The PhD thesis "Narrating Diaspora across Media" investigates narratives of diaspora in three distinct media formats: novels, feature films and graphic narratives. Its methodology brings together various branches from diaspora studies and narrative theory, both of which chronicle theoretical developments into various directions since the 1990s. Thus, diaspora and migration literatures have drawn increasing scholarly attention to literary representations of diasporic experiences and transnational and transcultural processes, which manifest very differently in various contexts of global migration. During the same period, narrative theory has undergone significant theoretical and methodological re-conceptions – from the structuralist and text-immanent approaches in the 1970s to today's "postclassical" narratologies. Narrating Diaspora across Media connects culture-oriented and transmedial narratologies, and examines the ways in which recurrent themes in diaspora narratives are realised across media formats. With the particular interest in representations of space and time, the PhD thesis focuses on such themes as the journey, history and memory, and asks questions about relationships between content and form. How, for example, are movement, arrival and distance fictionally constructed and narratively realised? How are the tensions between 'official' history and individual histories and memories literarily discussed? How are the medium-specific properties of the novel's written language, the film's moving image, and the graphic narrative's multimodal narrative resources utilised, how their aesthetic devices exploited for 'staging' these themes? Eventually, the narratives discussed in this thesis all enjoy certain popularity on the international market, which also raises interest in certain strategies that may be involved in making these narratives attractive to global audiences.


Introduction: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disorder that is distinguished by coughing, wheezing, and dyspnea. It is the most common chronic disease among children. Epidemiological trials have suggested that there may be a correlation between vitamin C intake and the incidence of asthma. Specifically, according to these studies, a rapid increase in the occurrence of asthma may be caused by a decreased intake of dietary antioxidants and various vitamins such as vitamin C. A systematic review was performed to determine the role that vitamin C, in terms of both dietary intake and serum levels, had on asthma in children. Methods: PubMed and Scopus databases were searched for studies that provide information on the effects of vitamin C on asthma in children aged between 1 and 17 years. The inclusion criteria specified that the studies involved needed to be cohort and case series involving at least ten patients. Exclusion criteria were non-English articles, case reports, and articles involving children who were aged below or above the age 1 and 17 respectively.Result: A total of 13 studies involving 6503 patients met the inclusion criteria. Dietary vitamin C intake was lower in people with asthma than in those without asthma. Lower quantity dietary intakes and serum levels of vitamin C were also associated with increased incidents of asthma.Conclusion: According to the extracted data, a relatively low dietary intake of vitamin C is associated with an increased risk of asthma and wheezing. Moreover, asthmatic patients who consumed vitamin C exhibited an improvement in their diseases.


Human and mouse studies indicate that TLRs are important in mycobacterial infections. We investigated TLR gene expression in fresh unstimulated blood and bronchoalveolar lavage from patients with pulmonary tuberculosis using a well-validated, real-time PCR. A human splice variant of TLR1, designated hsTLR1, was found in all donors tested. hsTLR1 mRNA lacks exon 2, which is a 77-bp region of the 5′-untranslated region, but contains the same coding sequence as TLR1. Compared with the matched controls, whole blood from patients had increased levels of mRNA encoding TLR2 (p = 0.0006), TLR1 (p = 0.004), hsTLR1 (p = 0.0003), TLR6 (p < 0.0001), and TLR4 (p = 0.0002). By contrast, expression of these TLRs was not increased in bronchoalveolar lavage. An increased level of hsTLR1 mRNA was found in both CD3− (p = 0.0078) and CD4+ cells (p = 0.028), resulting in an increased ratio of hsTLR1 mRNA to TLR1 and to TLR6 mRNA. An in vitro study in THP1 cells suggested that this relative increase in hsTLR1 might be attributable to a direct effect of mycobacterial components because it could be mimicked by mycobacterial preparations in the absence of IFN-γ or T cells and by the TLR1/2 agonist Pam3CysK4. Half-life studies using blood from patients with pulmonary tuberculosis and THP1 cells exposed to Myobacterium tuberculosis in vitro showed p38 MAPK-independent stabilization of mRNAs encoding hsTLR1 and TLR1. We conclude that M. tuberculosis exerts direct effects on patterns of TLR expression, partly via changes in mRNA half-life. The significance of these changes in the pathogenesis of disease deserves further investigation.


The emerging nanotechnology has ushered a new avenue to tailor conventional composite materials. In this study, a new kind of nano-engineered composite material has been developed with a self-sensing capability for guided ultrasonic waves (GUWs)- based structural health monitoring (SHM). In the composites, a graphene-based selfsensing network is designed, developed and "dispersed" in the epoxy matrix of conventional glass fibre-reinforced composites. The nano-structure of the graphene conductive network is optimized, via which the quantum tunnelling effect formed in the network is linked to material elastic deformation when GUWs traverse the composites, via measuring the changes in the conductivity of the dispersed network. Measurement can be implemented at any position of the composites, owing to the "dispersed" sensing capability of the composites, and this renders a possibility to monitor GUW propagation throughout the entire composite structures at any desired position of the structures, while without a need to use any additional sensor externally attached to or internally embedded in the composites. Experimental validation is conducted, in which GUWs that are self-sensed by the composites are compared with the counterpart signals obtained by conventional sensors (piezoelectric wafers), to observe that the developed composites can be responsive to GUWs with frequencies in an ultrasonic regime up to several hundreds of kilohertz, with no prominent discrepancy compared with conventional piezoelectric wafers. This study has spotlighted a new breed of composites with a capacity of self-sensing and self-diagnosis towards online health monitoring of composite materials and structures


Although existing research has established that aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic interest are two distinct positive aesthetic responses, empirical research on aesthetic preferences usually considers only aesthetic liking to capture participants' aesthetic response. This causes some fundamental contradictions in the literature; some studies find a positive relationship between easy-to-process stimulus characteristics and aesthetic liking, while others suggest a negative relationship. The present research addresses these empirical contradictions by investigating the dual character of aesthetic liking as manifested in both the pleasure and interest components. Based on the Pleasure-Interest Model of Aesthetic Liking (PIA Model; Graf and Landwehr, 2015), two studies investigated the formation of pleasure and interest and their relationship with aesthetic liking responses. Using abstract art as the stimuli, Study 1 employed a 3 (stimulus fluency: low, medium, high) × 2 (processing style: automatic, controlled) × 2 (aesthetic response: pleasure, interest) experimental design to examine the processing dynamics responsible for experiencing aesthetic pleasure versus aesthetic interest. We find that the effect of stimulus fluency on pleasure is mediated by a gut-level fluency experience. Stimulus fluency and interest, by contrast, are related through a process of disfluency reduction, such that disfluent stimuli that grow more fluent due to processing efforts become interesting. The second study employed product designs (bikes, chairs, and lamps) as stimuli and a 2 (fluency: low, high) × 2 (processing style: automatic, controlled) × 3 (product type: bike, chair, lamp) experimental design to examine pleasure and interest as mediators of the relationship between stimulus fluency and design attractiveness. With respect to lamps and chairs, the results suggest that the effect of stimulus fluency on attractiveness is fully mediated by aesthetic pleasure, especially in the automatic processing style. Conversely, disfluent product designs can enhance design attractiveness judgments due to interest when a controlled processing style is adopted.


Endocrine disrupting compounds can affect the hormone system in organisms. A wide range of endocrine disrupters were found in sewage and effluents of municipal wastewater treatment plants. Toxicological evaluations indicate that conventional wastewater treatment plants are not able to remove these substances sufficiently before disposing effluent into the environment. Membrane technology, which is proving to be an effective barrier to these substances, is the subject of this research. Nanofiltration provides high quality permeates in water and wastewater treatment. Eleven different nanofiltration membranes were tested in the laboratory set-up. The observed retention for nonylphenol (NP) and bisphenol A (BPA) ranged between 70% and 100%. The contact angle is an indicator for the hydrophobicity of a membrane, whose influence on the permeability and retention of NP was evident. The retention of BPA was found to be inversely proportional to the membrane permeability.


Abstract Objective: To determine socio-demographic risk factors associated with HIV infection in women in Mangaung. Design and setting: A cross-sectional study was conducted in Mangaung, Bloemfontein. Subjects and methods: A representative group of 500 black women (25–44 years) was randomly selected to participate. Socio-demographic data were determined with a structured questionnaire and compared between HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected women. Results: After screening for eligibility, 488 women qualified. Sixty-one per cent of the younger women (25–34 years) and 38% of the older women (35–44 years) were HIV infected. It is possible that healthy women would be more likely to be working and were not included. HIV-infected women had been living significantly longer in urban areas (p = 0.0001 for both age groups) than HIV-uninfected women. Significantly more HIV-infected younger women than their HIV-uninfected counterparts snuffed tobacco (p = 0.002). Significantly more HIV-uninfected older women than HIV-infected older women were married or traditionally married (p = 0.010). Significantly more HIV-uninfected (p = 0.012 for younger and p = 0.002 for older) women than HIV-infected women reported a husband-headed household. Significantly more of the HIV-uninfected older women (p = 0.018) than the HIV-infected older women had no formal schooling or only primary school education. Unemployment ranged between 64.7 and 78.3%. Median room density between HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected women did not differ significantly. Conclusions: Unemployment and low levels of education were commonly reported. A self-headed household, urbanisation and being unmarried appeared to be possible risk factors for HIV infection.


