision and regular replenishment of multiple, slat-compatible, enrichment sources can reduce tail damage to manageable levels without the need for tail docking.


Several controversial studies linking handgrip strength and health have suggested that low handgrip strength in older adults may be related to health problems and have investigated whether there is a minimum handgrip strength level associated with reduced mortality. Thus, by meta-analysis, the authors identified an association between handgrip strength in older adults and disease-specific mortality and all-cause mortality. Thirty studies with a total of 194,767 older adult participants were included in this meta-analysis. Higher handgrip strength was associated with an 18% decrease in all-cause mortality. Lower handgrip strength was associated with increased all-cause mortality. The minimum handgrip strength in older women that did not increase all-cause mortality was 18.21 kg. Increased handgrip strength showed a decreased all-cause mortality, whereas decreased handgrip strength was associated with increased all-cause mortality. Strengthening the handgrip may help improve disease-specific mortality in older adults.


A B ST R ACT. This Note applies agency costs theory to explain charter schools' use of forprofit and nonprofit forms, and to suggest ways to make charter school regulation more sensitive to the differences between these forms. Borrowing from Henry Hansmann's "contract failure" theory of nonprofits and recent data on the makeup of the charter school market, I argue that nonprofit forms dominate because they minimize the unusually high agency costs that characterize interactions between charter operators and the parents, regulators, and donors who influence them. For-profit schools survive only when the economies of scale they capture through superior capital-raising offset their higher agency costs. I also compare nonprofits' and for-profits' abilities to achieve some of charter school policy's more complex goals. These include resource attraction, localized governance, and output-based accountability. I conclude by arguing for changes in regulation to control for-profits more tightly and to reflect more accurately nonprofits' and for-profits' relative strengths.


Sports industry includesmaterial and intangible service two aspects. From some extents, sports industry development status represents peopleÂ's living standard. Nowadays, China lies in economic adjustment hard time, which propels to sports industry development to conformto economic adjustment direction. Just because the two aspects causes, nation puts emphasis on sports industry development. The paper utilizes fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, takes Beijing, Seoul and Sydney as research objects, and regards China and America as weightsÂ' reference objects. Seoul and Sydney are developed countriesÂ' cities, the paper aims to look for Chinese sports industry internal structure and developed countriesÂ' sports industry internal structure differences, whether Chinese sports industry backward development is caused by regional development unevenness. By data analysis, it gets conclusion that Beijing is the most reasonable city from the three cities in sports industry internal structure. Though Seoul and Sydney lie in developed countries, Beijing industry structure is better than the other two,which shows Chinese sports industry development backward is caused by regional uneven development.


Text classification (TC) is the task of assigning predefined categories (or labels) to texts for information organization, knowledge management, and many other applications. Normally the categories are topical in library science applications, although they can be any labels suitable for an application. Thus, TC often requires topical analysis which relies on human knowledge. However, in recent decades, machine learning (ML) techniques have been applied to TC for efficiency, as long as a sufficient number of training texts are available for each category. Nevertheless, in real-world cases, the number of texts (documents) for each category is often highly skewed for a certain TC task. This leads to the problem of predicting labels for small categories, which is viable for humans but challenging for machines. Deep learning (DL) is an emerging class of machine learning (ML) which was inspired by human neural networks. This study aims to evaluate whether DL techniques are feasible for the mentioned problem by comparing the performance of four offthe-shelf DL methods (CNN, RCNN, fastText, and BERT) with four traditional ML techniques on five skew-distributed datasets (four in Chinese, and one in English for comparison). Our results show that BERT is effective for moderately skewed datasets, but is still not feasible for highly skewed TC tasks. The other three DL-aware methods (CNN, RCNN, fastText) do not show any advantage in comparison with traditional methods such as SVM for the five TC tasks, although they captured extra language knowledge in the pretrained word representation. To facilitate future study, all of the Chinese datasets used in this study have been released publicly, together with all of the adapted machine learning and evaluation source codes for verification and for further study at https://github.com/SamTseng/Chinese_Skewed_TxtClf.


BACKGROUND
Delirium is a prevalent problem among older patients and it is frequently underdiagnosed.

AIM
To develop and validate a clinical predictive model to identify patients at high risk of delirium.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Two consecutive prospective cohort studies were used to develop and validate the model. The development cohort included 542 consecutive medical inpatients, 65 years or older. The validation cohort included 85 comparable patients. A predictive score was constructed with a multivariate analysis, using variables independently associated with delirium and subsequently tested in the new cohort. Patients were assessed within the first 48 hours of admission, and every 48 hours thereafter, using the Confusion Assessment Method to diagnose delirium, evaluating also the severity of underlying disease, comorbidities, functionality, and laboratory data.

RESULTS
Delirium occurred in 192 patients (35.4%) of the development cohort and was independently associated with age and functional status assessed using the Barthel Index. With these two variables, the predictive score for delirium was developed and tested rendering an area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.80 (confidence intervals 0.77-0.85). Cut-off points were chosen to establish low, intermediate, and high-risk groups for delirium. According to these cut-off points, delirium frequencies in the development cohort were 8%, 23%, and 69%, and in the validation cohort 5%, 34%, and 66%, respectively (c² p<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS
This simple predictive model based on age and functional status may be a useful tool for identifying older patients risking delirium.


BACKGROUND
Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), the sixth most common cause of death worldwide, is a common condition representing a significant disease burden for the community, particularly in the elderly. Antibiotics are helpful in treating CAP and are the standard treatment. CAP contributes significantly to antibiotic use, which is associated with the development of bacterial resistance and side-effects. Several studies have been published concerning treatment for CAP. Available data arises mainly hospitalized patients studies. This is an update of our 2004 Cochrane Review.

OBJECTIVES
To summarize current evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) concerning the efficacy of different antibiotic treatments for CAP in participants older than 12.

SEARCH STRATEGY
We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library, 2009, issue 1) which contains the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group's Specialized Register; MEDLINE (January 1966 to February week 2, 2009), and EMBASE (January 1974 to February 2009).

SELECTION CRITERIA
RCTs in which one or more antibiotics were tested for the treatment of CAP in ambulatory adolescents or adults. Studies testing one or more antibiotics and reporting the diagnostic criteria as well as the clinical outcomes achieved, were considered for inclusion.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Two review authors (LMB, TJMV) independently assessed study reports in the first publication. In this update, LMB performed study selection, which was checked by TJMV and MMK. Study authors were contacted to resolve any ambiguities in the study reports. Data were compiled and analyzed. Differences between review authors were resolved by discussion and consensus.

MAIN RESULTS
Six RCTs assessing five antibiotic pairs (1857 participants aged 12 years and older diagnosed with CAP) were included. The study quality was generally good, with some differences in the extent of the reporting. A variety of clinical, radiological and bacteriological diagnostic criteria and outcomes were reported. Overall, there was no significant difference in the efficacy of the various antibiotics.

AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS
Currently available evidence from RCTs is insufficient to make evidence-based recommendations for the choice of antibiotic to be used for the treatment of CAP in ambulatory patients. Pooling of study data was limited by the very low number of studies assessing the same antibiotic pairs. Individual study results do not reveal significant differences in efficacy between various antibiotics and antibiotic groups. Multi-drug comparisons using similar administration schedules are needed to provide the evidence necessary for practice recommendations.


OBJECTIVES
First, to analyse whether a taxation-related decrease in spirit prices had a similar effect on spirit consumption for low-, medium- and high-level drinkers. Secondly, as the relationship between baseline values and post-intervention changes is confounded with regression to the mean (RTM) effects, to apply different approaches for estimating the RTM effect and true change.

SAMPLE
Consumption of spirits and total alcohol consumption were analysed in a four-wave panel study (one pre-intervention and three post-intervention measurements) of 889 alcohol consumers sampled from the general population of Switzerland.

METHODS
Two correlational methods, one method quantitatively estimating the RTM effect and one growth curve approach based on hierarchical linear models (HLM), were used to estimate RTM effects among low-, medium- and high-level drinkers.

RESULTS
Adjusted for RTM effects, high-level drinkers increased consumption more than lighter drinkers in the short term, but this was not a persisting effect. Changes in taxation affected mainly light and moderate drinkers in the long term. All methods concurred that RTM effects were present to a considerable degree, and methods quantifying the RTM effect or adjusting for it yielded similar estimates.