This article provides a new methodology to predict armed conflict by using newspaper text. Through machine learning, vast quantities of newspaper text are reduced to interpretable topics. These topics are then used in panel regressions to predict the onset of conflict. We propose the use of the within-country variation of these topics to predict the timing of conflict. This allows us to avoid the tendency of predicting conflict only in countries where it occurred before. We show that the within-country variation of topics is a good predictor of conflict and becomes particularly useful when risk in previously peaceful countries arises. Two aspects seem to be responsible for these features. Topics provide depth because they consist of changing, long lists of terms that make them able to capture the changing context of conflict. At the same time, topics provide width because they are summaries of the full text, including stabilizing factors.


We consider the problem of designing a packet-level congestion control and scheduling policy for datacenter networks. Current datacenter networks primarily inherit the principles that went into the design of Internet, where congestion control and scheduling are distributed. While distributed architecture provides robustness, it suffers in terms of performance. Unlike Internet, data center is fundamentally a "controlled" environment. This raises the possibility of designing a centralized architecture to achieve better performance. Recent solutions such as Fastpass and Flowtune have provided the proof of this concept. This raises the question: what is theoretically optimal performance achievable in a data center?
We propose a centralized policy that guarantees a per-flow end-to-end flow delay bound of $O$(#hops $\times$ flow-size $/$ gap-to-capacity). Effectively such an end-to-end delay will be experienced by flows even if we removed congestion control and scheduling constraints as the resulting queueing networks can be viewed as the classical reversible multi-class queuing network, which has a product-form stationary distribution. In the language of Harrison et al., we establish that baseline performance for this model class is achievable.
Indeed, as the key contribution of this work, we propose a method to emulate such a reversible queuing network while satisfying congestion control and scheduling constraints. Precisely, our policy is an emulation of Store-and-Forward (SFA) congestion control in conjunction with Last-Come-First-Serve Preemptive-Resume (LCFS-PR) scheduling policy.


We propose a novel approach for efficient tuning of optical properties of a high refractive index subwavelength nanoparticle with a magnetic Mie-type resonance by means of femtosecond laser irradiation. This concept is based on ultrafast photoinjection of dense (>10(20) cm(-3)) electron-hole plasma within such nanoparticle, drastically changing its transient dielectric permittivity. This allows manipulation by both electric and magnetic nanoparticle responses, resulting in dramatic changes of its scattering diagram and scattering cross section. We experimentally demonstrate 20% tuning of reflectance of a single silicon nanoparticle by femtosecond laser pulses with wavelength in the vicinity of the magnetic dipole resonance. Such a single-particle nanodevice enables designing of fast and ultracompact optical switchers and modulators.


Prenatal detection of fetal anomalies allows the adequate counseling of the parents regarding the pregnancy and the neonatal prognosis. This is especially true in the case of congenital heart defects where counseling the parents is essential, given the high neonatal mortality of such anomalies. Conotruncal malformations are made up of a wide variety of congenital heart defects with abnormal ventriculoarterial connections and represent up to 30% of all cases of congenital heart defects. The most common types of conotruncal malformations are tetralogy of Fallot, transposition of great arteries, double outlet right ventricle, common arterial trunk, but numerous anatomical variants exist. The 3-vessel view can be used as an alternative to the ventricular outflow tract views to detect conotruncal malformations and may be used as a screening test. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the 3-vessel view in both normal cases and cases of conotruncal malformations. As expected, in the 30 normal cases we reviewed, all the criteria for a normal 3-vessel view were met. In the 15 cases of conotruncal malformations (tetralogy of Fallot, transposition of great arteries, double outlet right ventricle, common arterial trunk) that we investigated, at least one criterion for a normal 3-vessel view was not met. This goes to show the utility the 3-vessel view can have in the screening for conotruncal malformations


While language tasks are naturally expressed in a single, unified, modeling framework, i.e., generating sequences of tokens, this has not been the case in computer vision. As a result, there is a proliferation of distinct architectures and loss functions for different vision tasks. In this work we show that a diverse set of"core"computer vision tasks can also be unified if formulated in terms of a shared pixel-to-sequence interface. We focus on four tasks, namely, object detection, instance segmentation, keypoint detection, and image captioning, all with diverse types of outputs, e.g., bounding boxes or dense masks. Despite that, by formulating the output of each task as a sequence of discrete tokens with a unified interface, we show that one can train a neural network with a single model architecture and loss function on all these tasks, with no task-specific customization. To solve a specific task, we use a short prompt as task description, and the sequence output adapts to the prompt so it can produce task-specific output. We show that such a model can achieve competitive performance compared to well-established task-specific models.


Some cultural and historical heritage artifacts and monuments cannot be visited or explored anymore. One of those is the Tunnel of hope, which enabled people to cross from the besieged city of Sarajevo to the free territory, bringing essential amounts of food, medical equipment, and weapons. The Tunnel was crucial for the defense of the city during the war in the 1990s. Presently, it is only partially accessible to visitors. The project aims to provide the users with the unique war experience of passing through the Sarajevo Tunnel of hope using immersive virtual reality. At the same time, the user is motivated to learn and to explore, which makes the application both entertaining and educational. The initial user evaluation shows that we succeeded to share the siege emotion and experience through this application.


Abstract Two models of faunal turnover patterns, one with constant turnover and another with climatically induced turnover pulses, were tested against the empirical fossil data of first and last appearances of large mammals from the late Pliocene and Pleistocene of East Africa. Computer simulations of each model were generated by first creating change in hypothetical faunal communities and then sampling the evolving communities in a manner scaled to the specific contingencies of the East African fossil record. Predictions of the two turnover models were compared with the empirical data. Neither model yielded predictions that deviated significantly from the observed patterns of first and last appearances of species, and both models produced extremely similar results. The implication is that the fossil data of East Africa are not refined enough to detect variations in the pace of turnover; the patterns of first- and last-appearance frequencies are determined more by the contingencies of the fossil record than by the underlying evolutionary and migrational patterns. Whereas these results undermine the primary basis of empirical support for the turnover-pulse hypothesis, they do not imply that other models are more likely. However, the simulation results were highly suggestive of significant reduction in species biodiversity of large mammals during the past 2 Myr.


Microfluidics, a field that has been well-established for several decades, has seen extensive applications in the areas of biology, chemistry, and medicine. However, it might be very hard to imagine how such soft microfluidic devices would be used in other areas, such as electronics, in which stiff, solid metals, insulators, and semiconductors have previously dominated. Very recently, things have radically changed. Taking advantage of native properties of microfluidics, advances in microfluidics-based electronics have shown great potential in numerous new appealing applications, e.g. bio-inspired devices, body-worn healthcare and medical sensing systems, and ergonomic units, in which conventional rigid, bulky electronics are facing insurmountable obstacles to fulfil the demand on comfortable user experience. Not only would the birth of microfluidic electronics contribute to both the microfluidics and electronics fields, but it may also shape the future of our daily life. Nevertheless, microfluidic electronics are still at a very early stage, and significant efforts in research and development are needed to advance this emerging field. The intention of this article is to review recent research outcomes in the field of microfluidic electronics, and address current technical challenges and issues. The outlook of future development in microfluidic electronic devices and systems, as well as new fabrication techniques, is also discussed. Moreover, the authors would like to inspire both the microfluidics and electronics communities to further exploit this newly-established field.


Design, manufacturing, integration and initial test results of the 6-DoF haptic interface, HIPHAD v1.0, are presented in this paper. The hybrid haptic robot mechanism is composed of a 3DoF parallel platform manipulator, R-Cube, for translational motions and a 3-DoF serial wrist mechanism for monitoring the rotational motions of the handle. The device is capable of displaying point-type of contact since only the R-Cube mechanism is actuated. The dimensions and the orientation of the R-Cube mechanism are reconfigured to comply with the requirements of the haptic system design criteria. The system has several advantages such as relatively trivial kinematical analysis, compactness and high stiffness. The integration of the system along with its mechanism, data acquisition card (DAQ), motor drivers, motors, position sensors, and computer control interface are outlined.


A study was conducted in Jamber Khurd, a union council of Tehsil Pattoki, district Kasur in Punjab province, Pakistan, in order to determine the effects of using polluted water for irrigation which disturbed the quality of ground water and then its ultimate effects on the environment and health of common man living in the area. Different water quality parameters were studied in ground water samples that includes physico-chemical variables (pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, turbidity and total dissolved solids), anions (carbonates, bicarbonates and chlorides), cations (sodium, calcium and magnesium), biological variables like total coliform (faecal coliform and E- coli), heavy metals (manganese, nickel, chromium, lead, copper, cobalt, iron and zinc), sodium absorption ratio and residual sodium carbonate. The results were compared with National Environment Quality Standards. The results of the study show that, the use of polluted water increases the value of conductivity, total dissolved solids, sodium absorption ratio and residual sodium carbonate in ground water and exceeds the acceptable limits of National Environment Quality Standards. The increase in values was statistically significant. After detailed survey by conducting interview, it was concluded that the use of polluted water not only degraded the ground water quality but also have a severe health hazard on the residents of the area. The concentration of heavy metals was also found to be higher than acceptable range. Possible recommendations were given, in order to protect the area from pollution degradation.


Since the 1990s, the understanding of how and where politics are made has changed radically. Scholars such as Ulrich Beck and Maria Bakardjieva have discussed how political agency is enacted outside of conventional party organizations, and political struggles increasingly focus on single issues. Over the past two decades, this transformation of politics has become common knowledge, not only in academic research but also in the general political discourse. Recently, the proliferation of digital activism and the political use of social media are often understood to enforce these tendencies. This article analyzes the Pirate Party in relation to these theories, relying on almost 30 interviews with active Pirate Party members from different parts of the world. The Pirate Party was initially formed in 2006, focusing on copyright, piracy, and digital privacy. Over the years, it has developed into a more general democracy movement, with an interest in a wider range of issues. This article analyzes how the party's initial focus on information politics and social media connects to a wider range of political issues and to other social movements, such as Arab Spring protests and Occupy Wall Street. Finally, it discusses how this challenges the understanding of information politics as a single issue agenda.


This paper aims to identify two different knowledge management (KM) systems and their underlying capabilities by accounting for two contextual factors: organisational structures and type of knowledge. Specifically, it seeks to explore how two different organisational structures (mechanistic and organic) shape the way explicit and tacit knowledge is shared, created, and learned. The paper uses a case-based approach of two sports teams as archetypal contexts to inform management research. Findings suggest that a mechanistic structure (American football) emphasises explicit knowledge for sharing of specific directives, centralised, incremental knowledge creation, and organisational learning through memorisation and repetitious actions. In an organic structure (ice hockey), sharing of tacit knowledge, decentralised novel knowledge creation, and organisational learning through empowered experiential learning episodes are emphasised. Findings illustrate the importance of accounting for organisational structures and knowledge needed for different KM systems geared towards efficiency and routine work, and flexibility and non-routine work.


Abstract Severe soil contamination is often found at old wood preservation sites and a common combination of pollutants is Cu, Cr, and As. In the present work it is tested if simultaneous removal of Cu, Cr, and As can be obtained in an electrodialytic cell where the polluted soil is remediated as a stirred suspension (placed as the desalination compartment in accordance to the position of the ion exchange membranes). The soil for the experiments was sampled at an abandoned wood preservation site and contained 2170 mg Cu/kg, 710 mg Cr/kg and 3200 mg As/kg. SEM-EDX analysis showed that Cu, Cr, As and oxygen formed particles that were cementing soil minerals together. The soil was suspended in distilled water, distilled water with I2 crystals to have an oxidizing environment, or in an acidified environment at pH about 1.0. The experiments lasted from 1 to 3 weeks. Good results were obtained in two experiments; an experiment where the soil was suspended in distilled water and the remediation lasted 3 weeks with 2.5 mA and an experiment with acidification of the soil suspension with HNO3 to pH about 1.0 (2 weeks and 5 mA). The best separation of pollutants and soil was obtained in the experiment with suspension in distilled water. Based on soil concentrations, good Cu removal (95%) was obtained in both experiments. Removal of Cr was most efficient from the acidified soil suspension (74%). Both Cu and Cr concentrations were below the limiting values after the remediation. The As concentration, however, was not even although 61% was removed. In the soil remained about 1070 mg As/kg soil and since the limiting value is 40 mg As/kg, the removal was not efficient enough. So simultaneous removal was possible, but the target values were only met in the case of Cu and Cr, and more research is needed to remove As to a sufficiently low concentration, as well.


Fluid inclusions and stable isotopes of giant transparent gypsum crystals in a huge geode recently discovered in Pulpí (SE Spain) are useful tools for explaining its geological formation. Fluid inclusions suggest a mixture of fluids, starting with freshwater and including seawater in more advanced stages of the gypsum crystal growth. The isotopic composition of the hydration water in the gypsum crystals agrees with a meteoric fluid. The gypsum is enriched in 34S, which denotes genetic links with marine sulphates via freshwater dissolution-recrystallization of earlier marine evaporites.


Recent years have seen rapid deployment of mobile computing and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which can be mostly attributed to the increasing communication and sensing capabilities of wireless systems. Big data analysis, pervasive computing, and eventually artificial intelligence (AI) are envisaged to be deployed on top of the IoT and create a new world featured by data-driven AI. In this context, a novel paradigm of merging AI and wireless communications, called Wireless AI that pushes AI frontiers to the network edge, is widely regarded as a key enabler for future intelligent network evolution. To this end, we present a comprehensive survey of the latest studies in wireless AI from the data-driven perspective. Specifically, we first propose a novel Wireless AI architecture that covers five key data-driven AI themes in wireless networks, including Sensing AI, Network Device AI, Access AI, User Device AI and Data-provenance AI. Then, for each data-driven AI theme, we present an overview on the use of AI approaches to solve the emerging data-related problems and show how AI can empower wireless network functionalities. Particularly, compared to the other related survey papers, we provide an in-depth discussion on the Wireless AI applications in various data-driven domains wherein AI proves extremely useful for wireless network design and optimization. Finally, research challenges and future visions are also discussed to spur further research in this promising area.


It is probable that a construction project anywhere in the world will encounter some form of delay as a consequence of change. The impact of the delay on a project will vary, but it is likely to have a negative financial outcome. Compensation can be requested by an affected party in the form of a claim; however, issues of liability and quantum can be difficult given the ever increasing complexity of construction work involving numerous differing successive parallel tasks with varying levels of interrelated resources. Experts are often employed to analyse delays based on project records and report their findings to a tribunal. This paper identifies the difficulties associated with the retrieval and representation of information for delay claims and recognises technological opportunities to deal with these challenges. The potential to exploit aspects of BIM to support these possibilities are discussed, concluding that it can assist through the ease of access to coordinated contemporaneous project information and the use of visualisation through multiple dimensions. In order to support this initiative a detailed review of the literature is undertaken which forms part of an Engineering Doctorate.


Impulse response shaping is a technique for modifying the characteristics of a linear channel to achieve desirable characteristics. The technique is well-known in the field of wireless communication. Acoustic impulse response shaping is used to reduce the effects of reverberation on audio signals propagating inside a room and is thus used for listening room compensation. This thesis addresses innovative approaches for acoustic impulse response shaping.  Many techniques have been proposed in the literature for canceling or reducing the effect of reverberation on the audio signal. Impulse response inversion attempts to completely cancel the effect of reverberations whereas impulse response shortening (or shaping) only partly equalizes the room impulse responses. Shortening has less stringent constraints than inversion and this can result in more robust solutions and thus more practically realizable systems.  Acoustic impulse response shaping works on measured room impulse responses and designs pre-filters to be placed before the loudspeakers so that the reverberation is reduced at the listening positions. When sampled, the room responses typically contain thousands or tens of thousands (N ) of samples. Thus, the shaping algorithm needs to be computationally fast and memory efficient in order to implement the system in real time. The techniques presented in the literature use interior point methods or steepest descent algorithms, which are computationally slow or require memory of the order of N² . This thesis presents shaping approaches based on the Dual Augmented Lagrangian Method (DALM), known in the literature on sparse reconstruction for its super-linear convergence. The method presented here also makes use of the concept of a Forward Adjoint Oracle (FAO) to make the shaping algorithm memory efficient. Thus, the thesis presents computationally fast and memory efficient shaping algorithms that can be used for practically realizable systems.  The thesis also presents robust shaping approaches. The measured room responses may contain measurement errors or noise and can vary from time to time. These variations may be due to changes in atmospheric conditions (such as temperature or humidity) or due to change in position of objects inside a room. While design approaches over multiple microphone positions have been proposed for design of filters that are robust to change in microphone positions, a more rigorous approach is statistical, involving the inclusion of some statistical constraints into the optimization problem. The thesis presents both the approaches viz., a computationally faster version (using DALM) of the already proposed design over multiple positions and a statistically robust shaping formulation. The latter limits the probability of large errors between expected and obtained response to be less than a specified value. This ensures that the solution is robust to variations in the room response.  The shaping algorithm works in the time domain, shaping the temporal characteristics of the room response to a desired form. The frequency response of the shaped response can contain potentially undesirable peaks and troughs. This thesis therefore presents an approach for an efficient projection to improve spectral flatness of the resultant response. This algorithm can be combined with the fast and memory efficient DALM based approach to achieve joint time and frequency shaping.  Finally, the thesis also presents a computationally fast algorithm based on DALM for pressure matching used in sound field reproduction. Impulse response shaping is applied in sound field reproduction, showing that the levels of pre-reverberation induced by a temperature change can be reduced. This application is different from impulse response shaping approaches presented in the previous chapters and highlights the flexibility of the algorithm developed in this thesis and its wide range of applications.


Aim To perform a blind study to assess the capability of the Ion Personal Genome Machine™ (PGM) system to sequence forensically relevant genetic marker panels and to characterize unknown individuals for ancestry and possible relatedness. Methods Twelve genomic samples were provided by a third party for blinded genetic analysis. For these 12 samples, the mitochondrial genome and three PGM™ panels containing human identity single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), ancestry informative SNPs, and short tandem repeats (STRs) were sequenced on the PGM™ system and analyzed. Results All four genetic systems were run and analyzed on the PGM™ system in a reasonably quick time frame. Completeness of genetic profiles, depth of coverage, strand balance, and allele balance were informative metrics that illustrated the quality and reliability of the data produced. SNP genotypes allowed for identification of sex, paternal lineage, and population ancestry. STR genotypes were shown to be in complete concordance with genotypes generated by standard capillary electrophoresis-based technologies. Variants in the mitochondrial genome data provided information on population background and maternal relationships. Conclusion All results from analysis of the 12 genomic samples were consistent with sample information provided by the sample providers at the end of the blinded study. The relatively easy identification of intra-STR allele SNPs offered the potential for increased discrimination power. The promising nature of these results warrants full validation studies of this massively parallel sequencing technology and its further development for forensic data analysis.