CONCLUSION
Intervention studies have to consider RTM effects both in the study design and in the evaluation methods. Observed changes can be adjusted for RTM effects and true change can be estimated. The recommended method, particularly if the aim is to estimate change not only for the sample as a whole, but for groups of drinkers with different baseline consumption levels, is growth curve modelling. If reliability of measurement instruments cannot be increased, the incorporation of more than one pre-intervention measurement point may be a valuable adjustment of the study design.


Over time, there has been a significant rise in vocational education and technical training in Botswana. This article shows that there is a positive and significant relationship between economic growth and vocational education and technical training in the country. However, job creation in the formal sector is limited, given the size of the domestic market. It is necessary that the expansion of vocational and technical training should be accompanied with appreciable growth in employment in the formal sector. Botswana should produce for the regional market in Southern Africa in order to circumvent the smallness of the domestic market. Outward-looking, export production can loosen the most binding constraints to economic growth with structural change in the country.


The label advertising behavior of an LDP speaker for a given
Forwarding Equivalence Class (FEC) is governed by the FEC type and not
necessarily by the LDP session's negotiated label advertisement
mode. This document updates RFC 5036 to make that fact clear. It also
updates RFCs 3212, 4447, 5918, 6388, and 7140 by specifying the label
advertisement mode for all currently defined LDP FEC types.


Aerothermodynamics is aimed at determining forces, moments and thermal loads of a spacecraft being launched or returning from orbit. The right shape as well as accurate prediction of the thermal loads determines the selection and dimensioning of thermal protection systems and load carrying structures, the guidance navigation and control of the vehicle as well as numerous mechanical and electrical subsystems. Therefore, aerothermodynamics represents a key technology for the development of space transportation systems. The aerothermodynamic behaviour of space transportation systems needs to be verified by computations using advanced numerical tools, experimental investigations in ground based experimental facilities and by flight tests and is essential for the optimization of aerodynamic shapes. The aerothermodynamics team of DLR was involved during the last 15 years in numerous national, European and international space projects. Relevant examples are the European Hermes program, the German Sanger project, the European flight experiment ARD (Atmospheric Re-entry Demonstrator) or the development of the crew rescue vehicle of the international space station (X-38/CRV). The latter was investigated in the framework of a cooperation between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). During this period major ground based test facilities, were designed and built at DLR. Important facilities with view to the design of spacecraft are the High Enthalpy Shock Tunnel Gottingen (HEG), the Trisonic Test Section Koln (TMK), the Hypersonic Wind Tunnel Koln (H2K) and the Arc Heated Facility Koln (L3K). The HEG is one of the major European ground based test facilities for the investigation of re-entry flows. In this free piston driven shock tunnel, hypersonic flows with total enthalpies up to 22 MJ/kg resulting in a free stream velocity of approximately 6 km/s can be generated. In such re-entry flows, classic aerodynamic problems are coupled with the influence of chemical reactions generated in the hot shock layer of a space vehicle by temperatures in excess of 10000 K. The operating conditions of HEG are designed in such a way that the oxygen and nitrogen dissociation relaxation behind the bow shock at model scale is equivalent to the full scale version at free flight conditions. The TMK and H2K are cold hypersonic wind tunnels. Their main purpose is to perform force, pressure and flow field measurements as basis for the design of high speed vehicles. The TMK allows to consider the Mach number range 0.5 to 5.7 with a special transonic test section and the H2K covers the range from M=5.3 to 11.2 applying different nozzles. The main purpose of the L3K is the characterization and qualification of thermal protection components of re-entry vehicles. Additionally, modern numerical tools were developed at DLR which allow the efficient computation of hot and cold hypersonic flows past complex configurations. Current and future activities are aimed at developing and further increasing the efficiency of numerical procedures, including the fluid-structure coupling, as well as the further improvement and development of facilities and measurement techniques in order to shorten analysis and development times and also to reduce design margins. The complexity of the design of space transportation vehicles and re-entry flows requires that experiments in ground based facilities are strongly linked with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) investigations. These common activities range from the calibration process of the facility and the study of basic aerodynamic configurations, which are well suited to look at fundamental aspects of high enthalpy flow fields, to the investigation of realistic configurations. In the present paper some selected results obtained by the strong link between experiments and numerical rebuilding will be discussed.


Participation in collaborative advocacy organizations is one of the most common advocacy tactics pursued by nonprofit organizations. However, field-level dynamics and norms around collaboration may be changing with the growth of public-private intermediary organizations. Using a lens that brings together theories of structuration and institutional entrepreneurship, this research investigates (a) how intermediary organizations structure advocacy opportunities and institutionalize new advocacy practices at the field level, and (b) how member organizations interpret those opportunities and practices. Qualitative findings from a regional homeless services policy field demonstrate that intermediary organizations gain members and thus, power, based on their position in the policy field and through their ability to connect members to valuable government contacts. In this field, participation in public-private intermediary organizations has surpassed involvement in traditional advocacy coalitions as providers are motivated to meet organizational legitimacy goals as much as advocacy goals.


1556-6072/18©2018ieee ieee vehicular technology magazine | december 2018 The fifth-generation (5G) has been developed for supporting diverse services, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultrareliable lowlatency communication (URLLC). The latter two constitute Internet of Things (IoT) enablers. The new spectrum released for 5G deployments are primarily above 3 GHz and, unfortunately, has a relatively high path loss, which limits the coverage, especially for the uplink (UL). The high propagation loss, the limited number of UL slots in a time-division duplexing (TDD) frame, and the limited user power gravely restrict the UL coverage, but this is where bandwidth is available. Moreover, the stringent requirements of eMBB and IoT applications lead to grave 5G challenges, e.g., site planning, ensuring seamless coverage, adapting the TDD downlink (DL)/UL slot ratio and the frame structure for maintaining a low bit error rate as well as low latency, and so on. This article addresses some of those challenges with the aid of a unified spectrum-sharing mechanism, and by means of a UL/DL decoupling solution based on fourth-generation (4G)/5G fre quen cy sharing. The key concept relies on accommodating the UL re sources in a long-term evolution (LTE) frequency-division duplexing (FDD) frequency band as a supplemental UL (SUL) carrier in addition to the new radio (NR) operation in the TDD band above 3 GHz. With the advent of this concept, the conflicting requirements of high-transmission efficiency, large coverage area, and low latency can be beneficially balanced. We demonstrate that the unified 5G spectrum-exploitation mechanism is capable of seamlessly supporting compelling IoT and eMBB services.


The promotion of Small, Medium and Micro enterprises (SMMEs) has

been identified as key strategy of government for employment

creation and income generation. For some time now small business

owners had to fend for themselves. Small business was neglected

and was in the main ignored by government. Since the 1994

democratic process the challenge for the new order has been to

create an enabling environment for the small business sector of the

economy. The historical neglect and the consequent policy vacuum

has had to be re assessed. To this end the 1995 White Paper on a

National Strategy for the development and Promotion of Small

Business in South Africa was the first major effort by government to

design a policy framework targeting the small business sector.

The promulgation of the Small Business Act in 1996 and the

establishment of the Ntsika Enterprise Promotion agency under the

aegis of the Department of Trade and Industry has attempted to

provide direction and facilitate the provision of Non Financial support

to the Small Business Sector. Various incentive schemes have been

developed and put into operation together with a range of tax

incentives to help promote Small Business. Eight years have passed

since the promulgation of the Small Business Act and the perception

that finance for SMMEs has been the greatest stumbling block to

development. However the failure of the vast numbers of micro

lending agencies have revealed that low levels of entrepreneurship

has led to their demise.

The provision of meaningful positive incentives need to be measured

and their effectiveness needs to be tested. This study will try and

identify the incentives available.


Alfvenic solutions of nondissipative MHD are entirely determined by their magnetic configuration. With the supplementary assumption of incompressibility any solenoidal field can be used to construct an Alfvenic solution. It is demonstrated that for nondissipative and compressible MHD the energy equation constrains the magnetic field of Alfvenic solutions to have a constant strength along field lines. Some topological solitons known in nondissipative and incompressible MHD do not have this property. New localized axisymmetric Alfvenic solutions of nondissipative and compressible MHD are explicitly constructed.