Feminism does not refer to one coherent theory, doctrine, or political movement. The range of movements and ideologies that thrive under the term feminism, however, are all committed to political and social change. Feminism recognises that we live in a patriarchal world, that is to say a world in which women are, and have historically been, oppressed by and unequal to men. It opposes this, and strives to change existing power structures so that people of all genders and races have control over their own bodies, have equal opportunities and value, can participate fully in community life, and are allowed to live with dignity and freedom.
 What has this to do with ancient literature? There are several significant ways in which feminism and ancient literature interact. Ancient literature, particularly ancient Greek tragedy and myth, has played a formative role in shaping feminist theory. Feminism encourages scholars to uncover and reevaluate a tradition of women's writing. Feminism has provided the tools for us better to understand how ancient literature functioned to promote, and sometimes to challenge, the misogynist practices of ancient Greek and Roman societies. Scholars have detected feminism, or proto-feminism, in ancient writing. Queer theory and feminism join forces to mine ancient literature for alternatives to hetero, cisgender, and gender binary models of identity. Feminism has changed the field of ancient literary studies by valuing authors and genres that are sensitive to the perspectives of women of all ethnicities and statuses. Finally, ancient literature is used to serve contemporary activism: Greek and Latin texts are used by modern feminist authors who rewrite and creatively adapt ancient literature, and classicists resist the use of ancient literature to promote misogyny and white supremacy.


I met Dr. Salma Khan, Chairperson of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and President of the CEDAW Forum ,around mid October. She was invited by UNICEF and the Lebanese University to attend a workshop, held in Beirut, whose aim was the incorporation of the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) into the curriculum of Law Schools .


This article presents a case study of a community college – Ivy Tech-Bloomington (IN) – to illustrate challenges faced by postsecondary institutions around the world. Ivy Tech-Bloomington has faced reduced state funding and increased pressure to emphasize the instrumental value of education – namely, "workforce development" – with constructive responses that diverge in many ways from dominant trends in higher education. Inspired by a vision of serving the common good, of helping those students most likely to fail, and valuing the role of the arts and humanities, the leadership of Ivy Tech-Bloomington has accomplished many of its goals in an otherwise hostile climate. It has been able to do so by skillfully employing a logic and language understandable to state officials and education system administrators, but grounded in a distinctly different set of values. The campus leadership also has been able to mobilize public support for its strategic initiative.


Received: April 11, 2019 Accepted: May 17, 2019 Published: May 31, 2019 Volume: 2 Issue: 3 DOI: 10.32996/ijllt.2019.2.3.19 With the growing advancements in technology and their highly influential role in teaching and learning, present day teachers find themselves grappling with a whole set of parameters against which they need to measure themselves constantly. One cannot be a proficient teacher in the true sense of the word if he or she is merely good at classroom management. There is more to it than meets the eye. The teacher has to cut across domains in order to scale heights in a bid for survival in today's highly competitive scenario. Earlier, materials design, curriculum design, research, teacher development, etc. were the domains of ivy-tower researchers and pedagogues. But now, the teacher has to know a bit of all in order to handle the present tech-savvy learners. This paper is an attempt to orient those teachers who are at the beginner's level or the intermediate level to use user-friendly online platforms to design tasks and activities. The purpose of doing so is to enable teachers to create a highly interactive learning set up for the purpose of blended learning or for any online learning that serves more of a supplementary role. The research focuses on the Belgium-based platform BookWidgets to strengthen its claim that the right materials at the right time for the right learners is sure to yield the right results. There are different types of softwares covered under three main apps in BookWidgets – Test and Review, Games, and Miscellaneous. The research concludes with an evaluation of the platform based on Chapelle's evaluation criteria. The conclusion attempts to strengthen the claim that BookWidgets is, in every sense, one of the best options for interactive learning. KEYWORDS


The goal of data center network is to interconnect the massive number of data center servers, and provide efficient and fault-tolerant routing service to upper-layer applications. To overcome the problem of tree architecture in current practice, many new network architectures are proposed, represented by Fat-Tree, BCube, and etc. A consistent theme in these new architectures is that a large number of network devices are used to achieve 1:1 oversubscription ratio. However, at most time, data center traffic is far below the peak value. The idle network devices will waste significant amount of energy, which is now a headache for many data center owners.
 In this paper, we discuss how to save energy consumption in high-density data center networks in a routing perspective. We call this kind of routing energy-aware routing. The key idea is to use as few network devices to provide the routing service as possible, with no/little sacrifice on the network performance. Meanwhile, the idle network devices can be shutdown or put into sleep mode for energy saving. We establish the model of energy-aware routing in data center network, and design a heuristic algorithm to achieve the idea. Our simulation in typical data center networks shows that energy-aware routing can effectively save power consumed by network devices.


In this piece, prepared for a symposium on the empirical study of taxation, we consider the intriguing possibility that taxes generate disutility for taxpayers in excess of the dollar amounts involved. While most people dislike paying taxes, the extent to which a phenomenon of "tax aversion" exists is empirically unknown, as are the causes and constituent elements of any such aversion. Investigation of these questions could provide important lessons for tax policy. If people are averse to taxes above and beyond the financial losses the taxes represent, they would tend to spend more time and money on tax avoidance than economic analysis would predict, creating additional deadweight losses for society. Even where avoidance is not pursued at elevated levels, tax aversion would increase the disutility associated with the payment of the tax, generating psychic costs and potentially impacting compliance levels. Hence, a better understanding of the magnitude and components of tax aversion could advance comprehension of taxpayer behavior and spur useful innovation in tax design. Towards those ends, we survey and mine existing bodies of empirical work for the light they might shed on tax aversion, and identify avenues for further study. We give particular attention to the growing body of experimental games used to model the provision of public goods. Anthropological studies of public goods provision and the effective use of norms of reciprocity in group contexts can help to parse and import richer meaning into the findings obtained in these controlled experimental settings. We close by discussing some possible ways of importing greater transparency and voice into the taxpaying interface, to test the hypothesis that these features can serve as proxies for some of the components present in successful reciprocal interactions.


Proper musculoskeletal health is dependent on the efficient inner workings of muscles, tendons, ligaments, joints, and bones. The homeless experience can be physically debilitating to these tissues and anatomical structures. This feasibility study aims to explore how to answer the overarching question: do the lived experiences of homeless young adults negatively affect their musculoskeletal health? Questionnaires were distributed to assess the demographic characteristics, physical activity, health behaviors, and sleep patterns of 40 homeless young adults and 45 university students in Los Angeles County. Participants also completed supervised stretch tests to assess musculoskeletal flexibility. Findings indicate that homeless young adults were less flexible in all four stretch assessments compared to university students. Noteworthy differences were noted with the sit and reach (p=0.050), butterfly (p=0.036), right shoulder (p=0.005), and left trunk twist tests (p=0.041). Analyses of physical activity levels and sleep location within the homeless subgroup suggest a deleterious impact on flexibility. Flexibility assessments are a low cost and sensitive method for measuring degree of musculoskeletal dysfunction of homeless young adults. Preliminary data suggests that the musculoskeletal health of this subgroup is adversely affected by their lived experience. Health services such as yoga or Pilates, in addition to existing case management and mental health services at homeless drop-in centers, may reduce the likelihood of long-term physical disability.


The different levels of phosphorus and potassium nutrition on the productivity of two-rowed winter barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) cv. Kamenitza were studied under conditions of pot experiments. Two greenhouse pot experiments with increased nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizing levels were conducted. The effect of potassium fertilization and different levels of nitrogen fertilizing was studied at the first experiment. The investigated nitrogen levels were 0, 200, 400 and 600 mg N/kg soil and the levels of potassium fertilizing were 0, 200, 400 mg K2O/kg soil. The aim of the second pot experiment was to establish the effect of increasing levels of phosphorus fertilizing at a background of 400 mg N and 200 mg K2O per kg soil on the barley grain and protein yields. The plants were grown in plastic pots (5L volume). Each pot was contained 5 kg soil (Molic fluvisol) with pH (H2O) - 7.3, humus content 3.2%, Nmin - 39.8 mg N/kg, available phosphorus (method of Egner - Riehm) - 102 mg P2O5/kg, and available potassium (2 N HCL) - 460 mg K2O/kg. The different levels of mineral nutrition at two pot experiments were created by applying of NH4NO3, Ca(H2PO4)2.H2O, and K2SO4 in the form of water solutions. Thirty seeds were sown in each pot ant the plants were reduced to equal number in each pot (15) at tillering. Phosphorus and potassium fertilizing were a proved positive effect on the nutrient regime of barley plants, productivity and grain quality. Moderate phosphorus fertilizing 200 mg P2O5.kg -1 soil combined with levels N 400K200 showed the highest grain and protein yields and grain protein concentrations. Grain protein concentration increased from 12.5 to 13.5% and protein yield increased by 28.6%, compared to variant without phosphorus N400P0K200. The K levels of 200 and 400 mg K2O.kg -1 soil increased the grain yield when were combined with nitrogen levels of 200 - 400 N mg/kg soil. The changes of potassium nutrient regime by fertilizing alone in a range K0 - K400 on the background of N0P200, slightly affect the grain protein concentrations and yields of barley. The potassium fertilization demonstrated a positive effect on the concentrations of plant nitrogen at tillering. The concentrations of N and P of barley plants at tillering stage slightly depended on fertilizing levels P0-P400.