The impact of the megacities of the world on global tropospheric ozone, and conversely, the extent to which megacities are influenced by emissions of ozone precursors from outside of the megacities is examined under the four alternative RCP ("Representative Concentration Pathway") emissions scenarios. Despite accounting for about 6% of present-day anthropogenic emissions of ozone precursor species, the contribution of emissions from megacities to global tropospheric ozone is calculated to be 0.84%. By 2100 this contribution falls to between 0.18% and 0.62% depending on the scenario, with the lower value being for the most-polluting of the four future emissions scenarios due to stringent controls on ozone precursor emissions from highly populated areas combined with a stronger tropospheric background ozone field. The higher end of this range is from the least-polluting of the four emissions scenarios, due to lower background tropospheric ozone combined with the use of a simpler downscaling methodology in the construction of the scenario, which results in higher emissions from megacities. Although the absolute impact of megacities on global ozone is small, an important result of this study is that under all future scenarios, future air quality in megacities is expected to be less influenced by local emissions within the cities, but instead more influenced by emission sources outside of the cities, with mixing ratios of background ozone projected to play an increasing role in megacity air quality throughout the 21st century. Assumptions made when downscaling the emissions scenarios onto the grids used in such modelling studies can have a large influence on these results; future generations of emissions scenarios should include spatially explicit representations or urban development suitable for air quality studies using global chemical transport models. © 2012 Author(s).


The flow of a rotating, linearly stratified fluid over a long symmetric ridge in a channel is investigated experimentally. The laboratory apparatus consists of a long channel of rectangular cross section. The upper bounding surface is a transparent, horizontal plane; the lower boundary is a horizontal flexible belt. The belt serves as a false bottom of the channel and is translated parallel to its long axis. Topographic features are mounted on the belt and are towed through a salt-stratified fluid which is otherwise at rest relative to a rotating observer; the channel rests on a rotating table whose rotation axis is vertical. The most important dimensionless parameters governing the motion are the Rossby and Ekman numbers, a stratification parameter defined as the ratio of the Brunt-Vaisala frequency to the Coriolis parameter, and the geometrical parameters defining the aspect ratio of the ridge, the ridge height to channel depth ratio and the ridge to channel width ratios. An analysis is presented that demonstrates the conditions under which centrifugal effects can be neglected in such laboratory experiments. The analysis also shows the conditions under which the laboratory flows should be a good approximation to the quasigeostrophic potential vorticity equations and attendant boundary conditions for the oceans and atmosphere. This analysis is made for a general three-dimensional topographic feature; i.e. it is not restricted to a long ridge. The laboratory system seems to be an excellent vehicle for modelling oceanic flows but does not properly reproduce a non-Boussinesq term in the atmospheric equation. An analysis for an infinitely long ridge is presented. The predictions so obtained are in good qualitative agreement with the experiments. The quantitative agreement, for the range of parameters considered however, is shown to be poor and this is attributed to neglecting the effects of the lateral bounding surfaces. The experiments demonstrate that for fixed rotation, stratification and free stream speed, the streakline deflection caused by the topography decays with height. For such experiments the flow in the lower levels for positive upward rotation deflects to the left before reaching the ridge, then continues to deflect to the left on the upwind side of the ridge before beginning a rightward drift slightly upstream of the mountain crest. 1 his rightward drift continues on the downwind side of the ridge and well downstream ot the ridge itself before reaching a maximum shift, from which a leftward drift again begins. Increased rotation, other parameters being held fixed, provides stronger horizontal streakhne deflections. Stronger stratification, other parameters being fixed leads to stronger downslope winds and possibly flow separation in the lee. Various charactenstics of the flow field, such as the distance upstream to which substantial streakline curvature is observed, are measured as functions of the various system parameters; comparisons with the infinite ridge theory are also made The downstream motion is accompanied by lee waves for the major portion of the parameter space examined. The amplitude of these waves is shown to decrease with increased rotation other parameters being held fixed. Some non-rotating experiments and these are shown to be in good agreement with the model of Long (1955) and the measured wavelengths are found to be in good agreement with linear theory and laboratory measurements made by other investigators. Measurements of Queney (1947) are presented which show that the horizontal wavelenghts of the waves decrease for increased rotation, other parameters being fixed. A flow regime map based on the observed structure of the vertical wave motion is developed and it is shown that for the range of parameters considered, rotation plays only a minor role, if any.


Disentangling the environmental and spatial drivers of biological communities across large scales increasingly challenges modern ecology in a rapidly changing world. Here, we investigate the hierarchical and trait-based organization of regional and local factors of zooplankton communities at a macroscale of 1240 mountain lakes and ponds spanning western North America (California, USA, to Yukon Territory, Canada). Variation partitioning was used to test the hypothesized importance of climate, connectivity, catchment features, and exotic sportfish to zooplankton betadiversity in the context of key functional traits (body size and reproductive dispersal potential) given the pronounced environmental heterogeneity (e.g. thermal gradients), topographic barriers, and legacy of stocked fish in mountainous regions. Dispersal limitation was inferred from multispecies patch connectivity estimates based on nearest and average distances to occupied patches. Environmental heterogeneity best explained community composition as catchment/lake features (morphometry, land cover, and lithology) collectively captured greater variation than did climate (temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation), local stocking, or connectivity; however, single climatic variables captured the most variation individually. Macrospatial variation by larger obligate sexual species was better explained than that by smaller cyclically parthenogenetic asexual species. Our results provide several novel insights into the macroecology of zooplankton of the North American Cordillera, demonstrating their stronger associations to climatically driven aquatic-terrestrial habitat coupling than dynamics arising from introduced salmonids, human land-use, or species dispersal. These findings highlight the clear and important role of these communities as bioindicators of the limnological impacts of accelerating rates of climate change, as their responses appear relatively not confounded by local human perturbations or dispersal limitation.


The Bradley-Terry model for obtaining individual skill from paired comparisons has been popular in many areas. In machine learning, this model is related to multi-class probability estimates by coupling all pairwise classification results. Error correcting output codes (ECOC) are a general framework to decompose a multi-class problem to several binary problems. To obtain probability estimates under this framework, this paper introduces a generalized Bradley-Terry model in which paired individual comparisons are extended to paired team comparisons. We propose a simple algorithm with convergence proofs to solve the model and obtain individual skill. Experiments on synthetic and re al data demonstrate that the algorithm is useful for obtaining multi-class probability estimates. Moreover, we discuss four extensions of the proposed model: 1) weighted individual skill, 2) home-field advantage, 3) ties, and 4) comparisons with more than two teams.


Abstract Spontaneous dynamics of magnetic islands depending on various plasma parameters in the Large Helical Device (LHD) are described. The structure of the magnetic island undergoes deformation during a discharge. There are two states of magnetic island; they are the growth and self-healing of the magnetic island. The self-healing occurs in the higher-beta and lower-collisionality plasmas. The magnetic island, on the other hand, grows in the lower-beta and higher-collisionality region. The self-healing phenomenon is realized by the disappearance of the local flattening of the Te profile and the perturbed magnetic field structure compensating the externally imposed perturbation field to produce a seed magnetic island.


Zooplankton faecal pellets (FPs) are important conduits of carbon from the surface to the deep ocean, as shown by their presence in deep-sea sediment traps. Zooplankton themselves are thought to play an important role in the breakdown and reworking of FPs as they sink, whilst processes such as diel vertical migration (DVM) may enhance the supply of carbon to the mesopelagic. However, comparatively little is known about the processes or variability of FP sinking/ transport within the upper mesopelagic and how this relates to deeper ocean export. Profiles of FP type and size, and the contribution made by FPs to mesopelagic carbon flux to a depth of 400 m, were considered. Three contrasting locations in the Scotia Sea were compared, which together reflect the variability in physical regime and productivity encountered across the Southern Ocean. Comparing observed FPs with predictions from the mesozooplankton community, we show that, even at shallow depths, the smallest fraction of FP is under-represented, suggesting rapid remineralisation, incorporation into larger aggregates or reworking into larger FPs, and that the flux is dominated by FPs from larger zooplankton. In contrast to models where POC attenuation rates are set to increase with temperature, we find that FP carbon flux attenuates rapidly in low productivity, colder regions dominated by krill, while remineralisation is deeper in warmer areas where productivity is high and copepods dominate. This emphasises the strong modulation of the zooplankton community on the supply and transfer of FP carbon between the epi- and mesopelagic. Evidence was found to suggest that DVM enhances FP flux across the upper mesopelagic, producing a pulse of fresh, dense material that may support secondary production and heterotrophic respiration in the mesopelagic. This illustrates that variability in flux at short (daily) as well as longer (seasonal) timescales may have important implications for the supply of FP carbon to deeper waters.


In both Britain and the United States, people have been moving away from the inner cities to suburban developments, often leaving behind concentrations of poverty and decaying neighbourhoods. Anne Power's paper focuses on the British situation. As Britain comes to terms with the implications of urban renaissance, a new way must be found of looking at regeneration based on rebuilding urban neighbourhoods. The key points for the future are: limiting suburban land supply and creating higher density in depleted urban neighbourhoods; equalising the incentives to recycle old buildings and used land rather than greenfield sites; improving public transport; managing neighbourhoods to encourage a social mix; and protecting green spaces. William Julius Wilson, looking at the American situation, addresses the rediscovery of 'metropolitan solutions' as answers to the common problems of America's cities and suburbs. This rediscovery reflects the recognition that metropolitan areas constitute the real competitive units in the new economy and that competitiveness requires a healthy urban core; the growing awareness that complex issues such as pollution and traffic congestion cross boundaries and are immune to localised fixes; and the co-existence of persistent joblessness in the central cities and labour shortages in the suburbs.


Much of the research into higher education and its role in work-based learning (WBL), and especially in supporting undergraduate students on placements, has focussed on longer term internships and sandwich courses. Research has also focussed on subject areas that have traditionally been associated with the above; for example, Business, Health, and Engineering. By contrast, the aim of this study was to gather data from students on a much shorter period of placement, categorised as a 'short project' (Brennan & Little, 1996). Furthermore, the data recovered was from students studying within the social sciences paradigm, undertaking an undergraduate degree in Education Studies (not teacher education). The social sciences and humanities more generally have not been discussed to any great extent within the context of research on placement or work-based learning (see Smith, Clegg, Lawrence, & Todd, 2007); the subject of Education Studies is not covered at all by previous research. This paper considers the different ways practitioners might blend learning and support university students' experiential and academic learning in this short project format. The results suggest that even a relatively short period of structured placement can be of significant benefit to students although for many respondents, face-to-face contact in the form of lectures and tutorials is still an important component of a blended approach to WBL.


The presence of massive particles with spin during inflation induces distinct signatures on correlation functions of primordial curvature fluctuations. In particular, the bispectrum of primordial perturbations obtains an angular dependence determined by the spin of the particle, which can be used to set constraints on the presence of such particles. If these particles are long-lived on super-Hubble scales, as is the case for example for partially massless particles, their imprint on correlation functions of curvature perturbations would be unsuppressed. In this paper, we make a forecast for how well such angular dependence can be constrained by the upcoming EUCLID spectroscopic survey via the measurement of galaxy bispectrum.


Background. Designing interventions for conserving the food, energy, and water nexus at household level poses a significant challenge due to the complex interplay between human behaviors, technologies, and policies. Games show potential to increase awareness for environmental issues and influence behaviors towards more sustainable practices. Aim. By bringing together scientists and practitioners in the game design process, a transdisciplinary (TD) approach is seen as a promising way to integrate available knowledge and establish ownership of the problem and solution options. Few gaming literature, however, looked at combining the two approaches in addressing resource conservation issues. Method. We present a systematic account of the TD approach process of developing a role-playing game (RPG) - called HomeRUN (Role-play for Understanding Nexus). Results. We documented our experiences in terms of challenges as well as the benefits of the TD approach. Interacting disciplines in this process include psychology, economics, engineering, climate, sociology, and computer science. Inputs from each discipline combined with feedback from social actors that include city government, utility companies, and community members facilitated continuous improvements of the RPG design.


Ceropegia bulbosa Roxb. belonging to Asclepiadaceae family is found distributed throughout India. The root is extensively used in treatment of diarrhoea, dysentery, and kidney stone. It also exhibits analgesic and diuretic activities. The sweet sour leaves are edible and are considered to be tonic and digestive. Authenticity of the crude drug should be ensured when used for remedial purposes. The present study was thus undertaken for systematic pharmacognostical evaluation of the leaf, stem and root of the plant with respect to macroscopy, microscopy, and phyisco-chemical parameters. Preliminary phytochemical investigation indicated the presence of alkaloids, carbohydrates, sterols, glycosides among others. These parameters would be useful in identification and authentication of the crude drug.


Objectives: The benefits of laparoscopic surgery with robotic assistance (da Vinci Robotic Surgical System, Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale, CA) includes elimination of tremor, motion scaling, 3D laparoscopic vision, and instruments with 7 degrees of freedom. The benefit of robotic assistance could be most pronounced with reconstructive procedures, such as pyeloplasty. We aimed to compare laparoscopic pyeloplasty, with and without robotic assistance, during a surgeon's initial experience to determine whether robotic assistance has distinct advantages over the pure laparoscopic technique. Methods: We retrospectively compared the first 7 laparoscopic pyeloplasties with the first 7 robotic pyeloplasties performed by a single surgeon. All patients were preoperatively evaluated with computed tomographic angiography with 3D reconstruction to image crossing vessels at the ureteropelvic junction. All patients were followed up by lasix renograms and routine clinic visits. Results: Patients were similar with respect to mean age (34 in laparoscopic pyeloplasty group vs 32 in the robotic pyeloplasty group), operative time (5.2 hours vs 5.4 hours), estimated blood loss (40 mL vs 60 mL), and hospital stay (3 days vs 2.5 days). Two patients in the laparoscopic pyeloplasty group had small anastomotic leaks managed conservatively, and one patient in the robotic pyeloplasty group had a febrile urinary tract infection necessitating treatment with intravenous antibiotics. Another patient in the robotic pyeloplasty group was readmitted with hematuria that was treated conservatively without transfusion. No recurrences were detected in either group. Conclusions: Operating times and outcomes during the learning curve for laparoscopic pyeloplasty were similar to those for robotic pyeloplasty. Long-term data with greater experience is needed to make definitive conclusions about the superiority of either technique and to justify the expense of robotic pyeloplasty.


Hospital emergency department statistics represent a distinct and underutilized source for measuring nonfatal intimate violence, especially those cases that result in serious injury. This study attempts to gain an improved understanding of these types of incidents through the use of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS), a nationally representative sample of U.S. hospital emergency departments. Findings from the Bureau of Justice Statistics' (BJS) intentional injury supplement of NEISS, the Study of Injured Victims of Violence (SIVV), indicate that emergency departments treated more than 243,000 intimate violence-related injuries in 1994. Eighty-four percent of people intentionally injured by an intimate were female. Weapons were used in 27% of all intimate violence cases, but were more likely to have been used in injuries inflicted on male patients than female patients (68% of male injuries versus 19% of female injuries). Findings from the SIVV also indicate that previous surveys may have undercounted intimate violence injuries treated in hospital emergency departments, as estimates were 4 times greater than the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and 1.5 times greater than the National Family Violence Survey (NFVS).


Importance
There is tremendous interest in using immunotherapy to treat breast cancer, as evidenced by the more than 290 clinical trials ongoing at the time of this narrative review. The objective of this review is to describe the current status of immunotherapy in breast cancer, highlighting its potential in both early-stage and metastatic disease.

Observations
After searching ClinicalTrials.gov on April 24, 2018, and PubMed up to June 30, 2018, to identify breast cancer immunotherapy trials, we found that immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is the most investigated form of immunotherapy in breast cancer. Use of ICB as monotherapy has achieved objective responses in patients with breast cancer, with higher rates seen when administered in earlier lines of therapy. For responding patients, those responses are durable. More recent data suggest clinical efficacy when ICB is given in combination with chemotherapy. Ongoing studies are evaluating combination strategies pairing ICB with additional chemotherapeutic agents, targeted therapy, vaccines, and local ablative therapies to enhance response. To date, robust predictive biomarkers for response to ICB have not been established.