The primary aims of this study were to investigate through active duty Army anesthesia provider's perceptions the following: 1) the extent and seriousness of emergence delirium (ED) in service members; 2) effects of ED on the safety of service members and OR/PACU personnel and 3) behaviors relevant to ED in service members. In addition to these primary aims the study also focused on identifying through provider's perceptions the following potential factors which may lead to the development of ED or to the alleviation of ED: 1) type of anesthetic agents; 2) physiological factors; 3) psychological factors; and 4) interventions used for alleviating the symptoms of ED. A final aim was to investigate from provider's perceptions the relationship between perceived seriousness of ED and reported case experience behaviors and consequences relevant to ED and physiological and psychological factors related to the development or alleviation of ED symptoms. This research utilized a descriptive correlational study design with a questionnaire survey and a convenience sampling technique totaling 89 active duty Army anesthesia providers. This study found that over 78% of active duty Army anesthesia providers have witnessed ED in their particular practice. Approximately 38% of the respondents felt that ED was a moderate problem. There was a statistically significant association between perceived severity of ED and ED case experience. The behaviors which were often seen or always seen included hyperactive motor behavior pulling at the monitoring equipment and making disruptive movements. The current study found that the majority of anesthesia providers with ED case experience believed ED could be related to the anesthetic used. The anesthetic identified most strongly as potentially related to ED were potent inhalation agents (PIA's). Most of the providers with ED case experience believed physiological factors and psychological factors were related to ED. Over ninety percent of the providers with ED case experience reported that they intervened when their patients showed behaviors related to ED with the majority of the providers stating they talked to the patient during the ED episode.


Abstract The World Heritage Convention has been ratified by 158 countries and provides an international legal regime for the conservation of sites of global cultural or natural value. There are 33 tropical forest sites listed under the convention, mainly for their global biodiversity value. They constitute an elite set of biodiversity sites covering approximately 2.5% of the world's closed tropical forests and making a significant contribution to the conservation of the world's terrestrial biodiversity. A range of international initiatives will eventually provide a framework for better conservation and sustainable management of forests worldwide, but the World Heritage Convention provides an existing mechanism which could quickly be mobilized to safeguard the most important forests. In the past sites were selected for listing under the convention if they were perceived to have minimal human impact. However, all forests are modified by humans and we contend that modification need not be inconsistent with the maintenance of global biodiversity values. The convention could have greater impact if it addressed more directly the reality of the ubiquitous human modification of forests. This could be achieved through use of more adaptive forms of management based on objective criteria and indicators to define tolerance of change and trigger management responses to achieve desired biodiversity outcomes. We conclude that an optimal list of world heritage tropical forest sites might include up to 100 sites or clusters of sites and that such a network of sites could effectively protect a high proportion of the world's forest biodiversity. The present rate of attrition of the world's tropical forests suggests the need for urgent international action to focus on a set of priority sites and the World Heritage Conservation could provide the best international framework for such action.


Special Edition Using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 captures the reality of designing Web sites with FrontPage today. The emphasis is on how to design professional looking sites, how to keep them current with effective content management techniques, and how to do both while working toward the crucial goals of strong communication and interaction.Elements exist in each chapter that have been crafted to make your reading experience as easy and useful as possible and also to make this book truly serve as the only reference you need for FrontPage 2003. Everything about the software is covered, with increased emphasis in this edition on advanced topics such as scripting, databases, and the design of site interaction. The creation of effective interaction is featured throughout the book, as are the principles of effective communication.The "Front and Center" area of each chapter is used to interject the authors' real-world experiences and provide that extra piece of knowledge that will help you see the whole picture. They also attempt to have a little fun in this section, showing the personal side to the product they have spent so much time with.In addition to some sample files and source code from the book, the CD-ROM contains: supplemental FrontPage software (a $100 value!), Internet marketing service trials from a top Internet marketing firm worth $54.95, several popular FrontPage add-ins, including one from Jimco Add-ins called SnipView available exclusively to readers of this book, and more!


Abstract. Dikes and sills represent an important component of the deformation history in volcanic systems, but unlike dikes, sills are typically omitted from traditional paleostress analyses in tectonic studies. The emplacement of sheet intrusions is commonly associated with Mode I fracturing in a low deviatoric stress state, in which dilation is perpendicular to the fracture plane. Many natural examples of sills and dikes, however, are observed to accommodate minor shear offsets, in addition to a component of dilation. Here we present mechanical models for sills in the San Rafael subvolcanic field, Utah, which use field-based measurements of intrusion attitude and opening angles to constrain the tectonic stress axes during emplacement and the relative magma pressure for that stress state. The sills display bimodal dips to the NE and SW and consistent vertical opening directions, despite variable sill dips. Based on sill attitude and opening angles, we find that the sills were emplaced during a phase of NE–SW horizontal shortening. Calculated principal stress axes are consistent (within ∼ 4°) with paleostress results for penecontemporaneous thrust faults in the area. The models presented here can be applied to any set of dilational structures, including dikes, sills, or hydrous veins, and represent a robust method for characterising the paleostress state in areas where other brittle deformation structures (e.g. faults) are not present.


For nearly half a century, the world's most powerful nuclear-armed states have been locked in a condition of mutual assured destruction. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the nuclear balance has shifted dramatically. The U.S. nuclear arsenal has steadily improved; the Russian force has sharply eroded; and Chinese nuclear modernization has progressed at a glacial pace. As a result, the United States now stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy, meaning that it could conceivably disarm the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia and China with a nuclear first strike. A simple nuclear exchange model demonstrates that the United States has a potent first-strike capability. The trajectory of nuclear developments suggests that the nuclear balance will continue to shift in favor of the United States in coming years. The rise of U.S. nuclear primacy has significant implications for relations among the world's great powers, for U.S. foreign policy, and for international relations scholarship.


Abstract In this chapter, we consider generic issues affecting the implementation of diagnostics in a burning plasma experiment (BPX). These are, directly or indirectly, caused by the radiation environment. In the first instance, handling nuclear radiation issues becomes a dominant factor in the choice of machine and diagnostic layout, construction, and maintenance. We discuss these integration issues first as they set the background against which more specific issues must be addressed. These include nuclear radiation effects on specific types of components and assemblies such as cables, fibers, and mirrors, and also thermal and mechanical degradation issues that must be considered in all component designs. One important consequence of the maintenance challenges brought about by the radiation environment is that degradation of front-line optical components by particle bombardment, normally handled by component replacement, also becomes far more challenging and in situ mitigation techniques must be sought. For the same reason, recalibration techniques become more difficult. At the same time, BPX operation time is precious and extracting the optimum performance from the device may require the use of more sophisticated diagnostic techniques. Therefore, the requirements on reliability and data availability are more stringent and must be applied more widely than is common on present devices. An important goal of BPX operation is to enable the design of future power plants. We consider briefly the development needs for diagnostics for these and conclude with an assessment of the present state of readiness of the diagnostic community for the detailed design and construction of a full diagnostic set for a BPX.


This paper discusses designing an open source software based library discovery system for full-text ETD retrieval on the basis of a cataloguing framework developed by using available global standards and best practices in the domain of theses cataloguing. The purpose of this prototype framework is to provide a single-window search and retrieval system for end users for discovering ETD at metadata level and at full-text level. The prototype framework is based on three-layer architecture with Koha ILS as backend metadata provider, Apache-Tika as full-text extractor and VuFind as discovery system. A MARC-21 bibliographic format, especially designed to handle TDs, is working as data handler mechanism in Koha ILS and the harvester of VuFind is tuned to fetch bibliographic data related to ETD in marcxml format. The user interface of VuFind is also configured to support accessing ETDs from global-scale services like NDLTD, OATD, IndCat, ShodhGanga etc. apart from the local level ETD collection in order to provide an all-in-one search interface for users.