Conclusions and Relevance
It is anticipated that combination therapy strategies will be the way forward for immunotherapy in breast cancer, with an improved understanding of tumor, microenvironment, and host factors informing treatment combination decisions. Thoughtful study design incorporating appropriate end points and correlative studies will be critical in identifying optimal strategies for enhancing the immune response against breast tumors.


This thesis describes novel microel ectromechanical system (MEMS) based electrochemical gas sensors and methods of fabrication.This thesis presents the research in two parts. In the first part, a method to handle a thin silicon wafer using an electrochemically active adhesive is described. Handling of a thin silicon wafer is an important issue in 3D-IC manufacturing where through silicon vias (TSVs) is an enabling technology. Thin silicon wafers are flexible and fragile, therefore difficult to handle. In addressing the need for a reliable solution, a method based on an electrochemically active adhesive was developed. In this method, an electrochemically active adhesive was diluted and spin coated on a 100 mm diameter silicon wafer (carrier wafer) on which another silicon wafer (device wafer) was bonded. Device wafer was subjected to post processing fabrication technique such as wafer thinning. Successful debonding of the device wafer was achieved by applying a voltage between the two wafers. In another part of the research, a fabrication process for developing a functional nanoporous material using atomic layer deposition is presented. In order to realize a nanoporous electrode, a nanoporous anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) substrate was used, which was functionalized with very thin layers (~ 10 nm) of platinum (Pt) and aluminum oxide (Al2O3) using atomic layer deposition. Nanoporous material when used as an electrode delivers high sensitivity due to the inherent high surface area and is potentially applicable in fuel cells and in electrochemical sensing.The second part of the thesis addresses the need for a high performance gas sensor that is applicable for asthma monitoring. Asthma is a disease related to the inflammation in the airways of the lungs and is characterized by the presence of nitric oxide gas in the exhaled breath. The gas concentration of above approximately 50 parts-per-billion indicates a likely presence of asthma. A MEMS based electrochemical gas sensor was successfully designed and developed to meet the stringent requirements needed for asthma detection. Furthermore, to enable a hand held asthma measuring instrument, a miniaturized sensor with integrated electrodes and liquid electrolyte was developed. The electrodes were assembled at a wafer-level to demonstrate the feasibility towards a high volume fabrication of the gas sensors. In addition, the designed amperometric gas sensor was successfully tested for hydrogen sulphide concentration, which is a bio marker for bad breath.


There's a great deal of debate at present about a ban on alcohol advertising, with Health Minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, doing much of the talking. Such a ban will no doubt have a profound effect on the advertising industry. Whether or not it will have a similar effect on alcohol consumption remains to be seen. What is very likely, however, is that the alcohol companies will look for creative ways of avoiding the ban. Like the tobacco industry did recently.


One hundred and twenty Holstein heifers weighing approximately 450 lb at the beginning of the study were used to evaluate the impact of bambermycins (Gainpro®), monensin (Rumensin®), and lasalocid (Bovatec®) on performance when included in high forage diets fed ad libitum. Heifers were housed in 24 pens (5 hf/pen) containing a super hutch. Pens were blocked (3 pens/block) from heaviest to lightest and randomly assigned within blocks to bambermycins, lasalocid, or monensin treatment. Bambermycins, lasalocid, and monensin were mixed with fine ground corn and fed as topdressing to deliver 20.25, 150, and 150 mg/hd daily, respectively. Diets were formulated (NRC 2001) to support body weight gains of less than 2 lb/hd daily using a mix of chopped alfalfa hay and corn silage (lighter weight heifers) or chopped alfalfa hay, chopped prairie hay, and corn silage (heavier weight heifers) supplemented with a mineral/vitamin premix. All heifers were fed a common total mixed ration, differing only in topdressing. Diets were fed once daily for ad libitum intake. The study continued until the average bodyweight exceeded 800 lbs. (140 days on study) at which time they were inseminated and first service conception rate determined. Heifers fed monensin consumed less dry matter (DMI) (P<0.05) than those fed bambermycins and lasalocid during the periods d 29 to 56, 57 to 84, and 113 to 140 but DMI was similar across treatments during the 140day study. No differences were observed for ADG over the 140-d study but heifers fed bambermycins and monensin tended (P=0.06) to gain faster during days 85 to 112 than heifers fed lasalocid. Feed efficiency (gain/feed) varied, but heifers consuming diets containing bambermycins and monensin were more efficient (P<0.05) during days 85 to 112 and tended to be more efficient (P=0.051) during the 140day study than heifers consuming lasalocid. Bodyweight, condition score, and hip height were similarly influenced by dietary treatments. First service conception rates were 60, 47 and 55% for heifers fed bambermycins, lasalocid, and monensin, respectively.; Dairy Day, 2002, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 2002;


Abstract Increased attention is being given to the role of local services, such as child care, in economic development. While not considered a driver for growth, we argue such services are a critical component of a balanced economic development strategy. We discuss various perspectives on conceptualizing the role of local service sectors: as exports, as import substitution, as human capital investments and as social infrastructure for the broader economy. We construct input-output models for each of the 50 U.S. states and find linkage effects for these local sectors are similar or higher than other sectors that are more typical targets for economic development policy. We recommend economic development policy include support for local service sectors such as child care. Local Services and Traded Sectors: A Balanced Growth Approach In this paper we explore the tension between the current export/productivity focus of economic development policy and the need for investment in local services and social infrastructure. We explore different ways to conceptualize the regional economic contribution of local services and argue economic developers should pursue a balanced approach which gives attention to both export industries and local services in economic development policy. Specific attention is given to the case of child care, a local service sector that currently receives scant economic development attention. There is a tension in economic development policy today between the traditional focus on export base promotion, recognition of the need to target investments to enhance productivity, concern over the relative importance of worker vs firm strategies, and the role of social supports. Traditionally economic development policy in the United States has focused primarily on export promotion as a means to bring new income into the regional economy. Tax abatements to attract outside investment continue to be the primary economic development strategy employed by state and local governments (Warner 2004) despite their limited effectiveness (Bartik 2003, Lynch 1996). While some success has been made in shifting economic development attention toward productivity investments through technology, management, labor, capital and physical infrastructure (Bartik 2003, Lynch 2004a), there is a lively debate over whether these strategies should be focused on export oriented industries (Porter 2003), on occupations (Markusen 2004), or on locally serving sectors which enhance quality of life (Florida 2002). Michael Porter has pointed to the role of business clusters and a focus on traded services as a strategy to promote economic revitalization in our nation's cities (2003, 2000, 1995). He argues a sustainable economic development strategy would invest in engines for growth. The increased tax base and employment generated from investment in traded sectors could be used to cover the costs of social supports. Recent work by Markusen et al (2004) finds that the local industry sectors are the largest component of most city economies and the most rapidly growing. Thus if job growth is a primary goal of economic development policy, then investment in locally serving sectors is justified because it provides important support to local economies and critical work experience and income development opportunities for workers. Even Porter (2003) credits local (untraded) jobs as accounting for 67% of total employment and higher rates of job growth than the traded sectors in his analysis of the entire United States. As the job commitment between workers and employers weakens, economic development policy should focus on occupations (and occupational clusters) rather than industries, as workers are a source of productivity and entrepreneurial growth in the regional economy (Markusen 2004, Feser 2003, Christopherson 1990) and they are less locationally mobile than capital. Florida shares this focus on the worker in his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, where he argues there is a creative class of workers who promote innovation and entrepreneurship. …


My title question comes from Walter Benjamin's ninth thesis on the philosophy of history. The answer I explore is that she is howling. I engage with some of the implications of the howling of living beings in a time of death. My concern is with death, and I must distinguish between two contexts of death. The first is the fact of death that inheres in life. Life, with the exception of some bacteria, involves death both for individuals and, it now seems, in much longer time frames, for most species. Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. In this context of death I will be working with the idea that living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and further that these communities are fields of matter within which life is making and unmaking itself in time and place. The second context I discuss differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: the context that we now call man-made mass death. I am concerned with the desire for destruction that is perhaps best termed the will-to-destruction.


Recently, photochemical polymerizations have received interest since they can be performed under mild conditions and they offer temporal control over the reaction. In this study, the kinetics of photochemical dithiobenzoate-mediated RAFT polymerization in the presence of triethylamine is explored. This system uses mild light sources such as visible light and sunlight, and does not require the use of expensive or rare earth catalysts. Instead triethylamine is combined with reagents used in RAFT polymerization. This study investigates the effects of light source, RAFT chain transfer agent concentration, and amine concentration, to understand the kinetic contributions of each component and possible mechanism of this process. Data suggests that there is electron transfer from the amine to the excited RAFT end-group, which is the major radical generation pathway. Radicals are also generated directly from the excited RAFT end-group. This method yields living polymers as evidenced by the synthesis of well-defined block copolymers.


The isotopic concentrations of carapace scutes, skin, muscle and blood of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) from the Balearic Archipelago were analysed to investigate the pattern of variation between tissues and to assess the position of this species in the trophic webs of the Algerian Basin. Skin showed higher d13C values than muscle or carapace scutes and these showed higher values than blood. Conversely, muscle showed higher d15N values than skin, skin showed higher values than blood and blood showed higher values than carapace scutes. Dead and live sea turtles from the same habitat did not differ in the concentration of stable isotopes. However, some of the tissues of the turtles caught in drifting long-lines in the oceanic realm showed higher d13C values than those from the turtles caught by hand or in trammel nets over the continental shelf, although they did not differ in the d15N. Comparison of the concentration of stable isotopes in the turtles with that of other species from several areas of the Algerian Basin revealed that they consumed planktonic prey and that the trophic level of the sea turtles was higher than that of carnivorous cnidarians but lower than that of zooplanktophagous fish and crustaceans.


As a novel way to raise fund, crowdfunding has attracted more and more attention from industry, academia and investment community. During the past few years, a variety of online crowdfunding platforms have supported a large number of crowdfunding campaigns all over the world. Due to its online nature, the design of crowdfunding campaigns on crowdfunding platforms is of great importance to the success of both crowdfunding campaigns and crowdfunding platforms. The profile page of a crowdfunding campaign not only provides abundant descriptive information of it, but also contains a choice schema for potential backers to pledge. Similar to tradition e-commerce context, proper choice design is also critical to the success of crowdfunding campaigns. Except for donation-based choice and reward-based choice, some leading reward-based crowdfunding platforms in China introduced lottery-based choice into the choice schema of crowdfunding campaigns. In this paper, we aim at reward-based crowdfunding campaigns. Firstly, we investigate the impact of choice schema's two key features: the number of reward-based choices and the existence of lottery-based choice. After that, we focus on crowdfunding campaigns that contain lottery-based choice to uncover whether the price of lottery-based choice and the chance to win the reward have significant impact on the success of crowdfunding campaigns. We find that the number of reward-based choices in the choice schema of crowdfunding campaigns has a positive effect on their success and the existence of lottery-based choice has a negative effect on their success. Furthermore, both the price of lottery-based choice and the chance to win the reward have no significant impact on the success of crowdfunding campaigns.


This paper argues that the work of the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV) brought about sustained developments in social capital in the host communities and contributed to motivating people to change their individual behavior. A mixed-methods approach using semi-structured interviews and surveys was used to examine how Volunteers worked to instill "norms", "trust," and affect changes of "sentiment" among people in two developing countries, Bangladesh and Honduras. Specifically, the paper is concerned with the activities undertaken by the JOCV within the Polio Control/EPI (Expanded Program on Immunization) programs in Bangladesh from 1999 to 2015, and the Chagas Disease Vector Control program carried out in Honduras from 2003 to 2011. The key findings of the study include: In Bangladesh, the JOCV contributed to improving the motivation of field workers, demonstrating that their "trust" for enlarging the acceptance of vaccinations has increased as a result of their work; this then resulted in vaccinations becoming the new "norm" for the community. In this respect, the increased "trust" and changing "norms" contributed to the 2004 polio free declaration in the country by altering social capital. In Honduras, the JOCV promoted the creation of an "exchange of responses" between health administrations and communities by stimulating the intrinsic motivation of the people concerned and generating positive sentiment among them. As a result, three common "sentiments" were identified among local Community Health Volunteers: happiness, a sense of achievement, and pride. This indicates that the JOCV created and altered social capital that supported self-sustained vector control.In both Bangladesh and Honduras, the Volunteers accompanied their local colleagues during fieldwork, spoke the same language, and shared common successes and failures. Cooperation between JOCV and local colleagues was an important factor in altering the hearts, minds, and sentiments of the local partners and communities, and contributed to the achievement of the important goal of disease control. This paper argues that more attention should be focused on the heart, mind, and sentimental aspects of the individual aid workers.


This paper provides a dissection of both mutual fund fees and flows into several categories, and presents evidence that relates specific components of fees to flows, and fees and flows to performance. For stand-alone funds that cannot be purchased directly from fund managers, fees that compensate fund advisors when investors maintain their portfolio positions, and fees that penalize investors for early withdrawal, have a much flatter flow-performance relationship ("flow-performance slope"), and higher flows regardless of past performance ("flow-performance intercept"). Further, the data indicate that flow-performance intercept and slope are significantly negatively and positively, respectively, related to future risk-adjusted performance, which is consistent with the view that flow-performance provides a strong incentive to generate future returns. These findings are quite stable over time, and robust to numerous sensitivity checks. We find some consistency in the evidence but less robust statistical significance amongst the subsamples of direct purchased funds, and among fund-of-funds.


In this article, written about twenty years ago, Professor Peter Junger developed an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Second Amendment: the right to bear arms is the right to display armorial bearings - coats of arms - and the original plain meaning of the Amendment is that the government shall not infringe upon one's right to be a lady or a gentleman. That interpretation was derived (loosely, to be sure) from a 1955 decision of the Court of Chivalry, an English court (known to Blackstone) that had been silent since 1737. Whether Professor Junger, who died in November 2006, was serious about this or not, this unfinished article is a fitting memorial to a person with an amazingly creative mind.


Amplification vulnerabilities in many UDP-based network protocols have been abused by miscreants to launch Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks that exceed hundreds of Gbps in traffic volume. However, up to now little is known about the nature of the amplification sources and about countermeasures one can take to remediate these vulnerable systems. Is there any hope in mitigating the amplification problem?

In this paper, we aim to answer this question and tackle the problem from four different angles. In a first step, we monitored and classified amplification sources, showing that amplifiers have a high diversity in terms of operating systems and architectures. Based on these results, we then collaborated with the security community in a large-scale campaign to reduce the number of vulnerable NTP servers by more than 92%. To assess possible next steps of attackers, we evaluate amplification vulnerabilities in the TCP handshake and show that attackers can abuse millions of hosts to achieve 20× amplification. Lastly, we analyze the root cause for amplification attacks: networks that allow IP address spoofing. We deploy a method to identify spoofing-enabled networks from remote and reveal up to 2,692 Autonomous Systems that lack egress filtering.


The future success of Indian industry depends on the growth of quality engineering education. Yet, there is significant unemployment among graduating engineers, due to their poor quality. India produces a large number of engineers every year. So why do industry leaders complain about the absence of quality engineers for their industries?. In India, the brightest students opt for engineering after the 12th standard. This has resulted in a spurt of engineering colleges, mainly in the private sector. This is because of the inconsistency of the performance of the students basing on various factors of which some of them are quantitative and qualitative nature. We made an attempt to know the associations of performance over different time periods in the three engineering disciplines viz. Mechanical, Computer science and Information technology in a four year Engineering course. This evaluation makes us to think over it and identify the various factors causing the downfall and to take the necessary action to improve the performance based value education.