The settlements in the Aegean Sea islands contain a variety of architectural properties, which are differentiated depending on their historical origin and their last domination of Franks, of Othomans or Greek authorities. Before the constitution of the contemporary Greek state, these properties were built based on common sense rules, deriving from the progressive evolution of building codes since antiquity, and which combined the Eastern tacit with the western codified knowledge. Official design rules have existed since the 6 th century A.D. These have been assembled mainly by K. Harmenopoulos (14 th century A.D.) who composed the previous design rules in the "Exavivlos" code. These rules were rooted into the customary practices, providing equability of benefits between inhabitants. Most islands of the Aegean Sea remained isolated up to the decade of the 1980s, practicing these norms as customs, when under the motive of tourism, they began to be developed. With minimal exceptions, all the settlements of the Aegean Sea islands originated before the 20th century and consequently they have been shaped by pre-existing the modern period construction attitudes. The principles of these attitudes are summarized in four initial purposes that the built environment would have to fulfil: the compact and bounded layout, the view provision to all houses, the value of privacy and the facilitation of access to neighbours following the irregularities of topography. Today, a complicated legislative framework, although it is not efficiently implemented, results in


The article considers the current problem of the assessment of the level of human wellbeing in the Russian regions. The research identifies the features of application of traditional tools to the assessment of welfare in the conditions of spatial heterogeneity. However, modernizing these tools allows to show the real quality of life in the regions. On the example of the multidimensional index of welfare, we test the hypothesis that the position of a region in spatial selection can vary depending on various combinations of indicators as a part of the integrated indicator. At the first stage, the authors calculate the multidimensional index of welfare in the subjects of the Russian Federation for three various sets of indicators. At the second stage, we estimate the dependences of indexes on their indicators. It allows defining the potential conditions for upgrading the position of each subject of the Far East in terms of welfare among other Russian regions. At the third stage, we assess the influence of initial indicators on the integrated index of population welfare on the basis of an hierarchy analysis method of T. Saati. This method allowed estimating local priorities for each Far East region. The received estimates have allowed to select the most significant indicators (job, income, and housing. Furthermore, we have offered a three-factorial integrated indicator of the population welfare reflecting the evaluation of individual prosperity. The interregional comparisons have shown that the northern regions of the Far East remain leaders in terms of the most significant factors of basic welfare, but not in terms of comfort. The regions of the southern zone of the Far East with more favourable conditions for life remain outsiders in terms of the prosperity level, but have a considerable potential for enterprise activity. Khabarovsk Krai holds the most advantageous position according to the integrated index of welfare. This region combines the functions of the capital and transport and logistic functions. The received conclusions adequately reflect a real situation and can be useful for the assessment of efficiency. The research results can be applied to define the priority directions of the development of the Far East regions.


Feed filters were installed in Syncrude hydrotreater units to protect the catalyst beds from plugging by fine solids in the feed. Severe filter fouling occurred after a process flow sheet change. The root cause of fouling was revealed through a step-by-step scientific investigation. It was first confirmed that the fouling problem was related to a process flow sheet change that introduced a heavy vacuum gas oil (HVGO) stream into the coker combined gas oil (KCGO) stream prior to filtration. Characterization of the foulant and the feed indicated that the fouling reactions are likely oxidative polymerization. Iron naphthenate or naphthenic acid in the HVGO stream could act as a catalyst for such a reaction. A bench-scale oxidation test was carried out to compare the oxygen uptake rates and the C7-insoluble contents after oxidation in KCGO, KCGO+HVGO, KCGO+iron naphthenate and KCGO+naphthenic acid streams. While the oxygen uptake kinetics for these samples were similar, the C7-insoluble contents for KCGO+HVGO and KCGO+iron naphthenate increased significantly after oxidation compared to the base case of KCGO. No significant increase of the C7-insoluble content was observed for KCGO+naphthenic acid, indicating that it was the iron naphthenate that catalyzed the fouling reactions. Iron naphthenate was a corrosion product in the HVGO stream, which could be eliminated by preventing corrosion in the vacuum distillation unit. The filter fouling problem indeed disappeared after the installation of corrosionresistant equipment. This paper is the modified version of a former publication: X.A. Wu, K.H. Chung, 2007, Hydrotreater feed filter fouling and its remedy, Energy Fuels Vol. 21, pp. 1212-1216.


We observe that a symmetric two-player zero-sum game has a pure strategy equilibrium if and only if it is not a generalized rock-paper-scissors matrix. Moreover, we show that every finite symmetric quasiconcave two-player zero-sum game has a pure equilibrium. Further sufficient conditions for existence are provided. Our findings extend to general two-player zero-sum games using the symmetrization of zero-sum games due to von Neumann. We point out that the class of symmetric two-player zero-sum games coincides with the class of relative payoff games associated with symmetric two-player games. This allows us to derive results on the existence of finite population evolutionary stable strategies.


The third millennium is approaching--are your students ready? Answer this question with a resounding Yes! Preparing Students for the 21st Century will bring you insight from a panel of more than 50 leaders in education, business and government on what students need NOW to lead successful, fulfilling lives in the future.


The new bank capital regulation commonly known as Basel II includes a internal rating based approach (IRB) to measuring credit risk in bank portfolios. The IRB relies on the assumptions that the portfolio is fully diversified and that systematic risk is driven by one common factor. In this work we empirically investigate the impact of these assumptions by comparing the risk measures produced by the IRB with those of a more general credit risk model that allows for multiple systematic risk factors and portfolio concentration. Our tests conducted on a large sample of eurobonds over a ten year period reveal that deviations between the IRB and the general model can be substantial.


Large law firms are increasingly moving away from the "up or out" organizational model by employing lawyers on a permanent basis under a variety of titles, a trend with important consequences for the structure of lawyers' career opportunities. Some firms, however, have moved farther in this direction than others. Using data from a nationwide sample of law firm establishments, this study investigates factors that lead firms to implement permanent employment arrangements. The results show that firms that are more exposed to new features of the changing legal environment make greater use of permanent employees. Permanent employment arrangements are more common in law firms where work is more complex, ties to clients are weaker, and lawyers place less emphasis on collegiality. Effects are stronger for lawyers with nontraditional titles such as "senior attorney" and "senior counsel" than for permanent associates, suggesting that firms employ two distinct categories of permanent nonpartner lawyers. Since the early 1980s, large law firms have increasingly implemented permanent employment arrangements alongside traditional probationary ones (Bower 1989; Buchholz 1995; Galanter & Palay 1991:37-76; Heintz & Markham-Bugbee 1986; Wren & Glascock 1991 ).1 Some permanent employees hold titles that clearly indicate the permanent nature of their employment, such as "senior attorney," "principal attorney," "counsel," "of counsel," "senior counsel," and "special counsel."2 Other permanent employees hold the title "associate," as probationary employees do; they are referred to informally as "permanent associates."3 Permanent employees may be former probationary associates of the firm who have been rejected for partnership, or they may have been hired directly into their current positions. In some firms, permanent employees remain eligible for possible promotion to partnership; in others, they do not. Even if they do remain eligible, they have no guarantee of consideration, and no fixed time period within which it must occur. This new pattern represents a marked departure from the employment model that was dominant in large law firms for much of the twentieth century.4 Under traditional "up-or-out" arrangements, associates are employed on a probationary basis for a fixed period, usually between 6 and 10 years from law school graduation. Through on-the-job training, associates are expected to develop practical skills that are not taught in law school. Upon the expiration of the probationary period, firm partners consider the associate for admission to the firm's partnership. If the associate is "passed over," or rejected, he or she is expected to leave the firm within a reasonable period of time. The spread of permanent employment arrangements has important consequences for lawyers' careers, the organization of legal practice, and the cohesion of the bar. Some lawyers are likely to welcome the opportunity for permanent employment, emphasizing the relative security of such positions and the freedom they offer to focus on law practice rather than on management or client development. Others are likely to view a permanent-employee position as a signal of career failure. Whether viewed positively or negatively, permanent-employee positions necessarily rank below partners in status and authority, and they thus conflict with lingering professional norms of autonomy and formal equality among professional colleagues (Freidson 1984; Hall 1968; Goode 1957). Permanent-employee positions also add a layer of hierarchy within large firms, thus advancing the bureaucratization of the organizational settings in which law is practiced. In addition, as part of the proliferation of status distinctions among lawyers, permanent employment arrangements contribute to the growing stratification of the bar. Despite a general increase in the use of permanent employment, law firms vary considerably in the extent to which they have created permanent positions. …


The purpose of this study was to discover what variables or teacher descriptors yield classroom democracy and a willingness to engage in critical pedagogy. While teachers' gender or teaching experience yielded no significant effect; their age, cultural background, and marital status had a significant effect on their perception of the factors for moving from egocentrism to group consciousness and the advantages of group meetings. Also, correlations were found between the children's pattern for resolving issues and the teacher's perception as well as their own perception. ********** The theoretical foundation for this work is strongly influenced by the writings and philosophies of Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux. Critical Pedagogy is a relationship between teaching and learning. Children participating in critical pedagogy go through a process of unlearning, learning, relearning, reflection, and evaluation. The power that these actions have on the students, in particular students who have been historically disenfranchised by traditional schooling, builds character while freeing them to learn. Teachers grow in critical consciousness through testing their own findings with openness to revision. Teachers attempt to avoid distortion when perceiving problems and preconceived notions when analyzing the problems. Critical consciousness is brought about not through an individual or intellectual effort, but through collective effort and praxis. Part of the process approach to praxis involves the dialogical approach to learning. This is characterized by an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and trust as well as cooperation and acceptance of interchangeability and mutuality in the roles of teacher and learner. According to Edwards and Ramsey (1986) "In order to master the knowledge of their culture and take their place in society, children must learn rules. This is not an easy task, because there are a complicated bewildering variety of rules ... Interpersonal moral rules prohibit people from harming themselves and others or violating their rights ... These rules are considered to be based on group consensus and important to the quality of group life". (p.167) However, these rules do not have to be presented as a narrative "banking system" (Freire, 2007); rather they can be constructed by the students with some teacher-facilitated guidance. Critical pedagogy allows the teachers to gain perspective in order to evaluate current practices and formulate new directions in the classroom. The major place of critical pedagogy in this study is to allow the young students to begin to develop critical capacities to reflect critique and act to transform their living conditions. In a classroom meeting, students are never powerless and they can act on their own behalf. The classroom is a place where they live for five to seven hours, five days per week. Like Freire, students can learn to prize dialogue and respect the choices of others while having a say in the day-to-day decisions that affect their lives. Action research is an important recent tool in the broad territory of "teachers' professional development." This research encourages teachers to look to themselves and to engage their students for ways to improve teaching and learning. When teachers engage in action research they want to know if they have "proven anything." Conclusions and comments and further suggestions are welcomed, as communities of professionals band together to develop and improve the dynamic art and skill of teaching. Teachers serve as models for the students showing them how to work together to improve their collective condition. A Latina classroom teacher located in a US/Mexico border city states, "Most children come with a great sense of who they are and who they want to be. They know what they like and what they don't like. Many times teachers want to have a class that is structured so that students are like factory workers. Some prefer to have a class where students sit alone and where talking or any kind of play is punished. …


From a delivery boy to one of the most important industrialists in American history, George Eastman's career developed in a particularly American way. The founder of Kodak died in 1932, and left his house to the University of Rochester. Since 1949, the site has operated as an international museum of photography and film, and today, holds the largest collection of its kind in the world. The continually expanding photography collection contains over 400,000 images and negatives - among them the work of Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams and others - as well as 23,000 cinema films, five million film stills, one of the most important silent film collections, technical equipment and a library with 40,000 books on photography and film. The George Eastman House is a pilgrimage site and a place of worship for researchers, photographers and collectors from all over the world. This volume shows in chronological order the most impressive images, and the most important developments in the art of light that is photography. It provides, in its huge collection and themes, a unique survey of the medium from its origins until now.