This Article first explores whether it is legally possible to extend the Arrangement on Reciprocal Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters by the Courts of the Mainland and of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Pursuant to Choice of Court Agreements between Parties Concerned to cover cross-border insolvency matters between Hong Kong and mainland China and, if so, the advantages and disadvantages of so doing.It then examines other alternatives for facilitating judicial recognition and enforcement of judgments between the courts in Hong Kong and mainland China that focus specifically on cross-border insolvency judgments (including court orders) that concern both Hong Kong and mainland China, such as signing a new arrangement, a special treaty, or a Memorandum of Understanding. It seeks to highlight the deficiencies of the Arrangement as well as discuss the options to remedy those deficiencies. The situation for Hong Kong-China cross-border insolvency cases is opaque due to the lack of local cross-border insolvency legislation in Hong Kong. In China, there is only one article (article 5) of the 2006 Enterprise Bankruptcy Law that concerns cross-border insolvency, but that article is inapplicable to Hong Kong-China cross-border insolvency cases. That article is inapplicable because it applies only to cross-border insolvency cases involving a foreign state. Since Hong Kong is not a foreign state, it is precluded from the article's application. Also, Hong Kong and China have not adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency. Although internationally accepted soft law standards such as the Model Law can provide institutional guidance to cross-border insolvency matters, it is compatible with Hong Kong-China cross-border insolvency cases only when a third jurisdiction is involved. The lack of a formal judicial recognition mechanism for Hong Kong-China cross-border insolvency judgments creates problems such as legal uncertainty and forum shopping. This Article aims to raise awareness of the difficulties facing practitioners involved in Hong Kong-China cross-border insolvency cases and to share academic perspectives on the issue.


The authors have developed an automated feature detection/classification system, called GENetic Imagery Exploitation (GENIE), which has been designed to generate image processing pipelines for a variety of feature detection/classification tasks. GENIE is a hybrid evolutionary algorithm that addresses the general problem of finding features of interest in multispectral remotely-sensed images. The authors describe their system in detail together with experiments involving comparisons of GENIE with several conventional supervised classification techniques, for a number of classification tasks using multispectral remotely sensed imagery.


One of the most crucial needs in the design and implementation of an underground waste isolation facility is a reliable method for the detection and characterization of fractures in zones away from boreholes or subsurface workings. Geophysical methods may represent a solution to this problem. If fractures represent anomalies in the elastic properties or conductive properties of the rocks, then the seismic and electrical techniques may be useful in detecting and characterizing fracture properties. 7 refs., 3 figs.


Pyramid image coding is a natural coding scheme for applications where progressive transmission is desired. In this kind of coder, versions of the original image at several resolution levels are formed by successive filtering and subsampling. Then, beginning from the coarsest image, the image is used to produce an estimate for the next (higher resolution) level and the error is coded and transmitted. While expansive pyramids (e.g., Burt's Laplacian pyramid) are usually less efficient, non-expansive pyramids tend to produce ringing (e.g., subband/wavelet) and/or blocking (e.g., DCT). We introduce a non-expansive pyramid that does not, produce ringing or blocking effects. Instead, the main artifact is texture removal. The simulations have produced images with entropies in the range of 0.2 to 1.5 bpp, with SNR figures similar to or better than JPEG at equivalent rates. The proposed coder has several attractive features, including 8 bit integer operations only, a perfect reconstruction mode, progressive transmission and an interesting progressive computation property.<<ETX>>


A large fraction of Internet traffic is now driven by requests from mobile devices with relatively small screens and often stringent bandwidth requirements. Due to these factors, it has become the norm for modern graphics-heavy websites to transmit low-resolution, low-bytecount image previews (thumbnails) as part of the initial page load process to improve apparent page responsiveness. Increasing thumbnail compression beyond the capabilities of existing codecs is therefore a current research focus, as any byte savings will significantly enhance the experience of mobile device users. Toward this end, we propose a general framework for variable-rate image compression and a novel architecture based on convolutional and deconvolutional LSTM recurrent networks. Our models address the main issues that have prevented autoencoder neural networks from competing with existing image compression algorithms: (1) our networks only need to be trained once (not per-image), regardless of input image dimensions and the desired compression rate; (2) our networks are progressive, meaning that the more bits are sent, the more accurate the image reconstruction; and (3) the proposed architecture is at least as efficient as a standard purpose-trained autoencoder for a given number of bits. On a large-scale benchmark of 32$\times$32 thumbnails, our LSTM-based approaches provide better visual quality than (headerless) JPEG, JPEG2000 and WebP, with a storage size that is reduced by 10% or more.


The Kenyan HIV/AIDS burden differs greatly among its various regions. There are 42
different ethnic groups each with its unique culture. Nyanza province, the home of
the Luos shares the highest HIV/AIDs prevalence of 15.1% while in the North
Eastern region, the home of Somalis is at 0.5%. Nyanza province is the home of the
counties with the highest HIV/AIDs prevalence rates: Homabay-26%, Siaya 24.8%,
Kisumu 19.9% and Migori 14.3% while Wajir county in Northern Eastern province
has 0.4% prevalence rate. The HIV/AIDS burden also is greatest among females
between 15-49 years.
Culture and ethnicity are generally associated with risky sexual behaviour in relation
to HIV/AIDs. Paradoxically, this relationship has not been deeply investigated within
the Kenyan context. Therefore, set against the backdrop of HIV/AIDs scourge in
Kenya, the need to understand cultural meaning related to this problem and how
social marketing intervention can be appropriately used is a necessary study area.
This study explores the link between culture and risky sexual behaviour in relation to
HIV/AIDs, for the purpose of seeking situated understanding of the consequences and
possible intervention strategies. It explores the contextual and cultural realities faced
by intervention programmers using a social marketing approach in a multi-culturally
rich environment as Kenya.
A Qualitative approach is used to probe cultural and contextual realities faced by
intervention programme leaders to understand the barriers and opportunities presented
by context and culture to their work. Instruments of open-ended questions and
qualitative interviews are used to provide in-depth insights of their experiences from
their own point of views. The results greatly link contextual realities and tribal
cultures to the spread of HIV/AIDs.
The findings imply that cultures and context of a market or target audiences greatly
impact on social marketing programmes. A good understanding of the two should
indeed be the foundations that guide the planning, implementing, monitoring and
evaluating of cultural specific social marketing initiatives, rather than the use of
generic or blanketed campaigns. They should also guide the application of upstream,
in-stream and downstream social marketing approaches. There is need for

programmers and other stakeholders to invest in cultural competency to avoid
culturally incongruence in decision-making, policies and programmes. More
resources are necessary to change deprived contexts for successful programme work.
The study makes important contributions to social marketing and related disciplines.
Firstly, it suggests cultural context assessment composite model and culturalcontextual
assessment model for use by social marketers. These models can greatly
help programmers understand their target audiences' cultural and contextual
environments, in order to actively use this intelligence in social marketing
programmes. Secondly the study contributes to an understanding of the Kenyan tribal
groups' culturally sensitive knowledge on sexual beliefs and practices that have
impact on HIV/AIDS. This knowledge greatly contributes to an understanding of
patterns of HIV transmission within the country, as the significant aspects of seven
major and three minor Kenyan tribes, accounting for 81.22% of the Kenyan
population, are well explored and discussed in this study. Lastly, the study makes
important recommendations in relations to cultural and contextual aspects, which
social marketers, policy makers, the government and other stakeholders can work on
for more effective social marketing interventions.


We present the results of performance modeling of diode-pumped solid state laser beamlines designed for use in Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) power plants. Our modeling quantifies the efficiency increases that can be obtained by increasing peak diode power and reducing pump-pulse duration, to reduce decay losses. At the same efficiency, beamlines that use laser slabs of Yb:YAG or Yb:S-FAP require lower diode power than beamlines that use laser slabs of Nd:phosphate glass, since Yb:YAG and Yb:S-FAP have longer storage lifetimes. Beamlines using Yb:YAG attain their highest efficiency at a temperature of about 200K. Beamlines using Nd:phosphate glass or Yb:S-FAP attain high efficiency at or near room temperature.


Two subspecies of the Red-billed Quelea, Quelea quelea lathamii and Q. q. spoliator, have been described from southern Africa on the basis of differences in dorsal colouration in non-breeding plumage, but the validity of spoliator has often been challenged. We examined museum specimens of both subspecies, including paratypes of spoliator, and recorded plumage characters of breeding and non-breeding queleas in the wild. These data suggest that 'typical' lathamii and spoliator merely represent two extremes of a continuous variation in colour, with the majority being intermediate. Significantly, breeding males whose plumage types span the range between spoliator and lathamii occur together in the same colonies. Furthermore, variation in male nuptial colouration, which has provided the basis for distinguishing the subspecies of Red-billed Queleas elsewhere in Africa, shows no association with differences in dorsal plumage colour. We also present data on the timing of breeding of the two taxa which suggest that reproductive isolation sufficient to maintain two separate subspecies within southern Africa is unlikely to occur. We conclude, therefore, that because spoliator individuals cannot be reliably separated from lathamii on morphological criteria and, because both forms are likely to breed in the some places at the some times, the subspecies spoliator does not reflect any meaningful phylogenetic division. The Red-billed Quelea is therefore represented by Q. q. lathamii alone in southern Africa.


This paper reexamines the apparent success of two prominent stock trading strategies: long-term contrarian and intermediate-term momentum. The paper demonstrates that long-term contrarian is entirely attributable to the classic January size effect, rather than to investor overreaction, as argued by De Bondt and Thaler (1985). Further, the paper also resolves the Novy-Marx (2011) concern about whether return autocorrelation "is really momentum" by demonstrating that the superior performance of intermediate-term momentum is due to strong January seasonality in the cross-section of returns. The implications are that long-term contrarian must be considered largely illusory, and intermediate-term momentum must take account of annual seasonalities in returns.


Most real-world databases contain substantial amounts of time-referenced, or temporal, data. Recent advances in temporal query languages show that such database applications may benefit substantially from built-in temporal support in the DBMS. To achieve this, temporal query representation, optimization, and processing mechanisms must be provided. This paper presents a foundation for query optimization that integrates conventional and temporal query optimization and is suitable for both conventional DBMS architectures and ones where the temporal support is obtained via a layer on top of a conventional DBMS. This foundation captures duplicates and ordering for all queries, as well as coalescing for temporal queries, thus generalizing all existing approaches known to the authors. It includes a temporally extended relational algebra to which SQL and temporal SQL queries may be mapped, six types of algebraic equivalences, concrete query transformation rules that obey different equivalences, a procedure for determining which types of transformation rules are applicable for optimizing a query, and a query plan enumeration algorithm.


We present DanteSources, a focused Digital Library that aims at building innovative services supporting scholars in creating, evolving and consulting a digital encyclopaedia of Dante Alighieri's works. DanteSources is endowed with Web services that allow extracting and visualizing data about Dante Alighieri's primary sources, i.e. other authors' works which Dante referred to in his own works. The heart of the digital library is a knowledge base built on an ontology that was developed in the RDF/S language, representing Dante's works and the knowledge about them, extracted from some authoritative commentaries. Finally, on top of this graph, we developed DanteSources, which allows users to extract and display the knowledge stored in the knowledge base in the form of charts and tables. The methodology and the tool we developed are easily reusable to represent the knowledge about primary sources of other authors of the Italian or the international literature.


Haptic augmented reality (AR) is an emerging research area, which targets the modulation of haptic properties of real objects by means of virtual feedback. In our research, we explore the feasibility of using this technology for medical training systems. As a possible demonstration example, we currently examine the use of augmentation in the context of breast tumor palpation. The key idea in our prototype system is to augment the real feedback of a silicone breast mock-up with simulated forces stemming from virtual tumors. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the underlying algorithm to provide these force augmentations. This includes a method for the identification of the contact dynamics model via measurements on real sample objects. The performance of our augmentation is examined quantitatively as well as in a user study. Initial results show that the haptic feedback of indenting a real silicone tumor with a rod can be approximated reasonably well with our algorithm. The advantage of such an augmentation approach over physical training models is the ability to create a nearly infinite variety of palpable findings.


Once designed, mine compressed-air systems tend to operate at peak levels throughout the life of the mine, despite there being significant periods when this air quantity is not required. This is mainly due to lack of appropriate compressor controls. Consequently, such compressed-air systems are inefficient and wasteful. A compressed-air system at a South African gold mine was retrofitted with an automatic compressor control system featuring compressor cascading and pressure bandwidth control. The goal was to implement a simple demandside management (DSM) strategy to afford meaningful electrical energy savings. The automatic control strategy realised a saving of 1.25 MW (on a baseline of 7.22 MW) during Eskom's evening peak demand window. This represents a reduction of 17.3% in electrical power consumption during the evening peak period, and savings of nearly R2.9 million per year.


Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used extensively and with increasing success to model various types of sequential data. Much of this progress has been achieved through devising recurrent units and architectures with the flexibility to capture complex statistics in the data, such as long range dependency or localized attention phenomena. However, while many sequential data (such as video, speech or language) can have highly variable information flow, most recurrent models still consume input features at a constant rate and perform a constant number of computations per time step, which can be detrimental to both speed and model capacity. In this paper, we explore a modification to existing recurrent units which allows them to learn to vary the amount of computation they perform at each step, without prior knowledge of the sequence's time structure. We show experimentally that not only do our models require fewer operations, they also lead to better performance overall on evaluation tasks.


Longitudinal observations on known individuals are an important source of data with which to test evolutionary theory within natural populations, in particular, the evolution and maintenance of life-history traits. In this paper, we concentrate on the reproductive behaviour and survival of a small passerine bird, the great tit (Parus major). The dataset we consider is taken from the long-term study of great tits in Wytham Woods in Oxfordshire. The models we consider are designed to relate variation in several phenotypic response variables that are linked to evolutionary fitness, alongside the correlations between them, to both general environmental and individual-specific factors. We fit multivariate cross-classified random effects models using a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation algorithm described in the paper. Our results show for which traits variability is influenced by environmental factors and for which traits individual bird factors are more important. The partitioning of correlations is particularly illuminating, producing some pairs of 'antagonistic' correlations which are biologically meaningful.


This paper investigates two important issues in constructing and combining ensembles of acoustic models for reducing recognition errors. First, we investigate the applicability of the AnyBoost algorithm for acoustic model training. AnyBoost is a generalized Boosting method that allows the use of an arbitrary loss function as the training criterion to construct ensemble of classifiers. We choose the MCE discriminative objective function for our experiments. Initial test results on a real-world meeting recognition corpus show that AnyBoost is a competitive alternate to the standard AdaBoost algorithm. Second, we investigate ROVER-based combination, focusing on the technique for selecting correct hypothesized words from aligned WTN. We propose a neural network based insertion detection and word scoring scheme for this. Our approach consistently outperforms the current voting technique used by ROVER in the experiments.


Under the 'eventual consistency' approach to updates in a distributed graph database, it is possible that edge information may be corrupted. Errors may then be propagated to other parts of the database by subsequent queries. The process by which this occurs is modeled, with the aim of estimating the time that it takes for a clean database to become degraded to the point of being unusable. A fluid approximation is developed and two solution methods are proposed. The accuracy of those solutions is examined thoroughly, for databases with different sizes, structures and parameter settings, using simulations as a basis of comparison.


Immediately after the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat
coalition government following the May 2010 general election, the conduct
of a Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), in line with
election manifesto pledges, was announced. This SDSR was published
just prior to the Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010. It
was intended to be a fundamental review of Britain's defence and security
posture, based on the strategic need established by the 2010
National Security Strategy, rather than another example of the budgetary
salami slicing seen in the 1990s and in the revisions to the 1998
Strategic Defence Review (SDR) during the 2000s. The message was
clear: the SDSR was distinctive precisely because it was the operational
embodiment of the NSS's strategic assessment. However, by the turn of
2011, the SDSR was already being seen as fundamentally flawed by parliamentarians,
defence professionals and expert commentators alike (continues ...)


I posit that strategic innovation – the act of carrying an idea through to execution – is an act of destruction as much, or perhaps more so, then it is an act of creation. Specifically, innovation is a violent act against an extant complex adaptive system, a system whose purpose is not only to survive, but also to improve its relative position vis-a-vis others in its milieu. Moreover, innovation that happens within institutions such as corporations is an act of violence against a system animated by extant social structures who also seek to survive and improve their relative positions. The result is a system whose emergent properties actively resist innovation, a point well covered in literature. Strategic innovations, already a low probability event, can occur with greater likelihood, therefore, if one leaves the system and returns in a structured manner, a structure I propose is remarkably similar to the Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey". Implications for the structure of strategic innovation, innovations very often at the heart of ethnographic work are discussed.