Violation criminal act at children under age is a criminal act which is rapidly happen around us. Most at news that we heard from electronic media or printing media about violation at children under age is a reality that how susceptible the children position is too delicate from all at the threatening compulsion or delusion until become a victim at violence criminal act easily. By the accurse at laws number 23 years 2002 about children protection, hopefully can give intimidated attach to the doer at violation under age. This research formulate statements at the problem that are: (1) how is the foundation at law and judge?s consideration in deciding violation under age case is Gresik District Court? (2) How is the implication of chapter 81 laws number 23 years 2002 about children protection in Gresik district court? The methodology that is used in this research is juridical normative. The technique at collecting the data is interview with a judge who justice case number 384/Pid.B/2008/PN.Gresik and notes documentation or important documents like bundles at case, number at table cases, and others which is gain in the field that is in Gresik District Court as a place to get the data then the data that has gotten is analyzed with descriptive qualitative way. From the 4 (four) sexual criminal act case that is brought to Gresik District Court for January up to November 2008 based on the kind of violation criminal act is 1 (one) case white accused Kusnadi and the victim is Siti Indari. In assembly of public prosecutor prosecute the accused legally and surely had runner against chapter 293 verse 1 panel code at law (KUHP). Than judge at Gresik district court in his decision number 384/Pid.B/2008/PN.Gresik decided with what wrote in accusation letter and prosecution letter of public prosecutor of law. By the end council argues that accused has proved legally and surely had runner against chapter 293 verse 1 KUHP even though the laws that is more specific have proclaimed that is laws number 23 year 2002 about children protection. About decision that is given by council, it is important to know that based on chapter 182 verses 4 KUHAP decided that what a foundation of law and the consideration become. The judge must be founding on the accusation letter and what have proved in the law court investigation. From the research and discussion ending, we can conclude that in this decision, the council uses chapter 293 verse 1 KUHP even thought laws number 23 year 2002 about children protection have applied. It should based on principle ?lex specialis derogate legi generalis? therefore the chapter which is demanded by the public prosecutor an than to be based on appointment with chapter 81 laws number 23 year 2002 about children protection. In the end of laws writing, there are some suggestion that is delivered by the writer. The firt is in taking decision of violation criminal act to the daughter under age, law endorsement apparatus should use principle ?lex specialis derogate legi generalis? in decide every case abow. The judge at Gresik district court should use chapter 81 laws number 23 year 2002 about children protection. An cost aside chapter 293 verse 1 penal code of law (KUHP). The second is in finishing every case it should always there is coordination between law enforcement apparatus. Keyword : Perkosaan Anak Dibawah Umur Related Link :  http://skripsi.umm.ac.id/files/disk1/332/jiptummpp-gdl-s1-2009-yanihartan-16592-PENDAHUL-N.pdf


BACKGROUND
Nosodes are ultra-dilute preparations made from diseased tissues or organisms used in homeopathy since 1830, more frequently used since 1880. Carcinosin is a commonly used nosode prepared from cancer tissues in the last part of the nineteenth century, of which the exact information is not known. Scientific information on histopathological characterization of the source material of Carcinosin made over 130 years ago is not available. The current therapeutic indications of Carcinosin have been largely empirical and clinically derived. In such a scenario, understanding the paramount importance of the cancer nosode, it's revamping in the light of current scientific knowledge has been identified by the author.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Specific cancerous tissue samples were sourced for nosode preparation. Identified pieces of tissue were histopathologically diagnosed, thoroughly washed, quantified and triturated with powder of Saccharum lactis to prepare decimal potencies, as per standard method suggested in the Homoeopathy Pharmacopoeia of India. Centesimal potencies were prepared using electromechanical potentizer, documenting the force parameters.

RESULT
The Cancer Nosodes from specific cancer tissues were prepared in a systematic manner, which could be used for research as well as in clinical practice.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The author has attempted scientific preparation of new cancer nosodes making them available to the profession. On similar lines, more of cancer tissues could be explored for making other nosodes.


Fluids and lubricants are critical for the mechanical manufacturing processing of metals, due to a high amount of friction generated, also reflected as heat, could wear and damage tooling and machine components. The proper application of lubricants increases machinery lifetime, decreases long-term costs, and energy and time consumption due to the maintenance or components exchange/repairs. Besides being non-renewable, mineral oils bring consequences to the environment due to their low biodegradability and could affect the user with respiratory and skin diseases. Recently, due to an increase in environmental awareness, the search of biocompatible and efficient lubricants has become a technology goal. The vegetable oil-based lubricants are slowly emerging as ecofriendly and high-performance alternatives to petroleum-based lubricants. This study evaluates soybean, sunflower, corn and paraffinic oils reinforced with SiO2 nanoparticles. The thermal and tribological evaluations were performed varying the temperature and nanofiller concentrations. The thermal conductivity improvements were observed for all nanolubricants as the temperature and filler fraction increased. The highest thermal conductivities were observed at 323 K with 0.25 wt % SiO2. The soybean and corn oils unveiled a maximum enhancement of ~11%. The tribological evaluations showed that SiO2 addition, even in small concentration, resulted into a significant improvement on a load-carrying capacity. For instance, at 0.25 wt % enhancements of 45% and 60% were observed for soybean and sunflower oils, respectively. The coefficient of friction performance also showed enhancements between 10% and 26%.


Indonesian cinema of the early 1990s has often been noted for its lowbrow and erotic content. One film from this era, Gadis metropolis, which earned something of a reputation for its exploitation of the female body, is also notable for its lesbi, and to a lesser extent, gay storylines. This representation of alternative sexualities constitutes the particular concern of this article. The film's producer argued that in making Gadis metropolis he sought to 'explain the lives of lesbi' in Indonesia. Its dominant message, however, was actually a depressing reaffirmation of popular media notions of homosexuality and of societal concerns regarding women's sexuality generally. Analysis of contemporary press reports and reviews show that while reactions to the film initially focused on its lesbi content, by the following year it had become more of a reference for concerns about the deterioration of the quality of domestic film production. Engaging with academic
studies on Western representations of female homosexuality, this article draws on the trope of the murderous, deviant lesbian while at the same time contextualising the emergence of this image in Indonesia as a continuation of popular images of the sexually licentious woman as a threat to the moral (heterosexual) order. By comparing the film's representations of male and female homosexuality, it is shown that there was far greater concern with the policing of female sexuality than with the gay subject position. Despite the fact that female homosexuality in Gadis
metropolis is principally situated within the ideological framework of the heterosexual viewer, however, this article contends that the film may simultaneously offer, at least for some lesbi and gay viewers, momentary spaces for communal identification.


We present a new method for automatically providing feedback for introductory programming problems. In order to use this method, we need a reference implementation of the assignment, and an error model consisting of potential corrections to errors that students might make. Using this information, the system automatically derives minimal corrections to student's incorrect solutions, providing them with a measure of exactly how incorrect a given solution was, as well as feedback about what they did wrong. We introduce a simple language for describing error models in terms of correction rules, and formally define a rule-directed translation strategy that reduces the problem of finding minimal corrections in an incorrect program to the problem of synthesizing a correct program from a sketch. We have evaluated our system on thousands of real student attempts obtained from the Introduction to Programming course at MIT (6.00) and MITx (6.00x). Our results show that relatively simple error models can correct on average 64% of all incorrect submissions in our benchmark set.


The rising powers have become the default movers and shakers in the global economy, including the green economy. This article shows how China has become more powerful in renewable energy and examines the implications for the green transformation. China exerts strong downward pressure on the costs of the transformation but the effects on the speed of this transformation are not yet clear. The paper suggests that a focus on public-private-civic alliances within and across countries is essential for understanding and fostering progress in accelerating the green transformation.


This paper is a proposal for a future method of avionics data communication in military aircrafts. The need for this proposal results from the increasing complexity of avionics systems that is pushing the MIL-STD-1553B well beyond the limits of its bandwidth. Among several high speed interconnection technologies, Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet is an attractive candidate to replace the MIL-STD-1553B for advanced military aircraft system interconnection but, unfortunately, it was not originally developed with the aim to deliver real-time communications. Therefore, we have to add new mechanisms over Switched Ethernet to achieve realtime behaviour with bounded delays. In this paper, we describe the most important existent real-time transfer solutions for the classic Ethernet and discuss their possible applicability over Switched Ethernet. Then, we compare their performances and their capacities to handle realtime constraints required by the military applications. A special care is given to the traffic shaping approach which allows to limit the congestions in the switch and to guarantee low delays. We will show in experiments that with the traffic shaping approach with the priority handling, we can achieve deterministic transmission that respect the military application's requirements.


The two parental alleles at a specific locus are usually inherited with equal probability to the offspring. However, at least three processes can lead to an apparent departure from fair segregation: early viability selection, biased gene conversion and various kinds of segregation distortion. Here, we conduct a genome‐wide scan for transmission distortion in a captive population of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) using 1302 single‐nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) followed by confirmatory analyses on independent samples from the same population. In the initial genome‐wide scan, we found significant distortion at three linked loci on chromosome Tgu2 and we were able to replicate this finding in each of two follow‐up data sets [overall transmission ratio = 0.567 (95% CI = 0.536–0.600), based on 1101 informative meioses]. Although the driving allele was preferentially transmitted by both heterozygous females [ratio = 0.560 (95% CI = 0.519–0.603)] and heterozygous males [ratio = 0.575 (95% CI = 0.531–0.623)], we could rule out postzygotic viability selection and biased gene conversion as possible mechanisms. Early postzygotic viability selection is unlikely, because it would result in eggs with no visible embryo and hence no opportunity for genotyping, and we confirmed that both females and males heterozygous for the driving allele did not produce a larger proportion of such eggs than homozygous birds. Biased gene conversion is expected to be rather localized, while we could trace transmission distortion in haplotypes of several megabases in a recombination desert. Thus, we here report the rare case of a prezygotically active transmission distorter operating equally effectively in female and male meioses.


What does being British actually mean today? Depending on your age, it can conjure up imagery of the Battle of Waterloo, Queen Victoria's Empire, the British Lions rugby team or that famous Union Jack dress Geri Halliwell wore at the Brit Awards. In the twenty-first century, Britain - like many Western countries - enjoys a diverse racial mix. Therefore, as with the USA, we need to explore the values and cultural reference points around us to fully understand what it now means to be a British citizen. Twenty contributions written by well-known individuals representing a cross section of Britain's cultural landscape attempt to offer an insight into, or snapshot of, how Britons today see themselves and their place in the world. Their thoughts will highlight just how divergent our society is and where its strengths and weaknesses lie. All these views are championed by two unlikely collaborators - "Spectator" editor Matthew d'Ancona and Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Often politically opposed, they share a passionate interest in exploring what is meant by being British. This unique book will enlighten, inspire and stir up many debates but ultimately it will provide a path for any reader wanting to understand just what it is to be British in the new millennium.


The shock wave of the economic crisis touched all aspects of economic, social and political life, has overturned the value systems and has disrupted the daily life of human resources. The lack of expectations, of a safe and legal income, insufficient jobs and undervalued human capital have generated such human resources developments that, in the future, will turn against those who now don't have a coherent policy in this area. The purpose of this paper is to pull a warning signal about the erosion of the recovery opportunities of a very special resource which, unlike others, is endowed with reactive qualities and decision power over their own developments. Without a framework for its development, the quality human resource leaves Romania while the other part of it survives as it can. All these situations are beginning to be passed on to new generations, some abandoned any form of struggle, giving up hope, education, evolution, and some being ready to find a position outside the country. The question that remains is: who will build the future of this country and what 'nationality' will have this?


Background: Velopharyngeal insufficiency causes hypernasal vocal quality and can also result in audible nasal air emission and difficulty in producing pressure consonants. The resulting speech is often socially unacceptable and can be difficult to understand. Platelet-rich plasma is an autologous derivative of whole blood. Today, the importance of clinical use of Platelet-rich plasma in the plastic surgery is considered. This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of combined Platelet-rich plasma and fat injection in the treatment of velopharyngeal insufficiency. Methods: In this prospective clinicaltrial study, of 15 patients including 9 males and 6 females and aged 15-20 years with mild/ moderate velopharyngeal insufficiency who were injected with 5 mL of combined Platelet-rich plasma (1 mL) and fat (4 mL) in the front volume in the posterior pharyngeal wall in the pre-vertebral fascia under sedation. Speech samples were recorded by nasoendoscopy before the injection, and at 6 weeks and 6 months after the injection. Assessment of pathologic speech was done by speech therapist. Results: Velar displacement showed significantly increased at 6 weeks after the injection (P=0.049). Velopharyngeal gap disappeared in 60% of patients at 6 weeks after the injection (P=0.019). Lateral pharyngeal wall movement showed significantly increased in 73.3% of the patients at 6 months after the injection (P=0.04). After the treatment, aerodynamic assessment showed significantly decreased in nasal air escape during phonation and repeat the words (P Conclusion: It seems that, combined Platelet-rich plasma and fat injection lead to improve voice resonance and reduce nasal air escape in all treated cases. It can be a promising alternative to major procedures, such as velopharyngoplasties, for the treatment of mild/ moderate velopharyngeal insufficiency.


Access telecommunication systems are categorized as digital subscriber line (xDSL), fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC), power line systems, local multipoint distribution system (LMDS), free space optics (FSO), satellite and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WIMAX) systems. Basic specifications, such as the rate of information for upstream and downstream, access link length, frequency licence requirement for these access telecommunication networks are defined. Expert system analysis is applied to find out the possible systems that can be employed among the abovementioned choices of access telecommunication within the user defined inputs describing the requirements of the end user. The rule-based structure of the expert system is formed by using the Exsys expert system development tool.


Abstract Reproductive lesions have been described in various nonhuman primate species, including rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), cynomolgus macaques (Macaca fascicularis), baboons (Papio spp.), squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus), and chimpanzees (Pan spp.); however, there are few publications describing reproductive disease and pathology in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). A retrospective evaluation of postmortem reports for two captive M. fuscata populations housed within zoos from 1982 through 2015 was completed, comparing reproductive diseases diagnosed by gross pathology and histopathology. Disease prevalence, organs affected, and median age at death between the two institutions was also compared. Fifteen female captive M. fuscata, ranging in age from 15 to 29 yr were identified with reproductive tract lesions, including endometriosis, endometritis, leiomyoma, leiomyosarcoma, and adenomyosis. No significant differences were identified in disease prevalence, organs affected, and median age of death between the two institutions. Endometriosis was the most common disease process identified and was found in 10 of the 15 cases (66.7%), followed by leiomyoma (4 of 15; 26.7%). In four cases (26.7%), severe endometriosis and secondary hemorrhage was indicated as the cause of death or the primary reason for humane euthanasia. These findings were compared with a separate population of Japanese macaques managed within a research facility in the United States, with a prevalence of endometriosis of 7.6%. This study discusses possible risk factors and potential treatment options for the management of endometriosis in captive M. fuscata.


The distribution of acoustical scattering layers of fish and knll changed markedly in concert with fluctuating fluorescence (chlorophyll a) in upper waters, possibly due to a varying 'shadow effect'. Beneath clear waters on the outer Norwegian shelf (about 300 m depth), mesopelagic fish (Maurolicus muelleri) were located at approximately 150 to 200 m by day. Krill (mainly Thysanoessa inermis) was primarily found below the mesopelagic fish and above planktivorous demersal fish (Norway pout Trisopterus esmarkii). The vertical distributions changed abruptly across a front into water with less light penetration associated with increased fluorescence (chlorophyll a). Mesopelagic fish ascended by about 100 m accompanied by a rise of knll. Demersal fish left the benthic boundary zone, with ascending Norway pout foraging in the lower part of the knll layer. We suggest that the intermediate light conditions inside the front provided an 'antipredation window' (sensu Clark & Levy 1988: Am Nat 131:271-290) and thereby favorable feeding conditions for the planktivore These results indicate that properties of upper layers may impact plankton and fish distributions and their predator-prey interactions throughout the water column on continental shelves.


"Strategic Service Management" is a new approach for competitive success which embraces the major developments in service management thinking over the 1980s. In this volume case studies from a wide variety of industries, both in the private and public sector, focus on the main areas of this approach: creating competitive strategies for a service oriented business; and the process of successful and accelerated strategy implementation. The authors provide valuable ideas and techniques for the service business aiming for market leadership and profit growth, and for all companies where adding value with service and motivating employees towards business goals is vital. This is the 7th volume in the "Best of Long Range Planning" series which brings together the best articles on a particular topic from the "Long Range Planning" journal so that readers wishing to study a specific aspect of planning can find an authoritative and comprehensive view of the subject, conveniently published in one volume.


To identify attitudes toward bicycle helmet ownership and use, questionnaires were sent to parents of 2178 third-graders; 1057 (48.5%) returned valid responses. Of 931 children who had bicycles, 24% owned helmets, but only 56% of children who owned helmets wore them. Helmet ownership, but not use, was associated with higher parental education. Fifty-one percent of 704 parents of bicycle owners who had not purchased helmets said they had never thought of it, 29% thought helmets were too costly, and 20% felt their children would not wear them. Of 792 children who did not wear helmets, 25% said they did not wear them because their friends did not; 22% never thought about wearing helmets; and 16% found them uncomfortable. Efforts to increase the wearing of helmets should address helmet design, awareness, peer pressure, and cost.